Contents

COPYRIGHT INFO

A NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHER

The MEGAPACK™ Ebook Series

TORQUING VACUUM, by Jay Lake

COLLECTORS, by Pamela Sargent

VICTORY, by Lester del Rey

THE TREE OF LIFE, by C. L. Moore

YE OLDE RESIGNATION, by Rhys Hughes

FACE TO FACE, by Adrian Cole

BEYOND THE THUNDER, by H. B. Hickey

CAPTIVES OF THE THIEVE-STAR, by James H. Schmitz

THE DEEPS, by Keith Roberts

I’VE NEVER SEEN, by Hannes Bok (poem)

MADMEN MUSTERED, by Connor Freff Cochran

EXILE FROM SPACE, by Judith Merril

THROUGH TIME AND SPACE WITH FERDINAND FEGHOOT: THE CHAIRMAN DANCES, by David Gerrold

THE FROZEN PLANET, by Keith Laumer

THE TAIL-TIED KINGS, by Avram Davidson

THE GRAIN KINGS, by Keith Roberts

HIS MASTER’S VOICE, by Randall Garrett

BACK TO JULIE, by Richard Wilson

BRIGHTSIDE CROSSING, by Alan E. Nourse

THOUGHT AND SPACE, by Ray Bradbury

THE SECRET OF THE SCARAB, by Ron Goulart

REINVENTING CARL HOBBS, by James Glass

THE OLD SHILL GAME, by H.B. Fyfe

NOTES TOWARD A NEW TRAIT AS REVEALED BY CORRELATION AMONG ITEMS OF THE MMMPI, by M. Purrzillo, U. R. A. Ferball, and C. Kitirun

THE SLEEPER IS A REBEL, by Bryce Walton

THE TEACHER FROM MARS, by Eando Binder

NIF’S WORLD, by Lawrence Watt-Evans

A MAN OBSESSED, by Alan E. Nourse

FIRST LENSMAN, by E.E. “Doc” Smith [Part 1]

FIRST LENSMAN, by E.E. “Doc” Smith [Part 2]

FIRST LENSMAN, by E.E. “Doc” Smith [Part 3]

REINCARNATE, by Lester del Rey

THE MAN WHO LIVED FOREVER, by R. DeWitt Miller and Anna Hunger

THE MARTIAN CHILD, by David Gerrold

Special Feature: FIREBIRD, by Tony Rothman [Part 1 of 3]

COPYRIGHT INFO

The 10th Science Fiction MEGAPACK™ is copyright © 2015 by Wildside Press, LLC. All rights reserved.

* * * *

The MEGAPACK™ ebook series name is a trademark of Wildside Press, LLC. All rights reserved.

* * * *

“Torquing Vacuum,” by Jay Lake, was originally published in Clarkesworld Magazine, Feb. 2010. Copyright © 2010 by Joseph E. Lake, Jr. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Collectors,” by Pamela Sargent, was originally published in Castle Fantastic and is copyright © 1996 by Pamela Sargent. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Victory,” by Lester del Rey, was originally published in Astounding Science Fiction, August, 1955. Reprinted by permission of author’s estate.

“The Tree of Life,” By C. L. Moore, was originally published in Weird Tales, October 1936.

“YE OLDE RESIGNATION,” by Rhys Hughes, was originally published in Link Arms with Toads! and is copyright © 2011 by Rhys Hughes. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Face to Face,” by Adrian Cole, was originally published in Dark Voices 2 and is copyright © 1990 by Adrian Cole. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Beyond the Thunder,” by H. B. Hickey, was originally published in Amazing Stories, December 1948.

“Captives of the Thieve-Star,” by James H. Schmitz, was originally published in Planet Stories, May 1951.

“The Deeps,” by Keith Roberts, was originally published in 1966. It is copyright © 1966 by Keith Roberts. Reprinted by permission of the author’s estate.

“I’ve Never Seen,” by Hannes Bok (poem), was originally published in Futuria Fantasia, Spring 1940.

“Madmen Mustered,” by Connor Freff Cochran, was originally published as “Hear Today” (The Berkeley Showcase, Vol. 2 [1980]), “Snowflake” (Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Feb. 16, 1981). Part 3, “Angst For the Memories,” is original to this collection.

“Exile from Space, by Judith Merril, was originally published in Fantastic Universe, Nov. 1956.

“Through Time and Space with Ferdinand Feghoot: The Chairman Dances,” by David Gerrold, is original to this collection and is copyright © 2015 by David Gerrold.

“The Frozen Planet,” by Keith Laumer, was originally published in 1961.

“The Tail-Tied Kings,” by Avram Davidson, was originally published in Galaxy Science Fiction, April 1962.

“The Grain Kings,” by Keith Roberts, was originally published in 1972. It is copyright © 1972 by Keith Roberts. Reprinted by permission of the author’s estate.

“His Master’s Voice,” by Randall Garrett, was originally published in Analog, March 1962.

“Back to Julie,” by Richard Wilson, was originally published in Galaxy Science Fiction, May 1954.

“Brightside Crossing,” by Alan E. Nourse, was originally published in Galaxy, January 1956.

“Thought and Space,” by Ray Bradbury, was originally published in Futuria Fantasia, Summer 1939.

“The Secret of the Scarab,” by Ron Goulart, was originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, April 2005.

“The Old Shill Game,” by H.B. Fyfe, was originally published in Analog Science Fiction, January 1967. Copyright © 1967 by H.B. Fyfe. Reprinted by permission of the author’s estate.

“Notes Toward a New Trait as Revealed by Correlation Among Items of the Mmmpi,” by M. Purrzillo, U. R. A. Ferball, and C. Kitirun, was originally published in Analog, Sept. 1999, and is copyright © 1999 by Mary A. Turzillo. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“The Sleeper Is a Rebel,” by Bryce Walton, was originally published in Thrilling Wonder Stories, February 1948. Copyright © 1948, renewed 1976. Reprinted by permission of the author’s estate.

“The Teacher from Mars,” by Eando Binder, was originally published in Thrilling Wonder Stories, February 1941. Copyright © 1941, renewed 1969. Reprinted by permission of the author’s estate.

“Nif’s World,” by Lawrence Watt-Evans, is original to this publication and is copyright © 2015 by Lawrence Watt-Evans.

A Man Obsessed, by Alan E. Nourse, was originally published in 1955.

First Lensman, by E.E. “Doc” Smith, was originally published in this form in 1950.

“Reincarnate,” by Lester del Rey, was originally published in Astounding, April 1940. Copyright © 1940 by Street & Smith, renewed 1968. Reprinted by permission of the author’s estate.

“The Man Who Lived Forever,” by R. DeWitt Miller and Anna Hunger, was originally published in 1956.

“The Martian Child,” by David Gerrold, was originally published in 1994. It is copyright © 1994 by David Gerrold. Reprinted by permission of the author.Winner of the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and HOMer Awards (Best Novelette Category).

Firebird, by Tony Rothman, is copyright © 2013. Reprinted by permission of the author.

A NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHER

I can’t believe it’s been almost a year since we released The Ninth Science Fiction MEGAPACK™! I have lots of excuses, of course (mostly having to do with time—the big SF volumes take a lot of time), but here at last is #10. And I promise the next volume won’t take nearly as long.

The 10th Science Fiction MEGAPACK™ features David Gerrold’s “The Martian Child,” which won the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and HOMer Awards (Best Novelette Category)… Plus two-and-a-third original stories, (a new Feghoot by David Gerrold, a new short story by Hugo Award-winner Lawrence Watt-Evans, and part 3 of a 3-part story by Connor Freff Cochran [parts 1 and 2—previously published—are also included, of course!]) Plus classics by Keith Roberts, Eando Binder, Alan E. Nourse, E.E. “Doc” Smith—with the complete novel, First Lensman, and many more. More recent tales by Jay Lake, Pamela Sargent, Mary Turzillo, Rhys Hughes, and others. And poems by Ray Bradbury and Hannes Bok.

As if that’s not enough, we’re also serialize Tony Rothman’s novel, Firebird, with Part 1 in this issue. Kirkus wrote: “Prominent physicist and writer Tony Rothman, PhD, uses his technical expertise to create a rare and timely novel based on genuine science. Not science fiction, the science of Firebird is as real as the collision between science and politics it portrays. Rothman, who has taught physics at Princeton and Harvard Universities, is the author of eleven books.” (How’s that for an review, from one of the leading library journals?) The serialized book is another reason volume 11 will follow shortly. We don’t want to keep readers waiting.

Enjoy!

—John Betancourt

Publisher, Wildside Press LLC

www.wildsidepress.com

ABOUT THE SERIES

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X is for Xmas: Christmas Mysteries

TORQUING VACUUM, by Jay Lake

Originally published in Clarkesworld Magazine, Feb. 2010.

Spanich had been up three shifts straight working on a drive alignment issue aboard ICV Mare Ibrium {13 pairs}. She was a charter—a rare thing, in a starship, which signified pockets deeper than planetary budgets—and the passengers reportedly wanted to lift out, but her pilot wasn’t lighting up without the alignment problem being solved. Spanich could get behind this. Faced with the choice of a well-monied tongue lashing or being smeared in rainbow quarks across a few dozen lightyears, he’d take the dressing down every time.

Besides, he was the only drive tech on Estacada Orbital certified to work the finicky and bizarre paired drives that post-Mistake starships relied upon. Supraluminal travel was so sporadic that if the system got half a dozen outside visitors a year, it was considered busy. And most of them flew with their own maintenance crews as a matter of course. Mare Ibrium {13 pairs} was practically a yacht, the smallest starship he’d ever seen or heard of.

The shipmind kept whispering specs and test results to him in a voice that made the hairs on his arms prickle and stiffen. Fair enough. A man shouldn’t get too comfortable with the machines that kept him alive. Mistrust was healthy.

Thank the saints he wasn’t signed onto this bucket for this run. Their quantum bloc cross-processors weren’t piping temporal data flow correctly. No one had liked his suggestion to pull the whole rig and reconfigure on a bench back at the station. A week’s work, at a minimum. But Spanich wouldn’t trust his life to the jigger he’d been ordered to attempt in the name of expediency.

He sighed and focused on the circuit joins. Nose-to-panel, flat on his back, falling asleep with the smartprobe in his hand, Spanich knew he was still better off working here than back in the engineering pool rotation.

“Domitian,” said the shipmind. “I think it’s time for you to stand down.”

“What!?” Spanich snapped.

“You’ve just probed the same shunt five times.”

He sighed, unclipped his instruments, and wriggled back into the engineering bay. That was only moderately less claustrophobic than the service accessway he’d just spent twenty hours in, minus breaks for pee and chow. “Home,” Spanich said to no one in particular, then began packing up.

* * * *

Ribo thumped from the big speakers embedded in the floor of the Bar Gin. When the bass riffs hit, peanut shells danced across the table like cootch girls on payday. Most place used ambient nano to whisper music, but Bar Gin was so old school they probably hadn’t even invented reading, writing or differential equations back when the place had been founded.

Spanich huddled in a booth and wondered why he hadn’t gone home to sleep. ‘Home’ being a two-point-two meter-long tube, a meter in diameter. He paid extra for rack space for his hardsuit, and extra extra to make sure parts didn’t vanish from it during off shifts. Still, sleep would have made more sense for him than crouching here over some of Bitter Jane’s homebrew algae beer listening to music which had been crap when he was a kid, and not improved since.

Then Austen wandered into the joint, and Spanich’s world grew a little brighter. That boy just moved right. Cute enough kid, and buff in a way that kept the eye resting easy, and he smelled like heaven on a Friday night, but the way Austen walked sometimes kept Spanich up late, sweating.

He raised his hand, waved to Austen, but the kid’s gaze slid right over Spanich like he wasn’t there. Was it too dark back here in the booth? Maybe too much toke smoke in the air.

Who the hell was he kidding?

Austen No Last Name didn’t give a shit about Domitian Spanich. Sometimes the kid gave a shit about Domitian Spanich’s pay chitty, when the keycard was fat with local thalers, or more rarely, Imperial schillings. Except payday was seventeen shifts away right now, and Austen could scent ‘broke’ the way a sniffer could find a carbon dioxide breach in a scrubber tank.

Spanich sank deeper into his algae beer and wondered why the hell he couldn’t ever fall in love with anyone available. There was no lack of available talent. Half the guys torquing vacuum here on Estacada Orbital swung his way. For his own part, Spanich knew he was decent enough looking, and a good lover—it didn’t take raging egotism to sort out those kinds of truths, not once you’d left teen hormones behind. But somehow he always tumbled for the pretty boys, the working kids, who’d roll over and whisper sweet nothings while they let him play their bodies like harps, but always ran off with each other for the real laughs or the quiet times.

“Dommie,” said a voice for the second time.

Startled, he looked up from his beer, slopping some of it onto the tabletop. A warning blinked with pixel-rotted irritation from beneath the greenish puddles, but he ignored that.

Austen!

Spanich tried desperately to stay cool. “Hey.”

His sometime-lover sat down. “Mind if I join you?”

That crooked smile always melted Spanich. “Uh, yeah. Let, let me get you something.”

“I’m locked and stocked,” Austen said. Those violet eyes seemed to glitter in the bar’s lousy lighting. “Bitter Jane’s sending something over. Said she’d put it on your tab.”

“I don’t have a—” Spanich managed to shut himself up before he looked any stupider. “Oh, right. Good. Happy to buy you one.” He tried to fight the goofy grin he could feel taking over his face. “Or more,” he blurted. Lots more.

Thank the pressure demons this place was so dark. Austen couldn’t see him blush, at least.

“Don’t mind if I don’t.” The kid’s crooked smile flashed into an answering grin that looked so free, so easy, that Spanich wondered why he even bothered to try.

He kept himself cautious. Don’t hope, don’t hope, don’t hope. “So, uh, what’s up?”

A drink arrived on a rollerbot, a cybernetic waiter converted from a level one security drone. For all Spanich had ever been able to tell, it might still be a kill platform. You couldn’t know, not with Bitter Jane in play.

Austen picked up the long, graceful ceramometallic stem, frost sparkling diamond bright as mist curled off its sides.

Great, thought Spanich. One of Jane’s thousand-thaler cryoliquid specials. Someone here was pushing their luck. Spanich had a sick fear that he was the chump. There was his next pay chitty gone, and a decent portion of his liquid savings. So to speak.

“Well… The kid took a long, slow sip, batting his eyelashes.

Focus, focus.

“You’ve been working on the Mare Ibrium, right?”

Spanich winced. Austen even pronounced the old, old term wrong, as if he were speaking Classical English instead of Preclassical Spanish or Mayan or whatever language of lost Earth those words came from.

“Mare Ibrium, thirteen pairs.” Spanich corrected the kid’s pronunciation and usage both. “And the shipminds are mighty picky about getting their numbers right.”

“Shipminds,” Austen said. “Yeah. Whatever.”

In that moment, Spanich suddenly wondered what it was he’d found so alluring about Austen. Sure, the kid was smoking hot, like fire in an oxygen plant, but had he never noticed how dumb Austen was. Maybe some dirtball farmer wouldn’t know the difference, but how could anyone survive in an orbital habitat and be so ignorant of the basic etiquette of ships and shipminds? The kind of ignorant that got people spaced out an airlock, or their breathing license erased from the station records.

“Look.… Spanich felt obscurely deflated and betrayed. “Don’t worry about Mare Ibrium thirteen. There’s a charter riding her this trip, and I hear the woman is deep-fried trouble on a fuckstick, if you catch my datastream. Let’s have a drink and, I don’t know, go dancing. Forget about starships, kid. They never mattered to you before, did they?”

Austen shrugged and smiled. The wattage seemed to have gone out of his expression, but maybe that was just Spanich. “I need something, Dommie. Something only you can help me with.”

“Only me, huh?” The words just slipped out of his triple-shift exhausted mouth. “And that’s why you’re sucking down a thousand-thaler drink on my tab? To get in good?”

The metalloceramic stem hit the table with a click that would have cracked ordinary plastic. “Dommie, please…

Spanich stood up. “I’m tired, I need to sleep, I’m going home.”

Austen shot out of his chair, grabbing for Spanich’s rough, greasy hand with his own slim, manicured fingers. “At least let me come with you.”

Close, with that smell, though he knew them both for idiots, Spanich couldn’t say no to that. Even if he’d been awake enough to stop this disaster before it got any worse, with Austen standing so close his hormones were kicking ass and taking names.

Home they went, together.

* * * *

The tube’s comm panel beeped him out of dreams into the reality of an itching belly—cum always dried that way on his skin—and a gently snoring Austen. Spanich nudged a crusty towel aside and punched the sleepshift override.

That didn’t stop the beeping.

He focused on the little display. Priority message, channel two. His blood chilled. Station ops.

“What the…?” He stabbed again, brought up voice-no-video mode. “Spanich.”

Austen groaned, tucked in tighter to his side. Spanich patted the kid, trying to soothe him enough not to make noise on this call.

The speaker crackled, shitty cheap tech like everything his type ever got, other than the tools of their trade. “Engineering Supervisor Spanich?”

“Yeah. ’s what I said.” He blinked some sand from his eyes, and ignored hot memories of the most recent midshift here inside the comfortably tight confines of his sleeping tube.

“This is Olivez Marquessa Inanometriano Parkinson sub-Ngome, Adjutant-Intendant of Estacada Orbital operations.”

Whoa. Only flash brass used names that long. And most of the hypercrust didn’t bother to work for a living. “Alright. I’m impressed now.” Damn, he needed to be smarter.

Austen stirred. “Whu…?” Spanich jammed his fingers in the kid’s mouth. Reflexively, Austen began to suckle.

“Your presence is requested and required at berth eleven, docking boom gamma.”

Shit on an airfilter! That would be the current hookup of ICV Mare Ibrium {13 pairs}. “I’m not due back til thirteen hundred hours.”

“Requested and required, Engineering Supervisor Spanich. Would an escort facilitate your prompt presence?”

Shit! What was this about? “Ah, no. I’ll be there fast.”

“Adjutant-Intendant out.”

His comm panel died with a definitive pop that suggested further conversation would not only be pointless, but impossible. Spanich looked down at Austin, who was busy slurping the last of their midnight passion off his fingertips.

He was the chump, alright. Flash brass played for fatal stakes. Not their lives, of course, but the lives of people like him. And people like Austen.

“What the fuck did you want last night?” Spanich grabbed Austen’s hair, forced the kid’s head back until they were staring eye to eye. “What the fuck did you do?”

* * * *

Austen didn’t have a hell of a lot to say at first. Spanich poured some bulb-coffee into him anyway, on principle, while slamming a couple for himself. He didn’t let go of the kid, either, dragging him into the shitter, then the scrubstall.

When the water hit them at 0.5 celsius, Austen sputtered into some fairly creative profanity. “You gruyere-scented douchenozzle, I’m going to kick your ass from the throat down, then yank your nuts—”

Spanich slapped him. “Hush up, dearie,” he growled, dragging Austen’s face so close they might have been kissing again. Somehow, being naked and wet with the kid wasn’t doing much for him this morning. “You know how many times in my life flash brass has rung my bell?”

Austen found his voice. “Th-they put their jocks on one strap at a time like everybody else.”

“Maybe. And maybe they have platinum-plated jeweled nut sacks snapped on every morning by hermaphroditic dwarves. How the fuck would I know? Because never in my entire pressure-bleeding life have I had to take a call like that one.” He shook the kid hard, banging that pretty head against the scrubstall’s algaplastic lining. “And I’d bet my last gene scan you have something to do with it. You and your Mayor Eye-breye-um.”

“Mare Ibrium.” This time he pronounced the name right.

“That’s Mare Ibrium, thirteen pairs, to you, my friend. Shipminds are damned proud, and have very long arms indeed when they’re riled up.” Even talking about it here in the scrubstall made him nervous.

Spanich dragged the shivering, naked Austen back to his tube, then forced the kid to dress by the simple expedient of bending his fingers back til he agreed. This one would run like a ball bearing if given the chance, and he figured on bringing Austen in as a kind of human shield for whatever it was the Adjutant-Intendant of Estacada Orbital had in mind for him.

All too soon for Spanich’s taste, they were off among the sweat-reeking passageways of the station’s guest-worker quarters. A person could get almost anywhere in this place without leaving oil footprints on the tourist walkways. Mostly he liked it that way, though if they’d dial the heat up even halfway to tourist standards, he’d have been a hell of a lot happier.

Austen had given up even muttering, and let himself be dragged along like a second toolbag. Whatever fate was coming, Spanich was pretty sure it wasn’t a surprise to the kid.

* * * *

Just outside the lock array for docking boom gamma, Austen made his break. The kid stomped down hard on Spanich’s instep, or would have if Spanich hadn’t been wearing carbon-jacketed boots rated up to sixty gravities of pressure.

His second mistake was waiting until Orbital Security’s troopers had them in sight. Which was probably what panicked the kid, Spanich realized, as he knocked Austen down and went to one knee of top of the kid’s chest. “Don’t fuck around in front of the troopies,” he hissed.

The troopies were watching the scene with mild disinterest. Mild disinterest suited Spanich just fine. No hands on weapons, everybody stayed peaceful. He dragged an out-of-breath Austen back to both their feet, then manhandled the kid right up to the troopers.

Now their interest was neither mild nor dis. “You guys feeling brave?” asked the right-hand cop. Spanich vaguely recognized him from the Bar Gin, dude with space-black skin and eyes that shade of violent green that said that one of his ancestors had come from Falkesen sometime post-Mistake. Nobody from a human norm gene line had retinas that color.

The left hand cop, a fellow with nubbly skin and tight epicanthic folds, drew his stungun for emphasis. Bad cop, then.

“Got a call-in,” Spanich said to the good cop, keeping his chin down, his lips closed and his tone quiet. “Adjutant-Intendant wants us up on Mare Ibrium, thirteen pairs.”

Austen squirmed at that, but Spanich knuckled his collar tighter. The kid seemed to get the message.

“You that Spinach guy?” green-eyes asked.

“Span-ick. It’s Span-ick.”

“Whatever.” The weapon was reholstered with the same bored air. Green-eyes gave Austen a long look, making no move to cycle the lock. “Who’s the cyclone ranger there?”

“My lovely and talented assistant,” Spanich informed his feet.

“Didn’t say nothing about no assistant.”

He looked up, caught the fellow’s green eyes. “Did anyone say I couldn’t?”

“Hey… The cop spread his arms wide, letting go the responsibility. “You want to wave your dick around in front of flash brass, be my guest.” He glanced at his partner. “They tooled?”

Bad cop had the faraway gaze of someone reading a retinal implant. Finally he spoke, his voice like gravel in an airshaft. “Nothing out of profile.”

“Your lucky day,” said green eyes. “No cavity search. Hell, not even a pat down.” He leaned close. “We got orders to run light and easy for now.”

Spanich nodded vigorously. “Light and easy it is, sir.” Well, at least there hadn’t been a murder aboard the starship. Not of anyone important, at any rate. They’d be a lot more sealed up out here if so. He waited while bad cop punched in an access code—not one Spanich recognized—then waved them into the transition tube.

Waiting for the outer lock to cycle, he leaned very close to Austen. “What are you so afraid of?”

“You’re going to be sorry you asked,” the kid replied in a low whisper. His words sounded like a threat, but nothing in Austen’s voice, stance or stink of fear-sweat backed that up.

Not murder then, but something worse?

* * * *

They found another troopie at berth eleven. This one didn’t bother to shake out their suits—he just cycled open the lock and let Spanich and Austen go in, not saying a word. Spanich did note that the tote board alongside the berth’s lock had been blacked out. Which was both unsafe, and he was pretty sure, illegal. Not open-flame illegal, but still a safety violation waiting for a monitor to write a fine-and-dine.

The berth lock opened to the familiar accordion-walled transfer tube. Inside, Spanich’s breath damned near crystallized as he grabbed the lead lines. Air this stupid-cold meant someone had shut off the enviros, probably since he’d left Mare Ibrium thirteen’s deck a shift and a half ago. When there were no troopies guarding access, for one thing.

And they hadn’t had the stuff back up long.

“Dommie.” Austen’s voice was pleading as they approached Mare Ibrium thirteen’s hull lock.

No, Spanich realized, not pleading. Terrified. “Is this where you give it up?” He stopped them, floating in the tube’s microgravity. They had maybe a minute, tops, before whoever was expecting them onboard got unpleasant.

“We don’t have to d-do this.” The kid’s teeth were chattering.

“A little late now. You could have spoke up last night, instead of playing rolypoly with me for half a shift. Or anytime before now, even.”

“You h-have no idea.”

Close, so close that the kid’s smell began lighting up his backbrain once more, Spanich growled, “So give me a fucking idea, punk.”

“That w-woman on board. She’s not just some charter tourist.”

“Who is she, then?”

“My mom.” The abject terror in Austen’s voice was frightening.

The little bastard knew this ship all along then. He’d been faking, before. Faking everything, then? Spanich didn’t see much point in asking who the kid’s mother was. “Family reunion time.”

They kicked off together, heading the last few meters to the hull lock. Spanich was surprised how graceful Austen had suddenly become, for someone who had seemed to know so little about starships and life in space.

He was even more surprised when the lock cycled at the touch of Austen’s fingertip on the bioscanner. Though, really, Spanich was starting to realize, he shouldn’t have been.

* * * *

Adjutant-Intendant Olivez Marquessa Inanometriano Parkinson sub-Ngome waited in the passageway beyond. There was no mistaking a flash brass—no one else dressed like them, or looked like them, or stood as if they owned the worlds of the Imperium Humana.

Which they as good as did, of course.

The Adjutant-Intendant stood about two meters, forty cents, but didn’t weigh above sixty kilos. It was all whipcord muscle, bred in through the better part of a thousand years of careful genetic planning, since the Mistake. Every schoolchild knew this, because every schoolchild was taught why the Familia Majora—flash brass—ruled over them all.

His skin was velvety black, similar to the guard outside. These were people who treated chromosomal radiation damage as a preventable disease on the par with influenza or head lice, after all. The Adjutant-Intendant’s eyes had the liquid silver look of someone whose optical nano bloom had been induced in utero, and carefully cultivated ever since.

If he’d had a few billion Imperial schillings, and some key Writs of Exemption, Spanich could have bought most of that package for himself. Adjutant-Intendant Olivez Marquessa Inanometriano Parkinson sub-Ngome wore it all like someone born to two dozen generations of that inheritance.

“Engineering Supervisor Spanich.” His voice had the tone of a man finding a slug under a salad leaf.

“Reporting, sir.”

“Were you ordered to bring an accompanist.”

“My assistant, Jim,” Spanich said, immediately regretting the stupid lie.

“Jim…?” The Adjutant-Intendant looked Austen over briefly. “Your wit is at least half misplaced, Engineering Supervisor.”

Spanich wondered if that had been the flash brass equivalent of a joke. “Your comm was urgent, sir. I figured this might take an extra pair of hands.”

“Hmm.” With a visible letting go—meant to be visible, Spanich was certain—the Adjustant-Intendant continued. “We are aboard because the Mare Ibrium shipmind has declared an emergency.”

“Thirteen pairs, you cocksucker,” muttered Austen. Spanich could have backjacked the little bastard for that—referring to shipminds that was a prerogative of the highest aristos among the flash brass, a rank thing—but he didn’t want to make this agonizing scene that much worse.

The look in the flash brass’ eyes could have frozen helium. “Indeed. Mare Ibrium, thirteen pairs. I see why Engineering Supervisor Spanich values your services, Jim. As I was saying, the shipmind has declared an emergency, which it determined only you could resolve.”

“I was coming back in half a shift, anyway,” Spanich pointed out. “I’ve spent a lot of time in this engineering bay, these past few shift-cycles.”

The shipmind’s voice echoed through the corridor, a whisper like thunder—pervasive and overwhelming, but not loud. “This seems an opportune time to redirect.”

The hair on Spanich’s arms prickled. Far more astonishing, even Adjutant-Intendant Olivez Marquessa Inanometriano Parkinson sub-Ngome looked surprised. Austen just groaned.

“Please escort our new visitors to the wardoom, Markie,” the ambient voice continued.

Spanich nearly choked. No one called flash brass by a nickname, not like that. Not even other flash brass. From the look of him, much like a man swallowing a live eel, the Intendant-General was no less surprised.

“Of course,” he said, his voice in the perfect equilibrium that his facial expression had failed to retain.

Austen groaned again. Spanich was beginning to mightily regret bringing the kid, and was already thinking hard about ways to get out of this alive and free.

* * * *

The wardroom hatch slid open. Where the passageway had been utilitarian—hookfabric carpet, grab bars, emergency stations every five meters; all the usual details of space travel—the wardroom was astonishing in its simple, almost terrible luxury.

A pond. A pond, on a starship. These people weren’t just wealthy, they were insane. The little pool of black water was walled around with rock, filled by a bamboo pipe serving as a fountain. The floor was pebbled like raked gravel, though Spanich’s engineering eye noted that was a texture, not half a ton of loose stone ready to break free in the event of a grav failure. The walls were of some woven reed matting, while the ceiling was draped with a rough, undyed fabric.

All highly illegal, according to any safety standards he’d ever been lectured about. Illegal, unsafe…

Next to the pond was a low black lacquer table aggressively simple in its lines. A woman knelt behind it, her robes a coarse, raw fabric that almost matched the ceiling. She had an air of extreme age about her—not like the Befores, those crazed, dangerous immortals everyone whispered about, that Spanich had even met one once—but more like an ordinary person who’d lived an extraordinarily long time with very good medical care.

And eyes like hull-cutting lasers. Eyes that happened to be the same pale violet as Austen’s.

“Hello,” she said.

Spanich knew where the Mare Ibrium thirteen shipmind had modeled its voice from. In those velvet tones, he could hear the armies march at a word, feel the bar emptying for a fight to the last man standing. He had to force himself not to kneel.

Austen did go down on one knee. So did Olivez Marquessa Inanometriano Parkinson sub-Ngome. The Adjutant-Intendant gave Spanich a glance which should have fried skin off his bones.

What the hells was he missing here?

“He can be forgiven because he does not know,” the woman said.

The voice again. And her scent, in this room as subtle as atomized lubricant moving through an air duct. She and Austen were of a—

He broke off the thought, staring at the kid in horror.

“Mother,” Austen finally said in a low voice so unlike his usual attitude that if the words had not come out of his mouth, Spanich wouldn’t have known.

“Tranh Shankakini Clovis McVail Austen deLacey sub-Rachman sub-Nagona,” she replied.

Somewhere in that welter of flash brass name, Spanich picked out the kid. He’d been fucking a runaway, and from the length of the name, one of the highest-placed runaways possible. How had the kid managed to seem so normal, instead of gene-modded to hell and gone like the Adjutant-Intendant?

Austen bowed so low his head almost touched the floor.

Clovis, thought Spanich. She’d said Clovis. He nearly shit himself. These people were Imperial family! There should have been a battalion outside the lock, not two bored station troopers.

No wonder the Adjutant-Intendant had been glaring him to death. Clumsy, shivering, clammy with sweat, Spanich dropped to one knee as well.

“Mare Ibrium tells me that you are working to set her drive to rights, Domitian Spanich.”

“Ma’am. I’m… He didn’t know what to say. He wasn’t qualified to work on a starship carrying members of the Imperial family.

The shipmind spoke. “There is nothing wrong with my drives, Engineering Supervisor Spanich. But I thank you for your work.”

“All a ruse, I am afraid.” Austen’s mother smiled at him. He was ready to lay himself at her feet if she’d just do it again. “Necessary to keep us in port without question while certain rumors were…traced.”

Spanich glanced over at Austen. The kid was pressed to the floor, his voice a whisper when he asked, “Why tell me now?”

“So you would understand what must happen to you next,” she replied, her voice now steel-hard. Austen took a sharp breath, then fell completely silent. The Adjutant-Intendant moved slightly, still on his right knee but shifting his weight in preparation for action.

In that moment, Spanich’s future became very narrow and very short. He stood, shaking off the spell of that voice, and reached slowly for his toolbag. Austen’s mother nodded slightly at the Adjutant-Intendant, who then spoke, his voice harsh. “What are you doing, Engineering Supervisor Spanich?”

The words slipped out of him like bullets dropping from an open clip. “Preparing to die like a man.” Truly, he had no idea.

“Mother,” Austen said, his voice so low it was almost a squeak.

She gave Olivez Marquessa Inanometriano Parkinson sub-Ngome another significant look. Spanich took his cue and swung the toolbag hard, letting the strap pay out so fifteen kilos of metal and ballistic cloth took the bastard right in the temple. Two dozen generations of exquisite germline engineering dropped to the floor like a stunned drunk.

“Guess you’ll have to kill me yourself,” Spanich said, breathing hard. Austen was splayed flat on deck, hiccuping or laughing or crying or something. “Or is it Princess?”

“Is this how a man dies?” she asked, deceptively conversational.

“Yes.” Spanich tried to catch up to his adrenaline, slow himself down. “On his feet, fighting for his life.”

“Don’t,” moaned Austen.

“Do you care for this man?” his mother asked, curiosity filling her voice. Spanich let the bag swing on its strap, but she ignored the makeshift weapon utterly.

“No.” Austen whimpered, practically embracing the floor. Then, “Yes. No.”

Her gaze met Spanich’s again, and he wondered how he’d ever confused this woman for human.

“I’m very sorry, Engineering Supervisor Spanich, but my son does not seem to speaking up for you.”

He expected to be shot in the back, but the hatch continued to fail to open, and hordes of guards bristling with armament did not leap into the room. “I can speak for myself, ma’am. I’m as much a citizen as you or he.”

“Then go.” Her voice was almost a whisper now.

“Just like that?” Spanich blurted.

“Who would believe your story?” A laugh was hidden in her words somewhere.

On impulse, he reached down and grabbed at Austen’s shoulder without taking his eye off the old woman. “You coming, kid?”

“I—”

She interrupted. “My son is not free to go.”

Feckless impulse rose inside of Spanich on a red wave of anger. “He’s a citizen, too.”

The Adjutant-Intendant groaned, then stirred.

Austen’s mother glanced at the man, then turned her attention back. “Walk away, Engineering Supervisor Spanich, with your unbelievable story. You’ve won that much in standing up to authority. Take your life and go.”

“And what?” The anger poured out of him in a flood of words. “When Markie wakes up and gets onto comm, I’m a dead man. Station troopers will pinch me, and I’ll never be seen again. I’ve already committed two, maybe three capital crimes here! Talking directly to you is probably another one.”

“How you keep your prize is not my trouble.” Her face narrowed, the first real expression he’d seen on her. “Now depart.”

Spanich tugged at Austen’s shoulder, dragged the kid to his feet. “Come on.”

Austen stood shaking. His mother slipped a small flechette gun from beneath her robes.

Ah, thought Spanich, and wondered why he wasn’t surprised.

“Let’s go,” he hissed in Austen’s ear. “Nobody deserves to be pushed around like this.”

The flechette gun was unwavering. “Tranh Shankakini Clovis McVail Austen deLacey sub-Rachman sub-Nagona, you are coming home with me.”

“Mother… The kid seemed so lost.

“You already said that.” Spanich let his voice grow gruff, in his talking-to-idiot-techs tone. “Get a new line.” Gambling, he turned the kid with a hard tug on the shoulder and began walking him out like a drunk.

“My son,” she said from behind them.

Spanich tapped the hatch panel. At least that control was normal in this freakish room. With a hiss, the wall slid open.

“Austen…

He propelled the kid out, marching him with an arm twist. Austen wasn’t stumbling, though, which meant the heart hadn’t completely gone out of him. The hatch hissed shut behind them, without the characteristic whick-whine of flechettes that Spanich’s ears were straining for.

“Engineering Supervisor Spanich,” said the shipmind. Its voice was tentative, a tone he’d never heard from a starship.

“Shut the fuck up,” he growled. “You’re part of this, too.”

Mare Ibrium {13 pairs} didn’t say another word as they left the ship, left the transfer tube, left the berth lock, left the docking boom, and made their way back into the oily, cold passageways.

* * * *

Well away from the locks-and-docks sector, he finally let go of Austen. Kid would be bruised for sure. “Alright then,” Spanich said. “You’re on your own.”

“Wh-what?” Austen seemed dazed.

“Snap out of it, kid. You’re free.” Spanich swatted him on the ass. “Now time to scoot.”

“But I don’t know where to go.”

“Sure you do. You’ve been living on Estacada Orbital for months.” Platinum-coated genetics or not, the kid had survived on his own. Hustling wasn’t the worst way to live.

Austen glanced back they way they’d come.

“Sure. Head back to Mare Ibrium thirteen if you want to.” Spanich leaned close. “But on your own terms.” Kid still smelled great. “And whatever you do, drop the stupid act. You got more education than anyone on this station who isn’t flash brass themselves. Damn well use it. At least be a smarter hustler.”

“I didn’t think they’d find me,” he said.

“Hah. You’re genetagged. Probably sniffed you out of the air recyclers, momma came running.” Spanich paused, then probed. “But the big dogs don’t know you’re gone, do they?”

“I th-thought I’d got away clean.”

“And that’s why she came with Mare Ibrium thirteen, instead of a battalion of special forces from the Household Guards.”

“Right. No scandal.”

“Yet,” said Spanich. “But you’ve been screwing the help, out here on big bad Estacada Orbital. Sullying yourself in the shallow waters of the gene pool.”

Austen nodded. “Some things get erased.”

Spanich thought about that, hard. “But not the entire labor force of a station. Too many of us know you, know you’ve been here a while.” He patted the kid’s arm. “I’m grabbing my kit and shipping out as an engineer’s mate in the next empty rack bound somewhere on the backside of this system. With a little luck I can get away before the Adjutant-Intendant puts out a warrant for my ass. You can stay here if you want, but you might consider the same.”

“No… Austen stood firm. “I’m going back.”

“After all the trouble I took to get you out?”

The kid grinned, that old, easy smile flashing. “Back on my own two feet, walking in to set what terms I can. Like you said. Besides, on Mare Ibrium I can do something about those warrants. Or Mother can, if I ask her nicely enough.”

Now that Austen had outed himself, he didn’t seem to have any problem with the starship’s name. Spanich gave him a long, slow stare. “Then what, kid? You ran away from something? Sure you want to go back to it?”

“No.” He looked around. “But what’s here? They won’t let me be. And you’re right. I can be traced anywhere I’m likely to be able to get.”

For a brief moment, Spanich consider inviting Austen to berth out with him. It would be harder to sign on two, but not impossible. He shook off the idiocy, pulled the kid close for a rough kiss that mostly proved they both needed to shave, then took a step back. “I’m going, then. Good luck.”

“You’ll make it off Estacada Orbital,” Austen said behind him. “I’ll see to that.”

“Then you’d better fucking hurry,” muttered Spanich, but not loud enough for the kid to hear. He picked up his pace. There were maybe only a few minutes of freedom left. At the next junction, as he turned, Spanich glanced back. It would be just like the kid to be standing there, staring.

But no. A couple of off-shift sanitation techs, a trundlebot loaded down with something lumpy, and no sign of Austen, prince of the Imperium Humanum.

“What do you know?” he asked no one in particular. “Sometimes they grow up.”

He went for the rest of his tools and his gear. There was always room for a man who could torque vacuum, out here in the Deep Dark. All he had to do was live to not tell the tale.

COLLECTORS, by Pamela Sargent

Originally published in Castle Fantastic (1996).

Alberto had bypassed Orléans, where the traffic heading toward that city was as heavy as it had been around Paris. People had flooded into Paris after the announcement, maybe because so much of French life had always been centered there. Whatever happened now, a lot of people obviously wanted to be in Paris when it did.

To have so many coming into Paris had made it easier for us to leave. The traffic had been heavy on the roads leading to the city, but almost nonexistent on the lanes going out. Alberto had filled the tank of his Fiat right after our arrival and hadn’t driven the car since, so we had enough gas. The concierge at the hotel had let us check out without paying, maybe because by then the exchange rates were fluctuating from one hour to the next and there was no way of knowing how much any currency would be worth in time. We even had a bag of canned food and bottled water. Making my way back to the hotel, I had been caught in a crowd of looters, and somebody had thrust a canvas bag of food at me. The owners of the shops and stores didn’t seem to mind the looting. By then, some of them were standing by the doors of their establishments shouting “Prenez-en” and “Prenez-les tous,” telling people to help themselves to everything inside.

We left the main highway, then had to detour around a small town. The cobblestone streets leading into the town were blocked by vans. The traffic was thinning rapidly. Soon ours was the only car I could see on the road.

We followed the Loire along a two-lane highway nearly as straight as the line on a graph. On the other side of the river, I spotted the distinctive dome and stacks of a nuclear power plant.

“I hope they’ve shut that thing down,” I said.

Alberto was silent as he drove over a bridge and past the plant, then turned right. He hadn’t said anything since leaving Paris. After dropping off my bag of food in our room, I had found him in the hotel bar, sitting with a middle-aged Canadian couple and a young woman in a University of Minnesota sweatshirt. The middle-aged man was saying, “We were on our second honeymoon.” The young woman said, “This was my first trip to Europe.” Alberto sighed, then said, “We were going to look at some of the châteaux along the Loire before starting back to Italy.” It struck me then that everyone was using the past tense, as if their earlier lives were over.

I had let Alberto decide what to do. He seemed to think that the place to be was outside the major cities. Whatever happened now was likely to affect the cities first, so it was better to get out of Paris and then consider what to do next. His thinking had seemed reasonable to me when we were sitting in our room, with the TV tuned in to CNN International for the latest news—or non-news—and the sounds of cars, honking horns, and tolling bells outside growing louder by the minute. Now I wasn’t so sure. Alberto had decided to head toward the Loire Valley because that was where we had originally planned to go. I was beginning to think that he simply didn’t know what to do, that he preferred to pretend that there was some purpose to his actions rather than sit around in our room or the hotel bar speculating about what might happen and freaking himself out. Probably all the people crowding into Paris and other cities didn’t know what to do, either. Maybe they just wanted to be in a crowd while they waited instead of getting terrified all alone somewhere.

Alberto turned on to another road. A high stone wall at our left surrounded forested land. I gazed absently at the map on my lap, on which the roads were not very clearly marked, then thrust it into the glove compartment.

“Where are we now?” I asked.

“Near Chambord,” he replied, speaking at last. “You remember, Lois--we were going to stop there first. It is considered one of the most spectacular of the châteaux, perhaps the grandest. It was the project of François the First-—”

“I know all of that,” I muttered, wondering why he was mentioning it now.

“--who was a great admirer of Renaissance art, particularly Italian art. Leonardo da Vinci has been credited with drawing up some of the plans for Chambord.” Alberto sounded like a tour guide. Hearing him speak in such a flat, matter-of-fact manner made me even moreapprehensive. I realized then that he was probably just trying to distract himself from any fears he might be harboring with this pretense of normality. By then, I was wishing that we had stayed in Paris.

My lord and master. I had called Alberto that in jest during the early days of our relationship, even though I was never sure if he caught my sarcasm or sensed that the phrase was my little joke. Now those terms seemed only too accurate. He was always in charge; there was never any doubt of that. He didn’t have to go out of his way to demonstrate it, either; his dominance was simply assumed, without question. A lot of American men might make noises about being in control, but in practice many of them were willing to share some authority, even cede some of their traditional territory. There was an almost appealing insecurity in American men that I hadn’t properly appreciated before getting involved with Alberto, whose behavior seemed part of an earlier age.

“We could try to drive back to Rome,” I said.

“No. It’s much too far. The hotels along the way might be full by now, with no one toattend to anyone, and the service stations will probably be closed.” Then his voice got more strained, his accent thicker. “Would you want to pass your time now running a service stationor attending to hotel guests?”

“I guess not.” I didn’t want to pass the time looking at châteaux, either, trying to pretend everything was still normal. There wasn’t even any way at the moment to find out what was happening in the rest of the world, since Alberto’s car radio had died during the drive from Lyon to Paris. I was about to suggest that we head back to Orléans and take our chances there when the sky suddenly turned white.

Alberto hit the brakes. I covered my face with my hands, thinking wildly of laser beams and advanced weapons, then peered between my fingers. The sky was still white; the stone wall along the road rippled, as if I were seeing it through water, and the forest beyond was black under the piercing light.

I don’t know how long it lasted. There was no sound of explosions, no heat, no firestorms, quakes, or other signs of destruction, only the bright whiteness of the sky and the blackness of the trees on the other side of the rippling wall. I glanced to my right and saw that the sky to the west was still blue, the flat land green. I turned back. The white light vanished abruptly; the black leaves of the trees on the other side of the wall were once again green.

Alberto crossed himself. We sat there for a while, and then he started the car again.

They were scanning us, I thought. They would satisfy their curiosity about us and then go on their way. I was so busy trying to reassure myself that we were through a gate and 5on the road leading to Chambord’s parking lot and visitors’ entrance before I noticed our surroundings again.

Alberto sucked in his breath; I looked up. That was when I saw the traffic ahead.

Cars and buses were speeding straight at us along both lanes of the road. Horns beeped and wailed, warning us to get out of the way. Alberto slowed, then quickly drove onto the shoulder and into the grass. Vehicles raced past us, heading toward the gate. The cars sped ahead of the buses, but even the buses were barreling along, pebbles flying from under their wheels.

I stared after them until the long procession was out of sight. “If they’re all in such a hurry to get out of here,” I said, “maybe we’d better follow them.”

Alberto rested his hands on the wheel. “To where?”

“Anywhere.”

“And what will we do when we run out of gasoline? Staying here is as reasonable as going somewhere else. Think, Lois--where could we be completely safe now?”

I was silent.

“And I must confess to being curious about why all those people were driving away so rapidly.”

Of course, I thought. Alberto would never admit to being afraid of anything, even when there was good reason to be fearful. But I didn’t feel like arguing with him, and everything looked peaceful now. In the distance, pale stone towers seemed to be floating against the sky, a magical place apart from this world; that had to be the château. Maybe all the people in the cars and buses had simply panicked after seeing the sky brighten. They would come back when they came to their senses.

Alberto drove back onto the road. The parking lot was empty when we reached it. So were the walkways near the souvenir shops and cafés of the tiny town. Alberto parked near an ice-cream counter. We got out and wandered along the street in the direction of the château.

Beyond the rows of trees up ahead, the ticket booth was empty, its door open. I could see the château clearly now. Chambord loomed over a vast plain of cropped grass. The pale stone facade was crowned by four large towers and several smaller towers and turrets. One slender tower topped by a dome, taller than the others, stood in the center. It was hard to accept the structure’s size, its hugeness; only a megalomaniac could have built such a castle. But Chambord’s massiveness and solidity were also reassuring. We would be safe here after all, I told myself. The château would protect us.

The sky was growing gray, the autumn air colder. A voice behind me shouted, “Hey!”

I spun around. A tall lanky white-haired man stood in an open doorway. “Hey!” the man called out again. “You speak English? Anglais?”

“Yes,” Alberto replied, “I do.”

“Everybody just took off--didn’t even wait for us.”

The stranger had a flat Midwestern accent and looked harmless enough. Alberto strode toward him; I followed.

“We saw them,” Alberto said. “They ran us off the road.”

“Scared, that’s what they were. We were walking to the castle there, ahead of all the others on our bus. Couldn’t get back in time.” The man motioned with one hand. “Better come inside.”

We entered the building. Wooden tables and chairs stood against one wall; a bar ran along the other side of the room. A stocky woman with short curly gray hair was perched on one of the stools. Like the man, she was wearing a windbreaker, sweatshirt, loose jeans, and athletic shoes.

“You’re Americans,” I said as we sat down. “So am I.”

“Well, I’ll be,” the man said. “You don’t look American.”

“I’ve been living in Italy.” I wondered if I would ever see my own country again.

Alberto introduced us. The couple’s names, they told us, were Edna and Jim Haworth, and they came from a suburb of Kansas City. Jim had been in France with the army toward the end of World War II and had brought his wife there on a trip with several other retired people, all of whom had apparently fled on one of the buses with their tour guide.

“Didn’t even wait for us,” Edna Haworth said, shaking her head.

“Just took off like a bat outa hell,” Jim Haworth muttered, “right after the light changed and the air got all thick. Heard this sound, like a big giant heart beating, and by then my hair was standing up. It went on and on, that sound and the rippling air and all, till I like to be sick. Folks were running out of the castle there, trying to make it to the parking lot--damn near trampled us. Edna was hanging onto my arm like a little kid, and then we started for the bus, but by the time we got to here, they were already driving off.”

“We saw something strange,” I said, “The sky going white, and-—”

“Didn’t just see it, young lady. Felt it, right in my guts. I was scared. Edna felt it, too.”

“We didn’t feel anything like that,” I said.

“It’s them.” Edna gestured toward the ceiling. “Has to be.”

She didn’t have to say what she meant. I thought of how quickly everything had changed in just three days. Three days ago, I was trying to figure out how to tell Alberto I was going to leave him and go back to New York. Three days ago, nobody had even suspected that visitors from outer space were suddenly going to show up. A physicist interviewed on CNN had said something about the alien vessel stitching its way through spacetime, which was his way of trying to explain how it had appeared near Earth so abruptly, without any warning.

The aliens had come here in a spherical ship the size of an asteroid--if that alien globe could be called a ship. They had sent no messages, no envoys, no signs of hostile intent, no signals, no greetings at all. The Russians had two cosmonauts in orbit, and the United States had begun a space shuttle mission several days early, replacing the scheduled crew with members of the armed forces; they now had some footage of the vessel from a distance, and the aliens still had not reacted. No one was even sure if there were any aliens inside the ship; one theory was that it housed an artificial intelligence, a computer mind of sorts. Nobody knew why it was here, or what the aliens--or the artificial intelligence--wanted.

No wonder people were starting to get unhinged. Anyone could understand malevolent aliens attacking the world, or kindly aliens arriving to solve all our problems. But this ship was just sitting out there, inside the orbit of the moon, and we didn’t know anything more about it than we had three days ago. Waiting without knowing anything--that was the worst of it.

Alberto took out his cigarettes, lit one, then slipped his leather case back into his pocket. I had long since given up what he called my puritanical American habit of chiding him about his smoking, and the Haworths didn’t object; maybe they were thinking we had more important things to worry about now.

I noticed the TV over the bar.

“There must be some news on,” I said. That was a safe bet; there hadn’t been anything except news on TV ever since the alien ship had appeared. “We haven’t heard anything since leaving Paris.”

“We tried it,” Jim said. “Set’s not working.”

We sat there for a while. I suppose we were all thinking that some of the people who had left might come back. At last Jim said, “Well, what do we do now?”

* * * *

We searched through the souvenir shops and cafés. That was Alberto’s idea. The doors were unlocked, the rooms empty; it seemed that everyone had fled. Edna and Jim weren’t surprised; they remembered how terrified they had been, how the impulse to get away from the terror they had felt had overwhelmed them. Occasionally, we tried one of the radios or TVs we found in a few of the buildings, trying to pick up some news, but none of them worked. A power failure couldn’t be the cause; the lights were still working. Maybe the government had ordered an end to the broadcasts. A couple of ministers had been claiming that several reporters were only adding to the panic with their speculations.

“Didn’t look like too many people were here to begin with,” Edna said as she and I sat down at one of the tables under the trees lining the walkway.

“There wouldn’t have been as many at this time of year.”

“I know. We wanted to avoid the big crowds. That’s why we came in October--it was cheaper, too.” Edna gazed toward Alberto and Jim, who were walking toward the empty ticket booth. “Funny. I don’t feel scared at all now. I almost feel glad to be here.”

I knew what she meant. I was feeling the same way. Under the circumstances, I should have been feeling anxious, jumpy, afraid, despairing, or depressed, all of which were common enough mental states for me anyway. Instead, I was feeling almost reassured; that bothered me.

We got up and joined the men. Alberto and Jim were standing by the booth, staring atthe château. The sky still looked gray and overcast, but Chambord’s pale walls and cupola-topped towers glowed with a golden light. A few horses, dwarfed by the massive château, were grazing on the groomed grass near the moat.

“Where’d the horses come from?” I heard Jim ask.

“They use them for the carriage rides,” Edna replied. “That’s what our guide said, remember? Patrick was telling us about how most of the woods around this castle is a big game park where tourists aren’t allowed, and then he said that the horses-—”

“Someone is with them,” Alberto said. I squinted and glimpsed a tiny human form before it disappeared around the far tower. “Perhaps we should investigate.”

I was thinking that we should leave, but the château drew me. It was strange to feel so drawn to it, especially when a small part of my mind was insistently telling me that we should get out of here and head somewhere else. I would be safe here. The rest of my mind was insisting on that, drowning out my fears.

* * * *

Alberto drove along a walkway to the château. He and Jim Haworth sat in the front of the car; Edna and I were wedged into the back.

“So you’ve been living in Italy,” Edna said.

“In Rome, for about a year.”

“Is that where you two met?” She smiled. “‘Three Coins in the Fountain’ is one of my favorite movies--so romantic.”

Older American women often seemed to find my situation romantic. I had once thought of it as romantic myself. My taste for romance was probably why none of my relationships had lasted very long; the romance always wore off in the end.

“Actually, we met in New York,” I said, “trying to hail a cab on the same corner. Alberto was there on business--his firm imports a lot of American products. We ended up going to dinner, and one thing led to another, and a couple of months later, I was living in Rome.”

“How adventurous.”

I had never been adventurous; it only sounded that way. However great my longing for romance and a break from my everyday life, I always covered my bets. My job was safe atthe ad agency because my best friend owned the agency; Karen had faxed only last week to say I could come back any time. My apartment had been subletted, so I would still have a place to live if I returned to New York. It wasn’t my style either to burn my bridges behind me or to commit myself completely by abandoning my previous life. I had read that François I, Chambord’s builder, had needed thousands of horses to bring his luggage, servants, and courtiers to this château just for short visits. I could sympathize with that. I took all my baggage with me, psychologically at least.

All of my past caution might not make any difference now, I reminded myself. At the moment, there might be little security for anyone. That thought should have brought on another wave of despair and fear. Instead, I found myself placidly looking forward to a closerlook at the magnificent château. Something’s wrong, my inner voice told me; I ignored it.

The great château was even larger than I realized. We could have walked around it, following the wide pathway that led around the moat to the entrance on the other side, but it would have been a long walk. If any visitors were still inside, I had the feeling we could wander through the château for days without ever finding them. Chambord was a world in itself; I no longer feared what might be happening elsewhere.

The main entrance was in the center of a wall; the doors and the gate of the arched entryway were open. The towers of the keep rose behind the wall, still golden even under the overcast sky. We got out and went through the entrance to the pebbled courtyard in front of the keep.

“How strange,” Alberto said softly. “I feel as if I belong here.” In the past, I would have teased him about his arrogance, but the same feeling of belonging here had stolen over me. Perhaps it was the strangeness of our situation, of being alone in this monument to Renaissance architecture while the world outside waited--for what?

“Know what you mean, son,” Jim was saying to Alberto. “I feel kind of easy here, too. Almost seems like we got all scared for nothing.”

Across the courtyard, the two doors leading into the keep were also open. We walked toward the steps that led to them.

“It’s almost as if someone wants us to come inside,” I said.

“Probably the folks trying to get away just didn’t bother to close up,” Edna said.

We climbed the steps and entered the keep. In the center of a large bare hall, square, massive pale pillars supported a winding stairway. From the entrance, it looked as though there was only one staircase, but I knew there were two, entwined around each other. A slight dark-haired woman stood on a lower step, leaning against the marble bannister.

“Vous parlez français?” the woman called out.

“Oui,” Alberto shouted back, his voice echoing in the empty hall.

She hurried to us. There was no tension in her face and no fearfulness in her brown eyes as she introduced herself. Her name was Ariane, and she was staying at St-Michel, the inn across from the château. She had been over by the canal, speaking to one of the estate’s gamekeepers, when the white light had filled the sky and the terror had seized her. She and the gamekeeper were running toward the inn when Ariane saw her sister, who had traveled there with her, speeding away in their car. By then, other vehicles were racing toward the road. Alberto waited until the Frenchwoman was finished, then translated for the rest of us.

“She must be furious with her sister,” I murmured.

Edna shook her head. “Maybe not. Everybody just ran. You don’t know how it was. You couldn’t think of anything else except getting out of here.

Jim nodded. “Might of even left Edna behind if she hadn’t been hanging on to me.”

Ariane didn’t look frightened now. She said something about being content to stay here for the moment; I knew enough French to catch that much. Alberto translated the rest. Jean, the gamekeeper, had gone to let the horses out of the stables; she would wait here for him and then return to the inn.

She sounded awfully calm under the circumstances. I would have found her serenity eerie except that I was finding it increasingly hard to work up any real fear myself. I almost felt drugged. Maybe we were all too stunned by our situation to react to anything. Our psychological defenses must be kicking in, I thought absently.

The Haworths decided to wait with Ariane, then walk to the inn with her and Jean. Alberto was saying something else to Ariane as I wandered toward the staircase, suddenly wanting to be by myself. Inside this magnificent château, I could pretend, for a while, that there was nothing to worry about.

It struck me then that, no matter what the intentions of the interstellar visitor, our world would never be the same. Even if the alien ship left without revealing its purpose, we would all know that other beings were out there, and that their civilization was obviously technologically far in advance of our own. What would that do to us? No wonder I wanted to remain here, near one of humankind’s wonders, thinking back to a time when most people had assumed that beings on other worlds did not exist.

A stocky brown-haired man had come inside the château; I assumed he was Jean the gamekeeper. Alberto said something to him, and then the man led the others toward the entrance.

I leaned against the stone railing. My feet were beginning to hurt. Ankle-high leather boots with pointed toes and narrow heels weren’t good for walking very far. That was probably why Jim Haworth was surprised to find out I was an American, because I was wearing a pin-striped pantsuit and chic boots instead of jeans and athletic shoes. Alberto didn’t like it when I looked too American.

Things had not been right between Alberto and me for a while. I wasn’t sure of exactly when I had begun to notice that. Maybe it was the morning when I stood by our apartment window and realized that Rome no longer looked as it had to me, as though fragments of the past were slipping into the present, or as if the present were just an illusion superimposed on something more ancient. The present had finally overtaken my view of the city. All I saw now was the chaotic traffic, and all I could hear was the constant noise of the streets.

Once, I had been entranced by the city and its layers of history, and then I was longing to get away. The same was true of my feelings toward Alberto. Everything that had drawn me--his expressiveness, his ardent professions of love, his determination to enjoy whatever he wanted to do regardless of the cost, his inability to keep to any schedule for long, his erratic moods--were exactly the same characteristics that had finally convinced me that our relationship couldn’t work. His unquestioned assumption that I was the lady of the house and that he was in charge of everything else hadn’t helped, either.

Everything had come to a head after yet another hair-raising ride through Roman traffic in the Fiat that he would never allow me to drive. I started screaming at him about his recklessness and the motorcyclist he had narrowly missed and the amount of wine he had drunk. He was retaliating with his usual tirade about my constipated American ways when he abruptly fell silent, then said, “You wanted to spend some time in France. We’ll go, in September or October. We can drive there, stop along the way. The business will not collapse if I leave it in Giancarlo’s hands for three weeks.” He had taken me completely by surprise, so I had gone along with his proposal. Maybe I was also thinking that I might as well see some more of Italy and France before walking out on him. I had known that he wouldn’t come after me if I left, that the break would be final; he was too proud to beg, however wounded he might feel. How irrelevant and unimportant all of that seemed now.

I looked down. Alberto was below, following me up the staircase. I stopped to work my sore toes inside my boots, and he disappeared behind the central pillar.

“Lois!” he called out. He was now above me on the stairway that intertwined with this one.

“Maybe you shouldn’t have left the Haworths without an interpreter,” I shouted back.

“Jean knows some English. I want to explore the château with you.”

I hurried up the stairs after him, through a vast hall, and caught up with him in a room paneled in pale wood, with a large canopied bed against one wall.

“This room once housed a king of Poland,” he said.

“Perhaps we should stay here tonight.”

I found myself laughing. We clasped hands and hurried through large bare rooms, smaller rooms tucked away in corners, and narrow corridors. It was difficult, even in the cozier spaces, to imagine anyone, even the arrogant monarchs and nobles of France’s past, actually living in the vastness of this château. Chambord was a place for spectacle and display, for the mighty to show off their wealth and power. I thought of the servants that must have once stood in the doorways that led from small alcoves, rooms, and passages into the staterooms and bedchambers, how they must have marveled at the glittering and careless aristocrats who might as well have come from another world.

We scurried up stairs, heedless of where we were going. I was suddenly relieved that I had never told Alberto that I was thinking of leaving him, and deeply regretting that I had ever planned to go back to New York. We would lose ourselves inside Chambord, and never find our way out again. What happened outside could not touch us.

We had climbed to the roof terrace before a stray thought intruded on my contented mood. All of the rooms, even the small alcoves and chambers that lacked the huge windows of the biggest rooms, had glowed with a soft light. I had assumed that daylight was providing much of the illumination, but the overcast sky had not cleared, and evening was approaching. I recalled seeing lighting in some of Chambord’s rooms, but not in the small passages where the walls had also glowed.

“The walls here,” I said. “It’s almost as if they were lighted from inside.”

Alberto didn’t say anything. On the terrace, we were amid a forest of towers and chimneys, as if an entire town of spires and steeples had been placed on top of the château. I slipped my arm through his as we walked toward the north wall. The air had grown sharper, colder. It had been warmer inside, in spite of the size of the rooms and the lack of fires in the fireplaces.

We came to the railing. I had a clear view of the moat and the canal that ran through the grounds nearest the château. Near a small bridge over the canal, a flock of ducks rested on the bank. I lifted my head, then noticed something else. In the distance, at the western edge of the forest and the groomed field alongside it, a low wall of thick gray mist seemed to mark a boundary.

“That fog,” I said. “There’s something odd about it.”

“I know.” Alberto frowned as he rubbed his dark beard. “Perhaps we should leave now, all of us. We would have to squeeze the others into the auto, but-—” His voice trailed off. It was obvious that he didn’t want to leave. I didn’t, either, but the voice inside my head was growing more insistent, saying that there was something the matter with my being so serene, with our willingness to linger in a place where people had nearly run us down in their fear to get away, who had been so determined to flee the area that they hadn’t cared what was in their path.

“Look there.” Alberto pointed. Four tiny shapes had emerged from the wall of fog. I narrowed my eyes, but some time passed before I could see them more clearly. They were cyclists, pedaling up the road we had taken. “Perhaps we should find out what they want.”

We left the terrace. It never occurred to me to worry about whether the new arrivals might be dangerous.

* * * *

The bicyclists arrived at the inn shortly after Alberto had parked our car near the entrance. One look at their wholesome, clean-featured faces told me that they were no threat to us. They were equipped with maps, backpacks, and other gear; one of them told us that he had visited Chambord before.

His name was Erland; he had startlingly blue eyes, spoke perfect English, and was a medical student from Sweden. He and his friends, another blond young man and two fair-haired slender young women, had been staying at a hostel near Blois when the announcement came, and had left it only that morning. Later, they had seen a large bright flash of light in the distance, in the direction of Cour-Cheverny.

“We listened over the radio,” Erland said. We were all sitting in the empty dining room of the refurbished country house that was the inn. “Knut has a short-wave with him. We thought they might be attacking. There were reports from Meung-sur-Loire and Chenonceaux, of people fleeing from the châteaux there, seeing the sky go white, feeling terrified. Then it was over. There were a few auto accidents, collisions, and some people being hit by cars, but nothing more serious.”

“Happened here, too,” Jim Haworth said, “that business with the sky lighting up. My wife and me saw it.”

“Have you heard any news since then?” Erland asked.

Jim shook his head. “Tried a lot of televisions here. None of them worked. Neither did the radios.”

“I was thinking the government might have ordered a stop to news broadcasts,” I said, “to keep people from getting more frightened.”

Erland shook his head. “How could they stop the news, even if they wanted to do so? They can’t shut down satellites and the Internet. There are too many ways to spread the news now.” He motioned at Knut. The other young man rummaged in his backpack and took out a small radio. We all huddled around it and heard nothing. No static, weak signals, white noise--nothing but absolute silence.

“This radio was working before,” Knut muttered in English much more heavily accented than his friend’s. “There is nothing wrong with it.” Astrid and Dorotea, the two young women, glanced at each other.

The Swedes were on their feet in a few seconds. They swept through the inn, searching for other radios and TVs, but discovered that none of them worked, either.

They were coming back into the dining room when I heard Ariane murmur something to Jean about the lights. Alberto leaned forward, then glanced at the Haworths. “She is saying that the lights in this room do not look the same,” he said. “When she was having dinner here last night, they weren’t as bright.”

Erland and his friends sat down at a nearby table. “There is something very odd here,” the young Swede said. “When we saw on our maps that we were near Chambord, we decided to stop here for the night. There was this fog-—”

“I saw it,” Alberto interrupted, “from the roof of the château. It looked almost like a wall.”

“It is hanging outside the wall that surrounds these grounds,” Erland went on. “We had to ride through it. It felt like a warm soft mass, but dry and not damp. I could feel it pressing around me. A strange feeling went through me, like a small electric shock, and I thought of turning back, but by then we were through it.”

“We all felt it,” Knut added. “But then-—” He leaned back in his chair. “I am glad we found this place. We all found ourselves glad to be here when we were closer to this inn. There is probably some food in the kitchen. We should make supper and then get some rest.” He smiled. “Perhaps we should stay for a few days. We will surely be comfortable enough. I feared that we might have to camp out in the forest.”

Everyone seemed eerily relaxed. Edna’s arm rested on that of her husband; Alberto had the sleepy-eyed contented look I usually saw after he had drunk a couple of glasses of wine.

“I think we should leave,” I said, having to force the words from my lips. Even as I said it, the rest of me was thinking of supper and then some sleep. “Something’s wrong here. I think-—” But I couldn’t bring myself to say anything else, and no one was paying any attention to me.

* * * *

Knut and Dorotea cooked lamb chops, potatoes, and carrots for our supper, and served the meal with wine from the inn’s cellar. We found room keys behind the desk in the lobby and drifted off to St-Michel’s guest rooms. I slept in my shirt and underpants, too tired even to go to the car and bring in my overnight bag.

A dream came to me. I was standing on the steps of Chambord’s double stairway, gazing down at the people in the hall below. The hall was ablaze with light, and four people stood near the staircase beckoning to me. I recognized Erland and his companions; they seemed to want me to join them. Looking up, I saw Alberto above me; I hurried up the stairs, lifting the skirt of my long blue silk gown. I left the stairway and came to a room where Edna and Jim Haworth sat in two small wooden chairs, warming themselves near the fire that blazed in the fireplace. Ariane entered the room, clothed in a long red gown. Faces appeared in the embroidery on the walls near the window and smiled at me. I was on the staircase again, with stone dragons writhing on the pilasters above me and stone salamanders flicking their tails as they crawled along the walls. I came to the terrace and found Alberto by the railing, looking out over the forest. He held out his arm and I rested my hand against it, but something about my gesture felt false, as if I hadn’t quite performed it correctly. On the other side of the canal, Jean was riding out of the woods on horseback with a deer slung across his mount. It was all ours, this magical place. No one could take it from us.

I woke and lay in bed without moving. I was used to waking in the middle of the night, when all my self-doubt and neuroses were working at full strength to convince me that my life was empty and useless. Even when I slept through until morning, I often had to lie there wrestling with lassitude and despair before facing the day. The hollow, stunned feeling of hopelessness with which I was so familiar was gone; I wasn’t quite sure of what I was feeling instead. Anticipation? Happiness? I hadn’t been truly happy for so long that happiness would be hard to recognize.

I sat up. Our overnight bag sat near the window. The door opened; Alberto entered with a tray holding a pot of coffee and two cups. In all our time together, he had never once brought me coffee in the morning. He had forgotten to bring milk, or else hadn’t found any; I drank the coffee black.

“I dreamed about you,” I said as he sat down on the edge of the bed. “We were in the château, all of us, Ariane and the Haworths and the Swedes. I found you on the terrace. Jean was riding out of the forest with a deer carcass on his horse. It was as if-—”

“--it belonged to us,” Alberto finished. “I had the same dream, Lois, or one much like it. I stood on the terrace, and you came to me, and then I saw Jean come out of the forest. Before that, I was standing on the central staircase, and you were there, and the young Swedes were calling out to us. Then I was in another room, with the Haworths and Ariane.”

“Isn’t that kind of strange, both of us dreaming the same thing?” I poured myself morecoffee. “There’s something else. My dream didn’t feel like one of my dreams. For one thing, mine usually aren’t that coherent. For another-—” I tried to think of how to explain it. “I felt as if I was playing a part in a way, almost as if someone were trying to cast me but I wasn’t quite right for the role. And yet-—”

Alberto said, “I felt I was where I belonged.”

“I felt that you were, too. You know, when I was a kid, I used to imagine that I’d meet a prince some day, or a nobleman anyway, and end up living in a palace. It’s a common enough fantasy, almost a cliché, but-—”

“One of my mother’s ancestors was a count,” he said. “This was several generations back, but she was quite proud of her great-great-grandfather the count.”

I said, “That explains a few things about you,” and touched his arm lightly.

“Oh, I considered her pride in him an affectation, but she must have passed on some of that pride to me. There have been a few times, even recently, when I would tell myself while in a bad situation to behave as the count might have.”

My dream had seemed familiar, as if I’d dreamed it before, and yet parts of it seemed to come from outside my own memories and imagination. I recalled the feeling that I had been playing a part, that something had forced the role on me. I was about to say that we should go to our car and drive away now, but couldn’t bring myself to speak.

Somehow I got up and got dressed. Alberto was uncharacteristically subdued. We left the room together and found the others sitting on the terrace, gazing at the château across the way.

Chambord was unearthly in the early morning light. Despite its size, it had an ethereal air. As I moved across the terrace, my arm looped through Alberto’s, I could imagine the great castle ascending to the sky to rest among clouds.

Everyone was staring at us. I was about to greet the Haworths when Jean and Ariane rose to their feet. The blond cyclists stood up then, followed by the Haworths.

Edna came toward us, her husband just behind her. “You were in my dream,” she said in a soft voice unlike the heartier one I recalled from the day before, “you and Alberto both. We were over there, in the castle, all of us. We-—”

Jim made a sound, almost like a moan. He seemed to be struggling to say something. His thin face contorted, then relaxed. I had the strange sensation that Ariane, Jean, and the Swedes were about to curtsy and bow to us.

No one else spoke. We left the terrace together, in silence. Jean and Ariane led the way, followed by the Haworths. They moved at a stately pace, their backs stiff, their footsteps slow and deliberate. The young Swedes were behind us, bringing up the rear. When I tried to speak, to turn around and go back to my room, my body refused to obey me.

We walked toward the château. It seemed to rise from the ground as we approached it. The horses were grazing nearby; they lifted their heads and whinnied. A deer was standing at the edge of the forest, unafraid.

We passed through the still-open entrance and went inside the keep. I found myself on the double staircase, feeling as though I was trapped inside last night’s dream. I looked down to see Erland and his friends gazing up at me.

I was on the terrace, with no memory of having climbed that far. Alberto was at my side, surveying the woods below. How familiar it all seemed. I had imagined such a scene as a child, when dreaming of a prince who would take me away from my ordinary life and carry me to his fairy-tale realm.

“Alberto,” I said, and his name sounded as if someone else had spoken it.

The wall of fog was still visible, but higher now, almost obscuring the distant road. A long line of cars waited beyond the gray mist. It looked as though people were returning to Chambord. I wondered why they had stopped there instead of continuing on their way.

The cars didn’t move. A few tiny human figures were walking among the vehicles, waving and motioning with their arms. I continued to watch the misty wall rise until I could no longer see the line of cars. The sun had risen, the sky was a sharp blue, and it came to me then that the air was much warmer than it had been the day before, almost too warm for this time of year.

“Alberto,” I said, and the word tore itself from me. “We have to get out of here.”

“You are wrong,” he said. “Chambord belongs to us now.”

I struggled to hold on to my thoughts. The fog was still rising; it would wall us in, cutus off from the outside. What did I care about the rest of the world? I could be happy here as the lady of the castle, my lord at my side. Hadn’t that always been a favorite fantasy of mine?

He took my arm. I felt entranced, unable to resist the dreamlike state stealing over me. I drifted across the terrace and down another staircase, clinging to Alberto’s arm. We came to a room where the heads of deer and other animals hung on the walls. Jean the gamekeeper was there, standing in front of a tapestry depicting a hunting party.

Jean said something in French. I didn’t catch his words. “What did he say?” I whispered. It was an effort to speak; my words sounded as though they were on a tape being played at too slow a speed.

“That he was a gamekeeper,” Alberto replied, “and that now he will be a hunter.”

I dug my fingers into Alberto’s arm and led him out of the room. To speak, even to think of what to say, was becoming increasingly difficult. I could be safe here. Alberto would be transformed into the romantic figure for whom I had always longed, and we would have our castle. Something was drawing those thoughts from me, playing them, making them resonate within me. That was when I knew we had to get out.

I would not try to talk. I would hang on to Alberto and try to guide him away from this place. I looked into his dark eyes and saw the fear that lay beneath the spell that had been cast on him. He understood what I was trying to do, even if part of him was resisting it. Maybe we could escape.

We made it to the double staircase and descended to the floor below. I heard voices echoing through the hall, and followed the sound to a red-walled room hung with portraits. Edna and Jim Haworth stood in the center of the room, speaking in English to Ariane, who was responding in French. Edna was muttering incoherently about a garden, while Jim was saying something about his army days. I couldn’t understand what Ariane was saying. One look at their slack-jawed, happy faces and empty eyes told me that they were completely under the château’s spell.

“Come with me.” I gasped for breath as I spoke, knowing it was futile, that they would not be able to leave. We went through another room, where Dorotea, one of the Swedes, was lying unconscious on a bed. I gazed at her composed face and thought of Sleeping Beauty, then tried to drag her from the bed. She slipped from my grip and fell back.

I had to save my strength. Alberto and I shuffled back to the staircase. The farther down the stairs we went, the harder it was to make our feet move.

We came to the ground floor and left the staircase. Erland was standing by one of the doors that led out of the keep. He seemed to be miles away, a small figure across the vast polished wood plain of the floor. I wondered how we could cross that floor, how we could ever get out of the château.

We struggled over the floor. With every step, I thought of how much easier it would be to stay. I remembered the contentment that had filled me inside these walls, of how much Iwanted to remain here. I clutched at Alberto more tightly, knowing that if I gave up now, he wouldn’t have the strength to get out alone. His hand found mine and hung on tightly, and I knew that I wouldn’t get out without him. Erland’s lips moved, but I couldn’t understand what he was saying. I think he was begging us to stay. We pushed past him and went outside. Knut and Astrid were in the courtyard, leaning against each other as they staggered toward the gate.

All four of us got to the walkway. I kept my eyes on the ground, thinking only of getting as far as the inn. Once we made it there, we could get into the car and drive away. I concentrated on that thought. Alberto was muttering in Italian. I kept my hand in his, determined not to let go.

Knut and Astrid were several feet ahead of us, struggling toward the distant inn. The forested land behind the inn seemed beyond our reach. Knut stumbled and fell; Astrid helped him up. We had to get to the car. Maybe by then Alberto and I would have enough strength to help the other two into the vehicle.

“Get to the car,” I murmured, “keep going,” and then noticed that a misty gray wall was rising behind the trees. For a while, I didn’t know what I was seeing as the mist continued to rise, obscuring the cloudless blue expanse. Slowly, I forced my head to my right. Another mass of fog was rising toward the sun.

VICTORY, by Lester del Rey

Originally published in Astounding Science Fiction, August, 1955.

I

From above came the sound of men singing. Captain Duke O’Neill stopped clipping his heavy black beard to listen. It had been a long time since he’d heard such a sound—longer than the time since he’d last had a bath or seen a woman. It had never been the singing type of war. Yet now even the high tenor of old Teroini, who lay on a pad with neither legs nor arms, was mixed into the chorus. It could mean only one thing!

As if to confirm his thoughts, Burke Thompson hobbled past the cabin, stopping just long enough to shout. “Duke, we’re home! They’ve sighted Meloa!”

“Thanks,” Duke called after him, but the man was hobbling out of sight, eager to carry the good news to others.

Fourteen years, Duke thought as he dragged out his hoarded bottle of water and began shaving. Five since he’d seen Ronda on his last leave. Now the battered old wreck that was left of the flagship was less than an hour from home base, and the two other survivors of the original fleet of eight hundred were limping along behind. Three out of eight hundred—but they’d won! Meloa had her victory.

And far away, Earth could rest in unearned safety for a while.

Duke grimaced bitterly. It was no time to think of Earth now. He shucked off his patched and filthy clothes and reached for the dress grays he had laid out in advance; at least they were still in good condition, almost unused. He dressed slowly, savoring the luxury of clean clothes. The buttons gave him trouble; his left hand looked and behaved almost like a real one, but in the three years since he got it, there had been no chance to handle buttons.

Then he mastered the trick and stepped back to study the final results. He didn’t look bad. Maybe a little gaunt and in need of a good haircut. But his face hadn’t aged as much as he had thought. The worst part was the pasty white where his beard had covered his face, but a few days under Meloa’s sun would fix that. Maybe he could spend a month with Ronda at a beach. He still had most of his share of his salary—nearly a quarter million Meloan credits; even if the rumors of inflation were true, that should be enough.

He stared at his few possessions, then shrugged and left them. He headed up the officers’ lift toward the control room, where he could see Meloa swim into view and later see the homeport of Kordule as they landed.

* * * *

The pilot and navigator were replacements, sent out to bring the old ship home, and their faces showed none of the jubilation of the crew. They nodded at him as he entered, then returned to staring at the screens without expression. Aside from the blueness of their skins and the complete absence of hair, they looked almost human, and Duke had long since stopped thinking of them as anything else.

“How long?” he asked.

The pilot shrugged. “Half an hour, captain. We’re too low on fuel to wait for clearance, even if control is working. Don’t worry. There’ll be plenty of time to catch the next ship to Earth.”

“Earth?” Duke glowered at him, suspecting a joke, but there was no humor on the blue face. “I’m not going back!” Then he frowned. “What’s an Earth ship doing on Meloa?”

The navigator exchanged a surprised look with the pilot, and nodded as if some signal had passed between them. His voice was as devoid of expression as his face. “Earth resumed communication with us the day the truce was signed,” he answered. He paused, studying Duke. “They’re giving free passage back to Earth to all Terran veterans, captain.”

Nice of them, Duke thought. They were willing to let the men who’d survived come back, just as they hadn’t forbidden anyone to go. Very nice! They could keep their world—and all the other coward planets like them! When the humanoid world of Meloa had been attacked by the insectile monsters from Throm, Earth could have ended the invasion in a year, as those with eyes to see had urged her. But she hadn’t chosen to do so. Instead, she had stepped back on her high retreat of neutrality and let the Throm aliens do as they liked. It wasn’t the first time she’d acted like that, either.

With more than half of the inhabited planets occupied by various monsters, it seemed obvious that the humanoid planets had to make a common stand. If Meloa fell, it would be an alien stepping stone that could lead back eventually to Earth itself. And once the monsters realized that Earth was unwilling to fight, her vast resources would no longer scare them—she’d be only a rich plum, ripe for the plucking.

When Duke had been one of the first to volunteer for Meloa, he had never realized his home world could refuse to join the battle. He’d believed in Earth and humanity then. He’d waited through all the grim days when it seemed Throm must win—when the absence of replacements proved the communiqués from Meloa to be nothing but hopeful lies. But there had been no help. Earth’s neutrality remained unshaken.

And now, after fourteen years in battle hell, helping to fight off a three-planet system of monsters that might have swarmed against all the humanoid races, Earth was willing to forgive him and take him back to the shame of his birthright!

“I’m staying,” he said flatly. “Unless you Meloans want to kick me out now?”

The pilot swung around, dropping a quick hand on his shoulder. “Captain,” he said, “that isn’t something to joke about. We won’t forget that there would be no Meloa today without men like you. But we can’t ask you to stay. Things have changed—insanely. The news we sent to the fleet was pure propaganda!”

“We guessed that,” Duke told him. “We knew the Throm ships. And when the dispatches reported all those raids without any getting through, we stopped reading them. How many did penetrate, anyhow?”

“Thirty-one full raids,” the navigator said woodenly. “Thirty-one in the last four months!”

“Thirty-one! What happened to the home fleet?”

“We broke it up and sent it out for your replacements,” the pilot answered dully. “It was the only chance we had to win.”

Duke swallowed the idea slowly. He couldn’t picture a planet giving up its last protection for a desperate effort to end the war on purely offensive drive. Three billion people watching the home fleet take off, knowing the skies were open for all the hell that a savage enemy could send! On Earth, the World Senate hadn’t permitted the building of one battleship, for fear of reprisal.

He swung to face the ports, avoiding the expression on the faces of the two Meloans. He’d felt something of the same on his own face when he’d first inspected Throm. But it couldn’t be that bad on Meloa; she’d won her hard-earned victory!

* * * *

They were entering the atmosphere now, staggering down on misfiring jets. The whole planet seemed to be covered with a gray-yellow haze that spoke of countless tons of blast dust in the air. From below, Duke heard the men beginning to move toward the big entrance lock, unable to wait for the landing. But they were no longer his responsibility. He’d given up his command before embarking.

The ship came down, threatening to tilt every second, and the pilot was sweating and swearing. The haze began to clear as they neared the ground, but the ports were too high for Duke to see anything but the underside of the thick clouds. He stood up and headed for the lift, bracing himself as the ship pitched.

Suddenly there was a sickening jar and the blast cut off. The ship groaned and seemed to twist, then was still. It was the worst landing Duke had known, but they were obviously down. A second later he heard the port screech open and the thump of the landing ramp.

The singing of the men had picked up into a rough marching beat. Now abruptly it wavered. For a moment, a few voices continued, and then died away, like a recording powering down in mid chorus. There was a mutter of voices, followed by shouts that must have been the relief officers, taking over. Duke was nearly to the port before he heard the slow, doubtful sound of steps moving down the ramp. By the time he reached it, the last of the men was just leaving. He stopped, staring at the great port city of Kordule.

Most of the port was gone. Where the hangars and repair docks had been, a crater bored into the earth, still smoking faintly. A lone girder projected above it, to mark the former great control building, and a Meloan skeleton was transfixed on it near the top. It shattered to pieces as he looked and began dropping, probably from the delayed tremor of their landing.

Even the section their ship stood on was part of the crater, he saw, with an Earth bulldozer working on it. There was room for no more than ten ships now. Two of the berths were occupied by fat Earth ships, sleek and well kept. Three others held the pitted, warped hulks of Meloan battleships. There were no native freighters, and no sign of tending equipment or hangars.

The pilot had come up behind him, following his gaze. Now the man nodded. “That’s it, captain. Most cities are worse. Kordule escaped the blasts until our rocket cannon failed. Got any script on you?” At Duke’s nod, he pointed. “Better exchange it at the booth, before the rate gets worse. Take Earth dollars. Our silver’s no good.”

He held out a hand, and Duke shook it. “Good luck, captain,” he said and swung back into the ship.

* * * *

Mercifully, most of Kordule was blanketed by the dust fog. There was the beginning of a series of monstrous craters where men had begun rebuilding underground, the ruined landing field, and a section of what had been the great business district. Now it was only a field of rubble, with bits of windowless walls leading up to a crazy tangle of twisted girders. Only memory could locate where the major streets had been. Over everything lay the green wash of incandite, and the wind carried the smell of a charnel house. There was no sign of the apartment where he and Ronda had lived.

He started down the ramp at last, seeing for the first time the motley crew that had come out to meet the heroes of the battle of Throm. They had spotted him already, however, and some were deserting the men at the sight of his officer’s uniform. Their cries mingled into an insane, whining babble in his ears.

“…Just a scrap for an old man, general…three children at home starving…fought under Jones, captain…cigarette?”

It was a sea of clutching hands, ragged bodies with scrawny arms and bloated stomachs, trembling and writhing in its eagerness to get to him first. Then as one of the temporary officers swung back with a couple of field attendants, it broke apart to let him pass, its gaze riveted on him as he stumbled between the lines.

He spotted a billboard one man was wearing, and his eyes focused sharply on it. “Honest Feroiya,” it announced. “Credit exchange. Best rates in all Kordule.” Below that, chalked into a black square, was the important part: “2,345 credits the dollar.”

Duke shook his head but the sign did not change. A quarter million credits for a hundred dollars. And he’d thought—

“Help a poor old widow.” A trembling hand plucked at his sleeve, and he swung to face a woman in worse rags than the others, her eyes dull and unfocused, her lips mouthing the words only by habit. “Help the widow of General Dayole!”

He gasped as he recognized her. Five years before, he’d danced with her at a party given by Dayole—danced and agreed that the war was ruining them and that it couldn’t get worse.

He reached into his pocket, before remembering the worthlessness of his bills. But there was half a pack of the wretched cigarettes issued the men. He tossed them to her and fled, while the other beggars scrambled toward her.

He walked woodenly across the leprous field, skirting away from the Earth ships, toward a collection of tents and tin huts that had swallowed the other veterans. Then he stopped and cursed to himself as a motorcycle sprang into life near the Earth freighters and came toward him. Naturally, they’d spotted his hair and skin color.

The well-fed smooth-faced young man swung the machine beside him. “Captain O’Neill?” he asked, but his voice indicated that he was already certain. “Hop in, sir. Director Flannery has been looking forward to meeting you!”

Duke went steadily on, not varying his steps. The machine paced him uncertainly. “Director Flannery of Earth Foreign Office, Captain O’Neill!” he shouted over the purr of his machine. “He requests your presence!” He started to swing ahead of the marching man.

Duke kept his eyes on his goal. When his steady steps almost brought him against the cycle, it roared out of his way. He could hear it behind him as he walked, but it faded. There was only the sight and smell of Kordule ahead of him.

II

Senators were already filing through the Presidium as Edmonds of South Africa came out of his office with Daugherty of the Foreign Office. The youngest senator stopped beside the great bronze doors, studying the situation. Then he sighed in relief. “It’s all right,” he told Daugherty. “Premier Lesseur’s presiding.”

He hadn’t been sure the premier’s words were a full promise before. And while he hadn’t been too worried, it was good to see that the doubtful vice-premier wouldn’t be presiding.

“It better be all right,” the diplomat said. “Otherwise, it’s my neck. Cathay’s counting on Earth to help against the Kloomirians, and if Director Flannery ever finds I committed us—”

Edmonds studied the seats that were filling, and nodded with more confidence as he saw that most of the senators on whom he counted were there. “I’ve got enough votes, as I told you. And with Lesseur presiding, the opposition won’t get far with parliamentary tricks against me. This time, Earth’s going to act.”

Daugherty grunted, obviously still worried, and headed up the steps to the reserved Visitors’ Gallery, while Edmonds moved to his seat in the assembly room. Today he didn’t even mind the fact that it was back in the section reserved for the newest members—the unknowns and unimportants, from the way the press treated them. He would be neither unknown nor unimportant, once his bill was passed, and his brief experience would only add to the miracle he was working.

Looking back on his efforts, he found the results something of a miracle to himself. It had taken two years of vote-swapping, of careful propaganda, and of compromise with his principles. That business of voting for the combined Throm-Meloa Aid Bill had been a bitter thing; but old Harding was scared sick of antagonizing the aliens by seeming partiality, and Edmonds’ switch was the step needed to start the softening up.

At that, he’d been lucky. In spite of what he’d learned of the manipulation of sociological relationships, in spite of the long preparation in advertising dynamics and affective psychology, he couldn’t have made it if Cathay hadn’t been a human colony!

Now, though, Lesseur was calling the chamber to order. The senators quieted quickly, and there was almost complete silence as the old man picked up the paper before him.

“The Senate will consider Resolution 1843 today,” Lesseur said quietly. “A Resolution that Earth shall grant assistance to the Colony of Cathay in the event of any aggressive alien act, proposed by Sir Alfred Edmonds. Since the required time for deliberation has elapsed, the chair will admit discussion on this resolution. Senator Edmonds!”

Edmonds was on his feet, and every face turned to him. The spotlight came down on him, blinding him to the others. He picked up the microphone, polishing the words in his mind. The vote might already be decided, but the papers would still print what he said now! And those words could mean his chance to work his way up through the Committee of Foreign Affairs and perhaps on to becoming Earth’s youngest premier.

It might even mean more. Once Earth shook off her lethargy and moved to her rightful position of power and strength among the humanoid worlds, anything could happen. There was the Outer Federation being formed among the frontier worlds and the nucleus of close relations with hundreds of planets. Some day there might be the position of premier of a true Interstellar Congress!

* * * *

Edmonds began quietly, listening to his voice roll smoothly from the speakers, giving the long history of Earth and her rise to a position as the richest and most respected of planets. He retold the story of how she had been the first to discover the interstellar drive, and how it had inevitably spread. He touched on the envy of the alien worlds, and the friendship of the humanoid planets that had enabled Earth to found her dozen distant colonies. He couldn’t wisely discuss her cowardice and timidity in avoiding her responsibilities to help her friends; but there was another approach.

“In the forefront of every battle against alien aggression,” he declaimed proudly, “have been men from Earth. Millions of our young men have fought gloriously and died gladly to protect the human—and humanoid—civilizations from whatever forms of life have menaced them. Djamboula led the forces of Hera against Clovis, just as Captain O’Neill so recently directed the final battle that saved Meloa from the hordes of Throm. In our own ranks, we have a man who spent eight long and perilous years in such a gallant struggle to save a world for humanoid decency. Senator Harding—”

From the darkened sea of faces, a voice suddenly sounded. “Will the senator yield?” It was the deep baritone of Harding.

Edmonds frowned in irritation, but nodded. A few words of confirmation on his point from Harding couldn’t hurt. “I yield to the senator from Dixie,” he answered.

The spotlight shifted as Harding got slowly to his feet, making a white halo of his hair. He did not look at Edmonds, but turned to face Lesseur.

“Mr. Chairman,” he said, “I move that Resolution 1843 be tabled!”

“Second!” The light shifted to another man, but Edmonds had no time to see who it was as he stood staring open-mouthed at Harding.

He shouted for the chair’s attention, but Lesseur brought the gavel down sharply once, and his voice rang over the speakers. “It has been moved and seconded that Resolution 1843 be tabled. The senators will now vote.”

Edmonds stood frozen as the voting began. Then he dropped back hastily to press the button that would turn the square bearing his number a negative red. He saw his light flash on, while other squares were lighting. When the voting was finished, there were three such red squares in a nearly solid panel of green.

“The resolution is tabled,” Lesseur announced needlessly.

Harding stood up and began moving towards the rear where Edmonds sat. The junior senator was too stunned for thought. Dimly he heard something about regrets and explanations, but the words had no meaning. He felt Harding help him to his feet and begin to guide him toward the door, where someone had already brought a shocked, white-faced Daugherty.

It was then he thought of Cathay, and what his ambition and Earth’s ultimate deceit and cowardice would mean to the millions there.

III

A week of the dust-filled air of Meloa had left its mark on Captain Duke O’Neill. It had spread filth over his uniform, added another year to his face, and made waking each morning a dry-throated torture. Now he stopped at the entrance to the ship where he had been reassigned a berth for the night shift. An attendant handed him a small bottle, three biscuits, and a magazine. He tasted the chemically purified water sickly, stuffed the three ersatz biscuits into his pocket, and moved down the ramp, staring at the magazine.

It was from Earth, of course, since no printing was being done yet on Meloa. It must have come in on one of the three big Earth freighters he’d heard land during the night. Tucked into it was another of the brief notes he’d been receiving: “Director Flannery will be pleased to call on Captain O’Neill at the captain’s convenience.”

He shredded the note as he went across the field; he started to do the same with the news magazine, until the headlines caught his attention.

Most of the news meant nothing to him. But he skimmed the article on the eleventh planet to join the Outer Federation; the writer was obviously biased against the organization, but Duke nodded approvingly. At least someone was doing something. He saw that Cathay was in for trouble. Earth was living up to her old form! Then he shoved the magazine into his pocket and trudged on toward the veteran’s reassignment headquarters.

Machinery was being moved from the Earth freighters, and Duke swore again. Five billion Earthmen would read of their “generosity” to Meloa, and any guilt they felt for their desertion would vanish in a smug satisfaction at their charity. Smugness was easy in a world without dust or carrion smell or craters that had been factories.

There were only a few Meloans in the crude tent that served as their headquarters. Duke went back toward the cubbyhole where a thin, haggard man sat on a broken block behind a makeshift desk.

The hairless blue head shook slowly while the man’s eyes dropped hungrily to the paper in Duke’s pocket and away again guiltily. “No work, Captain O’Neill. Unless you can operate some of those Earth machines we’re getting?”

Duke grimaced, passing the magazine over to hands that trembled as they took it. His education was in ultra-literary creative writing, his experience in war. And here, where there was the whole task of rebuilding a planet to be done, the ruin of tools and power made what could be done too little for even the few who were left. There was no grain to reap or wood to cut after the killing gas from Throm had ruined vegetation; there were no workable mines where all had been blasted closed. Transportation was gone. And the economy had passed beyond hand tools, leaving too few of those. Even whole men were idle, and his artificial hand could never replace a real one for carrying rubble.

“Director Flannery has been asking for you again,” the man told him.

Duke ignored it “What about my wife?”

The Meloan frowned, reaching for a soiled scrap of paper. “We may have something. One of her former friends thinks she was near this address. We’ll send someone out to investigate, if you wish, captain; but it’s still pretty uncertain.”

“I’ll go myself,” Duke said harshly. He picked up the paper, recognizing the location as one that had been in the outskirts.

The man behind the desk shook his head doubtfully. Then he shrugged, and reached behind him for a small automatic. “Better take this—and watch your step! There are two bullets left.”

Duke nodded his thanks and turned away, dropping the gun into his pocket. Behind him he heard a long sigh and the rustle of a magazine being opened quickly.

* * * *

It was a long walk. At first, he traced his way through streets that had been partially blasted clear. After the first mile, however, he was forced to hunt around or over the litter and wreckage, picking the way from high spot to high spot. There were people about, rooting through the debris, or patrolling in groups. He drew the automatic and carried it in his hand, in plain sight. Some stared at him and some ignored him, but none came too close.

Once he heard shouting and a group ran across his path, chasing a small rodent. He heard a wild tumult begin, minutes later. When he passed the spot where they had stopped, a fight was going on, apparently over the kill.

At noon he stopped to drink sparingly of his water and eat one of the incredibly bad biscuits. What food there was available or which could be received from the Earth freighters was being mixed into them, but it wasn’t enough. The workers got a little more, and occasionally someone found a few cans under the rubble. The penalty for not turning such food in was revocation of all food allotment, but there was a small black market where unidentified cans could be bought for five Earth dollars, and some found its way there. The same black market sold the few remaining cigarettes at twice that amount each.

It was beginning to thunder to the north as he stood up and went wearily on, and the haze was thickening. He tried to hurry, uncertain of how dark it would get. If he got caught now, he’d never be able to return before night. He stumbled on a broken street sign, decoding what was left of it, and considered. Then he sighed in relief. As he remembered it, he was almost there.

The buildings had been lower here, and the rubble was thinner. There seemed to be more people about, judging by the traces of smoke that drifted out of holes or through glassless windows. He saw none outside, however.

He was considering trying one of the places from which smoke was coming when he saw the little boy five hundred feet ahead. He started forward, but the kid popped into what must have been a cellar once. Duke stopped, calling quietly.

This time it was a girl of about sixteen who appeared. She sidled closer, her eyes fixed on his hair. Her voice piped out suddenly, scared and desperate. “You lonesome, Earthman?” Under the fright, it was a grotesque attempt at coquetry. She edged nearer, staring at him. “I won’t roll you, honest!”

“All I want is information,” he told her thickly. “I’m looking for a woman named Ronda—Ronda O’Neill. She was my wife.”

The girl considered, shaking her head. Her eyes grew wider as he pulled out a green Earth bill, but she didn’t move. Then, as he added the two remaining biscuits, she nodded quickly, motioning him forward. “Mom might know,” she said.

She ran ahead, and soon an older woman shuffled up the broken steps. In her arms was a baby, dead or in a coma, and she rocked it slowly, moaning softly as she listened to his questions. She grunted finally, and reached out for the reward. Shuffling ahead of him, she went up the rubble-littered street and around a corner, to point. “Go in,” she said. “Ronda’ll be back.”

Duke shoved the crude door back and stepped into what was left of a foyer in a cheap apartment house. The back had been blasted away, but the falling building had sealed over one corner, covering it from most of the weather. Light came from the shattered window, showing a scrap of blanket laid out on the floor near a few possessions. At first, nothing identified the resident in any way, and he wondered if it were a trap. Then he bent over a broken bracelet, and his breath caught sharply. The catch still worked, and a faded miniature of him was inside the little holder. Ronda’s!

Duke dropped onto the blanket, trying to imagine what Ronda would be like, and to picture the reunion. But the present circumstances wouldn’t fit into anything he could imagine. He could only remember the bravely smiling girl who had seen him off five years before.

He heard a babble of voices outside, but didn’t look out. The walk had exhausted him. Hard as the bed was, it was better than standing up. Anyhow, if Ronda came back, he was pretty sure she would be warned of his presence.

He slept fitfully, awakened by the smells and sounds from outside. Once he thought someone looked in, but he couldn’t be sure. He turned over, almost decided to investigate, and dozed off again.

It was the hoarse sound of breathing and a soft shuffle that wakened him that time. His senses jarred out of slumber with a feeling of wrongness that reacted in instant caution. He let his eyes slit open, relieved to find there was still light.

Between him and the door, a figure was creeping up on hands and knees. The rags of clothes indicated it was a woman and the knife in one hand spelled murder!

Duke snapped himself upright to a sitting position, his hand darting for the gun in his pocket. A low shriek came from the woman, and she lunged forward, the knife rising. There was no time for the gun. He caught her wrist, twisting savagely. She scratched and writhed, but the knife spun from her grasp. With a moan, she collapsed across his knees.

He turned her face up, staring at it unbelievingly. “Ronda!”

Bloated and stained, lined with fear, it bore a faint resemblance to the girl he had known. Now a fleeting look of cunning crossed her face briefly, to be replaced with an attempt at dawning recognition. “Duke!” She gasped it, then made a sound that might have been meant for joy. She stumbled to her knees, reaching out to him. But her eyes swiveled briefly toward the knife. “Duke, it’s you!”

He pushed her back and reached for the knife. He was sure she’d known who it was—had probably been the one who awakened him by looking in through the broken window. “Why’d you try to kill me Ronda? You saw who it was. If you needed money, you know I’d give you anything I had. Why?”

“Not for money.” She twisted from him and slumped limply against a broken wall. Tears came into her eyes. This time the catch in her voice was real. “I know…I know, Duke. And I wanted to see you, to talk to you, too.” She shook her head slowly. “What can I do with money? I wanted to wake you up like old times. But Mrs. Kalaufa—she led you here—she said—I”

He waited, but she didn’t finish. She traced a pattern on the dust of the floor, before looking up again. “You’ve never been really hungry! Not that hungry! You wouldn’t understand.”

“Even with the dole, you can’t starve that much in the time since Kordule was bombed,” he protested. He gagged as he thought of the meaning he’d guessed from her words, expecting her to deny it.

* * * *

She shrugged. “In ten years, you can do anything. Oh, sure, you came back on leave and we lived high. Everything was fine here, wasn’t it? Sure it was, for you. They briefed me on where I should take you, so there’d be good food ready. They kept a few places going for the men who came back on leave. We couldn’t ruin your morale!”

She laughed weakly, and let the sound die away slowly. “How do you think we sent out the food and supplies for the fleet the last three years, after the blockade on our supplies from friendly worlds? Why do you think there was no more leave for you? Because they didn’t think you brave soldiers could stand just seeing how the rest of us lived! And you think you had it tough! Watch the sky for the enemy while your stomach hopes for the sound that might be a rat. Hide three cans of food you’ll be shot for hoarding—because there is nothing else important in the world. And then have a man steal them from you when the raids come! What does a soldier know of war?”

The sickness inside him grew into a knot, but he still couldn’t fully believe what she was saying. “But cannibalism—”

“No.” She shook her head with a faint trace of his own disgust. “No, Duke. Mrs. Kalaufa told me…you’re not really the same race—Not as close as you are to an Earth animal, and you don’t call that cannibalism. Nobody on Meloa has ever been a cannibal—yet! How much money do you have, Duke?”

He took it out and handed it to her. She counted it mechanically and handed it back. “Not enough. You can’t take me away when you leave here.”

“I’m not leaving,” he told her. He dropped the money back on the blanket beside her.

She stared at him for a moment and then pulled herself up to her feet, moving toward the door. “Good-bye, Duke. And get off Meloa. You can’t help us any more. And I don’t want you here when I get desperate enough to remember you might take me back. I like you too much for that, even now.”

He took a step toward her, and she ducked.

“Get out!” She screamed it at him. “Do you think I can stand looking at you without drooling any longer? Do you want me to call Mrs. Kalaufa for help?”

Through the open door, he saw Mrs. Kalaufa across the street, still cradling the child. As the door slammed shut behind him, the woman screamed, either as a summons or from fear that he’d seek revenge on her. He saw other heads appear, with frantic eyes that stared sullenly at the gun he carried. He stumbled down the street, where rain was beginning to fall, conscious that it would be night before he got back to the port. He no longer cared.

There was no place for him here, he now saw. He was still an Earthman, and Earthmen were always treated as a race apart somehow. He didn’t belong. But there were still the recruiting stations there; so long as war existed, there had to be stations. He headed for the fat ships of Earth that squatted complacently on the wrecked port.

IV

Prince Queeth of Sugfarth had left the royal belt behind, and only a plain band encircled his round little body as he trotted along, his four legs making almost no sound. His double pair of thin arms and the birdlike head on his long neck bobbled excitedly in time to his steps. Once he stopped to glance across the black stone buildings of the city as they shone in the dull red of the sun, toward the hill where his father’s palace was lighted brightly for the benefit of his Earth guests. Queeth touched his ears together ceremoniously and then trotted on, until he came to the back door of his group’s gymnasium. He whistled the code word and the door opened automatically.

The whole group was assembled, though it was past sleep week for most of them. Their ears clicked together, but they waited silently as he curled himself up in the official box. Then Krhal, the merchant viscount, whistled questioningly. “This will have to be important, Queeth.”

The prince bobbed his ears emphatically. “It is. My father’s guests have all the news, and I learned everything. It won’t be as long as we thought.” He paused, before delivering the big news. “The bipeds of Kloomiria are going to attack Cathay. There’ll be official war there within two weeks!”

He saw them exchanging hasty signals, but again it was Krhal who voiced their question. “And you think that is important, Queeth? What does it offer us? Cathay is a human colony. Earth will have to declare war with her. And with Earth’s wealth, it will be over before we could arrive.”

“Earth has already passed a resolution that neutrality will apply to colonies as well as to other planets!” This time the whistles were sharper. Krhal had difficulty believing it at first. “So Earth really is afraid to fight? That must mean those rumors that she has no fleet are true. Our ancestors thought so, and even planned to attack her, before the humanoids defeated us. The ancestor king believed that even a single ship fully armed might conquer her.”

“It could be,” Queeth admitted. “But do you agree that this is the news for which we’ve waited so long?”

There was a quick flutter of ears. “It’s our duty,” Krhal agreed. “In a war between Cathay and Kloomiria, we can’t remain neutral if we’re ever to serve our friends. Well, the ship is ready!”

That came as a surprise to Queeth. He knew the plans were well along, but not that they were completed. As merchant viscount, and second-degree adult, Krhal was entitled to a tenth of his father’s interests. He’d chosen the biggest freighter and the balance in fluid assets, to the pleasure of his father—who believed he was planning an honorable career of exploring.

“The conversion completed?” Queeth asked. “But the planet bombs—!”

“Earth supplied them on the last shipment. I explained on the order that I was going to search uninhabited planets for minerals.”

Queeth counted the group again, and was satisfied. There were enough. With a ship of that size, fully staffed and armed, they would be a welcome addition to any fleet. They might be enough to tip the balance for victory, in fact. And while Cathay and Kloomiria lay a long way on the other side of Earth’s system, the drivers were fast enough to cover it in two weeks.

“Does your father know?” Krhal asked.

Queeth smirked. “Would you tell him? He still believes along with the Earth ambassador that the warrior strain was ruined among our people when we lost the war with the humanoids.

“Maybe it was,” Krhal said doubtfully. “In four generations, it could evolve again. And there are the books and traditions from which we trained. If even a timid race such as those of Earth can produce warriors like O’Neill—a mere poet—why can’t the Sugfarth do better? Particularly when Earth rebuilt factories for us to start our shipbuilding anew.”

“Then we join the war,” the prince decided.

There was a series of assent signals from the group.

“Tonight,” he suggested, and again there was only assent.

Krhal stood up, setting the course for the others. When the last had risen Queeth uncurled himself and rose from the box. “We’ll have to pass near Earth,” he suggested as they filed out toward the hangers where Krhal kept his ship. “Maybe we should show our intentions there!”

There was a sudden whistle of surprise. Then the assent was mounting wildly. Queeth trotted ahead toward the warship, making his attack plans over again as he realized he was a born leader who could command such enthusiasm. He had been doubtful before, in spite of his study of elementary statistical treatment of relationships.

The lights in the palace showed that the Earth guests were still celebrating as the great, heavily-laden warship blasted up and headed toward Earth.

V

Duke O’Neill found a corner of the lounge where no Earthman was near and dropped down with the magazine and papers, trying to catch up on the currents of the universe as they affected the six hundred connected worlds. Most of the articles related to Earth alone, and he skipped them. He found one on the setup of the Outer Federation finally. The humanoid planets there were in a pocket of alien worlds, and union had been almost automatic. It was still loose, but it seemed to have sound enough a basis.

If Earth had been willing to come out of its shell and risk some of its fat trading profits, there could have been an even stronger union that would have driven warlike thoughts out of the minds of all the aliens.

Instead, she seemed to be equally interested in building up her potential enemies and ruining her friends. Duke had watched a showing of new films on the work being done on Throm the night before, and he was still sick from it. Throm had lost the war, but by a military defeat, not by thirty-one unprotected raids on all her surface. She still had landing fields equipped for Earth ships, and the big freighters, spewing out foods, equipment and even heavy machinery for her rebuilding. Throm was already on the road back. Meloa had to wait until she could pull herself up enough to build fields.

Duke turned his eyes to the port. The ship had stopped at Clovis on the way back to Earth. From where he sat, he could see almost Earthlike skyscrapers stretching up in a great city. The landing field was huge, and there were rows on rows of factories building more of the freighters that stubbed the field.

It seemed impossible, when he remembered that only forty years had passed since Djamboula’s suicide raid had finally defeated the fungoid creatures of the planet and since the survivors’ vows to repay all Earthmen for their defeat. They were a prolific race, of course—but without help from Earth, the factories would be shacks and the rockets and high drive ships would be only memories.

He wondered how many were cursing their ancestors for making the mistake of attacking a neighboring humanoid planet instead of Earth, only two days away on high drive. By now, they knew that Earth was defenseless. And yet, they seemed content to go on with their vows forgotten. Duke couldn’t believe it. Down underground, beyond Earth inspection, they could have vast stockpiles of weapons, ready to install in their ships within days.

How could Earth risk it, unless she had her own stock of hidden ships and weapons? Yet if she did, he was sure that it would have been impossible not to use them in defense of the colony of Cathay.

He stared out, watching the crewmen mixing with the repulsive alien natives, laughing as they worked side by side. There must be some factor he didn’t understand, but he’d never found it—nor did he know anyone who had guessed it.

He stirred, uncomfortable with his own thoughts. But it wasn’t fear for Earth that bothered him. It was simply that sooner or later some alien race would risk whatever unknown power the others feared. If the aliens won, the vast potential power of Earth would then be turned against all the humanoid races of the universe. Humanity could be driven from the galaxy.

He turned the pages, idly glancing at the headlines. It was hard to realize that the paper wasn’t right off the presses of Earth; it must have been brought out to Clovis on the latest ship. He checked the date, and frowned in surprise. According to the rough calendar he’d kept, it was the current date. Somewhere he must have lost track of two days. How much else had he lost sight of during the long years of war?

A diagram caught his attention almost at once as he turned to another magazine. It was a behemoth ship, bigger than any he had ever seen, and built like the dream of a battleship, though it was listed as a freighter. He scanned it, mentally converting it. With a few like that, Meloa could have won during the first year.

Then he swore as he saw it was part of an article on the progress of some alien world known as Sugfarth—by the article, a world of former warriors, once dedicated to the complete elimination of humanoids!

* * * *

He saw Flannery coming along the deck at that moment, and he picked up the magazine, heading for his cabin. He’d ignored previous summons on the thin excuse of not feeling well. He had no desire to talk with Earthmen. It was bad enough to take their charity back to Earth and to have to stay on the planet until he could sign on with the Outer Federation. His memories were ugly enough, without having them refreshed.

But Flannery caught him as he was opening the door to his cabin. The director was huge, with heavy, strong features and a body that looked too robust for the white hair and the age that showed around his eyes. His voice was tired, however, showing his years more plainly than his looks.

“Captain O’Neill,” he said quickly. “Stop jousting with windmills. It’s time you grew up. Besides, I’ve got a job for you.”

“Does my charity passage demand an interview, director?” Duke asked.

The other showed no offense, unfortunately. He smiled wryly. “If I choose, it does. I’m in command of this ship, as well as head of the Foreign Office. May I come in?”

“I can’t keep you out,” Duke admitted. He dropped onto the couch, sprawling out, while the other found the single chair.

Flannery picked up the magazine and glanced through it. “So, you’re interested in the Outer Federation?” he asked. “Don’t be. It doesn’t have a chance. In a week or so, you’ll see it shot. And I don’t mean we’ll wreck it. They’ve picked their own doom, against all the advice we could give them. Care to have a drink sent down while I talk?”

Duke shook his head. “I’d rather cut it short.”

“Hotheads,” Flannery told the walls thoughtfully, “make the best men obtainable, once they’re tamed. Nothing beats an idealist who can face facts. And the intelligent ones usually grow up. Captain, I’ve studied your strategy against Throm on that last drive after Doyale was killed. Brilliant! I need a good man, and I can pay for one. If you give me a chance, I can also show you why you should take it. Know anything about how Earth got started on its present course?”

“Dumb luck and cowardice, as far as I can see,” Duke answered.

When Earth discovered the first inefficient version of the high drive, she had found herself in a deserted section of the universe, with the nearest inhabited star system months away. The secret of the drive couldn’t be kept, of course, but the races who used it to build war fleets found it easier to fight with each other than with distant Earth. Later, when faster drives were developed, Earth was protected by the buffer worlds she had rebuilt.

Flannery grinned. “Luck—and experience. We learned something from our early nuclear-technological wars. We learned more from the interstellar wars of others. We decided that any planet ruined by such war wouldn’t fight again—the women and children who lived through that hell would see to it—unless new hatreds grew up during the struggle back. So we practically pauperized ourselves at first to see that they recovered too quickly for hate and fear. We also began digging into the science of how to manipulate relationships—Earth’s greatest discovery—to set up a system that would work. It paid off for us in the long run.”

“So what’s all that got to do with me?” Duke asked. He’d heard of the great science of Earth and her ability to manipulate all kinds of relationships before, spoken of in hush-hush terms when he was still in college. But he’d quit believing in fairy tales even before then. Now he was even sicker of Earth’s self-justification.

Flannery frowned, and then shrugged. “It’s no secret I need a good man on Throm, and you’re the logical candidate, if I can pound some facts into your head. I’ve found that sending an Earthman they know as a competent enemy works wonders. Not at first—there’s hostility for a while—but in the long run it gives, them a new slant on us.”

“Then you’d better get an Earthman,” Duke snapped. “You’re talking to a citizen of Meloa! By choice!”

“I hadn’t finished my explanation,” Flannery reminded.

Duke snorted. “I was brought up on explanations. I heard men spouting about taming the aliens when I first learned to talk—as if they were wild animals. I read articles on how the Clovisem and those things from Sugfarth needed kindness. It’s the same guff I heard about how to handle lions. But the men doing the talking weren’t in the ring; and I noticed the ringmaster carried a whip and gun. He knew the beasts. I know the aliens of Throm.”

“From fighting them? From hating them? Or from being more afraid of them than you think Earth is, captain? I’ve talked to more aliens than you’ve ever seen.”

“And the Roman diplomats laughed at the soldiers who told them the Goths were getting ready to sack Rome.”

Flannery stared at him in sudden amusement. “We aren’t in an Empire period, O’Neill. But you might look up what the Romans did to conquered people during the Republic, when Rome was still growing. Captain, I’m not underrating the aliens!”

“Tame aliens! Or ones faking tameness. You’ve seen them smiling, maybe. I saw the other side.”

The old man sighed heavily and reached for his shirt. He began unbuttoning it and pulling it over his head. “You’ve got a nice prosthetic hand,” he said. “Now take a look at some real handiwork!”

There was a strap affair around his shoulders, with a set of complicated electronic controls slipped into the muscle fibers. From them, both arms hung loose, unattached at the shoulder blades. Further down, another affair of webbing went around his waist.

“Only one leg is false,” he explained, “but the decorations are real. They came from a highly skilled torturer. I’ve had my experience with aliens. Clovisem, if you’re curious. I was the second in command on Djamboula’s volunteer raid, forty years ago.”

Duke dropped his eyes from the scars. For a second, he groped for words of apology. Then the cold, frozen section of his brain swallowed the emotions. “I’ve seen a woman with a prosthetic soul,” he said bitterly. “Only she didn’t turn yellow because of what the aliens did!”

Red spots shot onto Flannery’s cheeks and one of the artificial arms jerked back as savagely as a real one. He hesitated, then reached for his shirt. “O.K., squawman!”

The word had no meaning for Duke, though he knew it was an insult. But he couldn’t respond to it. He fumbled through his memories, trying to place it. Something about Indians—

Flannery began buttoning his pants over the shirt. “I’m out of bounds, captain,” he said more quietly. “I hope you don’t know the prejudices behind that crack. But you win. If you ever want the rest of the explanation, look me up.”

He closed the door behind him softly and went striding evenly up the passage.

Duke frowned after him. The talk had gotten under his skin. If there were things he didn’t know—

Then he swore at himself. There was plenty he didn’t know. But the carefully developed indoctrination propaganda of the top Earth psychologists wasn’t the answer he wanted.

He’d have to make his stay on Earth shorter than he’d planned. If they could get to a man who had served under Djamboula and convince him that Clovisem were nice house pets, it was little wonder they could wrap the rest of Earth around their psychological fingers.

Too bad their psychology wasn’t adjusted to aliens!

VI

Barth Nevesh was nearly seven feet tall, and his cat-shaped ears stuck up another four inches above his head. Even among the people of Kel he was a big man, but to the representatives of the other humanoid worlds of the Federation, he seemed a giant. The thick furs he wore against the heavy chill of the room added to his apparent size, and the horns growing from his shoulders lifted his robes until he seemed to have no neck.

Now he stood up, driving his heavy fist down against the big wooden table. “The question is, do we have the answer or not?” he roared. “You say we do. Logic says we do. Then let’s act on it!”

The elfin figure of Lemillulot straightened up at the other end of the table. “Not so fast, commander. Nobody questions the power of your fleet. Nobody doubts that we have the only possible answer to the aliens that Earth is helping to take over our universe—strength through unity. But is it as good as it can be?”

“How better?” Barth roared again. “Every world in this alien pocket has been building its strength since the Earthmen’s ships first reached here and showed us space travel was possible. We’ve seen the stinking aliens get the same ships. But now we’ve got something they can’t resist—a Federation, in spite of all Earth could do to stop us. If all our fleets strike at once, no alien world can resist—and we can stop merely holding them back. Wipe them out, one by one, I say! The only good alien is a dead alien!”

There was a lot of talk—more than Barth usually heard or contributed in a month. Lemillulot was the focus of most of it. The little man would never be satisfied. He wanted all the humanoid worlds organized, and by now it was plain that Earth’s influence would be too strong outside of their own section.

Their accomplishments were already enough. United as they were, the Federation was clearly invincible. Their fleets were at full size and the crews were thoroughly trained. No other time would be better.

There had already been a stir of ship-building on the alien worlds, since the first word of the Federation had somehow leaked out. The Federation position was as good as it would ever be—and with eleven fleets working together, nothing better was needed.

“Knock them down with the long shells, haze them to base with interceptors, and then rip their worlds with planet bombs,” Barth repealed his plans. “We can do it in six hours for a planet—we can start at the strongest, Neflis, and work down through the weakest, to make up for our losses. And if the Earth forces start moving in to rebuild them—well, I’ve been thinking the Federation could use a little more wealth and power!”

“Humanoids don’t attack humanoids,” Lemillulot protested.

The snarling, dog face of Sra from Chumkt opened in a grin, and his sly voice held a hint of a chuckle. “Or so Earth keeps preaching. But Earthmen aren’t humanoids. They’re humans!”

He laughed softly at his own wit. There were rumbles of uncertainty, but Barth saw that the seed had taken root. If they kept working together, he and Sra could force it to ripen soon enough.

“That can wait,” Barth decided. “The question is, do we attack Neflis, and when? I say now!”

* * * *

It took an hour more for the decision. But there would be only one answer, and the final vote was unanimous. The fleets would take off from their home worlds and rendezvous near the barren sun; from there, they would proceed in a group, under the control of Barth, toward the alien world of Neflis.

The commander checked his chronometer as the delegates went to send their coded reports to their home worlds. He had the longest distance to lead his fleet, and there was no time for delay.

Outside, the harsh snow crackled under his feet, and a layer of storm clouds cut off the wan heat of Kel’s sun. He drew in a deep breath, watching the swirl of white as he exhaled. It was a good world—a world to build men. It was the world from which a leader should come.

The fleet would be all his within a day. And for a time, it would be busy at the work of wiping out the nearby aliens. After that—well, there were other aliens further out toward the last frontiers of exploration. With care, the fleet could be kept busy for years.

Barth was remembering his histories, and the armies that had been swept together. In a few years, fighting men began to think of themselves as a people apart, and loyalty to their birthplace gave way to loyalty to their leader. Five years should be enough. Then there could be more than a Federation; there could be the empire among the worlds that had been his lifelong dream.

But first, there was Earth. He snorted to himself as he reached the ships of his fleet. Missionaries! Spreading their soft fear through the universe. In five years, his fleet should be ready for ten times the power of any single planet—including Earth. Sra would be the only problem in his way. But that could be met later. For the moment, the man from Chumkt was useful.

Barth strode up the ramp of his flagship, shouting out to his men as he went. There was no need of signals. They had been primed and waiting for days, ready to follow him up.

He dropped to the control seat, staring at the little lights that would tell him of their progress. “Up ship!” he shouted, and from the metal halls and caverns of the ship other voices echoed his cry.

The Wind Dragon leaped upwards sharply. Behind, as the red lights showed, four hundred others charged into the sky and the open space beyond. Barth sat at the great screen, watching as they drew on steadily toward the rendezvous, mulling over his plans.

They were three hours out from Kel when he turned the control over to his lieutenant and went below, where his table was laden with the smoking cheer of good green meat and ale. With a sigh of contentment, he threw back his outer robe and prepared to forget everything until he had dined.

He was humming hoarsely to himself as he cut a piece of the meat and stuck it on his left shoulder horn, within reach of his teeth. Maybe a little of the baked fish would blend well—

The emergency drum blasted through the ship as he lifted the knife. Swearing and tearing at the flesh near his mouth, he leaped up and forward toward the control room. He heard voices shouting, something about a fleet. Then he was at the screens where he could see for himself.

Five million miles ahead, another fleet was assembled, where none should be from any of the Federation worlds! His eyes swept sideways across the screen, estimating the number. It was impossible. There weren’t a quarter of that number in the fleet of any world, humanoid or alien!

Barth flipped on the microresolver, twisting the wheel that sent it racing across the path of the fleet ahead. His eyes confirmed what his mind had already recognized.

The aliens had their own federation. There were ships of every type there, grouped in units. Thirteen alien worlds were combined against the Outer Federation. For a breath he hesitated, ready to turn back and defend Kel while there was time. But it would never work. One fleet would never be enough to defend the planet against the combined aliens.

“Cluster!” he barked into the communicator. “Out rams and up speed. Prepare for breakthrough!”

If they could hit the aliens at full drive and cut through the weaker center, they could still rendezvous with the other fleets. The combined strength might be enough. And the gods help Kel if the aliens refused to follow him!

Earth, he thought; Earth again, coddling and protecting aliens, forming them into a conspiracy against the humanoid worlds. If Kel or any part of the Federation survived, that debt would be paid.

VII

Earth lay fat and smug under the sun, seemingly unchanged since Duke had left it. For generations the populace had complained that they were draining themselves dry to rebuild other worlds, but they had grown rich on the investment. It was the only planet where men worked shorter and shorter hours to give them more leisure in which to continue a frantic effort to escape boredom. It was also the only world where the mention of aliens made men think of their order books instead of their weapons.

Duke walked steadily away from the grotesquely elaborate landing field. He had less than thirty cents in his pocket, but his breakfast aboard had left him satisfied for the moment. He turned onto a wider street, heading the long distance across the city toward the most probable location of the recruiting stations.

The Outer Federation station would be off the main section, since the official line was disapproving of such a union. But he was sure there would be one. The system of recruiting was a tradition too hard to break. Earth used it as an escape valve for her troublemakers. And since such volunteers made some of the best of fighters, they had already decided the outcome of more than one war. By carefully juggling the attention given the stations, Earth could influence the battles without seeming to do so.

The air was thick with the smell of late summer, and there was pleasure in that, until Duke remembered the odor of Meloa, and its cause. Later the cloying perfume of women mixed with the normal industrial odors of the city, until his nose was overdriven to the point of cutoff. He saw things in the shop windows that he had forgotten, but he had no desire for them. And over everything came the incessant yammer of voices saying nothing, radios blaring, television babbling, and vending machines shouting.

He gave up at last and invested half his small fund in a subway. It was equally noisy, but it took less time. Beside him, a fungoid creature from Clovis was busy practicing silently on its speaking machine, but nobody else seemed to notice.

Duke’s head was spinning when he reached the surface again. He stopped to let it clear, wondering if he’d ever found this world home. It wouldn’t matter soon, though; once he was signed up at the recruiting station, there would be no time to think.

He saw the sign, only a few blocks from where the recruiting posters for Meloa had been so long ago. It was faded, but he could read the lettering, and he headed for it. As he had expected, it was on a dirty back street, where the buildings were a confusion of shipping concerns and cheaper apartment houses.

He knew something was wrong when he was a block away. There was no pitch being delivered by a barking machine, and no idle group watching the recruiting efforts on the street. In fact, nobody was in front of the vacant store that had been used, and the big posters were ripped down.

He reached the entrance and stopped. The door was half open, but it carried a notice that the place had been closed by order of the World Foreign Office. Through the dirty glass, Duke could see a young man of about twenty sitting slumped behind a battered desk.

He stepped in and the boy looked up apathetically. “You’re too late, captain. Neutrality went on hours ago when the first word came through. Caught me just ready to ship out—after two lousy months recruiting here, I have to be the one stranded.”

“You’re lucky,” Duke told him mechanically, not sure whether he meant it or not. Oddly, the idea of a kid like this mixed up in an interplanetary war bothered him. He turned to go, then hesitated. “Got a newspaper or a directory around that I could borrow?”

The boy fished a paper out of a wastebasket. “It’s all yours, captain. The whole place is yours. Slam the door when you go out. I’m going over to the Cathay office.”

“I’ll go along,” Duke offered. The address of that place was all he’d wanted from the paper. He’d have preferred the Federation to joining up with Earth colonists, but beggars never made good choosers.

The kid shook his head. He dragged open a drawer, found a slip of paper, and handed it over. It was a notice that the legal maximum age for recruiting had been reduced to thirty! “You’d never make it, captain,” he said.

Duke looked at the paper in his hands and at the dim reflection of his face in a window. “No,” he agreed. “I didn’t make it.”

He followed the boy to the door, staring out at the street, thick with its noises and smells. He dropped to the doorsill and looked briefly up at the sky where two ships were cutting out to space. Flannery had known the regulation and hadn’t told him. Yet it was his own fault; the age limit was lower now, but there had always been a limit. He had simply forgotten that he’d grown older.

He found it hard to realize he’d been no older than the kid when he’d signed up for the war with Throm.

* * * *

For a while he sat looking at the street, trying to realize what had happened to him. It took time to face the facts. He listened with half his attention as a small group of teen-age boys came from one of the buildings and began exchanging angry insults with another group apparently waiting for them on the corner. From their attitudes, some of them were carrying weapons and were half-eager, half-afraid to use them. It was hard to remember back to the time when such things had seemed important to him. He considered putting a stop to the argument, before it got out of hand, since no police were near; but adults had no business in kid fights. He watched them retreat slowly back to an alley, still shouting to work up their courage. Maybe he should be glad that there was even this much fire left under the smug placidity of Earth.

Finally, he picked up the newspaper from where he’d dropped it and began turning back to the want ads. His needs were few, and there should be dishwashing jobs, at least, somewhere in the city. He still had to eat and find some place to sleep. A headline glared up at him, catching his attention. He started to skim the story, and then read it thoroughly. Things weren’t going at all as he’d expected in the Outer Worlds, if the account were true; and usually, such battle reports weren’t altered much.

The aliens had developed a union of their own—if anything, a stronger one than the humanoids had. Apparently they’d chased the Federation ships into some kind of a trap. Losses on both sides were huge. And raids had begun on all the alien and humanoid planets.

He scowled as he came to the latest developments. One section of the Federation fleet under Sra of Chumkt had pulled out, accusing the faction headed by Barth Nevesh of leading the aliens to the humanoid rendezvous. Kel’s leader had gone after the deserters, fought it out with them in the middle of the larger battle, killed Sra, and declared himself the head of the whole Federation. It was madness that should have led to complete annihilation; only the fumbling, uncoordinated leadership of the aliens had saved the humanoid fleets. And now the Federation was coming apart at the seams, with Barth Nevesh frantically scurrying around to catch up the pieces.

Duke read it through again, but with no added information. It was a shock to know that the aliens had combined against the humanoid Federation. Still, looking back on that, he could begin to see that they would have to, once they knew of the Federation. But the rest of the account—

Flannery’s words came back to him. The director had been right. His prediction was already coming true, after only three days—unless he had either had prior knowledge or juggled things to make it come true! Duke considered it, but he could see no way Flannery could either learn or act in advance of the arrival of the ship on Earth. The Federation was farther from Meloa than from this planet. He’d been forced to depend on the same accounts Duke had read in the papers on board the ship.

Then Duke glanced at the date on the current paper idly, and his thoughts jolted completely out of focus. It was dated only three days later than the paper he had seen when they were docked on Clovis! Without instantaneous communication, it was impossible. He might have been mistaken about the date before, but—

Nothing fit. The feeling of uncertainty came back, crowding out the minor matter of his memory of the date. He stared at the richness of even this poor section of an Earth that huddled here as if afraid of its own shadows, yet reeked with self-satisfaction. He thought of Meloa and Throm, and the gallant try at Federation that had been made on the Outer Worlds. Strength had to lie in union and action; yet all the evidence seemed to say that it lay in timidity and sloth.

Reluctantly he turned the page away from the news, to seek for the job sections. From the alley, there came the sound of a police whistle, and shouts that faded into the distance. It was probably the breaking up of the teen-age argument. A few people ran by, heading for the excitement, but Duke had lost all interest. A taxi stopped nearby and he heard a patter that might have been that of children’s feet, but he didn’t look up.

* * * *

Then a sharper whistle shrilled almost in his ear and he twisted around to stare at a creature who was gazing at him. Four spindly legs led up to a globular body encased in a harness-like contraption. Above the body, two pairs of thin arms were waving about, while a long neck ended in a birdlike head, topped by two large ears.

The ears suddenly seemed to shimmer in the air, and a surprisingly human voice sounded. “You’re Captain Duke O’Neill!”

Before Duke could answer, a small hand came out quickly to find his and begin shaking it, while the ears twittered on in excitement. “I’m honored to meet you, Captain O’Neill. I’ve been studying your work against Throm. Amazingly clever strategy! Permit me—I’m Queeth, lately a prince of Sugfarth. Perhaps you noticed our ship? No, of course not. You must have landed at the government field. My crew and I are on the way to the war about to begin between Kloomiria and Cathay.”

“Why tell me about it?” Duke asked roughly. Sugfarth—the ship he’d seen diagrammed had come from there. If one of those titans was to be used against Cathay, Earth’s colony was doomed. And the impertinent little monster—!

The creature tried to imitate a shrug with his upper set of arms. “Why not, captain? We’re registered here as a recruiting ship for Cathay, so it’s no secret. We thought we might as well carry along some of the men going out to help, since we had to pass near Earth anyhow. And I dropped by here in the hope that there might be a few who had failed to join the Federation and who would like to switch to Cathay.”

“Wait a minute,” Duke said. He studied the alien, trying to rake what he’d learned from the article out of his memory. But no record of subtlety or deceit had been listed there. The Sugfarth were supposed to be honest—in fact, they’d been one of the rare races to declare their war in advance. Somehow, too, the words had a ring of truth in them. “For Cathay?”

“Certainly, captain. For whom else? The civilized Earth races naturally have to stick together against the barbarians.”

Duke stared at the almost comic figure, juggling the words he had heard with the obvious facts. “What Earth races? Do you mean that Earth is now giving citizenship to your people?”

“Not on this planet, of course.” A pair of beady black eyes stared back, as if trying to understand a ridiculous question. “But we’re citizens of Earth’s economic-cultural-diplomatic system, naturally.”

Duke felt something nibble at his mind, but he couldn’t grasp it. And he wasn’t accustomed to carrying on long chitchat with aliens. He shoved the thoughts away and reached for the paper again. “You won’t find recruits here, Queeth. Only me. And I’m too old for the recruiting law. Besides, I’ve got to find a job.”

He turned the pages, locating the column he wanted. What had Flannery meant about Republican Rome? Duke could remember dimly something about Rome’s granting citizenship to her conquered neighbors. It had been the basis of the city’s growth and later power. Now if Earth could inspire citizenship from conquered aliens—

Queeth made a sound like a sigh and shuffled his four feet on the sidewalk uncertainly. “If you came aboard on a visit, who could stop our taking off at once?” he suggested. “We have room for another officer, and we need men like you, Captain O’Neill, to help us against the aliens out there!”

Duke looked down at the small face, and even the alien features couldn’t disguise the obvious sincerity behind the words. It should have made his decision automatic. He’d come here to be recruited, and he was being accepted. There was a ship waiting for him, where his skills could be used. With such a ship, things would be different from the war he had known. He had a picture of Kloomiria under attack from it.

Abruptly, he was seeing again the exploding ships of Throm, and the charnel smell of Kordule on victorious Meloa was thick in his nose.

He stood up, shaking his head, and held out his hand, groping for the phrases that had been all-important once among the recruits he had joined. “Thanks, Queeth,” he said finally. “But I’ve got something to catch up on here. Good luck—on to victory—and give the aliens hell!”

He stood watching Queeth patter off toward the waiting cab and saw it drive away. Then he turned to the want ads in earnest.

Nothing was clear in his mind yet, but he’d need a job first, then a room near the library. He had a lot of current history to catch up on. Whatever Earth was up to had to be recorded somewhere, if he could find it.

VIII

Through half his reign, Var of Kloomiria had nursed his hatred of the humans into a holy mission. It was eighty years since his visit to Cathay, when the colonists’ children had run screaming from, him, shouting that he was a monster, but time had only sharpened the memory. He had covered his too-human body under a multitude of robes and had gloried in the alienness of his head, with its fringe of breathing tentacles and the two lobsterlike claws that concealed his tiny mouth. Year after long year, he had built and prayed for the war of vengeance that must come.

Almost, it had passed him by. With the threat of help from Earth for Cathay, he had been forced to delay while larger fleets were built. His reign had been drawing to a close and he had almost resigned himself to the law that would turn the rulership over to his eldest son. Then the boy had died in an explosion less than a week from the change of rule, and almost simultaneously Earth timidity had won again, and the protection had been denied her colony.

Now Var’s waiting was finished. He stood in the cabin of his flagship, heading back to Kloomiria after the opening raid of the war, savoring the sweetness of the damage he had done Cathay. Life was sweet.

Behind him, the door dilated softly and his aide came in, carrying a roll of paper. “A message from Cathay, magnificence,” he announced.

Var opened the message and studied it. Then he read it again, uncertainly. He was sure of his knowledge of English, but the note was senseless gibberish. Again he read it, this time aloud:

“Yours of the fourteenth ultimo received and contents noted. We are pleased to inform you that we are in a position to fill your entire order and that shipment is going out at once by special messenger. We trust that you will find our products superior in every way. We believe that you will find our terms completely reasonable.”

It made no more sense aloud.

The aide sighed apologetically. “Deliberately misapplied archaicism is sometimes regarded as humorous by Earthmen, magnificence. I suspect this is a warning that they are retaliating.”

“Bluff!” Var read the words again, but he could make no other meaning from them. Did the fools expect him to believe their flippancy spelled confidence, or were they deceiving themselves? And the hint of surrender terms was sheer stupidity. It must be an offer, though the wording seemed to indicate he should surrender!

He threw the message into the waste receptacle in disgust and went over to look at the screens where Kloomiria was showing. The humans of Cathay might try a return raid, but he was unworried. Cathay’s fleet was pitiful, and she had no heavy ships from which to launch planet bombs. Of course, there were spy reports of vast numbers of what seemed to be guided missiles, but they could never get through the confusion-signals that blanketed Kloomiria.

As he watched, a signal blinked. He opened the circuit and the face of his admiral looked out. “We’ve received indications of a swarm of small ships, magnificence,” the man reported. “High speed and piloted. It may be a suicide squadron.”

“Suicide!” Var spat the word out. “Whoever heard of the human cowards risking their own necks?”

The aide touched his shoulder apologetically. “They are mentioned in Earth books, magnificence. And there was Djamboula.”

Var stared at the screen as the flight was relayed to him, snarling. Definitely, they were one-man ships, not guided missiles. His defenses had never been built to handle suicide squadrons.

“Up, surround them, blast them!” he ordered. A few might get through to the ships or to the planet below, but quick action would wreak havoc among them and discourage further attempts.

* * * *

The Kloomirian fleet opened into a circle and began rising. Now the swarm of little ships began breaking apart, fanning out and attempting to turn. Var hissed. Not even the courage to go through with it after they were discovered! They—

He leaped to the screen, cursing at what he saw.

Where the little ships had opened a hole, a monstrous bulk was hurtling through at fantastic speed. The tiny ships had screened it, but now it outran them, boring straight toward the opening in the Kloomirian fleet. Atomic cannon began running out of enormous hatches, like the bristles jutting from a tendril brush.

“Blast out!” Var screamed into his engine phone. His flagship leaped away at full drive, while the enemy seemed to grow on the screen. Then it diminished as they began drawing away from the fleet.

There was nothing Var could do about the horror that followed. The great vessel bored through the fleet with cannons spitting out hell. If countershots were fired, they had no effect.

“Sugfarth!” the aide screamed in his ears. “A ship from Sugfarth!”

Var remembered the pictures he had seen, and they matched, though none had suggested such a size. It was impossible. The race of Sugfarth were aliens—warriors who had fought humanoids as few races had done. They should have fought with him, not against him!

The ship drove down toward the planet, braking fiercely now. From it, two bulky objects fell. While the planet bombs dropped, the behemoth began to rise again. It came through the shattered ranks of Kloomiria’s fleet, blasting again, and headed toward the tiny ships that had screened it, new hatches opening to receive them.

Half of Var’s fleet was in total ruin. On the planet below, two horrible gouts of flame leaped up through the atmosphere and beyond it, while all of Kloomiria seemed to tremble as half a continent was ruined. Var stared down at the destruction, unmoving.

The aide coughed, holding out another roll of paper. “Cathay is broadcasting an appeal for us to surrender without reprisals, magnificence. And the Estate Governors are demanding fleet protection.”

Var crushed the paper in his hands without reading it.

It would take half the remaining part of the fleet to give even token protection to Kloomiria. His plans had never been based on holding back the seemingly weak forces of Cathay.

“No answer,” he said. His hand reached for the communicator switch and he began issuing orders. “The fleet will regroup and return to base for immediate repairs and rearming. Commanders of all ships will prepare to take off against Cathay within six hours!”

Somehow the humans had to be crushed completely before they could destroy Kloomiria. After that, if any of his race survived, there would be a mission for all future generations.

Only the power of Earth could have sent the alien ship from Sugfarth, loaded with cannon and bombs, to fight against fellow aliens. Earth had declared neutrality, and then struck! For such villainy, a million years was not too long to seek vengeance!

IX

Night had fallen in the park beyond the huge Foreign Office building and the air was damp and cool. Duke shivered in the shadows that covered his bench. He should head back to his room, but he had no desire to listen again to the meaningless chatter that came through the thin walls. Time didn’t matter to him now, anyhow.

He swore and reached for a cigarette, brushing the crumpled newspaper from his lap. He’d been a fool to think Flannery would bother with him, just as he’d been a fool to turn down Queeth’s offer. He’d wasted his day off from the messenger job.

Footsteps sounded down the walk that led past his bench, and he drew deeper into the shadows. The steps slowed and a man moved to the other end of the bench. Duke drew heavily on his cigarette, tossed it away, and started to get up.

“Drink?” There was a hand holding a flask in front of him. He hesitated, then took it, and let a long slug rum down his throat. In the faint light he could make out the face of Director Flannery. The man nodded. “Sorry I was out when you came, O’Neill. One of the guards saw you out here, so I came over.”

“You should have been in,” Duke said, handing the flask back. “I’ve changed my mind since reading about some of your deals in the Journal. Well, thanks for the drink.”

One of Flannery’s prosthetic hands rested on Duke’s shoulder, and the pressure was surprisingly heavy. “When a man takes a drink with me, captain, he waits until I finish mine.” He tipped up the flask and drank slowly before putting it away. “I suppose you mean the Cathay-Kloomiria mess?”

“What else?” Mess was a mild word. The Sugfarth ship had seemed to make victory for Cathay certain the first few days, but the war had entered a new phase now. Cathay couldn’t maintain the big ship, and it was practically useless. It had simply served to reduce Kloomiria to a position where both sides were equal. The war showed signs of settling down to another prolonged, exhausting affair.

“Yeah, I read the editorial.” Flannery sighed. “We did let a couple of fools make Cathay think we’d bail her out. At the time, it seemed wise. The son of old Var was due to assume rule in a little while and he was strongly pro-human. We wanted to hold things off until he took over and scrapped the war plans. When he was killed—well, we pulled out before Var was any stronger.”

“And sent Queeth’s crowd in to do your blood-letting for you?” Duke sneered.

“That was their own idea,” Flannery denied. He lighted a cigarette and sat staring at the end of it, blowing out a slow stream of smoke. “All right, we made a mess of Cathay. We’ll know better next time. Care to walk back with me?”

“Why? So one of your trained psychopropagandists can indoctrinate mo? Or to get drunk and cry over your confession?”

“To keep me from sinking to your level and pushing your nose down your throat!” Flannery told him, but there was no real anger in his voice. He stood up, shrugging. “Nobody’s forcing you, O’Neill. Say the word and I’ll drive you home. But if you want that explanation, my working office seems like a good place to talk.”

For a moment, Duke wavered. But he’d reached the end of his own research, and he’d come here to find the answers. Leaving now would only make him more of a fool. “O.K.,” he decided. “I’ll stay for the big unveiling.”

Flannery grimaced. “There’s no great secret, though we don’t broadcast the facts for people and races not ready for them. We figure those who finish growing up here will soak-up most of it automatically. Did you get around to the film file on interstellar wars at the library?”

Duke nodded, wondering how much they knew about his activities. He’d spent a lot of time going over the film for clues. It was so old that the color had faded in places. The rest would have been easier to take without color. Most wasn’t good photography, but all was vivid. It was the record of all the wars since Earth’s invention of the high-drive—nearly two hundred of them. Gimsul, Hathor, Ptek, Sugfarth, Clovis, and even Meloa—the part he hadn’t seen, beyond Kordule where the real damage lay; Ronda had been wrong, and cannibalism had been discovered, along with much that was worse. Two hundred wars in which victor and vanquished alike had been ruined—in which the supreme effort needed to win had left most of the victors worse than the defeated systems.

“War!” The word was bitter on Flannery’s lips. “Someone starts building war power—power to insure peace, as they always say. Then other systems must have power to protect themselves. Strength begets force—and fear and hatred. Sooner or later, the strain is too great, and you have a war so horrible that its very horror makes surrender impossible. You saw it on Meloa. I’ve seen it fifty times!”

* * * *

They reached the Foreign Office building and began crossing its lobby. Flannery glanced up at the big seal on the wall with its motto in twisted Latin—Per Astra ad Aspera—and his eyes turned back to Duke’s, but he made no comment. He led the way to a private elevator that dropped them a dozen levels below the street, to a small room, littered with things from every conceivable planet. One wall was covered with what seemed to be the control panel of a spaceship, apparently now used for a desk. The director dropped into a chair and motioned Duke to another.

He looked tired, and his voice seemed older as he bent to pull a small projector and screen from a drawer and set them up. “The latest chapter of the film,” he said bitterly, throwing the switch.

It was a picture of the breakup of the Outer Federation, and in some ways worse than the other wars. Chumkt rebelled against Kel’s leadership and joined the aliens, while a civil war sprang up on her surface. Two alien planets went over to Kel. The original war was forgotten in a struggle for new combinations, and a thousand smaller wars replaced it. The Federation was dead and the two dozen races were dying.

“When everything else fails, the fools try federation,” Flannery said as the film ended. “We tried it on Earth. Another race discovered the interstellar drive before we did and used it to build an empire. We’ve found the dead and sterile remains of their civilization. It’s always the same. When one group unites its power, those nearby must ally for protection. Then, there’s a scramble for more power, while jealousies and fears breed new hatreds, internally and externally. And finally, there’s ruin—because at the technological level of interstellar travel, victory in war is absolutely, totally impossible!”

He sat back, and Duke waited for him to resume, until it was obvious he had finished. At last, the younger man gave up waiting. “All right,” he said. “Earth won’t fight! Am I supposed to turn handsprings? I figured that much out myself. And I learned a long time ago about the blessed meek who were to inherit the Earth—but I can’t remember anything being said about the stars!”

“You think peace won’t work?” Flannery asked mildly.

“I know it won’t!” Duke fumbled for a cigarette, trying to organize his thoughts. “You’ve been lucky so far. You’ve counted on the fact that war powers have to attack other powers nearby before they can safely strike against Earth, and you’ve buffered yourself with a jury-rigged economic trading system. But what happens when some really bright overlord decides to by-pass his local enemies? He’ll drop fifty planet bombs out of your peaceful skies and collect your vassal worlds before they can rearm. You won’t know about that, though. You’ll be wiped out!”

“I wouldn’t call our friends vassals, or say the system was jury-rigged,” Flannery objected. “Ever hear of paradynamics? The papers call it the ability to manipulate relationships, when we let them write a speculative article. It’s what lets us rebuild worlds in less than half a century—and form the first completely peaceful politico-economic culture we’ve ever known. Besides, I never said we had no weapons for our defense.

Duke considered it, trying to keep a firm footing on the shifting quicksand of the other’s arguments. He knew little of paradynamics, of course, but only as something supposed to remake the world and all science in some abstract future. It had been originated as a complex mathematical analysis of nuclear relationships, and had been seized on for some reason by the sociologists. It had no bearing he could see on the main argument.

“It won’t wash, Flannery. Without a fleet, it won’t matter if you have the plans of every weapon ever invented. The first time a smart power takes the chance, you’ll run out of time.”

“We didn’t!” Flannery swung to the control board that served as his desk, and his fingers seemed to play idly with the dials. From somewhere below them, there was a heavy vibration, as if great engines had sprung into life. He pressed another switch.

* * * *

Abruptly the room was gone. There was a night sky above them, almost starless, and with a great glaring moon shining down, to show a rough, mossy terrain that seemed covered endlessly with row after row of rusting, crumbling spaceships. Atomic cannon spilled from their hatches, and broken ramps led down to the ground. Down one clearer lane among the countless ships that surrounded him, Duke saw what might be a distant fire with a few bent figures around it, giving the impression of age.

Beside him, Flannery sat in his chair, holding a small control. There was nothing else of the office visible.

The director shook his head. “It’s no illusion, O’Neill. You’re here—fifty odd thousand light-years from Earth, where we transferred the attacking fleet. You never heard of that, of course. The dictator-ruler naturally didn’t make a report when his fleet simply vanished without trace. Here!”

The liquor burned in Duke’s throat, but it steadied him. He bent down, to feel the mossy turf under his hand.

“It’s real,” Flannery repeated. “Paradynamics handles all relationships, captain. And the position of a body is simply a statement of its geometrical relationships. What happens if we change those relationships—with power enough, that is? There is no motion, in any classic sense. But newspapers appear two high-drive days away minutes after they’re printed. We arrive here. And fleets sent against Earth just aren’t there any more!”

He pressed a button, and abruptly the walls of his office were around them again—the office that was suddenly the control room of a building that was more of a battleship than any Duke had ever seen.

He found himself clutching the chair, and forced himself to relax, soaking up the shock as he had soaked up so many others. His mind faced the facts, accepted them, and then sickly extended them.

“All right, you’ve got weapons,” he admitted, and disgust was heavy in his voice. “You can defend yourself. But can the galaxy defend itself when somebody decides it’s a fine offensive weapon? Or are all Earthmen supposed to be automatically pure, so this will never be turned to offensive use? Prove that to me and maybe I’ll change my mind about this planet and take that job of yours!”

Flannery leaned back, nodding soberly. “I intend to,” he answered. “Duke, we tried making peaceful citizens of our youngsters here a century ago, but it wouldn’t work. Kids have to have their little gang wars and their fisticuffs to grow up naturally. We can’t force them. Their interests aren’t those of adults. In fact, they think adults are pretty dull. No adventure. They can’t see that juggling a twenty-million gamble on tooling up for a new competitive product is exciting; they can’t understand working in a dull laboratory to dig something new out of nature’s files can be exciting and dangerous. Above all, they can’t see that the greatest adventure is the job of bringing kids up to be other adults. They regret the passing of dueling and affairs of honor. But an adult civilization knows better—because the passing of such things is the first step toward a race becoming adult, because it is adopting a new type of thinking, where such things have no value. You didn’t hit me when I called you names, because it made no sense from an adult point of view. Earth doesn’t go to war for the same reason. Thank God, we grew up just before we got into space, where adult thinking is necessary to survival!”

There had been the kids and their seemingly pointless argument on the street. There had been the curiously distant respect the Meloans had shown him, as if they guessed that only his exterior was similar. There were a lot of things Duke could use to justify believing the director. It made a fine picture—as it was intended to.

* * * *

“It must be wonderful to sit here safely, while agents do your dangerous work, feeling superior to anyone who shows any courage,” he said bitterly. “I suppose every clerk and desk-jockey out there feeds himself the same type of rationalization. But words don’t prove anything. How do you prove the difference between maturity and timidity or smugness?”

“You asked for it,” Flannery said simply.

The button went down on the control again. The air was suddenly thin and bitingly cold as they looked down on a world torn with war, where a hundred ships shaped like half-disks and unlike anything Duke had seen were mixed up in some maneuver. The button was pushed again, and this time there was a world below that had a port busy with similar ships, not fighting now. A third press brought them onto the surface of a heavy world that seemed to be composed of solid buildings and factories, where the ships were being outfitted with incomprehensible goods. A thing like a pipe-stem man looked up from a series of operations, made a waving motion to them, and abruptly disappeared.

“Did you really think we could be the only adult race in the universe?” Flannery asked. “You’re looking at the Allr, the closest cultural Gestalt to us, and somewhere near our level. Now—”

Something squamous perched on a rock on what seemed to be a barren world. Before it floated bright points of light that were obviously replicas of planets, with tiny lines of light between them, and a shuttling of glints along the lines. The thing seemed to look at them briefly. A tentacle whipped up and touched Flannery, who sat with his hands off the control box. Without its use, they were abruptly back in their office.

Flannery shivered, and there was strain on his face, while Duke felt his mind freeze slowly, as if with physical cold. The director cleaned his throat. “Or maybe we should look at more routine things, though you might consider that we have to get ready for the day when our advancing culture touches on other cultures. Because we can’t put it off forever.”

This time, they were in a building, like a crude shed, and there were men there, standing in front of a creature that seemed like a human in armor—but chitinous armor that was part of him. The alien suddenly turned, though Duke could now see that they were in a section behind one-way glass. Nevertheless, it seemed to sense them. Abruptly, something began pulling at his mind, as if his thoughts were being drained. Flannery hit the button again. “Telepathic race, and very immature,” he said, and there was worry in his voice. “Thank God, the only one we’ve found, and out of our immediate line of advance.”

There were other scenes. A human being who walked endlessly three feet off the floor, fighting against some barrier that wasn’t there, with his face frozen in fear, while creatures that seemed to be metallic moved about. “He found something while working on one of our paradynamic problems,” Flannery said. “He transported himself there and has been exactly like that ever since—three years, now. So far, our desk-jockeys here haven’t been able to discover exactly what line he was working on, but they’re trying!”

They were back in the office, and the director laid the control box on the big panel and cut off the power. He swung back to face Duke, his face tired.

“You’ll find a ship waiting to take you to Throm, and a man on board who’ll use the trip to brief you, if you decide to take the job. Duke. As I said, it’s up to you. If you still prefer your wars, come and see me next week, and maybe I can get the recruiting law set aside in your case, since you’re really a citizen of Meloa. Otherwise, the ship takes off for Throm in exactly three hours.”

He led the way back to the elevator, and rode up to the lobby. Duke moved out woodenly, but Flannery was obviously going no farther. The old man handed over what was left of the flask, shook Duke’s hand quickly, and closed the elevator door.

Duke downed the liquor slowly, without thinking. Finally, a flicker of thought seemed to stir in his frozen mind. He shook himself and headed down the lobby toward the Earth outside. A faint vibration seemed to quiver in the air from below, and he quickened his steps.

Outside, he shook himself again, signaled a cab, and climbed in.

“The first liquor store you come to,” he told the driver. “And then take me to the government space port, no matter what I say!”

X

It was quiet in the underground office of the director, except for the faint sound of Flannery’s arms sliding across each other in an unconscious massaging motion. He caught himself at it, and leaned back, his tired facial muscles twitching into a faint smile.

Strange things happened to a man when he grew old. His hair turned gray, he thought more of the past, and prosthetic limbs began to feel tired, as if the nerves were remembering also. And the work that had once seemed vitally important in every detail winnowed itself down to a few things, with the rest only bothersome routine.

He pulled a thermos of coffee from under the desk and turned back to the confusion of red-coded memoranda on his desk. Then the sound of the elevator coming down caught his attention, and he waited until the door opened.

“Hello, Harding,” he said without turning around. Only one man beside himself had the key to the private entrance. “Coffee?”

Harding took a seat beside him, and accepted the plastic cup. “Thanks. I tried to call you, but your phone was shut off. Heard the good word?”

Flannery shook his head. With the matter of the strange ship that had been reported and the problem of what to do with the telepaths both coming to a head, he’d had no time for casual calls. There was no question now that the telepaths had plucked the knowledge of how to build an interstellar drive from the observers’ minds, in spite of all precautions. And once they broke out into the rest of the galaxy—

“Var died of a heart attack in the middle of a battle,” Harding announced. “And Cathay and Kloomiria sent each other surrender notices the minute word was official! The damnedest thing I ever heard of. Edmonds came with me, and he’s upstairs now, planning a big victory celebration as soon as we can let the word out. It should finish his reorientation.”

“I’ll probably get word on it by the time someone has it all organized into a nice, official memo,” Flannery said. “Back him up on that celebration. It’s worth a celebration to find out both worlds are that close to maturity. Coming over for bridge tonight?”

Harding shook his head. “I’ll be up to my elbows in bills for the relief of Cathay and Kloomiria. It’s a mess, even if it could be worse. Maybe tomorrow.”

He dropped the cup onto the desk and turned to the elevator, while Flannery hunted through the memoranda. As he expected, he found a recent one announcing Var’s death. He rubbed his arms together as he read it, but there was no new information in it.

Then, reluctantly, he picked up his phone and started to call. Scanning for information, just as another bundle of memos came through a small door in the panel. At the sight of the top photo, he put the phone back on its cradle. His face tautened and his arms lay limp as he read through it.

The picture was that of one of the half-disk Allr ships. The rumors of the strange ship were true enough. One of the Allr races had crossed the gulf between the two expanding cultures, and had touched several worlds briefly, to land in the biggest city on Ptek, the trading center for a whole sector. It had been there two days already, before being reported to Earth!

To make matters worse, it had come because its home world had been visited by a foreign ship—from the description, apparently from Sugfarth; there was no longer any chance of cutting off the news, since it would be circulating busily through both cultures. And with it must be going a thousand wild schemes by trading adventurers for exploration!

He’d expected it to happen some day, maybe in fifty years, after he was out of the office. By then enough of the worlds should have reached maturity to offer some hope of peaceful interpenetration. But now—

Victory, he thought bitterly. A small victory, and then this. Or maybe two small victories, if O’Neill worked out as well on Throm as he seemed to be doing, and if he realized he’d never be satisfied until he could return to Earth to face the problems he now knew existed. Flannery had almost hoped that it would be O’Neill who would handle the problem of cultural interpenetration. The man had ability.

But all that was in the past now, along with all the other victories. And in the present, as always, there were larger and larger problems, while full maturity lay forever a little farther on.

Then he smiled slowly at himself. There were problems behind him, too—ones whose solutions made these problems possible. And there would always be victory enough.

What was victory, after all, but the chance to face bigger and bigger problems without fear?

Flannery picked up the phone, and his arms were no longer tired.

THE TREE OF LIFE, by C. L. Moore

Originally published in Weird Tales, October 1936.

Over time-ruined Illar the searching planes swooped and circled. Northwest Smith, peering up at them with a steel-pale stare from the shelter of a half-collapsed temple, thought of vultures wheeling above carrion. All day long now they had been raking these ruins for him. Presently, he knew, thirst would begin to parch his throat and hunger to gnaw at him. There was neither food nor water in these ancient Martian ruins, and he knew that it could be only a matter of time before the urgencies of his own body would drive him out to signal those wheeling Patrol ships and trade his hard-won liberty for food and drink. He crouched lower under the shadow of the temple arch and cursed the accuracy of the Patrol gunner whose flame-blast had caught his dodging ship just at the edge of Illar’s ruins.

Presently it occurred to him that in most Martian temples of the ancient days an ornamental well had stood in the outer court for the benefit of wayfarers. Of course all water in it would be a million years dry now, but for lack of anything better to do he rose from his seat at the edge of the collapsed central dome and made his cautious way by still intact corridors toward the front of the temple. He paused in a tangle of wreckage at the courtyard’s edge and looked out across the sun-drenched expanse of pavement toward that ornate well that once had served travelers who passed by here in the days when Mars was a green planet.

It was an unusually elaborate well, and amazingly well preserved. Its rim had been inlaid with a mosaic pattern whose symbolism must once have borne deep meaning, and above it in a great fan of time-defying bronze an elaborate grille-work portrayed the inevitable tree-of-life pattern which so often appears in the symbolism of the three worlds. Smith looked at it a bit incredulously from his shelter, it was so miraculously preserved amidst all this chaos of broken stone, casting a delicate tracery of shadow on the sunny pavement as perfectly as it must have done a million years ago when dusty travelers paused here to drink. He could picture them filing in at noontime through the great gates that—

The vision vanished abruptly as his questing eyes made the circle of the ruined walls. There had been no gate. He could not find a trace of it anywhere around the outer wall of the court. The only entrance here, as nearly as he could tell from the foundations that remained, had been the door in whose ruins he now stood. Queer. This must have been a private court, then, its great grille-crowned well reserved for the use of the priests. Or wait—had there not been a priest-king Illar after whom the city was named? A wizard-king, so legend said, who ruled temple as well as palace with an iron hand. This elaborately patterned well, of material royal enough to withstand the weight of ages, might well have been sacrosanct for the use of that long-dead monarch. It might—

Across the sun-bright pavement swept the shadow of a plant. Smith dodged back into deeper hiding while the ship circled low over the courtyard. And it was then, as he crouched against a crumbled wall and waited, motionless, for the danger to pass, that he became aware for the first time of a sound that startled him so he could scarcely credit his ears—a recurrent sound, choked and sorrowful—the sound of a woman sobbing.

The incongruity of it made him forgetful for a moment of the peril hovering overhead in the sun-hot outdoors. The dimness of the temple ruins became a living and vital place for that moment, throbbing with the sound of tears. He looked about half in incredulity, wondering if hunger and thirst were playing tricks on him already, or if these broken halls might be haunted by a million-years-old sorrow that wept along die corridors to drive its hearers mad. There were tales of such haunters in some of Mars’ older ruins. The hair prickled faintly at the back of his neck as he laid a hand on the butt of his force-gun and commenced a cautious prowl toward the source of the muffled noise.

Presently he caught a flash of white, luminous in the gloom of these ruined walls, and went forward with soundless steps, eyes narrowed in the effort to make out what manner of creature this might be that wept alone in time-forgotten ruins. It was a woman. Or it had the dim outlines of a woman, huddled against an angle of fallen walls and veiled in a fabulous shower of long dark hair. But there was something uncannily odd about her. He could not focus his pale stare upon her outlines. She was scarcely more than a luminous blot of whiteness in the gloom, shimmering with a look of unreality which the sound of her sobs denied.

Before he could make up his mind just what to do, something must have warned the weeping girl that she was no longer alone, for the sound of her tears checked suddenly and she lifted her head, turning to him a face no more distinguishable than her body’s outlines. He made no effort to resolve the blurred features into visibility, for out of that luminous mask burned two eyes that caught his with an almost perceptible impact and gripped them in a stare from which he could not have turned if he would.

They were the most amazing eyes he had ever met, colored like moonstone, milkily translucent, so that they looked almost blind. And that magnetic stare held him motionless. In the instant that she gripped him with that fixed, moonstone look he felt oddly as if a tangible bond were taut between them.

Then she spoke, and he wondered if his mind, after all, had begun to give way in the haunted loneliness of dead Illar; for though the words she spoke fell upon his ears in a gibberish of meaningless sounds, yet in his brain a message formed with a clarity that far transcended the halting communication of words. And her milkily colored eyes bored into his with a fierce intensity.

“I’m lost—I’m lost—” wailed the voice in his brain.

A rush of sudden tears brimmed the compelling eyes, veiling their brilliance. And he was free again with that clouding of the moonstone surfaces. Her voice wailed, but the words were meaningless and no knowledge formed in his brain to match them. Stiffly he stepped back a pace and looked down at her, a feeling of helpless incredulity rising within him. For he still could not focus directly upon the shining whiteness of her, and nothing save those moonstone eyes were clear to him.

The girl sprang to her feet and rose on tiptoe, gripping his shoulders with urgent hands. Again the blind intensity of her eyes took hold of his, with a force almost as tangible as the clutch of her hands; again that stream of intelligence poured into his brain, strongly, pleadingly.

“Please, please take me back! I’m so frightened—I can’t find my way—oh, please!”

He blinked down at her, his dazed mind gradually realizing the basic facts of what was happening, Obviously her milky, unseeing eyes held a magnetic power that carried her thoughts to him without the need of a common speech. And they were the eyes of a powerful mind, the outlets from which a stream of fierce energy poured into his brain. Yet the words they conveyed were the words of a terrified and helpless girl. A strong sense of wariness was rising in him as he considered the incongruity of speech and power, both of which were beating upon him more urgently with every breath. The mind of a forceful and strong-willed woman, carrying the sobs of a frightened girl. There was no sincerity in it.

“Please, please!” cried her impatience in his brain. “Help me! Guide me back!”

“Back where?” he heard his own voice asking.

“The Tree!” wailed that queer speech in his brain, while gibberish was all his ears heard and the moonstone stare transfixed him strongly. “The Tree of Life! Oh, take me back to the shadow of the Tree!”

A vision of the grille-ornamented well leaped into his memory. It was the only tree symbol he could think of just then. But what possible connection could there be between the well and the lost girl—if she was lost? Another wail in that unknown tongue, another anguished shake of his shoulders, brought a sudden resolution into his groping mind. There could be no harm in leading her back to the well, to whose grille she must surely be referring. And strong curiosity was growing in his mind. Much more than met the eye was concealed in this queer incident. And a wild guess had flashed through his mind that perhaps she might have come from some subterranean world into which the well descended. It would explain her luminous pallor, if not her blurriness; and, too, her eyes did not seem to function in the light. There was a much more incredible explanation of her presence, but he was not to know it for a few minutes yet.

“Come along,” he said, taking the clutching hands gently from his shoulders. “I’ll lead you to the well.”

She sighed in a deep gust of relief and dropped her compelling eyes from his, murmuring in that strange, gabbling tongue what must have been thanks. He took her by the hand and turned toward the ruined archway of the door.

Against his fingers her flesh was cool and firm. To the touch she was tangible, but even thus near, his eyes refused to focus upon the cloudy opacity of her body, the dark blur of her streaming hair. Nothing but those burning, blinded eyes were strong enough to pierce the veil that parted them.

She stumbled along at his side over the rough floor of the temple, saying nothing more, panting with eagerness to return to her incomprehensible “tree.” How much of that eagerness was assumed Smith still could not be quite sure. When they reached the door he halted her for a moment, scanning the sky for danger. Apparently the ships had finished with this quarter of the city, for he could see two or three of them half a mile away, hovering low over Illar’s northern section. He could risk it without much peril. He led the girl cautiously out into the sun-hot court.

* * * *

She could not have known by sight that they neared the well, but when they were within twenty paces of it she flung up her blurred head suddenly and tugged at his hand. It was she who led him that last stretch which parted the two from the well. In the sun the shadow tracery of the grille’s symbolic pattern lay vividly outlined on the ground. The girl gave a little gasp of delight. She dropped his hand and ran forward three short steps, and plunged into the very center of that shadowy pattern on the ground. And what happened then was too incredible to believe.

The pattern ran over her like a garment, curving to the curve of her body in the way all shadows do. But as she stood there striped and laced with the darkness of it, there came a queer shifting in the lines of black tracery, a subtle, inexplicable movement to one side. And with that motion she vanished. It was exactly as if that shifting had moved her out of one world into another. Stupidly Smith stared at the spot from which she had disappeared.

Then several things happened almost simultaneously. The zoom of a plane broke suddenly into the quiet, a black shadow dipped low over the rooftops, and Smith, too late, realized that he stood defenseless in full view of the searching ships. There was only one way out, and that was too fantastic to put faith in, but he had no time to hesitate. With one leap he plunged full into the midst of the shadow of the tree of life.

Its tracery flowed round him, molding its pattern to his body. And outside the boundaries everything executed a queer little sidewise dip and slipped in the most extraordinary manner, like an optical illusion, into quite another scene. There was no intervention of blankness. It was as if he looked through the bars of a grille upon a picture which without warning slipped sidewise, while between the bars appeared another scene, a curious, dim landscape, gray as if with the twilight of early evening. The air had an oddly thickened look, through which he saw the quiet trees and the flower-spangled grass of the place with a queer, unreal blending, like the landscape in a tapestry, all its outlines blurred.

In the midst of this tapestried twilight the burning whiteness of the girl he had followed blazed like a flame. She had paused a few steps away and stood waiting, apparently quite sure that he would come after. He grinned a little to himself as he realized it, knowing that curiosity must almost certainly have driven him in her wake even if the necessity for shelter had not compelled his following. She was clearly visible now, in this thickened dimness—visible, and very lovely, and a little unreal. She shone with a burning clarity, the only vivid thing in the whole twilit world. Eyes upon that blazing whiteness, Smith stepped forward, scarcely realizing that he had moved.

Slowly he crossed the dark grass toward her. That grass was soft underfoot, and thick with small, low-blooming flowers of a shining pallor. Botticelli painted such spangled swards for the feet of his angels. Upon it the girl’s bare feet gleamed whiter than the blossoms. She wore no garment but the royal mantle of her hair, sweeping about her in a cloak of shining darkness that had a queer, unreal tinge of purple in that low light. It brushed her ankles in its fabulous length. From the hood of it she watched Smith coming toward her, a smile on her pale mouth and a light blazing in the deeps of her moonstone eyes. She was not blind now, nor frightened. She stretched out her hand to him confidently.

“It is my turn now to lead you,” she smiled. As before, the words were gibberish, but the penetrating stare of those strange white eyes gave them a meaning in the depths of his brain.

Automatically his hand went out to hers. He was a little dazed, and her eyes were very compelling. Her fingers twined in his and she set off over the flowery grass, pulling him beside her. He did not ask where they were going. Lost in the dreamy spell of the still, gray, enchanted place, he felt no need for words. He was beginning to see more clearly in the odd, blurring twilight that ran the outlines of things together in that queer, tapestried manner. And he puzzled in a futile, muddled way as he went on over what sort of land he had come into. Overhead was darkness, paling into twilight near the ground, so that when he looked up he was staring into bottomless deeps of starless night.

Trees and flowering shrubs and the flower-starred grass stretched emptily about them in the thick, confusing gloom of the place. He could see only a little distance through that dim air. It was as if they walked a strip of tapestried twilight in some unlighted dream. And the girl, with her lovely, luminous body and richly colored robe of hair was like a woman in a tapestry too, unreal and magical.

After a while, when he had become a little adjusted to the queerness of the whole scene, he began to notice furtive movements in the shrubs and trees they passed. Things flickered too swiftly for him to catch their outlines, but from the tail of his eye he was aware of motion, and somehow of eyes that watched. That sensation was a familiar one to him, and he kept an uneasy gaze on those shiftings in the shrubbery as they went on. Presently he caught a watcher in full view between bush and tree, and saw that it was a man, a little, furtive, dark-skinned man who dodged hastily back into cover again before Smith’s eyes could do more than take in the fact of his existence.

After that he knew what to expect and could make them out more easily: little, darting people with big eyes that shone with a queer, sorrowful darkness from their small, frightened faces as they scuttled through the bushes, dodging always just out of plain sight among the leaves. He could hear the soft rustle of their passage, and once or twice when they passed near a clump of shrubbery he thought he caught the echo of little whispering calls, gentle as the rustle of leaves and somehow full of a strange warning note so clear that he caught it even amid the murmur of their speech. Warning calls, and little furtive hiders in the leaves, and a landscape of tapestried blurting carpeted with Botticelli flower-strewn sward. It was all a dream. He felt quite sure of that.

* * * *

It was a long while before curiosity awakened in him sufficiently to make him break the stillness. But at last he asked dreamily.

“Where are we going?”

The girl seemed to understand that without the necessity of the bond her hypnotic eyes made, for she turned and caught his eyes in a white stare and answered.

“To Thag. Thag desires you.”

“What is Thag?”

In answer to that she launched without preliminary upon a little singsong monolog of explanation whose stereotyped formula made him faintly uneasy with the thought that it must have been made very often to attain the status of a set speech; made to many men, perhaps, whom Thag had desired. And what became of them afterward? he wondered. But the girl was speaking.

“Many ages ago there dwelt in Illar the great King Illar for whom the city was named. He was a magician of mighty power, but not mighty enough to fulfill all his ambitions. So by his arts he called up out of darkness the being known as Thag, and with him struck a bargain. By that bargain Thag was to give of his limitless power, serving Illar all the days of Illar’s life, and in return the king was to create a land for Thag’s dwelling-place and people it with slaves and furnish a priestess to tend Thag’s needs. This is that land. I am that priestess, the latest of a long line of women born to serve Thag. The tree-people are his—his lesser servants.

“I have spoken softly so that the tree-people do not hear, for to them Thag is the center and focus of creation, the end and beginning of all life. But to you I have told the truth.”

“But what does Thag want of me?”

“It is not for Thag’s servants to question Thag.”

“Then what becomes, afterward, of the men Thag desires?” he pursued.

“You must ask Thag that.”

She turned her eyes away as she spoke, snapping the mental bond that had flowed between them with a suddenness that left Smith dizzy. He went on at her side more slowly, pulling back a little on the tug of her fingers. By degrees the sense of dreaminess was fading, and alarm began to stir in the deeps of his mind. After all, there was no reason why he need let this blank-eyed priestess lead him up to the very maw of her god. She had lured him into this land by what he knew now to have been a trick; might she not have worse tricks than that in store for him?

She held him, after all, by nothing stronger than the clasp of her fingers, if he could keep his eyes turned from hers. Therein lay her real power, but he could fight it if he chose. And he began to hear more clearly than ever the queer note of warning in the rustling whispers of the tree-folk who still fluttered in and out of sight among the leaves. The twilight place had taken on menace and evil. Suddenly he made up his mind. He stopped, breaking the clasp of the girl’s hand.

“I’m not going,” he said.

She swung round in a sweep of richly tinted hair, words jetting from her in a gush of incoherence. But he dared not meet her eyes, and they conveyed no meaning to him. Resolutely he turned away, ignoring her voice, and set out to retrace the way they had come. She called after him once, in a high, clear voice that somehow held a note as warning as that in the rustling voices of the tree-people, but he kept on doggedly, not looking back. She laughed then, sweetly and scornfully, a laugh that echoed uneasily in his mind long after the sound of it had died upon the twilit air.

After a while he glanced back over one shoulder, half expecting to see the luminous dazzle of her body still glowing in the dim glade where he had left her; but the blurred tapestry-landscape was quite empty.

He went on in the midst of a silence so deep it hurt his ears, and in a solitude unhaunted even by the shy presences of the tree-folk. They had vanished with the fire-bright girl, and the whole twilight land was empty save for himself. He plodded on across the dark grass, crushing the upturned flower-faces under his boots and asking himself wearily if he could be mad. There seemed little other explanation for this hushed and tapestried solitude that had swallowed him up. In that thunderous quiet, in that deathly solitude, he went on.

* * * *

When he had walked for what seemed to him much longer than it should have taken to reach his starting-point, and still no sign of an exit appeared, he began to wonder if there were any way out of the gray land of Thag. For the first time he realized that he had come through no tangible gateway. He had only stepped out of a shadow, and—now that he thought of it—there were no shadows here. The grayness swallowed everything up, leaving the landscape oddly flat, like a badly drawn picture. He looked about helplessly, quite lost now and not sure in what direction he should be facing, for there was nothing here by which to know directions. The trees and shrubs and the starry grass still stretched about him, uncertainly outlined in that changeless dusk. They seemed to go on for ever.

But he plodded ahead, unwilling to stop because of a queer tension in the air, somehow as if all the blurred trees and shrubs were waiting in breathless anticipation, centering upon his stumbling figure. But all trace of animate life had vanished with the disappearance of the priestess’ white-glowing figure. Head down, paying little heed to where he was going, he went on over the flowery sward.

An odd sense of voids about him startled Smith at last out of his lethargic plodding. He lifted his head. He stood just at the edge of a line of trees, dim and indistinct in the unchanging twilight. Beyond them—he came to himself with a jerk and stared incredulously. Beyond them the grass ran down to nothingness, merging by imperceptible degrees into a streaked and arching void—not the sort of emptiness into which a material body could fall, but a solid nothing, curving up toward the dark zenith as the inside of a sphere curves. No physical thing could have entered there. It was too utterly void, an inviolable emptiness which no force could invade.

He stared up along the inward arch of that curving, impassable wall. Here, then, was the edge of the queer land Illar had wrested out of space itself. This arch must be the curving of solid space which had been bent awry to enclose the magical land. There was no escape this way. He could not even bring himself to approach any nearer to that streaked and arching blank. He could not have said why, but it woke in him an inner disquiet so strong that after a moment’s staring he turned his eyes away.

Presently he shrugged and set off along the inside of the line of trees which parted him from the space-wall. Perhaps there might be a break somewhere. It was a forlorn hope, but the best that offered. Wearily he stumbled on over the flowery grass.

How long he had gone on along that almost imperceptibly curving line of border he could not have said, but after a timeless interval of gray solitude he gradually became aware that a tiny rustling and whispering among the leaves had been growing louder by degrees for some time. He looked up. In and out among the trees which bordered that solid wall of nothingness little, indistinguishable figures were flitting. The tree-men had returned. Queerly grateful for their presence, he went on a bit more cheerfully, paying no heed to their timid dartings to and fro, for Smith was wise in the ways of wild life.

Presently, when they saw how little heed he paid them, they began to grow bolder, their whispers louder. And among those rustling voices he thought he was beginning to catch threads of familiarity. Now and again a word reached his ears that he seemed to recognize, lost amidst the gibberish of their speech. He kept his head down and his hands quiet, plodding along with a cunning stillness that began to bear results.

From the corner of his eye he could see that a little dark tree-man had darted out from cover and paused midway between bush and tree to inspect the queer, tall stranger. Nothing happened to this daring venturer, and soon another risked a pause in the open to stare at the quiet walker among the trees. In a little while a small crowd of the tree-people was moving slowly parallel with his course, staring with all the avid curiosity of wild things at Smith’s plodding figure. And among them the rustling whispers grew louder.

Presently the ground dipped down into a little hollow ringed with trees. It was a bit darker here than it had been on the higher level, and as he went down the slope of its side he saw that among the underbrush which filled it were cunningly hidden huts twined together out of the living bushes. Obviously the hollow was a tiny village where the tree-folk dwelt.

He was surer of this when they began to grow bolder as he went down into the dimness of the place. The whispers shrilled a little, and the boldest among his watchers ran almost at his elbow, twittering their queer, broken speech in hushed syllables whose familiarity still bothered him with its haunting echo of words he knew. When he had reached the center of the hollow he became aware that the little folk had spread out in a ring to surround him. Wherever he looked their small, anxious faces and staring eyes confronted him. He grinned to himself and came to a halt, waiting gravely.

None of them seemed quite brave enough to constitute himself spokesman, but among several a hurried whispering broke out in which he caught the words “Thag” and “danger” and “beware.” He recognized the meaning of these words without placing in his mind their origins in some tongue he knew. He knit his sun-bleached brows and concentrated harder, striving to wrest from that curious, murmuring whisper some, hint of its original root. He had a smattering of more tongues than he could have counted offhand, and it was hard to place these scattered words among any one speech.

But the word “Thag” had a sound like that of the very ancient dryland tongue, which upon Mars is considered at once the oldest and the most uncouth of all the planet’s languages. And with that clue to guide him he presently began to catch other syllables which were remotely like syllables from the dryland speech. They were almost unrecognizable, far, far more ancient than the very oldest versions of the tongue he had ever heard repeated, almost primitive in their crudity and simplicity. And for a moment the sheerest awe came over him, as he realized the significance of what he listened to.

* * * *

The dryland race today is a handful of semi-brutes, degenerate from the ages of past time when they were a mighty people at the apex of an almost forgotten glory. That day is millions of years gone now, too far in the past to have record save in the vaguest folklore. Yet here was a people who spoke the rudiments of that race’s tongue as it must have been spoken in the race’s dim beginnings, perhaps a million years earlier even that that immemorial time of their triumph. The reeling of millenniums set Smith’s mind awhirl with the effort at compassing their span.

There was another connotation in the speaking of that tongue by these timid bush-dwellers, too. It must mean that the forgotten wizard king, Illar, had peopled his sinister, twilight land with the ancestors of today’s dryland dwellers. If they shared the same tongue they must share the same lineage. And humanity’s remorseless adaptability had done the rest.

It had been no kinder here than in the outside world, where the ancient plainsmen who had roamed Mars’ green prairies had dwindled with their dying plains, degenerating at last into a shrunken, leather-skinned bestiality. For here that same race root had declined into these tiny, slinking creatures with their dusky skins and great, staring eyes and their voices that never rose above a whisper. What tragedies must lie behind that gradual degeneration!

All about him the whispers still ran. He was beginning to suspect that through countless ages of hiding and murmuring those voices must have lost the ability to speak aloud. And he wondered with a little inward chill what terror it was which had transformed a free and fearless people into these tiny wild things whispering in the underbrush.

The little anxious voices had shrilled into vehemence now, all of them chattering together in their queer, soft, rustling whispers. Looking back later upon that timeless space he had passed in the hollow, Smith remembered it as some curious nightmare—dimness and tapestried blurring, and a hush like death over the whole twilight land, and the timid voices whispering, whispering, eloquent with terror and warning.

He groped back among his memories and brought forth a phrase or two remembered from long ago, an archaic rendering of the immemorial tongue they spoke. It was the simplest version he could remember of the complex speech now used, but he knew that to them it must sound fantastically strange. Instinctively he whispered as he spoke it, feeling like an actor in a play as he mouthed the ancient idiom:

“I—I cannot understand. Speak—more slowly—”

A torrent of words greeted this rendering of their tongue. Then there was a great deal of hushing and hissing, and presently two or three between them began laboriously to recite an involved speech, one syllable at a time. Always two or more shared the task. Never in his converse with them did he address anyone directly. Ages of terror had bred all directness out of them.

“Thag,” they said. “Thag, the terrible—Thag, the omnipotent—Thag, the unescapable. Beware of Thag.”

For a moment Smith stood quiet, grinning down at them despite himself. There must not be too much of intelligence left among this branch of the race, either, for surely such a warning was superfluous. Yet they had mastered their agonies of timidity to give it. All virtue could not yet have been bred out of them, then. They still had kindness and a sort of desperate courage rooted deep in fear.

“What is Thag?” he managed to inquire, voicing the archaic syllables uncertainly. And they must have understood the meaning if not the phraseology, for another spate of whispered tumult burst from the clustering tribe. Then, as before, several took up the task of answering.

“Thag—Thag, the end and the beginning, the center of creation. When Thag breathes the world trembles. The earth was made for Thag’s dwelling-place. All things are Thag’s. Oh, beware! Beware!”

This much he pieced together out of their diffuse whisperings, catching up the fragments of words he knew and fitting them into the pattern.

“What—what is the danger?” he managed to ask.

“Thag—hungers. Thag must be fed. It is we who—feed—him, but there are times when he desires other food than us. It is then he sends his priestess forth to lure—food—in. Oh, beware of Thag!”

“You mean then, that she—the priestess—brought me in for—food?”

A chorus of grave, murmuring affirmatives.

“Then why did she leave me?”

“There is no escape from Thag. Thag is the center of creation. All things are Thag’s. When he calls, you must answer. When he hungers, he will have you. Beware of Thag!”

Smith considered that for a moment in silence. In the main he felt confident that he had understood their warning correctly, and he had little reason to doubt that they knew whereof they spoke. Thag might not be the center of the universe, but if they said he could call a victim from anywhere in the land, Smith was not disposed to doubt it. The priestess’ willingness to let him leave her unhindered, yes, even her scornful laughter as he looked back, told the same story. Whatever Thag might be, his power in this land could not be doubted. He made up his mind suddenly what he must do, and turned to the breathlessly waiting little folk.

“Which way—lies Thag?” he asked.

A score of dark, thin arms pointed. Smith turned his head speculatively toward the spot they indicated. In this changeless twilight all sense of direction had long since left him, but he marked the line as well as he could by the formation of the trees, then turned to the little people with a ceremonious farewell rising to his lips.

“My thanks for—” he began, to be interrupted by a chorus of whispering cries of protest. They seemed to sense his intention, and their pleadings were frantic. A panic anxiety for him glowed upon every little terrified face turned up to his, and their eyes were wide with protest and terror. Helplessly he looked down.

“I—I must go,” he tried stumblingly to say. “My only chance is to take Thag unawares, before he sends for me.”

He could not know if they understood. Their chattering went on undiminished, and they even went so far as to lay tiny hands on him, as if they would prevent him by force from seeking out the terror of their lives.

“No, no, no!” they wailed murmurously. “You do not know what it is you seek! You do not know Thag! Stay here! Beware of Thag!”

* * * *

A little prickling of unease went down Smith’s back as he listened. Thag must be very terrible indeed if even half this alarm had foundation. And to be quite frank with himself, he would greatly have preferred to remain here in the hidden quiet of the hollow, with its illusion of shelter, for as long as he was allowed to stay. But he was not of the stuff that yields very easily to its own terrors, and hope burned strongly in him still. So he squared his broad shoulders and turned resolutely in the direction the tree-folk had indicated.

When they saw that he meant to go, their protests sank to a wail of bitter grieving. With that sound moaning behind him he went up out of the hollow, like a man setting forth to the music of his own dirge. A few of the bravest went with him a little way, flitting through the underbrush and darting from tree to tree in a timidity so deeply ingrained that even when no immediate peril threatened they dared not go openly through the twilight.

Their presence was comforting to Smith as he went on. A futile desire to help the little terror-ridden tribe was rising in him, a useless gratitude for their warning and their friendliness, their genuine grieving at his departure and their odd, paradoxical bravery even in the midst of hereditary terror. But he knew that he could do nothing for them, when he was not at all sure he could even save himself. Something of their panic had communicated itself to him, and he advanced with a sinking at the pit of his stomach. Fear of the unknown is so poignant a thing, feeding on its own terror, that he found his hands beginning to shake a little and his throat going dry as he went on.

The rustling and whispering among the bushes dwindled as his followers one by one dropped away, the bravest staying the longest, but even they failing in courage as Smith advanced steadily in that direction from which all their lives they had been taught to turn their faces. Presently he realized that he was alone once more. He went on more quickly, anxious to come face to face with this horror of the twilight and dispel at least the fearfulness of its mystery.

The silence was like death. Not a breeze stirred the leaves, and the only sound was his own breathing, the heavy thud of his own heart. Somehow he felt sure that he was coming nearer to his goal. The hush seemed to confirm it. He loosened the force-gun at his thigh.

In that changeless twilight the ground was sloping down once more into a broader hollow. He descended slowly, every sense alert for danger, not knowing if Thag was beast or human or elemental, visible or invisible. The trees were beginning to thin. He knew that he had almost reached his goal.

He paused at the edge of the last line of trees. A clearing spread out before him at the bottom of the hollow, quiet in the dim, translucent air. He could focus directly upon no outlines anywhere, for the tapestried blurring of the place. But when he saw what stood in the very center of the clearing he stopped dead-still, like one turned to stone, and a shock of utter cold went chilling through him. Yet he could not have said why.

For in the clearing’s center stood the Tree of Life. He had met the symbol too often in patterns and designs not to recognize it, but here that fabulous thing was living, growing, actually springing up from a rooted firmness in the spangled grass as any tree might spring. Yet it could not be real. Its thin brown trunk, of no recognizable substance, smooth and gleaming, mounted in the traditional spiral; its twelve fantastically curving branches arched delicately outward from the central stem. It was bare of leaves. No foliage masked the serpentine brown spiral of the trunk. But at the tip of each symbolic branch flowered a blossom of bloody rose so vivid he could scarcely focus his dazzled eyes upon them.

This tree alone of all objects in the dim land was sharply distinct to the eye—terribly distinct, remorselessly clear. No words can describe the amazing menace that dwelt among its branches. Smith’s flesh crept as he stared, yet he could not for all his staring make out why peril was so eloquent there. To all appearances here stood only a fabulous symbol miraculously come to life; yet danger breathed out from it so strongly that Smith felt the hair lifting on his neck as he stared.

It was no ordinary danger. A nameless, choking, paralyzed panic was swelling in his throat as he gazed upon the perilous beauty of the Tree. Somehow the arches and curves of its branches seemed to limn a pattern so dreadful that his heart beat faster as he gazed upon it. But he could not guess why, though somehow the answer was hovering just out of reach of his conscious mind. From that first glimpse of it his instincts shuddered like a shying stallion, yet reason still looked in vain for an answer.

Nor was the Tree merely a vegetable growth. It was alive, terribly, ominously alive. He could not have said how he knew that, for it stood motionless in its empty clearing, not a branch trembling, yet in its immobility more awfully vital than any animate thing. The very sight of it woke in Smith an insane urging to flight, to put worlds between himself and this inexplicably dreadful thing.

Crazy impulses stirred in his brain, coming to insane birth at the calling of the Tree’s peril—the desperate need to shut out the sight of that thing that was blasphemy, to put out his own sight rather than gaze longer upon the perilous grace of its branches, to slit his own throat that he might not need to dwell in the same world which housed so frightful a sight as the Tree.

All this was a mad battering in his brain. The strength of him was enough to isolate it in a far corner of his consciousness, where it seethed and shrieked half heeded while he turned the cool control which the spaceways life had taught him to the solution of this urgent question. But even so his hand was moist land shaking on his gun-butt, and the breath rasped in his dry throat.

Why—he asked himself in a determined groping after steadiness—should the mere sight of a tree, even so fabulous a one as this, rouse that insane panic in the gazer? What peril could dwell invisibly in a tree so frightful that the living horror of it could drive a man mad with the very fact of its unseen presence? He clenched his teeth hard and stared resolutely at that terrible beauty in the clearing, fighting down the sick panic that rose in his throat as his eyes forced themselves to dwell upon the Tree.

Gradually the revulsion subsided. After a nightmare of striving he mustered the strength to force it down far enough to allow reason’s entry once more. Sternly holding down that frantic terror under the surface of consciousness, he stared resolutely at the Tree. And he knew that this was Thag.

It could be nothing else, for surely two such dreadful things could not dwell in one land. It must be Thag, and he could understand now the immemorial terror in which the tree-folk held it, but he did not yet grasp in what way it threatened them physically. The inexplicable dreadfulness of it was a menace to the mind’s very existence, but surely a rooted tree, however terrible to look at, could wield little actual danger.

As he reasoned, his eyes were seeking restlessly among the branches, searching for the answer to their dreadfulness. After all, this thing wore the aspect of an old pattern, and in that pattern there was nothing dreadful. The tree of life had made up the design upon that well-top in Illar through whose shadow he had entered here, and nothing in that bronze grille-work had roused terror. Then why—? What living menace dwelt invisibly among these branches to twist them into curves of horror?

A fragment of old verse drifted through his mind as he stared in perplexity:

What immortal hand or eye

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

And for the first time the true significance of a “fearful symmetry” broke upon him. Truly a more than human agency must have arched these subtle curves so delicately into dreadfulness, into such an awful beauty that the very sight of it made those atavistic terrors he was so sternly holding down leap in a gibbering terror.

A tremor rippled over the Tree. Smith froze rigid, staring with startled eyes. No breath of wind had stirred through the clearing, but the Tree was moving with a slow, serpentine grace, writhing its branches leisurely in a horrible travesty of voluptuous enjoyment. And upon their tips the blood-red flowers were spreading like cobra’s hoods, swelling and stretching their petals out and glowing with a hue so eye-piercingly vivid that it transcended the bounds of color and blazed forth like pure light.

But it was not toward Smith that they stirred. They were arching out from the central trunk toward the far side of the clearing. After a moment Smith tore his eyes away from the indescribably dreadful flexibility of those branches and looked to see the cause of their writhing.

A blaze of luminous white had appeared among the trees across the clearing. The priestess had returned. He watched her pacing slowly toward the Tree, walking with a precise and delicate grace as liquidly lovely as the motion of the Tree. Her fabulous hair swung down about her in a swaying robe that rippled at every step away from the moon-white beauty of her body. Straight toward the Tree she paced, and all the blossoms glowed more vividly at her nearness, the branches stretching toward her, rippling with eagerness.

Priestess though she was, he could not believe that she was going to come within touch of that Tree the very sight of which roused such a panic instinct of revulsion in every fiber of him. But she did not swerve or slow in her advance, Walking delicately over the flowery grass, arrogantly luminous in the twilight, so that her body was the center and focus of any landscape she walked in, she neared her horribly eager god.

Now she was under the Tree, and its trunk had writhed down over her and she was lifting her arms like a girl to her lover. With a gliding slowness the flame-tipped branches slid round her. In that incredible embrace she stood immobile for a long moment, the Tree arching down with all its curling limbs, the girl straining upward, her head thrown back and the mantle of her hair swinging free of her body as she lifted her face to the quivering blossoms. The branches gathered her closer in their embrace. Now the blossoms arched near, curving down all about her, touching her very gently, twisting their blazing faces toward the focus of her moon-white body. One poised directly above her face, trembled, brushed her mouth lightly. And the Tree’s tremor ran unbroken through the body of the girl it clasped.

* * * *

The incredible dreadfulness of that embrace was suddenly more than Smith could bear. All his terrors, crushed down with so stern a self-control, without warning burst all bounds and rushed over him in a flood of blind revulsion. A whimper choked up in his throat and quite involuntarily he swung round and plunged into the shielding trees, hands to his eyes in a futile effort to blot out the sight of lovely horror behind him whose vividness was burnt upon his very brain.

Heedlessly he blundered through the trees, no thought in his terror-blank mind save the necessity to run, run, run until he could run no more. He had given up all attempt at reason and rationality; he no longer cared why the beauty of the Tree was so dreadful. He only knew that until all space lay between him and its symmetry he must run and run and run.

What brought that frenzied madness to an end he never knew. When sanity returned to him he was lying face down on the flower-spangled sward in a silence so deep that his ears ached with its heaviness. The grass was cool against his cheek. For a moment he fought the back-flow of knowledge into his emptied mind. When it came, the memory of that horror he had fled from, he started up with a wild thing’s swiftness and glared around pale-eyed into the unchanging dusk. He was alone. Not even a rustle in the leaves spoke of the tree-folk’s presence.

For a moment he stood there alert, wondering what had roused him, wondering what would come next. He was not left long in doubt. The answer was shrilling very, very faintly through that aching quiet, an infinitesimally tiny, unthinkably far-away murmur which yet pierced his ear-drums with the sharpness of tiny needles. Breathless, he strained in listening. Swiftly the sound grew louder. It deepened upon the silence, sharpened and shrilled until the thin blade of it was vibrating in the center of his innermost brain.

And still it grew, swelling louder and louder through the twilight world in cadences that were rounding into a queer sort of music and taking on such an unbearable sweetness that Smith pressed his hands over his ears in a futile attempt to shut the sound away. He could not. It rang in steadily deepening intensities through every fiber of his being, piercing him with thousands of tiny music-blades that quivered in his very soul with intolerable beauty. And he thought he sensed in the piercing strength of it a vibration of queer, unnamable power far mightier than anything ever generated by man, the dim echo of some cosmic dynamo’s hum.

The sound grew sweeter as it strengthened, with a queer, inexplicable sweetness unlike any music he had ever heard before, rounder and fuller and more complete than any melody made up of separate notes. Stronger and stronger he felt the certainty that it was the song of some mighty power, humming and throbbing and deepening through the twilight until the whole dim land was one trembling reservoir of sound that filled his entire consciousness with its throbbing, driving out all other thoughts and realizations, until he was no more than a shell that vibrated in answer to the calling.

For it was a calling. No one could listen to that intolerable sweetness without knowing the necessity to seek its source. Remotely in the back of his mind Smith remembered the tree-folk’s warning, “When Thag calls, you must answer.” Not consciously did he recall it, for all his consciousness was answering the siren humming in the air, and, scarcely realizing that he moved, he had turned toward the source of that calling, stumbling blindly over the flowery sward with no thought in his music-brimmed mind but the need to answer that lovely, power-vibrant summoning.

Past him as he went on moved other shapes, little and dark-skinned and ecstatic, gripped like himself in the hypnotic melody. The tree-folk had forgotten even their inbred fear at Thag’s calling, and walked boldly through the open twilight, lost in the wonder of the song.

Smith went on with the rest, deaf and blind to the land around him, alive to one thing only, that summons from the siren tune. Unrealizingly, he retraced the course of his frenzied flight, past the trees and bushes he had blundered through, down the slope that led to the Tree’s hollow, through the thinning of the underbrush to the very edge of the last line of foliage which marked the valley’s rim.

* * * *

By now the calling was so unbearably intense, so intolerably sweet that somehow in its very strength it set free a part of his dazed mind as it passed the limits of audible things and soared into ecstasies which no senses bound. And though it gripped him ever closer in its magic, a sane part of his brain was waking into realization. For the first time alarm came back into his mind, and by slow degrees the world returned about him. He stared stupidly at the grass moving by under his pacing feet. He lifted a dragging head and saw that the trees no longer rose about him, that a twilit clearing stretched away on all sides toward the forest rim which circled it, that the music was singing from some source so near that—that—

The Tree! Terror leaped within him like a wild thing. The Tree, quivering with unbearable clarity in the thick, dim air, writhed above him, blossoms blazing with bloody radiance and every branch vibrant and undulant to the tune of that unholy song. Then he was aware of the lovely, luminous whiteness of the priestess swaying forward under the swaying limbs, her hair rippling back from the loveliness of her as she moved.

Choked and frenzied with unreasoning terror, he mustered every; effort that was In him to turn, to run again like a madman out of that dreadful hollow, to hide himself under the weight of all space from the menace of the Tree. And all the while he fought, all the while panic drummed like mad in his brain, his relentless body plodded on straight toward the hideous loveliness of that siren singer towering above him. From the first he had felt subconsciously that it was Thag who called, and now, in the very center of that ocean of vibrant power, he knew. Gripped in the music’s magic, he went on.

All over the clearing other hypnotized victims were advancing slowly, with mechanical steps and wide, frantic eyes as the tree-folk came helplessly to their god’s calling. He watched a group of little, dusky sacrifices pace step by step nearer to the Tree’s vibrant branches. The priestess came forward to meet them with outstretched arms. He saw her take the foremost gently by the hands. Unbelieving, hypnotized with horrified incredulity, he watched her lead the rigid little creature forward under the fabulous Tree whose limbs yearned downward like hungry snakes, the great flowers glowing with avid color.

He saw the branches twist out and lengthen toward the sacrifice, quivering with eagerness. Then with a tiger’s leap they darted, and the victim was swept out of the priestess’ guiding hands up into the branches that darted round like tangled snakes in a clot that hid him for an instant from view. Smith heard a high, shuddering wail ripple out from that knot of struggling branches, a dreadful cry that held such an infinity of purest horror and understanding that he could not but believe that Thag’s victims in the moment of their doom must learn the secret of his horror. After that one frightful cry came silence. In an instant the limbs fell apart again from emptiness. The little savage had melted like smoke among their writhing, too quickly to have been devoured, more as if he had been snatched into another dimension in the instant the hungry limbs hid him. Flame-tipped, avid, they were dipping now toward another victim as the priestess paced serenely forward.

And still Smith’s rebellious feet were carrying him on, nearer and nearer the writhing peril that towered over his head. The music shrilled like pain. Now he was so close that he could see the hungry flower-mouths in terrible detail as they faced round toward him. The limbs quivered and poised like cobras, reached out with a snakish lengthening, down inexorably toward his shuddering helplessness. The priestess was turning her calm white face toward his.

Those arcs and changing curves of the branches as they neared were sketching lines of pure horror whose meaning he still could not understand, save that they deepened in dreadfulness as he neared. For the last time that urgent wonder burned up in his mind why—why so simple a thing as this fabulous Tree should be infused with an indwelling terror strong enough to send his innermost soul frantic with revulsion. For the last time—because in that trembling instant as he waited for their touch, as the music brimmed up with unbearable, brain-wrenching intensity, in that one last moment before the flower-mouths seized him—he saw. He understood.

With eyes opened at last by the instant’s ultimate horror, he saw the real Thag. Dimly he knew that until now the thing had been so frightful that his eyes had refused to register its existence, his brain to acknowledge the possibility of such dreadfulness. It had literally been too terrible to see, though his instinct knew the presence of infinite horror. But now, In the grip of that mad, hypnotic song, in the instant before unbearable terror enfolded him, his eyes opened to full sight, and he saw.

That Tree was only Thag’s outline, sketched three-dimensionally upon the twilight. Its dreadfully curving branches had been no more than Thag’s barest contours, yet even they had made his very soul sick with intuitive revulsion. But now, seeing the true horror, his mind was too numb to do more than register its presence: Thag, hovering monstrously between earth and heaven, billowing and surging up there in the translucent twilight, tethered to the ground by the Tree’s bending stem and reaching ravenously after the hypnotized fodder that his calling brought helpless into his clutches. One by one he snatched them up, one by one absorbed them into the great, unseeable horror of his being. That, then, was the reason why they vanished so instantaneously, sucked into the concealing folds of a thing too dreadful for normal eyes to see.

The priestess was pacing forward. Above her the branches arched and leaned. Caught in a timeless paralysis of horror, Smith stared upward into the enormous bulk of Thag while the music hummed intolerably in his shrinking brain—Thag, the monstrous thing from darkness, called up by Illar in those long-forgotten times when Mars was a green planet. Foolishly his brain wandered among the ramifications of what had happened so long ago that time itself had forgotten, refusing to recognize the fate that was upon himself. He knew a tingle of respect for the ages-dead wizard who had dared command a being like this to his services—this vast, blind, hovering thing, ravenous for human flesh, indistinguishable even now save in those terrible outlines that sent panic leaping through him with every motion of the Tree’s fearful symmetry.

All this flashed through his dazed mind in the one blinding instant of understanding. Then the priestess’ luminous whiteness swam up before his hypnotized stare. Her hands were upon him, gently guiding his mechanical footsteps, very gently leading him forward into—into—

The writhing branches struck downward, straight for his face. And in one flashing leap the moment’s infinite horror galvanized him out of his paralysis. Why, he could not have said. It is not given to many men to know the ultimate essentials of all horror, concentrated into one fundamental unit. To most men it would have had that same paralyzing effect up to the very instant of destruction. But in Smith there must have been a bed-rock of subtle violence, an unyielding, inflexible vehemence upon which the structure of his whole life was reared. Few men have it. And when that ultimate intensity of terror struck the basic flint of him, reaching down through mind and soul into the deepest depths of his being, it struck a spark from that inflexible barbarian buried at the roots of him which had force enough to shock him out of his stupor.

In the instant of release his hand swept like an unloosed spring, of its own volition, straight for the butt of his power-gun. He was dragging it free as the Tree’s branches snatched him from its priestess’ hands. The fire-colored blossoms burnt his flesh as they closed round him, the hot branches gripping like the touch of ravenous fingers. The whole Tree was hot and throbbing with a dreadful travesty of fleshly life as it whipped him aloft into the hovering bulk of incarnate horror above.

In the instantaneous upward leap of the flower-tipped limbs Smith fought like a demon to free his gun-hand from the gripping coils. For the first time Thag knew rebellion in his very clutches, and the ecstasy of that music which had dinned in Smith’s ears so strongly that by now it seemed almost silence was swooping down a long arc into wrath, and the branches tightened with hot insistency, lifting the rebellious offering into Thag’s monstrous, indescribable bulk.

But even as they rose, Smith was twisting in their clutch to maneuver his hand into a position from which he could blast that undulant tree trunk into nothingness. He knew intuitively the futility of firing up into Thag’s imponderable mass. Thag was not of the world he knew; the flame blast might well be harmless to that mighty hoverer in the twilight. But at the Tree’s root, where Thag’s essential being merged from the imponderable to the material, rooting in earthly soil, he should be vulnerable if he were vulnerable at all. Struggling in the tight, hot coils, breathing the nameless essence of horror, Smith fought to free his hand.

The music that had rung so long in his ears was changing as the branches lifted him higher, losing its melody and merging by swift degrees into a hum of vast and vibrant power that deepened in intensity as the limbs drew him upward into Thag’s monstrous bulk, the singing force of a thing mightier than any dynamo ever built. Blinded and dazed by the force thundering through every atom of his body, he twisted his hand in one last, convulsive effort, and fired.

He saw the flame leap in a dazzling gush straight for the trunk below. It struck. He heard the sizzle of annihilated matter. He saw the trunk quiver convulsively from the very roots, and the whole fabulous Tree shook once with an ominous tremor. But before that tremor could shiver up the branches to him the hum of the living dynamo which was closing round his body shrilled up arcs of pure intensity into a thundering silence.

Then without a moment’s warning the world exploded. So instantaneously did all this happen that the gun-blast’s roar had not yet echoed into silence before a mightier sound than the brain could bear exploded outward from the very center of his own being. Before the awful power of it everything reeled into a shaken oblivion. He felt himself falling.…

* * * *

A queer, penetrating light shining upon his closed eyes roused Smith by degrees into wakefulness again. He lifted heavy lids and stared upward into the unwinking eye of Mars’ racing nearer moon. He lay there blinking dazedly for a while before enough of memory returned to rouse him. Then he sat up painfully, for every fiber of him ached, and stared round on a scene of the wildest destruction. He lay in the midst of a wide, rough circle which held nothing but powdered stone. About it, rising raggedly in the moving moonlight, the blocks of time-forgotten Illar loomed.

But they were no longer piled one upon another in a rough travesty of the city they once had shaped. Some force mightier than any of man’s explosives seemed to have hurled them with such violence from their beds that their very atoms had been disrupted by the force of it, crumbling them into dust. And in the very center of the havoc lay Smith, unhurt.

He stared in bewilderment about the moonlight ruins. In the silence it seemed to him that the very air still quivered in shocked vibrations. And as he stared he realized that no force save one could have wrought such destruction upon the ancient stones. Nor was there any explosive known to man which would have wrought this strange, pulverizing havoc upon the blocks of Illar. That force had hummed unbearably through the living dynamo of Thag, a force so powerful that space itself had bent to enclose it. Suddenly he realized what must have happened.

Not Illar, but Thag himself had warped the walls of space to enfold the twilit world, and nothing but Thag’s living power could have held it so bent to segregate the little, terror-ridden land inviolate.

Then when the Tree’s roots parted, Thag’s anchorage in the material world failed and in one great gust of unthinkable energy the warped space-walls had ceased to bend. Those arches of solid space had snapped back into their original pattern, hurling the land and all its dwellers into—into— His mind balked in the effort to picture what must have happened, into what ultimate dimension those denizens must have vanished.

Only himself, enfolded deep in Thag’s very essence, the intolerable power of the explosion had not touched. So when the warped space-curve ceased to be, and Thag’s hold upon reality failed, he must have been dropped back out of the dissolving folds upon the spot where the Tree had stood in the space-circled world, through that vanished world-floor into the spot he had been snatched from in the instant of the dim land’s dissolution. It must have happened after the terrible force of the explosion had spent itself, before Thag dared move even himself through the walls of changing energy into his own far land again.

Smith sighed and lifted a hand to his throbbing head, rising slowly to his feet. What time had elapsed he could not guess, but he must assume that the Patrol still searched for him. Wearily he set out across the circle of havoc toward the nearest shelter which Illar offered. The dust rose in ghostly, moonlit clouds under his feet.

YE OLDE RESIGNATION, by Rhys Hughes

Originally published in Link Arms With Toads! (2011).

When Celia Radical saw the size of the nostalgia storm in Betjeman Gardens, she was astonished that nobody had reported it sooner. The typical suburban setting had been profoundly affected by the winds of yearning. Couples stood on tidy lawns chatting and smoking cigarettes. There were even some bicycles on the streets.

“Living in the past!” she muttered ruefully as she checked the readings on her retrospectometer. Under the rose tinted glass the dials had stopped spinning. The eye of the storm was located in the kitchen of one of the dwellings. She wove her way between the figures and rang the bell of the house in question.

The door opened and Mrs Diode peered out tentatively. She wore several strings of beads looped about her neck. “At last! It’s getting worse, you know. My husband has been wearing a cravat all morning and I’ve had this terrible impulse to dance a Charleston. Is there anything you can do?”

Celia sighed. “Show me the eye,” she said. She followed Mrs Diode through the hallway into the kitchen. As she passed the open door of the lounge, she glimpsed a man with a dark kiss-curl pasted to his forehead winding up a clockwork gramophone. “Mr Diode?”

Mrs Diode nodded. “Best not to disturb him. I think he has absorbed more nostalgia than I have. He hardly talks to me anymore. Prefers to read newspapers and tune the wireless.”

Celia placed her retrospectometer on the floor and felt under the sink. The eye of the storm blinked at her apprehensively. “Why didn’t you blindfold it earlier?” she demanded.

Mrs Diode cleared her throat and shrugged her shoulders. She fitted a cigarette into a long holder, raised it to her lips and then changed her mind. She started polishing the leaves of an aspidistra that had forced its way through the floor.

Celia fixed the blinking eye with a cold stare. “It looks to me as if someone has been batting their lashes at it. You should bear in mind that’s not only highly illegal but also rather reckless.”

Mrs Diode blushed and became restless. Ignoring her, Celia quickly hypnotised the eye and sent it into a deep sleep. Then she carefully extracted it with tweezers and dropped it in a black bag. “That will be 350,000 credits,” she said.

“What’s that in old money, dear?”

“Seven pounds, four shillings, two pence,” replied Celia.

She picked up her retrospectometer and made her way out of the kitchen back through the house. In the lounge, the clockwork gramophone had been replaced by a slightly later valve model. “You’re lucky this time,” she told Mrs Diode, who was following her. “The effects seem to be wearing off already. Be more careful in future.”

Mrs Diode nodded. She pressed something into Celia’s hand. Celia looked down and saw food coupons. “Get yourself some butter and powdered eggs,” came the whisper. “I know you’ll keep quiet about this. Go on, take them, love.”

Celia frowned and returned the coupons. “I want you to understand that it is a criminal offence to attempt to bribe an employee of the Style Council. I may have to suggest you contact a solicitor if you persist in this blatant disregard of fashion ethics.”

“Let me tell you about my nephew,” Mrs Diode began.

“No thanks, I’m busy,” said Celia.

“Ah, you sneak!” Mrs Diode turned away in disgust, removing the bubblegum from her mouth and adjusting her beehive hairdo. The decades were falling back into place rapidly. Celia reached the front door and rubbed her eyes. The winds of yearning were dying down. The environment was shimmering and changing even as she looked.

Outside, a skiffle band was growing its hair.

* * * *

Back in the office, Celia collapsed into her swivel chair and waited for it to massage her neck and shoulders. “I’m tired of working out in the field,” she told her assistant. “So tired!”

Jules Oviform was sympathetic. He patted her hand and flashed his new smile at her. He rarely failed to amuse Celia: she had spent a small fortune on his French accent and love of garlic. The voicebox and tastebuds had been grown together in a tank and grafted on at a private clinic. Celia had chosen him for his entertainment value.

“People can be so obtuse,” she added. “I met a housewife today who flirted openly with a big blue storm eye. Thought she could have some harmless fun! She let herself and her neighbours regress back to the 1920s before doing anything about it.”

Jules raised Celia’s hand to his lips and kissed it. “I only have eyes for you. And not just eyes but croissants too.” Celia withdrew her hand and wiped it with a handkerchief.

“What worries me is where the rogue style goes after it disperses. Is it all accumulating in the atmosphere?”

Jules made a comic face. “Ah, mon cheri! Such ideas!” But Celia was in no mood for his buffoonery. She switched on her secretary and began to forge ahead with her report. Paperwork depressed the machine as much as it depressed her. To enliven the process, the secretary occasionally queried the accuracy of her version of events.

A chime sounded and Celia threw up her arms in despair. “What now?” she cried. The chime was a summons from Big Boss Barium. This usually meant more problems. She stood and made her way out of the office onto the moving walkway of the corridor.

Big Boss Barium was sweating in his plush room, his huge bulk suspended from the ceiling on a system of wires. He greeted Celia with his customary sneer. The neons on his oversized pinstripe suit crawled with council slogans. “Sit down, Ms Radical.”

“There’s nowhere free,” she replied.

“Exactly!” he roared in triumph.

The room was filled with large rubber balls designed to break his fall if the wires snapped. Big Boss Barium glowered for a full minute in silence and then he spoke again, his chins wobbling alarmingly as he rumbled the words in her direction. “I’ve had a complaint, Ms Radical. A complaint concerning you. I want you to know that the Style Council takes such matters very seriously.”

“Who made the complaint?” she asked.

Big Boss Barium chewed his fat lip. “The Chief of Police, El Greco Cooper himself! He rang through a few minutes ago and demanded to know why you were poking about in Betjeman Gardens.”

“I was doing my job,” responded Celia.

Big Boss Barium shook a finger smudged with chocolate. “Mrs Diode is one of his favourite aunts. We don’t take action against the friends and relatives of the police force. We can afford to let a few nostalgia storms work themselves out naturally. I suggest that you return the eye to her kitchen immediately!”

“I sent it to the crushers half an hour ago.”

“Can’t you call it back?”

Celia shook her head. “It’s already jelly.”

Big Boss Barium held his head in his chubby hands. Pulleys groaned and squeaked as he sobbed. “There’s such a thing as being too efficient, Ms Radical. This is all becoming a mess.”

“El Greco must learn to live with disappointment.”

Big Boss Barium flew into one of his melodramatic rages. They were bad for his health but sometimes earned him a bonus. Celia knew that one of the rubber balls contained a secret critic who judged these rages and arrived at a monetary figure. As the wires twanged and whistled and the vast blob of flesh bounced and span over her, dribbling foam, she decided to take the easy way out.

“Fine. I’ll make a replacement.”

Big Boss Barium shuddered to a halt. “You will?”

“I’m dedicated to my job but I’m not a particularly ethical person. My morality is fake, for intimidation purposes. Nobody is better at swelling up hugely with artificial righteousness.”

“We all have our individual bloats,” Big Boss Barium agreed.

“I’ll open the refrigeration units where the jellies are kept and mould a new eye from a big blue scoop.”

“That will be a very sensible thing for you to do,” said Big Boss Barium. He was convinced he had won the bonus and was already planning to spend it on more ultra-high calorie food, which in turn would damage his health more, making his next melodramatic rage more alarming and droolly and more worthy of a bigger bonus. This cycle would accelerate towards a spectacular blubbery doom.

“I’ll do it right now, with your permission.”

“Of course!” He waved a shapeless hand and allowed her to depart his presence. He had no love for his employees, no outstanding loyalty to the Council. His only concern was not to come under the adverse scrutiny of his superiors, the Style Gurus, or to make an enemy of the President and his Police Chief. El Greco Cooper was the sort of man who arrested autumn leaves for crunching underfoot without an entertainment license. It was imperative to keep on his right side: but that side was as thin and sharp as a scalpel.

Celia urged the walkway to maximum speed and returned to her office within seconds. “Jules!” she called.

Jules Oviform appeared at her side. “Mon cheri!”

“We have an unorthodox job to do. We’re going behind the crushers to pilfer some eye jelly.”

“How bohemian! How fin de siècle!”

“Then we’re going to shape it into a new eye and plant it under the sink in a domestic kitchen.”

“How escargot! How Victor Hugo!”

Celia nodded. It was going to be all those things and more. Opening a filing cabinet and selecting a winter scarf and mittens, she hurried down the tunnel that ran behind the crushers. These garments matched her colouring not at all and suited her in no degree. The Style Council was full of confiscated goods. And all of them were bad.

* * * *

The walls of the tunnel were decorated with murals depicting packets of frozen peas and carrots, tubs of ice cream, bottles of beer and other refrigerative subjects. Celia and Jules proceeded to a chamber that resembled a garage. This was the deepest part of the Style Council. Here stood the Five Famous Freezers.

Celia opened the first freezer and removed the ice tray, turning it upside down and pressing the bottom with her thumbs until the frozen key worked itself loose. This key provided access to the second freezer and its ice tray and frozen key, which in turn opened the third freezer, and so on. These security measures were deemed cool by Style Gurus the world over. Even Guru Futuro approved.

The fifth freezer was directly connected to the crushers. Its door was rarely opened. Big Boss Barium preferred not to know what the jelly inside was doing. All those pulverised storm eyes gave him the jeebies. He could live with heebies but had a dread of jeebies. Celia felt no such qualms as she opened the lock.

The inside was empty! This was worthy of a gasp!

Celia was amazed. The container that should have held a milky white jelly streaked with blue, green and hazel, the end result of a thousand storm eye pulpings, had gone. In its place was a note. She snatched it and read it aloud with a frown:

“I am a terrorist organisation and I have stolen the storm jelly in order to build a massive nostalgia bomb. This bomb will be detonated at noon on the President’s birthday.”

“But that’s today!” simpered Jules.

“Don’t be ridiculous. The President was born under the sign of the Toerag. The sun is still in Hoops.”

“He changed the law. Didn’t you hear? He passed a rule saying that from now on every day is his birthday.”

“What’s the time?” Celia roared.

“Ten minutes to noon! Goodbye mon cheri! How I adored you!”

“We must show this note to Big Boss Barium,” said Celia. She closed the freezer with her foot and ran back up the tunnel, Jules clattering along behind her. Then he stopped dead.

“Footprints! I know who the culprit is!”

Celia span. “What do you mean?”

“See these footprints, mon cheri! They must belong to the person who proceeded us to the eye jelly.”

“But there aren’t any footprints!”

“Exactly! That proves that the man who made them did not walk down this tunnel. He must have come some other way. Among all the agents of the Style Council who is the only one who never walks? Big Boss Barium! This evidence is incontrovertible.”

“I’m not sure about that,” responded Celia.

Jules seemed on the verge of tears but Celia had no time to comfort him. She continued along the tunnel, reached her office and then mounted the walkway to Big Boss Barium’s office. She knocked on his door with a minute to spare. “Enter!” he bellowed.

He was swinging and sweating when she came into his presence. Jules remained in the corridor, timidly peering through the open doorway. Big Boss Barium scowled and juddered.

“Did you manage to make a replacement?”

She shook her head and passed him the note. He read it and frowned so deeply the folds of skin above his eyebrows came down and obscured his vision like blubber goggles. He traced the words with his fingers instead and then crumpled the note in his fist like an empty chocolate wrapper. “This must be a hoax,” was his conclusion.

A giggle escaped from one of the rubber balls. Celia and Big Boss Barium exchanged glances. Now everything was clear! This explained why there were no footprints in the tunnel. It suddenly seemed obvious that a hidden critic would aspire to be a terrorist. Big Boss Barium leaped across the room, dangled high and peered down, trying to work out which ball had emitted the telltale sound.

He hovered over one ball, rubbed his chin, chose another. He cocked his head, angling his ear carefully but the critic remained silent. Then Big Boss Barium grew impatient and bounced violently on his cables. This action worked off his frustration but it also created catastrophe. With a horrible pinging sound, the cables snapped. Big Boss Barium plummeted to the ground like a dropped house.

He landed on one of the balls. It broke his fall but it happened to be the ball with the critic inside. And the critic happened to clutching his nostalgia bomb. There was an awful sound, a squelch not merely of bones and fat but aeons. Suddenly winds of yearning were everywhere, a thousand storm eyes unleashing their fury all at once. Celia blinked in horror at the changes in her environment. One moment she was wearing a toga, the next furs. Then she felt an abrupt chill and gazed down. What was keeping that fig leaf in place?

* * * *

After the prehistoric mists had cleared, Celia went looking for Jules. He was squatting at the base of a vast tree. Sap dripped from a gash in the bark and slowly covered him.

“Move away,” warned Celia, “or you’ll become trapped in amber for eternity and be expensive to collect.”

He glumly shuffled to her side, tripping over his newly acquired long beard. “My odour is unbearable!”

She sniffed. “You’ll get used to it. Where’s Big Boss Barium? What are these grooves in the earth?”

“He has been dragged away on ropes, mon cheri.”

They followed the grooves through the Cenozoic forest until they reached a rocky plain. A flint tower stood precariously at the summit of a low hill and here they found the President and El Greco Cooper going about their familiar business. The President was attempting to juggle three sabre-toothed tiger’s teeth, failing to catch them properly and cutting his arms in the process. El Greco Cooper was standing in a muddy puddle swinging a club awkwardly.

Still fully concentrating on the flying fangs, the President nodded at his Chief of Police and said to Celia, “First I declared mud illegal and he clubbed every puddle around here. Then I declared clubs illegal and now he’s trying to club his own club.”

“Very amusing,” commented Celia as she passed on.

Jules began complaining about the condition of his feet. He didn’t mean blisters but the fact that his toenails weren’t nicely manicured. Celia ignored him and continued until she came to a cave. Just inside the entrance stood a large pot and inside the pot bobbed Big Boss Barium with wild carrots and asparagus.

“It’s boiling in here!” he groaned.

Celia and Julia managed to overturn the pot and release Big Boss Barium. But he wasn’t able to rise without his wires. He just sat there like a magnified globule of mucus.

“Who did this to you?” Celia asked with only minor interest.

“A pair of cannibals. I couldn’t get a word of sense out of either of them. They were positively Pliocene!”

“I think you’re exaggerating,” remarked Celia.

Big Boss Barium shrugged. “I’m just glad you rescued me in time. They’ll be back soon. They went to collect some salt from the nearest ocean. I find that grossly insulting!”

“I think we’re in the region of Betjeman Gardens,” said Celia.

“But 40,000 years ago!” whimpered Jules. “What if another nostalgia storm takes us even further back? We might end up in the time of the dinosaurs and be eaten completely raw, without flavourings of any kind. Have you considered that scenario?”

Celia shook her head. “We’ve gone back to the limits of nostalgia. Storm eyes can’t survive here. Nostalgia is only possible when social change is apparent. During this particular era the relevant changes that occur are so gradual they aren’t noticeable. Society will remain pretty much the same over a lifetime. To put it more simply, nostalgia does not exist at the present time!”

“There is nothing to feel nostalgic for,” agreed Big Boss Barium, “because everything remains the same.”

“By the same token, the effects can’t wear off,” she confirmed. “We are stuck here permanently. Feelings of nostalgia can’t disperse when they aren’t there in the first place!”

“I’m scared, mon cheri. Don’t you have any pity for me?”

Celia laughed. “As you well know, the Style Council only employs agents who don’t have normal emotional responses to changing events. I have never felt nostalgia. That’s why it’s safe for me to tackle storm eyes. I’m immune to the effects.”

“I wonder how the Style Gurus will cope as hunter-gatherers?”

“Anything can become fashionable,” Celia replied.

Big Boss Barium raised a fat finger to his lips. “Hush! Someone’s coming. It might be the cannibals!”

Two figures bounded into the cave. They were dressed in strips of bark and badly cured fish skins.

“Mr and Mrs Diode!” exclaimed Celia.

The female figure pressed something into Celia’s hand. Celia looked down and saw cowrie shells. “Get yourself some Mammoth lard and Teratornis eggs,” came the whisper. “I know you’ll keep quiet about this. Go on, take them, love.”

Celia sighed. “I’m tempted to resign my job.”

“You can’t do that!” protested Big Boss Barium. “You’re our finest agent, certainly the most emotionally stunted!”

“Back in the future I was special,” she pointed out. “One of the privileged few never to feel any sense of yearning. But here I’m just like everybody else, because nobody feels nostalgia now. I don’t think the Style Council needs me anymore.”

“You can’t resign!” repeated Big Boss Barium.

A sudden roar from outside the cave distracted them all. They went out into the light, blinking at the object that was descending from the sky. It resembled a child’s drawing of a rocket, a flared cylinder with fins and a single engine. It landed unsteadily on three spindly legs. An automatic ramp extended and an utterly absurd robot glided down. It had a perfectly square head and square body and its legs were shiny metal tentacles. It undulated back and forth in front of the cave shouting out a single phrase in a grating voice:

“Take me to your leader! Take me to your leader!”

“What a time to be visited by extra terrestrials!” moaned Jules. He raised his hands in abject surrender.

The robot ignored him and continued screeching its demand. Celia eyed the slowly unwinding clockwork key protruding from its back. “I can guess what’s happened. This spacecraft was originally the product of a very advanced alien species. But as it passed through the atmosphere of our planet it encountered all the accumulated clouds of rogue style. Thus it has regressed with its occupants to a time that I judge to be the early 1940s.”

“Shall we take him to the President?” asked Jules.

“You can do what you like,” sniffed Celia. “I’m not doing anything at all. Apart from resigning.”

Big Boss Barium opened his mouth to speak again but Celia suddenly frowned and added, “You know something, I think I am feeling a twinge of nostalgia after all. Nostalgia for a time when the worst I had to deal with were storm eyes and terrorists!”

“That changes everything!” Big Boss Barium cried.

“Will we become unstuck, mon cheri?”

“Take me to your leader! Take me to your leader!”

Celia felt herself choking and reached up a hand. She was wearing a ruff and a complicated dress. Jules was covered in lace and sequins and his long hair fell in ringlets over his shoulders. Big Boss Barium wore vast yellow trousers and a shirt with slashed sleeves. Mr and Mrs Diode were less elaborately attired, sporting black clothes and tall hats that symbolised a strict form of purity.

Dogs and rats capered in the narrow streets. The houses were wooden and squat with overhanging eaves and signs that swung in the malodorous breeze. A window above opened and a pan of something foul was hurled on them, apparently without malice.

“Well, we’re not back to our original age,” croaked Big Boss Barium, “but you’ve done a fine job of piling on the centuries. Does anyone else feel nostalgia for anything?”

There was a general silence. He gazed at Celia.

“It’s up to you again.”

She shook her head. “I’m still resigning,” she said.

FACE TO FACE, by Adrian Cole

Originally published in Dark Voices 2 (1990).

When he woke up that morning, he had no idea anything was seriously wrong with him.

His head was stuffed with anxieties about the day’s work ahead of him. Damn Cartelli. Where in hell was he? The senior programmer, of all people, gone for a week. No word, not even a call. They’d tried to contact him, but it was useless.

Holland couldn’t believe Cartelli would just up and quit for another firm, not this way. It wasn’t his style. Oh, he’d leave for a better offer, like most people. But he’d do it openly. No reason for cloak-and-dagger.

So now the work was piling up. How was Holland supposed to load up the new database on his own? He and Cartelli had put weeks into devising the program, a slick, sophisticated system that would really streamline things in Client Control. But Cartelli was the brains behind it, the imagination. Holland knew that he himself could follow a lead, take up someone else’s idea and shape it. But the program was Cartelli’s baby. Without him, it was going to be difficult to get the best from it.

Holland had already put in too many hours since Cartelli’s disappearance for the good of his health. His head throbbed as he got out of bed. No good squinting at his watch as he fumbled it on. It was 7 a.m. and no amount of glaring was going to change that.

Dazedly he walked into the bathroom. The water felt good as he sloshed it over him. Cold, almost refreshing. He ungummed his eyes and studied the mirror. He looked blurred, which was how he felt. Damn Cartelli.

He ran the sink half full of hot water, getting ready for a shave. His morning shadow didn’t look so bad today. He stroked his chin. It was smooth, as though he had already had a shave. He looked at himself more closely in the mirror. No sign of dark stubble. Well, that was fine. One less task.

Coffee was all he could take for breakfast. He left soon after.

On the Underground he stared vacantly ahead of him, not seeing the commuters packed in with him, functioning automatically, hardly thinking. But the database program began to loom large before his eyes, the endless information, the individual details, the details of individuals. Interlocking, interrelating, merging. Personal files, medical files. Medical Files. For a moment there was something…

Someone nudged him, an accident. They were forcing their way in, the tube too full. The usual morning crush. He murmured an unheard apology.

In the foyer of the glass building where he worked, he found himself glancing in a mirror. He felt guilty at not having had a shave. Absurd. But as he looked at his face, there was no sign of stubble, no dark stain on the cheeks or chin. He took the lift before someone wondered at his odd self-attention.

He was seated at the console before anything else registered. He took out his tabulations, the streams of figures. But it was a language he spoke fluently.

The screen came on, a white rectangle. He saw himself reflected in it and leaned forward. His reflection was very clear, if not exactly a mirror image. He found himself studying his eyes. There were no lines, no signs of strain, no crow’s feet. Same with the mouth. The visual display unit was flattering him. A reward for working together.

He punched in his requirements. The face dissolved, to be replaced with Cartelli’s program, information. People as figures, as data. Damn Cartelli. Where was the bastard? He should be here. Helping with this monster.

His fingers began accessing Cartelli’s file. Maybe there would be something here to indicate what the fool was up to.

FILE NOT FOUND.

The words blinked. Holland re-punched. But the message remained stubbornly fixed in the centre of the screen. Mildly annoyed, Holland tried to access the file another way, bypassing the system. Half an hour later, he was forced to admit that Cartelli’s personal file was missing, just like the man himself. He tried the backup system. Nothing. Exasperated, he went to the old manual files. Still nothing.

Another hour, and some terse exchanges with the secretaries, taught him that every record they had of Cartelli was gone. Only Cartelli could have done this. How had he got his own manual files out? Not many people knew that there were any hard copy files left anyway.

Holland checked on other files. They were all present. He looked at his own. It was there.

Curiosity drew him deeper into the labyrinth of the file. Medical details. He knew them well enough. Mundane stuff. His health was good, apart from the additional stresses of the job. He didn’t need a professional opinion in order to update the file.

There was a page of data missing.

It was blank, although on the screen there was something, ghostly lines, as though data were fading. A stupid concept. He stared at it. His own face loomed out of the screen, a slightly misshapen copy. He drew back.

He ran on through the file, checking to see if anything else was missing. There wasn’t. He checked out the backup. It was complete, so he restored the original file’s missing page. For some curious reason it made him feel more secure.

* * * *

The rest of the morning wore on remorselessly. He pumped in as much information as he could, building up the huge database. Apart from the select few clients, there were several thousand on the payroll of the company, and their paper files came in all kinds of sizes. Because of the complexity of Cartelli’s program, converting the paper files could only be done by Holland and Cartelli himself. Part of the problem was security.

The kind of medical research done by their company was highly confidential. Only the senior employees knew the full range of cosmetic surgery undertaken by the company, themselves under private contract. Holland and Cartelli were party to controversial stuff. Maybe that had something to do with Cartelli’s disappearance.

Holland saw his superior, Adamley, for ten minutes that afternoon. No news of Cartelli.

“Something I don’t know about?” said Holland. “Is he in trouble?”

Adamley shrugged. He seemed more interested in the streets of the city far below the plate glass. “Tell me, Holland. How safe is this client and personnel database you’re building?”

“How easy is it to access? There’s only the two of us can get in. When it’s ready, the company can designate its users. No one else will have access. It will be as tight as any system can be. And you can lock me and Cartelli out as well.”

Adamley turned. There was no emotion, no hint of concern, though Holland knew it must be under his flesh like a barb. “Can you alter the system, as of now?”

Holland knew what he wanted. “Lock Cartelli out?”

“It’s no use if he can access that information. Not if he’s gone. He could be with anyone. With what he knows, the system would be a dangerous tool. In the wrong hands.”

Adamley didn’t have to elaborate. Holland knew what he meant. He could smell the stink of fear that competition brought. “I can alter it. Redirect all the prime access functions. I’ll be the only one, though.”

“We’ll find someone else to work with you.”

They would. It would be as dangerous to have one man running the system as having Cartelli back if he was working for someone else. An industrial spy.

* * * *

Holland snatched a brief snack for lunch. A hot, flaking pasty and a pint of shandy. He didn’t like to drink at dinner time; it broke up his concentration. In the noisy pub, he saw himself in a floor-to-ceiling mirror that he had always ignored in the past. This time he felt decidedly uncomfortable sitting next to himself. The mirror was dirty, smeared. He couldn’t see his face clearly.

He struggled with the pasty. It had gone cold, the pitifully small chunks of meat congealing. He couldn’t swallow them properly, even with the help of the shandy.

As he pushed through the tables to leave, he abruptly sensed someone behind him, watching him. It came to him with an unreasonable force that it was Cartelli, hidden in the crowd. Turning, he saw only the contorted image of himself in the huge mirror, faceless and pathetic.

* * * *

The afternoon wore on dully, more information swallowed by the hungry database. Holland was beginning to pick up on some of the refinements. Cartelli had linked things together ingeniously, the logic of the program exceptional.

It was while he was scanning the layouts and the intricate sub-data menus that Holland came across the rogue file. Rogue because it had no business to be there. Cartelli had been amusing himself, or perhaps he had been trying to improve the program through a trial and error pattern. This file should have been wiped off when he’d finished.

Intrigued, Holland studied the file. It was unusual. Instead of pulling information about a given subject from a number of different sources, this file seemed to be pulling information about a number of subjects and…what, creating a fact file on them? He couldn’t be sure. He asked the machine for a graphic projection.

And gasped. But then he realised that Cartelli had evidently been having some fun. It was as though he had been playing the part of some mad surgeon, cobbling together a lunatic conglomerate of human organs and tissues. It might even have been the basis for some fantastic game, something for the open market. Who knew? It might have been the prototype for something very lucrative. There had been no limits to Cartelli’s imagination.

Holland came out of the program, but could not bring himself to erase it from the computer’s memory. Maybe he’d play with it himself sometime.

He went home tired, haggard. It was late.

* * * *

He couldn’t make any sense out of the movie he tried to watch on TV. He flipped channels but everything was merging into one, and he found it impossible to keep track of the conversations, which might as well have been in a foreign tongue.

In the kitchen, cutting himself a late sandwich, he nicked his finger with the breadknife. He sucked on the blood for a moment. Under the glare of the bulb, he examined the minor damage. He forgot the cut at once: his fingers were very smooth, printless. Where were the whirls, the many lines? Instinctively he stroked the side of his face. No five o’clock shadow. After two days? Still no stubble.

He looked at his hands again. If a gypsy had wanted to read his palms, he thought with a mirthless smile, she would have been disappointed. There was nothing there, as though every line, every crease, had been wiped off.

I need a good sleep, he thought. It came easily.

* * * *

Adamley reached jerkily for the phone, surprising himself. Maybe his nerves were getting frayed by this whole business. But he recognised his own relief when he heard the voice on the other end of the line.

It was Holland.

“It’s 9.30 a.m., Holland.” It was an admonition.

“I’d have called you earlier, Mr Adamley, but I’ve been asleep since 5.30. I was working from home until the early hours. I want to go on. Work from home today.” The voice wasn’t tired: it was feverish, Holland talking too fast.

“On the program?”

“I’m working on the database. I don’t need to work from hardcopy today. I’m not installing new material from our files. I’m…changing things in the structure.” Holland gabbled on some more, getting into jargon that Adamley only vaguely understood.

“Okay, Holland. Do what you need to do. I want the system safe. But report here tomorrow. 8.30. I want an update.”

Adamley put down the phone but it rang again.

Adamley knew the efficient, cold voice of the private investigator. “Anything?”

“Cartelli’s still in the country. No one has seen him leave.”

“What about our competitors?”

“No one has been approached by Cartelli. None of his friends have seen him for a week. I talked to his sister, Louisa. She called him at his flat. She has her own key. Comes and goes as she pleases.”

“I know the girl. She’s clean?”

“Yes, I’m sure of that. No interest in computers. No contacts. Apparently she went to the flat nine days ago and Cartelli never showed up. No note, no phone call.”

“You believe she knows nothing?” said Adamley.

“She appeared genuinely upset at Cartelli’s disappearance. I’m sure she’s no actress. I didn’t think she was feigning her distress. She’s very alarmed. She thinks he’s in trouble. Kidnapped, or something like that.”

Adamley snorted. “Does she?”

“He left in a hurry, but he took nothing, and he left no mess. I’ve almost nothing to go on.”

Adamley nodded slowly. “Okay. I want you to put a man on Holland. From now. Every step he takes.”

After the conversation Adamley wondered about the new work. Pull the plug? But the cost, the money the company had pumped into it. Where the hell was Cartelli?

* * * *

“Who is it?” came the voice. It sounded annoyed, like someone had been interrupted in the bath, or worse, having sex. But the girl guessed that Holland wouldn’t have answered if that had been the case.

“It’s Louisa. Can I see you for a moment?”

The door opened, obscuring the man beyond. Louisa went into the flat, mildly surprised by the dim lighting. There was an eerie glow to the room adjoining the main suite, as though a TV had been left on, but Louisa had seen enough of her brother at work to recognise it for what it was. Holland had been using his screen.

The door thumped shut and Louisa turned to face Holland. She was quite stunning, even in her distress. Quite a contrast to Frank Cartelli, whose face was pinched and narrowed, pocked and ridged unevenly. He had often joked, with more than a suggestion of bitterness, that God had lavished so much time creating his beautiful sister that he’d had nothing but scraps left for him.

In contrast to the lovely girl, Holland looked dreadful. His face was white, his eyes a smudge, his mouth a thin, pale gash, his nose flat. If she had not known it was Holland, she would never have recognised him in the street.

“Where’s Frank?” he said, unable to keep a note of desperation out of his voice. It was almost a wheeze, as though he had hardly enough energy to speak.

“I came here to ask you. Don’t you know?”

He shook his head, going past her and into the room with the glow. She followed him.

“This is insane!” she told him. “He can’t just have gone off like this. There’s no reason.”

Holland sat down at the screen as though he had already forgotten that she was there.

“I’ve said nothing to the police about this, but I think they should know. Something is wrong. Well, don’t you think so? Dammit, surely you know something. What was he working on? He said something about surgery. Was it illegal?”

“I can’t find his file,” murmured Holland, fingers working at the keyboard, fluttering incredibly fast. The screen before him was blinking, the information changing rapidly, whole sheets of it shifting, creating new patterns.

The girl watched it for a moment as if it would hypnotize her. But she shook her head. “His file? What does his file matter? Will it tell us where he is?”

“It might. It contains every known thing about him. Right down to the last gene.” Holland turned to her as he spoke. The light from the screen shone on his face, flattening it.

She drew back. In the false light he was featureless, his head like a naked, empty balloon of flesh.

He turned back to his work.

Quickly she went to the door, shaking her head, unable to go to him to confirm that it was a trick of the light, her tired brain. This was hopeless. Holland was obsessed with the machines, far more than Frank had been. She would get no sense from him.

* * * *

After she had gone, Holland felt himself beginning to sway, unable to focus on the figures in front of him. The screen was like a pool of grey water. Whatever swam beneath its surface was well hidden.

* * * *

“Mr Adamley?”

“Yes.”

“Horton, sir, in Systems. We’ve disconnected the link with Mr Cartelli’s home terminal. Shall we do the same with Mr Holland’s?”

“Is he working on it?”

“He was until about midday, sir. Since then he’s been signed out of his program.”

“Then disconnect. If he rings you, tell him I want to see him.”

“Sir.”

* * * *

The voice on the end of the phone sounded like that of an invalid, short of breath. Possibly an old, old man. But it was Holland.

“Holland, are you ill?” demanded Adamley. He had had reports that Holland had been in his flat all day. Cartelli’s sister had visited him, understandably, but that was all. Asking the same questions they were all asking, no doubt. She knew nothing, couldn’t help. She’d gone to the police. Adamley had known they would have to be told. He had the bland cover story ready for them.

Holland’s exhausted voice answered. “My terminal is off.”

“I authorized that. I don’t want any more work done away from this office. Is that clear?”

“I need the terminal.”

“Then come in. It will be available to you until eleven tonight. After that I’m scrapping Cartelli’s work. All of it.”

“No! You can’t!”

Adamley sat up slowly, holding the phone as though it were the key piece in a game of chess. “And why not, Holland? Why can’t I wipe that program clean?”

“You’ll never find him. Listen, I think I know where he is. But you must let me handle this. You must do what I ask you, Mr Adamley.”

“I’m listening.” He made it sound as though he had endless patience.

“I need access to Cartelli’s machine. Switch it on, and this one of mine. Lock his office. Don’t let anyone in there.”

Adamley kept his voice level. “I’m sorry, Holland, but if you want to use a machine, come in here.”

There was a long pause. Eventually Holland spoke, with a great effort. “I have to access the program.”

“Then you’d better get in here.”

“Lock Cartelli’s office until I arrive. Please.”

“No one is going to touch anything. But if you know where Cartelli is, you’d better enlighten me. The police are going to want explanations. Right now I don’t have any. The company is going to find this embarrassing, Holland. We don’t want that.”

* * * *

Adamley looked at the screen. It was on, but white and empty. The Systems Manager, Horton, sat at Cartelli’s desk, his face pretending indifference, though his frustration seeped through in a tell-tale pinkish hue. Nothing was happening on the screen, the program defying whatever it was Horton was trying to do.

“I can’t get in without the passwords. I’ve tried hacking—breaking in—sir. It’s just no good. It’s a very secure program.”

“That’s how it should be,” grunted Adamley.

The phone rang and Horton jumped as if he had been electrocuted. But Adamley picked it up calmly enough. It was an internal call and he’d been expecting it.

“Send him straight in.”

The door opened only a moment or two later. Surprisingly it was Cartelli’s sister who stood there. Slightly dishevelled, her eyes tired and accusing, she still looked attractive. Amazing that that gargoyle Cartelli could be related to her.

Behind her there was a movement, and Holland, or what Adamley took to be Holland, stood there. Was he drunk? He almost had to lean on the door frame. He had a silk scarf wrapped around his lower face, as if he had just climbed off a motor bike, an idiotic thought, as he must have driven here by car. Only his eyes showed.

Horton gaped stupidly, but Adamley made a curt, dismissive gesture and the Systems Manager left the office quickly, a suggestion of guilt in his retreat. Both Holland and the girl ignored him. She watched Adamley, but Holland had eyes only for the screen. It lured him like a siren and he moved clumsily to the desk, sitting at the keyboard.

Adamley looked at his watch. Ten to eleven. Nearly everyone else had gone home. Holland had only just made the deadline.

“He rang me,” the girl said, sensing the need for an explanation. “He couldn’t get here on his own.”

“You’d better wait outside.”

“You both had,” said Holland, his mouth still muffled by the scarf.

Adamley was about to say something abrupt to him. Why cover his face so ridiculously? But something in the manner of the seated man deterred him. Instead he turned back to the girl and led her gently by the elbow out of the office, closing the door as he went.

* * * *

Holland sat alone with the machine.

It was a while before he was able to gather his flagging energy and begin, but when he did so, he slipped into a natural flow, his hands moving with their usual smooth rhythm over the keys.

Access files. Okay. Cartelli’s was still missing. His own was there, but again it had sections missing. He checked the backup they had built into the system. To his horror, he found it incomplete. He did a routine check on other personnel files. Some of them, too, were incomplete, as if Cartelli had for some reason taken pieces away. Why had he done this? So that only he would have control of the system? It didn’t make sense.

During his routine checks, Holland came across the menu that gave him the opportunity to go into the client files. At the moment only he and Cartelli had the keys to get in. This was the most confidential information in the entire building. It related to the customers, the very rich clients whose names had been replaced by codes. Adamley knew their real identities. He was paid a great deal of money to keep them secret.

Holland entered the system of client information. The biological detail was exhaustive. Everything a surgeon could wish for. And a surgeon using the specialized equipment housed here, programmed and controlled by a computer of infinite potential, could perform miracles.

Holland sat back, his breath coming in gulps. Perform miracles. Here. In one of the theatres.

He banged at the keys, looking for something else, a schedule. Dates, coded names. Treatment. He found it.

Tonight.

Lurching out of the chair, he got to the door, his hand flapping at it. He couldn’t open it, but Adamley must have heard his efforts and it swung inwards.

“Theatre,” muttered Holland.

Adamley glanced across at the girl. She was sitting on one of the leather seats, still tired, her hopes worn thin. Adamley’s face indicated clearly that he didn’t want her involved. There would be a few guards on night patrol by now. Maybe he should get them to escort him home.

Holland tried to push past him.

“Please wait here,” Adamley said as calmly to the girl as he could. She looked as if she might resist, but instead nodded and shrank back, as though she had given up the fight.

In the corridor, Adamley gripped Holland’s arm. “You know you’re not authorized to go near the theatres. What have you found?”

“Who’s Steven S.?”

Adamley scowled, his anger deepening. “That isn’t your concern. The clients are not, repeat, not your field. They’re just codes in a file.”

Holland shook his head stubbornly, still struggling down the corridor. “Steven S. is lying on an operating table. Now. With a robot surgeon, a computer, working on his face. Wiping it clean. Starting again. With new data.”

Adamley drew back from the eyes, their coldness. Still the face was covered.

“Who is Steven S.?” repeated Holland.

“That’s quite impossible.”

They had moved down internal flights of stairs, half in darkness now. Beyond more corridors they stopped. The theatres were near at hand, silent, listening to their coming.

“His file is missing, like Cartelli’s,” said Holland thickly. “Wiped from the program.”

“All right,” said Adamley. He looked around him, his tongue running along his lips nervously. “Steven S. is dead. He died two days ago in his sleep. Natural causes, though it was totally unexpected. Only a few people know. He’s…an important official. Most of our clients are important people. Who wiped his file? His death has been kept extremely quiet. He was due to be moved tomorrow, for the funeral. He can’t be under the knife. Who wiped his file?”

“Cartelli. But the file isn’t lost.”

Adamley looked appalled, unable to fathom the nonsense Holland was giving him.

“It’s been transferred. On to a disc. Along with Cartelli’s.”

Holland stood outside the door of one of the theatres. Its oval window was a black mirror, Holland a distorted smudge within it. “Who is supervising Steven S.’s operation?”

“No one, you fool. The man’s dead.”

Holland looked up and down the corridor for guards. There were none. Operations were often performed at night in these buildings. He pushed at the first theatre door. It resisted, but opened inward. In the room beyond, the lights were all but out. The computer had no need of human eyes to work by.

There were steeply tiered seats dropping down to a balcony overlooking the well of the surgery area. The two men went to the balcony, peering down into the glow. On the operating table beneath them, there was a body stretched out, covered in a spotless white sheet, only the head exposed. Delicate metal arms hovered over it, and light winked from the paper-thin surgical tools that dipped towards it.

Adamley looked appalled, his face terrible. “This isn’t authorized!” he said in a whisper. “We have to stop it.”

Holland shook his head. “The program is locked in to finish.” He led the way round the balcony to an area of consoles, flicking on one of the screens. Its green light bathed the two men as they watched.

“Can’t you do anything?” said Adamley. “What about the night watch?” But he knew they would have no reason to be close by.

Holland ignored him. He worked at one of the keyboards. In a while he nodded. “They’re here.”

“What do you mean?”

“Cartelli copied his file and others onto discs. Then he brought them here. Inserted them in the operating computer, under a time lock. You, above all, know what we do here.”

Adamley grimaced. Holland made it sound corrupt. “Holland, this is state-of-the-art cosmetic surgery. You understand our reasons for secrecy. Few people can afford it—”

“Yes, it’s not for the likes of Cartelli and the ordinary working man. They have to live with their ugliness.”

“Don’t be a fool.” Yet something in Holland’s words alerted Adamley. He looked into the operating well. “Who is on the table?”

Holland tapped the screen, the file, the name in the upper right hand corner.

“You’ve got to stop him—”

Slowly Holland undid the silk scarf that he had so carefully arranged about his lower face. As it came away, the green light suffused his smooth, alien features. The nose had almost disappeared, the mouth a tiny opening, far too small. The skin was like glass, polished and unblemished.

“I couldn’t stop this,” he said.

Adamley drew back in alarm. “What’s wrong with you?”

“You tell me. I can’t explain it. My files are incomplete, somehow corrupted by Cartelli’s meddling. That goes for anyone else whose file he’s changed. He’s taken what he needs from us. And he’s programmed that computer down there to fuse the information into a new face. For himself. All the files have been loaded.”

Adamley stared down at the equipment. Could he see beads of blood on those precise blades? How far had it gone? “But what will he look like? Not—the man who died?”

Holland shook his head. “Cartelli’s more subtle than that. Which is why he used other components. Whatever face he emerges with, you won’t recognise it. It’ll be new. Isn’t that what this art is all about?”

Adamley drew in a long breath. He seemed to have brought his anger, his fear, under control. “Very well. When the machines have finished, I’ll deal with the situation.” He glanced at Holland, who was again fitting the scarf to his face. “And I’ll see that you’re given every opportunity to—”

Holland gestured vaguely with his arm, settling back to watch the patient work of the operating computer. In a moment he was alone.

Something nagged at his mind as he sat there. Cartelli’s plan was too good. Too simple. Yet it would have worked. He would have got out without discovery, possibly a little embarrassment. No doubt he had another good job lined up. A man of his talent. And he would have chosen a face that would ensure him the attention he had never had. As many beautiful women as he desired. Holland shook his head. For a man of his vision, it was a curiously adolescent dream.

Holland saw the slender arms of the robot rise above the table, folding back like the intricate limbs of a huge insect. Now he could see the exposed head. He leaned as far over the balcony as he dared to get a better view of the face.

There was none. The skin was pulled like the surface of a balloon over the face. Beneath it there were shapes, knuckling up as though the new face would break out of its skin like a butterfly emerging from a cocoon. Holland waited.

The layer of skin began to darken, peeling away, dead flesh.

Dead flesh? The words reverberated inside Holland’s mind. Dead flesh. Cartelli had chosen as his subject for the main source of his operation a man who, two days ago, had died. But Cartelli had prepared his program days before that. He couldn’t have known that the man would be dead. What difference would it make?

Holland watched, fear turning to shock as the new face thrust up from the blackened skin around it. One hugely bloated eye opened, opaque as a mirror, and the sagging mouth yawned as it tried to form words, the tongue flapping wetly, immense and obscene. Blood seeped from the distorted lips, which were like two engorged maggots, about to split down their length.

As the theatre doors below were unlocked from outside the room, the thing on the bed at last managed a sound. Holland could not be sure whether it was a groan of agony or a distorted howl of bitter rage.

BEYOND THE THUNDER, by H. B. Hickey

Originally published in Amazing Stories, December 1948.

Ten thousand persons in New York looked skyward at the first rumble of sound. The flash caught them that way, seared them to cinder, liquefied their eyeballs, brought their vitals boiling out of the fissures of their bodies. They were the lucky ones. The rest died slowly, their monument the rubble which had once been a city.

Of all that, Case Damon knew nothing. Rocketing up in the self-service elevator to his new cloud-reaching apartment in San Francisco, his thoughts were all on the girl who would be waiting for him.

“She loves me, she loves me not,” he said to himself. They were orchid petals, not those of daisies, that drifted to the floor of the car.

“She loves me.” The last one touched the floor softly, and Case laughed.

Then the doors were opening and he was racing down the hall. No more lonely nights for him, no more hours wasted thumbing through the pages of his little black book wondering which girl to call. Case Damon, rocket-jockey, space-explorer, was now a married man, married to the most beautiful girl in the world.

He scooped Karin off her feet and hugged her to him. Her lips were red velvet on his, her spun gold hair drifted around his shoulders.

“Box seats for the best show in town, honey,” he gloated in her ear.

He fished around in his pockets with one hand while he held her against him with the other. They’d said you couldn’t get tickets for that show. But what “they” said never stopped Case Damon, whether it was a matter of theatre tickets, or of opening a new field on a distant airless planet.

“Turn off that telecast,” he said. “I’m not interested in Interplan news these days. From now on, Case Damon keeps his feet on terra firma.”

And that was the way it was going to be. His interest in the uranium on Trehos alone should keep him and Karin in clover for the rest of their lives. They’d have fun, they’d have kids, they’d live like normal married people. The rest of the universe could go hang.

“If you’d stop raving, I might get a word in edgewise,” Karin begged.

“The floor is yours. Also the walls, the building, the whole darned city if you want it,” Case laughed.

“That telecast is ticking for you. Washington calling Case Damon. Washington calling Case Damon. Since you left an hour ago it’s been calling you.”

“Let it call. It’s my constitutional right not to answer.”

But his mood was changing to match Karin’s. His lean, firm-jawed features were turning serious. Tension tightened his powerful body.

“It must be important, Case,” Karin said. “They’re using your code call. They wouldn’t do that unless it was urgent.”

He listened to the tick of the machine. Unless you knew, it sounded only like the regular ticking that told the machine was in operation. But there were little breaks here and there. It was for him.

Three long strides took him to the machine. His deft fingers flicked switches, brought a glow to the video tubes.

“Case Damon,” he said softly. “Come in, Washington.”

It was Cranly’s face that filled the screen. But a Cranly Case barely recognized. The man had aged ten years in the last three days. His voice was desperate.

“Good grief, man! Where’ve you been? Get down here fast. But fast!”

“Listen, Cranly. I’m on my honeymoon. Or have you forgotten? Remember three days ago you were best man at a wedding? Well, the fellow at the altar was Case Damon.”

That should have gotten a smile out of Cranly. But it didn’t. He was even a little angry now.

“This is an order, Case! I’m giving you the honor of being the first non-official person to know about it. Supreme Emergency Mobilization and Evacuation Order. New York was blasted out of existence an hour ago!”

* * * *

All flights grounded, the skyport in a turmoil, but that little silver card got him and Karin through. Nobody knew yet what was going on. They were readying for something big, but they didn’t know what as yet.

Case hurried Karin to his own hangar, bustled her into the small speeder.

“The fishing cabin on the Columbia, honey. Stay there! And don’t worry if you don’t hear from me.”

He didn’t even wait to see her take off. Karin would be safe enough. The cabin was a hundred miles from any possible military objective. All he had to do was sit tight until things were straightened out. New York blasted! That could have been an accident. It must have been an accident. The only alternative would be war. And there were no more wars. Somebody at Supreme Council must have lost his head to issue the E.M.E. order.

Sure, that was it. Leave it to the politicos to get excited and jump out of their skins. Below him the glistening towers of Kansas City flashed and faded and were replaced minutes later by the towers of St. Louis. Chicago was batting out a “clear the sky order.”

All three of those cities would have been gone by now if there were really a war, Case told himself. But Cranly was no politician. And he wasn’t the kind that scared easily.

It was Cranly who met him at Washington skyport. Cranly was scared, all right. He was more frightened than he’d been the time their ship had started to tear loose from their mooring on that moon of Jupiter. His face was gray.

“I’ll fill you in as we go,” he said. The official car jerked into high speed and Cranly talked. “It was no accident. Get that straight. New York was hit from the outside.”

“But how? By what? Under the Unified Council there’s no one who’d have anything to gain by war. There isn’t even anyone on Earth with the power to make war.”

“That’s why we wanted you here. It figures to be an enemy from another planet.”

“That doesn’t make sense.” Case swivelled around to face Cranly. “You and I know our system as well as anyone alive. Cut out the guessing and give me the facts.”

“All right. Enough people saw the thing from Jersey so that we know what happened. They say there was a rumble like thunder. Out of a clear sky, mind you. Then—get this—the sky seemed to open! There was a blast of light. That’s all. New York was gone.”

“Atom blast?”

“Hardly. No mushroom cloud. Accident? No, and you’ll learn why I’m so sure shortly.”

* * * *

Case Damon had met some of these men before. A few others he recognized from their pictures. The Supreme Council. They were plenty worried. Strogoff was chewing his mustache; Vargas drummed nervously with thick fingers. Cunningham and Osborn were pacing the floor.

“Thank heaven for one thing,” Osborn said. Vargas looked up at him quickly, his dark eyes slits in his swarthy face.

“For what?” Vargas asked bitterly.

“That there has been no panic. Urban evacuations are proceeding quietly.”

“I still think it could have been some natural phenomenon,” Case interrupted. “Even a terrific bolt of lightning.”

Cranly’s big shoulders lifted as a recorder was wheeled into the room. He indicated where the machine was to be set down.

“We’ve wasted a little time in letting you make these guesses,” he told Case. “All for a reason. We want you to realize fully what sort of weapon we are up against. Now listen to this message that was beamed onto the Council’s private line a few minutes after the blast.”

He went to the recorder and tripped a lever. The instrument settled to a low whine that soon disappeared as the recording tape entered the converter. The voice might have been in the room with them.

“To the Supreme Council of the Planet Earth: What happened to New York was only a token of what can be done to your entire planet. Our terms are complete and unconditional surrender, to be telecast within one week. To hasten your decision, there will be other tokens at twelve-hour intervals.”

“Now you know,” Cranly said heavily. “Either give up or be destroyed. And that ultimatum from an enemy which has no compunction about murdering ten million people to prove its power.”

A thousand questions jumped to Case Damon’s mind. The horror of the thing stilled most of them. He checked over possibilities quickly.

“You say many people outside of New York saw the flash. What about skyports, observatories, the fleet base on the Moon? Did they try to get a triangulation?”

“I can see why Cranly wanted you here,” Vargas said, smiling faintly. His own people had been the last to join the Unified Council. He had held out to the last, had demanded and received concessions, but he was considered one of the Council’s ablest men.

“Naturally there were attempts at fixing the source of the flash,” he continued. “Had those attempts met with success the fleet would already be on its way.”

“I don’t get it,” Case said bluntly. “If they attempted triangulation, they must have got it.”

“Precisely,” Cranly interjected. “They got it. The source of the flash was an empty space between Mars and Venus!”

* * * *

Case was rocked back on his heels by Cranly’s disclosure. This was something. An enemy who loosed his blasts out of unoccupied space, who could cut into the Council’s own line at will!

“What about a fast moving asteroid? That could have been gone before it was observed.”

“Not a chance,” Cranly said.

And Cranly should know. So should the rest. Every one of them was in charge of a department of the Earth’s services. But there was that emphasis on Mars and Venus. Strogoff interrupted that line of thought.

“I say we might as well give in.” Even his thick mustache drooped in despondency. “Why have millions more killed?”

“Never!” Osborn thundered.

“I should hesitate to admit defeat,” Vargas shrugged. “But how can we defend ourselves?”

Outside the chambers, in the corridor, Cranly gripped his friend’s shoulder hard. “That’s been going on for an hour,” he said, “this one for, and that one against.”

“And meanwhile the fleet can’t do a thing,” Cranly added.

“Exactly. Whoever blasted New York is doing it from an invisible base. That’s my guess. It’s an invader from space. My job will be to stay here and keep the Council from giving up. Your job is to find the base.”

“Are you sure the attack was from space?”

“Positive.”

“Well,” Case mused, “I’ve found uncharted planets, even discovered a city on Mars that the experts said didn’t exist. Maybe I can get beyond the thunder, through a hole in the sky.”

* * * *

It was night, and that was a good break. Cranly had been sure he could hold the Council together another twelve hours. Even through a second attack. Fine. For a job like this, Case thought, twelve hours of night were better than twenty of daylight.

He grabbed an aero-cab for the skyport. The pilot looked twice at the silver tab, finally nodded. Case had a few minutes with his thoughts. He’d wanted to talk to Karin, but Cranly had turned thumbs down.

“You can talk to her if and when you get back,” he’d said. Fine stuff for a guy who was supposed to be enjoying a honeymoon.

“Hey!” the pilot blurted, cutting into Case’s thoughts. He pointed out the window.

Case saw a red streak cut through the sky toward them. A rocket ship, and moving fast. It flashed closer. No mistake about this, it was aiming right for them. They were a couple of dead ducks.

“Look out,” Case said.

His big hands flung the pilot out of his seat. Case took over the controls. A whoosh of fire swept past the cabin, missed them as Case sent the ship into a dive.

“Break out the glider chutes,” he called back over his shoulder.

Luckily, the pilot didn’t try to argue. He was too scared. He snapped a chute around his own shoulders, fought his way forward and got the other one around Case. Another blast cut past the cabin, then another. The rocket ship was using all guns now. They were over the Potomac, then over a wooded area.

“We’ll jump at a hundred feet,” Case yelled.

A streak of flame caught the cab’s right edge, and Case told himself they’d be lucky to jump at all. The little craft was almost out of control. His pretended spin was turning into the real thing. Keeping his eyes glued on the plummeting altimeter, he got his left foot up and kicked out the side window. A flash melted the dial and singed his sleeve. One-fifty.

“Go!” Case barked.

The pilot’s heels vanished out the window and Case banked sharply to the right and flung himself out of the seat. Hard earth of a clearing looked like it was going to smack him right in the face.

* * * *

Then the small chute billowed and pulled out glider wings. Case pulled cords and dropped leftward. The cab hit the ground to his right, the rocket ship on its tail for a final blast. He saw that, and then got his hands in front of him and hit the ground in a rolling fall.

The pilot was a still shape near him in the gloom. Case got out of the chute and ran to him, slid expert hands over the man, and felt the messy pulp that had once been a face. The pilot hadn’t known how to fall properly.

Case took a quick look upward. His trick hadn’t worked. The rocket was making a tight curve for a landing. Smart operators; they weren’t taking any chances. Case cursed them, whoever they were, even as he dug his silver identification plate out of his pocket and slid it into the dead pilot’s flying jacket.

Then he ran. Maybe he’d fool them. Maybe he wouldn’t. They’d probably take a few minutes to think it over. He skipped around a bush and heard voices and the pound of running feet behind him.

* * * *

So Cranly was wrong. This wasn’t strictly a space job. There was a tie-up on Earth, and the tie-up had to be on the very inside of the Supreme Council! Nobody else knew Case Damon was in on this deal. He ought to head back and warn Cranly.

No, that wasn’t right. He had to trust Cranly to handle his end. Only nine hours now till the next blast, and if he took time out to reach Cranly he wouldn’t ever make it. Besides, his stunt might have worked. Why tip them off he was still alive?

Brilliant headlights came up the road and Case stepped out onto the highway. The lights came on at two hundred miles an hour, caught him and made him blink. Then there was the hiss of automatic brakes.

“Hey!” a man yelled “What if those brakes hadn’t worked?”

Case jerked the car door open and saw that the man was alone. A young fellow, and plenty frightened at sight of Case’s torn clothes and scratched and dirty face.

“Don’t take your hands off that wheel,” Case said sharply. “Head for Washington skyport and keep your foot on the floor all the way.”

The young fellow’s hand fell away from the dash compartment. He gulped, nodded, and threw the car into gear. He got his foot all the way down and kept it there. They took a sweeping curve at full speed.

Washington was a dot of light, then a haze, a glare. All departments working overtime tonight, Case thought. They hurtled toward the city, smack toward Pennsylvania Avenue.

“Slow down,” Case said. “I don’t want to be picked up.”

The young fellow slowed down. He must be thinking he’s got a desperate character next to him, Case mused. If he only knew how desperate! The skyport was less than a mile away now.

“Take the side road around to where the hangars are,” Case directed.

The young fellow took the side road. They swept past the main gate, along the ten-mile fence, slid without lights now behind the row of hangars. The hangars looked like rows of cigars standing on end, the ships inside them pointing up and ready to go.

“This is where we get out,” Case said. He shoved the driver out of the door and followed him. His fist came up in a short arc and cracked against a jaw-bone.

“Sorry,” Case told the inert figure. “I just can’t take any chances.”

He dumped the unconscious man beside the road and then went back to the car. Wheeling it around so it pointed back toward the main gate, he left the motor whirring and stepped out. One hand depressed the accelerator button, the other held the motor release.

When he jumped clear, the car spurted. With lights off in the darkness the automatic brake wouldn’t work. A hundred yards down the car slowed, swerved, hit a concrete abutment. Quite a crash, Case thought. That ought to turn a few heads the wrong way for a while.

He was at the high fence in a flash. His fingers searched for and found crevices. Those fingers were strong as steel. They hauled Case Damon upward and over the top. He grinned into the darkness.

Men were running from the hangars toward the site of the crash. With no incoming traffic slated, the control tower had swung all lights that way. Somewhere a crash siren sang its song.

Case dropped completely relaxed. His feet hit first as he fell forward. His hands hit next, then his head was down between his shoulders and he was rolling forward onto the back of his neck and then onto his feet again. He came up running.

* * * *

It was going to be a slow start without rocket-boosters. But rockets made light and sound. This had to be a silent takeoff.

He knew his way around this tiny ship even in complete blackness. He had designed it himself, and it was completely functional. Case Damon had wanted no comforts; those came at the end of a journey. When there was a race for a newly discovered ore field, it was the man who got there first, not most comfortably, who won out.

A sharp click told Case that the anti-grav was on. He was looking through his forward visalloy plate straight up into a starlit sky. That wasn’t too good. Small as the ship was, it still would make a dark blot.

His eyes roved, discovered a few wisps of cloud. He prayed them closer. Now!

This wasn’t the first time he’d taken off in darkness, depending on spring power to lift him silently out of the hangar cradle. He’d beaten them all to Trehos only because they’d figured to catch his takeoff by the rocket flashes. They’d figured to tail him that way, too, only by the time the competition had found out he was gone, he’d been half way there.

Cranly hadn’t called him in on this without good reason. Together, he and Cranly had made many a rocket jaunt to distant and dangerous places. They’d been a good team before Cranly had sought election to the Council. Cranly was the cautious kind; but when he knew exactly where he stood, he could move fast enough.

Case slid the ship behind a cloud and felt his speed slacken. He had to risk a short burst of the jets. The odds were against anyone seeing the flash now.

At his present low speed, it would be a while before he was out of range of detection apparatus. He had time to wonder whether he ought to buzz Karin on the telecast. Better not; there was always the chance his call might be picked up.

He was sorry now that he hadn’t thought to shoot cross-country to get Karin. Who knew for certain where the next blast would hit? He could have dropped her off at the moon base.

The moon was full in his vision plates now. He was close enough to tune in their local telecast to the moon colonies. The machine was ticking away and Case switched it onto the pitted satellite’s local beam.

They had the news all right, and they were making preparations for an attack. The fleet base was assuring all colonists that it would furnish them all possible protection.

A fat lot of good that was going to do! Case had had enough time now to think this over, and he was beginning to see the ramifications of the thing.

Someone on Earth, someone inside the Council, wanted to take over. But with Earth supervision of military manufacture so thorough, he hadn’t a chance to get started. So he must have enlisted the aid of some power from outer space.

But how? And what power? And who was the traitor inside the Council?

Case wasn’t going at this blindly. That first question, for instance. There had been in the last year several strange disappearances. Two space liners from Mars to Venus had utterly vanished, without a trace. Smaller ships, too, had never reported back. They had last been heard from in that same area.

But space liners just didn’t vanish. They had equipment for any emergency, were able to contact Earth at a moment’s notice.

A hole in the sky, observers of the flash had said. Between Mars and Venus, Cranly had told him. It was beginning to add up. It was Case Damon’s job to figure the total.

* * * *

Now the moon was far behind. Case looked at his watch and saw that he was making real time. Another couple of hours was all he’d need.

He got out the chart Cranly had given him, set it up alongside his own navigation map, figured the time element and aimed his ship at a blankness in space. He would hit that empty space at exactly the right time.

After that? Case didn’t know. But he wasn’t the kind to cross bridges before he got to them.

What if Cranly was the traitor within the Council? That was hard to believe, but you could never tell what lust for power might do to a man. Cranly wasn’t the type. Yet, there was a planet to be won. They said every man had his price. And Cranly was in charge of Earth’s intelligence services.

The ticking of the telecast broke into his thoughts. There were breaks in the steady sounds. His code call.

Case switched on the video and got a blank. What the devil! Automatically he reached for his transmitter switch. And caught himself in the nick of time. It might be a trick to get him to reveal his position. Instead, he turned up the audio.

“Damon,” a voice said. “Case Damon.” It was not the same voice he had heard in the Council chambers. This was vaguely familiar, but definitely disguised.

“Better turn back, Damon,” the voice said. “You almost tricked us. Don’t let a small success go to your head. We cannot be defeated. Why sacrifice your life for a lost cause?”

“You know where you can go, brother,” Case said aloud.

It had been bad psychology to use on a man who had never feared death anyway. Besides, if they were so omniscient, why bother to try to stop him with words?

The voice had tried to impress him with power. It had only succeeded in disclosing a weakness. They didn’t know where Case Damon was, and they were worried.

* * * *

Hours had become minutes, and the minutes were ticking away with the sweep of the hand on Case’s watch. Ten minutes more to go. Using Cranly’s figures and chart, he was only a thousand miles from that point in space.

He swung the ship around and cut speed, but held his hand ready at the throttle. There might not be much time to act. And the telecast was using his signal again. He didn’t want to turn it up, but he wanted to hear that voice again.

“Damon,” the voice said. “Case Damon. This is your last chance.”

“Change your tune,” Case snarled at the instrument.

But the voice was going on. “If your own life means nothing, perhaps you value another more. Turn on your video and you will see something of interest to you.”

That got him, brought him bolt upright in his seat. The voice could mean only one thing—Karin! Somehow they had got to her!

Maybe this was a trick. Only five minutes or less now. They might be trying to distract him. But he couldn’t take the chance. With fingers that were icy cold, Case Damon flicked on the video.

A wall was what he first saw. Only a wall. It was a trick. But wait. That wall was familiar, rough, unpainted. The focus was shifting to a section that showed a mounted fish. Now down the wall and across to a familiar couch. The fishing cabin!

“Karin!” Case blurted.

Then he was mouthing incoherent curses. Her figure had been flung across the screen, on the couch. She had put up a fight. Her face was scratched, her blouse ripped. There was a gag in her mouth and her hands were tied behind her.

“She dies unless you turn back!” the voice said. It meant every word.

Karin had guts. She was shaking her head, imploring him with her eyes not to turn back.

If he only had time to think! What did the rest of the world mean to Case Damon? Nothing, if it was a world without Karin. Yet, she was his own kind, this girl he had married. Were their positions reversed, it would have been Case who shook his head. Better to die than live in a world dominated by a murderous, merciless power.

And yet, she was … Karin. Without her there was nothing. Already Case’s hands were busy, throwing switches that would cut in the retarding jets, swinging the responsive craft about. He had to give in. He didn’t have time to think.

“All right,” he started to say.

* * * *

His right hand reached out to turn on his transmitter. His lips framed the words again. But it was too late!

The video was distorting into a mass of wavy lines, the audio brought nothing but a jumble of sound. Interference was scrambling the telecast waves beyond hope of intelligibility. He couldn’t get through. The first rumble rose to audibility and made the ship shiver.

“Too late,” Case said, and was beyond cursing.

Too late to turn back now. But not too late to go ahead. Air waves were pitching the ship like a cork. He fought to control, and finally swung back on course.

Case took a last quick look at Cranly’s chart, and flicked his eyes ahead to the vision plate. Only blackness yet, but the sound was growing and rising in pitch past the point where he could hear it. There was the sense of enormous strain, of the tug of unbelievably powerful and overwhelming contending forces.

And then the blackness split!

First, he could see only a pinpoint of light. It grew larger, widened, spread until it became a cleft in the void. Case flung his ship forward.

The last rumble of thunder was fading. He kept his eyes on that cleft in space, knowing what would come. Yet, when it came, he was almost blinded. A blast of light, a light so intense that it was a tangible, solid thing, roared through the cleft and hurtled Earthward.

Then the bolt was gone and the cleft was closing. The tug of forces was growing less. He had just seconds left to reach that diminishing crack in the blackness.

Like a streak of vengeance itself, Case sent his ship across the void. His lips moved in silent prayer. There were only seconds now. The crack was growing smaller, and that meant his speed was not great enough. To risk more power might blow the ship apart. But he had to get through. He must, he must.…

He was through!

* * * *

Case was through, through the cleft and beyond the thunder. He was hurtling out of blackness into a world of light. Frantically, he cut down his speed, not knowing whether he was going into open space or the side of a mountain, whether in this new world he would be going up or down.

His altimeter had switched on automatically. That was a relief. A quick glance showed the dial at 90,000 feet. The retarding jets were slowing his drop, and Case had time for a look at strange terrain below.

From his present height, it looked like rolling country. There were hills, valleys, a checkerboard of green and tan that might be cultivated ground, a river.

But most important of all, there was a city, a city of towers and pinnacles more impressive than any on Earth. Three of those towers interested Case. They stood apart, the center tower hundreds of feet higher than the two which flanked it, and all three were like fingers pointing directly at the place where the cleft had been.

Case made decisions rapidly. He had to get the ship out of the air before someone saw it. First, though, he’d have to make sure it would be air he stepped into when he got out. He had a space suit in the forward locker, but putting that on would slow him up.

An intake valve hissed away. Soon, there would be something to test. Then the hissing stopped. That was a good sign. Pressure outside the ship was almost the same as inside. There was an atmosphere.

But of what was that atmosphere composed? That was now the big question. Case set the controls and turned to the intake tank. With the turn of a petcock, there came another hiss. Case got out his cigarette lighter and flicked it into flame.

He held his breath as the flame wavered. The air in the ship was being forced away from it. But the flame did not die. Case sighed with relief. If the atmosphere supported combustion, it would support breathing.

With that important question answered, Case turned to others. Where the devil was he? He couldn’t answer that, but perhaps he might discover a clue. The telecast was one way.

But the telecast had stopped ticking. Case ran the thing over the entire frequency range and got nothing. If that was a clue, it was a negative one.

He had to think it over even as he swung the ship into a long glide for a hill which looked like it might have a good deal of growth on it. Coming in low, Case saw that vegetation was sparse. But there was not another ship in these strange skies. He had to land soon.

Running his eyes over the landscape below, Case discovered tall vegetation along the base of another hill. It would have to do. He came in low over the green, and swooped in for a landing. Luckily, this ship could land on a handkerchief.

* * * *

Strange trees, these which encircled the tiny clearing. They were all shades of green, taller and broader than sequoias, and yet more like ferns in the delicacy of their gigantic fronds.

Case stepped through the forward hatch into a warm, humid atmosphere that was quite comfortable. He had thought of waiting for darkness, but there was no way of knowing whether darkness ever came to this strange world which seemed to exist in nowhere.

Too bad his compass was no good here. There seemed to be no magnetic polarity. He’d have to trust to his sense of direction.

The city Case had seen was at least fifty miles away and past a couple of low-lying hills that hid it from sight. That made it a good hike, even for Case Damon’s long and muscular legs.

And after he got there, if he got there? Case shrugged. Another bridge to be crossed later. He hitched at his holstered gun and started moving through the ferns.

He’d have to be careful; on closer scrutiny from a low level the land had proved to be cultivated. And that meant people about.

A humming drew his eyes skyward. Huge ships of weird design were crisscrossing the air above, obviously looking for something. Probably himself, Case thought grimly. They must have cleared the air for that blast. Now they’re out in force. Still, there was a chance they’d thought him one of their own pilots who’d disobeyed. He’d come in too fast for anyone to have had a good look at his ship, he hoped.

He jumped five feet at an ear-splitting roar, whipped out his gun and had the stud under his fingertip for a quick blast. He felt foolish when the source of the roar turned out to be a purple bird that soared up out of the foliage overhead.

There were other sounds now, from small animals that scooted about on six legs and looked like fur-bearing armadillos. Then the ferns were behind him, and he was out onto a road that came over the hill.

Case got off the road in a hurry. Well tended fields lay on either side of it with spaced rows of grain that was taller than he. He could walk between the rows and be out of sight of the road.

He took a few quick steps, pushed aside a stalk of grain, and tripped. His gasp was involuntary but loud. For a second he lay still, then got to his feet. He had tripped over a root.

“Natsa!” a voice shouted. There was the thump of heavy feet behind him.

* * * *

Case whirled. Just in time. A big orange-skinned man in a metallic suit came bursting out of the next row of grain. He took one look at Case, and reached for the holstered weapon at his side.

But few men could outdraw and out-shoot Case Damon. A flash of green played about his opponent’s head. And then there was no head.

“Natsa to you,” Case grunted at the body.

He was used to death in many forms, and it upset him not at all to handle the body. The fellow had been about his own size. At least he would now have a suit that wouldn’t attract attention. He decided to keep his own gun rather than trust a strange one, but he exchanged holsters with the corpse.

“Now, if only Natsa doesn’t show up, I’ll make tracks out of here,” Case said to himself.

But the Damon luck was wearing thin. There were shouts from along the road. More than one voice now, and all using a strange language. They must have come over from the field across the way, Case thought.

He flattened himself against the last row of stalks and took a deep breath. With the first sight of somebody coming through the row of grain, he stepped out and onto the road.

There were three of them, all big men, and none were looking his way. By the time their cries of consternation rose at sight of the body, Case was across the road and into the grain on the other side.

He ran until his heart began to hammer, and then he slowed to a fast walk. When the field curved around a bend, he breathed easier.

Along the road there was activity now, and the sound of vehicles moving fast. They were looking for him. Then the field ended, and Case was in a grove of wild fruit. Heavy brush caught at his face, but he stuck close to the road.

Voices drifted in toward him. He had to chance a look. Stretching himself full length, Case parted thick brambles and peered out. More men, all wearing the same metallic suits. This group was walking slowly, munching on the same sort of fruit that grew overhead.

Case thought it over. He didn’t have a chance. His own tanned skin would stand out like a sore thumb against the orange brightness of these people.

But he was not without resources. The fruit had given him an idea. It dripped an orange liquid. If the stuff was good enough to eat, it certainly couldn’t hurt to smear a little over his face and hands!

* * * *

When he hit the road again, Case Damon was as orange as any man he’d so far seen in this new world. Maybe he wouldn’t get away with it, but he had to try.

Vehicles sped by and nobody gave him a second glance. So far, so good. When he passed the group he had seen from the grove without drawing undue attention, he relaxed.

A long row of chugging trucks rumbled by, apparently loaded with produce for the city. Case looked up and a man on the back of the last one waved and shouted to him. Case waved back and the truck slowed.

He wished now that he hadn’t waved. The truck had stopped, and the man in back was waiting to give him a hand up. Too late to back down now. Case took a short run and swung aboard and the truck moved on. The man who’d helped him up said something.

“Hmmm?” Case hummed. If this fellow made a suspicious move he’d have to slug him.

“Kanato?” the man said. It was a question. They came over the brow of a small hill and the man pointed to the city in the distance. He was asking if Case was bound for the city.

Case bobbed his head. He was going to play dumb. He pointed at his mouth and shook his head. His companion nodded understandingly, but wanted to get chummy anyway. Then he looked down and saw Case’s holster and changed his mind.

Small cars of a strange sort were buzzing past them, going away from the city. They were filled with orange-skinned men carrying shoulder arms. Probably Kanato police on their way to investigate a very recent killing. Case gave silent thanks he had got this ride.

There was a tense moment at the gate of the city. Heavily armed men swarmed about. But produce trucks seemed to be exempt from close scrutiny.

Case’s companion traded jeers and coarse laughter with the gendarmerie, and the truck rolled on down a wide avenue. The old feud between city dweller and rustic, Case guessed. He noticed that the citizens of Kanato wore clothing of high lustre and fine mesh.

They must be a scrappy people. Almost every male citizen carried a gun. His own wouldn’t be noticed, then.

Before a huge building, the truck stopped. The end of the journey. Case hopped off, nodded his thanks for the lift and started walking.

* * * *

Those three towers were at the edge of the city. Case made his way through a crowded square, turned down a fern-lined street and headed for them. From behind him a light breeze came, wafting a familiar aroma to his nostrils.

Cigarette smoke! But until now he had seen nobody smoking. Acting on impulse, Case drifted over to one side of the walk and bent as though to tie his shoe.

Men walked past. Case straightened up, got a look at the backs of their necks, and gasped. White—as white as his own skin. These were no inhabitants of this world, but men of his own kind!

There were three of them. And now, as they finished lighting up, they were talking plain Earth English with as little concern as though they were strolling down the street of any Earth city.

“By the time we get back, there ought to be news,” one of the men said.

“Yeah. That last one should have brought them around.”

The second voice was another surprise. It stirred memories. Somewhere, Case had heard that coarse tone before. He thought hard.

Sure, now he had it. Pete Engels, hotshot engineer cashiered out of the space fleet and turned adventurer bum. The other two men Case didn’t know.

“I’d give plenty for a look at Davisson’s face now,” Engels was saying. Davisson was commander of the moon base, to which Engels had been attached.

“He’s probably running around in circles,” one of Engels’ companions laughed.

“Yeah. And don’t think he ain’t number one on my list when we take over.”

A sudden humming filled the air as they drew closer to the three towers, and Case stopped listening to the conversation for a moment. The man ahead had paused briefly, but they were now moving on.

Pedestrian traffic had fallen off, Case noticed. He and the three ahead were the only ones heading for the towers. It looked like the towers were out of bounds for most citizens. A moment later he was certain of that, when he saw the number of armed guards around the entrance gate.

But the guards didn’t stop Engels and the pair with him. They jerked their heads in a brief greeting and walked right through the cordon. Case paused, let them get inside the building.

* * * *

Here goes, he thought. Nothing like a bold front in a spot like this. He stepped forward briskly.

But the bold front wasn’t working. Hostile eyes swung his way. Fingers came down to rest on triggers that could send death winging.

Case looked up, pretended to be startled. A foolish grin spread over his face. Would they believe he’d been day-dreaming? They would. He was turning around and walking back the way he’d come and nobody was stopping him.

He cursed under his breath. Somehow he had to get inside that tower Pete Engels had entered. But how?

An inviting doorway yawned back along the avenue, and Case stepped inside. He looked at his watch. A few hours left until the next blast. He’d have to move fast.

Fighting his way into the tower was absolutely out of the question. He’d never get past the guards. Maybe not, but he was sure going to try. This time the grin on his face was far from foolish.

Case Damon had an idea, and he wasn’t one to let time slip by before he acted on it. The idea was simple, so simple it might even work.

An orange dye had gotten him into Kanato. But it would never get him into that tower. Yet, Pete Engels and his pals had walked right in. Maybe that was one place where an Earth complexion would turn the trick.

Case got out his handkerchief, spit on it a few times and started rubbing. It was slow work, but he’d better not leave any telltale streaks.

When he came out of the doorway a few minutes later, he had left behind him a handkerchief and as much of the dye as he could remove. Lucky he’d always been an outdoor man. Whatever was left would be too faint to show against his tan skin.

His walk was not too slow, not too fast. His step was the step of a man who knew he wasn’t going to have any trouble. The guards looked up and saw him coming.

Case kept his head down as though in deep thought. They could see his color, but not his face. His right hand swung close to his holster. Now a booted foot came into his line of vision.

The foot moved toward him. Case bobbed his head up and down briefly, much as Engels had done, and kept walking. The guard hesitated, stepped out of his way. He was through the cordon and going up through the entrance.

Then the yelling came from behind him. They had caught on.

* * * *

One leap took Case through the doorway. Over his head, a pellet burst. They were shooting now. Somewhere in the building, a warning whistle cut loose.

He ran down a long corridor, saw figures pop out of a room ahead. But there was a corridor running crossways. Case skidded, made a fast turn and pounded along that one. Plenty of shouting now. It sounded like he had an army after him.

These halls were too long. He was a dead pigeon if he didn’t find a place to hide soon. There were plenty of doors, but he didn’t know which one to try. Then a series of the deadly pellets broke around him and made up his mind. The next door was the one.

It opened into a big room filled with electrical equipment. Case barged around something that looked like a big transformer, and headed for a door at the other end. The door swung toward him, disclosing a mass of men.

His gun was in his hand now and spitting death. But there were too many. Their corpses blocked the doorway. He couldn’t get around them.

Something heavy cracked against the base of his skull and knocked him to his knees. Half dazed, he turned and tried to fire and was buried beneath an avalanche of charging men. The gun was knocked out of his hand.

“Hey!” A startled voice came through the roaring in Case Damon’s ears. “Hey! This guy is white!”

Rough hands twisted his arms behind Case and other hands hauled him to his feet. He shook his head to clear it and found himself facing Pete Engels. There was instant recognition.

“Case Damon. Well, I’ll be! I told Yuna to warn those guards, but I didn’t really think you’d make it.”

“I didn’t, did I?” Case said bitterly.

“What is it?” A voice said from behind Engels. “What is going on?”

That was in Earth English, but with a heavy accent. The voice belonged to an orange skinned man who came through as the guards parted. This was someone of importance, Case realized. His metallic suit gleamed with the lustre of spun gold, and it filled his big body as though it had been moulded to it.

“Meet Case Damon,” Engels said with mock ceremony. “Damon, this is Yuna, ruler of Kanato and soon to be half ruler of the Earth.”

Haughty yellow eyes flashed at Engels and stilled his tongue. Then the eyes swung back to Case and gave him a thorough scrutiny.

“So this is the one of whom we were warned,” Yuna said. “I can see why the Earthlings do not surrender so quickly.”

“They’ll surrender all right,” Engels snarled.

Case saw an opening and lashed out with his foot. The kick caught Engels low in the belly and drew a yell of pain. A fist thudded against Case’s jaw.

“You rat,” Case said through drawn lips. “You’d sell out your own mother.”

“For the right price,” Engels admitted, cheerfully. He turned to Yuna. “What’ll we do with him?”

“Put him with the rest. We can dispose of them later.”

* * * *

As a cell it was not too bad. But there was a stench that was nauseating. Case adjusted his eyes to the gloom and looked about.

There were bunks along one wall, a few of them occupied. With the shutting of the door behind Case, men stirred. Two thin legs swung over the top of a bunk, followed by an equally thin body.

“Take your gloating elsewhere, Engels,” a sharp voice said.

“The name is not Engels. It’s Case Damon.”

“Huh?”

There were more legs now, four pairs. Men were spluttering excitedly. Thin bodies slid out of bunks and feet came toward Case. There was one man he knew, Burnine, the pilot of the Mars-Venus liner which had vanished.

“Case Damon! I knew sooner or later someone would get through.”

“Don’t let your hopes run away with you,” Case said. “I’m the only one, and it looks like I’ll be the last.”

Burnine was crying, definitely and without shame. He fought to bring himself under control.

“They’re going to get away with it,” he said, brokenly. Long imprisonment had broken him down.

“Maybe,” Case said. “It all depends on what the chances are of getting out of this cell before the next blast. The Council hasn’t given up yet.”

“I know. But that humming means they’re building up voltage for the next shot. It won’t be long.”

“How do you know?”

“Engels. He comes down here every couple of days to tell us we’re chumps for not coming over to his side. Meanwhile, we’ve learned what goes on. In a year you can learn a lot if you keep your ears open.”

“A year,” Case mused. “Since those liners disappeared.”

“Yeah. Engels and his pals were on the one I was piloting. They stuck guns in our ribs and took over and brought us here.”

“There are a couple of things I’ve got to know,” Case said. “First, what kind of weapon are they using? Second, where are we?”

“I can’t quite answer the first. And I don’t know exactly where we are, but I know how we got here. Maybe that will help.

“It seems that someone on Earth was experimenting with a new force. He discovered that he could put a crack in the curvature of space. Once he got through that crack and found Yuna, he realized that with this weapon of Yuna’s he could take over the Earth. I don’t know who this person is, but Engels is working for him. So are a lot of other people.”

“What about these towers?”

“They work automatically. Two of them contain the apparatus for building up energy. The blast is fired from this one. It’s all timed to fit with the machine on Earth. That’s why it takes exactly twelve hours.”

“Do you know where the main works are?”

“On the level below this one. But what’s the difference? We’ll never get out of here.”

“Maybe not. But we can sure try. Are you game?”

Burnine stared at him, looked around at the other three. Their thin shoulders had lost some of the sag. A spark had been kindled in their eyes.

“What can we lose?” Burnine said.

* * * *

They could tell when Engels started down the corridor outside their cell. His feet made a heavy sound. There were several guards with him.

“What do you guys want?” Engels shouted through the door.

“I’ve got a message for your boss,” Case shouted back.

“Go ahead. I can hear you.”

“It’s in writing,” Case called.

Engels laughed sourly. “This better not be a trick. You’re a dead tomato if it is. Back away from the door.”

He came through, closely followed by four guards. All of them carried guns in their hands, but when they saw Case in the middle of the room with the men behind him, they put up the weapons and moved forward.

“Where is it?” Engels asked.

“Here.” Case put his hand out and Engels reached.

Too late, Engels and the guards realized that there were only three men behind Case. From behind the open door, Burnine’s frail body hurtled and crashed into the guards, knocking them off balance.

Engels was thrown forward, his chin meeting Case’s fist on its way upward. There was the crack of a neck breaking. Case had put all his strength into that punch.

Burnine kicked at a guard’s head, dropped down to one knee and came up with a gun. The other guards didn’t have a chance. Burnine peppered them with pellets that ate away flesh wherever they hit.

“Let’s go,” Case snapped. “You take the lead. And don’t stop to argue if anyone gets in our way.”

Then they were racing down the long corridor toward a heavy door at the end. A pair of guards looked up and saw them coming and died before their hands could reach their guns. Case paused to pick up a heavy weapon that leaned against a wall.

Another guard stuck his head out of a side room and popped it back in. Within a second, warning whistles pierced the air. But over the whistles Case could still hear a hum.

“Not much time,” Burnine panted. He was completely winded.

A stairway made a dark opening and they plunged downward through it. The sound of motors pounded up toward them. They were in darkness for long minutes. And then the darkness gave way to light and they were racing into a vast chamber filled with scurrying men.

Case brought up the heavy gun he was carrying, triggered it and was gratified by the streak of flame that issued from the muzzle. But other guns were popping steadily. Behind Case, a man went down.

There was a sharpshooter behind a bank of instruments, and Case took steady aim. The sharpshooter dropped. Meanwhile, Burnine and the other two had not been idle. They had both flanks cleared.

“This is it,” Burnine gasped. “Good thing Engels liked to brag. That big panel is the converter.”

He reached out a bony hand for a maze of wires, but Case stopped him.

“Wait. We don’t want to do just a temporary job. And we don’t want to die here either. There’s a debt I’ve got to settle on Earth. What are our chances of getting a ship?”

“Not much,” Burnine told him. “The liner we came in is in a hangar beyond the last tower.”

“Close enough,” Case snapped. “You four watch the doors. They’ve got a tank of atomic fuel here, and if I know my stuff I ought to be able to rig up something that will do a permanent job on this installation.”

* * * *

Only two of them came up out of the lower level—Burnine and Case Damon. Behind them, they left a pile of corpses. Burnine was kept going by sheer strength of will, lugging a shoulder gun that weighed half as much as he.

The corridor on the main level was packed with armed men, but they cleared it by keeping a blast of fire always before them. Men melted away into side rooms, slid down intersecting halls. But at the entrance, the big door was closed.

“Looks like we’re stuck,” Burnine grunted. “We can’t burn our way through that. And if we move, we’ll have a hundred men popping out again behind our backs.”

“We’ll try one of these rooms back here,” Case said. “Always the chance of it having a window.”

The first room they tried was a blank. So were the next couple. While Case kept the corridor cleared, Burnine stuck his head inside and investigated.

“This one,” he said at his fourth try. “Bars on the window, but maybe we can burn them off. Looks like a council room.”

They darted inside, slammed the door behind them. Outside there was the pounding of many feet. While Burnine watched the door, Case turned his fire on the barred windows.

One of the bars turned red, glowed bright and started to melt. But it was going to be a long job. And they hadn’t much time now. Case snatched a quick look at his watch and saw there was but an hour left.

“Damon!” That was from the corridor. Yuna’s voice. Too calm, Case thought. Yuma had a card up his sleeve. “Better give up!”

“Make us,” Case called.

“There is a telecast machine in the room,” came the reply. “Turn it on.”

Yuna wasn’t just wasting time. He knew something. Case hesitated, looked around and sighted the machine. It was the familiar kind, but with an unfamiliar attachment. He fiddled with it, got it going.

“Damon,” said a voice he remembered but could not identify. “Turn up the video.”

There was a threat in the words. But Case Damon was beyond being frightened. He had nothing to lose. Only curiosity made him flick the switch.

There was that room again, with its unpainted walls. There was the couch. And there was Karin!

“We decided to save her on the chance you’d get through,” said the voice. A moment later, a man walked into view.

* * * *

It was Vargas. Somehow, Case was not surprised. It all made sense. Vargas had not wanted to join the Council. He’d held out for concessions, and those concessions had included a certain freedom from supervision of his country.

“Listen,” Vargas said. “It is possible you have managed to do some harm there. If so, undo it at once.”

His hand dipped into his pocket and came out with a gun. He calmly pointed it at Karin’s head. With a sinking heart, Case realized that this time there would be no interference, this time Vargas would go through with it.

“All right,” Case said. “You win.”

He turned away from the video, and swung his gun around at Burnine. He hated to do this, but it had to be done. His eyes avoided Burnine’s as he said:

“Open that door.”

But before Burnine could comply with the order, there was a shout from the machine. Case whirled, startled. The room in the fishing cabin had erupted into a maelstrom of struggling men. He saw Vargas go down, smothered by blue-jacketed men of Earth Intelligence.

And then there was Cranly, his broad back bent over Karin’s figure on the couch. He straightened with a length of rope in his hands. She was free. Cranly turned and his face filled the screen.

“Nice going, Case. I had a hunch Vargas was behind this, but I couldn’t move until I had him dead to rights. But it was you who helped me to fight the Council for the time I needed.”

“How much time have I got?” Case wanted to know.

“Not much. The Council can’t take a chance on having another city blasted. Within fifteen minutes they will destroy the machine Vargas built.”

“That’s time enough,” Case said. “Give me a look at Karin.”

He got his look, and then turned to Burnine. Yuna and his men had got the news elsewhere, apparently, for they were hammering at the door. But the lock was holding.

Together now, Case and Burnine turned their guns on the bars of the window. It went faster now. One bar melted away, another, still another. There was room enough for Burnine, then room enough for Case’s broad shoulders.

They dropped through and hit the ground, running. With Burnine leading the way and Case keeping him covered from behind, they raced around the edge of the tower, cut down a pair of surprised guards who weren’t expecting them here, and skirted the outside tower.

Then the hangars were only yards away and they were sprinting toward them. Now there were no more men to block their way. Only time was the enemy.

And time ticked away on Case’s watch as he and Burnine strapped themselves into their seats. Five minutes was all the time they could hope for. With his own ship that would have been enough, but this space liner was not built for speed.

* * * *

Case had deliberately spoken with more confidence than he’d felt. If that was to be his last look at Karin, he’d wanted her to have a smile on her face.

“All set,” Burnine said. His skin was drawn tight over the long bones in his face.

They took off with all jets wide open. From stem to stern, the big liner shuddered. Even with all power on, they lifted slowly. From overhead, a small attack ship flashed in. Fire darted at them, slid harmlessly off the liner’s duralloy plates.

“Wish that was our biggest worry,” Case said. He could still grin weakly.

Now their speed was mounting steadily. The altimeter climbed past 60,000 and kept going. Case kept his eyes glued to the vision plate.

Now was the time. Thunder rumbled, roared in their ears. Far, far below and behind them there was another roar. Then came the single blinding flash that spelled the end of Kanato, and afterward a billowing mushroom cloud. It was the end of Yuna and his devilish weapon.

Over them, in the heart of the brightness, there was a black speck. It grew larger as they roared toward it. It was a black cleft in the azure. Case flashed a desperate glance at his watch. Seconds left, that was all.

With a prayer in their hearts, and with all jets blazing, they aimed for the blackness. It grew smaller, almost too small. There was a rumble of thunder. And they were through, into a black sky dotted with a myriad of stars.

Case reached up and flicked on the liner’s telecast. It warmed up slowly, first the click coming through, and then the audio. Last of all, and best of all, the video.

Karin’s face filled the screen. She was smiling, none the worse for her experience. Her hair was in disorder but it still looked like spun gold to Case. He could almost taste those velvety lips.

“Be with you soon, honey,” Case said. “We’ve got a honeymoon to finish.”

Her face beckoned him Earthward.

CAPTIVES OF THE THIEVE-STAR, by James H. Schmitz

Originally published in Planet Stories, May 1951.

CHAPTER I

The celebration of the wedding of Peer and Channok had to be cut a little short, because a flock of police-boats from Irrek showed up at detector-range about midway. But it was carried off with a flourish nevertheless.

The oxygen-bubble in the small moon-crater was filled with colorful solidographs, creating the impression of an outdoor banquet hall. The best bands playing in the Empire that night unwittingly contributed their efforts, and food and drink were beyond reproach.

Though somewhat dazed throughout, Channok was startled to discover at one point that the thick carpets on which he stood were a genuine priceless Gaifornaab weave—and no solidographs either! The eighty-four small ships of the space-rat tribe—or voyageurs, as they distinctly preferred to be called—lined up along the outer edges of the banquet hall looked eerily out of place to him; but Peer didn’t seem to mind. Her people rarely did go far away from their ships, and the lawless, precarious life they led made that an advisable practice.

It would be up to him now, Channok reflected, beaming down on Peer, to educate her into customs and attitudes more fitting for the wife of a regular citizen of the Empire and probable future member of the Imperial Secret Service—

And then, suddenly, the whole ceremony seemed to be over! A bit puzzled by the abruptness with which everybody had begun to pack up and leave, Channok was standing beside the ramp of his own ship, the Asteroid—an honest, licensed trader—when Santis strolled over to talk to him. Santis was Peer’s father and the pint-sized chieftain of the tribe.

“Didn’t tell you before, son,” he remarked, “because you were already nervous enough. But as soon as they finish collapsing the bubble, you’ll have about six minutes to get your Asteroid aloft and off this moon before the cops from Irrek arrive!”

“I heard you, Pop, and everything’s packed!” Peer called down from the open lock of the Asteroid. “Come up and kiss me good-by and we’ll seal her up!”

Frowning suspiciously, Channok followed Santis up the ramp. “Why should I worry about cops?” he inquired, looking down at the two little people while they briefly embraced. Peer came about up to his shoulder, though perfectly formed, and Santis was an inch or two shorter. The tribe didn’t run to bulk. “Nobody’s hunting for me!”

“Not yet, son,” Santis conceded. He twirled his fierce brown mustache-tips thoughtfully and glanced at Peer.

“If you’re passing anywhere near Old Nameless, you might cache that special cargo you’re carrying for me there,” he told her. “Around the foot of the Mound. Too bulky for the ships I’ve got here! Put a dowser plate in with it, and I’ll come pick it up with a transport sometime in the next four months.”

“Yes, Pop,” said Peer.

“The Fourth Voyageur Fleet will rendezvous at New Gyrnovaan next Terra-spring. If you can talk this big lug into it, try to make it there, daughter!”

“We’ll be there,” promised Peer.

Channok cleared his throat impatiently. Not if he could help it, they wouldn’t!

“Those cops are looking for the missing Crown Jewels of Irrek,” Santis resumed, looking at him. “After they’ve opened you up from stem to stern to make sure you’re not hiding them, they might apologize. And again they might not.”

“Holy Satellites!” Channok said, stunned. “Did you actually—”

“Not I, son. I just master-mind these things. Some of the boys did the job. There goes the oxygen-bubble! Now will you get going?”

They got going, Channok speechless for once.

* * * *

Some two months later, he stood in the Asteroid’s control room, watching a pale blur creep up along the starboard screen.

“That’s not just one ship—that’s at least a hundred!” he announced presently, somewhat startled. “Looks like they’ve turned out the entire Dardrean war-fleet! Wonder what’s up?”

Peer laid the cargo list she was checking down on the desk and came over to look at the screen. “Hm!” she said.

“It couldn’t possibly have anything to do with us, could it?” he inquired, on a sudden alarming hunch. Being unfamiliar with the dialect used on Dardrea, he had left most of the bargaining there to her.

Peer shrugged. She showed the bland, innocent look of a ten-year-old child, but that was habitual with her. On one occasion she’d been mistaken for his daughter, and at times he even had to remind himself that she’d been eighteen and a student at the Imperial Institute of Technology when he first met her there—and then unwittingly became Santis’ tool in the abstraction of a small but important section of the IIT’s top-secret experimental files! He’d been trying to counteract that little brigand’s influence on Peer ever since, but he wasn’t too sure of his degree of success so far.

“We took the Merchants Guild for plenty on our auction!” she admitted.

“Well,” Channok frowned, “they’d hardly send a fleet after us for that.”

“And, of course,” added Peer, “we got the Duke of Dardrea’s fabulous Coronet. Forgot to mention that. Perfectly legal, though! Some local crook swiped it and we took it in trade.”

Channok winced. As a matter of fact, fencing was a perfectly legitimate business on Dardrea. But a man who planned to enter the Imperial Secret Service, as soon as he could save up the money to pay his way through the Academy, couldn’t afford any stains on his past! Throughout the Empire, the Service was renowned in song and story as the one body of men who stood above the suspicion of reproach.

“The Duke won’t know it’s gone for another week,” Peer consoled him. “Anyway, it looks to me as if those ships are beginning to pull off our course!”

There followed some seconds of tense observation.

“So they are,” Channok acknowledged then. He mopped his forehead. “But I wish you wouldn’t be quite so technical in your interpretation of local laws, Peer! Those babies are really traveling. Wonder who or what they’re chasing?”

Three days later, as the Asteroid approached the area of the red giant sun of Old Nameless, where they were going to cache Santis’ cargo for him—hot cargo, probably; and it would be a load off Channok’s mind to get rid of it—they picked up the trail of the foundering spaceship Ra-Twelve and found part of the answer on board.

CHAPTER II

“It seemed to me,” Channok remarked, watching the Ra-Twelve in the viewscreen before them, “as if her drives had cut off completely just then! But they’re on again now. What do you think, crew-member Peer?”

“Let’s just follow her a bit,” Peer suggested. “I’ve seen ships act like that that were just running out of juice. But this one won’t even answer signals!”

“It could be,” Channok said hopefully, “a case of fair salvage! You might keep working the communicators, though…”

However, the Ra-Twelve continued to ignore them while she plodded on towards the distant red glare of the Nameless System like a blind, thirsty beast following its nose to a water-hole. Presently, she began a series of quavering zigzag motions, wandered aimlessly off her course, returned to it again on a few final puffs of invisible energy and at last went drifting off through space with her drives now obviously dead.

The Asteroid continued to follow at a discreet distance like a chunky vulture, watching. If there was anyone on board the Ra-Twelve, it almost had to be a ghost. Her rear lock was wide open, and the hull showed deep scars and marks of some recent space-action.

“But she wasn’t really badly hurt,” Channok pointed out. “What do you suppose could have happened to her crew?”

Peer gave him a nervous grin. “Maybe a space-ghost came on board!”

“You don’t really believe those spooky voyageur stories, do you?” he said tolerantly.

“Sure I do—and so will you some day!” Peer promised him. “I’ll tell you a few true ones just before your next sleep-period!”

“No, you won’t,” Channok said firmly. “Aside from space-ghosts, though, that crate has a downright creepy look to her. But I suppose I’d better go over and check, as soon as she slows down enough so we can latch on. And you’re going to stay on the Asteroid, Peer.”

“In a pig’s eye, I am!” Peer said indignantly. And though Channok wished to know if she had forgotten that he was the Asteroid’s skipper, it turned out that this was one time he’d have to yield.

“Because, Channy dear,” Peer said, her big dark eyes welling slow tears, “I’d just die if something happened to you over there and I was left all alone in space!”

“All you’d have to do,” Channok said uncomfortably, “is to head the Asteroid for New Gyrnovaan, and you know it. Well—you’ve got to promise to stay right behind me, anyway!”

“Of course,” promised Peer, the tears vanishing miraculously. “Santis says a wife should always stick with her husband in space, because he might lead her into a jam, all right, but nothing like the jams she’s likely to run into if she strays around by herself.”

“Whereas Ship’s Regulation 66-B says,” said Channok with grim satisfaction, “that crew-member Peer gets her mouth washed out with soap just before the next sleep-period because of another uncontrolled lapse into vituperous profanity—and what was that comment?”

“That one was under my breath,” said Peer, crestfallen, “so it doesn’t count!”

* * * *

Without making any particular remarks about it, both of them had fastened a brace of guns to their jet-harnesses. At close range—held thirty feet away against the Asteroid’s ring-bumpers by a set of dock grapnels—the Ra-Twelve’s yawning lock looked more than ever like the black mouth of a cavern in which something was lurking for them.

Channok went over first, propelled by a single squirt of his jets, and landed a little heavier than he had intended to. Peer, following instructions to keep right behind him, came down an instant later in the middle of his back. They got untangled hurriedly, stood up and started swiveling their helmet beams about the Ra-Twelve’s storage lock.

It was practically empty. So was the big rack that had held the ship’s single big lifeboat. There were some tools scattered around. They kicked at them thoughtfully, looked at each other and started forward through an open door up a dark passageway, switching their lights ahead and from side to side.

There was a locked door which probably led into the Ra-Twelve’s engine section, and then four cabins, each of which had been used by two men. The cabins were in considerable disorder, but from what one could tell in a brief look-around, each of the occupants had found time to pack up about what you would expect a man to take along when he was planning on a lifeboat trip. So whatever had happened probably hadn’t been entirely unexpected.

The mess-room, all tidied up, was next; two locked doors were at the back of it, and also an open entrance to the kitchen and food storage. They glanced around at everything, briefly, and went on to the control-room.

It was considerably bigger than the one on the Asteroid and luxuriously equipped. The pilot’s section was in a transparently walled little office by itself. The instruments showed both Dardrean and Empire markings and instructions. Channok switched the dead drives off first and then reached out, quite automatically, for the spot above the control desk where a light button ought to be—

Light instantly flooded the interior of the Ra-Twelve.

The intruders jumped a foot. It was as if the ship had suddenly come alive around them! Then they looked at each other and grinned.

“Automatic,” Channok sighed.

“Might as well do it the easy way!” Peer admitted. She slid the Ophto Needle she’d half-drawn back into its holster.

* * * *

The Ra-Twelve had eighteen fully charged drive batteries still untouched. With some system of automatic power transfer working, she could have gone cruising along on her course for months to come. However, she hadn’t been cruising, Channok discovered next; the speed controls were set to “Full Emergency”… An empty ship, racing through space till the battery she was operating on went dead—

He shook his head. And then Peer was tapping his arm.

“Look what I found! I think it’s her log!”

It was a flat steel box with an illuminated tape at its front end, on which a date was printed. A line of spidery Dardrean script was engraved on a plate on the top of the box.

“Ra-Twelve,” Peer translated. “That’s her name.”

“So it’s a Dardrean ship! But they’re using the Empire calendar,” Channok pointed out, “which would make it an Empire crew… How do you work this thing? If it is her log, it might give us an idea of what’s happened.”

“Afterwards, Channy! I just found another door leading off the other end of the control room—”

The door opened into a second passage, parallel to the one by which they had come forward, but only half as long and very dimly lit. Filled with uneasy speculations, Channok forgot his own instructions and let Peer take the lead.

“More cabins!” her voice said, just as he became aware of the wrecked doorframe out of which the light was spilling ahead of her.

A woman had been using that cabin. A woman who had liked beautiful and expensive things, judging by what was strewn about. It looked, Channok thought, as if she hadn’t had time to finish her packing.

“Her spacesuit’s gone, though,” Peer’s voice announced from the interior of a disordered closet.

Channok was inspecting the door. This was the first indication that there had been any violence connected with whatever had happened on the Ra-Twelve. The door had been locked from without and literally ripped open from within by a stream of incandescence played on it by a gun held probably not much more than a foot away. That woman had wanted out in an awful hurry!

Peer came over to watch him. He couldn’t quite read her expression, but he had a notion she wanted to bawl.

“Let’s take a quick look at the rest of it and get back to the Asteroid,” he suggested, somewhat disturbed himself. “We ought to talk this over.”

The one remaining cabin lay just beyond the point where the passage angled back into the ship. There was light in that one, too, and the door was half open. Channok got there first and pushed it open a little farther. Then he stood frozen in the door-frame for a moment.

“What’s stopping you?” Peer inquired impatiently, poking his ribs from behind.

He stepped back into the passage, pulled the door shut all the way, scooped her up and heaved her to his shoulder. His space-boots felt like iron anchors as he clunk-clunked hastily back through the passages to the derelict’s lock. There was nothing definite to run from any more; but he knew now what had happened on the Ra-Twelve, and he felt nightmare pacing after him all the way.

He crossed to the Asteroid’s control room lock in a jump, without bothering with his jets.

CLOSE the outer lock!” he told Peer hoarsely, reaching up for the switch marked “Decontaminant” above him.

A fourfold spray of yellowish Killall was misting the trapped air in the lock about them an instant later.

“What was it?” Peer’s voice came out of the fog.

“Antibiotic,” Channok said, his scalp still crawling. “What you—what voyageurs call a lich, I think. I don’t know that kind. But it got the guy in that last cabin.”

The occupant of the last cabin had looked as if somebody had used a particularly vicious sort of acid gun on him, which somehow had missed damaging his clothing. To the grisly class of life-forms that produced that effect, an ordinary spacesuit offered exactly no resistance.

“A lich can’t last more than an hour or so in space, Channy,” Peer’s voice came shakily after a pause. “It’s a pretty awful way to get it, but that stuff over there must have been dead for a long time now.”

“I know,” said Channok. He hesitated, and then cut off the Killall spray and started the blowers to clear the lock. “I guess I just panicked for a moment. But I’m going to go over that ship with decontaminant before we do any more investigating! And meanwhile you’d better get in a few hours of sleep!”

“Wouldn’t hurt any,” Peer agreed. “How do you suppose the lich got on board?”

He could tell her that. He’d seen a heavy, steel-framed glassite container in a corner of the cabin, opened. They must have been transporting some virulent form of antibiotic; and there might have been an accident—

Five hours later, they had come to the conclusion that it had been no accident. Four hours of that time, Channok had been engaged in disinfecting the Ra-Twelve, even her engine sections. He’d given the one man left on board space-burial in one of the Asteroid’s steel cargo crates. The crate hadn’t been launched very far and presently hung suspended some eighty yards above the two ships, visible as a black oblong that obscured the stars behind it.

It and its contents were one of the reasons Channok was anxious to get done with the job of salvaging the Ra-Twelve. She was a stream-lined, beautiful ship; but after what had happened, he knew he would never be able to work up any liking for her. She seemed to be waiting sullenly and silently for a chance to deal with the two humans who had dared come on board her again.

He sealed her up presently, filled her with a fresh airmix and, having once more checked everything he could think of, let Peer come over again for a final briefing on their run to Old Nameless.

Peer wandered promptly into the cabin where the dead man had been and there discovered the wall-safe.

CHAPTER III

She called him. He couldn’t imagine how he had overlooked it. Perhaps because it was so obviously there! It was an ordinary enough safe, from what they could see of the front of it; and there was a tiny key in its lock.

They looked at it thoughtfully. “You didn’t try to open it, did you?” Channok inquired. “No,” said Peer; “because—”

“That’s what I was thinking,” Channok admitted.

There had been, they had decided, at least two groups working against each other in the ship. The dead man had been in charge of the antibiotic. Perhaps the woman had been on his side, perhaps not. But the eight other men had acted together and had controlled the ship. What action or threat of theirs had caused the dead man to release his terrible weapon would be hard to discover now. But he had done it, and the eight men had abandoned the Ra-Twelve promptly, leaving the woman locked in her cabin…

It looked pretty much as if she had been the one who had switched the drives to full speed—before jumping out into space. A pretty tough, desperate lot all around, in Channok’s opinion. The Ra-Twelve’s log offered the information that they had left Dardrea three calendric days earlier, but had been of no further help in identifying crew or passengers. That most of them were professional criminals, however, seemed a pretty safe bet—as Peer had pointed out, in voyageur terms, amateurs didn’t play around with taboo-weapons like a bottled lich!

Also, amateurs—Peer and Channok, for example—could have sense enough not to blunder into a booby-trap…

* * * *

“He’d know, of course,” Channok said reflectively, “that everybody would be wondering what’s hidden in that safe! And it could be anything up to and including full instructions on how to set up an artificial culture of antibiotics. Plenty of governments would pay twenty times what the Ra-Twelve is worth as salvage for that kind of information. But it’s nothing we need to know.”

“Not that bad,” Peer agreed.

“And the guy who opens that wall-safe had better be an armaments expert! Which we’re not. But now, crew-member Peer, if we want to get Santis’ cargo cached on Old Nameless before I fall asleep, we ought to get started. Idle curiosity is something we can satisfy some other time.”

“Two hours past your sleep-period right now!” said Peer, glancing at her wrist-watch. “Tsk, tsk! That always makes you so grouchy.”

Half an hour later, they were on their way—Channok in the Ra-Twelve, Peer in the Asteroid, keeping as close to each other as two ships in flight could safely get. With the red glare of the Old Nameless sun a trifle off-center before him, Channok settled down in the most comfortable pilot-seat he’d ever found on any ship and decided he could relax a trifle. Peer was obviously having a wonderful time doing her first solo-piloting job on a ship of the Asteroid’s size; and since she’d run and landed the Asteroid any number of times under his supervision, he wasn’t worried about her ability to handle it. However, he continued to check in on her over the communicators every five minutes or so, and grinned at the brisk, spacemanlike replies he got in return. Crew-member Peer was on her best behavior right now!

By and by, then—he couldn’t have said just when it started—Channok began to realize that some very odd things were happening around him—

* * * *

It appeared that the Thing he had put out for burial in a space-crate hadn’t liked the idea of being left alone. So it was following him.

Channok decided uneasily that it might be best to ignore it. But it kept coming closer and closer until, finally, the crate was floating just outside the Ra-Twelve’s control room port, spinning slowly like a running-down top.

The crate stayed shut, but he knew the Thing inside it was watching him.

“That’s my ship,” the Thing remarked presently.

Channok ignored it. “And you’re all alone,” said the Thing. “No, I’m not!” said Channok. “Peer’s with me.”

“Peer’s gone back to Santis,” said the Thing. “You’re all alone! Except,” it added, “for me.”

“Well, good-by!” Channok said firmly. There was no point in getting too chummy with it. He punched the Ra-Twelve’s drives down as far as they would go, and the crate vanished.

How that ship could travel! Nothing could hope to keep up with him now—except, perhaps, that round, red glare of light just behind the Ra-Twelve.

That was actually overtaking him, and fast. It was coming up like a cosmic police-ship, with a huge, hollow noise rushing before it. Channok listened apprehensively. Suddenly, there were words:

“WHOO-WHOOO!” it howled. “This is the Space Ghost!”

He shot up out of his chair like a jabbed cat, knocking it over, and glared around.

The Ra-Twelve’s control room lay brightly lit and silent behind him.

“Ha-ha!” Peer’s chuckle came from the communicator. “That woke you up, I bet! Was that you that fell over?”

“Aw-awk!” breathed Channok. Articulation came back to him. “All right, crew-member Peer! Just wait till we get to Old Nameless! I’ll fix you good!”

“Shall I tell you the story now about the Horror Ship from Mizar?” Peer inquired intrepidly.

“Go right ahead,” Channok challenged, righting his chair and settling back into it. “You can’t scare me with that sort of stuff!” He began checking their position.

He must have been asleep for quite a while! The Nameless System was less than two hours ahead now. He switched on the front screen; and the sun swam up like a big, glowing coal before him. He began checking for the seventh planet.

“Well,” he reminded the communicator grimly, “you were going to tell me a story.”

The communicator remained silent a moment.

“I don’t think I will, anyway,” Peer said then, rather quietly.

“Why not?” Channok inquired, getting his screen-viewer disentangled from a meteor-belt in the Nameless System.

“I made that Space Ghost too good!” whispered Peer. “I’m getting scared myself now.”

“Aha!” said Channok. “See what behaving like that will get you?” He got Old Nameless VII into the viewer.

The communicator remained still. He looked over at it.

“Of course, there’s really nothing to be scared of!” he added reassuringly.

“How do you know?” quavered Peer.

“I’m all alone.”

“Nonsense!” Channok said heartily. “I can see the Asteroid right over there on the screen! You can see me, can’t you?”

“Sure,” said Peer. “That’s a long way off, though. You couldn’t do anything!”

“It’s not safe for two ships to travel much closer together,” Channok reminded her. “We’re only two hours from Old Nameless right now—I’m already focussed on it.”

“I’ve been focussed on it for an hour,” said Peer. “While you were snoring,” she added. “Two hours is an awful long time!”

“Tell you what,” suggested Channok. “I’ll race you to it. The Ra-Twelve’s a mighty fast boat—” He checked himself. He’d only dreamed that, after all.

“Let’s go!” Peer said briefly.

HE LET PEER STAY just ahead of him all the way in, though the streamlined derelict probably could have flown rings around the Asteroid, at that. Just an hour later, they went around Old Nameless VII twice, braking down, and then coasted into its atmosphere on their secondary drives.

“That’s the place,” Peer’s voice said suddenly. “I can see the old Mound in the plain! In the evening strip, Channy—that straight-up cliff!”

He set the Ra-Twelve down first, at the base of a mountain that reared up almost vertically for eighteen thousand feet or so out of a flat, dimly-lit stretch of rocky desert land.

The Asteroid came down in a very neat landing, two hundred yards away. He got there on the run, just as the front lock opened. Peer came tumbling out of it into his arms and hung on fiercely, while her skipper hugged her.

“Let that scare be a lesson to you!” he remarked when he set her down.

“It certainly will,” said Peer, still clutching his arm as they started over to the Ra-Twelve. “That old Space Ghost had me going!”

“Me, too,” he confessed; “just for a moment, anyway! Well, let’s get busy.”

They went over the Ra-Twelve again from bow to stern, to make sure there was nothing they would want to take along immediately, and found there wasn’t. They gave the unopened wall-safe a last calculating regard, and decided once more that they’d better not. Then they shut off everything, closed the front lock behind them and safetied it with the dock bolts.

The plain was darkening when they came out, but the top of the mountain still glowed with red light. They climbed into the Asteroid, and Channok closed the lock. He started for the control desk then; but Peer beat him to it and anchored herself into the seat of command with hands, knees and feet. It became apparent almost at once that he couldn’t get her out of it without running the risk of pulling off her head.

“Now look here, crew-member Peer,” he said persuasively, “you know good and well that if these top-heavy cargo crates have one weakness, it’s the take-off!”

“It could be the pilot, too,” Peer said meaningly. “I’ve been studying the manual, and I’ve watched you do it. It’s my turn now.”

He considered her thoughtfully.

“Suppose you die of old age, all of a sudden?” argued Peer. “Wouldn’t want me to sit here alone without knowing even how to take her off, would you?”

That did it.

“Go ahead,” said Channok with dignity, taking a position back of the chair. “Go right ahead! This decrepit old man of twenty-eight is going to stand right here and laugh himself sick!”

“You’ll be sick, all right,” promised Peer. “But it won’t be from laughing! I’ll read that chapter out of the manual to you sometime.”

She had studied it, too, he decided. She sat perched forward on the edge of the chair, alert and cocky, and went through the starting operations without hitch or hesitation. The Asteroid rumbled beneath them, briefly building up power…

Channok braced himself—

CHAPTER IV

For the next few seconds, the question seemed to be whether they’d pile into the plain or the mountain first; and, for another improbable moment, they were distinctly skidding along upside down. Then Peer got them straightened out, and they soared up rapidly into the night sky above Old Nameless.

Channok’s hair settled slowly back into place.

Peer looked around at him, puzzled and rather pale.

“That’s not the way it said in the manual!” she stated.

Channok whooped. Then he sat down on the floor, bent over and yelled.

When he got around to wiping the tears from his eyes, Peer was looking down at him disgustedly from the control chair.

“It wasn’t the way it said in the manual!” she repeated firmly. “We’re going to have to have this old crate overhauled before she’ll be safe to fly—and if you weren’t my husband, I’d really let you have it now!”

He stood up, muttering some sort of apology.

“I’ve done some just as bad!” he assured her.

“Hum!” said Peer coldly, studying Old Nameless in the screen below them. It seemed safe to pat her on the head then, but he kept his hand well out of biting range.

“We’d better get back to that mountain and bury the Ra-Twelve before it gets too dark to find the spot,” he suggested.

“It’s still just in sight,” said Peer. “You get the guns ready, and I’ll run us past it slowly.”

Spaceships being what they were, there wasn’t much ceremony about caching the Ra-Twelve. Channok got the bow-turret out; and as Peer ran the Asteroid slowly along the mountainside a few hundred feet above the Ra-Twelve, he cut a jagged line into the rock with the gun’s twin beams. A few dozen tons of rock came thundering down on the Ra-Twelve.

They came back from the other side, a little higher up, and he loosened it some more. This time, it looked as if a sizable section of the mountain were descending; and when the dust had settled the Ra-Twelve was fifty feet under a sloping pile of very natural-looking debris. To get her out again, they’d only have to cut a path down to her lock and start her drives.

She’d come out of the stuff then, like a trout breaking water…

* * * *

Satisfied, they went off and got the Asteroid on an orbit around Old Nameless, not too far out. Peer had assured Channok that Santis’ investigations had proved the planet safe for human beings, so it probably was. But he knew he’d feel more comfortable if they put in their sleep-periods outside its atmosphere.

Bathed in the dismal light of its giant sun, Old Nameless looked like a desolate backyard of Hell. It was rocky, sandy, apparently waterless and lifeless and splotched with pale stretches of dry salt seas. Incongruously delicate auroras went crawling about its poles, like lopsided haloes circling a squat, brooding demon.

It wasn’t, Channok decided, the kind of planet he would have stopped at of his own accord, for any purpose.

* * * *

The cliff against which they had buried the Ra-Twelve was the loftiest section of an almost unbroken chain of mountains, surrounding the roughly circular hundred-mile plain, which was littered with beds of boulders and sandhills, like a moon crater. What Peer had referred to as the “Mound” lay approximately at the center of the plain. It turned out, next morning, to be a heavily weathered, dome-shaped structure half a mile high and five miles across, which gave the impression that all but the top tenth of a giant’s skull had been buried in the sand, dented here and there with massive hammers, and sprinkled thickly with rock dust. It was obviously an artifact—constructed with hundred-foot bricks! As the Asteroid drifted down closer to it, Channok became interested.

“Who built it?” he asked. Peer shrugged. She didn’t know. “Santis spent a few hours jetting around the edges of it once,” she said. “But he wouldn’t tell us much; and, afterwards, he wouldn’t let us get nearer than a mile to it. He didn’t go back himself, either—said it was dangerous to get too close!”

It didn’t look dangerous. But fifty thousand years ago, it might have been a fortress of some sort.

“You oughtn’t to be flying so low over it, even!” Peer said warningly. “Right in the middle on top is where it’s the most dangerous, Santis said!”

Channok didn’t argue the matter—they had to get Santis’ special cargo cached and off their hands first, anyway. He lifted the Asteroid a mile or so and then brought her down a couple of miles beyond the Mound, at the point Peer had designated.

They got out of the ship and gazed about the broken, rocky plain. The red light of the Nameless Sun was spilling across it in what passed for morning on this world. In it, the black mountain chains rearing about the horizon and the craggy waves of flat land had the general effect of a bomb-shattered and slowly burning city. Far off to their left, he could see the upper half of the towering precipice which marked the Ra-Twelve’s resting-place.

“How long a time did you say you spent here?” he asked.

Peer reflected. “About two Terra-months, I guess. I’m not sure, though. That was a long time ago. My youngest brother Dobby wasn’t born yet.”

He shook his head. “What a spot for a nice family picnic!”

“It wasn’t a picnic,” Peer said. “But my kid brother Wilf and I had a lot of fun anyway, just running around and teasing the ghouls. I guess you don’t notice so much what a place looks like when you’re little.”

“Teasing the what?”

“Ghouls,” said Peer carelessly.

He looked at her suspiciously; but she seemed to be studying the nearby terrain for a good spot to start digging.

“And what were Santis and your mother doing?” he inquired.

“They were looking for some sort of mineral deposit on Old Nameless; I forget just what. How about that spot—just under that little overhang? It looks like good, solid top-rock.”

Channok agreed it was just the place. He’d got a drilling attachment mounted to the Asteroid’s small all-purpose tractor; and now he went back and ran the machine down the ramp from the storage lock. He ordered Peer, who wanted to help, up a rock about twenty feet over-head, where she perched looking like an indignant elf, out of reach of any stray puffs of the drill-blast. Then he started running a slanting, narrow tunnel down under the overhang.

Half an hour later, when he backed the tractor out of the tunnel, pushing a pile of cooking slag behind him, he saw her standing up on the rock with a small stun-gun in her hand. She beckoned to him.

Channok pulled off his breather-mask, shut off the tractor, and jumped from the saddle.

“What is it?” he called anxiously, trotting towards her, while the machine’s clacking and roaring subsided.

“Some of those ghouls!” Peer called back. “Climb up here and I’ll show you.” She didn’t seem worried.

“They’ve ducked behind those rocks now,” she said as he clambered up beside her; “but they won’t stay there long. They’re curious, and I think some of them remember the time we were here before.”

“Are they dangerous?” he inquired, patting his holstered set of heavy-duty Reaper guns.

“No,” said Peer. “They look sort of awful, but you mustn’t shoot them! If they get inside of thirty feet I’ll hit them in the stomach with a stunner. They grunt then and run. Santis said that was the right way to teach them not to get too nosey.”

They waited a moment in silence, scanning the rocks.

Then Channok started violently.

“Holy Satellites!” he swore, his hair bristling.

A big, dead-white shape had popped up springily on a rock about fifty feet away, stared at him for an instant out of eyes like grey glass-platters, and popped down out of sight again. Awful was right!

“Aha!” crew-member Peer gloated, grinning. “You shouldn’t have said that! Tonight you’ve got to let me soap out your mouth!”

A light dawned gradually.

“You did it on purpose!” he accused her. “You knew I’d say something like that the first time I saw one!”

Peer didn’t deny it.

“It’s the soap for you, just the same!” she shrugged. “People ought to have some self-control—that’s what you said! Look, there, another one now—no, two!”

CHAPTER V

When he came up for lunch, he found about fifty ghouls collected around the area. By that time he had dug the cache, steel-lined it, disinfected it and installed preservatives, a humidifier and a dowser plate. Loading it up would take most of the rest of the day.

He avoided looking at the local population as much as he could while he ate. However, the occasional glimpses he got suggested that the Nameless System had made a half-hearted and badly botched attempt at developing its own type of humanoid inhabitant. They had extremely capable looking jaws, at any rate, and their wide, lipless mouths were wreathed in perpetual idiot grins. The most completely disagreeable parts of them, Channok decided, were the enormous, red-nailed hands and feet. Like fat, white gargoyles, they sat perched around the tops of the rocks in a wide circle and just stared.

“Sloppy-looking things,” he remarked, noticing Peer’s observant eyes on him. “But at least they’re not trying to strike up a conversation!”

“They never say anything until you hit them in the stomach with a stunner,” she informed him. “Then they just grunt and run.”

“Sure they mightn’t get mean about that? The smallest of this lot looks plenty big enough to take us both apart.”

Peer laughed. “All of them together wouldn’t try it! They’re real yellow. Wilf got mad at a couple of ’em once and ran ’em halfway over to the Mound before mother caught up with him and stopped him. Wilf had his blood up, that time!”

“Maybe the ghouls built the Mound,” Channok suggested. “Their great-great-ancestors, anyway.”

“They won’t go near it now,” Peer said, following his gaze. “They’re scared of that, too!”

They studied the rugged, ungainly slopes of the huge artifact for a moment.

There was something fascinating about it, Channok thought. Perhaps just its size.

“Santis said the plain was the bottom of a sea a while ago,” Peer offered. “So it could have been some sort of sea-things that built it.”

“Any entrances into it?” he asked casually.

“Just one, right at the top.”

“You know,” he said, “I think I’d like to go over and have a look at that thing before we leave.”

“No!” said Peer, alarmed. “You’d better not. Santis said it was dangerous—and there is something there! We saw a light one night.”

“What kind of a light?”

“Like someone walking around the top of it, near that entrance, with a big lamp in his hand,” Peer remembered. “Like he might have been looking for something.”

“Sounds a bit like your old friend, the Space Ghost,” Channok murmured suspiciously.

“No,” Peer grinned. “This was a real light—and we took off the next evening. Santis said it might be as well if we moved somewhere else for a while.”

Channok considered a moment. “Look,” he said finally, “we can do it like this, I’ll jet myself over there and stroll around it a bit in daylight; and if you’re worried, you could hang overhead in the Asteroid with a couple of turrets out. Just in case someone gets tough.”

“I could, maybe,” said Peer, in a tight voice, “but I’m not going to. If you’re going to go walking around there, after all Santis said, I’m going to be walking right behind you!”

“Oh, no, you’re not,” Channok said.

“Oh, yes, I am!” said Peer. “You can’t make me stay here!”

He looked at her in surprise. Her eyes were angry, but her lower lip quivered.

“Hey,” he said, startled. “Maybe I’m being a pig!”

“You sure are!” Peer said, relieved. The lip stopped quivering. “You’re not going over there, then?”

“Not if you feel that way about it,” Channok said. He paused. “I guess,” he admitted awkwardly, “I just didn’t like the idea of Santis flitting around space. Holy Aynstyn knows where, and still putting in his two millicredits worth every so often, through crew-member Peer!”

Peer blew her nose and considered in turn. “Just the same,” she concluded, “when Santis says something like that, it’s a lot better if people do it. Is ‘Holy Aynstyn knows where’ a swear-word?”

“No,” said Channok. “Not exactly.”

* * * *

He’d finished his lunch and was just going to suggest they run the tractor out of the cache and back the few hundred yards to the Asteroid for the first load of Santis’ cargo, when he noticed that all the ghouls had vanished.

He called Peer’s attention to the fact. “Uh-huh,” she said in an absent-minded tone. “They do that sometimes…”

Channok looked at her. She was staring at a high boulder a short distance away, with a queer, intent expression, as if she were deep in thought about something. He hoped she wasn’t still brooding about their little argument—

Then she glanced at him, gave him a sudden grin, swung herself around and slid nimbly off the rock.

“Come on down quick!” she said. “I want to show you something before you get back to work. A ghoul-burrow!”

“A ghoul-burrow?” Channok repeated unenthusiastically.

“Yes, sure!” said Peer impatiently. “They’re cute! They’re all lined with glass or something.” She spread her arms wide. “Jump, and I’ll catch you!”

Channok laughed, flopped over on his stomach with his legs over the edge of the rock, and slid down in a fair imitation of Peer’s nonchalant style of descent, spraining his ankle only a little. Well, he hadn’t grown up skipping from craggy moon to Asteroid to heavy-planet to whatnot like she had…

* * * *

They threaded their way about the rocks to the spot she had been studying. She explained that he’d have to climb into the burrow to get a good idea of what it was like.

“Well, look now, Peer!” Channok protested, staring into the big, round hole that slanted downwards under a big boulder—it did seem to be lined with black glass or some similar stuff. “That cave’s got ‘No Trespassing’ written all over it. Supposing I slide down a half a mile and land in a mess of ghouls!”

“No, you won’t,” Peer said hurriedly. “It goes level right away, and they’re never more than thirty feet long. And the ghoul’s out—there’s never more than one to a burrow; and I saw this one pop out and run off just before we started here! You’re not scared, are you? Wilf and I crawled in and out of hundreds of them!”

“Well, just for a moment then,” said Channok resignedly.

He got down on hands and knees and crept into the tunnel. After about six feet, he stopped and found he could turn around, without too much trouble. “Peer?” he called back.

“Yes?” said Peer.

“How can I see anything here,” Channok demanded peevishly, “when it’s all dark?”

“Well, you’re in far enough now,” said Peer, who had sat down before the entrance of the tunnel and was looking in after him. “And now I’ve got to ask you to do something! You know how I always promptly carry out any orders you give me, like getting in my full sleep-period and all?” she added anxiously.

“No, you do not!” Channok stated flatly, resting on his elbows. “Half the time I practically have to drag you to the cabin. Anyway, what’s that got to do with—”

“It’s like this,” Peer said desperately. She glanced up for a moment, as if she had caught sight of something in the dim red sky overhead. “You’ve got to stay in there a while, Channy!”

“Eh?” said Channok.

“When those ghouls pop out of sight in daytime like that, it’s because there’s a ship or something coming.”

“Peer, are you crazy? A ship! Who—I’m coming right out!”

“Stay there, Channy! It’s hanging over the Asteroid right now. A big lifeboat with its guns out—it must be those men from the Ra-Twelve! They must have had a tracer of some sort on her!”

“Then get in here quick, Peer!” Channok choked, hauling out one of the Reapers. “You know good and well that bunch would kill a woman as soon as a man!”

“They’ve already seen me—I wanted them to,” Peer informed him. She was talking out of the side of her mouth, looking straight ahead of her, away from the cave. “I’m not going to be a woman. I’m going to be a dumb little girl, ordinary size. I can pull that one off any time!”

“But—”

“They’ll want to ask questions. I think I can get them to send that lifeboat away. We can’t fight that, Channy; it’s a regular armed launch! Santis says you can always get the other side to split its forces, if you’re smart about it.”

“But how—”

“And then, when I yell ‘Here we go!’ then you pop out. That’ll be the right moment—” She stood up suddenly. “We can’t talk any more! They’re getting close—” She vanished with that from before the mouth of the burrow.

“Hold on there!” a voice yelled in the distance a few seconds later, as Channok came crawling clumsily up the glassy floor of the tunnel, hampered by the Reaper he still clutched in one hand. It seemed to come from up in the air, and it was using the Empire’s universal dialect.

Peer’s footsteps stopped abruptly.

“Who you people?” her voice screeched in shrill alarm. “You cops? I ain’t done nothing!”

CHAPTER VI

“And just look at those guns she’s carrying!” the deeper of the two strange voices commented. “The real stuff, too—a stunner and an Ophto Needle! Better get them from her. If it isn’t a baby Flauval!”

“I didn’t shoot nobody lately!” Peer said, trembly-voiced.

“No, and you ain’t going to shoot nobody either!” the other strange voice mimicked her. That one was high-pitched and thin, with a pronounced nasal twang to it. “Chief, if there’re kids with them, it’s just a bunch of space-rats that happened along. It couldn’t be Flauval!”

“I’d say ‘it couldn’t be Flauval’, if we’d found her dead in her cabin,” the deep voice said irritably. “But that door was burned out from inside—and somebody ditched the Ra-Twelve on this clod!” It sounded as if the discovery of Peer had interrupted an argument between them.

“I still can’t see how she got out,” Nasal-voice Ezeff said sullenly. “She must have been sleeping in her spacesuit. We were out of the ship thirty seconds after I slap-welded that lock across her door! She must have felt the boat leaving and started burning her way out the same instant—”

“It doesn’t matter how she did it,” said the deep voice. Apparently, it belonged to someone with authority. “If Flauval could think and move fast enough to switch the drives to Full Emergency and still get alive out of a ship full of the Yomm, she could cheat space, too! She always did have the luck of the devil. If we’d had just that minute to spare before leaving, to make sure—”

It paused a moment and resumed gloomily: “That stubborn old maniac of a Koyle—‘I’m the Duke’s man, sir!’ Committing suicide—like that—so no one else would get control of the Yomm! If we hadn’t managed to start the launch’s locators in time… Well, I hope I’ll never have to sweat out another four days like the last. And now we still have to find whoever got Koyle’s records!”

“Flauval ain’t here,” Peer offered at that point, brightly.

There was a pause. It seemed that the two newcomers must have almost forgotten their prisoner for a moment.

“What was that you said, kid?” Nasal-voice inquired carefully.

“Those space-rats are all half crazy,” the deep voice said contemptuously. “She doesn’t know what we’re talking about.”

“Sure I know!” Peer said indignantly. “You was talking about Flauval. It’s Wilf that’s the crazy one—I ain’t! And she ain’t here. Flauval.”

“She ain’t, eh?” Nasal-voice said, with speculative alertness.

“No, sir,” Peer said, timid again. “She’s went with the rest of’m.”

Both voices swore together in startled shock.

“Where are they?” the deep voice demanded. “Hiding on the ship?”

“No, sir,” quavered Peer. “It’s just me on the ship, till they come back.”

“You mean,” the deep voice said, with strained patience, “you’re supposed to be on the ship?”

“Yes, sir,” said Peer. She added in a guilty mutter, “Sleepin’…”

“Where did the others go?” Nasal-voice inquired sharply.

“But I ain’t tired,” said Peer. “Well, with the boxes and stuff! What Flauval wants buried.”

There was another duet of exclamations which Channok, at almost any other time, would have considered highly unsuitable for Peer’s ears. Right now, it escaped his attention.

“She’s got Koyle’s records!” stated the deep voice then.

“What’s in those boxes?” Nasal-voice snapped.

“D-d-don’t shake me!” wept Peer. “Papers and stuff—I don’t know. They don’t never tell me nothing,” she wailed, “because I’m just a little girl!”

“Yes, you’re just a little girl,” said Nasal-voice, exasperated. “You’re not going to get much bigger either.”

“Cut that,” said the deep voice. “No sense scaring the kid.”

“Well, you’re not figuring on taking them back, are you?” Nasal-voice inquired.

“No. Just Flauval. The colonel will be glad to chat with Flauval a bit, now that she’s turned up alive again. Koyle may have told her plenty before we soured him on her. But there’s no point in making the rest of them desperate. It’s easier when they surrender.”

There was a short pause. Then the deep voice addressed Peer with a sort of amiable gruffness:

* * * *

“So they all went off to bury the boxes, but you don’t know where they went—is that it, little girl?”

“Oh, sure!” Peer said, anxious to please. “Yes, sir! I know that!”

“WHERE?” said both voices together, chorusing for the third time.

“It’s that big Mound over there,” Peer said; and Channok started nervously. “It’s got a big door on top. No,” she added, “I guess you can’t see from down here—and you can’t see from the ship. That’s why I came out. To watch for’m. But you can see it plain from the top of the rocks.”

“That would be the old reservoir or whatever it was we passed back there,” said the deep voice.

“That’s right,” said Peer. “That’s just what Flauval called it at lunch! The word you said. There was water there once, she said. They flew the boxes over with jets, but they’ll be back before it’s dark, they said.”

There was a brief silence.

“Scares me when it’s dark, it does!” grumbled the idiot-child.

“Well, that ties it up!” the deep voice said, satisfied. “It’s the exact kind of stunt Flauval would try. But she’s outsmarted herself, this time!”

“How do you figure on handling it?” Nasal-voice inquired.

“Get up on one of those rocks with the kid where you can watch both that ‘mound’ and the lock of their ship. Yes, I know it’s more trouble that way—but don’t, ah, do anything conclusive about the—uh—aforementioned, before we’ve corralled the rest! Much more useful while capable of inhaling. Hostage possibilities. Inducement to surrender!”

“Uh-huh,” Nasal-voice said comprehendingly.

“Yes, sir!” added Peer.

There was another short pause.

“Might as well skip the circumlocutions,” the deep voice continued. “Barely human! I’ll send a couple of men through the ship and, if it’s empty, I’ll leave one of them in the forward lock where you can see him. That’s just in case anyone slips past us and comes back. The rest of us will go over to the reservoir in the launch. If the entrance is where she says it is, we’ve got them bottled. If it looks right, we’ll go in.”

“That’ll be only four of you,” said Nasal-voice. “No; three—you’re keeping one at the launch-guns, aren’t you?”

“Yes, of course. Hey, little girl—how many are with Flauval?”

“Of us, you mean?” Peer asked.

“Of what else?” snarled Nasal-voice.

“Now don’t get her so scared she can’t talk!” the deep voice reproved. “That’s right, little girl—how many of you?”

“Well, there’s me,” sniffled Peer, “and my old man, and my big brother Dobby. And then there’s Wilf—that’s all. But I don’t like Wilf!”

“I don’t like Wilf either!” agreed Nasal-voice. “Four against three, chief! It might be safer to bring over the two from the Ra-Twelve first—no point in searching her anyway, now that we know where the records are!”

“No,” said the deep voice. “Flauval could just happen to decide to come out in the few minutes we’re gone. It’s sewed up too neatly right now. We’ll have the heavy guns from the launch and we’ll give them a chance to surrender. Flauval’s too intelligent to pass that up—she never stops hoping! The chances are there won’t be any shooting, till, afterwards.”

“Any friends of hers are likely to be tough,” Nasal-voice warned.

“Very tough,” said his chief. “Like the kid there! You worry at the wrong times, my boy. A parcel of space-rats that happened along.” He swore again. “That woman’s unbelievable luck! Well, take care of yourself, Ezeff. I’m off. Keep your eyes open both ways! Just in case—”

CHAPTER VII

There was silence for a moment. Then footsteps came crunching over the rocks towards the ghoul-burrow, and Channok got set. But the footsteps halted a few yards away.

“That’s the one I was sitting on,” Peer volunteered. “Nice, easy one to climb!”

“Yeah, I never saw a nicer looking rock,” Nasal-voice said sourly. “We’ve got to climb it, too! I’m not trying any point-landings with jets. Get on up there then, before I boot you up!”

There were sounds of scrambling. “Don’t you move now!” Peer said suddenly.

“What are you talking about?” demanded Nasal-voice.

“Durn rock come loose!” muttered Peer.

“Near flung me off!”

But Channok, meanwhile, had got the idea and settled back. It was not yet the Right Moment…

* * * *

There were more scrambling sounds and some breathless swearing from Ezeff, who obviously had not spent his formative years in Asteroid-hopping either. But at last all become quiet.

“And here we are!” Peer’s voice floated down clearly. A small chunk of rock dropped right in front of the burrow’s entrance, like a punctuation mark.

“Sit still, blast you!” said Nasal-voice, badly out of breath.

A large, dim shadow swept silently over the ground before the ghoul’s burrow just then. That would be the launch, going towards the Mound. A prolonged silence overhead confirmed the impression.

“They want to give Flauval a surprise?” Peer inquired meekly at last.

Rather startlingly, Nasal-voice laughed.

“They sure do!” he agreed. “That’s a good one! Yes, sir, they sure do!”

“Flauval’s nice, don’t you think?” continued Peer conversationally, picking up courage.

“Depends a lot on how you look at it,” Nasal-voice said dreamily. “She’s a real pretty thing anyhow, that Flauval! Luck of the devil she’s had, too. But it’s got to run out sometime.”

There was another silence. Then Peer remarked:

“Boy, he set that launch down nice! Right quick spang on top of the—what the big guy said it was. On the Mound.”

“We’ve got a good pilot,” Nasal-voice agreed. “Flauval’s going to get her surprise in just a minute now!”

“And there they come out of the launch,” continued Peer. “One, two, three, four. All four of them. Marching right down into the Mound!”

“You’ve got sharp eyes,” Nasal-voice acknowledged. “But that’s funny!” he continued worriedly. “One of them was to stay with the guns.”

“And now look at the launch!” cried Peer in a high, bright voice. “Getting pulled right into the Mound!”

Nasal-voice was making loud, choking sounds.

“What was that?” he screamed then. “What’s happened? What’s that over there?”

“Let go my arm!” cried Peer. “Don’t pull it—you’re pushing me off! Here we go!”

* * * *

A small avalanche of weathered rock came down before the burrow’s mouth as Channok shot out through it into the open. He looked up. In what looked like an inextricable tangle of arms and legs, Peer and Nasal-voice were sliding and scuffling down the steep side of the rock together. Nasal-voice was trying to hang on to the rock, but Peer was hanging on to him and jerking like a hooked fish whenever he got a momentary hold.

She looked down and saw Channok, put her boots into the small of Nasal-voice’s back, pushed off and landed two yards from Channok on hands and feet. He flattened himself back against the boulder, while Nasal-voice skidded down the rest of the way unaided, wisely refraining from triggering his jets. In the position he was in, they simply would have accelerated his descent to a fatal degree.

He arrived more or less on his feet. Peer bounced up and down before him, her finger pointed, like a small lunatic.

“Surprise!” she screamed. “Surprise! Like Flauval got! When you locked her in her cabin and ran off with the launch, so she’d have to jump out into space!”

“That’s right, kid,” Nasal-voice panted softly, fumbling for his gun without taking his eyes off her. He looked somewhat like a white-faced lunatic himself just then. “Don’t get scared, kid! Don’t run off! I won’t shoot.”

He pulled the gun out suddenly.

But Channok had taken two soft steps forward by then, and he had only to swing. The Reaper was clubbed in his right hand, and he brought the butt end down on the top of Nasal-voice Ezeff’s skull-tight flying cap as if he were trying to ram a stake through the surface rock of Old Nameless.

“What happened over there on the Mound?” he inquired in a voice that kept wanting to quaver. He was hurriedly pulling on Nasal-voice’s flight suit.

“Here’s his goggles,” said Peer, also shakily. “Tell you tonight about the Mound. But Santis was right!”

“That’s what it sounded like,” Channok admitted. He slipped on the goggles. “Do I look like this Ezeff now?”

“Not very much,” Peer said doubtfully. “You still got that nose and that jaw. Better hold me close up to your face! I’ll put on a good act.”

“All right. As soon as I set you down in the lock, jump past the guard and yell, or something. If he looks after you, we mightn’t have to kill this one.” He held out his arms. “Hop up! We’d better get started before those last two on the Ra-Twelve decide to come over.”

Peer hopped up. Channok wrapped his right arm carefully around her. They looked at each other thoughtfully for a moment.

“All set?” he asked.

“Sure,” said crew-member Peer. She smiled faintly.

He triggered the jets with his left hand, and they shot upwards. Peer drew a deep breath.

“Quit bossing me around all the time, you big lug!” she yelled suddenly. She reached up for that nose and gave it a good yank.

“All right,” Channok muttered, startled. “You don’t have to be so realistic! He can’t even see us yet!”

“Just because you’re bigger’n me!” shrieked Peer as they soared over the top of the rocks into view of the Asteroid’s lock. She hooked a smart right to Channok’s left ear.

“Cut that out now, Peer!” he ordered futilely.

He was lightly battered all around by the time they reached the Asteroid’s lock, though the act did get them in safely. But then—whether it was the nose or the jaw—the instant he dropped Peer to her feet, the guard stopped laughing and brought a gun out and up faster than Channok ever had seen a man produce one before. However, the Reaper had been ready in his hand all the time; so, with a safe fraction of a second to spare, it talked first—

The glare of the discharge seemed about fifty times brighter than normal.

“Hit the floor, Channy!” he heard Peer’s shout.

He hit it without thought, dropping over the dead guard’s legs…

Sound rammed at him enormously, roared on and began banging itself about and away among distant mountains. The Asteroid’s floor had surged up ponderously, settled back, quivered a bit and become stable again.

“An earthquake,” Channok muttered, sitting up dazedly, “was exactly all we needed right now!”

“That wasn’t any earthquake!” said Peer, standing pale-faced above him. “Get up and look!”

Long veils of stuff, presumably solid chunks of mountain, were drifting down the distant, towering face of the cliff at the foot of which they had buried the Ra-Twelve. Rising to meet them, its source concealed beyond the horizon of the plain, was the slow, grey cloud of some super-explosion.

“I guess,” he said slowly, “one of those two must have got curious about Koyle’s wall-safe!”

“We were pretty smart about that,” nodded Peer.

“We were, for once!” Channok agreed. He was looking around for something to sit down on quietly when he caught sight of the dead guard again. He started violently.

“Almost forgot about him! I guess now I’ll have to bury him, and that Ezeff, the first thing. Maybe this one is carrying something that will show who they were.”

He found something almost instantly—and he was glad then that Peer was still watching the oily writhings of the cloud across the plain. It was in a flat steel case he took out of one of the dead man’s pockets: the identification disk of a member of the Imperial Secret Service—

The Service!

And they would have murdered us, he thought, shocked. They were going to do it!

He turned the guard over on his back.

A big muscular young man with a look of sudden purpose and confidence still fixed on his face. It was the same face as the one on the disk.

Channok put the disk back in its case and shoved the case into the dead man’s pocket. He stood up, feeling rather sick. Peer turned around from the lock and regarded him reflectively for a moment.

“You know, Channy,” she stated carefully, “if you can’t help it, it doesn’t count.”

He looked back at her. “I guess not,” he said—and suddenly, for a moment, he could see four men marching one after the other down into the Mound. “Of course, it doesn’t count!” he told her firmly.

CHAPTER VIII

They worked hard at shifting the cargo into the cache, but the Nameless Sun was beginning to slide down behind the mountains before they were finished. And by the time Channok had rammed the tunnel full of rocks with the tractor and cemented them into a glassy plug with the drill-blast, and scattered a camouflaging mess of boulders over everything, only a foggy red glow over the mountain crests, half obscured by the lingering upper drifts of the explosion of the Ra-Twelve, remained of the day.

There was no moon, but the sky had come full of stars big and little over the opposite section of the plain; and so there was light enough to make out the dark hump of the Mound in the distance. Every time Channok looked in that direction, the low, sinister pile seemed to have edged a little closer; and he looked as often as his work gave him a chance to do it. Santis might have been right in stating that the Mound wasn’t dangerous if you didn’t get too close to it—but the instant he suspected there might be something going on over there, Channok was going to hop off the tractor, grab up Peer and get off Old Nameless at the best speed he and the Asteroid could produce.

However, the Mound remained quiet. With everything done, he gave Peer a last ride back to the Asteroid on the tractor, ran it up the ramp into the storage section and closed the rear lock. Then they discovered they’d left their lunch containers lying among the rocks.

If he’d been alone, Channok would have left them there. But Peer looked so matter-of-fact about it that he detached the tractor’s headlight and started back with her on foot. It was only a couple of hundred yards, and they found the containers without any difficulty. The Mound seemed to have moved a little closer again, but not too much. He gave it only a casual glance this time.

“Where are your friends, the ghouls?” he inquired, shining the light around the rocks as they started back. The grisly creatures had put in a few cautious appearances during the afternoon, but their nerves seemed to have suffered even more than his own from all that had happened.

“The ghouls always hit their burrows at sundown,” Peer explained. “They’re not like the story ones.”

“What do they find to eat around here?” Channok inquired.

“Some sorts of rocks. They’ve got no real teeth but their mouth is like a grinder inside. Most of the rest of their insides, too, Santis said. I had a tame one I used to pitch stones at and he’d snap ’em up. But all that weren’t blue he’d spit out. The blue ones went right down—you could hear them crunching for about a foot.”

“What a diet!” Channok commented. Then he stopped short. “Say, Peer! If they bite like that, they could chew right into our cache!”

“They won’t,” said Peer. “Come on.”

“How do you know?” Channok asked, following her.

“They can’t bite through a good grade of steel-alloy. And they don’t like its taste anyhow. Santis said so.”

* * * *

Well, it had been Santis this and Santis that for quite a while now! Peer’s father seemed to be on record with a definite opinion on just about everything. And what made him think he knew what a ghoul liked to chew on?

Perhaps Channok couldn’t be blamed too much. He was dog-tired and dirty and hungry, He’d killed his first two men that day, and not in fair fight either but with an assassin’s sneak thrusts, from behind and by trickery; and he’d buried them, too. He’d seen the shining ISS disclose itself in action as something very tarnished and ugly, and a salvaged ship worth a fortune go up in a cloud of writhing grey smoke…

There had been a number of other things—close shaves that had felt too close, mostly.

At any rate, Channok stated, in flat unequivocal terms, that he didn’t wish to hear anything else that Santis had said. Not ever!

“You’re taking the wrong attitude,” Peer informed him, frowning. “Santis is a very smart man. He could teach you a lot!”

“What makes you think I want to learn anything from a space-rat?” Channok inquired, exasperated.

Peer stopped short. “That was a dirty thing to say!” she said in a low, furious voice. “I’m not talking to you any more.”

She drew away till there was a space of about six feet between them and marched on briskly towards the Asteroid, looking straight ahead.

Channok had to hurry to keep abreast of her. He watched her in the starlight for a few moments from the corners of his eyes. He probably shouldn’t have used that term—the half-pint did look good and mad!

“Tsk! Tsk!” he said, disturbed.

Peer said nothing. She walked a bit faster. Channok lengthened his stride again.

“Who’s my nice little girl friend?” he inquired wheedlingly.

“Shuddup!” growled Peer.

She climbed into the Asteroid ahead of him and disappeared while he sealed the locks. The control room was dark, but he felt she was around somewhere. He switched on the power and the instruments. Familiar dim pools of green and pink gleamings sprang up in quick sequence like witchfire quivering over the control desk. Perhaps it wasn’t an exceptionally beautiful sight, but it looked homelike to Channok. Like fires lighting up on a hearth.

“Well, let’s see you handle this take-off!” he invited the shadows around him briskly. This time there weren’t any mountains nearby to worry about.

“You handle it,” Peer said from behind his shoulder. “It’s my turn to laugh.”

She did, too, a few minutes later—loud and long! After he’d got over the first shock of narrowly missing the Mound, Channok gave a convincing imitation of a chagrined pilot and indignantly blamed the Asteroid…

* * * *

He’d guided them halfway out of the Nameless System when she came behind the control chair in the dark, wrapped her arms in a stranglehold around his neck, and fondly bit his ear. “Cut it out,” Channok choked.

“Just the same,” stated Peer, loosening her grip a trifle, “you’re not so smart, like Santis is!”

“I’m not, eh?”

“No,” said Peer. “But Santis said you would be some time. “That Channok’s going to make a real spacer!” he said. “Just give him a chance to catch on.”

“Well,” Channok muttered, secretly flattered, “we’ll hope he was right.”

“And, anyway,” said Peer, “I LOVE you just as much!”

“Well, that’s something, too!” Channok admitted. He was beginning to feel very much better.

“And guess what I’ve got here,” Peer said tenderly.

“What?”

“A nice, soapy cloth. For what you said when you saw the first ghoul. So just open that big trap right up now, Channy!”

He couldn’t tell in the dark; but it tasted like she’d taken the trouble to mix something extra foul into the soap lather, too.

“And after you’ve stopped spitting bubbles,” said crew-member Peer, who was switching on all lights to observe that part of the business, “I’ll tell you what I saw on the Mound.”

Channok shuddered.

“If you don’t mind, Peer,” he suggested soapily, “let’s wait with that till we’re a lightyear or two farther out!”

THE DEEPS, by Keith Roberts

Originally published in 1966. Copyright © 1966 by Keith Roberts.

It was bound to happen. For generations, the chain reaction of population explosion had been going on and on. While medical skill grew, while longevity increased nearly beyond belief, humankind everywhere breed and bred and bred. Houses, estates, factories to serve the vast new economies spread and sprawled, twitching out across good land and bad, climbing mountains, suffocating rivers. Town touched town, touched town; the pink octopus tentacles of houses grew and thickened as the machines graded and scraped and hammered. Green belts and parks vanished, fields were swallowed overnight. Here and there voices were raised; the voices of economists, scientists, philosophers, even at last theologians. But they were swamped in the great universal cry.

Give us room… The shout went up night and day from a hundred million throats, the slogan blared from loudspeakers, blazed from hoardings as political parties jockeyed for power. Increasingly, room was what they promised. Room for more houses, more estates, room to rear new families that cried in their turn for room and still more room…

All over the world countrysides vanished, eaten. Wars flared as nations bit at each other’s borders, but still the Cities grew. The huge estates were searched, forced to yield their last acres, their secret gardens. And all for nothing, it seemed, because still the cry heard for room. Skyscrapers soared, fifty stories, seventy, a hundred, and it was not enough. The Cities bulged outward, noisy with music and the sound of human life. A hundred yards thick they were and blaring with light, complex with stack on twinkling stack of avenues. Raucous, Technicolored, sleepless. Everywhere, they reached the sea.

And they could not stop. The pressure, the need for room, pushed them out again. The houses sank like silver bells into blueness and quiet, and at last there was room enough.

* * * *

Mary Franklin sat in the living area of her bungalow, knitting quiet for once in her lap, and tried to watch the telscreen at the other side of the room. Across her line of sight Jen passed scuttling, bare feet scuffing the carpet, the straps of her lung flapping round her shoulders. Across and back, then across again, frantic now, going to a party at the Belmonts on the other side of town, and late. Mary raised her eyes to heaven, represented temporarily by a curved steel shell. She concentrated on the screen where a demonstrator, in vivid colour, divulged to her audience the inner secrets of a variant of crawfish mayonnaise. Jen yelped something inaudible from the bedroom, thumped the wall. (Why…?) She padded across again and back. Mary raised her voice suddenly.

“Jen…?”

Thump. Mumble.

“Jen!”

“Mummy, I can’t find my…” Indistinguishable.

“Jen, you’re not to be late. No more than nine, understand?”

“Yes…”

“And for land’s sake child, put something on…”

“Yes, Mummy…” That in a high voice, wearily. And almost instantly the roar of the sealock. Mary got up in quick rage, walked halfway to the radio gear, changed her mind, went back to her chair. Jen, she knew well enough, would conveniently have forgotten her phone-leads.

She kicked the channel switch irritably in passing; the picture on the wallscreen jumped and altered. The set began to disgorge a Western; Mary lay back, eyes nearly shut, half her mind in the ancient film and half on the blueness overhead. The endless blue.

Jen, defiantly bare, hung twenty feet above the hemispherical roof of her home. Bubbles from her breathing rose in a series of shimmering, dimly seen sickles to the Surface overhead. As always, the sea had made her forget her compulsion to hurry; she began to paddle slowly, feet in their long fins catching and driving back wedges of water. As she moved she looked below her, at the lines of domes with their neat, almost suburban gardens of waving weed. She saw the misty squares of their windows, the brighter greeny-blue globes of the streetlighting swung from thin wires above the ocean bed. Warnings were hung on long streamers of wires for swimmers; there were well-marked lanes, corresponding to the streets of the city complexes Jen barely remembered, but many people ignored them. And most of the children. Technically she was out of bounds now, gliding along like this only a few feet from Surface.

Visibility was good tonight; onshore winds could kick up a smother that lasted for days, but there had been nearly a week of calm. Jen could make out through the almost haze-free water the faint shimmer where the engineers, her father among them, were working on the new extension to the theatre and civic centre. When it was finished, the installation would be the pride of Settlement Eighty, the town its inhabitants called Oceanville. There were a dozen other Oceanvilles scattered up and down this one stretch of coast, hundreds possibly in all the seas of the world. She shivered slightly although the water was not cold.

Beyond the lights, beyond where the divers floated round the tall steel skeletons, were long sloping stretches where the town buildings petered out and the coral and sand of the inshore waters gave place to the silt of real ocean. There was a graveyard, tiny as yet, where a few bodies lay in their metal cans; beyond again, past grey Junes where the light faded imperceptibly to navy blue and black, were the Deeps. Above anything else Jen liked to go to the new buildings, sit on one of the girders, look down into the vagueness that was the proper sea, bottomless and immense. Just stare, and listen, and wait. She would go there tonight maybe, after the party.

She let herself relax, holding air in her lungs to increase buoyancy. Her body floated upward, legs and arms slack; Surface appeared above her, a faintly luminous upside-down plain. Points of light sparkled where the moon-track refracted into the depths. Jen wagged lazily with her flippers, once, twice; her body broke the Surface and she felt herself lifted by the slight action of the waves.

She looked round. The sea was flatly calm, dark at the horizon, glinting with bluish swirls of phosphorescence round her shoulders and neck. When she looked closely, she could see the organisms that made the light floating in it like grains of brightness. Way off was the orange cloud reflection over the land, where the universal Cities bawled and yammered. Jen lay still, supported by the water. Once she would have pulled her mask aside, breathed in the wet salt of ordinary air. Now she felt no desire to do so. She turned slowly treading water, took a last look at the moon, and dived. Her heel stirred up a momentary flash of light Once below she moved powerfully, stroking with her arms She arrowed down to West Terrace where the Belmonts had their dome. The party would be in full swing already; she was missing good dancing time.

* * * *

Hours later. Mary prodded one of her rare cigarettes from the wall dispenser. She frowned a little, drawing in smoke and letting it dribble from her nostrils She lay back and watched the fumes being sucked toward the ceiling vent The telscreen was off; the last badman had bitten the dust and she had grown tired of watching The bungalow seemed very quiet; the buzz of the air conditioning plant sounded unusually loud, as did the recurring clink-thump of the refrigerator solenoids from the kitchen.

She stood uncertainly, fingered her throat, took a step, paused She went to the alcove by the kitchen that housed the radio link and telephone. Beside the handset the dome metering equipment chuckled faintly Inside the grey housings striped discs spun, needles wavered against their dials. Force of habit made her check the readings. All normal, of course… She touched the phone, pulled at her lip with her teeth, made herself take her hand away. A quarter of an hour, that was nothing. When she was dancing Jen forgot the time. They all did. She would be home in a few minutes, by nine-thirty at the latest. She knew exactly how long to outstay an order… Mary went back to the living area, turned the telscreen on, clicked the channel switch to five. While the set was warming she walked through to David’s cubicle, peered in. He was asleep, hair tousled on the pillow.

Nine-fifty.

Mary got up again, walked to the window in the curved wall. She drew the curtains back, looked across the street at the neighbouring houses visible through the faint residual haze. A little fear stirred somewhere at the back of her mind, throbbed, stilled itself again. She wondered, fear of what? Accidents maybe; they happened, even in the best-run towns. Jack—but it wasn’t that. She laughed at herself quietly, trying to shrug away her fit of nerves.

These late shifts of her husband’s were a curse but there was no help for them; the new building was going ahead fast and as engineering controller for the sector Jack had to be almost constantly on site. She told herself, physically her husband was not far away She could ring him if she had to. How far off was the new complex, a hundred and fifty yards, two hundred? No distance, by terrestrial standards… But here under the sea, just how far was a hundred yards? Could be a lifetime, or an epoch. She grimaced. That was what the fear was about, what the…throb…tried to tell her maybe. That under the sea, patterns and values could change ineradicably.

She sat down, crossed her knees, laid her head against the back of the chair. After a few moments she picked up the abandoned knitting and stared at it. She was making a sweater, though there was no point in the exercise. The domes were air-conditioned and sea temperature only varied a few degrees through the year; nobody needed sweaters down here and the yarn was expensive. It came from Surface and all Surface things were dear. But it was something to do, it kept her hands busy. Above all, it was a link with the past.

Ten o’clock.

The face of the clock was round and sea-blue, the hands plain white needles. They moved in one-minute jerks; Mary imagined that she could see the tiny quiver that preceded each jump. She stubbed out the cigarette. The party would be long finished now, the dancers dispersed.

Dancers? She shook her head. She could remember the dancing in the Cities, the pulsing rhythms, frenetic jerking. That pattern, like everything else, had changed. She remembered the first time she had heard what they called sea-jazz, the shock it had given her. Jen had a player in her bedroom, it wailed and bumped half the night, but the rhythms, the melodies, were like nothing she had ever heard landside. The music howled and dragged, the beats developed timings that defied notation, had in them something of the slow surge of the tides. It was music for swimming to.

The Belmonts had a dance floor but it was outside, in the sea. Airposts surrounded it, and speaker casings; round them the kids would swirl like pale flakes among the hordes of fish that always seemed to be attracted. “But Mummy,” Jen would say if she protested. “You just don’t gel, you’re not wavy…” It was all part of the new phraseology; the boy down the block, Kev Hartford wasn’t it, he gelled for Jen, he was a wave; but the lad from the airplant, Cy Scheinger who had visited once or twice, was out of favour. He was neapy, a scorp. (Scorpion fish?) The sea, and thoughts of the sea, pervaded their whole lives now even to the language they spoke. Which was natural, and it should be…

Why did we call her Jennifer? Why, of all the names we could have used? The Jennifer was a sea-thing, and accursed…

It was no use. Mary killed the sound from the screen, walked back to the phone, lifted the handset and dialled. She listened to the clicking of the exchange relays, the faint purr-purr at the other end of the line. An age, and the receiver was lifted.

“Ye-es?” The slight coo in the voice, unmistakable even through the surging distortion of the sea. The Belmonts were just a little conscious of their status; Alan Belmont was fisheries manager for the area. Mary licked her lips. “Hello? Hello, Anne, this is Mary. Mary Franklin… What? Yes, fine thank you… Anne…is Jen still at your place by any chance? I told her nine, she’s late, I wondered if…”

Anne Belmont sounded vaguely surprised. “My dear, I shooed them off positively hours ago. Well, an hour… Hold the line…”

Unidentifiable human sounds. Someone calling faintly. The wash…crash…of the sea.

“Hello?”

“Yes…”

“Just before nine,” said the phone. “We sent them all off, there’s no one here now… You say she’s not back?”

“No,” said Mary. “No, she’s not. “ Her knuckles had whitened on the handset.

The phone clucked. “My dear, they’re all the same; ours are hopeless, time means nothing, absolutely nothing… But I’m quite sure you needn’t worry, she’ll be along any moment. Perhaps she’s with that Cy boy, whatever his name is…yes…”

Ice along the spine, moving out like fingers that gripped and clutched. “Thank you,” said Mary. “No, no, of course not. Yes, I’ll let you know… Yes, goodbye Anne…”She laid the handset on its cradle, stood looking at it, not knowing what to do. The sea pushed at the dome gently, slurringly.

A quarter after ten.

Mary stood very still in the middle of the living area, lips pursed. She had called the airworks; Cy was off duty, could not be traced. And two or three neighbours and friends. No Jen. She could not ring Jack at the construction office, not again. Down here you helped your husband, pulled your weight. You didn’t run panicking at every little thing… The trembling had started, in her legs; she rubbed her thighs unconsciously through her dress. She touched the hair pinned into a chignon at the nape of her neck. In front of her, on the sill of the window, a plaster foal pranced, hooves outlined against greenness. The greenness was the sea.

Decision. She pulled at her hair, shook it free round her shoulders. She unsnapped the clasp at her neck, wriggled her dress up over her head. Beneath it she wore the conventional blue leotard of a married woman. She plucked automatically at the high line of the legs, kicked her sandals off, crossed to the equipment locker. She came back with her sea gear, lung, mask and flippers. She dressed quickly, fastening the broad straps round her waist and between her legs, the lighter shoulder harness that held the meter panel across her chest. Habit again made her check the dials, valve air, slap the red cancellator-tab on her shoulder. That was another safety factor; if for any reason air stopped flowing from the pack and that tab was not touched, a built-in radio beacon would arrow town guards down to the wearer.

She looked in at David again, satisfied herself he was still sleeping. She walked to the sealock, stopped on the way to see herself in the half-length mirror. She was heavier now, her hips had broadened and there were maybe faint worry lines round her mouth. But her hair was brown and soft; landside she would still be a desirable woman.

She looked round the dome slowly, seeming to see familiar things in a new light that was bright and strange. The bungalow was double-skinned, the inner ceiling finished in octagonal plates of white and pale blue plastic. The half-round shape, dictated by considerations of pressure, had the secondary advantage of enclosing the greatest possible volume of space; deep-pile carpets covered the floors, the furniture was low and streamlined, easy to live with. The telscreen was tucked neatly into an alcove; to each side of it were wall tanks with fish and anemones. Through a half-open door she could see the kitchen. It was miniaturised but well equipped, with plenty of stainless steel like the galley of a ship.

The whole bungalow was as safe as it was functional. In the unlikely event of a fracture in the pressure shell, the second skin would hold the sea while instantaneous warnings were flashed to a central exchange, ensuring help within minutes. Not that anything could or would go wrong of course, the whole system was too carefully worked out for that. People had been living undersea for years now, and fatalities were far fewer than on the overcrowded land.

Mary grimaced, stepped through into the lock and closed the inner hatch. The ceiling lamp came on; she pressed the filler control, heard the hiss as air was expelled through the outlet valves.

She squatted in rising water to work the straps of the flippers over her heels, straightened up. The coolness touched her hips; she pushed her hair back, spat in the mask and rinsed it, pressed the transparent visor onto her face. The plastic was self-adhesive, moulded to her skull contour; it fitted from forehead to chin. She palmed the earphones into place, reached under her arm for her mike leads, flicked the tags onto the magnetic contacts in her throat. The compartment filled, water rising greenly over her head. As the pressure equalised, the outer segment of wall slid aside automatically, letting in the hazy glow of the street lighting. Mary kicked away and floated up from the dome, sensing the old lift as the sea shucked off her weight. Her hair swirled across her eyes gracefully, like fronds of black fern.

She swam slowly across the town. To each side, lines of round-topped buildings marched out of the haze. Some of the houses were still new and bright with their coated steel skins, others had grown a rich waving cover of algae. In the main street the shop windows were brightly lit; the plate-glass ports displayed seafoods set on white dishes garnished with fronds of weed; there were aqualungs and radiophones, Surface ware of all sorts, clothes and books, records, dolls, toys. Here the ocean floor had been cleared to the rock that underlay the sand; overhead were slim arches to which were moored the sledges of out-of-tov/ners, the fish herders and oceanographers whose work took them to lonely domes scattered over the bed of the sea. There were lights on the gantries; each globe hung glaring in greenness, surrounded by a flickering cloud of tiny fish like moths round a terrestrial lamp. Over everything was an air of peace, the dreamy peace of dusk on an ancient, unspoiled Earth.

There were few human swimmers about, but here and there, careering over the roofs of buildings, Mary caught sight of glistening shapes. Dolphins—they had been quick to discover the sea-floor communities and take advantage of them. Many families, in fact, kept one or more of them as semipermanent pets, became very attached to them. Other creatures occasionally troubled the townships—sharks, rays, the odd squid. But the repellents carried by the swimmers in their harness had been developed to a stage where there was little to fear. The town guards could be relied on to harpoon or shoo off any of the big fellows who hung around too close or too long, though in the main there was little to attract predators.

Disposal of garbage was rigidly controlled; locking offal into the sea was about the worst crime in the book, it could result in being sent landside. The “monsters of the deep”, in so far as they existed, tended to avoid the colonies. They disliked the brightness and noise, the bustle, the thud of many vibrations criss-crossing in the water. As Jack never tired of pointing out, life down here was as safe or safer than on land.

Mary doubled back, passing the king-size domes that held the town distillation plant. The per capita consumption of fresh water was fifty percent higher for Sea People than for Terrestrials. Frequent bathing was necessary to remove ingrained salt from the skin; supplying salt-free water was one of the biggest problems of the ocean-floor settlements. Beyond the distillery was the airworks The electrolysers reached halfway to the Surface, each mass of tubes contained in an insulating shell of helium. The current for the oxygen separation came from strategically sited tidal generating Stations up and down the coast. Many domes were already on tap from the plant; eventually they would all avail themselves of the new municipal service, though they would retain their own gear as a fail-safe in case of emergency.

Mary swam round the huge stacks, peering into locked shadows, calling softly through her mask. “Jen…Jen…” The harness pack radiated the word into the water, farther than a human voice could reach in air, but there was no answer. She clung to a steel stay twenty feet above the seabed. Bubbles curled up from her in a shimmering stream as she tried to quiet her breathing. A group of children went by, out late and swimming fast; she heard their chattering, realised with a cold shock how similar it was to the noises of a fish herd in the hydrophones. She shivered Thoughts like that had been plaguing her for months now, maybe years She called urgently, but the child-shoal swerved aside, accelerating and vanishing in the gloom. There was quiet; beside her the great cans vibrated, the sensation more felt than heard. The stay seemed to buzz in her fingers.

She let go quickly, because electrolyser stacks cannot make any sound. She concentrated. That deep, thudding boom Was it her heart, or just fear, or was there something…something else… No, it was gone. Slipped over the edge of perception, into silence. She started to swim again, thoughts churning confusedly. She remembered a conversation she had had with her husband weeks back. They had been lying abed after his shift had done; the house was silent, or as silent as it could get. Just the airplant, buzzing in the dark…

She had spoken to blackness. “Jack,” she said, wondering at herself, “the Deeps. Have you heard what they’ve been saying about them—that they talk?”

“I’ve heard a lot of rubbish.”

She said, “They talk. That’s what the kids say. Jen…she says she’s heard it a…thing, I don’t know what. A calling. Jack, be serious, listen to me…”

“I am serious,” he said. “Completely. Mary, there’s nothing in the Deeps except one hell of a lot of water, at one hell of a pressure. Oh, there could be a slip somewhere, volcanic activity maybe, a long way down, that would send up pressure waves, you might be able to feel them, but that’s all. I’m an engineer. I’ve been working with the sea more years than I want to think about, now take my word, I know. This…thing, it’s a fad with the kids. You get little gangs floating out there waiting for revelations, I’ve seen ’em. I don’t know where it started but it’s just a craze, it’ll die off when something new comes along…”

She was quiet, thinking of all the towns stretching through the warm seas of the world, all along the Continental shelves. The domes were snug and secure, automated; nothing could go wrong. But what if…what if there was an enemy, something more insidious than pressure? Something in people, in me she told herself, or in Jen. Something working outward from the roots of the brain… She said abruptly, “Jack, how can you be so damn sure you’re always right?”

The bed creaked as he moved. “You going Continental on me. Mary?”

She did not answer. His hand reached the contacts on her throat, stroked. “You know what I told you. What we agreed when they put these in. Once down, always down.” He paused. Then, softly, “What’s for us on land?”

She lay remembering the lowness of the roofed City streets, the flaring miles of fluorescent strip, the crushing sense of overcontact. Hive phobia of a crowded planet.

He could play her mind, he always could. “Listen,”he said. “You can still hear it deep down. The roaring. Escalators, pedivators. Traffic. Dancehalls. Wallscreens all yelling, fighting one against another. Buy this. Buy that. Vote for freedom. Use our toothpaste. Don’t copulate… Just remember it, Mary. Markets. Moviehouses. The whole heaped-up, tipped-up jumble we made for ourselves. Is that a thing to go back to? Take the kids to? Well is it?”

No answer. He carried on talking. The old vision. “Down here we’ve got peace. We’ve got security. Well, as much security as people can find anywhere. And more important, we’ve got a democracy. A real practical working democracy, maybe for the first time ever. Down here your neighbour’s house is always open because that’s the way it has to be. We can’t afford to fight each other, the sea takes care of that. And the sea’s forever.

“So we’ve got unity, and drive. Right now maybe you reckon there’s a lot of us but I say we’re still villages, settlements. We’re dependent on Surface, we still buy down supplies. But it won’t always be like that. I can see whole nations and tribes of us scattered over the oceans, everywhere in the world. Right down into the Deeps. We’ll be independent. We’ll draw everything we need straight out of the sea: Gold, tin, lead, copper, uranium, you name it you’ll find it’s right here in the sea. Billions of tons of it, waiting to be used. In a small way we’ve started already. The land’s old, burned out. Let the Continentals keep it…” He chuckled. “Tell you what, we’ll pop up one day, in a thousand years maybe, for a little trade. Find they’ve gone. All of them. Blown each other apart, starved, lit out for the planets, anywhere. We wouldn’t know. If the whole world burned up, how should we tell? We shouldn’t care…”

She was making patterns in blackness, drawing on the pillow with one finger. Biting her lip. He touched her hair; his hand found the pendant warmth of a breast and she moved irritably, twisting away from him. “I was thinking,” she said, “about the kids. All the kids we’ve got down here—”

“All the kids,” he said tiredly. “Mary, all the kids have changed. Adapted to their surroundings, now that’s the most natural thing. We d be having to worry if it wasn’t happening. This environment, after all it’s alien. Outside racial experience. In a sense this life of ours is being lived on a new planet. We must expect new skills, new adaptations, and they’ll show in the children quicker because the children have known nothing else. That’s the way it has to be, that way’s right. This has taken a long time coming out in you, Mary, can’t you see what’s happening?”

“I can,” she said bitterly. “Can you?”

“Mary, listen here a minute…”

She felt that obscurely he was still hedging. His mind maybe would automatically reject anything that could not be measured and calibrated. She wanted to scream; the confidence, the know-how, suddenly it all seemed so much smugness. The sea was infinite, from it could come an infinity of fears. She said, “We all…they say we all came from the sea. Well, couldn’t we…regress, you know, sort of slip back…”

He clicked on the bedside light. “Mary, do you have any clear idea what you’re saying?”

She nodded vigorously, trying to make him understand. “I thought it all through, Jack. I mean about birds losing their wings and seals—didn’t seals go back into the sea, degenerate somehow? And now us, the children, they…swim like fish, more and more like fish…”

“But hell,” he said, “Mary, do you know how long a thing like that takes? A biological degeneration? How many millions of… Oh look, Mary, look here. A million years. That’s how long we’ve been around, give or take a few thousand. And that’s nothing, nothing at all. It isn’t…that.” He snapped his fingers. “You’re thinking on the fine scale, the historical scale. All that time, that million years, wasn’t enough for us to lose our little toes. Look, the Earth’s a day old. Took twenty-four hours to evolve, go through all the cycles of life and get to us. You know what we are, what all our history is? The last tick of the clock… That’s how long evolution takes, it’s a very big thing…”

But it was no use, she’d heard it all before. “Maybe it won’t be like that this time,” she said. “We…evolved that quick, at the end. Maybe we’ll go back now just as fast…”

“It isn’t anything to do with it,” he said. “Nothing at all.”

She said desperately, “We were so smart, Jack, getting out like this, living in the sea. Making a new world. But maybe…couldn’t that somehow be what the sea really wanted, all along? What we were meant to do? Oh, I know this sounds crazy but believe me when I see the kids…Jen slipped the other day, in the kitchen. When she tried to get up, I think she tried to turn like she was swimming—she forgot she was in air… And David, he swims just like a little shrimp… When I see things like that I think Oh, I don’t know what I think sometimes—maybe we’re not…pioneers at all This thing about the Deeps, they say they call, pull… Maybe we’re just sort of being sucked back, that’s where we belong…”

He was angry, finally “All right. So this craziness is all true. We’ve got a racial memory in our brains; in our nervous systems. We remember the beginnings of life all those years back, so many years we can’t even count the thousands. Well then, we’re home already, Mary. Right where we are, this is where life started. In the shallows, swilling in the sunlight Not in the Deeps. It moved down there, same time some of it spread onto land. There’s nothing can call us from there. We don’t belong there, never did.”

She was quivering a little, looking at the pillow, seeing the texture of it. Every strand in the weave of the cloth. “I wanted to stay human,” she said. “That was all. Just to stay human, and the kids…”

He touched her. “You’re human,” he said “You’re all right.”

She wouldn’t look at him. “I think,” she said, “I think now…I’d take the Cities. Jack…”

He didn’t answer, and she knew the expression on his face without looking. Something inside her seemed to twist and become cold. He would do anything for her maybe, except that. He would not go landside, not now. The empires, the herds and tribes of the sea, they were in his brain, they called too. The dream was too strong, he couldn’t let it go. He pushed the clothes back and swung his legs off the bed. She heard the little swish as he picked up a robe. “Mary,” he said, “why don’t you get a little checkup? You’re run down, it’s my fault I should have realised… Too much time on your own, you don’t get about. Not any more. Maybe you should have a trip landside. Go and see your folks. Tell you what—I’ll get a couple of days leave, we’ll have a run up to Seventy-five, take the kids, how’s that? They’ve got the new theatre up there, whole pile of junk. Sound okay?”

She didn’t answer. “I’ll have a talk with Jen,” she said. “I’ll do it tomorrow. This is silliness, it can be stopped…”

He walked out, turned on a light. Started tinkering in the kitchen. He brought her back coffee laced with rum. She pulled a bedjacket over her shoulders, sat drinking, hands gripped round the warmth of the cup. Feeling the trembling still deep in her body, hearing the buzz of the airplant, imagining the silly, silly meters checking and recording Pressure, humidity, oxy-level, all the things that didn’t matter. While Jack sat and watched her, smoked and smiled and did not understand.

* * * *

Mary swam the length of the town again, moving slowly, watching to right and left the domes nestling in shadow, their windows like square bright eyes. The sea was darker now; in the real world above, the moon was setting. Surface was just visible as a greyish sheen; tall weed fronds were silhouetted against it, leaning majestically to the current like trees bowed by an endless wind. The tide was setting out, toward the Deeps.

After that talk with her husband, her restlessness had become worse. Quite suddenly it seemed the whole furnishing of the dome was oppressive, stultifying. The curtains had come down, the glinting blue fabric with its faint interlapping tidal patterns had been put away. Mary had hung new yellow cloth, sun-yellow, printed with designs of buds and flowering trees. She had banished the spiny amber-spotted shells and the urchin lamps, Jen’s untidy collection of sea bed fossils, even the cushion covers on which she herself had once worked swirling Minoan patterns of weed and octopi. In their places were landside things, figurines of horses and kittens, panting china dogs. Creatures long vanished now but that reminded her of Earth and the way humans lived once on a time.

Every ornament, every yard of cloth, had had to be bought from Surface; the cost had been enormous but once started Mary had seemed unable to stop. Jack had raised his eyebrows but said nothing; Jen had protested more noisily.

Things had reached crisis pitch the day Mary found, in the wall tank in Jen’s room, a piece of old human skull, coral-crusted, put there as a home for crabs. She had slapped her daughter for that, a thing she had never done before, and emptied tank and contents through the lock. Jen had fled squalling, into the sea, and not come home for hours. After that Mary spent a week scraping the whole top of the dome, polishing away the velvet coat of sea-growth till the plastic-covered panels gleamed like new; but it seemed the more she did, the more she tried to banish the presence of the sea from her home, the more the sea invaded. At night, lying quiet, she imagined she could feel the slow push of the wave force against the bungalow, tilting it this way and that, slow, slow, this way…then that…

She drove herself across to West Terrace, built slightly higher than the rest of town on a curving ridge of rock. Nearly to the Belmonts’ dome and back, calling all the way. Jen was not in town; or if she was, she refused to answer. Mary’s face was wet now inside the mask and her lungs were labouring. Thoughts tumbled in her mind. Nitrogen narcosis…no longer possible, the lungs delivered an oxy-helium mix. Oxygen intoxication then, the thing they used to call rapture of the depths; that could make you throw your mask off, breathe water and die. But it was nearly unheard of. Low down on Mary’s back, and on Jen’s, were other contacts. They led to cells deep in the body that metered the blood itself, tasting it for oxy-content. The lungs were self-compensating. Pack failure? Crazy, the gulp-bottle on Jen’s belt would give her twenty minutes’ breathing. And the beacon, there was the beacon. But beacons could go out…

Mary doubled, swerving under the rigging of the street lamps. Across to where she could see the divers working on the new building complex. The bodies hung round the curving ribs, tiny with distance, silver as fish under the glare of the lamps; below, the windows of the construction office just showed in the gloom. Soon she would call Jack, she would have to… She felt the fear again, like a coldness round her heart. There was only one place she had not been. She began to swim purposefully away from the town and its lights, towards the Deeps.

Just beyond the domes the sea bed fell away in a series of troughs, miles long and wide. Unseen, their contours could still appal the mind. This was the frontier, the last frontier maybe on the planet. She passed over the graveyard, trying not to see the frail crosses sticking up from the silt, name tags fluttering in the current like grey leaves. Out to where the last light faded, and beyond…

She was in a void, bottomless, pit-black. Above her a vagueness that was just one shade less dark than darkness itself. Not light; some trailing ghost maybe, that light had left behind it. Mary drove deeper, hopelessly, feeling pressure begin to squeeze her body like cold hands. She was panting, though there was no sound of it in her ears; her breathing alone could not activate the throat mike. She called again; her voice was a vibrating thread, nearly lost in immensity.

And there was something, a blemish in the gulf. Tiny, nearly invisible, its shape so vague it mocked the retinas. Mary swam, hair flowing; there was a longness, a paleness, like a body caught and floating on some denser stratum of the sea. Deep down, far below…

“Jen!”

Mary kicked out, desperate now, her movements losing smoothness and coordination. Fighting the pressure was like butting at a wall; she imagined her whole body shrinking, condensing, becoming tiny as a fish.

“JEN!”

She’d reached the thing, she was stretching for it with her hands, when it moved. Eeled away, rolled… She saw the bright cloud of breathing suddenly released, the fins threshing. Heard her daughter chuckling in her earphones.

Fear turned to anger. Mary arced in the water. “Jen, get back this instant…” She grabbed again and the girl eluded her, quick as a fish. “Mummy, listen…” The voice bubbled through the sea. “It’s loud tonight, listen…”

She listened, straining. Found herself not breathing. It was impossible; no outside sound could come through her blocked ears. Nonetheless, it came. There, and again… A thudding, but not a thudding. Some pressure, like a concussion against the brain. Immeasurably slow and powerful and somehow ancient… Pulsing with her heart, fading, swelling back to touch her body. Earthquake or volcano, she had no idea. Nor did she care. Somehow it was sufficient that the sensation, the not-sound, was there. This was something immemorial, eternal. The true, dark, jet-blue voice of the sea…

Woman and girl hung a little apart, bodies vaguely glowing motes against a hugeness of water. Mary felt she could lie all night, not speaking, just soaking in the strangeness that seemed to fill her by rich stages from feet to head. Hearing rhythms that were not rhythms, that blended and crossed, melding each into each like the sounds of the sea-jazz. Soothing, calming, somehow warm…

She could hear Jen calling but the voice was unimportant, remote. It was only when the girl swam to her, grabbed her shoulders and pointed at the gauges between her breasts that she withdrew from the half-trance. The thing below still called and thudded; Mary turned reluctantly, found Jen’s hand in her own. She let herself float, Jen kicking slowly and laughing again delightedly, chuckling into her earphones. Their hair, swirling, touched and mingled;

Mary looked back and down and knew suddenly her inner battle was over.

The sound, the thing she had heard or felt, there was no fear in it just a promise, weird and huge. The Sea People would go on now, pushing their domes lower and lower into night, fighting pressure and cold until all the seas of all the world were truly full; and the future, whatever it might be, would care for itself. Maybe one day the technicians would make a miracle and then they would flood the domes and the sea would be theirs to breathe. She tried to imagine Jen with the bright feathers of gills floating from her neck. She tightened her grip on her daughter’s hand and allowed herself to be towed, softly, through the darkness.

I’VE NEVER SEEN, by Hannes Bok (poem)

Originally published in Futuria Fantasia, Spring 1940

I’ve never seen a Flirtenflog.

I’ve heard that it’s a Martian dog.

But science-fiction has romanced

That the Martian race is much advanced;

So thus my reasoning should be,

Has a Flirtenflog ever seen ME??????

MADMEN MUSTERED, by Connor Freff Cochran

Originally published as “Hear Today” (The Berkeley Showcase, Vol. 2 [1980]), “Snowflake” (Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Feb. 16, 1981). “Angst For the Memories” is original to this collection and is copyright © 2015 by Connor Freff Cochran.

(1) HEAR TODAY

This is how it happened. I was at the Mad Prof’s place for my weekly lesson…

“What’s on the blackboard for today, creep?”

He frowned at me. Whenever he did that his eyes looked like little blue aggies full of cracks. “The agenda for today’s tutorial will be announced, little Billy, when you display some semblance of human manners.”

“Aw geeze, I’m nine fuggin’ years old! Do I gotta—”

“No respect, no lesson.” He crossed his arms and harrumphed.

I wanted to bite him in a nasty spot—it was right about eye level, me being short for my age—but I wanted to get on with the lesson more. So I played it his way. You could only push the Mad Prof so far.

“Aaahh…what are we gonna do today, Mr. Science?”

He lit up like a smashed firefly. Nuts.

“I’ve in mind a followup on last week’s lesson in quantum electrodynamics. And then—a surprise.”

“Whaddaya mean, surprise?”

“Patience!—though I can hardly wait myself. First, the lecture.”

Half an hour later my head was spinning in a cyclone of tunnel diodes and charmed quarks and super-relativistic paradoxes. But I had a proper Heisenbergian handle on it all, which was pretty amazing considering the interruptions. There was this indistinct shouting coming through the wall. Two voices, male and female.

“What’s going on over there?”

“Nothing, little Billy. Merely a lover’s quarrel.”

“You mean all those decibels are over mushy stuff? Adults are stupid. And don’t call me that goddamn name.”

He looked at me almost fondly then. “Ah, sweet unjaded youth—albeit a trifle surly. Wait a few years. When your glands open up for business, that’s when you’ll know what’s important in life. Science and Sex. Especially Sex.” A new burst came through the wall, and this time I could make out some swearing. The Mad Prof hugged himself in delight and managed, somehow, to moan and giggle at the same time. “Oh Maureen, if ever I’ve seen someone worthy of the most rigorous examination! Your arch, your thrust, your specific gravity…”

He regained a bit of his dignity, but not very much, and there had only been a little to begin with. “They are new tenants, here only five days. He is an intern—conscientious, determined, and usually at the hospital. Every night when he comes home they begin to argue like this.”

It was adult stuff and it gave me a severe pain and I told him so. Black holes I could understand. Singularities made sense. But this? Hah! In reply he just smiled, with that damned knowing smile adults were always pasting on their faces, and finally got back to the lesson.

But the whole time the shouting ebbed and flowed in the background, sometimes punctuated by breaking noises. In the end I got curious despite myself.

“Why are they fighting?”

“To put it bluntly, he thinks she is screwing around.”

“Is she—”

“Of course! I hear the waterbed sloshing its siren song for hours at a stretch; passionate grunts, ecstatic cries, excited murmurings…a veritable symphony of sensation, dear boy—and tomorrow I shall be its conductor!” He glanced at the wall, then back to me. “Two mornings ago I smiled at her in the hall. Yesterday we chatted, exchanged names, shook hands firmly but drily. Today she confessed that her husband was a juvenile bore, that she liked middle-aged men, and, as I put a sympathetic arm around her shoulder, she managed to twist so that my arm entered her housecoat. Oh I’m in, I’m in! Tomorrow is the day!”

Sudden quiet on the other side of the wall. It didn’t last, though, and when the arguing started up louder than before the Mad Prof started licking his lips.

“Jesus, if my mother knew how you were corrupting me…”

“Me corrupting you? If that misguided woman had known the real reason you were dissecting those live frogs she’d have sent you to an asylum instead of a science tutor! I mean you’re smart, kid, smart as I’ve ever seen, but you’re sick.”

“Thanks. I like you too. And I still think all that sex stuff is junk.”

“You’ll see, you’ll see…or more properly, hear. Which brings me to my little surprise.” Grinning so hard his moustache twisted up like a boomerang, he went into his kitchen, which I’d only been in once and which wasn’t very kitchenlike. Mad Scientists never leave anything the way they find it.

When he came back he was carrying something that looked like a lucite cattle horn, with decorator-color circuitry at the pointy tip.

“Voila! My greatest invention—a device for hearing the future.”

He caught the look on my face. “You think I’m crazy.”

So what else was new?

“Granted you’ve worked the trick,” I said, shrugging, “what’s the point? I’d lots rather see the future than just hear it.”

“Clichéd thinking, lad! To free a probe chronologically you must anchor it spacially, so standing in this room all I could ever tap into is the future of this room. What good vision to a practical man, then? To figure stocks, or horseraces, or even get ahead on the funnies I’d have to stand here with a paper and let my past self read over my shoulder. No thank you—easier to leave a radio on and listen ahead to it. Also,” he said, pride ringing in his voice, “chronoaudience takes less circuitry, less power, less secondary hardware, and less software, all of which allows me to make this unit portable. I can go anywhere. I can listen ahead to anybody. In a matter of weeks I will have made a fortune, and then I won’t have to teach little suburban demons like you!

“But for the horn’s maiden run—as it inappropriately were—a less businesslike approach is called for.”

He paused and sighed. “Oh Maureen…”

“You gonna show that thing off or not?” I had to say it real loud to get through to him.

“Avanti! Immédiatement! Without delay!” He winked. “Let’s listen ahead to tomorrow night and find out if she says anything about me.”

Oh hell.

He adjusted a set of knobs on the wide end of the horn and then held it up to his ear, with the wide end aimed at the wall. More arguing spilled out, tinny and distant, jarring against the rhythms of the fight we could already hear. They didn’t mesh. It was giving me a headache.

“Damn drat and damn, it’s not coming through clearly. Perhaps if I adjusted—”

But before he had a chance to twiddle another knob things started to happen real fast.

There was a huge shout from the other room, one that pierced the wall like it was paper. “YOU TRAMP! I OUGHT TO KILL YOU!” And at the very same time, from the horn: “you tramp! i ought to kill you!” Out of nowhere what had been an interference pattern suddenly synchronized, with every scream and muffled insult matching in a two-part harmony that shredded reality into little tiny pieces. Whatever cheat the Mad Prof had figured on Time was running out of control. The volume on the horn shot up in a deafening squeal that rattled every loose object in the room. The window shattered.

And then the light show began.

The Mad Prof was dancing inside a spinning ball of blue fire. The horn glowed cherry red in his hand. Ugly little spectrums burst like fireworks in the air. My gut wrenched as pain slammed into me, pain like I was being pulled hard from both ends, and the room seemed to be getting bigger and smaller at the same time. I could barely hear him chattering something that sounded like “ohmigod, no, no, a feedback loop—” and then everything was snuffed out in one wide, white silent explosion.

I woke up sprawled against the wall. The room was quiet.

Leave it to the Mad Prof to do something the dangerous way. It occurred to me that I was lucky to still be alive.

I stumbled over to where the Mad Prof was lying, tangled up on the broken glass under the windowsill, and turned him over. The melted remnants of the horn were burnt into his hand. He was still breathing…but he was old.

I mean: very, very old.

I ran next door and hammered away until the Intern opened up. He looked at me funny, but I didn’t give him time to make any remarks. I spluttered out an explanation—sort of—about an accident and an injured man, and by the time I was done his manner was all eager and Hippocratic. Inside a minute, tops, he’d called for an ambulance backup, grabbed his shoes and black bag, and was gone. Maybe he could help. I didn’t know.

“Oh my,” said a warm voice.

It was the woman, Maureen, and she was looking at me funny too. All wide-eyed. I didn’t understand it until I followed her gaze, tracking down.

I wasn’t small for my age anymore. Anywhere. I wasn’t even my age anymore. My old clothes were rags hanging on my shoulders and around my ankles.

“You must be in shock. Come in and let me help you.”

Something in the way she said it; something in me that responded… I didn’t know what it was, then, but it sure was interesting, and when she deadbolted the door behind us and came real close I—

Well, suffice to say that the Mad Prof had been right about that mushy stuff all along.

I never did get a chance to tell him so, because he died on the way to the ambulance. But—just once—Maureen slipped out after midnight, and the two of us indulged in a little Science of Sex on his grave.

I like to think he would have appreciated the gesture.

(2) SNOWFLAKE

In recent times (or so it was whispered, by those who claimed they knew) the old monastery in the crags of Mount Strokazh had been possessed by a terrifying Evil. As with many other things in the world this was not precisely fact; but neither was it entirely fiction…

“I’m a failure. A broken man,” the Mad Scientist sadly observed, drinking a brandy while warming himself before the great hall’s fire. “A total and complete failure. I should have stayed at Canby & McWellan. At least I was good at the ad game.”

“There you go again, feeling sorry for yourself. I can’t stand that.” His Beautiful Daughter glared at him. With the ease of long practice she scooped a bon-bon into her mouth, and then munched angrily.

“Whuffle urga,” echoed Igor, slumped in the arched doorway.

“It is not self-pity, it’s self-realization! What have I succeeded at in the last six months? The perpetual motion machine ran down; the device to contact the dead didn’t, and gave me green forehead stains in the bargain; the process to turn lead into gold only worked the other way around…and that corpse we stole from the village? Thirty thousand kilovolts we ran through it, and it not only refused to come to life, it didn’t even cook evenly!”

“Aaar, bad taste, too,” mumbled Igor.

“And how about him?” The Mad Scientist gestured expansively towards the hunchback, spilling brandy in an arc that came perilously near the fire. “My so-called assistant. I operate on his hump and brain and he comes out crookeder and stupider than before.

“It’s no use, I tell you. I wish I’d never won that lottery money. I wish I’d never seen THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN when I was young and defenseless. This Mad Scientist business just isn’t my suit.”

“So chuck it.”

“I…I can’t. It’s like a drug, an addiction. It’s got me bad. But I’ve used all the equipment I bought before we left the States, and gotten nowhere. I’m all out of ideas. What now?”

“Listen, for all I care you can go bury yourself in the snow. When are we getting out of this dump?”

“Your concern is touching. Weather permitting, the next supply copter comes in two weeks. We could…what was that you said? Snow?” A peculiar expression took hold of his features.

“Hold it right there! I know that look. You’re going to vanish into the lab and only come out to eat or make corny, pretentious remarks. What am I supposed to do while you’re having fun—play with myself? I’m lonely here!”

“That’s no way to talk around your father.”

“I could say a few things about that, too, ‘daddy’.”

His mouth curled back in a sneering smile. “But you won’t, will you? Not now. Not ever. You’re too greedy for that.”

“Don’t push me…”

“Mistreat my sweet daughter? Never!” He laughed. Then that look, that faraway haze in his eyes, grew stronger, and he rose from his chair and walked out, so preoccupied that he even forgot to cuff Igor in passing.

Two weeks, his Beautiful Daughter thought. Only two more weeks…

* * * *

Three days later he called her to the laboratory and shattered that hope.

“It’s cold in here,” she complained, shivering. Snow covered most of the floor and the exotic technical equipment in gently sloping drifts. The wind moaned, licking in through the open casements, sharp and swift as a saber. The Mad Scientist could ignore it easily enough because he was wearing an arctic coldsuit; he opened a cabinet and got out another one for her.

His eyes were brighter and scarier than she had ever seen them.

“Of course it’s cold. I had to open the place up or the snow would melt.” He said it as if it were an obvious thing that only a dunce would question. “The computers are running better, too. Hell of a thing.

“But that’s not why I asked you to come in. Since it was your flippant remark that set me on the trail, I thought you deserved first look at My Discovery. Here.” He handed her two photographic transparencies. They showed a snowflake so magnified that its crystalline structure was defined in great detail.

“Big deal. Flakes for a flake.”

“You really ought to leave these vain stabs at humor to copywriters, my dear. They aren’t becoming in you. Try looking more closely.”

“Okay, I’m looking. What’s so great about two identical pictures of a lousy snowflake?”

His smile was broad inside the fur ring of his hood. “Just that those aren’t two shots of a snowflake. They are two separate snowflakes, and the shots were taken over three hours apart.”

“Can’t be. Snowflakes are all different, I learned that in school.”

“That’s what everyone thinks. But they’re wrong.

“I came in here,” he declaimed, “thinking about snow, about ways to pervert its natural function, of Mad Purposes to which it could be bent. I’ll confess it; I was a desperate man, and it was the last straw I had to clutch. But aside from a plan to tie-dye Antarctica I came up zilch. Clearly, a more empirical approach was called for…so I weighed snow. I tasted snow. I measured, photographed, mass spectrometered, melted, vaporized, and atomized it. I applied every straight and twisted test I could conceive, and I found nothing worth the effort—until those two snowflakes matched.” He pulled more transparencies from the counter top, shaking away shallow clumps of snow. “Then I got this one. And this, and this, and—

“At last count I’ve found eleven-hundred-and-fifty-two exactly identical snowflakes. The rate of duplication seems to be going up, too. If it continues on this curve all the flakes will be identical in 39 hours, plus or minus six minutes. Do you realize what that means?”

“No,” she said through chattering teeth. “And neither do you.”

He stopped, his moment of headlong elation neatly punctured. “True. Very true. But we’re not leaving here until I do.”

* * * *

The Mad Scientist’s Beautiful Daughter sat on the edge of the bed in the monastery cell that passed, with some interior decoration, for her boudoir. It was entirely too much to bear. Six months had seemed like a tolerable stint, sort of a middle-European purgatory, worth it when you considered the money she was being offered. But to look ahead to an unspecified time on this forsaken pinnacle of rock, with no company but an accounts executive turned Mad Scientist, a feeble-minded hunchback, and the occasional paunchy copter jock with stale beer on his breath…it was just too much!

If one more thing turned sour, she decided, she was going to let loose and cry.

Reflexively she took a chocolate from her pocket, unwrapped it, bit in—and almost broke a tooth. The thing was still frozen solid from her visit to the lab.

She started to cry.

“Hey, don’t do that. That tears me up inside.”

She looked up in stunned surprise, to see Igor standing in the doorway, his ugly features twisted in concern.

Igor? Standing?

“Just a second,” the hunchback said. He pulled off and discarded a wig. Sponge pads were removed from inside his cheeks and lips; collagen peeled away from his eyelids and nose; makeup wiped off. When he was done, standing in Igor’s place, nonchalantly swinging a rubber hump by its elastic straps, was a handsome and rather athletic-looking man in his early thirties.

“Fred Carver—” his voice was fully two octaves lower than Igor’s had been—“CIA Covert Agent, Balkan Mountains Mad Scientist Division. The real Igor died from complications following your father’s operation on him. It’s been me here ever since.”

Her eyes went wide. “You’re gorgeous.”

“What? Oh, ahem, thank you. I try and give the Company my best.”

“How much will that leave for me?”

“What?”

Now it was his turn to be surprised. The Mad Scientist’s Beautiful Daughter rose from her bed and walked toward him with an air of deliberateness he hadn’t seen since…unbidden and rather embarrassing memories of an assignment to infiltrate an android brothel in Marrakesh rose up in his mind. The debriefing on that one had been hell.

He twitched, ever so slightly, as she snuggled against his muscular side.

“Err…look, you’re very attractive, really, but—that is I…please, I came here to tell you something important!”

“So tell me,” she whispered into his neck, which she was gently nibbling. He wished he’d put his shirt back on after taking off the phony hump. This was getting out of hand.

“It’s about your father!”

“My father is a dentist in Fort Lauderdale.” Her mouth moved lower, and then her hands swooped to join the attack. His stoicism was perilously near a short-circuit.

“Not—?”

“Nope.”

“That’s a relief,” he sighed, and finally said to hell with resisting. “I thought it was the Mad Guy, and the Company says I have to terminate him.”

The hump thudded to the floor. Neither of them heard it.

Two hours and four-and-a-half times later he looked up from what he was doing and said:

“No kidding. He made you his beneficiary and everything, even though you aren’t really related?”

“Uh-huh.” She reached down and curled the light brown hair on his head with a fingertip. “He was already a nutcase, you know? But when he won all that money he just flew off the edge. Quit the agency after thirty years there, hired that orphan cripple to play Igor, found this lousy place…everything had to be just right, just like a grade Z movie. He even had all the door hinges replaced with rusty ones that creaked. There was this other girl from the steno pool that he wanted for his daughter, and she was willing to be adopted but she wouldn’t dye her hair blonde. So he came to me. ‘You’ll get to see Europe,’ he said. Right. Through a goddamn telescope. When it isn’t snowing. Which is never.

“But you make things better…are you really going to kill him?”

Carver frowned. “The Company says I have to. He seems harmless enough to me, but ever since Professor Wood in Vancouver they’ve had this prevention-equals-cure attitude about Mad Scientists.”

“Vancouver?”

“Forget I said that.”

“I will, but only if you distract me. You were right in the middle of something, remember?”

Later—much, much later—she settled firmly on top of him and murmured in his ear: “I’ve got a plan.”

* * * *

Only an hour was left (plus or minus six minutes) before his predicted curve peaked, and frustration possessed the Mad Scientist. He sat tensely at the scullery table, staring at the time-stained wood. Eyebrows twitching, jaw set, he ignored the bowl of stew in front of him and contemplated things beyond normal comprehension. What hair he hadn’t pulled out was plastered in loose, snow-wet ringlets across his skull.

The time has come, his Beautiful Daughter/ex-stenographer thought. She stepped out of the alcove where she had been waiting.

“Hi there, sunshine. Haven’t figured out how to use this thing, have you?”

“That’s none of your business.” He meant it to be a forceful growl, but there was a quaver in his voice.

“Oh no? Isn’t it part of the accepted scenario in these things? Aren’t I supposed to show daughterly concern? ‘Woe is me, my father nears the brink.’ I think—”

“Can it.”

“Not until I’ve had my say. See, you haven’t thought this Mad Scientist game through.” She stopped to gauge his reaction. He glared at her with a thoroughly sullen curiosity, and she knew he was hooked. “Check the record. In every book you ever read or movie you saw or newspaper clipping you saved, what happened to the crazy genius who made a capital D Discovery? It’s a definite pattern. Either the Discovery gets out of control and kills them, or else the Discovery gets out of control and someone else kills them for revenge, or they go really crazy and end up in a nuthouse where they starve to death or maybe get killed by a sadistic attendant, or else they get beaten to the publishing punch and are so upset they have some kind of seizure, usually fatal, or…you probably think I’m exaggerating things, but only a little. Seems to me the options in your chosen career are kind of limited, ‘dad.’”

“I’m different.”

“Really…care to test that?”

Without actually moving he conveyed an impression of folding inward. “What do you mean?” In his heart he knew, of course, and that knowledge was the source of a sudden, stabbing fear.

“Well, I’ll be damned if I can figure out how snowflake clones can get out of control and kill you. So it must be one of the other ones. The nuthouse is a possibility, but I’d put my money on the Unpublished Perish. Want me to tune in some radio news and find out?”

The Mad Scientist sprang from his chair and stood in front of the radio, both his arms spread to block her approach. “No. Don’t,” he whispered. Sweat mingled with the melted snow on his brow.

“I can wait. It’s not my life.”

She sat down and began carefully filing her nails.

At first, all he did was pace, but it didn’t help, so he paced and cursed. But that didn’t help either. Finally he paced, cursed, shivered, held half of a dialog with an unfair God, and wrung his hands helplessly. The minutes seemed to drag on forever. His fear grew and grew as he refused to face it.

The predicted peak came. A faint bell could be heard ringing from the laboratory.

“I can’t stand it anymore!” he cried. He almost snapped off the radio’s knob in his haste to turn it. After a few seconds of search and several horrible bursts of static the radio finally fixed on the distant, bland voice of a stateside news announcer. The voice rattled off a string of meaningless events: a revolution here, an insurrection there, famine upon gas shortage upon labor strike…but there was no mention of anomalies in the weather.

The Mad Scientist was almost calm again when the thunderclap broke.

“This just in, folks,” said the announcer, “and it’s really strange. Scientists in weather stations all over the globe are mystified today by none other than the skier’s friend, snow. That’s right, I said snow. It seems that every flake in the world is now identical to all other flakes, a fact that most meteorologists say has a probability of less than a hundred billion to one. No explanation has yet been offered, and many call it a hoax. In this reporter’s opinion, if you believe—”

There was more, but the Mad Scientist did not hear it. His eyes opened wide, then glazed over. His fingers crabbed into claws that clutched weakly at his chest. A shudder that began around his ankles passed straight to the top of his head, jerking him up on tiptoe.

With a short, breathless “urrrrk—” he fell against the scullery table and slid to the cold stone floor. The bowl of stew was dragged with him. It made a messy skullcap.

His Beautiful Daughter no longer, except for purposes of inheritance, Eileen the one-time stenographer stepped over his corpse and removed the radio from its niche in the wall. Whistling to herself, she unsnapped the back of the box, reached in, and turned off the tape recorder there.

* * * *

She found him in front of the leaded windows in the great hall, staring out into dim whiteness. He was wearing an elegant smoking jacket. The initials MS were embroidered left of the lapel.

“Dead?”

“Let’s not say dead. Let’s just say not alive.” She handed him a small plastic vial. “I didn’t have to slip this in the stew while he was distracted, after all. The tape was enough.”

“That’s good. A natural cause of death is always better. I’ll go drag him to the lab in a bit. It’s cold enough there that he’ll keep until the authorities can shovel their way up from the village.”

“I already did that.”

“Really?” He paused and frowned. “That was good work. Thanks for doing my job for me.”

“My pleasure. Really.”

They stood awkwardly for what seemed a long time, unable to look at each other.

Finally, she spoke. “Now what, Fred?”

“Now I signal my relief team and vanish. Only…”

“Yes?” She tried not to sound eager.

“Look, I don’t want you to get the wrong idea. It’s not the fact that the Company will have my ass in a sling for breaking cover. And it’s not that you’re rich now. It has to do with the way I’ve come to feel about you after all these weeks. It’s why I really revealed myself. Eileen—I think I love you.”

“0h, Fred!”

“Come with me, darling. The Company appreciates your kind of mind. A few weeks of special training in Maclean and we could be a great team.”

The only answer she had for him, the only one that made any sense, was a kiss; and of course that led to other things.

In the middle of the act Fred was taken by an aberrant moment, in which it was suddenly very important for him to know what the Mad Guy’s Discovery had meant, after all.

Eileen’s response was to bring him back to reality with a series of brief, pungent, and highly inspirational terms, and after that minor hitch it was very good for them, the best yet, with the implicit promise of better to come.

The future, they knew, was going to be kind. All that afternoon and into the night they cuddled together on the great hall’s ancient rug and watched the snowflake fall.

(3) ANGST FOR THE MEMORIES

The ubiquitous video eye followed him in, of course.

For his sixth turnaround Abernathy had gotten a beige-tentacled administrator, for which he silently thanked Hollywood. It was the blue-tentacled Otts you had to watch out for. The beige were merely sadistic.

It shuffled twelve stacks of paper (simultaneously) and lifted three skeptical eyebrows. “Sound off!” it barked. “Name, Rank, and Serial number!”

“Abernathy, Bing Hope. Leading Man. RADAR MEN OF 10, chapters three to seven; RONALD REAGAN GOES TO OXFORD, twelve to sixteen; GOING THEIR WAY, one—”

“That’s enough, Abernathy! I’ve seen your kind before!” Steam rose from its ventral vents. “You’re here because you’ve blown six perfectly good role assignments. What was wrong with the latest, hah?”

“I was a Borgia Pope.”

“So?”

“I couldn’t take the robes. When you’ve been raised with polyfit it’s hard to go primitive.”

“And before that you were a singing priest in the key of J Flat; and before that you were a cricket captain who shouted out football plays; and before that…but why go on with this dreary recitation? You’re a waste of videocomp time, Abernathy, a disgrace to Cinesociety!” The Ott frowned happily to itself. “What am I going to do with you…”

“Well, I always thought I was suited for—”

“Shutup! Shutup! SHUTUP!”

“If you say so.”

The Ott’s steam turned fuschia.

“You’ll edit well take what I give you and like it! Now let’s see…” The piles of paper flew in an intricately juggled search pattern. One sheet popped out of the blur and sailed to a landing at Abernathy’s feet. He picked it up. Written across it, in pastel block letters with chrome edging, were the words MAD SCIENTIST.

“You’re joking, of course. I don’t have any experience in character roles.”

All of the Ott’s eyes but one crinkled in a smile. “End of the line, slime. You know the rules. Seven ages of man, seven wonders of the world, seven brides for seven brothers, seven-eleven, seven strikes and you’re out. This Mad Scientist part is your last role, your very last role, and you’re going to spend the rest of your miserable little human life in it! Any questions?”

“One. I want to talk to the author.”

You called?

The Ott spun up from its chair in a panic, its lower fibrils scattering all the file folders and papers off the desktop. “Who? What?! Explain this!!”

“Better tune out that thing,” said Abernathy.

Watch.

The administrator was anchored to the chair. Its sonic portals were flapped over, indicative of a wish for privacy, as it turned intent gazes upon its paperwork. It would not interrupt until I let it.

Will that do?

“Very kind of you, considering it was you got me into this in the first place.”

What’s your beef, Abernathy? I’d like to get on with the story.

“I just want to know what the hell is going on! I mean, you’ve put all these really weird words in my mouth and I don’t know the context. How can I play a part without a context?”

So you want an expository lump.

“Please.”

This is a cheap way to do this.

“And how much are you earning off this piece?”

You have a point. Hokay. You are a figment of my imagination, cast in the part of a fourteenth-generation inhabitant of a sub-light starship. Unfortunately, several disasters have befallen your people. About five generations into the trip the ship was invaded and conquered by this race of very nasty aliens called the Ott, who altered ship society—sort of an experiment—to fit what they found in the film archives. Unfortunately, these archives had been damaged even earlier in the voyage by an accidental computer flush which left only old movies; no other historical data, sociology, anthro, nothing. Therefore for hundreds of years everybody on board has been playing one part or another. They’ve gotten used to it. Most of them even like it. You’re a washout.

“Listen, there’s meat in there for a hefty novel.”

Perhaps. I may write it someday. I’ve got something else in mind for now.

“I want to go on record as objecting to your frivolous handling of good epic material.”

Trust me.

At that point Abernathy had to swallow his frustration, because the Ott administrator extended three sensor antennae and addressed the hapless actor once more.

“You have to pick a discipline.”

“What?”

Two wings flapped in irritation. “A discipline! All Mad Scientists have to have a science to be Mad in. It says so in the bible! What’ll it be: physics, chemistry, biology, botany, thaliacs, geology—”

“Anthropology.” Abernathy looked vaguely upward, and said “Let’s see you do something with that, you high-handed bastard.”

“Good, good, talking to the air! That’s right in character!” squawked the Ott. “You are now a Mad Anthropologist. You have one rev to register your first Mad Project and slot production time. Now sign here, and get the Hayes out of my sights!”

It shoved him through the doorway with a deft kick. His video eye hummed out a moment later, and he took the tube home to his dressing room.

All that afternoon he stayed at the videocomp terminal, surveying the history of Mad Science.

The idea came to him during the evening meal in the commissary. There was something restful about the hubbub and din there; what with cowboys crashing through balcony railings and video eyes scooting merrily about, tracking barrages of cream pies and beer suds, it was like a little bit of his home level. He thought better there.

He turned the idea over in his mind, and found it good. A trifle academic, perhaps—what the ancients would have called peebious—but it would do. For a start. So he went back to his dressing room and, after showering off dessert, implemented it.

“This is B.H. Abernathy,” he said to the videocomp terminal, which relayed his words to some faceless Ott in Programming. “I wish to register my first Mad Anthropologist series.”

“Whatever it is, I can only give you a mass-channel at 1 AM.”

“But I’m a Leading Man! I’ve never worked after nine before.”

“Stuff it,” said the Ott in a perfect fifth harmony. That made it one of the ones with orange tentacles. They were more musical. “Mad Scientists are a priori late show material. You’ll pick up an audience if you’re any good. And if you aren’t then it’s no flesh off my beak. What’s the project?”

Abernathy frowned. This was all very humiliating.

“Well, in my reading I’ve noticed that everybody talks about Mad Scientists but nobody ever does anything about them. Except villagers. As an anthropologist I would like to understand the dynamics of this relationship, of how it came into being as a cultural response. I want to trace the overriding patterns. And as a Mad Anthropologist I want to go beyond that and discover why they are. I will be satisfied with no less than an understanding of their purpose in Creation!

“I think I can do it in three specials, three hours each. Are you sure prime time is booked for—”

The terminal abruptly shut down. A moment passed before it came on again. A different Ott’s voice, this one in E Minor, came out. “Denied,” it said.

Abernathy’s brain whirled. Denied? Why? Had he accidentally struck on something of vital importance?

Are you going to let me get away with this?

“No chance.” He addressed the terminal again. “Okay, how about something light-and kinky. A survey of Mad Scientists’ Mad Sexual Practices.”

“Logged and on the schedule. You get a twelve-part mini-series with option for renewal, half an hour a show. Starting Tuesday. Now go away.”

Hours later, in character and ready to begin taping, he rang the bell of his first interviewee.

His preparation time had been well—and disturbingly—spent. The first problem in any role was creating a convincing persona: what was a Mad Anthropologist supposed to look like, anyway? He’d settled on a Brooks Brothers lab coat with suede elbow patches, a kilt, embroidered Aleutian hunting mukluks, a necklace of lion’s teeth and ersatz human knucklebones, an orange frightwig, horn-rimmed glasses, and a conservative tie. The only makeup that seemed appropriate was a hint of red on the cheeks, simulating the flush of discovery. The second problem came from outside the role, and it disturbed him greatly. While comping out profiles for his interviews he had noticed a definite pattern.

No Mad Scientist series had ever been completed.

There was no information on why they stopped. They just did. In the past year alone thirty-seven had come on the schedule and fizzled.

It was most puzzling to Abernathy. Competition on the mass-channels simply wasn’t rough enough to account for the cancellations. And if no Mad Scientist series had ever been completed…what about his own?

The door opened.

“G.A. Börgstrasser?”

“Please,” said the old man in the doorway, doing a little shuffle. “Call me Ginger Astaire. Come in, come in.”

The room was a cross between a dance rehearsal hall and a musty secret laboratory. In between bubbling vats and sparking machinery there was a practice bar, and one whole wall was a mirror. Ginger Astaire Börgstrasser clumsily pirouetted to the center of the floor and bowed to his own reflection. There were several nasty runs in his Danskins. “I suppose you’ve come to idolize my invention.”

“Actually I came here to ask you embarrassing questions about your private sexual practices.”

“Sex? Oh my dear, I gave that up years ago. Years. It did simply horrible things to my lower back. No, I’ve said it many times and I will say it again, a Mad Choreographer has to give his entire being over to The Dance…are you sure you don’t want to see my invention? Just for a little bit?”

Abernathy sighed. “Only if you’ve had sex with it.”

“Well…” Börgstrasser winked. “Actually, I have considered it. You see, I’ve synthesized the first artificial gene.” He spun and bellowed, “Gene!”

One of the vats decanted. A man in a baggy suit (circa second decade A.T., Anno Talkies) emerged and started to perform the title number from “Singing in the Rain.”

“Look at him! Look at him sing and dance!” cried the old man, enraptured. “Isn’t he beautiful?”

At that point the gene kelly did a particularly high kick which caught the Mad Choreographer square in the throat. He fell dead, his neck snapped. Immediately his video eye went into null mode, hovering in place and emitting a plaintive beeping.

“Gosh, I didn’t mean to do that. I was shoved.”

“Right. Anything you say,” muttered Abernathy, backing slowly towards the door.

He was bowled over by the sudden inrush of an Ott workforce. The lead Ott, whose tentacles were white, warbled orders in Ottish to the others, who began tearing the room down and boxing props. “This show has been canceled! Everybody out out out! You too,” it screamed, batting the corpse against the wall with one of its spare arms. “OUT!”

“Gosh,” said the gene kelly to Abernathy, “Can I go with you? I really hate it in the vat.”

“No!”

But it followed him home anyway.

* * * * *

Six weeks later Abernathy’s show was the underground hit of the ship. In response to audience pressure it was expanded to an hour and put on earlier in the evening, although still outside the bounds of prime time. The key to its success was three-pronged, a combination of Sex, Bad Craziness, and Death. The first two weren’t that unusual, but the third, ahh…after centuries of the bad guys biting the dust only to brush it off and sin again in another series, real death was an unusual treat.

For Mad Scientists continued to die, with depressing regularity, whenever Abernathy interviewed them.

He was running out of space in his dressing room, too.

There was the gene kelly, of course. It ate too much, sang too loud, and kept him awake by tapdancing without warning at four AM. And there were more. Along the way he had “inherited” from their dead creators an evolved badger that talked like John Wayne; two arthritic robots with a Laurel and Hardy fixation; a portable glacier; three men in a boat (not to mention the damned dog); two filing cabinets filled with plans for conquering the world; four filing cabinets of extensive rebuttal; a model-T Ford with an engine made of flubber; several dozen undescribable small nasty things; a microweave oven; and a forty-foot ape trained in the arts of plumbing. That last stayed in the hall outside his door, eliciting an endless series of complaints from his neighbors.

Why did Mad Scientists keep dying on him? He considered this puzzle as he walked to his latest interview.

The deaths were always at the hands or feet or drawers or ice floes of their creations. That much was consistent. Except…the creations that could talk all said they didn’t do it. Like the gene kelly, who claimed to have been shoved. On that point the videotapes were ambiguous. There was a flash which might have been a blue tentacle flicking out; or it might have been a processing artifact; or—

Could this have something to do, he thought, with the way his first show idea had been nixed?

Death and Mad Scientists. An idea blossomed in his mind.

Suddenly a shot rang out. The bullet creased the crepe of his frightwig and buried itself in the wall. More followed, but by that time Abernathy had thrown himself flat behind a crate of rocks left over from the annual re-enactment of “The Lottery.”

Staying low, he peeked around the corner of the crate. At the end of the hall were two blue-tentacled Otts. Their heads were bouncing up and down. Each carried several submachine guns.

“Author!” shouted Abernathy. A round of fire came by way of answer, and so did I.

Now what?

“What the hell is this all about, dammit!?”

They’re trying to kill you.

“You mean you’re trying to kill me. They do what you write!”

True.

“Sadist!”

You ought to know. You and I are the same person.

“Then why are you trying to kill me?”

Oh, I don’t know. I just don’t feel nice today.

The Ott were advancing down the hallway. Abernathy had only a few precious minutes of life left for him to reach a peace with himself and his god. He noticed that next to him there was a multipurpose Last Will and Testament form.

“That’s premature, you capricious charlatan. I know your game. You’re just upset because I’ve figured out how you’ve rigged this setup. I see the wires behind the cyclorama!” He shook his fist at the sky. Gunfire came within inches of taking it off at the wrist.

You do not.

“Damn straight I do, and if you get rid of those creeps I’ll prove it.”

The Ott fired three more volleys and ran out of ammunition. Cursing their bad luck in voices that sounded like castrated garbage trucks, they ate the guns and waffled away.

Talk. Fast.

“Gladly,” said Abernathy, standing up again. “This whole Mad Scientist trip is a cultural control, a pressure relief valve. People who can’t cope—or people whom the Ott are afraid might cope too well—are systematically shunted into the Mad Scientist division, where it’s not only possible to kill them, it’s required by the form. After all, Mad Scientists always die. Only since most of these people aren’t really Mad Scientists, just poor helpless spear-carriers trying to get by, the Ott step in and murder them, using their creations as scapegoats. In my case there isn’t any creation, so you had to send those blue mothers as a hit team. Am I right?”

Grudgingly I’ll admit…yes. Now say your prayers. As you pointed out, the form requires that Mad Scientists die.

“Not so fast, creep. I’ve got more. I also know what the purpose of a Mad Scientist is. And better than that, I know what the Ott are and how to defeat them.”

Nonsense.

“Kill me and you’ll never find out if I’m telling the truth. I’m willing to make a bet, though. On my terms.”

This audacity is entertaining; I do think I’m feeling nicer. What kind of terms?

“You give me an honest chance to defeat the Ott. If I fail, you can kill me. If I win you have to fulfill my deepest wishes.” Abernathy smiled gutsily.

Such as?

“You said it yourself—I’m you. So I want what you want. I want a really good bass guitar. I want an unlimited credit card at the record store of my choice. I want a prime-time show of my own, a chance to really let loose and show my abilities as an actor. I want to be back in Brooklyn with Amy. I want all those things in my dressing room disposed of. And I want Kathy Mailer to feel comfortable with me. Say—have you sublimated her into this story?”

Could be.

“If I beat the Ott, would you make her, umm, love me?”

I’ll think about it. As for the rest, you’ve got a deal.

“I want a guarantee!”

Abernathy…trust me.

“Hmmph.” He grimaced skeptically and went on his way. After he had finished his interview (another corpse, another acquisition: what was he going to do with a formula for the Universal Coagulant?) he returned home to find a message waiting.

The gene kelly danced it over to him. “Gosh, boss, great news! You’ve been cast in an impromptu remake of INHERIT THE WIND. Prime time, live telecast—this is your chance. We’ll be able to buy more from the commissary.”

“What part, and how much rehearsal time?”

“All of them, except the judge. And no time at all.” It pointed at the terminal screen. “The credits are already rolling.”

* * * *

“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,” Abernathy said to a stand full of purple-tentacled Otts. “Your Honors,” he said to the three neon Otts on the bench. “Distinguished members of the Press,” he said to the ragtag collection of androids, apes, robots, glaciers, formulas, filing cabinets, and miscellaneous Things which had followed him into the courtroom. “And,” he said, turning to face the cameras directly for the first time in his performance, “Cast of the Ship! In summation I would like only to thank all of you for your time and…and…”

He spun savagely on his heel and stabbed a finger at the judges. “And blow the whistle on all of you!”

The neon Otts went square with rage. One pounded eight gavels at once, mostly off the hides of the other Otts, where the impacts made great squelching sounds. “Out of order! Contempt of court!”

Abernathy smiled. “Not contempt…love.”

Though he almost whispered the word, it was sufficient to make the Ott recoil as if slashed with a chainsaw.

“Stop! You don’t know what you’re saying!”

“But I do. Because I love you.”

Ott voices rose in a cacaphony of pain. An excited murmuring spread through the gallery.

“I said I love you.”

When the wailing subsided this time, the Ott were noticeably smaller than before, and dimmer in color. Fluorescent tears fell from the eyes of one judge. From left to right it dripped a spectrum.

“No more. Please…”

“You can’t stand not being hated, can you?” Slowly, dramatically, overacting terribly, he lifted his hands to the sky. “This is what Mad Scientists are for, Author! To ask the questions others are afraid to ask, to drag humanity up by its bootstraps! For this promethean arrogance they must die, but it is a sacrifice to the good, because today’s Mad Science is tomorrow’s commonplace.”

“We’ll have you disembowled and burned at the stake and beheaded and forced to watch Three Stooges movies!” threatened the Ott jury foreman.

“Nah, that’s just the Author in you talking. Want to come over to my place for some beer and poker?”

The Ott fainted, one half at a time.

“See, Author, if I’m you and everything in this story is yours, then it must all represent some part of you, if only at a distance. Do you know what side of you the Ott represent? They’re the part that gets surly when people compliment you or your work. That just emphasizes your own dissatisfaction, so you vent that rage in their direction to scare them off ever doing it again.”

In its amazement the gene kelly stopped dancing. “Gosh, you mean the Ott were nasty and vicious and cruel just to keep us from thinking of being nice to them? They’re that warped?”

“Yup. But I love ’em. Maybe because the Author named them after the girl he had a crush on in elementary school, Laurie Ott. Hey everybody,” he shouted with joy. “Everybody on the Ship! Let’s have a great big hand for the Ott—they made us what we are today!”

The response was an immediate and deafening round of applause, mixed with whistles and cheers and foot-stomping. The entire ship hummed with it.

Squeaking little mews of self-pity, the Otts vanished. All of them, all at once, just like soap bubbles popping in the sun except that the Ott left no filmy residue.

You win.

“I should hope so. Where are the goodies?”

The fete was held in the ship’s central hall. One by one the most important actors and actresses of the generation praised him and laid their Oscars at his feet. Gifts were given. There was an unlimited credit card at the record store of his choice. There was a plane ticket (first-class) to Kennedy Airport, and rental slips for a car from there to Brooklyn. The things in his dressing room gave him a goodbye card and took up residence in another apartment. The gene kelly went on a fast and took vows of silence. There was a beautiful handmade Alembic double-necked bass with a new set of Rotosound strings. Tied to it was a note, which turned out to be a gift certificate for a free refretting job, when required, and it was signed “love and lust, Kathy.” He held it to his nose and smelled sandalwood.

Everything was perfect.

They even gave him his own prime-time show, but there his smug pride in his accomplishments betrayed him. He made it autobiographical, blew up his exploits, dressed other actors in ugly rubber suits, called them Otts, and named the whole piece of dreck “There Are Some Men Things Were Not Meant To Know.”

“Wait a minute—that’s not fair!”

Fair? FAIR? Madness always outs, Abernathy!

They killed him in the ratings.

EXILE FROM SPACE, by Judith Merril

Originally published in Fantastic Universe, Nov. 1956.

I don’t know where they got the car. We made three or four stops before the last one, and they must have picked it up one of those times. Anyhow, they got it, but they had to make a license plate, because it had the wrong kind on it.

They made me some clothes, too—a skirt and blouse and shoes that looked just like the ones we saw on television. They couldn’t make me a lipstick or any of those things, because there was no way to figure out just what the chemical composition was. And they decided I’d be as well off without any driver’s license or automobile registration as I would be with papers that weren’t exactly perfect, so they didn’t bother about making those either.

They were worried about what to do with my hair, and even thought about cutting it short, so it would look more like the women on television, but that was one time I was way ahead of them. I’d seen more shows than anyone else, of course—I watched them almost every minute, from the time they told me I was going—and there was one where I’d seen a way to make braids and put them around the top of your head. It wasn’t very comfortable, but I practiced at it until it looked pretty good.

They made me a purse, too. It didn’t have anything in it except the diamonds, but the women we saw always seemed to carry them, and they thought it might be a sort of superstition or ritual necessity, and that we’d better not take a chance on violating anything like that.

They made me spend a lot of time practicing with the car, because without a license, I couldn’t take a chance on getting into any trouble. I must have put in the better part of an hour starting and stopping and backing that thing, and turning it around, and weaving through trees and rocks, before they were satisfied.

Then, all of a sudden, there was nothing left to do except go. They made me repeat everything one more time, about selling the diamonds, and how to register at the hotel, and what to do if I got into trouble, and how to get in touch with them when I wanted to come back. Then they said good-bye, and made me promise not to stay too long, and said they’d keep in touch the best they could. And then I got in the car, and drove down the hill into town.

I knew they didn’t want to let me go. They were worried, maybe even a little afraid I wouldn’t want to come back, but mostly worried that I might say something I shouldn’t, or run into some difficulties they hadn’t anticipated. And outside of that, they knew they were going to miss me. Yet they’d made up their minds to it; they planned it this way, and they felt it was the right thing to do, and certainly they’d put an awful lot of thought and effort and preparation into it.

If it hadn’t been for that, I might have turned back at the last minute. Maybe they were worried; but I was petrified. Only of course, I wanted to go, really. I couldn’t help being curious, and it never occurred to me then that I might miss them. It was the first time I’d ever been out on my own, and they’d promised me, for years and years, as far back as I could remember, that some day I’d go back, like this, by myself. But.…

Going back, when you’ve been away long enough, is not so much a homecoming as a dream deja vu. And for me, at least, the dream was not entirely a happy one. Everything I saw or heard or touched had a sense of haunting familiarity, and yet of wrongness, too—almost a nightmare feeling of the oppressively inevitable sequence of events, of faces and features and events just not-quite-remembered and not-quite-known.

I was born in this place, but it was not my home. Its people were not mine; its ways were not mine. All I knew of it was what I had been told, and what I had seen for myself these last weeks of preparation, on the television screen. And the dream-feeling was intensified, at first, by the fact that I did not know why I was there. I knew it had been planned this way, and I had been told it was necessary to complete my education. Certainly I was aware of the great effort that had been made to make the trip possible. But I did not yet understand just why.

Perhaps it was just that I had heard and watched and thought and dreamed too much about this place, and now I was actually there, the reality was—not so much a disappointment as—just sort of unreal. Different from what I knew when I didn’t know.

The road unwound in a spreading spiral down the mountainside. Each time I came round, I could see the city below, closer and larger, and less distinct. From the top, with the sunlight sparkling on it, it had been a clean and gleaming pattern of human civilization. Halfway down, the symmetry was lost, and the smudge and smoke began to show.

Halfway down, too, I began to pass places of business: restaurants and gas stations and handicraft shops. I wanted to stop. For half an hour now I had been out on my own, and I still hadn’t seen any of the people, except the three who had passed me behind the wheels of their cars, going up the road. One of the shops had a big sign on it, “COME IN AND LOOK AROUND.” But I kept going. One thing I understood was that it was absolutely necessary to have money, and that I must stop nowhere, and attempt nothing, till after I had gotten some.

Farther down, the houses began coming closer together, and then the road stopped winding around, and became almost straight. By that time, I was used to the car, and didn’t have to think about it much, and for a little while I really enjoyed myself. I could see into the houses sometimes, through the windows, and at one, a woman was opening the door, coming out with a broom in her hand. There were children playing in the yards. There were cars of all kinds parked around the houses, and I saw dogs and a couple of horses, and once a whole flock of chickens.

But just where it was beginning to get really interesting, when I was coming into the little town before the city, I had to stop watching it all, because there were too many other people driving. That was when I began to understand all the fuss about licenses and tests and traffic regulations. Watching it on television, it wasn’t anything like being in the middle of it!

Of course, what I ran into there was really nothing; I found that out when I got into the city itself. But just at first, it seemed pretty bad. And I still don’t understand it. These people are pretty bright mechanically. You’d think anybody who could build an automobile—let alone an atom bomb—could drive one easily enough. Especially with a lifetime to learn in. Maybe they just like to live dangerously.…

It was a good thing, though, that I’d already started watching out for what the other drivers were doing when I hit my first red light. That was something I’d overlooked entirely, watching street scenes on the screen, and I guess they’d never noticed either. They must have taken it for granted, the way I did, that people stopped their cars out of courtesy from time to time to let the others go by. As it was, I stopped because the others did, and just happened to notice that they began again when the light changed to green. It’s really a very good system; I don’t see why they don’t have them at all the intersections.

* * * *

From the first light, it was eight miles into the center of Colorado Springs. A sign on the road said so, and I was irrationally pleased when the speedometer on the car confirmed it. Proud, I suppose, that these natives from my own birth-place were such good gadgeteers. The road was better after that, too, and the cars didn’t dart in and out off the sidestreets the way they had before. There was more traffic on the highway, but most of them behaved fairly intelligently. Until we got into town, that is. After that, it was everybody-for-himself, but by then I was prepared for it.

I found a place to park the car near a drugstore. That was the first thing I was supposed to do. Find a drugstore, where there would likely be a telephone directory, and go in and look up the address of a hock shop. I had a little trouble parking the car in the space they had marked off, but I could see from the way the others were stationed that you were supposed to get in between the white lines, with the front of the car next to the post on the sidewalk. I didn’t know what the post was for, until I got out and read what it said, and then I didn’t know what to do, because I didn’t have any money. Not yet. And I didn’t dare get into any trouble that might end up with a policeman asking to see my license, which always seemed to be the first thing they did on television, when they talked to anybody who was driving a car. I got back in the car and wriggled my way out of the hole between the other cars, and tried to think what to do. Then I remembered seeing a sign that said “Free Parking” somewhere, not too far away, and went back the way I’d come.

There was a sort of park, with a fountain spraying water all over the grass, and a big building opposite, and the white lines here were much more sensible. They were painted in diagonal strips, so you could get in and out quite easily, without all that backing and twisting and turning. I left the car there, and remembered to take the keys with me, and started walking back to the drugstore.

* * * *

That was when it hit me.

Up to then, beginning I guess when I drove that little stretch coming into Manitou, with the houses on the hills, and the children and yards and dogs and chickens, I’d begun to feel almost as if I belonged here. The people seemed so much like me—as long as I wasn’t right up against them. From a little distance, you’d think there was no difference at all. Then, I guess, when I was close enough to notice, driving through town, I’d been too much preoccupied with the car. It didn’t really get to me till I got out and started walking.

They were all so big.…

They were big, and their faces and noses and even the pores of their skin were too big. And their voices were too loud. And they smelled.

I didn’t notice that last much till I got into the drugstore. Then I thought I was going to suffocate, and I had a kind of squeezing upside-down feeling in my stomach and diaphragm and throat, which I didn’t realize till later was what they meant by “being sick.” I stood over the directory rack, pretending to read, but really just struggling with my insides, and a man came along and shouted in my ear something that sounded like, “Vvvm trubbb lll-lll-lll ay-dee?” (I didn’t get that sorted out for hours afterwards, but I don’t think I’ll ever forget just the way it sounded at the time. Of course, he meant, “Having trouble, little lady?”) But all I knew at the time was he was too big and smelled of all kinds of things that were unfamiliar and slightly sickening. I couldn’t answer him. All I could do was turn away so as not to breathe him, and try to pretend I knew what I was doing with the directory. Then he hissed at me (“Sorry, no offense,” I figured out later), and said clearly enough so I could understand even then, “Just trying to help,” and walked away.

As soon as he was gone, I walked out myself. Directory or no directory, I had to get out of that store. I went back to where I’d left the car, but instead of getting in it, I sat down on a bench in the park, and waited till the turmoil inside me began to quiet down.

I went back into that drugstore once before I left, purposely, just to see if I could pin down what it was that had bothered me so much, because I never reacted that strongly afterwards, and I wondered if maybe it was just that it was the first time I was inside one of their buildings. But it was more than that; that place was a regular snake-pit of a treatment for a stranger, believe me! They had a tobacco counter, and a lunch counter and a perfume-and-toiletries section, and a nut-roasting machine, and just to top it off, in the back of the store, an open-to-look-at (and smell) pharmaceutical center! Everything, all mixed together, and compounded with stale human sweat, which was also new to me at the time. And no air conditioning.

Most of the air conditioning they have is bad enough on its own, with chemical smells, but those are comparatively easy to get used to…and I’ll take them any time, over what I got in that first dose of Odeur d’Earth.

* * * *

Anyhow, I sat on the park bench about fifteen minutes, I guess, letting the sun and fresh air seep in, and trying to tabulate and memorize as many of the components of that drugstore smell as I could, for future reference. I was simply going to have to adjust to them, and next time I wanted to be prepared.

All the same, I didn’t feel prepared to go back into the same place. Maybe another store wouldn’t be quite as bad. I started walking in the opposite direction, staying on the wide main street, where all the big stores seemed to be, and two blocks down, I ran into luck, because there was a big bracket sticking out over the sidewalk from the front of a store halfway down a side street, and it had the three gold balls hanging from it that I knew, from television, meant the kind of place I wanted. When I walked down to it, I saw too that they had a sign painted over the window: “We buy old gold and diamonds.”

Just how lucky that was, I didn’t realize till quite some time later. I was going to look in the Classified Directory for “Hock Shops.” I didn’t know any other name for them then.

Inside, it looked exactly like what I expected, and even the smell was nothing to complain about. Camphor and dust and mustiness were strong enough to cover most of the sweaty smell, and those were smells of a kind I’d experienced before, in other places.

The whole procedure was reassuring, because it all went just the way it was supposed to, and I knew how to behave. I’d seen it in a show, and the man behind the grilled window even looked like the man on the screen, and talked the same way.

“What can we do for you, girlie?”

“I’d like to sell a diamond,” I told him.

He didn’t say anything at first, then he looked impatient. “You got it with you?”

“Oh…yes!” I opened my purse, and took out one of the little packages, and unwrapped it, and handed it to him. He screwed the lens into his eye, and walked back from the window and put it on a little scale, and turned back and unscrewed the lens and looked at me.

“Where’d you get this, lady?” he asked me.

“It’s mine,” I said. I knew just how to do it. We’d gone over this half a dozen times before I left, and he was behaving exactly the way we’d expected.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Can’t do much with an unset stone like this.… He pursed his lips, tossed the diamond carelessly in his hand, and then pushed it back at me across the counter. I had to keep myself from smiling. It was just the way they’d said it would be. The people here were still in the Mech Age, of course, and not nearly conscious enough to communicate anything at all complex or abstract any way except verbally. But there is nothing abstract about avarice, and between what I’d been told to expect, and what I could feel pouring out of him, I knew precisely what was going on in his mind.

“You mean you don’t want it?” I said. “I thought it was worth quite a lot.…

“Might have been once.” He shrugged. “You can’t do much with a stone like that any more. Where’d you get it, girlie?”

“My mother gave it to me. A long time ago. I wouldn’t sell it, except.… Look,” I said, and didn’t have to work hard to sound desperate, because in a way I was. “Look, it must be worth something?”

He picked it up again. “Well…what do you want for it?”

That went on for quite a while. I knew what it was supposed to be worth, of course, but I didn’t hope to get even half of that. He offered seventy dollars, and I asked for five hundred, and after a while he gave me three-fifty, and I felt I’d done pretty well—for a greenhorn. I put the money in my purse, and went back to the car, and on the way I saw a policeman, so I stopped and asked him about a hotel. He looked me up and down, and started asking questions about how old I was, and what was my name and where did I live, and I began to realize that being so much smaller than the other people was going to make life complicated. I told him I’d come to visit my brother in the Academy, and he smiled, and said, “Your brother, is it?” Then he told me the name of a place just outside of town, near the Academy. It wasn’t a hotel; it was a motel, which I didn’t know about at that time, but he said I’d be better off there. A lot of what he said went right over my head at the time; later I realized what he meant about “a nice respectable couple” running the place. I found out later on, too, that he called them up to ask them to keep an eye on me; he thought I was a nice girl, but he was worried about my being alone there.

By this time, I was getting hungry, but I thought I’d better go and arrange about a place to stay first. I found the motel without much trouble, and went in and registered; I knew how to do that, at least—I’d seen it plenty of times. They gave me a key, and the man who ran the place asked me did I want any help with my bags.

“Oh, no,” I said. “No, thanks. I haven’t got much.”

I’d forgotten all about that, and they’d never thought about it either! These people always have a lot of different clothes, not just one set, and you’re supposed to have a suitcase full of things when you go to stay anyplace. I said I was hungry anyway, and wanted to go get something to eat, and do a couple of other things—I didn’t say what—before I got settled. So the woman walked over with me, and showed me which cabin it was, and asked was everything all right?

It looked all right to me. The room had a big bed in it, with sheets and a blanket and pillows and a bedspread, just like the ones I’d seen on television. And there was a chest of drawers, and a table with more small drawers in it, and two chairs and a mirror and one door that went into a closet and one that led to the bathroom. The fixtures in there were a little different from the ones they’d made for me to practice in, but functionally they seemed about the same.

I didn’t look for any difficulty with anything there except the bed, and that wasn’t her fault, so I assured her everything was just fine, and let her show me how to operate the gas-burner that was set in the wall for heat. Then we went out, and she very carefully locked the door, and handed me the key.

“You better keep that door locked,” she said, just a little sharply. “You never know.…

I wanted to ask her what you never know, but had the impression that it was something everybody was supposed to know, so I just nodded and agreed instead.

“You want to get some lunch,” she said then, “there’s a place down the road isn’t too bad. Clean, anyhow, and they don’t cater too much to those…well, it’s clean.” She pointed the way; you could see the sign from where we were standing. I thanked her, and started the car, and decided I might as well go there as anyplace else, especially since I could see she was watching to find out whether I did or not.

* * * *

These people are all too big. Or almost all of them. But the man behind the counter at the diner was enormous. He was tall and fat with a beefy red face and large open pores and a fleshy mound of a nose. I didn’t like to look at him, and when he talked, he boomed so loud I could hardly understand him. On top of all that, the smell in that place was awful: not quite as bad as the drugstore, but some ways similar to it. I kept my eyes on the menu, which was full of unfamiliar words, and tried to remember that I was hungry.

The man was shouting at me—or it was more like growling, I guess—and I couldn’t make out the words at first. He said it again, and I sorted out syllables and matched them with the words on the card, and then I got it:

“Goulash is nice today, miss.…

I didn’t know what goulash was, and the state my stomach was in, with the smells, I decided I’d better play safe, and ordered a glass of milk, and some vegetable soup.

The milk had a strange taste to it. Not bad—just different. But of course, this came from cows. That was all right. But the vegetable soup…!

It was quite literally putrid, made as near as I could figure out from dead animal juices, in which vegetables had been soaked and cooked till any trace of flavor or nourishment was entirely removed. I took one taste of that, and then I realized what the really nauseating part of the odor was, in the diner and the drugstore both. It was rotten meat, dead for some time, and then heated in preparation for eating.

The crackers that came with the soup were good; they had a nice salty tang. I ordered more of those, with another glass of milk, and sat back sipping slowly, trying to adjust to that smell, now that I realized I’d probably find it anywhere I could find food.

After a while, I got my insides enough in order so that I could look around a little and see the place, and the other people in it. That was when I turned around and saw Larry sitting next to me.

He was beautiful. He is beautiful. I know that’s not what you’re supposed to say about a man, and he wouldn’t like it, but I can only say what I see, and of course that’s partly a matter of my own training and my own feelings about myself.

At home on the ship, I always wanted to cut off my hair, because it was so black, and my skin was so white, and they didn’t go together. But they wouldn’t let me; they liked it that way, I guess, but I didn’t. No child wants to feel like a freak, and nobody else had hair like that, or dead-white colorless skin, either.

Then, when I went down there, and saw all the humans, I was still a freak because I was so small.

Larry’s small, too. Almost as small as I am. And he’s all one color. He has hair, of course, but it’s so light, and his skin is so dark (both from the sun, I found out), that he looks just about the same lovely golden color all over. Or at least as much of him as showed when I saw him that time, in the diner.

He was beautiful, and he was my size, and he didn’t have ugly rough skin or big heavy hands. I stared at him, and I felt like grabbing on to him to make sure he didn’t get away.

After a while I realized my mouth was half-open, and I was still holding a cracker, and I remembered that this was very bad manners. I put the cracker down and closed my mouth. He smiled. I didn’t know if he was laughing at the odd way I was acting, or just being friendly, but I smiled back anyhow.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I mean, hello. How do you do, and I’m sorry if I startled you. I shouldn’t have been staring.”

“You,” I said, and meant to finish, You were staring? But he went right on talking, so that I couldn’t finish.

“I don’t know what else you can expect, if you go around looking like that,” he said.

“I’m sorry.… I started again.

“And you should be,” he said sternly. “Anybody who walks into a place like this in the middle of a day like this looking the way you do has got to expect to get stared at a little.”

The thing is, I wasn’t used to the language; not used enough. I could communicate all right, and even understand some jokes, and I knew the spoken language, not some formal unusable version, because I learned it mostly watching those shows on the television screen. But I got confused this time, because “looking” means two different things, active and passive, and I was thinking about how I’d been looking at him, and.…

That was my lucky day. I didn’t want him to be angry at me, and the way I saw it, he was perfectly justified in scolding me, which is what I thought he was doing. But I knew he wasn’t really angry; I’d have felt it if he was. So I said, “You’re right. It was very rude of me, and I don’t blame you for being annoyed. I won’t do it any more.”

He started laughing, and this time I knew it was friendly. Like I said, that was my lucky day; he thought I was being witty. And, from what he’s told me since, I guess he realized then that I felt friendly too, because before that he’d just been bluffing it out, not knowing how to get to know me, and afraid I’d be sore at him, just for talking to me!

Which goes to show that sometimes you’re better off not being too familiar with the local customs.

* * * *

The trouble was there were too many things I didn’t know, too many small ways to trip myself up. Things they couldn’t have foreseen, or if they did, couldn’t have done much about. All it took was a little caution and a lot of alertness, plus one big important item: staying in the background—not getting to know any one person too well—not giving any single individual a chance to observe too much about me.

But Larry didn’t mean to let me do that. And … I didn’t want him to.

He asked questions; I tried to answer them. I did know enough at least of the conventions to realize that I didn’t have to give detailed answers, or could, at any point, act offended at being questioned so much. I didn’t know enough to realize that reluctance or irritation on my part wouldn’t have made him go away. We sat on those stools at the diner for most of an hour, talking, and after a little while I found I could keep the conversation on safer ground by asking him about himself, and about the country thereabouts. He seemed to enjoy talking.

Eventually, he had to go back to work. As near as I could make out, he was a test-pilot, or something like it, for a small experimental aircraft plant near the city. He lived not too far from where I was staying, and he wanted to see me that evening.

I hadn’t told him where the motel was, and I had at least enough caution left not to tell him, even then. I did agree to meet him at the diner, but for lunch the next day again, instead of that evening. For one thing, I had a lot to do; and for another, I’d seen enough on television shows to know that an evening date was likely to be pretty long-drawn-out, and I wasn’t sure I could stand up under that much close scrutiny. I had some studying-up to do first. But the lunch-date was fine; the thought of not seeing him at all was terrifying—as if he were an old friend in a world full of strangers. That was how I felt, that first time, maybe just because he was almost as small as I. But I think it was more than that, really.

* * * *

I drove downtown again, and found a store that seemed to sell all kinds of clothing for women. Then when I got inside, I didn’t know where to start, or what to get. I thought of just buying one of everything, so as to fill up a suitcase; the things I had on seemed to be perfectly satisfactory for actual wearing purposes. They were quite remarkably—when you stopped to think of it—similar to what most of the women I’d seen that day were wearing, and of course they weren’t subject to the same problems of dirtying and wrinkling and such as the clothes in the store were.

I walked around for a while, trying to figure out what all the different items, shapes, sizes, and colors, were for. Some racks and counters had signs, but most of them were unfamiliar words like brunchies, or Bermudas or scuffs; or else they seemed to be mislabeled, like dusters for a sort of button-down dress, and Postage Stamp Girdles at one section of a long counter devoted to “Foundation Garments.” For half an hour or so, I wandered around in there, shaking my head every time a saleswoman came up to me, because I didn’t know, and couldn’t figure out, what to ask for, or how to ask for it.

The thing was, I didn’t dare draw too much attention to myself by doing or saying the wrong things. I’d have to find out more about clothes, somehow, before I could do much buying.

I went out, and on the same block I found a show-window full of suitcases. That was easy. I went in and pointed to one I liked, and paid for it, and walked out with it, feeling a little braver. After all, nobody had to know there was nothing in it. On the corner, I saw some books displayed in the window of a drug store. It took all the courage I had to go in there, after my first trip into one that looked very much like it, but I wanted a dictionary. This place didn’t smell quite so strong; I suppose the pharmacy was enclosed in back, and I don’t believe it had a lunch counter. Anyhow, I got in and out quickly, and walked back to the car, and sat down with the dictionary.

It turned out to be entirely useless, at least as far as brunchies and Bermudas were concerned. It had “scuff, v.,” with a definition; “v.,” I found out, meant verb, so that wasn’t the word I wanted, but when I remembered the slippers on the counter with the sign, it made sense in a way.

Not enough sense, though. I decided to forget about the clothes for a while. The next problem was a driver’s license.

The policeman that morning had been helpful, if over-interested, and since policemen directed traffic, they ought to have the information I wanted. I found one of them standing on a streetcorner looking not too busy, and asked him, and if his hair hadn’t been brown instead of reddish (and only half there) I’d have thought it was the same one I talked to before. He wanted to know how old I was, and where was I from, and what I was doing there, and did I have a car, and was I sure I was nineteen?

Well, of course, I wasn’t sure, but they’d told me that by the local reckoning, that was my approximate age. And I almost slipped and said I had a car, until I realized that I didn’t have a right to drive one till I had a license. After he asked that one question, I began to feel suspicious about everything else he asked, and the interest he expressed. He was helpful, but I had to remember too, that it was the police who were charged with watching for suspicious characters, and—well, it was the last time I asked a policeman for information.

He did tell me where I could rent a car to take my road test, though, and where to apply for the test. The Courthouse turned out to be the big building behind the square where I’d parked the car that morning, and arranging for the test turned out to be much simpler than, by then, I expected it to be. In a way, I suppose, all the questions I had to answer when I talked to the policeman had prepared me for the official session—though they didn’t seem nearly so inquisitive there.

By this time, I’d come to expect that they wouldn’t believe my age when I told them. The woman at the window behind the counter wanted to see a “birth certificate,” and I produced the one piece of identification I had; an ancient and yellowed document they had kept for me all these years. From the information it contained, I suspected it might even be a birth certificate; whether or not, it apparently satisfied her, and after that all she wanted was things like my address and height and weight. Fortunately, they had taken the trouble, back on the ship, to determine these statistics for me, because things like that were always coming up on television shows, especially when people were being questioned by the police. For the address, of course, I used the motel. The rest I knew, and I guess we had the figures close enough to right so that at least the woman didn’t question any of it.

I had my road test about half an hour later, in a rented car, and the examiner said I did very well. He seemed surprised, and I don’t wonder, considering the way most of those people contrive to mismanage a simple mechanism like an automobile. I guess when they say Earth is still in the Mechanical Age, what they mean is that humans are just learning about machines.

* * * *

The biggest single stroke of luck I had at any time came during that road test. We passed a public-looking building with a sign in front that I didn’t understand.

“What’s that place?” I asked the examiner, and he said, as if anyone would know what he meant, “That? Oh—the Library.”

I looked it up in my dictionary as soon as I was done at the License Bureau, and when I found out what it was, everything became a great deal simpler.

There was a woman who worked there, who showed me, without any surprise at my ignorance, just how the card catalogue worked, and what the numbering system meant; she didn’t ask me how old I was, or any other questions, or demand any proof of any kind to convince her I had a right to use the place. She didn’t even bother me much with questions about what I was looking for. I told her there were a lot of things I wanted to know, and she seemed to think that was a good answer, and said if she could help me any way, not to hesitate to ask, and then she left me alone with those drawers and drawers full of letter-and-number keys to all the mysteries of an alien world.

I found a book on how to outfit your daughter for college, that started with underwear and worked its way through to jewelry and cosmetics. I also found a whole shelf full of law books, and in one of them, specific information about the motor vehicle regulations in different States. There was a wonderful book about diamonds and other precious stones, particularly fascinating because it went into the chemistry of the different stones, and gave me the best measuring-stick I found at any time to judge the general level of technology of that so-called Mechanical Age.

That was all I had time for, I couldn’t believe it was so late, when the librarian came and told me they were closing up, and I guess my disappointment must have showed all over me, because she asked if I wouldn’t like to have a card, so I could take books home?

I found out all I needed to get a card was identification. I was supposed to have a reference, too, but the woman said she thought perhaps it would be all right without one, in my case. And then, when I wanted to take a volume of the Encyclopedia Americana, she said they didn’t usually circulate that, but if I thought I could bring it back within a day or two.…

I promised to, and I never did, and out of everything that happened, that’s the one thing I feel badly about. I think she must have been a very unusual and good sort of woman, and I wish I had kept my promise to her.

* * * *

Some of the stores downtown were still open. I bought the things I’d be expected to have, as near as I could make out from the book on college girls: panties and a garter belt and a brassiere, and stockings. A slip and another blouse, and a coat, because even in the early evening it was beginning to get chilly. Then the salesgirl talked me into gloves and a scarf and some earrings. I was halfway back to the car when I remembered about night clothes, and went back for a gown and robe and slippers. That didn’t begin to complete the college girls’ list, but it seemed like a good start. I’d need a dress, too, I thought, if I ever did go out with Larry in the evening…but that could wait.

I put everything into the suitcase, and drove back to the motel. On the way, I stopped at a food store, and bought a large container of milk, and some crackers, and some fruit—oranges and bananas and apples. Back in my room, I put everything away in the drawers, and then sat down with my book and my food, and had a wonderful time. I was hungry, and everything tasted good, away from the dead meat smells, and what with clothes in the drawers and everything, I was beginning to feel like a real Earth-girl.

I even took a bath in the bathroom.

A good long one. Next to the library, that’s the thing I miss most. It would be even better, if they made the tubs bigger, so you could swim around some. But just getting wet all over like that, and splashing in the water, is fun. Of course, we could never spare enough water for that on the ship.

Altogether, it was a good evening; everything was fine until I tried to sleep in that bed. I felt as if I was being suffocated all over. The floor was almost as bad, but in a different way. And once I got to sleep, I guess I slept well enough, because I felt fine in the morning. But then, I think I must have been on a mild oxygen jag all the time I was down there; nothing seemed to bother me too much. That morning, I felt so good I worked up my courage to go into a restaurant again—a different one. The smell was beginning to be familiar, and I could manage better. I experimented with a cereal called oatmeal, which was delicious, then I went back to the motel, packed up all my new belongings, left the key on the desk—as instructed by the sign on the door—and started out for Denver.

* * * *

Denver, according to the Encyclopedia Americana, is more of a true metropolitan area than Colorado Springs; that means—on Earth—that it is dirtier, more crowded, far less pleasant to look at or live in, and a great deal more convenient and efficient to do business in. In Denver, and with the aid of a Colorado driver’s license for casual identification, I was able to sell two of my larger diamonds fairly quickly, at two different places, for something approximating half of their full value. Then I parked the car they had given me on a side street, took my suitcase, coat, and book with me, and walked to the nearest car sales lot. I left the keys in the old car, for the convenience of anyone who might want it.

Everything went extraordinarily smoothly, with just one exception. I had found out everything I needed to know in that library, except that when dealing with humans, one must always allow for waste time. If I had realized that at the time I left Colorado Springs that morning, everything might have turned out very differently indeed—although when I try to think just what other way it could have turned out, I don’t quite know…and I wonder, too, how much they knew, or planned, before they sent me down there.…

This much is sure: if I hadn’t assumed that a 70-mile trip, with a 60-mile average speed limit, would take approximately an hour and a half, and if I had realized that buying an automobile was not the same simple process as buying a nightgown, I wouldn’t have been late for my luncheon appointment. And if I’d been there on time, I’d never have made the date for that night. As it was, I started out at seven o’clock in the morning, and only by exceeding the speed limit on the last twenty miles of the return trip did I manage to pull into that diner parking space at five minutes before two.

His car was still there!

It is so easy to look back and spot the instant of recognition or of error. My relief when I saw his car…my delight when I walked in and saw and felt his mixture of surprise and joy that I had come, with disappointment and frustration because it was so late, and he had to leave almost immediately. And my complete failure, in the midst of the complexities of these inter-reactions, to think logically, or to recognize that his ordinary perceptions were certainly the equivalent of my own.…

At that moment, I wasn’t thinking about any of these things. I spent a delirious sort of five minute period absorbing his feelings about me, and releasing my own at him. I hadn’t planned to do it, not so soon, not till I knew much more than I did—perhaps after another week’s reading and going about—but when he said that since I’d got there so late for lunch, I’d have to meet him for dinner, I found I agreed with him perfectly.

* * * *

That afternoon, I bought a dress. This, too, took a great deal of time, even more than the car, because in the one case I simply had to look at a number of component parts, and listen to the operation of the motor, and feel for the total response of the mechanism, to determine whether it was suitable or not—but in the other, I had nothing to guide me but my own untrained taste, and the dubious preferences of the salesgirl, plus what I thought Larry’s reactions might be. Also, I had to determine, without seeming too ignorant, just what sort of dress might be suitable for a dinner date—and without knowing for sure just how elaborate Larry’s plans for the evening might be.

I learned a lot, and was startled to find that I enjoyed myself tremendously. But I couldn’t make up my mind, and bought three dresses instead of one. It was after that, emboldened by pleasure and success, that I went back to that first drugstore. The Encyclopedia volume I had taken from the library, besides containing the information I wanted on Colorado, had an article on Cosmetics. I decided powder was unnecessary, although I could understand easily enough how important it must be to the native women, with their thick skin and large pores and patchy coloring; that accounted for the fact that the men were mostly so much uglier…and I wondered if Larry used it, and if that was why his skin looked so much better than the others’.

Most of the perfumes made me literally ill; a few were inoffensive or mildly pleasant, if you thought of them just as smells, and not as something to be mistaken for one’s own smell. Apparently, though, from the amount of space given over to them on the counter, and the number of advertisements I had seen or heard for one brand or another, they were an essential item. I picked out a faint lavender scent, and then bought some lipstick, mascara, and eyebrow pencil. On these last purchases, it was a relief to find that I had no opportunity to display my ignorance about nuances of coloring, or the merits of one brand over another. The woman behind the counter knew exactly what I should have, and was not interested in hearing any of my opinions. She even told me how to apply the mascara, which was helpful, since the other two were obvious, and anyhow I’d seen them used on television, and the lipstick especially I had seen women use since I’d been here.

It turned out to be a little more difficult than it looked, when I tried it. Cosmetics apparently take a good deal more experience than clothing, if you want to have it look right. Right by their standards, I mean, so that your face becomes a formal design, and will register only a minimum of actual emotion or response.

I was supposed to meet Larry in the cocktail lounge of a hotel in Manitou Springs, the smaller town I’d passed through the day before on my way down from the mountain. I drove back that way now, with all my possessions in my new car, including the purse that held not only my remaining diamonds and birth certificate, but also a car registration, driver’s license, wallet, money, and makeup. A little more than halfway there, I saw a motel with a “Vacancy” sign out, and an attractive clean look about it. I pulled in and got myself a room with no more concern than if I’d been doing that sort of thing all my life.

This time there was no question about my age, nor was there later on that evening, in the cocktail lounge or anywhere else. I suppose it was the lipstick that made the difference, plus a certain increase in self-confidence; apparently I wasn’t too small to be an adult, provided I looked and acted like one.

The new room did not have a bathtub. There was a shower, which was fun, but not as much as the tub had been. Dressing was not fun, and when I was finished, the whole effect still didn’t look right, in terms of my own mental image of an Earth-woman dressed for a date.

It was the shoes, of course. This kind of dress wanted high heels. I had tried a pair in the store, and promptly rejected the whole notion. Now I wondered if I’d been too hasty, but I realized I could not conceivably have added that discomfort to the already-pressing difficulties of stockings and garter belt.

This last problem got so acute when I sat down and tried to drive the car, that I did some thinking about it, and decided to take them off. It seemed to me that I’d seen a lot of bare legs with flat heels. It was only with high heels that stockings were a real necessity. Anyhow, I pulled the car over to the side on an empty stretch of road, and wriggled out of things with a great deal of difficulty. I don’t believe it made much difference in my appearance. No one seemed to notice, and I do think the lack of heels was more important.

* * * *

All of this has been easy to put down. The next part is harder: partly because it’s so important; partly because it’s personal; partly because I just don’t remember it all as clearly.

Larry was waiting for me when I got to the hotel. He stood up and walked over to me, looking at me as if I were the only person in the room besides himself, or as if he’d been waiting all his life, and only just that moment saw what it was he’d been waiting for. I don’t know how I looked at him, but I know how I felt all of a sudden, and I don’t think I can express it very well.

It was odd, because of the barriers to communication. The way he felt and the way I did are not things to put into words, and although I couldn’t help but feel the impact of his emotion, I had to remember that he was deaf-and-blind to mine. All I could get from him for that matter, was a sort of generalized noise, loud but confused, without any features or details.

He smiled, and I smiled, and he said, “I didn’t know if you’d really come … and I said, “Am I late?” and he said, “Not much. What do you want to drink?”

I knew he meant something with alcohol in it, and I didn’t dare, not till I’d experimented all alone first.

“Could I get some orange juice?” I asked.

He smiled again. “You can get anything you want. You don’t drink?” He took my arm, and walked me over to a booth in the back corner, and went on without giving me a chance to answer. “No, of course you don’t. Just orange juice and milk. Listen, Tina, I’ve been scared to ask you, but we might as well get it over with. How old are you anyhow?… We sat down, but he still didn’t give me a chance to answer. “No, that’s not the right question. Who are you? What are you? What makes a girl like you exist at all? How come they let you run around on your own like this? Does your mother.… Never mind me, honey. I’ve got no business asking anything. Sufficient unto the moment, and all that. I’m just talking so much because I’m so nervous. I haven’t felt like this since…since I first went up for a solo in a Piper Cub. I didn’t think you’d come, and you did, and you’re still here in spite of me and my dumb yap. Orange juice for the lady, please,” he told the waiter, “and a beer for me. Draft.”

I just sat there. As long as he kept talking, I didn’t have to. He looked just as beautiful as he had in the diner, only maybe more so. His skin was smoother; I suppose he’d just shaved. And he was wearing a tan suit just a shade darker than his skin, which was just a shade darker than his hair, and there was absolutely nothing I could say out loud in his language that would mean anything at all, so I waited to see if he’d start talking again.

“You’re not mad at me, Tina?”

I smiled and shook my head.

“Well, say something then.”

“It’s more fun listening to you.”

“You say that just like you mean it…or do you mean funny?”

“No. I mean that it’s hard for me to talk much. I don’t know how to say a lot of the things I want to say. And most people don’t say anything when they talk, and I don’t like listening to their voices, but I do like yours, and … I can’t help liking what you say…it’s always so nice. About me, I mean. Complimentary. Flattering.”

“You were right the first time. And you seem to be able to say what you mean very clearly.”

Which was just the trouble. Not only able to, but unable not to. It didn’t take any special planning or remembering to say or act the necessary lies to other humans. But Larry was the least alien person I’d ever known. Dishonesty to him was like lying to myself. Playing a role for him was pure schizophrenia.

Right then, I knew it was a mistake. I should never have made that date, or at least not nearly so soon. But even as I thought that, I had no more intention of cutting it short or backing out than I did of going back to the ship the next day. I just tried not to talk too much, and trusted to the certain knowledge that I was as important to him as he was to me—so perhaps whatever mistakes I made, whatever I said that sounded wrong, he would either accept or ignore or forgive.

But of course you can’t just sit all night and say nothing. And the simplest things could trip me up. Like when he asked if I’d like to dance, and all I had to say was “No, thanks,” and instead, because I wanted to try it, I said, “I don’t know how.”

Or when he said something about going to a movie, and I agreed enthusiastically, and he gave me a choice of three different ones that he wanted to see … “Oh, anyone,” I told him. “You’re easy to please,” he said, but he insisted on my making a choice. There was something he called “an old-Astaire-Rogers,” and something else that was made in England, and one current American one with stars I’d seen on television. I wanted to see either of the others. I could have said so, or I could have named one, any one. Instead I heard myself blurting out that I’d never been to a movie.

At that point, of course, he began to ask questions in earnest. And at that point, schizoid or not, I had to lie. It was easier, though, because I’d been thoroughly briefed in my story, for just such emergencies as this—and because I could talk more or less uninterruptedly, with only pertinent questions thrown in, and without having to react so much to the emotional tensions between us.

I told him how my parents had died in an automobile accident when I was a baby; how my two uncles had claimed me at the hospital; about the old house up on the mountainside, and the convent school, and the two old men who hated the evils of the world; about the death of the first uncle, and at long last the death of the second, and the lawyers and the will and everything—the whole story, as we’d worked it out back on the ship.

It answered everything, explained everything—even the unexpected item of not being able to eat meat. My uncles were vegetarians, which was certainly a harmless eccentricity compared to most of the others I credited them with.

As a story, it was pretty far-fetched, but it hung together—and in certain ways, it wasn’t even too far removed from the truth. It was, anyhow, the closest thing to the truth that I could tell—and I therefore delivered it with a fair degree of conviction. Of course it wasn’t designed to stand up to the close and personal inspection Larry gave it; but then he wanted to believe me.

He seemed to swallow it. What he did, of course, was something any man who relies, as he did, on his reflexes and responses to stay alive, learns to do very early—he filed all questions and apparent discrepancies for reference, or for thinking over when there was time, and proceeded to make the most of the current situation.

We both made the most of it. It was a wonderful evening, from that point on. We went to the Astaire-Rogers picture, and although I missed a lot of the humor, since it was contemporary stuff from a time before I had any chance to learn about Earth, the music and dancing were fun. Later on, I found that dancing was not nearly as difficult or intricate as it looked—at least not with Larry. All I had to do was give in to a natural impulse to let my body follow his. It felt wonderful, from the feet on up.

Finally, we went back to the hotel, where we’d left my car, and I started to get out of his, but he reached out an arm, and stopped me.

“There’s something else I guess you never did,” he said. His voice sounded different from before. He put both his hands on my shoulders, and pulled me toward him, and leaned over and kissed me.

I’d seen it, of course, on television.

I’d seen it, but I had no idea.…

That first time, it was something I felt on my lips, and felt so sweetly and so strongly that the rest of me seemed to melt away entirely. I had no other sensations, except in that one place where his mouth touched mine. That was the first time.

When it stopped, the world stopped, and I began again, but I had to sort out the parts and pieces and put them all together to find out who I was. While I did this, his hands were still on my shoulders, where they’d been all along, only he was holding me at arm’s distance away from him, and looking at me curiously.

“It really was, wasn’t it?” he said.

“What?” I tried to say, but the sound didn’t come out. I took a breath and “Was what?” I croaked.

“The first time.” He smiled suddenly, and it was like the sun coming up in the morning, and then his arms went all the way around me. I don’t know whether he moved over on the seat, or I did, or both of us. “Oh, baby, baby,” he whispered in my ear, and then there was the second time.

The second time was like the first, and also like dancing, and some ways like the bathtub. This time none of me melted away; it was all there, and all close to him, and all warm, and all tingling with sensations. I was more completely alive right then than I had ever been before in my life.

After we stopped kissing each other, we stayed very still, holding on to each other, for a while, and then he moved away just a little, enough, to breathe better.

I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to get out of the car. I didn’t even want to be separated from him by the two or three inches between us on the seat. But he was sitting next to me now, staring straight ahead, not saying anything, and I just didn’t know what came next. On television, the kiss was always the end of the scene.

He started the car again.

I said, “I have to…my car … I.…

“We’ll come back,” he said. “Don’t worry about it. We’ll come back. Let’s just drive a little…?” he pulled out past my car, and turned and looked at me for a minute. “You don’t want to go now, do you? Right away?”

I shook my head, but he wasn’t looking at me any more, so I took a breath and said out loud, “No.”

We came off a twisty street onto the highway. “So that’s how it hits you,” he said. He wasn’t exactly talking to me; more like thinking out loud. “Twenty-seven years a cool cat, and now it has to be a crazy little midget that gets to you.” He had to stop then, for a red light—the same light I’d stopped at the first time on the way in. That seemed a long long time before.

Larry turned around and took my hand. He looked hard at my face, “I’m sorry, hon. I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.”

“What?” I said. “What do you mean?” I hadn’t even tried to make sense out of what he was saying before; he wasn’t talking to me anyhow.

“Kid,” he said, “maybe that was the first time for you, but in a different way it was the first time for me too.” His hand opened and closed around mine, and his mouth opened and closed too, but nothing came out. The light was green; he noticed, and started moving, but it turned red again. This time he kept watching it.

“I don’t suppose anybody ever told you about the birds and the bees and the butterflies,” he said.

“Told me what about them?” He didn’t answer right away, so I thought about it. “All I can think of is they all have wings. They all fly.”

“So do I. So does a fly. What I mean is…the hell with it!” He turned off the highway, and we went up a short hill and through a sort of gateway between two enormous rocks. “Have you ever been here?” he asked.

“I don’t think so.…

“They call it The Garden of the Gods. I don’t know why. I like it here…it’s a good place to drive and think.”

There was a lot of moonlight, and the Garden was all hills and drops and winding roads between low-growing brush, and everywhere, as if the creatures of some giant planet had dropped them, were those towering rocks, their shapes scooped out and chiseled and hollowed and twisted by wind, water and sand. Yes, it was lovely, and it was non-intrusive. Just what he said—a good place to drive and think.

Once he came to the top of a hill, and stopped the car, and we looked out over the Garden, spreading out in every direction, with the moonlight shadowed in the sagebrush, and gleaming off the great rocks. Then we turned and looked at each other, and he reached out for me and kissed me again; after which he pulled away as if the touch of me hurt him, and grabbed hold of the wheel with a savage look on his face, and raced the motor, and raised a cloud of dust on the road behind us.

I didn’t understand, and I felt hurt. I wanted to stop again. I wanted to be kissed again. I didn’t like sitting alone on my side of the seat, with that growl in his throat not quite coming out.

I asked him to stop again. He shook his head, and made believe to smile.

“I’ll buy you a book,” he said. “All about the birds and the bees and a little thing we have around here we call sex. I’ll buy it tomorrow, and you can read it—you do know how to read, don’t you?—and then we’ll take another ride, and we can park if you want to. Not tonight, baby.”

“But I know.… I started, and then had sense enough to stop. I knew about sex; but what I knew about it didn’t connect with kissing or parking the car, or sitting close…and it occurred to me that maybe it did, and maybe there was a lot I didn’t know that wasn’t on Television, and wasn’t on the Ship’s reference tapes either. Morals and mores, and nuances of behavior. So I shut up, and let him take me back to the hotel again, to my own car.

He leaned past me to open the door on my side, but he couldn’t quite make it, and I had my fourth kiss. Then he let go again, and almost pushed me out of the car; but when I started to close the door behind me, he called out, “Tomorrow night?”

“I…all right,” I said. “Yes. Tomorrow night.”

“Can I pick you up?”

There was no reason not to this time. The first time I wouldn’t tell him where I lived, because I knew I’d have to change places, and I didn’t know where yet. I told him the name of the motel, and where it was.

“Six o’clock,” he said.

“All right.”

“Good night.”

“Good night.”

* * * *

I don’t remember driving back to my room. I think I slept on the bed that night, without ever stopping to determine whether it was comfortable or not. And when I woke up in the morning, and looked out the window at a white-coated landscape, the miracle of snow (which I had never seen before; not many planets have as much water vapor in their atmospheres as Earth does.) in summer weather seemed trivial in comparison to what had happened to me.

Trivial, but beautiful. I was afraid it would be very cold, but it wasn’t.

I had gathered, from the weather-talk in the place where I ate breakfast, that in this mountain-country (it was considered to be very high altitude there), snow at night and hot sun in the afternoon was not infrequent in the month of April, though it was unusual for May.

It was beautiful to look at, and nice to walk on, but it began melting as soon as the sun was properly up, and then it looked awful. The red dirt there is pretty, and so is the snow, but when they began merging into each other in patches and muddy spots, it was downright ugly.

Not that I cared. I ate oatmeal and drank milk and nibbled at a piece of toast, and tried to plan my activities for the day. To the library first, and take back the book they’d lent me. Book…all right then, get a book on sex. But that was foolish; I knew all about sex. At least I knew…well, what did I know? I knew their manner of reproduction, and.…

Just why, at that time and place, I should have let it come through to me, I don’t know. I’d managed to stay in a golden daze from the time in the Garden till that moment, refusing to think through the implications of what Larry said.

Sex. Sex is mating and reproduction. Dating and dancing and kissing are parts of the courtship procedure. And the television shows all stop with kissing, because the mating itself is taboo. Very simple. Also very taboo.

Of course, they didn’t say I couldn’t. They never said anything about it at all. It was just obvious. It wouldn’t even work. We were different, after all.

Oh, technically, biologically, of course, we were probably cross-fertile, but.…

The whole thing was so obviously impossible!

They should have warned me. I’d never have let it go this far, if I’d known.

Sex. Mating. Marriage. Tribal rites. Rituals and rigamaroles, and stay here forever. Never go back.

Never go back?

There was an instant’s sheer terror, and then the comforting knowledge that they wouldn’t let me do that. I had to go back.

Baby on a spaceship?

Well, I was a baby on a spaceship, but that was different. How different? I was older. I wasn’t born there. Getting born is complicated. Oxygen, gravity, things like that. You can’t raise a human baby on a spaceship.… Human? What’s human? What am I? Never mind the labels. It would be my baby.…

I didn’t want a baby. I just wanted Larry to hold me close to him and kiss me.

* * * *

I drove downtown and on the way to the library I passed a bookstore, so I stopped and went in there instead. That was better. I could buy what I wanted, and not have to ask permission to take it out, and if there was more than one, I could have all I wanted.

I asked the man for books about sex. He looked so startled, I realized the taboo must apply on the verbal level too.

I didn’t care. He showed me where the books were, and that’s all that mattered. “Non-fiction here,” he said. “That what you wanted, Miss?”

Non-fiction. Definitely. I thanked him, and picked out half a dozen different books. One was a survey of sexual behavior and morals; another was a manual of techniques; one was on the psychology of sex, and there was another about abnormal sex, and one on physiology, and just to play safe, considering the state of my own ignorance, one that announced itself as giving a “clear simple explanation of the facts of life for adolescents.”

I took them all to the counter, and paid for them, and the man still looked startled, but he took the money. He insisted on wrapping them up, though, before I could leave.

* * * *

The next part of this is really Larry’s story, but unable as I am, even now, to be certain about his unspoken thoughts, I can only tell it as I experienced it. I didn’t do anything all that day, except wade through the books I’d bought, piece-meal, reading a few pages here and a chapter there. The more I read, the more confused I got. Each writer contradicted all the others, except in regard to the few basic biological facts that I already knew. The only real addition to my factual knowledge was the information in the manual of technique about contraception—and that was rather shocking, even while it was tempting.

The mechanical contrivances these people made use of were foolish, of course, and typical of the stage of culture they are going through. If I wanted to prevent conception, while engaging in an act of sexual intercourse, I could, do so, of course, but.…

The shock to the glandular system wouldn’t be too severe; it was the psychological repercussions I was thinking about. The idea of pursuing a course of action whose sole motivation was the procreative urge, and simultaneously to decide by an act of will to refuse to procreate.…

I could do it, theoretically, but in practice I knew I never would.

I put the book down and went outside in the afternoon sunshine. The motel was run by a young married couple, and I watched the woman come out and put her baby in the playpen. She was laughing and talking to it; she looked happy; so did the baby.

But I wouldn’t be. Not even if they let me. I couldn’t live here and bring up a child—children?—on this primitive, almost barbaric, world. Never ever be able fully to communicate with anyone. Never, ever, be entirely honest with anyone.

Then I remembered what it was like to be in Larry’s arms, and wondered what kind of communication I could want that might surpass that. Then I went inside and took a shower and began to dress for the evening.

It was too early to get dressed. I was ready too soon. I went out and got in the car, and pulled out onto the highway and started driving. I was halfway up the mountain before I knew where I was going, and then I doubled my speed.

I was scared. I ran away.

* * * *

There was still some snow on the mountain top. Down below, it would be warm yet, but up there it was cold. The big empty house was full of dust and chill and I brought fear in with me. I wished I had known where I was going when I left my room; I wanted my coat. I wanted something to read while I waited. I remembered the library book and almost went back. Instead, I went to the dark room in back that had once been somebody’s kitchen, and opened the cupboard and found the projector and yelled for help.

I didn’t know where they were, how far away, whether cruising or landed somewhere, or how long it would take. All I could be sure of was that they couldn’t come till after dark, full dark, and that would be, on the mountain top, at least another four hours.

There was a big round black stove in a front room, that looked as if it could burn wood safely. I went out and gathered up everything I could find nearby that looked to be combustible, and started a fire, and began to feel better. I beat the dust off a big soft chair, and pulled it over close to the stove, and curled up in it, warm and drowsy and knowing that help was on the way.

I fell asleep, and I was in the car with Larry again, in front of that hotel, every cell of my body tinglingly awake, and I woke up, and moved the chair farther back away from the fire, and watched the sun set through the window—till I fell asleep again, and dreamed again, and when I woke, the sun was gone, but the mountain top was brightly lit. I had forgotten about the moon.

I tried to remember what time it rose and when it set, but all I knew was it had shone as bright last night in the Garden of the Gods.

I walked around, and went outside, and got more wood, and when it was hot in the room again, I fell asleep, and Larry’s hands were on my shoulders, but he wasn’t kissing me.

He was shouting at me. He sounded furious, but I couldn’t feel any anger. “You God-damn little idiot!” he shouted. “What in the name of all that’s holy…? …put you over my knee and… For God’s sake, baby,” he stopped shouting, “what did you pull a dumb trick like this for?”

“I was scared. I didn’t even plan to do it. I just did.”

“Scared? My God, I should think you would be! Now listen, babe. I don’t know yet what’s going on, and I don’t think I’m going to like it when I find out. I don’t like it already that you told me a pack of lies last night. Just the same, God help me, I don’t think it’s what it sounds like. But I’m the only one who doesn’t. Now you better give it to me straight, because they’ve got half the security personnel of this entire area out hunting for you, and nobody else is going to care much what the truth is. My God, on top of everything else, you had to run away! Now, give out, kid, and make it good. This one has got to stick.”

I didn’t understand a lot of what he said. I started trying to explain, but he wouldn’t listen. He wanted something else, and I didn’t know what.

Finally, he made me understand.

He’d almost believed my story the night before. Almost, but there was a detail somewhere that bothered him. He couldn’t remember it at first; it kept nudging around the edge of his mind, but he didn’t know what it was. He forgot about it for a while. Then, in the Garden, I made my second big mistake. (He didn’t explain all of this then; he just accused, and I didn’t understand this part completely until later.) I wanted him to park the car.

Any girl on Earth, no matter how sheltered, how inexperienced, would have known better than that. As he saw it, he had to decide whether I was just so carried away by the night and the mood and the moment that I didn’t care—or whether my apparent innocence was a pose all along.

When we separated in front of the hotel that night, we both had to take the same road for a while. Larry was driving right behind me for a good three miles, before I turned off at the motel. And that was when he realized what the detail was that had been bothering him: my car.

The first time he saw me, I was driving a different make and model, with Massachusetts plates on it. He was sure of that, because he had copied it down when he left the luncheonette, the first time we met.

Larry had never told me very clearly about the kind of work he did. I knew it was something more or less “classified,” having to do with aircraft—jet planes or experimental rockets, or something like that. And I knew, without his telling me, that the work—not just the job, but the work he did at it—was more important to him than anything else ever had been. More important, certainly, than he had ever expected any woman to be.

So, naturally, when he met me that day, and knew he wanted to see me again, but couldn’t get my address or any other identifying information out of me, he had copied down the license number of my car, and turned it in, with my name, to the Security Officer on the Project. A man who has spent almost every waking moment from the age of nine planning and preparing to fit himself for a role in humanity’s first big fling into space doesn’t endanger his security status by risking involuntary contamination from an attractive girl. The little aircraft plant on the fringes of town was actually a top-secret key division in the Satellite project, and if you worked there, you took precautions.

The second time I met him at the luncheonette, he had been waiting so long, and had so nearly given up any hope of my coming, that he was no longer watching the road or the door when I finally got there—and when he left, he was so pleased at having gotten a dinner date with me, that he didn’t notice much of anything at all. Not except out of the corner of one eye, and with only the slightest edge of subconscious recognition: just enough so that some niggling detail that was out-of-place kept bothering him thereafter; and just enough so that he made a point of stopping in the Security Office again that afternoon to add my new motel address to the information he’d given them the day before.

The three-mile drive in back of my Colorado plates was just about long enough, finally, to make the discrepancy register consciously.

Larry went home and spent a bad night. His feelings toward me, as I could hardly understand at the time, were a great deal stronger, or at least more clearly defined, than mine about him. But since he was more certain just what it was he wanted, and less certain what I did, every time he tried to fit my attitude in the car into the rest of what he knew, he’d come up with a different answer, and nine answers out of ten were angry and suspicious and agonizing.

“Now look, babe,” he said, “you’ve got to see this. I trusted you; really, all the time, I did trust you. But I didn’t trust me. By the time I went to work this morning, I was half-nuts. I didn’t know what to think, that’s all. And I finally sold myself on the idea that if you were what you said you were, nobody would get hurt, and—well, if you weren’t on the level, I better find out, quick. You see that?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Okay. So I told them about the license plates, and about—the other stuff.”

“What other stuff?” What else was there? How stupid could I be?

“I mean, the—in the car. The way you—Listen, kid,” he said, his face grim and demanding again. “It’s still just as true as it was then. I still don’t know. They called me this evening, and said when they got around to the motel to question you, you’d skipped out. They also said that Massachusetts car was stolen. And there were a couple of other things they’d picked up that they wouldn’t tell me, but they’ve got half the National Guard and all the Boy Scouts out after you by now. They wanted me to tell them anything I could think of that might help them find this place. I couldn’t think of anything while I was talking to them. Right afterwards, I remembered plenty of things—which roads you were familiar with, and what you’d seen before and what you hadn’t, stuff like that, so—”

“So you—?”

“So I came out myself. I wanted to find you first. Listen, babe, I love you. Maybe I’m a sucker, and maybe I’m nuts, and maybe I-don’t-know-what. But I figured maybe I could find out more, and easier on you, than they could. And honey, it better be good, because I don’t think I’ve got what it would take to turn you in, and now I’ve found you—”

He let it go there, but that was plenty. He was willing to listen. He wanted to believe in me, because he wanted me. And finding me in the house I’d described, where I’d said it was, had him half-convinced. But I still had to explain those Massachusetts plates. And I couldn’t.

I was psychologically incapable of telling him another lie, now, when I knew I would never see him again, that this was the last time I could ever possibly be close to him in any way. I couldn’t estrange myself by lying.

* * * *

And I was also psychologically incapable—I found out—of telling the truth. They’d seen to that.

It was the first time I’d ever hated them. The first time, I suppose, that I fully realized my position with them.

I could not tell the truth, and I would not tell a lie; all I could do was explain this, and hope he would believe me. I could explain, too, that I was no spy, no enemy; that those who had prevented me from telling what I wanted to tell were no menace to his government or his people.

He believed me.

It was just that simple. He believed me, because I suppose he knew, without knowing how he knew it, that it was truth. Humans are not incapable of communication; they are simply unaware of it.

I told him, also, that they were coming for me, that I had called them, and—regretfully—that he had better leave before they came.

“You said they weren’t enemies or criminals. You were telling the truth, weren’t you?”

“Yes, I was. They won’t harm you. But they might.… I couldn’t say it. I didn’t know the words when I tried to say it. Might take you away with them…with us.…

“Might what?”

“Might…oh, I don’t know!”

Now he was suspicious again. “All right,” he said. “I’ll leave. You come with me.”

It was just that simple. Go back with him. Let them come and not find me. What could they do? Their own rules would keep them from hunting for me. They couldn’t come down among the people of Earth. Go back. Stop running.

We got into his car, and he turned around and smiled at me again, like the other time.

I smiled back, seeing him through a shiny kind of mist which must have been tears. I reached for him, and he reached for me at the same time.

When we let go, he tried to start the car, and it wouldn’t work. Of course. I’d forgotten till then. I started laughing and crying at the same time in a sort of a crazy way, and took him back inside and showed him the projector. They’d forgotten to give me any commands about not doing that, I guess. Or they thought it wouldn’t matter.

It did matter. Larry looked it over, and puzzled over it a little, and fooled around, and asked me some questions. I didn’t have much technical knowledge, but I knew what it did, and he figured out the way it did it. Nothing with an electro-magnetic motor was going to work while that thing was turned on, not within a mile or so in any direction. And there wasn’t any way to turn it off. It was a homing beam, and it was on to stay—foolproof.

That was when he looked at me, and said slowly, “You got here three days ago, didn’t you, babe?”

I nodded.

“There was—God-damn it, it’s too foolish! There was a—a flying saucer story in the paper that day. Somebody saw it land on a hilltop somewhere. Some crackpot. Some…how about it, kid?”

I couldn’t say yes and I couldn’t say no, and I did the only thing that was left, which was to get hysterical. In a big way.

He had to calm me down, of course. And I found out why the television shows stop with the kiss. The rest is very private and personal.

* * * *

Author’s note: This story was dictated to me by a five-year-old boy—word-for-word, except for a very few editorial changes of my own. He is a very charming and bright youngster who plays with my own five-year-old daughter. One day he wandered into my office, and watched me typing for a while, then asked what I was doing. I answered (somewhat irritably, because the children are supposed to stay out of the room when I’m working) that I was trying to write a story.

“What kind of a story?”

“A grown-up story.”

“But what kind?”

“A science-fiction story.” The next thing I was going to do was to call my daughter, and ask her to take her company back to the playroom. I had my mouth open, but I never got a syllable out. Teddy was talking.

“I don’t know where they got the car,” he said. “They made three or four stops before the last.… He had a funny look on his face, and his eyes were glazed-looking.

I had seen some experimental work with hypnosis and post-hypnotic performance. After the first couple of sentences, I led Teddy into the living-room, and switched on the tape-recorder. I left it on as long as he kept talking. I had to change tapes once, and missed a few more sentences. When he was done, I asked him, with the tape still running, where he had heard that story.

“What story?” he asked. He looked perfectly normal again.

“The story you just told me.”

He was obviously puzzled.

“The science-fiction story,” I said.

“I don’t know where they got the car,” he began; his face was set and his eyes were blank.

I kept the tape running, and picked up the parts I’d missed before. Then I sent Teddy off to the playroom, and played back the tape, and thought for a while.

There was a little more, besides what you’ve read. Parts of it were confused, with some strange words mixed in, and with sentences half-completed, and a feeling of ambivalence or censorship or inhibition of some kind preventing much clarity. Other parts were quite clear. Of these, the only section I have omitted so far that seems to me to belong in the story is this one:—

* * * *

The baby will have to be born on Earth! They have decided that themselves. And for the first time, I am glad that they cannot communicate with me as perfectly as they do among themselves. I can think some things they do not know about.

We are not coming back. I do not think that I will like it on Earth for very long, and I do not know—neither does Larry—what will happen to us when the Security people find us, and we cannot answer their questions. But—

I am a woman now, and I love like a woman. Larry will not be their pet; so I cannot be. I am not sure that I am fit to be what Larry thinks of as a “human being.” He says I must learn to be “my own master.” I am not at all sure I could do this, if it were necessary, but fortunately, this is one of Larry’s areas of semantic confusion. The feminine of master is mistress, which has various meanings.

Also, there is the distinct possibility, from what Larry says, that we will not, either of us, be allowed even as much liberty as we have here.

There is also the matter of gratitude. They brought me up, took care of me, taught me, loved me, gave me a way of life, and a knowledge of myself, infinitely richer than I could ever have had on Earth. Perhaps they even saved my life, healing me when I was quite possibly beyond the power of Earthly medical science to save. But against all this—

They caused the damage to start with. It was their force-field that wrecked the car and killed my parents. They have paid for it; they are paying for it yet. They will continue to pay, for more years than make sense in terms of a human lifetime. They will continue to wander from planet to planet and system to system, because they have broken their own law, and now may never go home.

But I can.

I am a woman, and Larry is a man. We will go home and have our baby. And perhaps the baby will be the means of our freedom, some day. If we cannot speak to save ourselves, he may some day be able to speak for us.

I do not think the blocks they set in us will penetrate my womb as my own thoughts, I hope, already have.

* * * *

Author’s note: Before writing this story—as a story—I talked with Johnny’s parents. I approached them cautiously. His mother is a big woman, and a brunette. His father is a friendly fat redhead. I already knew that neither of them reads science-fiction. The word is not likely to be mentioned in their household.

They moved to town about three years ago. Nobody here knew them before that, but there are rumors that Johnny is adopted. They did not volunteer any confirmation of that information when I talked to them, and they did not pick up on any of the leads I offered about his recitation.

Johnny himself is small and fair-haired. He takes after his paternal grandmother, his mother says.…

THROUGH TIME AND SPACE WITH FERDINAND FEGHOOT: THE CHAIRMAN DANCES, by David Gerrold

Copyright © 2015 by David Gerrold.

The Ferdinand Feghoot character was created by Reginald Bretnor and is used by permission of the Estate of Reginald Bretnor.

*

During Ferdinand Feghoot’s tour of The People’s Republic of China in the mid-1970s, Premier Zhou Enlai (Chou Enlai) asked Feghoot to help him deal with a serious morale problem in the massive Chinese army.

It had started when Mao Zedong (Mao Tse Tsung), the Chairman of the Communist Party, began to suspect that the western nations were secretly training a huge military force for an invasion of China. He believed that all of the various dance crazes sweeping across the western nations were actually ex…edtreme physical exercise routines, designed to produce super-strong soldiers. To counter this, Mao had ordered all good communists to learn the Bop, the Watusi, the Jerk, the Hand Jive, the Twist, and the M…ash. Mao then sent spies abroad to learn all the newest dances and bring them back to China as well. Under Chairman Mao’s personal direction, all of these dances were now incorporated into the physical training exercises of the vast Chinese army.

Because the psychological part of the training was as important as the physical part, Mao ordered a huge dance floor constructed. The Chinese troops had transformed their training grounds into a giant dance floor. They laid a vast wooden deck, enclosed by bright colored silks, with a similarly gaudy silk roof. They hung multitudes of flashing and whirling lights, all colors—crimson, tangerine, ochre, line, azure—and even huge rotating silver ornaments to cast reflections across the entire dance floor. The latest western music was reproduced on speakers five stories tall, loud enough to be a health hazard to animals and small children. The total output of three coal-fired electrical plants was needed to power the lights and the music for the vast array of military dancers.

To spur enthusiasm even further, Mao declared that the trainings would culminate in a dance contest and great prizes would be given to every soldier who could dance better than him. Among the prizes, of course, would be the precious silk used in the construction of the gigantic dance hall. And that was Zhou’s problem. No soldier in the land wanted to embarrass the ideological leader of the party, nor risk the wrath that might follow if they were to embarrass the most powerful man in China.

Feghoot listened carefully, then said, “Zhou, I can solve your problem in seven—no, eight words.” He took the microphone and announced to all, “Mao is the winner of our disco tent.”

THE FROZEN PLANET, by Keith Laumer

Originally published in 1961.

“It is rather unusual,” Magnan said, “to assign an officer of your rank to courier duty, but this is an unusual mission.”

Retief sat relaxed and said nothing. Just before the silence grew awkward, Magnan went on.

“There are four planets in the group,” he said. “Two double planets, all rather close to an unimportant star listed as DRI-G 33987. They’re called Jorgensen’s Worlds, and in themselves are of no importance whatever. However, they lie deep in the sector into which the Soetti have been penetrating.

“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 forward, 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.

“I have here,” he said solemnly, “information which will change that picture completely.” He leaned back and blinked at Retief.

“All 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 anti-acceleration 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.”

“Mmmm,” 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 antiac 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.”

“You’d 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’ll tell you what,” Retief said soberly. “In a pinch, I’ll 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 manage a snootful by takeoff.” He went to the door. “No objection to my checking out a needler, 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.”

Chapter II

Retief put down the heavy travel-battered suitcase and leaned on the counter, studying the schedules chalked on the board under the legend “ALDO CERISE—INTERPLANETARY.” A thin clerk 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 rabbit-like 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. “It’s my lunch hour,” he said. “I’ll 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.

“Some…ah… VIP’s required 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 19,” he added quickly. “But—”

Retief picked up his suitcase and walked away toward the glare sign reading To Gates 16-30.

“Another smart alec,” the clerk said behind him.

* * * *

Retief followed the signs, threaded his way through crowds, found a covered ramp with the number 228 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 went up the gangway into the ship.

A cabin boy in stained whites came along the corridor.

“Which way to cabin fifty-seven, son?” Retief asked.

“Up there.” The boy jerked his head and hurried on. Retief made his way along the narrow hall, found signs, followed them to cabin fifty-seven. The door was open. Inside, baggage was piled in the center of the floor. It was expensive looking baggage.

Retief put his bag down. He turned at a sound behind 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, thick-necked 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 thick-necked 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 baggage-smashers 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 cigar between his teeth. He gripped a handle of the brass-bound 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.

Five 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-necked 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 your 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 softly.

One 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 thick-necked 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-necked man paused at the door. “We’ll see you when you come out.”

Chapter III

Four 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 dem Sweaties, look at a man like 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.”

“Dern 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 Jorgensen’s Worlds. Then, if Magnan’s information 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 Jorgensens’ 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-necked man slipped a hand inside his tunic 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 face, knocking him under the table. The other man stepped back, fumbling a power pistol from his shoulder holster.

“Aim that at me, and I’ll kill you,” Retief said.

“Go on, burn him!” Mr. Tony shouted. Behind him, the captain appeared, white-faced.

“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 them 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 something,” Retief said. “This is shaping up into one of those long days.”

“They don’t like me bringing 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 got on the captain, Chip?” Retief asked.

“They’re in some kind of 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 eater when I was yer age.”

“I’ll bet you can still handle it, Old Timer. What are Jorgensen’s Worlds like?”

“One of ’em’s cold as hell and three of ’em’s colder. Most of the Jorgies live on Svea; that’s the least froze up. Man don’t enjoy eatin’ his own cookin’ like he does somebody else’s.”

“That’s where I’m lucky, Chip. What kind of cargo’s the captain got aboard for Jorgensen’s?”

“Demed if I know. In and out o’ there like a grasshopper, ever few weeks. Don’t never pick up no cargo. No tourists any more, like I says. Don’t know what we run in there for.”

“Where are the passengers we have aboard headed?”

“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.”

“Plenty 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 every trip out. Act like they was the Customs Patrol or somethin’.”

There was a distant clang, and a faint tremor ran through the floor.

“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’ papiss,” 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 around,” 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. Skaw stood poised, open pincers an inch from Retief’s eyes.

“Show him your papers, you damned fool,” the captain said hoarsely. “I got no control over Skaw.”

The 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 easy, Captain. Show a few guns as you hand the body back. We know their 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 three man scout. It could 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.”

Chapter IV

Retief 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 an 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 2mm needler. 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?”

* * * *

“This is it,” Chip said 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?” the 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, Captain. Don’t try to change course.”

The captain reached for the mike on his desk, pressed the key.

“Power Section, this is the captain,” he said. Retief reached across the desk, gripped the captain’s wrist.

“Tell the mate to hold his present course,” he said softly.

“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 needler 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.”

* * * *

“Why don’t you let me spell you, Mister?” Chip said. “Four hours to go yet. You’re gonna hafta be on yer toes to handle the landing.”

“I’ll be all right, Chip. You get some sleep.”

“Nope. Many’s the time I stood four, five watches runnin’, 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. “Whazzat?” 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 needler 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.”

At 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 needler, 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 comin’ with ya!”

Retief reached down, lifted the chef bodily through the port, slammed 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 kick-off.”

“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!” said Chip 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.”

Chapter V

The blonde 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. “Dern 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 the equipment shed 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’ every 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-scoured ramp abrupt peaks rose, snow-blanketed. A faint trail led across white slopes, disappearing into low clouds.

“The lodge is above the 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.”

Anne-Marie 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 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.

* * * *

Chip put down his mug 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 go visit it someday, although they say it’s all stone and ice.”

“Anne-Marie,” Retief said, “how many people live on Jorgensen’s Worlds?”

“About fifteen million, most 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!” Anne-Marie 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.”

* * * *

Retief shook his head, smiling, as a tall girl with coppery hair offered a vast slab of venison.

“I’ve caught up,” he said, “for 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 unmanned 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-guarded secret.”

“Secret?” Tove said.

Chip pulled at Retief’s 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 going bats, but I’ll swear there’s something funny here. I’m back there mixin’ a sauce knowed only to me and the devil and I be dog if them gals don’t pass me ever dang spice I need, without me sayin’ a word. Come to put my soufflé in the oven—she’s already set, right on the button at 350. 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.”

Chapter VI

“We’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?” Retief asked.

Tove shook his head. “They’re very different from us. It’s painful to touch their minds. We can only sense the subvocalized thoughts of a human mind.”

“We’ve seen very few of the Soetti,” Bo Bergman said. “Their ships have landed and taken on stores. They say little to us, but we’ve 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 course,” 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.”

* * * *

In 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. ACI 228 by-passed at 1600…”

“Just one?”

“A lone ship, coming in on a bearing of 291/456/653. On manual, I’d say.”

“How does this track key in with the idea of ACI 228 making 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 228, she ain’t got but the one 50mm 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 skunk’s 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.

* * * *

Inside the Briefing Room, 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 flipped a key. “Switch me direct to the ship,” he said. “Right.”

“You on ACI 228,” Tove 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 snow-swept 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 hundred 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. “I got the glimmerin’s of a idear.”

“I’ll stall them,” Tove said. He keyed the mike.

“ACI 228, what’s your authority for this demand?”

“I know that machine,” Chip said. “My hobby, old-time fightin’ machines. Built a model of a Resartus once, inch to the foot. A beauty. Now, lessee…”

Chapter VII

The 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’s-eye view,” Retief said. “Sorry you had to get mixed up in this, old timer.”

“Mixed myself in. Durn 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! anti-personnel 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 shuddered, 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. Immediately 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 anti-personnel apertures as another charge rocked the tank. He clambered to the turret crouched beside Chip. They waited, watching the entry hatch.

Five minutes passed.

“I’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 needler in Retief’s 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 needler. 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.”

* * * *

“The biggest problem the Jorgensen’s people will have is decontaminating the wreckage,” Retief said.

Magnan leaned forward. “Amazing,” he said. “They just kept 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 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 out 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. Retief,” 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 census 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 moonlight?”

THE TAIL-TIED KINGS, by Avram Davidson

Originally published in Galaxy Science Fiction, April 1962.

He 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 corner, 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, uncertainly. “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 and 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.

Sometimes he had tried to run away, but everywhere 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. “Out side 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 emptied 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 the 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 deep-voiced 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 milk-voiced 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 One-Eye 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 born 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 run 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, young, 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 One-Eye 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 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.

THE GRAIN KINGS, by Keith Roberts

Originally published in 1972.

1

The pamphlet was glossy and well thumbed. Harrison leafed the pages indifferently, glancing up from time to time at the bulkhead clock.

The principle of the combine harvester, he read, dates back to the early years of our century. The first machines were crude and small, and were usually controlled and operated by one man (See illustration opposite).

A UN combine has been likened to a small township on caterpillar tracks. Aboard each great machine a crew of up to a hundred must eat, sleep and work for weeks at a time. The superstructure houses construction and repair shops, generator and boiler rooms, a sick bay, laboratories, a gallery; and for off-duty relaxation a restaurant, television lounge, bars and a cinema. A modern combine is big. It has to be; it has a big job to do. In Alaska alone, upward of a hundred thousand square miles of wheat must be harvested in not much more than a month. Wheat that is needed, desperately, to feed the teeming millions of our overcrowded planet.

The wall clock pinged. Harrison yawned, tossed the booklet down and rose. A belted topcoat hung behind the door. He shrugged himself into it and left the cabin.”

The corridor beyond, dim and quiet when he had come aboard, vibrated faintly. The lamps in their wellglasses glowed brightly; the combine had raised running voltage. He turned left and right, climbed a flight of spindly metal stairs. The companionway gave on to B deck and the observation lounge.

On deck he was assailed by an echoing clamor. He stood blinking vaguely, saw without surprise that the combine was in motion. Above and close, the big metal girders of the hangar bay slid past one behind the next; he stared up, seeing the yellow bowls of service lights glide by, watching the shifting, repeating perspectives. Ahead, the exit doors had already rumbled back. Daylight gleamed outside, faint as yet and grey. The opening looked like the slit of a pillbox. In a building so vast, perspectives tended to confuse the brain.

The tannoys in the roof were working again, gobbing out their words in big, bouncing chunks of sound. The lights gleamed on the combine’s broad forward casings. On her stubby mast, red and turquoise identification lamps sequenced steadily, like the landing lights of an aircraft. Harrison found notebook and stylus, leaned against the deck rail. He wrote: It doesn’t fly, so it isn’t a plane. It doesn’t float, so it can’t be a ship. It’s something else, something different. Outside experience. He sneered at the phrase, scored it through. Beneath it he scribbled: Clearing hangar sheds. 07.30 hours. Loudspeakers working; difficult for the uninitiated to make out the words. They wouldn’t mean much if they did. Big combining already has a language of its own.

The observation deck was filling now. On the port wing O’Hara was angling his camera for a shot of the control-room windows. Alison Beckett had made her appearance, well muffled. Harrison flicked his fingers at her, walked over to the photographer. The combine was nearing the exit ramp. Red lamps sprang into brilliance round the edges of the great doors. He heard the main diesels, catch and thunder. She’d been running on her auxiliaries then. The engine beats steadied to a pounding throb. He thought, “We shall be living with that noise. For days.” He said to O’Hara, “Don’t forget the old man’s hangar shots.”

O’Hara grinned. He said, “The great sheds sink slowly in the west.”

Harrison said, “You take the pictures. I’ll write the copy.”

O’Hara rolled film, turned the Bronica, made an adjustment. He said, “It’s the pictures that matter, boyo.”

“Every one,” said Harrison, “is worth a thousand words.” He turned away, hands dug into the pockets of his coat.

A combine is too big to be solid. Rather it humps its way across the land, like a jointed, gigantic steel carpet. Harrison watched the forward casings rise steadily, taking the slight slope of the exit ramp. As they nosed into daylight they changed colour from brown to orange-red. The pitch of the engines altered as the main bulk felt the incline.

Beside him stood a stubby, grey-haired man, an off-duty engineer. Harrison said, “Why were the main diesels only started just now? I thought they’d need longer to warm up.”

The engineer glanced at him, took a pipe from his pocket, tamped the tobacco and struck a match. He seemed in no hurry to answer. Finally he said between his teeth, “She doesn’t run on her mains. They’re running ’em up for start of cut. She goes anywhere on her crawlers.”

Harrison said, “Thank you. I wasn’t sure.”

The bulk of the machine was clear of the sheds now. The noise of the loudhailers faded abruptly. In the open air the thunder of the engines was less oppressive. Harrison stared round him. The sky was an indeterminate grey-blue. He saw, or thought he saw, the last spark of a star. The eastern horizon, flat, was slashed with searing yellow.

On the wing, O’Hara was lining up the hangar shots. He’d got Alison to pose against the rail. She was wearing a headscarf. One long strand of hair had come free, was moving in the wind. She put her glove up, tucked it aside. The bridge speakers clicked and said, “Good morning.”

The voice said, “I am Controller Cheskin. I welcome you on behalf of the United Nations Organization and the World Food Council. The machine on which you are travelling is an American-built Rolls-Toyota of the Dakota class. She develops a total horse-power of just over a hundred thousand, and harvests on a two-hundred-and-fifty-meter swath. Her codename to base is Combine Patsy. We are travelling east, fifteen degrees north at a speed of ten Kilometres an hour. At zero nine hundred hours we shall be turning on to cut.”

The speakers crackled slightly. They said, “Breakfast is now being served in the C deck restaurant. May I wish you all a pleasant and interesting trip. Thank you.”

Alison came over. She said, “God, I’m frozen. Aren’t you cold?”

Harrison said, “Not too bad.”

“Coming to breakfast?”

He said, “I’ve got some notes to get down. I’ll take second tables.”

She said, “You’re too devoted.”

He said, “I work better first thing.”

He walked back to his cabin, closed the door and hung the coat up. He lay on the bunk, hands clasped behind his head. Now, with the main engines running, the dural walls thrummed faintly. He closed his eyes, feeling the pulse of the combine. He remembered, arbitrarily, how someone once told him he made love to her at dawn, though the fleshly Harrison was two hundred miles away. He shrugged. The borderline between fantasy and fact is vivid and hard. Whoever holds it to be otherwise is either a liar or a fool. Probably the former. He lay now alone, a hardish pillow under his head. The counterpane was striped in sage green and orange, the cabin furnishings looked vaguely Swedish. The air conditioner whistled slightly, the clock hands stood at 08.05. Nothing and nobody would alter these facts.

He had a bottle of whisky in the bedside locker. He sat up, poured himself two fingers, grimaced and added the third. He thought, “I should kick this early-morning drinking.” He drank, lit a cigarette, laid in it the tray. He was thinking about the flight up. He’d travelled, among others, in the company of a well-known divorcee. Her legs had been superb and she raised hell about the lunch. She left the plane at Idlewild. He thought, “I should be over the other thing by now. Nine months is a good gestation.”

He opened his eyes again at ten hundred hours. The Scotch still stood on the locker; the cigarette had burned itself out half through. He thought, I missed start of cut.” But he could make that bit up. He reached for the notebook, considered for a time and wrote.

The main power system of a combine is diesel-electric. Motors situated above each set of cutter blades. Access from motor gallery forward: maintenance staff permanently on duty. He thought for a moment. Could they withdraw blade sets, service while in motion? He presumed so; still, it was a point worth checking.

The light through the cabin port was bright now. He buzzed the steward, asked for some coffee. While he was waiting he shaved. The coffee when it came was very good. He smoked a cigarette, stubbed it and walked back to the observation deck.

Climate control made these exercises possible. As he emerged into sunlight the combine was flowing past a radiator. The tower stood on tall black struts. Clamped to one of the stilt legs was a board with the legend Danger. 10KV. Below it was stencilled another warning: Do not activate relays without blue and green authorities. He wondered how service engineers reached isolated towers. Not by helicopter; the downdraught would flatten the wheat.

He stared above him. The sky had a hard, steely brilliance. The decks of the combine stretched out like a scarlet plain; ahead and to either side, the wheat was an immense level sea. He thought, “Indian summer of technology,” and dismissed the phrase.

The radiator was well astern now. Ahead was a reef signal. The red disc bore a black triangle, point uppermost. He waited for the combine to change course. She didn’t appear to; but the signal passed well to port. Beyond it, the smoothness of the grain was unmarred. He wrote: “Dural girders. Aluminium panels. Ground clearance zero. Patsy is a fragile giant.”

He thought, “Aren’t we all?”

He watched the horizon, hazed with blue. Nothing to see; no way of marking progression. The combine was on cut; but from up here there was no way of telling. He listened, carefully. Maybe the engine rumble was a fraction deeper, there was a shade more vibration. The endless roaring he’d expected wasn’t there. The machine moved majestically, a ship against a yellow ocean. He wondered again about the sea metaphor. As yet he had nothing on which to peg his story. No theme. He watched the cutter coamings a hundred yards away. They rose and fell steadily, rolling with the contours of the land. He imagined he could hear, above the diesels, the sibilance of the blades slicing wheat.

Two dolly-bird reporters came up from below. The taller looked Scandinavian. They glanced at him as they passed, leaned backs turned to him against the rail. They seemed to have a lot to chat about. He walked to the starboard wing, propped the notebook on his knee.

A combine works to a predetermined grid, he wrote. Strictly, it’s flying by wire. Control units, buried by the score, kick out a parcel of signal frequencies; underbelly sensors keep each machine on a true heading. Course and pattern of cut are predetermined at base; onboard computers see to the rest. The system’s accurate; you can do a lot with a two hundred and fifty metre datum line.

He touched the tip of the stylus to his teeth. He wrote: “Palsy’s cutting on a two hundred kilometre grid. Two hundred up, two hundred down. When she gets back to start of cut she won’t be running more than a yard from true.

“She could cut on a five hundred kilometer grid, or a thousand, or ten. Distance is no object; all we need is a big enough planet.”

He thought, “I’m not getting anywhere.” He walked back down the companionway to C deck bar.

The room was wide and long, panelled in satin-finish dural. He’d read some of the Russian combines used mahogany and brass. Windows looked out through the underpinnings of B deck, across the main coamings to the wheat. There were chairs and tables set round, Audubon prints in thin black frames. A coffee machine sang and glugged on the countertop.

O’Hara was playing the Bandit. As Harrison walked in it paid fifty. O’Hara grinned a pale, square grin and said, “What do I do with these?”

Swissy said, “Use ’em for washers. Good for de car.”

Harrison said, “Pint of beer. No, the English.”

Swissy said, “D’American is very good.”

“I’ll stick with this.”

Swissy rubbed his hands. He said, “A dollar. T’ank you.”

Somebody said, “He gets a bigger mark-up on the American.” Harrison leaned on the bar and lit a cigarette.

Swissy said, “Where’s de li’l girl?”

O’Hara turned back from the machine. He said, “She’s developing.” He winked at Harrison. He said, “No point keeping these. The crafty bastard won’t change ’em.”

Swissy said, “Give you two dollar for ’em. Haven’t counted.”

O’Hara said, “I’d rather put them back.”

Swissy said, “Anyway, she’s tuned. Pay for t’ree dollar.”

Harrison said, “You put more than that in it last night.”

Swissy smirked. “Was wit’ syndicate,” he explained. “Get t’irty percent anyway. Can’t lose if I play wit’ four.”

O’Hara said, “He doesn’t understand his systems any more than anybody else.”

Harrison drank beer. He said, “Got your pictures for today then, Mike?”

O’Hara considered. He said, “I didn’t see you when we turned on to cut, boyo.”

“Quite so. How was it?”

O’Hara said, “Spectacular.”

Harrison drank another pint, which tasted good. The missed-breakfast feeling was starting to leave him. By the third he was feeling nearly human, which wasn’t in all respects a good idea. He walked to C deck restaurant, ate entrecôte steak with a scampi starter. You could say this for combiners’ food—it was reliable. He signed the bill for the company and walked back to the bar. He had a tour fixed for the afternoon; he’d arranged to meet an engineer called Bertie Pritchard.

Bertie was short, boyish, greying and relatively tired. He looked like an ex-Navy man. He spoke with an explosive punctuation that could turn readily to a stammer. They propped the bar up till three. Swissy was back on duty. He was talking about the last execution in Berne. “Dey climb up de trees,” he said. “All de boys, you know? So dey see into de prison yard. Christ, an’ down dey come den. Like de blowty apples.”

Somebody laughed.

Bertie said, “You never saw a bloody execution.”

Swissy grinned. “My fader tell me,” he said. “You know, a man get his head cutted off, he don’t stop wit’ de blinking?” He mimed, rapidly. He did in fact succeed in looking like a severed corpse. “Blinkin’ de eyes,” he said, “An’ de mout’ go, so; and out de trees day come. Christ, like apples.”

Bertie said, “Who are you with?”

“World Geographic.”

“Good outfit?”

Harrison said, “Fair. Like the rest.”

Bertie said, “Christ, listen to the basstard.”

Swissy was saying indignantly, “Is true. In Zürich I was apprentice from my fader, to a butcher. I drink lot of blood, when dey killing de calf. Good it was, hot. Dey go ksss on de li’l calf an’ we catch and drink in de glass. Good for you.”

Bertie said, “You are a repulsive basstard.”

“No, is true,” said Swissy. “Only tell de trut. Very good for you. Help wit’ de girls.” He smirked, clenched his fist, made short-arming motions. “Good, de blood,” he said. “You try it sometimes, Bertie. Bet on well.”

Bertie said, “If you’ve finished, we’ll get out of here.”

Swissy said, “Chow, bot’. See you next time.”

In the corridor Bertie said, “Where do you want to go first?” Harrison said, “It’s your tour.”

They walked forward. Over a bulkhead door was a stencilled sign, Crew Members Only. Bertie ducked through. He said, “Mind your head.”

Down here, the quality of sound was changed. There was a heavy roaring; Harrison guessed they were close to the main diesels. Bertie turned right and right again. There was a short companion-way. He took it at the trot. He said, “Links. Don’t get your feet tangled up.”

The corridor, articulated, flexed slightly, moving with the movements of the combine. From somewhere came a faint, persistent squealing. Already, Harrison felt lost. He said, “How long does it take to find your way about?”

Bertie snorted. He said, “They’re crazy f-fucking objects. Point-less complexity. All the same.”

Harrison said, “What do they cost?”

“Twenty million. Give or take. Everybody gets a nice slice of the pie. Watch your feet.”

There was a final hatchway. Harrison stepped through, and stared. They had emerged in the forward casings, directly above the cutter service gantry.

The noise hit him first. It seemed compounded of all frequencies; hum of motors, whirl and clank of chains, whick-hiss, whick-hiss of the blades, echoing rumble from the combine’s tracks. To right and left, long glints of daylight reached under the coamings. The air was yellow, fog-thick; through it the cutters glittered dully, spinning silver drums. Beneath his feet flowed a jostling brown river; the conveyors, edging the grain tons a minute to the threshers in the great belly of the machine.

He watched the men on the gantry. They wore one-piece suits of something that looked like asbestos. Visors covered their faces; on his back, each carried a bulky pack. Tubes from the packs dived beneath the wearers’ armpits. Harrison mouthed a question. Bertie shook his head. He said, “Self-contained systems. Ocy-nitrogen. You can’t filter that muck. It gets in everything.”

Harrison said, “What do these boys earn?”

Bertie said, “A hell of a lot.” He leaned back, hands in his trousers pockets. He said, “It’s all right while it lasts.”

Harrison said, “Silicosis?”

“There’s quicker than that. Heard of combiner’s balls?”

Harrison said, “No.”

Bertie said, “It means you don’t have any. No skin on the tops of the thighs. It gets up inside the suits. Can’t bloody stop it.”

Harrison said, “They’re welcome.”

Bertie said, “They’re the toughest basstards in the world.”

Near at hand, a crew were swinging a blade unit down into operation. One man was beating at the motor housing with a gauntleted fist. Harrison saw him raise his arms, make wash-out motions. He stared down. The movement of the grain beneath his feet was giddying.

Bertie said, “Seen enough? I can’t stand this bloody stuff for long.”

Harrison nodded, stepped back through the hatch. The engineer dogged it shut. The noise diminished. Harrison said, “Christ.”

Bertie clattered ahead of him, down a flight of steps. At their foot, the decking surged unexpectedly. Harrison grabbed for the rail. Bertie said, “This is E deck catwalk. We’re alongside the threshers. Nothing much to see. The process is totally enclosed.”

The catwalk was long, and dim. They glided, it seemed, at eye-level with the wheat. Down here you could really hear the whisper, the sibilance. Glass panels were rigged at head height along the gallery. Harrison leaned close, stared into the endless brown-grey aisles between the stalks. Bertie said, “That’s virgin, of course. Julie’s coming up from the west. We’re cutting east, towards the Russkie patch.”

Harrison said, “It’s a new viewpoint.”

Bertie banged the screen with his fist. He said, “We had to fit these last trip. Had some stupid little bitch of a journalist. She put her hand out in it. Said it reminded her of punting.” He tittered, soundlessly. “You should have seen it,” he said. “A little blood goes a long way.”

Harrison turned away. He thought, “It’s graceful, and soft. Touch it, and it opens to the bone.”

Bertie walked ahead. He said, “This might interest you.”

Harrison watched the complex assemblage of levers. The whole device seemed to stride. A rod was poised, plunged into a gap beside the main housings. A pause; and the forward travel of the combine brought the links upright. The rod lifted, gleaming; a dark earth sample was ejected, whirled away, before the corer dipped again. Harrison said, “What’s it taking?” He was still thinking about the wheat.

Bertie said, “They’re checking soil organisms. Bacteria count. It’s called a Tom Thumb sampler.”

He opened a bulkhead door. Beyond, a link corridor led to a big darkened space. Heat gusted back, heavily. Harrison saw steel drums rotating behind protective panels of mesh. Lamps gleamed here and there, red-mauve. Bertie said, “The intake is damped south of the conveyors. Here it’s irradiated, and dried.” He gestured at the lamps. He said, “Pig-rearing lights.”

They walked on. In the combine’s belly, sound levels varied continually. Sometimes the clatter of an auxiliary room drowned speech, sometimes the roar of the tracks. They walked down a serviceway, its floor panels composed of thick steel mesh. There was a rich, earthy smell; inspection lamps showed stubble flowing a yard beneath. Bertie ducked through a hatch. He said, “Main tracks.”

The combine jolted and heaved. He reached back, steadied Harrison’s arm. He said, “OK?”

Harrison said, “Yes.”

Bertie said, “Don’t want to have to scrape you off a bloody bobbin. Not while I’ve signed for you.”

The tracks were also lit. Harrison watched the steel rollers on which they ran bounce and jump. The links, each plate the size of a dinner table, rose up smoothly, passed out of sight overhead. He said, “How many tracks does she run on?” Bertie said, “They’re rigged on twenty-metre centres. You can do the sum yourself.”

In the main diesel room an engineer wearing padded earmuffs waved to Bertie from his gantry. Bertie waved back. Harrison looked at his watch. Already they’d been an hour on the trip. Bertie closed the door behind him. He said, “We’re now going aft. Crews quarters on the left, and sick bay. Laboratories to the right. Can’t go there; not my patch.”

There was a door marked: Latrine, male. Field use only. A part of Harrison’s mind recorded the words.

Bertie said, “When are you seeing the old man?”

Harrison said, “Tomorrow morning.”

Bertie said, “He’s a queer basstard. Why they let him get hold of this thing I shall never know.”

They passed another door. Bertie said, “Galleys. Bakehouse.”

Harrison said, “I shouldn’t think there’s any shortage of flour.”

Bertie said, “Under UN regulations, we can’t touch our output. They fly the f-flour up from base. Amazing, the workings of the Oriental mind.”

There was light ahead. Daylight. He pushed a door open. He said, “The ass-end of the process.”

Harrison walked to the rail. They were on the stern of the combine. Behind and above, unfamiliar from this viewpoint, the control bridge jutted at the sky. Astern stretched the great swath of stubble; again like a wake he thought, the wake of some ponderous geometric ship. Below him, slipways disgorged the produce of the machine like vast parcelled eggs, each pallet the size of a truck. Flying cranes were busy in the middle distance, droning like heavy dragonflies. He saw one settle its hooks into a bale, rise with it and lumber off to the south. The sun, already levelling, lit the great dust cloud, turning the grains to gold. As they entered the brilliance, the service vehicles became shadows. It was blue, and red of coamings, and gold; everywhere, the blue and gold.

Bertie said, “As far as I’m concerned, you’ve seen the lot. Anything you want to ask?”

Harrison said, “Later on maybe. I’m still taking it in.”

Bertie looked at his wrist. He said, “Can you find your own way back? Got to meet another party. We ran a bit late.”

Harrison said, “Don’t you have a duty watch?”

Bertie said. “I’m just the bloody liaison man. Tell ’em why the wheels go round.”

Harrison said, “Thanks for the trip. I shall be OK.”

Bertie said, “See you in the Swiss Embassy.” He ducked through the doorway, and was gone.

There was a seat, to one side of the observation deck. Harrison slumped on it, pulled his notebook from his pocket, stared at it for a time and put it away. He closed his eyes; and for a moment he was on a ship. She had just this same easy motion; the thunder of her diesels was muted, as it was muted here; and she was coming into Oban, from Mull. The sea was millpond calm, big vees of ripples starting and starting and spreading for miles. He thought, “How often you hear that phrase, how seldom you see what it means.” He shut his eyes again. It had been bad all day. He thought, “We were going there together, only you couldn’t quite make it. You weren’t on that ship, you bitch, and you are not here.”

Aloud he said, “That’ll do you a lot of bloody good.”

He leaned back, lit a cigarette. He was remembering Cheltenham, and the caryatid figures in the Colonnade, and buying the big buckled lovely handbag for her and the flat she’d taken in the town. He inhaled, blew smoke. He remembered the first months after the break-up. Time had telescoped; he’d lost nearly a year of his life. He hadn’t believed such a thing was possible. He thought about the place he’d found in London, and the absurdity of it all, the sheer absurdity. Once, years back, he’d had a really bad pain. He remembered laughing jerkily, in the middle of it; it seemed a ridiculous state of affairs that any one thing could hurt that much. He thought, “You sleep, not wanting to wake. But you wake. You get up, you get to the office, you trail back to your pad. You eat and speak and shave and wash and write words. Sometimes you can remember what you’ve done through the day. Sometimes you can’t.” He remembered drinking sessions, sessions that started because the office had shut and just went on anyway; and empty Sundays and empty weekends and trailing out West for drag, the go-go dollies. He thought, “Is there anybody anywhere, for whom pleasure is real, existence meaningful? What happens, inside Bertie? Inside Swissy? Is it any different for them?”

He glanced at the last thing he’d written that morning. Distance is no object, he read. All we need is a big enough planet.

He thought, “I’m riding Combine Patsy. And Patsy is cutting a two-hundred-and-fifty-metre swath; and Patsy is a Wonder of the Age.”

Aloud he said, “I couldn’t bloody well care less.”

He looked at his watch. He’d caught himself wondering when the bars would open.

The sun was dropping towards the horizon. The air was keener now; astern, the dust-pall gleamed with a reddish light. He got up, walked back the way he had come. Finding his way through the combine’s guts was a harder task than he’d realized. He passed along gantries he hadn’t seen. Once he was challenged, made to show his press card. He got to his cabin finally. The thrumming of the walls felt familiar. He thought, “Nearly like home.”

He took the Olivetti from its case, transcribed what notes he’d made. He added: It’s the dust you become aware of. It’s in the air, a grittiness on the lips. It creaks underfoot as you walk. Nothing’s really clean. Put a saucer down for an hour and lift it and you see the yellow bloom, the mark of where it lay. And this is only start of cut.

He looked at his watch again. This past few months he’d got into the habit of marking the progression of hours and days. It was as if some bright point, some node of light and warmth, receded steadily; there was a compulsion to mark the regression. There were little anniversaries to be noted, transient things, affairs of hours, months. One day he supposed they would total years.

Loudspeakers were clattering somewhere in the combine. The sound reached him faintly, mixed with the humming of the cabin walls. He wrote: In twenty minutes, if my mathematics serve me, we shall end our first pass: He rose, took his coat down, put it on. He walked down the corridor, turned left and right, climbed the companionway to B deck.

The sun was low, the western hemisphere a bowl of dusty pink light. He thought, “Red sky at night, climatologist’s delight.” The upper works and rigging of the combine were sharp-cut against the glow. Forward and below, the light seemed to permeate the coamings; the figures on the cutter housings were haloed with brilliance. The combine roared steadily, still forging to the north.

Alison was leaning on the rail. He joined her. She put her hair back, glanced up and half-smiled. She said, “It’s queer somehow. Oppressive.”

He said, “Did you get your prints done?” She nodded, not answering. He leaned on the rail. He thought, “O’Hara gets an assistant. Maybe he needs one. I shouldn’t take it out in her.”

The masthead lights began sequencing. He wondered vaguely why. The reflections hit her cheek and hair, scarlet, turquoise, scarlet, turquoise. He said, “Was the stuff okay?”

She had a knack of not looking at him when she answered. She said, “There’s one advantage to big negs.”

“How do you mean?”

She said, “You can always cut the middle out. It doesn’t really matter where you point the camera.”

He thought, “Maybe she doesn’t like O’Hara. But everybody likes O’Hara.”

The bridge speakers clicked and began to breathe. This time there was no formal announcement; it seemed they’d merely circuited on to Control. A voice said, “Two minutes from end of cut.” He heard Cheskin acknowledge.

A helicopter moved up overhead. The downdraught battered from the metal deck. He thought, “They have to fly grid patterns too. Always this business about flattening the crop.”

The speakers clicked again and roared. The chopper pilot was talking through a hamburger. He said, “End of cut, Roger.” The machine surged back, fell away into the gloom astern. A Klaxon began sounding somewhere. Alison said, “All this fuss, just for turning round.”

Harrison said, “It’s a big machine.”

She said, “They’re just afraid they’ll get on to somebody else’s patch.”

Cheskin said, “Time me, please.”

Another voice answered. It said, “Forty five seconds, and counting.”

The klaxon cut out. Cheskin said, “Stand by all stations. Ready on mains.”

The speakers said, “Cut end…

“Cease cut.”

The trembling of the deck eased. The speakers said, “Halfspeed on starboard auxiliaries. Phase differentials.”

Harrison heard the engine stations acknowledge. He turned away, becoming bored. Cheskin said, “Reverse starboard auxiliaries. All ahead port.”

A couple of stars were visible. Harrison watched their sideways drift. The big cauldron to the west was moving too, swinging round behind the bridge. The combine was vibrating, straining. From below came a confused roar. The speakers said, “Ninety degrees. One hundred degrees. One hundred ten.”

“Quarter speed on starboard auxiliaries.”

The sunset light was beginning to creep in from the right of the bridge. The combine nosed, questing.

The speakers said, “I have forty degrees. I have thirty degrees. I have twenty degrees. Line-up good.”

Harrison said, “Have dinner with me tonight.”

She looked up at him. She said after a pause, “Yes. All right.”

Something bumped in his chest. He thought, “That’s very odd.”

She said, “Which restaurant?”

“C deck. They’ve got lobster thermidor. I don’t know how old the lobsters are.”

She said, “I’m a martyr to my stomach. I think I’m a compulsive eater.”

The speakers said, “I have line-up.”

Cheskin said, “All stations stand by. Confirm your line-up.”

The speakers said, “Green board. I have line-up.”

Cheskin said, “Outphase differentials. All ahead. Begin cut. Controller to log. Commenced second pass. I have eighteen, repeat eighteen, oh nine hours.”

She made a face. She said, “Imagine that. Nine minutes late.”

O’Hara was weaving towards them across the observation deck. Harrison said, “Where shall we meet?”

“Where do you want?”

He said, “Swissy’s bar. Twenty hundred.”

She said, “You have a date.”

He went back to his cabin. He lay on the bunk and thought, “One in the eye for you, Michael.” He lit a cigarette, smoked for a while. Then he shook his head, sat up. He rang the steward for a sandwich, said “Gracias, Manuelo” when it arrived and plugged in his shaver. He bathed and changed; by that time the wall clock read nineteen hundred hours. He picked up lighter and cigarettes, clicked the ceiling light off and walked round to Swissy’s bar.

It was empty. Swissy was leaning on the counter reading a paper. He looked up and smirked. He said, “Evening, Mr. Harrison.”

Harrison said, “Pint please, Swissy. English, not American.”

Swissy said, “D’American is very good.” He drew the pint, set it on the bartop. He said, “Looks good. Like in de picture house. Advertisement.”

Harrison lit a cigarette. Swissy said, “Seen de paper?”

“What’s new?”

Swissy said, “Not’ing. Same blowty ol t’ing. It doesn’t go for my head.”

“What’s that?”

Swissy said, “Dey make big t’ing. Big fuss. ’Bout de combine. Dey say, Russia, America; blowty big row.”

“Where?”

Swissy showed him. The leader read:

Difficulties were prophesied today concerning the Russian-American grain link-up. Russia has lodged protests concerning what she describes as British-American infringements and infiltration. President Sukharevsky, in a strong note to the West, threatened Russian withdrawal from the World Food Council’s biggest experiment to date, the Alaskan Grain Development Area. Harold Jenkinson, British Premier, expressed in the Commons his total disagreement with the Soviet attitude.

“The Alaskan Development,” he said, “represents the biggest step so far in the cause of world unity and peace. The government of this country views these latest developments with disappointment, and grave concern.” Commentators feel the underlying cause of friction is the refusal of the United Nations select committee to accept Russia’s demands for a controlling interest in the project.

Harrison put the paper down. He said, “Like you said, Swissy. Nothing new.”

Swissy said, “It be stupid. Blowty stupid.”

Harrison said, “It doesn’t go for my head.”

The dolly birds came in. They bought lager-and-lime and a Bloody Mary. Swissy said, “I like to have dat one.”

“Which one? The blonde?”

Swissy snorted. He said, “Ach, she be no good. Norwegian. Say, do dis, do dat…same like blowty German.”

Harrison said, “Are you married, Swissy?”

Swissy shrugged. He said, “Divorce. Only mistake I made.”

“How so?”

“Ach,” said Swissy impatiently, “she be no good. English.” He leaned on the bar and wagged a finger. He said, “I tell you dis. She ask me to marry her, or I never would do it. Use to be on de boats. Go round de world, have a good time. Come back, to dis.”

Harrison said, “Are you drinking?”

Swissy said, “T’ank you. Have a half.”

Harrison paid. He said, “Any children?”

“Ya, two,” said Swissy. “Nice kids.” He produced a bulging, worn-looking wallet. He said, “Nice kids, no?”

The pictures showed a gap-toothed little boy, a rather chunky looking girl. Both were blonde. Harrison said, “Why were you divorced?”

“Ach,” said Swissy, “she be no blowty good. I was manager, big hotel. She make me take pub. She don’ like to work, dat one. Not like German. I tell her, you work. You blowty work. Den she don’ like it. I tell her, no blowty good. Never was any good. Never make English gentleman out of me…

Harrison said, “Was this in England?”

“Ya, at Cheltenham. You know it?”

Harrison said, “I was there for a time.”

Swissy said, “Have de children at school in England.” He waved his hand at the bar. He said, “I do dis for dem. Make more money. Kids come first, all de time. Eh? Not so?”

Harrison said, “I wouldn’t know.”

Bertie came in. He said, “Got it all written down?”

Harrison said, “I’m working on it.”

Swissy said, “Had a good day?”

Bertie said, “Christ, no. Been trying to service an auxiliary since seventeen hundred. Wanted to pull it out of line, but that stupid basstard’—he gestured upstairs—“won’t have it. Says he’s dropping behind schedule. As if it mattered… He picked the paper up. He said, “What’s new?”

Harrison said, “Why’re you educating the children in England?”

Swissy said, “Cause it’s best. She start dat. De ex-wife. Maybe later I send ’em to Switzerland. I don’t know.” He grinned. “Christ,” he said. “Have trouble wit’ de family.”

“Why so?”

“Ach,” said Swissy, “dey be pheasants. No, how you say dat?”

“Peasants.”

“Ah. Peasants. Be blowty peasants.”

“How do you mean?”

“Ah,” said Swissy, “is difficult. Dey not understand. Dey t’ink I give de kids away.”

“You what?”

“Ah, well,” said Swissy. “In my country, Z is no boarding school. State school only. All go dere, whatever parent. If you go odder school, eider parents dead, or prostitute…dat sort of t’ing.”

Harrison said, “Can’t you explain?”

Swissy said, “My brodder understand. He be lawyer. De rest… Christ, got two aunt won’t speak wit’ me. I tell ’em, I no get de kids in de first place, den dere be trouble.”

“Because of being Catholic?”

Swissy brooded. “Ach, yes, de Cat’olic,” he said, “Be blowty rubbish.”

Harrison ordered another beer. He sat and wondered about his notes. The combine throbbed; but already it seemed he was accustomed to the noise. Only when he brought his mind back to it could he hear it. He thought, “I should go on deck. Get the feel of the thing at night.” He remembered the reef markers. He’d been meaning to ask. He said, “Bertie, those reef warnings. Are they necessary?”

Bertie looked at him blearily. He said, “If you hit a b-bugger. you’d find out.”

“Can’t the radar pick them up?”

Bertie said, “Not under ten or twelve feet. These things only run a yard off the deck, and they’re built of silver paper.”

“Couldn’t they be levelled?”

Bertie said, “If you’d tried picking all the rocks out of ten thousand fucking miles, you wouldn’t ask.”

The Norwegian girl came to the bar with a glass. She said, “Fill it, please.”

Swissy grinned. He said, “For you, anyt’ing.”

Harrison drained his beer, lined up another. The bar was very quiet. The clock hands stood at 20.15. A couple of Americans drifted in. It seemed they knew Bertie. They sprawled across the bar, started an engineers’ convention. He heard Bertie say, “Well, what did you expect? The bloody com ring was shot.”

He wondered how long she’d be. He finished the beer, started on whisky. She walked in at 20.25.

She was wearing a little black dress. Her legs were delicious. Her hair gleamed; the bar lights made it look very blonde. Swissy grinned and said, “Christ. Be all right wit’ dat one.”

She said, “I heard that, Swissy. “Lo, John.”

He said, “You’re looking very nice, love.”

She said, “I’ve got a great big ugly face. Compliments don’t work.”

He asked her what she was drinking. She said, “Scotch.”

He asked for a double. He said, “How were the pictures?”

She perched on the bar stool. She said, “I thought I wasn’t going to make it. Big Brother wanted another batch put through.”

He laughed. He said, “I thought you two got on.”

She said, “He’s the answer to the maiden’s prayer. Didn’t you hear?”

He stubbed his cigarette. She said, “Have one of these.”

He lit up for her. He found himself starting to like her a little. He said, “Where’s the great man now?”

“Got a date. Or so he told me. I wished him luck.”

Harrison said, “Swissy, do we have to book for the restaurant?”

Swissy said, “Better, if you want table. No good eat at de bar. Not romantic.” He leered. He said, “I fix it for you. Ten percent.”

Harrison said, “I’ll buy your next beer.” It seemed a trite remark, and was. He thought, “Maybe I’m talking too much. Which is absurd. I’m dead; so I can’t be nervous.”

Swissy used the phone. He said, “Ya, two. Chow, Man’el.” He turned back. He said, “Got you corner table. Gipsy orchestra.”

Harrison said, “Have another drink.” While Swissy was pouring he said, “I wish you’d accept compliments. It’s very unnerving.”

She said, I’m funny. Somehow I can never believe in them.”

He said, “You don’t like yourself all that much.”

She said, “Not much. Not often.”

The clock had moved round to twenty-one hundred. Harrison said, “Let’s go on.”

She stood up. She said, “I’ll see you round there.”

He said, faintly surprised, “I’ll wait.”

Bertie looked up and smirked.

Outside, Harrison said, “That little man did nothing but stare at your legs.”

“Which little man?”

“Bertie. In the corner.”

She said vaguely, “Oh, he’s not too bad.”

Harrison said, “It was a comment, not a condemnation.”

Walking beside her, he was conscious for the first time how tiny she was. It had never appealed to him before. He caught a waft of her scent. He thought, “it suits her.”

The restaurant wasn’t too busy; half a dozen couples were eating, a few more sitting at the bar. The lighting was soft; they had no orchestra but piped music was playing. The tune was “Blue Moon” He wondered how old it was.

Manuelo showed them a corner table, held her chair. Harrison ordered Liebfraumilch. Manuelo offered him the glass. He sipped, knowing there would be nothing wrong. He said, “OK, I’ll pour.”

Manuelo said, “Thank you,” and left them alone.

She said, “Swissy said this means Mother’s Milk.”

Harrison said, “I suppose it does.” He thought, “You’re not like her. But you could be her. Face not your fortune, but the same big eyes.”

Over the main course she said, “I’m glad you asked me out.”

Harrison said, “You can’t really be ‘out’ in a combine harvester.”

She shook her head. She said, “O’Hara can be a pig. I was getting really tired of him.”

He said, “There’s an easy answer.”

She said, it’s not easy for me.”

He said, it will sort itself out. How’s the lobster?”

“Mmm. John…

“What?”

She said, “I am enjoying myself.”

He thought, “This is one of those Rare Moments.” Later he said, “We could dance. Only there’s no floor. Only I don’t dance.”

She smiled, and opened her cigarettes. He lit up for her. She said. “Was Swissy telling you about his family?”

“Yes.”

She said, “He’s divorced, isn’t he?”

“I think so. I can’t work it out. He’s Catholic.”

She said, “If he married outside the Church he’d have been lapsed anyway. Technically, he was living in sin.”

He said, “You know a lot about it.”

She smiled, and pushed her hair back. She said, “I’m a Catholic. Or was. I lapsed about a year ago.”

Harrison said, “Why?”

She lifted her chin. She said finally, “I don’t know. I just couldn’t see it any more. It’s no good just doing it.”

He said, “How did the family take it?”

“They’re still trying to get me back. It’s quite difficult.”

He said, “How old are you, Alison?”

She looked at him. She said, “Twenty-five.”

He said, “I’m sorry. That was rather personal.”

She blew smoke. She said, “I’m queer. I was always the rebel. My brother’s much more conventional. He went into the family business. I moved out. Came up to Town.”

He examined his cigarette. He said, “I was trying to work this afternoon. It wouldn’t come. I think the photographic section’s doing better.” He watched the fall of her hair and thought, “Get back behind me, you shadow, you bitch.”

She said, “It’ll come. I wish I could do that sort of thing.”

He offered the last of the Liebfraumilch. She shook her head. She said, “Thanks. Reached my limit.”

He drank, slowly. In the restaurant the roar of the combine was very loud. Beside him, the long windows were blue with night. He said, “Shall we have coffee in the cabin? The steward will send it up.”

She watched him a moment. She said, “If you like. Yes, nice.”

He said, “This place thrums too much. It gets into one’s head.”

She said, “It is noisy, isn’t it? I suppose you get used to it.”

She walked ahead of him. They turned right, and right again. At the door he reached past her to click the light switch. She said, “Oo, this is nice. Good heavens.”

“What?”

She said, “What’s this?”

He took it from her, carefully. He said, “Rule one. Or so I’m told. Never wave a gun about till you know it’s safe to.”

She said, “Is it safe?”

He broke the cylinder. He said, “It is now.”

She said, “What is it?”

He said, “Smith and Wesson. Point four five five.”

“It’s a revolver.”

He said, “Yes.”

She said, “I’ve never handled a gun before. It’s a beauty. Can I close it?”

He buttoned the intercom. He said, “Just push it shut.”

The steward answered. Harrison said, “Gaelic, Irish or plain?”

She said, “Just plain.”

He walked to her. He said, “Can I show you?” He broke the revolver again. He said, “It’s a very old one. It’s what’s called a fixed frame. With a hinged frame, the chambers open upwards.”

She said, “It’s not much fun waving an empty gun about.”

He opened the locker drawer. He said, “Here.”

She said, “Gosh. Can I do it?”

He thought, “I don’t know quite what’s happening.” He said, “Go carefully, it’s rather dangerous. Do it by numbers.”

She frowned, pushing the big cartridges home. Her hair fell forward, cascading. She shook it back. She said, “Would it shoot now?”

He said, “When it’s cocked. So.”

She said, “Oh, I see. The cylinder turns round.” She smiled. She said, “I’ve found out about revolvers.”

He said, “Hold it very carefully. Keep it pointing at the floor, else it’s bad manners.”

She said, “If I pulled the trigger now, it would go off.”

He said, “Yes. But that wouldn’t be a good idea so we’ll…eject. So. Out come the cartridge cases.”

She said, “I don’t understand. Wouldn’t they have been fired?”

He said, “This part is the bullet. The shiny nose. This is the case. There’s a cap at the bottom. When the pin hits it, it explodes.”

She collected the rounds carefully, gave them back. She said, “It’s safe now. Can I play with it?”

Harrison said, “Most girls aren’t interested in guns.”

She said, “I’m not most girls.”

The steward buzzed with the coffee. She rolled back on the bed. She said, “I’d like a gun. I’d like this one.”

“Whatever for?”

She said, “To keep the ghosts away.”

He poured coffee. He thought, “You are a funny little rat.”

She said, “You know a lot about guns.”

“Not really. I think they’re interesting.”

“Where did you get this one?”

He said, “One of the German riggers at base. I think he was broke.”

She said, it would kill a person, wouldn’t it?”

He said, “I rather think it would kill anything.” He smiled. He said, including ghosts.”

“Why did you buy it?”

He handed her the coffee. He said, “It interested me.” He thought, “What was it Hans said? “Your English law is stupid. Every man need a gun. For the one time.”

He said, “For the one time…

“What?”

He said, “Nothing. Just a thought.”

She drew her knees up, sighted the revolver.

He said, “You look like Pussy Galore.”

She said, “I feel like Pussy Galore.”

He thought, “And the dynamo’s running, you little bitch. But that’s not possible.”

She said, “You like nice things, don’t you?”

“How do you mean?”

She said, “Like the gun.”

He thought, “This is out of the question, absurd.” He said, “Alison, would you mind if I seduced you?”

She looked at him carefully. Then she put the Smith and Wesson down. She said, “Not in the slightest.”

Harrison said. “All right then. Better finish your coffee.”

She drank. He gave her a cigarette. They smoked for a while. Then he said, “Were you serious?”

She said, “Perfectly. Weren’t you?”

He said, “It was rather a silly question. I’m not sure how one goes about it.”

“Haven’t you done it before?”

He said, “I’ve been seduced. That’s rather different.”

She put the cigarette down. She said, “I don’t want this.” She rose, walked over to him, sat on his knee. She said gently, “This will do for a start.”

He lay back. She moved with him, softly. She was lithe, and light. She said, “I’m sorry. I’m all hair.”

He said, “Don’t I know it.” He kissed her. She didn’t mind his tongue. He found the cabin lights, dimmed to sleep level. In the half-dark, the thunder of the combine sounded louder.

She nestled, and kissed again. He found her dress clasp. She whispered “No,” and didn’t stop him.

The wine spun in his head. He said, “Now I can say all the silly things. Like lovely, desirable, sweet. Nice little girl.”

She said, muffled, “Nice big man…

He stroked her, ran his fingers along her bra strap. He said, “I’m not much good at this. Fumbly old job.”

The strap parted. She said, “That wasn’t bad for a novice.”

He worked her dress down, feeling satin skin. He thought, “I’m going to go crazy with this, because it’s too good. These things don’t happen.” Aloud he said. “Move your arms.”

“Why?”

“They’re in the way.”

She whispered, “Please. No, please John…

“What’s the matter?”

She said, “It’s silly. I’m shy.”

He said, “You can stop if you want. I don’t want to spoil any friendships.”

She said, “It won’t. Honestly. This is nice. Please, John…

She kissed him, wound her arms round his neck. He pulled at the dress, carefully. She sat up then, shivering. She said, “Well, this is me. For what it’s worth.” And he saw it was possible for a blush to spread, across the neck, down the shoulders and back.

He said, “You’re very lovely.” He bowed his head. She squeaked; and he knew he had to be gentle. Incredibly gentle. Her body was like a tight-strung wire; he could feel the responses start, little jumps deep inside her. She said, “No, please. Not down there.”

He said, “Yes…

She caught his fingers. She said, “I’ve got you now. You can’t get away.”

He used a trick. She said, “I shall fight you…

He said, “Alison, fight all night. That’s what it’s all about.”

He held her again, carefully. She lay back, head against the chair. She said, “You are nice.”

He said, “Alison, come to bed.”

“No!”

“I shall say please then.”

“John, no! It’s no good, I just get stubborn. It’s too early…

“Then we’ll go to bed later.”

She said, “I’m not ready. Don’t try to make me. I shan’t do it.”

He said, “Love, no one shall make you.” He stroked her back, gentling; and she relaxed again. He thought, “It could be her. She doesn’t look like her, she doesn’t act like her. But it could be her. I made it happen again.”

Her skirt had ridden up. She said, “Don’t look at me. I shall be decorous.”

He said, “I’m enjoying you. Don’t you like it?”

She said, “No. Yes. I don’t know…

He said, “What spectacular panties.”

She said, “I’m a panty fetishist. They always match my shoes. That’s something you know about me now.”

He said, “I shall blackmail you. Alison, come to bed.”

“No!’

“It’s all right.”

She said, “John, no. Don’t do that.”

He said, “You want it and you shall have it.”

“I don’t. I don’t.”

He said, “Don’t fib.” He thought, “Three years. She told me it had done me good. That’s why I left her. But she was right. I know it now, I know how to make it good.”

She started to struggle. He said, “Aren’t I doing it right?”

She said, “You’re doing it too damned well… John, don’t make me…

He said, “Girlie, you’re made… she was moving against him, arcing her body. She pushed her head back, soundlessly; he thought, “Contact contact, flaring bloody contact… And it was over; she relaxed against him with the longest, deepest sigh he had ever heard.

Later he said, “Did I hurt you?”

She nuzzled and whispered, not opening her eyes. She said “Only in the nicest possible way.”

He laughed, in the near-dark. He said, “Your bottom’s cold.”

She said, “It’s the only part of me that is.”

He watched the clock hands move, feeling her weight against him, hearing the great thunder of the combine. Once she stirred. She said, “It’s been a long time. I was only eighteen… He stroked her till she was quiet. Much later, she pushed away. She said, “I’m going to be a nuisance. I want to go back to my cabin now.”

He said, “Stay in this one.”

“I can’t.”

“You’ll be all right.”

She said, “You don’t know O’Hara.”

“This isn’t to do with O’Hara.”

She said, “He keeps asking me, everybody asks me. The boss asked me. If he found out…

Harrison said, “Even O’Hara couldn’t be that big a basstard.”

She said, “Care to bet? Please, John…

He said, “Nobody shall make you do anything, lovie. You know that. Here…

She sat upright, tousled. She said, “I’m all undressed.”

He said, “I like you that way.”

Her eyes looked huge. She said, “I didn’t know there were men like you.” She kissed him again.

Afterwards, he eased her to her feet. She tidied herself. He said, “Lights on?”

She said, “Yes. Trying to…find my comb.”

He swirled brightness back into the little cabin. The walls were the same, the bulkhead clock and the bunk; yet it was all different. Alive.

She stumbled, trying for her shoes. He caught her. He’d known she would be giddy. He thought, “I did it right. I did something right.” He said, “You had a trip.”

Her eyes were very sleepy. She said, “It was lovely. John, I must go.”

He walked her to her cabin. The corridor lights were dimming now, a part of Combine Patsy preparing for sleep. She opened her door, pulled him half inside, kissed him quickly with all her body. He said, “My head will be rather full of you, of course. I shall want to see you. Is that proper?”

She smiled. She said, “It’s human. I never knew you were. Good night, John.”

He said, “Goodnight.” He stayed till the door closed, softly; then he walked away.

In his cabin the bed was rumpled. He walked to the shower cubicle, rinsed his face and hands, lit a cigarette. He stood staring a while. The revolver lay where she had put it. He set it on the locker, twitched the covers straight.

Sleep was far from him. He walked back to C deck restaurant. The lights were out now, the place deserted. A bulb gleamed dully over the bar. Manuelo was drying a glass. He said, “Coffee, Manuelo?”

The little man grinned and shook his head, jerked his thumb at the wallclock.

Harrison laid a dollar on the counter. He said, “Por favor.”

Manuelo grinned again, and walked to the dispenser.

He took the tall mug back to his room, sat and sipped. After a while he frowned, sniffed his sleeve. Her scent clung, faint and delightful. He thought, “I was trying to make her. To fill a hole in my life. But I didn’t know what she was like. I didn’t know what she was going to be like.”

He drank again. After a while he thought, “She trusted me. And she was shy.” The shyness had hooked him through the lip. He thought, “The other thing was never like that. It couldn’t be.” A ghost had faded, seeming past return. He thought, “It was time. I went looking, and I made it happen again. A new thing.”

He finished the coffee, set the mug down, stood up. At the door he thought, “That wasn’t her voice. Those weren’t her eyes. It was all new. Like a flower, opening in the hand.” He wondered, “Are they all like that? When they’re loved?”

He climbed to B deck. The air was rushing, intensely cold. Above, the bridge superstructure slid against an incrustation of stars. Darkness seemed to enhance the sense of speed. He saw the combine now as a great entity; he knew her blades spun and roared, her dynamos hummed, her sensors probed with their electric fingers. He felt the exultation grow, and let it well. He thought, “I paid for tonight. It’s mine.” He saw, with heightened vision, Combine Patsy and her sisters; Julie, Susannah, all the rest, strung like beads of light and warmth against the moving dark. He thought, “I’d forgotten. I’d sunk into the pit, and didn’t know my need; and her hands raised me, unbeknown.” He thought, it flies at sense and logic; it flies in the face of reason. But we love; and we rejoice, because it sets us apart from the beasts.”

In the east, already, a new dawn was making. The night air was reaching him; he stubbed his cigarette, and turned away. He thought, “We reap, and we thresh; grain for half the world. We are the Grain Kings, raised of old; and I a new God. A giant God, who was dead.”

2

He lay for a while in a floating half-awareness before opening his eyes. Sunlight slanted into the cabin from the one square port. The patch vibrated slightly, moving with the movements of the dural wall. He turned his head. The Olivetti stood on the side table; on the locker was the Smith and Wesson. These things pleased him. He studied them a while, unmoving. His awareness, his sense of colour and form, seemed unnaturally sharp.

The wall clock read 09.15. The intercom buzzed; he reached for the cord, lazily, thumbed the switch. The speaker said, “Good morning, Mr. Harrison. Asked me to call you.”

He said, “Joe. Gracias.”

He rose, padded to the shower cubicle. The stinging needlepoints enlivened him. In the cubicle the hum of the combine sounded loud. A can of shaving foam clattered softly against a glass shelf. He towelled, shaved, got out clean shirt and shorts, dressed. He found himself humming, vaguely, the theme from Thomas Tallis. He thought, “That’s good music. English west country music.” He picked up his jacket, stooped to wriggle heels into shoes. He’d thought he would never go into the west again. Maybe now he would.

He let his thoughts drift round to her, by slow degrees. Before he’d kept her out of his head, deliciously. He looked round the cabin. He thought, “She was here, and she was naked. Funny little rat.”

He walked to C deck restaurant, ordered coffee, cereals and toast. He ate slowly, smoked a cigarette. At eleven hundred hours he was due to meet Controller Cheskin. He walked to the observation deck. The combine had turned once more on to a northern pass. He thought, Three since start of cut.” The sky was bright steely blue, the red bridge coamings sharp-cut in sunlight. He watched rigging shadows move, thin dark stripes against scarlet paintwork. The wind buzzed faintly in the mast struts. The morning was very fair.

He thought, “Maybe she’s sleeping it off.”

He walked back to C deck bar. The place smelled of polish and dust. Except for one of the American engineers, it was empty. Swissy grinned at him. He said, “Here he come. De great lover.”

He was faintly startled. He said, “What?”

Swissy said, “How you get on wit’ her? De li’l girl?”

Harrison said, “We had a nice evening.” He settled himself on the bar stool. He said, “Not beer, Swissy. Fruit juice.”

Swissy stopped, hand over the pump. He muttered, “Got to keep up de strengt’…

Harrison nodded vaguely. He was remembering the smoothness of her skin, dimly seen, the firm fullness under her scanties, later the bursting of soft dark down between her thighs. He thought, “These are my memories. It happened. Nobody can take them away.” He sipped orange juice. He thought, “I feel for her, rushingly. I didn’t know how much I wanted her.” The images would revolve now quietly, hour on hour, till he saw her again; as she had lain quiet in his arms. He thought, “The smell of her was like a drawer of linen. Clean, lavender-fresh.”

Swissy said, “Been up top?”

He said, “It’s a great morning.”

Swissy leaned on the bar. He said morosely, “All right for some. I gotta work.”

Harrison said, “I’m working all the time, Swissy.”

Swissy said, “Yeah. T’ink about de li’l girl.”

Harrison said, “You’ve got a one-track mind.”

The American glanced at his watch, nodded and strolled out. Swissy said, “I t’ink after all I go back to de boats. Had good time den, get plenty girls. Used to stop ’Frisco, Honolulu. Christ, was a place, dat. I t’ink I go Tasmania, or New Zealand. Lovely country.”

Harrison said, “Why’d you leave home anyway, Swissy?”

Swissy said, “Oh, some t’ings go wrong.”

“Family?”

“Ach, no. But some odder t’ing. Dey be pheasant anyway. I t’ink, fowk ’em. You know? See a bit of de world. Five years I was on de boats. Den I come ashore. After dat, go to England. Christ, was bad t’ing, dat.”

The wall clock pinged. Harrison said, “Got to go. Seeing the old man. Keep my seat warm.”

Swissy said, “Chow.”

At the bridge steps a guard with UN tabs on his shoulders scanned his press card. He said, “Wait, please,” and walked away. Harrison stood idly, heard an intercom buzz. The guard came back. He said, “Follow me, please.”

Here, higher in the combine, the endless sway and roll were more evident. Harrison glanced round him. Officers’ country seemed no less spartan than the rest of the machine. He was high above the wheat; a port gave him a view of it, like a sparkling, brilliant-yellow plain.

The guard tapped a door, opened it. He said, “Mr. Harrison, sir.” Harrison stepped through.

The cabin was wide, and carpeted. To one side a wallfire glowed cheerfully; above it was an oil painting in a heavy, ornate frame. There were cupboards of china and glassware; shelves held a further display. Cheskin sat at a polished desk fronting the great range of windows. He rose as Harrison walked towards him, and held out his hand. He said, “Mr. Harrison, how pleasant. World Geographic, I believe.”

Harrison said, “I’m delighted to meet you, sir.” His mind was far away; down maybe with the racing, rolling wheat.

Cheskin said, “Be seated, please. A drink?”

Harrison said, “Thank you. Thanks very much.”

Cheskin said, “Whisky perhaps.” He tinkled liquid from a decanter. He said, “Your British whisky is the finest in the world.” He handed the glass. He said, “Through peat, and over granite. I believe these are the requirements.”

Harrison smiled. He said, “I’ve been told so, sir.”

Cheskin nodded briskly. He said, “You will excuse me for not joining you. For me, it is a little early.” He pushed a box of cigarettes across the desk. He said, “I have visited Scotland. A most lovely country. Sometime I hope to return, for the salmon fishing. Do you fish, Mr. Harrison?”

Harrison said, “Last time I tried, I managed a pike.”

Cheskin said, “Ah. Yes.” He leaned back. He said, “Have you been well looked after?”

Harrison said, “Excellently. Mr. Pritchard has been most helpful.”

Cheskin said, “Good.” He steepled his fingers. He said, “First, a few facts about myself. I am, as you undoubtedly know, Russian by birth. America has been for many years my country of adoption. I am a biologist and agriculturalist; during the Moscow crisis I served in the Russian army. My rank was colonel.” He smiled. He said, “And you?”

Harrison said, “Rather an ordinary sort of background, sir. Agricultural degree, then jobbing journalism here and there. I’m afraid I haven’t led too adventurous a life.”

Cheskin said, “I see. It is better that we know just a little of each other.”

Harrison’s eyes had wandered. Cheskin caught the direction of his glance and turned. He said, “Ah, the painting. Are you knowledgeable about paintings, Mr. Harrison?”

Harrison said, “Not really. But I think that’s very unusual.” He was in a mood to be pleased by anything. He said, “It’s rather lovely.”

Cheskin smiled again. He said, “It’s not lovely. Rather, it is ugly. This is why I keep it.” He rose, walked to the picture. Its colours were sombre: flat reds, and browns. A table was set with a candlelit meal; a shirt-sleeved man sprawled across a bed, holding a stick over which a fluffy white poodle leaped. Cheskin said, “It is, of course, a facsimile. The original was painted shortly before his death by a great Russian artist, Pavel Fedotov. You have perhaps heard of him?”

Harrison said, “I’m afraid not.”

Cheskin said, “He is not known much outside Russia.” He turned back to the canvas. He said, “At twenty-five, Fedotov was a brilliant young officer of the Finlandsky Regiment of the Royal Guard. At thirty-seven he was dead, a pauper. This he produced in the last year of his life.”

He reached to touch the carved gilt frame. He said, “The officer is drunk. The surroundings are squalid, suburban. As the dog jumps the stick, so his master is driven by boredom. By ennui. He too is a victim of his circumstances.”

Harrison said, “I don’t think I quite follow you, sir.”

Cheskin said, “Though Fedotov was great, his life was wasted. The canvas serves to remind me of this. Effort misdirected is wasted. We must see clearly, rejecting dreams and the fantastic, holding at all times to the realities we perceive. We must not become such a man; jumping sticks, though we think we hold them for others.”

Harrison said, “You seem very…aware of your homeland, sir. Have you never wished to return?”

On the desk was a silver-mounted photograph. It showed a blonde, plumpish woman with a dog. Cheskin frowned across at it. He said, “While my wife lived, perhaps. Now it would be pointless.”

Harrison said, “I’m sorry, sir. That was extremely personal.”

Cheskin shook his head. He said, “This is a part of your profession.” He turned to the shelves. He said, “Here is something that may interest you. It is very rare.”

Harrison rose, walked to him. The Controller lifted a glass drinking vessel, turned it in his thin fingers. He said, “It is a joke, really, on the part of the glassblower. It was made sometime in the early eighteenth century. Above the goblet, you see, is a fabulous beast; you would call it a chimaera. To taste the wine, you must press your mouth to his. His body fills, as if with blood.”

Harrison took the piece, carefully.

Cheskin said, “These are modern works, by Tatyana Navrina. The city in which she was born is now called Gorky. Its folkart is well known in Russia. Here you see a circular composition. Tatyana shows us the fox, the hare and the cockerel. Famous beasts in our folklore. They chase each other round and round, merrily. It is pointless and gay; yet also perhaps a little sad. Like a fairground entertainment.”

Harrison said, “Do you have a large collection, sir?”

Cheskin said, “I have a house in America. In New Jersey. Most of my pieces are there. These few, my favourites, travel with me.”

He walked back to the desk. He said, “A little more whisky. Now, to your article. Have you collected all the information you will need?”

Harrison said slowly, “I’ve collected a lot of information. I think the problem now is putting it together, making a shape. I was looking for something to peg the facts on, to get all this across. Maybe a theme.” He took the plunge, feeling good. He said, “Yesterday I thought I’d got it.”

Cheskin said, “Ah, this business of a theme. I find it most interesting. You had thought perhaps of a ship? Or an aeroplane?”

Harrison said, “I suppose everybody does.”

“Yes,” said Cheskin. “This is most important. Remember the painting. There are no themes; merely realities. This is a large combine harvester. With a model number, known characteristics. I can give you rates of cut and thresh, length of cut, passage time on cut, estimated return to Grid Base. Are these things not enough?”

Harrison said, “I’m not sure.”

Cheskin said, “You thought in higher terms? In terms of significance, of poetry?”

Harrison said, “Don’t you approve of poetry, sir?”

Cheskin smiled fleetingly. He said, “There is perhaps a poetry. Unheard, unsung.” He brooded. He said, “No. I have no objection to poetry. But it is necessary to apply the proper labels. We should know at all times with what we are dealing.”

Harrison said, “I’m not quite with you, sir.”

Cheskin said, “There is your English author. Kipling. You have surely studied his work. He might perhaps render such a theme. He understood much of machines.”

Harrison said, “I’m afraid I’m no Kipling, sir.”

Cheskin said, “Perhaps that is as well.” He turned the cigarette box thoughtfully in his fingers. He said, “In Kipling’s work the machines are made to speak. They cannot; but the poet is skilful, and so we believe. Soon too England speaks, as an old grey Mother. The sea speaks to the Danish women, declaring itself a rival for the affections of their men. The little banjo speaks; and what a harmless instrument! So the world, which is as it is, becomes repeopled; with mirages, and Gods. Soon for us, stones speak and trees; we feel the touch of phantom hands. Here is a paradox, Mr. Harrison. We do not worship stones and trees; yet we listen to our poets.”

He rose, stood back and turned, staring down across the miles on miles of wheat. A buzzer sounded on the bridge; Harrison heard the vague pealing of an intercom. Cheskin said, “For me, the Grain Development Areas represent new hope. Here for the first time our many peoples work together, truly together, for the universal good. Here perhaps, if you search, you may find your poetry. This too is why none of us must be blinded. We must see, very clearly, what we do. We must see it as a good thing, perhaps a great one; but we must find no mystery. Moon and sun do not tug our brains, as they tugged the brains of earlier men. We reap, and we thresh. We are neither Gods nor ants. Our machines are our machines. As in this, so in our lives. Our hands work, our will directs the hands. The rest, our conceits, our grand words, are luxuries. We cannot permit ourselves such luxuries, Mr. Harrison, if we are to survive. Dreaming, we are unaware; from unawareness springs grief, disaster, despair. For our own sakes, we must not dream.”

Harrison said slowly, “I’m sorry if my ideas annoyed you, sir.”

Cheskin turned, and smiled. He said, “I am not here to approve or disapprove of your ideas, Mr. Harrison. I am not a censor. I merely warn.”

He walked back to the desk. He said, “And now, if you have finished your drink, I will show you Control.”

* * * *

At lunch, Harrison ran into O’Hara. He was sitting at a corner table in C restaurant, forging his way through a steak. He waved a fork, a chip impaled tastefully on the prongs. Harrison joined him, not particularly wanting to. He said, “Hello, Mike. Where’s Alison?”

O’Hara watched him palely. He said, “I’m keeping her busy. It’s good for her waistline.”

Harrison ordered Dover sole and a glass of wine. He steered the conversation on to safer grounds. There had been times when he’d felt a compulsion to belt O’Hara on the nose. Today, he might just do it.

He made his escape as soon as he decently could, walked round to C deck bar. Bertie was in evidence. He said, “The wanderer returns. Have a beer.”

Swissy pulled a pint. He said, “Is paid for.”

Bertie said, “How’d you get on with the old man?”

Harrison said, “This is good Russian beer. From the banks of our own Volga river.”

Bertie tittered. He said, “I know the feeling.”

Harrison said thoughtfully, “He’s a strange bird though. I can’t make out whether he loves Russia or hates it.”

Swissy said, “All Russians funny bastard. Why he is hating it?”

Harrison said, “I don’t know. I had the feeling they maybe got rid of his wife.”

Swissy said promptly, “Wish I could get rid of mine. Bitch still cost me twenty dollar a week, and she ain’t even got de kids.”

Bertie said, “If you will do these things…

Harrison said, “Are you married, Bertie?”

Bertie said, “Yes, worse bloody luck.”

Swissy said, “It don’t stop him none.”

Bertie drank beer. He said, “We’ve got a treat coming up this afternoon. We’re meeting the Russians. Did he tell you?”

Harrison said, “Yes. When will it be?”

Bertie said, “Fifteen hundred hours. Or should be. We’re getting near the end of the patch. We swing round north tomorrow. Start cut two.”

Harrison said, “Are the Russian combines any different from ours?”

Bertie said, “They cover the ground a bit quicker. Got a modified pickup system. They’re bloody cagey about it too.” He drained his pint, and pushed it across for a refill. He said, “You’ll get a good enough view anyway. They should pass two swaths out.”

Swissy said, “Funny bastard, dese Russian. Get on better wit’ de German.”

Bertie said, “You are a fucking German.”

Swissy said, “I be Swiss German. You know dat.”

Bertie said, “Oh Christ, don’t start.”

Swissy said, “I don’t start not’ing. Is big difference. You go to Switzerland, you find out.”

Bertie said, “You go to Switzerland. You’re so bloody fond of it.”

Harrison looked at the clock. It read 14.30 hours. He wondered about Alison. He said, “I’d better get on deck.”

Bertie said, “That’s what everybody will do. You’ll get just as good a view from here.” He set his beer down, lit a cigarette. He said, “What did the old man talk about?”

Harrison said, “Mainly a painter called Fedotov.”

Bertie tittered again. He said, “I expect you saw his glassware.”

“Yes,” said Harrison. “I did.”

Folk began drifting into the bar in twos and threes. Harrison walked over to the windows. Bertie followed him. He said, “Bring us a couple of beers, Swissy.”

Swissy said, “You come fetch ’em. Odderwise, plenty more bars.”

Bertie said, “What I really like about you is your unfailing civility.”

The wheat flowed past beyond the main coamings, silently. At 14.55 the intercom speakers crackled. They said briefly, “Combine Valeri is in sight from Control, and will pass on schedule.”

Harrison wondered again about going up to B deck. He thought, “Maybe she’s there.” Then he remembered, if she was O’Hara would be with her. He decided to stay put.

Just before fifteen hundred somebody said, “There she is.”

The combine was still well ahead, but coming up fast. Behind her, her dust cloud was a dark yellow funnel trailing on the land. She was big; God, she was big. She made Patsy, ungainly as she was, look elegant and low. On her side she wore the hammer and sickle of the Soviets, above it a big red star. The rest of her was grey; workmanlike, and blank.

Somebody said, “Here comes bloody St. Basil’s.”

Bertie said, “They were putting onion domes on ’em last year.”

Harrison said, “Why did they stop?”

Bertie said, “Track weight became excessive.”

She passed abeam, trailing the long dust cloud. Somebody said, “That’s it then.” On Patsy’s bridge a loudhailer was working faintly.

Bertie turned and shouldered his way out of the crowd. He said, “That’s damn funny.”

Harrison said, “What’s funny?”

Bertie said, “She was cutting a swath too close.”

Swissy said, “De blowty Russians never could steer. Not even de aeroplanes.”

Bertie said, “I’m going to look into that. See you blighters later.”

Harrison walked to B deck, stood on the starboard wing. The combine had certainly passed a single cut away. He stared astern. The Russian was still visible, small with distance. The dust cloud smoked away across the stubble. Beyond, the land lay brown and bare to the horizon. He walked to the forward rail. The double swath remaining stretched like a golden road. Nothing to be seen; just the endless perspectives of the land, shimmering a little with heat haze. Patsy thundered steadily.

The bridge intercom had been left live. The speakers clicked and said. “Mr. Puustjärvi to Control, please. Mr. Puustjärvi.”

He didn’t feel like work. He walked down to D deck. They had a little gift shop there. It sold corn dollies, paperbacks, wooden Russian toys. He thought, “Flowers were out, anyway. Right last time. Not this.”

A showcase held bracelets and some jewellery. He glanced across the display shelves and said, “Good Lord.”

The stewardess smiled professionally. She said, “Can I help you?”

He said, “Does this shoot?”

She lifted the tiny revolver out. She said, “They’re bracelet charms. They fire blanks.”

He said, “I shouldn’t think they need a firearms certificate.”

She said, “They didn’t say anything when we bought them.”

He said, “How much?”

“I think there’s a ticket. Nine dollars fifty.”

He said, “You’ve sold it.”

He walked back to his cabin, lay on the bunk, took the little pistol from its box. It had a hinge-frame action. He broke it and loaded carefully. The tiny thing made a very respectable crack. He thought, “Good for the littlest ghosts anyway.”

He put the charm in the side locker, picked up his notebook. He made a rough draft of the conversation with Cheskin. At the end he wrote: Strange to see the china cabinets. Impress of a personality that still isn’t Western. After all these years.

He pushed the papers aside, thought for a time. Then he reached for the intercom lead, pressed the button. He said, “Joe, do something for me.”

“Certainly, sir.”

“Page E deck. Miss Alison Beckett.”

Joe said, “It shall be done.”

The wall speaker was covered by a plain grey grille. It clicked twice and buzzed. Then it said, “Hello, John.” The voice had an unexpected huskiness.

He said, “’Lo, Alison. How’s things?”

A pause. The speaker said, “Fine.”

“Busy?”

She said, “O’Hara took a lot of shots of the Russians. We’re just starting on them.”

He said, “Shall I see you this evening?”

“Mmm. Yes. Where?”

He said, “Swissy’s bar. About twenty hundred. We can go on a pub crawl.”

She said, “Done. Sounds lovely. John, I have to go now.”

He said, “Bye, Alison.”

The speaker said, “See you later. ’Bye.” It clicked, and went dead.

He walked to C deck restaurant, ordered a coffee. He sat over it a while before going back. He spread the notes out, lit a cigarette and daydreamed. He wasn’t seeing Cheskin’s cabin. He thought, “The hell with it. It’s there to be enjoyed. Like the aftertaste of brandy.” He thought, “I still can’t believe it. But it happened.” Aloud he said, “You never know what another person’s like. Maybe a lot of chances get dropped that way.”

He started on a first draft of the article. It ran well. He read it back, made his corrections, started again. At eighteen hundred hours he bathed and shaved. He walked round to Swissy’s bar. In the corridors, evening light lay flaring. Where sunlight hit the satin-finish panels they glowed with minute grins of gold. The noise of the combine was a steady muted rumble.

Bertie was there. He seemed a bit the worse for wear. Swissy had a copy of the Swiss Observer. He said, “Dere. Tell you all about it dere.”

Bertie said, “The one thing that’s always struck me as curious is why nobody ever really understood the William Tell legend.” Harrison said, “What do you mean?”

“Well,” said Bertie, “look at it this way. For the sake of a few bob a week, the basstard was prepared to risk nailing his son between the eyes with a bloody iron bolt. That’s the Swiss for you. They haven’t altered.”

Swissy said indignantly, “He be blowty good bloke. I tell you.”

Bertie said, “Why, you ass… Oh, what’s the use?” He drank his wine, grimaced, and pushed the glass across. He said, “’Nother glass of your exorbitant plonk. This time, try filling it.”

Swissy said, “Don’ like to do ’em too full. Too much not good for you.” He recorked the bottle, looking pained. He said, “Anyway, what about ol’ Winkelried?”

Harrison said, “Never heard of him.”

“Ach,” said Swissy. “All de schoolchildren, dey learned him. Was a battle sometimes, can’t remember when. Against de Austrians. Austrians had de long spear, what you call it?”

Harrison said, “Pikes.”

“Ach… Pikes. Anyway, was no good. Swiss only have de ball wit’ spikes. So dey have to make a gap. An’ Winkelried say, “Look after de wife an’ kids.” Den he take all de spear to himself to de chest. An’ de odders run over him.”

Bertie said, “I can see you doing that. Why don’t you try?”

Swissy said, “Christ, no. But was a good chap. He say just like dat, ‘Look after de wife an’ kids’…”

Bertie said, “You told it once.”

O’Hara walked in. He slapped Harrison on the shoulder. He said, “Here’s the man who chats up my assistants.”

Harrison thought, “One day I’ll kill you and slice you, you bastard, and eat the strips. And I shall enjoy them.” He said, “Have a beer, Mike.”

O’Hara sat and swung his legs. He was looking well manicured. The love life must be prospering. He said, “You’ll not get anywhere with her, boyo.”

Harrison said, “Maybe I’m not trying to.”

O’Hara said casually, “She’s damn near married anyway. Reckon they’ll get spliced next trip. Bloke out in Gloucestershire somewhere, breeds horses. Old man’s got a packet. Didn’t she tell you?”

Harrison looked at his shoes. He said, “I don’t really know much about her.”

A klaxon sounded overhead. Feet pattered on the decking. The bridge tannoys said, “Duty officer to Control, please. Emergency stations.”

Bertie said, “Christ.” He put his glass down and ran for the door.

Harrison swung off the stool. O’Hara got ahead of him. He turned right and left, following the Irishman. They collided on the companion steps. O’Hara said, “No fucking camera.” He ran back the way he had come.

B deck was filling. Somebody pointed, they said, “Right up. Up ahead.”

Bertie was back, with a pair of heavy prismatics. He trained them and swore. He said, “The basstards shouldn’t be there at all.” He handed the glasses across.

She was big, as big as the last. To Harrison she looked like a great lurching biscuit tin on tracks, grinding across the land. He lowered the glasses. She was easily visible now to the naked eye. He stared behind him, up at the bridge windows. There was a pale blur that could have been Cheskin’s face. The light was fading fast, dying in long swaths and banners. The dustcloud ahead caught the last of the sunset, glowed orange against dull red. To right and left the stubble shone darkly, like landscape seen on Mars.

The bridge klaxons blasted, driving sound at Harrison’s shoulders and back. The intercom speakers said, “All stations stand by. Maintain revolutions.”

The loudhailer seemed to solidify the air of B deck. The words rolled into distance, a barrage of thunder. Harrison said, “What’s he saying?”

Bertie tittered. He said, “He’s telling ’em to f-fuck off.”

Harrison said, “She’s on the next swath. She’ll pass us.”

Bertie said, “She’s too close in. She’s not even on the grid.”

The loudhailer bawled again, fell silent. The Russian machine was closing fast now. The light gleamed on her bridge wings and coamings. In the sudden quiet, the roar of her engines sounded clear.

Bertie turned, stared up at the bridge. He said, “The crazy basstard.”

Harrison said, “Why doesn’t he swing?”

Bertie said, “Because he can’t. He’s too bloody late.”

The Russian was nearly alongside. A final flurry from the loudhailer; and Cheskin spoke suddenly and urgently in English. He said, “Emergency. Collision drill. Clear all starboard catwalks. Clear starboard casings. Hurry, hurry.”

Harrison saw figures run crouching along the cutter housings. The grey superstructure reared beyond the bridge wing. Identification letters slid by; vast, curling, Cyrillic.

Patsy jarred, and shook. There was a report like a cannon shot, and another. The crowd on B deck surged back. Harrison saw steel handrail rise into the air, loop jerkily. The catwalk sheered, thunderously, back towards the stern. Something hit the deck wing. A glass screen starred and shattered.

Alison was there, holding his arm. He pulled her back instinctively, swung her away. Wire thrummed overhead. Bertie yelled, “She’s clear. She’s clear… The superstructure was diminishing, sliding out of sight behind the bridge.

The deck wing was a mess of wire and glass insulators. Somebody said, “We got her aerial array.” Bertie spoke feelingly, glaring up at the bridge. He said, “I hope he broke all his fucking pots.”

The speakers said, “Damage reports to Control, please. Reports to Control.”

A crewman was wrestling with the coils of thick wire. Another swore and turned, showed a wrist dribbling scarlet. Alison said, “Oh, God…

Swissy was there in his white jacket, stogie clamped between his teeth. He said, “Blowty Russians.” He turned to Harrison, grinning. He said, “Like blowty Brand ’Atch…

The speakers said, “Controller Cheskin. There is no major damage. There is no emergency. I repeat, there is no emergency. Please return to your quarters. We are continuing on cut.”

Bertie said, “There’ll be bloody hell to pay for this.”

Harrison swallowed. He said, “Are you all right?”

She said, “Yes. Yes, I’m OK.”

He said, “Better come and have your drink. I think we need it.”

She shook her head, pushed her hair back. She said, “In a minute. Got to go somewhere.”

He said, “Are you sure you’re all right?”

She said, “Honestly. Go on down. I’ll come.”

The bar was packed already. The American engineers were making most of the noise. A red-necked man with cropped hair was saying, “Sons of bitches Russians.”

Swissy alone seemed unruffled. He was saying, “Blowty Brand ’Atch’ again. The phrase seemed to have taken his fancy.

Bertie was scribbling on the back of an envelope. His shoulders were shaking. Harrison jostled his way to the counter, called for a beer. He said, “Why didn’t he turn?”

Bertie said, “Because he’s bloody mad.”

Harrison said, “What’s so damn funny?”

Bertie seemed to be having difficulty controlling himself. He said, “The Russians cut to a complicated pattern. Two ahead, close, and a follower. Always groups of three.”

“And?”

Bertie said, “Well, we’ve encountered and dealt with two.”

It dawned. Harrison said slowly. “Then there’s—”

Bertie nodded. He said, “Another basstard somewhere dead ahead.”

Harrison said quietly, “How long?”

Bertie said, “You can’t be sure, of course. O seven hundred tomorrow. Give or take…

Alison was back. She said, “O’Hara’s gone temporarily insane.”

“What for?”

“He wanted to wire his pictures out. There’s a clampdown. Official news agencies only.”

Harrison said, “We’re not a news team anyway.”

She said, “That’s what I told him.”

He said, “So the pictures…

She said firmly, “Can wait till morning. I’ve had enough of friend O’Hara.”

Swissy leered at her. He said, “Here dey are. De love birds.”

Harrison bought a whisky. He said, “I tried to book a call to the old man. The booths were too crowded.”

She said, “O’Hara did it for you. They’ll page you when it comes.”

He said, “That was extraordinarily good of him.”

The bar was getting fuller than ever. He was jostled, beer spilled on his sleeve. The red-necked man was saying, “Shoot the bastards then. All the bastards.”

Somebody said, “Anyway, why the hell’d they let Cheskin get Controller?”

The red-necked man said, “Sucking the bastard British.”

Harrison said, “Let’s try D deck. We can still have our crawl.”

She said, “It won’t be much better.”

Harrison said, “We can try. Chow, Swissy.”

Swissy said, “Chow.”

D deck bar was quieter, to his surprise. She perched on a bar stool, looking fairly at home. He hadn’t had a chance to see her properly before. She was wearing a fawn sweater, a tiny kilt with a big dress pin. She looked about eighteen. He watched how her hair moved against the woolly. The texture contrast pleased him. He said, “You were terrific last night.”

She frowned. He said, “Don’t you want to talk about it?”

She said, “It isn’t that. You took me by surprise.”

He said, “What?”

She turned her glass round on the counter. She said, “I didn’t know you thought of me like that. It never showed.”

“Like what?”

She said, “Well, as a woman.”

He thought, “I can’t have come back, after all these years, to this same arid place.” But his mind had spun already, added and made a total. He thought, “I can’t believe. I won’t believe. It’s a joke that’s gone bad, through too much laughing. Just a joke gone bad.”

He smiled and said the first thing that came to him.

“Manuelo wants to buy the gun.”

She grasped the subject-change eagerly. She said, “It fascinated me. I’ve never handled one before. I’d love to fire it, just once.”

He said, “You were very good with it. But I don’t think you’d like it when it went off.”

She said, “I wouldn’t mind. Not if I was ready.”

“You’d flinch anyway.”

She said, “Is that wrong?”

Harrison said, “It makes you miss the target.”

He opened his cigarettes. She said, “No. Have one of these.”

He lit up for her. She blew smoke. She said, “We could have done it just now, if we’d known the collision was coming. Nobody would have heard.”

He thought, “Stop being desperate; for your sake, if not for mine.” He said, “It’s already an international incident. It would really have loused things up if the Russkies found a forty-five slug stuck in the works.”

The intercom speaker said, “Mr. John Harrison, World Geographic. International call.”

He said, “Excuse me.” There were booths outside in the corridor. He walked to the nearest, closed the door. They took a time establishing the connection. Finally London came through. He listened and said “Yes’ several times. Then he put the handset down, stood staring at it. He thought, “The mouth moves, and the facial muscles. The words form, while the odds increase to the power of n. Then you walk away. They call it maturity.”

He went back to the lounge. He said, “That’s about it then.”

She said, “What’s happened?”

He said, “I’m being recalled. They’re sending a bigger gun.”

“Who?”

He said, “Bill Goldie.”

She made a face. She said, “When do you have to leave?”

He said, “Day after tomorrow. They’re flying him from Tokyo. I take the helicopter back.”

She said, “I think we’re stopping on.”

He said, “I think so. From what they said.”

She looked at him blandly. She said, “You’re not getting all uptight about it, are you?”

He steered back. He thought, “Just twenty-four hours, and I’ve learned you all over again. My ducky little ball of solid brass.” He said, “No, I’m not getting all uptight.”

She said, “I’m sorry about on deck. I was scared.”

He said, “You had every right to be.”

“I didn’t think Swissy would ever stop laughing.”

Harrison said, “Normally he only laughs at earthquakes.” He stubbed his cigarette. He said, “Would you like to eat?”

She said, “Not tonight, honestly. I couldn’t.”

His skull felt blocked; too much personal stuff going through. He remembered Bertie and his envelope. He wondered if he should tell her. He said, “What do you want to do?”

“I don’t know. I don’t mind, really.”

“Shall we go back to Swissy’s?”

She brightened. She said, “I like him. Yes, all right.”

Outside he said, “I’m afraid it wasn’t much of a crawl.”

She said, “I’m enjoying myself. I just don’t show things much.”

The Americans had gone. Bertie still sat at the bar. He looked in a bad way; his eyes were starting to run. Swissy said, “Ah, here she come. De untouchable one.”

Alison said, “Supposition, Swissy. Mere supposition.”

Bertie brightened momentarily, and greyed back over.

Swissy said, “I was just telling Bertie here, ’bout dis duel. Last duel dey ever have, in Switzerland.”

Bertie said cloudily, “Another of his horrible bloody stories.”

“No, is true,” said Swissy. “Interestin’.” He turned back to Harrison. “Dey have de doctor dere,” he said, “An’ one man, he get de end of his nose cutted off.” He started to giggle. “An’ before dey can sticked it back on,” he said, “is eaten by de Alsatian dog.”

Alison said, “I still don’t understand about bullets. About part stopping in the gun.”

Harrison started drawing on a beer mat.

Later she said, “I know the lot. Matchlock, wheelock, flintlock, percussion cap. Then bullets. The percussion cap’s still a bit dodgy.”

Harrison said, “They only get more complicated. Just remember all guns are really clockwork.”

She said, “I like finding out about totally new things.”

Swissy said “’Bout time you give me de bar back.”

The time had passed, as any time passes. Harrison stood up. He said, “G’night, Swissy. Bertie.”

Swissy said, “Chow.” Bertie hiccupped faintly.

Outside she said, “Bertie always looks so unhappy. Like a singularly mournful puppy.”

Harrison said, “Maybe he is unhappy.”

They’d reached his cabin without the question being raised. Which he supposed was another hurdle crossed. He thought, “I’m not going to leap on you now every time I get the chance. But you’re not to know that, of course.” He opened the door, thumbed the lights to full. He said, “Coffee?”

She sat on the bed. She said, “Please. I mustn’t belong, though. I feel whacked.”

He murmured something like, “I wouldn’t wonder.” It didn’t much matter what he said; he’d lost interest in the words.

She drank her coffee, when it came. Afterwards he held his hands out. She looked uncertain. He said, “Nobody shall take your clothes off. I won’t let them.”

She walked to him, sat across his knees, relaxed. The pressure was back, and the warmth. She looped her arms round his neck and said, “’Lo.”

He kissed her. Her mouth was very soft. He thought, “Here we are again then.” He said, “Were you very mad?”

She said, “I’m never mad. I just don’t react when I should. I think there must be something wrong with me.”

He thought, “If I stayed surprised for two hours and twenty minutes, I should see a doctor.” He touched her knee.

She said, “No, John, please. Not tonight.”

He said, “Very decorous.”

She said, “I just wanted body contact. It’s comforting.”

They lay silent. He watched the wall clock and rubbed her behind. Finally she stirred. She said, “I was so worried.”

“What about?”

“You. And us. Being friends.”

He said, “As far as I know, nothing’s altered that.”

She said, “I just don’t know about…being lovers. I’ve had so many.”

He said, “Lovers?”

“No, boys. Well, men. I didn’t want you hurt.”

He thought, “You lying, two-timing bitch and mother of bitches to be, that is the bloody last straw.” Aloud he said, “I wouldn’t worry too much about me.”

She pushed against his shoulder. She said, “I’m better at…well, talking. I’m a great free thinker. That’s why it wouldn’t be fair.”

“What wouldn’t be fair?”

She frowned. She said, “The physical attraction thing. It always goes. It’s only once. Then…

He said, “It must be very frustrating for you.”

She said, “I’ve lost a lot of friends that way.”

He thought, “How much do you want? Just how much?”

She drew her finger across his lips. Then she put her mouth up. He evaded her. She punched his chest, chuckling. She said, “Oh, you…man…

The wall clock pinged. He thought she’d move but she didn’t. After a while she said, “I don’t think I shall ever marry. I don’t know. I’m too independent or something. It just isn’t me.”

He said very gently, “My dear, all I have done so far is remove your knickers. There are rather a lot of steps between that and publishing the banns.”

She stiffened, and relaxed. He thought, “You put your hand out to the flower; because it’s perfumed, and lovely, and you’re human. And you feel the cold, bristling worm. At last, I know the Enemy.” He felt tireder than he had thought possible; he wanted her weight, that was just a weight, shucked off.

He massaged, gently, the firm swelling of her woolly. She half put his hand away. She said, “Don’t please.”

He said, “This isn’t sex. This is friends.”

She said, “It’s in between.”

He thought, “And you’re starting to tighten behind the nipple.” He said, “Come on. I’m taking you home.”

She sat up carefully, smoothed her skirt. She said, “I shall have to find my comb.”

They walked up to B deck. The diesels roared, in the night. Overside, lamps were slung. Riggers were working, swinging in belts over the moving stubble. Most of the rubbish had been stripped clear. The combine’s side gaped for thirty yards or more, iron brackets showing like bones.

The sky was crusted with stars. Not the same stars. She looked up. She said, “What a lovely night.”

He walked her to her cabin. She stepped forward, kissed him quickly. She said, “Good night. And thank you.”

He thought, “And that, God preserve us, was the Regretful Parting Peck.”

He said, “Good night.”

He walked back to his pad, sat on the edge of the bunk. Then it hit him. He thought, “Last fling of lonely middle-aged man.” He picked the revolver up, broke the cylinder, loaded five. He closed the piece and cocked, hearing the creak of oiled steel. He laid the gun to his face, felt coldness touch temple and cheek. He thought, “I should have barrelled her across the ear and got stuck in while she was giddy. It would have come to the same thing.” He broke the gun, worked the ejector. The cartridges fell to the bedcover, lay fatly shining. He got up, opened the locker door. The whisky was two-thirds gone. He slid the big gun into his pocket, walked to C deck restaurant. Manuelo was closing up. He said, “Manuelo. Bottle of whisky. On my bill.”

Manuelo grinned, made a note on a pad. Harrison took the bottle. He said, “Gracias. And Manuelo…

“Mr. Harrison?”

He held the revolver out, butt foremost. He said, “Here.”

The little man’s face lit up. He said, “Mr. Harrison. Gracias, gracias.”

Harrison said, “Good night, Manuelo.”

He walked back. On the way he thought, “To her, it’s dirty. She couldn’t step right out. They never do.” He opened his cabin door, sat on the bunk. He raised the bottle, squinted through it at the ceiling light. He thought, “When she hooks her Mister Right, it’ll still be dirty. Only there’ll be children, for excuses.”

He finished the whisky, cracked the new bottle. He thought, “There’s two cold spaces now. Hers, and the gun’s. Odd to become attached to a material object. Any object.”

The wall speaker clicked, hummed a moment and faded. He thought, “Odd, too, what a jump that should give the heart.” Later he decided he had imagined the sound. He thought, “We could have worked. For a little while. Now all the rest comes back. Like rubble, cascading in the mind.” He said aloud, I wonder if he did break his bloody pots?” He remembered the Fedotov painting. He’d thought he’d been doing the taking. But he’d been giving again. So much more than he could afford. He said, “Now, I jump the stick. It isn’t even original.”

His lids felt warm and heavy. He lay on the bunk knowing he wouldn’t sleep. The combine was a monstrous weight, useless tracks grinding, useless blades spinning, useless bolts and nuts and chains and levers and wheels. He thought, “Cheskin knows as well as I.”

He palmed the ceiling light to dim. He didn’t want any more whisky; and he wasn’t drunk. He lit a cigarette. The first drag brought phlegm up into his throat. He finished the thing anyway, lay back. The cabin wails trembled and thrummed. He closed his eyes and remembered how her bare hip felt under her skirt. He said, “Get out, please God. Get out, get out, get out of my skull.”

He fell asleep.

The cabin was grey, when he opened his eyes. He felt chilled to the bone. Maybe the air conditioning had failed. He swayed upright, glared at the clock. He thought, “Another day, another dollar.”

The hands stood at 06.35. He said, in time for the show.” He walked to the shower cubicle. He looked as rough as he felt. He shaved, washed his face, changed his shirt. He thought, “Last night little Alison bestrode the grain, and was a Queen. Her eyes were stars, her flesh the good brown earth, her hair the golden crop.” He slapped his pockets, located matches and cigarettes. He thought, “I saw a goddess, from old time. She enjoyed the touch-up.”

The corridor vibrated faintly. He closed the cabin door, turned left and right. He thought, “One thing, only, is dirty. And that she didn’t do. She’ll give herself clean, the bells will ring her clean. They call it morality.”

He said, “And I let her get away with it.”

B deck was crowded. The figures stood muffled, not speaking, watching to the north. The light was growing, across the waste of stubble. He thought, “Bertie wasn’t the only one with an envelope and pencil.”

He stared ahead. There was nothing. The dawn-streaks in the sky were high, clear green. He thought, “Maybe she isn’t on track. Big anticlimax kick.”

Beside him stood the grizzled engineer he’d spoken to on the first day. He said, “There’s nothing there then.”

The man sucked his empty pipe. He turned, looking faintly surprised. He said, “They’ve had radar contact for half an hour. She’s there. Reciprocal course.”

High in the combine’s rigging a red light started to blink. It lit the backs of the people on the deck. The engine beats stayed steady. He wondered about Alison. He thought, “If she needs a pair of comforting arms, there’s always O’Hara.”

The wind stung his eyes. He rubbed, peering. There was something, after all. A smudge, on the wide, smudged horizon. On Patsy’s mast, the identification lights started to sequence. The smudge made no response.

He could see her clearer now. High and square, like her sisters. Bone-pale. Somebody said in a conversational voice, “Vostok class. Combine Ilya.”

Harrison looked back at the bridge windows. There were faces, staring ahead. He heard the loudhailer circuit start to breathe. The engineer said, “We’re privileged. We’re seeing the start of World War Three.”

The path, the swath of uncut wheat, stretched ahead. The gap was closing now with increasing speed. Harrison clenched his fingers on the deck rail. He thought, “He understands; and I know him. They took his wife, they took his birthright. Now they take his grain.”

He could make out the long rectangles of the bridge windows. Below, the Russian’s forward coamings looked higher than the deck on which he stood. He thought, “Combine Ilya.” The words made no particular sense.

The bridge speakers said, “Eight hundred metres, sir. Closing speed constant.”

The loudhailers rumbled briefly, and were quiet. The engineer said wonderingly, “Right on our bloody track.”

The combine was towering now against the horizon. Seen head-on, her silhouette was oddly complex. The speakers said, “Five hundred metres, sir. Closing constant.” The voice was starting to edge up in pitch.

Cheskin said, “Main beams, please.”

Brilliance burst, above Patsy’s cutter coamings. The Russian’s bridge windows reflected back a dazzled glare. The speakers said, “Three hundred metres, sir…

Abruptly, the combine bucked. A rumbling; then a tearing, crashing shock. The deck rail hit Harrison in the chest. He clung, stupidly. Somebody yelled “Reef… Round him people were tumbling stiffly, legs and arms thrust out. He saw the forward casings fly apart, plates hang in the air like petals of a red steel flower. Something black came ploughing and shrieking. The air was full of din. On C deck promenade the windows bowed and banged.

He saw the body fly out below him, plunge to the main coamings. It seemed they opened to receive it, snapped like a mouth. The victim poised a moment, impossibly. The eyes blinked rapidly; it was as if Swissy once more gave his impersonation of a severed head. Then he was gone, into the tracks.

The emergency beacons were glaring, orange-pink bowls of fire. The klaxon sounded, huge and harsh. The Russian was slowing, slowing. Her prow reared over the coamings like a grey-white cliff. Then she was halted; and the noise of her many motors was a roaring, confused and dim.

The bridge speakers said, “Emergency procedure, all departments. Give me full dampdown, please.”

There was a deepening whine as Patsy’s diesels died.

* * * *

Harrison laid the suitcase on the bed. He sorted used shirts, shorts and socks, slipped them into a polythene wrapper. He folded handkerchiefs, and ties, packed a box of quarto and half a dozen books. He closed the case, slid it to one side. He sat at the table, sorted the transcript sheets into order and pinned their corners with a staple. Somebody tapped the door. He said, “Come in.”

It was Bertie. He sat on the bunk for a time and puffed. He said, “Christ almighty, what a bloody day.”

Harrison said, “There’s some whisky in the locker.”

Bertie poured two fingers. He said, “I don’t know where the other glasses are, you’ll have to get your own.”

Harrison helped himself. He said, “Cigarette?”

Bertie said, “Not at the m-minute.” He drank Scotch, grimaced. He said, “D-did you see old Swissy take a dive?”

Harrison said, “Yes.” He looked at the papers, frowned and laid them aside. He said, “Were there many other casualties?”

Bertie said, “Six in the cutter casings. They’re still picking the bits out.” He stared at the Scotch. He said, “Christ, I needed that.”

Harrison thought, “I wish there was something I could think of to say. But it doesn’t get to me. Any of it.”

Bertie said, “Swissy’s a lucky basstard.”

Harrison turned. He said, “That’s one way to look at it.”

Bertie said, “Quite seriously. The basstard got away with it. They got him out. I think he lost a foot.”

Harrison said, “Good God.”

Bertie finished the whisky at a gulp and stood up. He said, “I’ve got to get on. Just thought you’d like the news.”

Harrison said, “How badly are we damaged?”

Bertie said, “It just about took her guts out. H-hell to pay.” He shook his head, clucked sorrowfully and closed the door.

Harrison called sick bay. The speaker said impersonally, “The patient is sleeping. His condition is satisfactory.”

Harrison said, “Thank you,” and broke the link.

The wall clock pinged. He frowned at it. In thirty minutes Cheskin was due to make a statement. He wondered if there was anywhere he could get a beer.

C deck was a shambles of girders and wire. To his surprise, the bar door was ajar. Manuelo was behind the counter, shovelling glass into a bucket. He said forlornly, “Not much on, Mr. Harrison. All bottles go smash.”

Harrison said, “Christ, what a mess. Any beer?”

Manuelo said, “American.”

Harrison said, “That’s fine.”

He walked to the windows. The glass had gone. Below, they had a heavy tackle rigged. Crewmen were lifting aside a buckled hatch cover. Ahead, the forward coamings were split as clean as an axe-cut.

He finished the beer, got another. A tired-looking party of men came in. They were blackened with oil, one had an arm bandaged. Manuelo said, “Sorry, sirs. American beer only.”

Harrison lit a cigarette. Sun patterns were moving on the dural walls; the polished panels glistened. He took the glass back to the counter, walked up to the bridge.

A flying crane was hovering alongside the combine. The downdraught beat at his clothes. He showed his pass to the security man, stepped into the cabin. The crane moved away.

The place was hazed with cigarette smoke. He found a seat. The dolly birds were there; one flashed him a frozen sort of smile.

Cheskin was sitting behind the desk. He said, “Mr. Harrison. Now, I think we are all here.” He looked at a paper. He said, “At oh seven fourteen hours this morning, the combine ran foul to a hitherto-unmarked reef. We have sustained heavy damage to engines and plant, and can no longer function as a field unit. I regret to inform you that nine lives were lost. Under the circumstances, other injuries were remarkably slight.”

Somebody said, “Have the Russ—the Russians been helpful, sir?”

Cheskin said, “A medical team from Combine Ilya is at present working with our own sickbay staff. The seriously injured are being flown to base hospital. We are in contact with combines Maya and Valeri. Both have offered assistance, which is not at present required.”

An American said, “Can you define our present position more closely, sir?”

Cheskin said, “Certainly. We are proceeding to base under our own auxiliary power. Tankers are withdrawing reserves of diesel fuel, which may not be jettisoned in this area. Civilian personnel will not be evacuated; there is no danger, and the situation is under control.”

Somebody said, “Can you tell us anything as yet about the Russian encroachment?”

Cheskin turned. He said, “It is by no means certain an encroachment has taken place. It is possible a computer error was responsible. At the moment this is my personal opinion, and is not for publication. A full-scale investigation will, of course, be held.”

The American came back to the attack. He said, “This reef, sir. Was it not detectable by radar?”

Cheskin said, “Under the circumstances, no. It was masked by the bulk of the approaching vehicle. Yes?”

The question was barbed. “Under the circumstances, I’d say this machine was a write-off. Where do you put the blame?”

Cheskin glanced up tiredly. He said, “An investigation will be held. Until its findings are known, I cannot answer you.” He paused. He said, “I am Combine Controller. I will naturally assume such responsibility as may be necessary.”

There were other questions. They tended to pass Harrison by. Finally Cheskin looked at his watch. He said, “I have to inform you full communications have been restored. You may cable your stories if you wish. Thank you, gentlemen. And ladies.”

There was a rush for the door. Harrison let himself be left behind. At the door he turned. He said, “Controller.”

“Mr. Harrison?”

Harrison said, “Had the reef not intervened, would you have closed down?”

Cheskin rose, stood hands clasped behind him. He stared down for a time at the ruined deck. Finally he turned. He said, “I find your question difficult to understand. There would, of course, have been no other choice.”

Harrison said, “Thank you, sir.”

Cheskin nodded. He said, “Goodbye, Mr. Harrison.”

Harrison walked back to his cabin, stood staring. But the packing was finished. He thought, “Once more, I’m killing time. It does seem a waste.” He got the Olivetti out, started reworking his notes. He thought, “While I’m doing this, the thing’s still alive.” Finally, he got himself a meal. He had to wait a goodish while; C deck restaurant was still suffering malfunction. Afterwards there was some whisky to finish. He sat and swilled the glass round and thought, “So life goes on. Habit is a wonderful thing.”

The intercom buzzed. He thumbed the control, said, “Harrison.”

The speaker said, “Mr. Harrison, this is Sick Bay. We have a Mr. Hauser asking for you; are you available?”

He thought, “I don’t know a Mr. Hauser.” Then he remembered. He said, “I’ll come at once.”

C deck looked tidier now, but D level was still a shambles. Repair crews were working with cutters; he stepped over a mess of cables, ducked through a bulkhead door.

He nearly ran into her. She said, “Oh…hello, John.”

He smiled. He said, “All right?”

She said, “Just about. I got knocked down. I’m bruised all over.”

“How’s O’Hara?”

She said, “Developing. The scoop of the year.”

He said, “I’m going to see Swissy.”

Her eyes widened. She said, “I saw it. It was horrible. You mean he’s not…?”

He said, “Apparently, he’s still kicking. With one foot.”

She said, “I’ll come too.”

Harrison said, “I don’t suppose they’ll mind.”

Emergency beds had been set up in the corridors. There was a clanging and clattering of trolleys. A nurse met them, a striking girl, dark-haired and high-cheekboned. On her shoulder tabs were neat red stars.

Harrison said, “A patient was asking for me. Mr. Hauser.”

She said, “Yes.” She smiled. She said, I’m sorry. Small English. With me, please.”

She walked ahead, opened a door. She said, “Doctor say—very short.”

Harrison said, “Thank you.”

The room was tiny, not much more than a cubicle. Swissy looked very sick. A cage had been rigged over his legs; beside the bed a blood drip was set up.

He said feebly, “Ah. De love birds.”

Harrison said, “How are you, Swissy?”

He said, “Had a foot gone. Christ, when I go t’rough dat t’ing. I t’ink dat’s it. No more take de piss out of Bertie.”

Alison said, “I’m…terribly sorry, Swissy.”

He waved a hand. He said, “I get over it. Same like de rest. Could lose worse t’ing.” He leered. He said, “Be in blowty trouble den. Chrissake…

Harrison said, is there anything we can do?”

Swissy said, “Ya.” He fumbled beside the bed, held out an envelope. He said, “Little t’ing. You don’t mind?”

Harrison said, “I don’t mind.”

Swissy said, “Dey fly me out tomorrow. Don’ want de kids to know. Tell ’em myself, in a bit. But dey need money.”

Harrison said, “I’ll go and see them.”

Swissy said, “No, don’t matter to see ’em. But send it on. Is in dollar. OK?”

Harrison said, “OK.”

Swissy said, “Christ, dat li’l one…only twelve, but she know how to spend. Know what she want already.”

Harrison said, “It’ll be done. Get some rest, Swissy.”

Swissy said, “Ain’t got much blowty choice… ’Bye, Al’son. Don’t do not’ing I wouldn’t.”

She said, “Chow, Swissy.” She walked through the door. Harrison closed it after her.

She leaned on the wall and rubbed her face. He said, “Are you all right?”

She nodded. She said, “I just don’t like hospitals.”

They walked back the way they had come.

He said, “I’m flying out tomorrow.”

She said, “Yes, I know.”

He said, “Meet me for a drink tonight? End-of-term party.” She said, “I suppose so… Haven’t you got a lot to do?”

“It’s done. Goldie takes over, anyway.”

She said, “Swissy’s bar. If it’s open. About twenty hundred.”

Harrison said, “OK.”

She said thoughtfully, “It won’t seem the same.”

He said, “No. It won’t.”

He walked back up to B deck. He was surprised, vaguely, to see it was evening already. The combine was heading nearly due west across the miles of stubble. He turned away from the pouring redness. A hundred yards off, a massive recovery tractor paced the crippled machine. A helicopter swooped low, belly lamps winking. He leaned on the rail, watched the slow flowing of the ground. He missed now the thunder of the mains; Patsy seemed somehow less than half alive, a crawling red shadow in the dusk.

A tanker moved away, left behind a rich gust of fumes. As the light faded, the torches working on the ruined forward housings sprang into prominence. He watched the white glare shift and flicker, the sparks fall like hot coals. He stayed still a long time, smoking, till the land was wholly dark.

The wind was rising, keening in the rigging. He pushed his jacket sleeve back, looked at his watch. He walked to his cabin, used the dry shaver and washed. He went to the locker, slipped the little charm into his pocket. He thought, “We must be ships, passing in the night; but elegantly, so elegantly. Nobody gets hurt.”

Halfway to C deck he thought, “I hope she’s stood me up. It’s about time.” But he pushed the door open knowing she would be there.

She wasn’t that kind of girl.

HIS MASTER’S VOICE, by Randall Garrett

Originally published in Analog, March 1962

I’d been in Ravenhurst’s office on the mountain-sized planetoid called Raven’s Rest only twice before. The third time was no better; Shalimar Ravenhurst was one of the smartest operators in the Belt, but when it came to personal relationships, he was utterly incompetent. He could make anyone dislike him without trying.

When I entered the office, he was sitting behind his mahogany desk, his eyes focused on the operation he was going through with a wineglass and a decanter. He didn’t look up at me as he said:

“Sit down, Mr. Oak. Will you have some Madeira?”

I decided I might as well observe the pleasantries. There was no point in my getting nasty until he did. “Thank you, Mr. Ravenhurst, I will.”

He kept his eyes focused on his work: It isn’t easy to pour wine on a planetoid where the gee-pull is measured in fractions of a centimeter per second squared. It moves slowly, like ropy molasses, but you have to be careful not to be fooled by that. The viscosity is just as low as ever, and if you pour it from any great height, it will go scooting right out of the glass again. The momentum it builds up is enough to make it splash right out again in a slow-motion gush which gets it all over the place.

Besides which, even if it didn’t splash, it would take it so long to fall a few inches that you’d die of thirst waiting for it.

Ravenhurst had evolved a technique from long years of practice. He tilted the glass and the bottle toward each other, their edges touching, like you do when you’re trying to pour beer without putting a head on it. As soon as the wine wet the glass, the adhesive forces at work would pull more wine into the wine glass. To get capillary action on a low-gee asteroid, you don’t need a capillary, by any means. The negative meniscus on the wine was something to see; the first time you see it, you get the eerie feeling that the glass is spinning and throwing the wine up against the walls by centrifugal force.

I took the glass he offered me (Careful! Don’t slosh!) and sipped at it. Using squirt tubes would have been a hell of a lot easier and neater, but Ravenhurst liked to do things his way.

He put the stopper back in the decanter, picked up his own glass and sipped appreciatively. Not until he put it back down on the desk again did he raise his eyes and look at me for the first time since I’d come in.

“Mr. Oak, you have caused me considerable trouble.”

“I thought we’d hashed all that out, Mr. Ravenhurst,” I said, keeping my voice level.

“So had I. But it appears that there were more ramifications to your action than we had at first supposed.” His voice had the texture of heavy linseed oil.

He waited, as if he expected me to make some reply to that. When I didn’t, he sighed slightly and went on. “I fear that you have inadvertently sabotaged McGuire. You were commissioned to prevent sabotage, Mr. Oak, and I’m afraid that you abrogated your contract.”

I just continued to keep my voice calm. “If you are trying to get back the fee you gave me, we can always take it to court. I don’t think you’d win.”

“Mr. Oak,” he said heavily, “I am not a fool, regardless of what your own impression may be. If I were trying to get back that fee, I would hardly offer to pay you another one.”

I didn’t think he was a fool. You don’t get into the managerial business and climb to the top and stay there unless you have brains. Ravenhurst was smart, all right; it was just that, when it came to personal relationships, he wasn’t very wise.

“Then stop all this yak about an abrogated contract and get to the point,” I told him.

“I shall. I was merely trying to point out to you that it is through your own actions that I find myself in a very trying position, and that your sense of honor and ethics should induce you to rectify the damage.”

“My honor and ethics are in fine shape,” I said, “but my interpretation of the concepts might not be quite the same as yours. Get to the point.”

He took another sip of Madeira. “The robotocists at Viking tell me that, in order to prevent any further…ah…sabotage by unauthorized persons, the MGYR-7 was constructed so that, after activation, the first man who addressed orders to it would thenceforth be considered its…ah…master.

“As I understand it, the problem of defining the term ‘human being’ unambiguously to a robot is still unsolved. The robotocists felt that it would be much easier to define a single individual. That would prevent the issuing of conflicting orders to a robot, provided the single individual were careful in giving orders himself.

“Now, it appears that you, Mr. Oak, were the first man to speak to McGuire after he had been activated. Is that correct?”

“Is that question purely rhetorical,” I asked him, putting on my best expression of innocent interest. “Or are you losing your memory?” I had explained all that to him two weeks before, when I’d brought McGuire and the girl here, so that Ravenhurst would have a chance to cover up what had really happened.

My sarcasm didn’t faze him in the least. “Rhetorical. It follows that you are the only man whose orders McGuire will obey.”

“Your robotocists can change that,” I said. This time, I was giving him my version of “genuine” innocence. A man has to be a good actor to be a competent double agent, and I didn’t want Ravenhurst to know that I knew a great deal more about the problem than he did.

He shook his head, making his jowls wobble. “No, they cannot. They realize now that there should be some way of making that change, but they failed to see that it would be necessary. Only by completely draining McGuire’s memory banks and refilling them with new data can this bias be eliminated.”

“Then why don’t they do that?”

“There are two very good reasons,” he said. And there was a shade of anger in his tone. “In the first place, that sort of operation takes time, and it costs money. If we do that, we might as well go ahead and make the slight changes in structure necessary to incorporate some of the improvements that the robotocists now feel are necessary. In other words, they might as well go ahead and build the MGYR-8, which is precisely the thing I hired you to prevent.”

“It seems you have a point there, Mr. Ravenhurst.” He’d hired me because things were shaky at Viking. If he lost too much more money on the McGuire experiment, he stood a good chance of losing his position as manager. If that happened some of his other managerial contracts might be canceled, too. Things like that can begin to snowball, and Ravenhurst might find himself out of the managerial business entirely.

“But,” I went on, “hasn’t the additional wasted time already cost you money?”

“It has. I was reluctant to call you in again—understandably enough, I think.”

“Perfectly. It’s mutual.”

He ignored me. “I even considered going through with the rebuilding work, now that we have traced down the source of failure of the first six models. Unfortunately, that isn’t feasible, either.” He scowled at me.

“It seems,” he went on, “that McGuire refuses to allow his brain to be tampered with. The self-preservation ‘instinct’ has come to the fore. He has refused to let the technicians and robotocists enter his hull, and he has threatened to take off and leave Ceres if any further attempts are made to…ah…disrupt his thinking processes.”

“I can’t say that I blame him,” I said. “What do you want me to do? Go to Ceres and tell him to submit like a good boy?”

“It is too late for that, Mr. Oak. Viking cannot stand any more of that kind of drain on its financial resources. I have been banking on the McGuire-type ships to put Viking Spacecraft ahead of every other spacecraft company in the System.” He looked suddenly very grim and very determined. “Mr. Oak, I am certain that the robot ship is the answer to the transportation problems in the Solar System. For the sake of every human being in the Solar System, we must get the bugs out of McGuire!”

What’s good for General Bull-moose is good for everybody, I quoted to myself. I’d have said it out loud, but I was fairly certain that Shalimar Ravenhurst was not a student of the classics.

“Mr. Oak, I would like you to go to Ceres and co-operate with the robotocists at Viking. When the MGYR-8 is finally built, I want it to be the prototype for a fast, safe, functional robot spaceship that can be turned out commercially. You can be of great service, Mr. Oak.”

“In other words, I’ve got you over a barrel.”

“I don’t deny it.”

“You know what my fees are, Mr. Ravenhurst. That’s what you’ll be charged. I’ll expect to be paid weekly; if Viking goes broke, I don’t want to lose more than a week’s pay. On the other hand, if the MGYR-8 is successful, I will expect a substantial bonus.”

“How much?”

“Exactly half of the cost of rebuilding. Half what it would take to build a Model 8 right now, and taking a chance on there being no bugs in it.”

He considered that, looking grimmer than ever. Then he said: “I will do it on the condition that the bonus be paid off in installments, one each six months for three years after the first successful commercial ship is built by Viking.”

“My lawyer will nail you down on that wording,” I said, “but it’s a deal. Is there anything else?”

“No.”

“Then I think I’ll leave for Ceres before you break a blood vessel.”

“You continue to amaze me, Mr. Oak,” he said. And the soft oiliness of his voice was the oil of vitriol. “Your compassion for your fellowman is a facet of your personality that I had not seen before. I shall welcome the opportunity to relax and allow my blood pressure to subside.”

I could almost see Shalimar Ravenhurst suddenly exploding and adding his own touch of color to the room.

And, on that gladsome thought, I left. I let him have his small verbal triumph; if he’d known that I’d have taken on the job for almost nothing, he’d really have blown up.

* * * *

Ten minutes later, I was in my vacuum suit, walking across the glaring, rough-polished rectangle of metal that was the landing field of Raven’s Rest. The sun was near the zenith in the black, diamond-dusted sky, and the shadow of my flitterboat stood out like an inkblot on a bridal gown. I climbed in, started the engine, and released the magnetic anchor that held the little boat to the surface of the nickel-iron planetoid. I lifted her gently, worked her around until I was stationary in relation to the spinning planetoid, oriented myself against the stellar background, and headed toward the first blinker beacon on my way to Ceres.

For obvious economical reasons, it it impracticable to use full-sized spaceships in the Belt. A flitterboat, with a single gravitoinertial engine and the few necessities of life—air, some water, and a very little food—still costs more than a Rolls-Royce automobile does on Earth, but there has to be some sort of individual transportation in the Belt.

They can’t be used for any great distances because a man can’t stay in a vac suit very long without getting uncomfortable. You have to hop from beacon to beacon, which means that your average velocity doesn’t amount to much, since you spend too much time accelerating and decelerating. But a flitterboat is enough to get around the neighborhood in, and that’s all that’s needed.

I got the GM-187 blinker in my sights, eased the acceleration up to one gee, relaxed to watch the radar screen while I thought over my coming ordeal with McGuire.

Testing spaceships, robotic or any other kind, is strictly not my business. The sign on the door of my office in New York says: DANIEL OAK, Confidential Expediter; I’m hired to help other people Get Things Done. Usually, if someone came to me with the problem of getting a spaceship test-piloted, I’d simply dig up the best test pilot in the business, hire him for my client, and forget about everything but collecting my fee. But I couldn’t have refused this case if I’d wanted to. I’d already been assigned to it by someone a lot more important than Shalimar Ravenhurst.

Every schoolchild who has taken a course in Government Organization and Function can tell you that the Political Survey Division is a branch of the System Census Bureau of the UN Government, and that its job is to evaluate the political activities of various sub-governments all over the System.

And every one of those poor tykes would be dead wrong.

The Political Survey Division does evaluate political activity, all right, but it is the Secret Service of the UN Government. The vast majority of the System’s citizens don’t even know the Government has a Secret Service. I happen to know only because I’m an agent of the Political Survey Division.

The PSD was vitally interested in the whole McGuire project. Robots of McGuire’s complexity had been built before; the robot that runs the traffic patterns of the American Eastern Seaboard is just as capable as McGuire when it comes to handling a tremendous number of variables and making decisions on them. But that robot didn’t have to be given orders except in extreme emergencies. Keeping a few million cars moving and safe at the same time is actually pretty routine stuff for a robot. And a traffic robot isn’t given orders verbally; it is given any orders that may be necessary via teletype by a trained programming technician. Those orders are usually in reference to a change of routing due to repair work on the highways or the like. The robot itself can take care of such emergencies as bad weather or even an accident caused by the malfunctioning of an individual automobile.

McGuire was different. In the first place, he was mobile. He was in command of a spacecraft. In a sense, he was the spacecraft, since it served him in a way that was analogous to the way a human body serves the human mind. And he wasn’t in charge of millions of objects with a top velocity of a hundred and fifty miles an hour; he was in charge of a single object that moved at velocities of thousands of miles per second. Nor did he have a set, unmoving highway as his path; his paths were variable and led through the emptiness of space.

Unforeseen emergencies can happen at any time in space, most of them having to do with the lives of passengers. A cargo ship would be somewhat less susceptible to such emergencies if there were no humans aboard; it doesn’t matter much to a robot if he has no air in his hull.

But with passengers aboard, there may be times when it would be necessary to give orders—fast! And that means verbal orders, orders that can be given anywhere in the ship and relayed immediately by microphone to the robot’s brain. A man doesn’t have time to run to a teletyper and type out orders when there’s an emergency in space.

That meant that McGuire had to understand English, and, since there has to be feedback in communication, he had to be able to speak it as well.

And that made McGuire more than somewhat difficult to deal with.

* * * *

For more than a century, robotocists have been trying to build Asimov’s famous Three Laws of Robotics into a robot brain.

First Law: A robot shall not, either through action or inaction, allow harm to come to a human being.

Second Law: A robot shall obey the orders of a human being, except when such orders conflict with the First Law.

Third Law: A robot shall strive to protect its own existence, except when this conflicts with the First or Second Law.

Nobody has succeeded yet, because nobody has yet succeeded in defining the term “human being” in such a way that the logical mind of a robot can encompass the concept.

A traffic robot is useful only because the definition has been rigidly narrowed down. As far as a traffic robot is concerned, “human beings” are the automobiles on its highways. Woe betide any poor sap who tries, illegally, to cross a robot-controlled highway on foot. The robot’s only concern would be with the safety of the automobiles, and if the only way to avoid destruction of an automobile were to be by nudging the pedestrian aside with a fender, that’s what would happen.

And, since its orders only come from one place, I suppose that a traffic robot thinks that the guy who uses that typer is an automobile.

With the first six models of the McGuire ships, the robotocists attempted to build in the Three Laws exactly as stated. And the first six went insane.

If one human being says “jump left,” and another says “jump right,” the robot is unable to evaluate which human being has given the more valid order. Feed enough confusing and conflicting data into a robot brain, and it can begin behaving in ways that, in a human being, would be called paranoia or schizophrenia or catatonia or what-have-you, depending on the symptoms. And an insane robot is fully as dangerous as an insane human being controlling the same mechanical equipment, if not more so.

So the seventh model had been modified. The present McGuire’s brain was impressed with slight modifications of the First and Second Laws.

If it is difficult to define a human being, it is much more difficult to define a responsible human being. One, in other words, who can be relied upon to give wise and proper orders to a robot, who can be relied upon not to drive the robot insane.

The robotocists at Viking Spacecraft had decided to take another tack. “Very well,” they’d said, “if we can’t define all the members of a group, we can certainly define an individual. We’ll pick one responsible person and build McGuire so that he will take orders only from that person.”

As it turned out, I was that person. Just substitute “Daniel Oak” for “human being” in the First and Second Laws, and you’ll see how important I was to a certain spaceship named McGuire.

* * * *

When I finally caught the beam from Ceres and set my flitterboat down on the huge landing field that had been carved from the nickel-iron of the asteroid with a focused sun beam, I was itchy with my own perspiration and groggy tired. I don’t like riding in flitterboats, sitting on a bucket seat, astride the drive tube, like a witch on a broomstick, with nothing but a near-invisible transite hull between me and the stars, all cooped up in a vac suit. Unlike driving a car, you can’t pull a flitterboat over and take a nap; you have to wait until you hit the next beacon station.

Ceres, the biggest rock in the Belt, is a lot more than just a beacon station. Like Eros and a few others, it’s a city in its own right. And except for the Government Reservation, Viking Spacecraft owned Ceres, lock, stock, and mining rights.

Part of the reason for Viking’s troubles was envy of that ownership. There were other companies in the Belt that would like to get their hands on that plum, and there were those who were doing everything short of cutting throats to get it. The PSD was afraid it might come to that, too, before very long.

Ceres is fifty-eight million cubic miles of nickel-iron, but nobody would cut her up for that. Nickel-iron is almost exactly as cheap as dirt on Earth, and, considering shipping costs, Earth soil costs a great deal more than nickel-iron in the Belt.

But, as an operations base, Ceres is second to none. Its surface gravity averages .0294 Standard Gee, as compared with Earth’s .981, and that’s enough to give a slight feeling of weight without unduly hampering the body with too much load. I weigh just under six pounds on Ceres, and after I’ve been there a while, going back to Earth is a strain that takes a week to get used to. Kids that are brought up in the Belt are forced to exercise in a room with a one-gee spin on it at least an hour a day. They don’t like it at first, but it keeps them from growing up with the strength of mice. And an adult with any sense takes a spin now and then, too. Traveling in a flitterboat will give you a one-gee pull, all right, but you don’t get much exercise.

I parked my flitterboat in the space that had been assigned to me by Landing Control, and went over to the nearest air-lock dome.

After I’d cycled through and had shucked my vac suit, I went into the inner room to find Colonel Brock waiting for me.

“Have a good trip, Oak?” he asked, trying to put a smile on his scarred, battered face.

“I got here alive, if that makes it a good flitterboat trip,” I said, shaking his extended hand.

“That’s the definition of a good trip,” he told me.

“Then the question was superfluous. Seriously, what I need is a bath and some sleep.”

“You’ll get that, but first let’s go somewhere where we can talk. Want a drink?”

“I could use one, I guess. Your treat?”

“My treat,” he said. “Come on.”

I followed him out and down a ladder to a corridor that led north. By definition, any asteroid spins toward the east, and all directions follow from that, regardless of which way the axis may point.

Colonel Harrington Brock was dressed in the black-and-gold “union suit” that was the uniform of Ravenhurst’s Security Guard. My own was a tasteful green, but some of the other people in the public corridor seemed to go for more flashiness; besides silver and gold, there were shocking pinks and violent mauves, with stripes and blazes of other colors.

A crowd wearing skin-tight cover-alls might shock the gentle people of Midwich-on-the-Moor, England, but they are normal dress in the Belt. You can’t climb into a vac suit with bulky clothing on, and, if you did, you’d hate yourself within an hour, with a curse for every wrinkle that chafed your skin. And, in the Belt, you never know when you might have to get into a vac suit fast. In a “safe” area like the tunnels inside Ceres, there isn’t much chance of losing air, but there are places where no one but a fool would ever be more than ten seconds away from his vac suit.

I read an article by a psychologist a few months back, in which he claimed that the taste for loud colors in union suits was actually due to modesty. He claimed that the bright patterns drew attention to the colors themselves, and away from the base the colors were laid over. The observer, he said, tends to see the color and pattern of the suit, rather than the body it clings to so closely. Maybe he’s right; I wouldn’t know, not being a psychologist. I have spent summers in nudist resorts, though, and I never noticed anyone painting themselves with lavender and chartreuse checks. On the other hand, the people who go to nudist resorts are a self-screened group. So are the people who go to the Belt, for that matter, but the type of screening is different.

I’ll just leave that problem in the hands of the psychologists, and go on wearing my immodestly quiet solid-color union suits.

* * * *

Brock pushed open the inch-thick metal door beneath a sign that said “O’Banion’s Bar,” and I followed him in. We sat down at a table and ordered drinks when the waiter bustled over. A cop in uniform isn’t supposed to drink, but Brock figures that the head of the Security Guard ought to be able to get away with a breach of his own rules.

We had our drinks in front of us and our cigarettes lit before Brock opened up with his troubles.

“Oak,” he said, “I wanted to intercept you before you went to the plant because I want you to know that there may be trouble.”

“Yeah? What kind?” Sometimes it’s a pain to play ignorant.

“Thurston’s outfit is trying to oust Ravenhurst from the managership of Viking and take over the job. Baedecker Metals & Mining Corporation, which is managed by Baedecker himself, wants to force Viking out of business so that BM&M can take over Ceres for large-scale processing of precious metals.

“Between the two of ’em, they’re raising all sorts of minor hell around here, and it’s liable to become major hell at any time. And we can’t stand any hell—or sabotage—around this planetoid just now!”

“Now wait a minute,” I said, still playing ignorant, “I thought we’d pretty well established that the ‘sabotage’ of the McGuire series was Jack Ravenhurst’s fault. She was the one who was driving them nuts, not Thurston’s agents.”

“Perfectly true,” he said agreeably. “We managed to block any attempts of sabotage by other company agents, even though it looked as though we hadn’t for a while.” He chuckled wryly. “We went all out to keep the McGuires safe, and all the time the boss’ daughter was giving them the works.” Then he looked sharply at me. “I covered that, of course. No one in the Security Guard but me knows that Jack was responsible.”

“Good. But what about the Thurston and Baedecker agents, then?”

He took a hefty slug of his drink. “They’re around, all right. We have our eyes on the ones we know, but those outfits are as sharp as we are, and they may have a few agents here on Ceres that we know nothing about.”

“So? What does this have to do with me?”

He put his drink on the table. “Oak, I want you to help me.” His onyx-brown eyes, only a shade darker than his skin, looked directly into my own. “I know it isn’t part of your assignment, and you know I can’t afford to pay you anything near what you’re worth. It will have to come out of my pocket because I couldn’t possibly justify it from operating funds. Ravenhurst specifically told me that he doesn’t want you messing around with the espionage and sabotage problem because he doesn’t like your methods of operation.”

“And you’re going to go against his orders?”

“I am. Ravenhurst is sore at you personally because you showed him that Jack was responsible for the McGuire sabotage. It’s an irrational dislike, and I am not going to let it interfere with my job. I’m going to protect Ravenhurst’s interests to the best of my ability, and that means that I’ll use the best of other people’s abilities if I can.”

I grinned at him. “The last I heard, you were sore at me for blatting it all over Ceres that Jaqueline Ravenhurst was missing, when she sneaked aboard McGuire.”

He nodded perfunctorily. “I was. I still think you should have told me what you were up to. But you did it, and you got results that I’d been unable to get. I’m not going to let a momentary pique hang on as an irrational dislike. I like to think I have more sense than that.”

“Thanks.” There wasn’t much else I could say.

“Now, I’ve got a little dough put away; it’s not much, but I could offer you—”

I shook my head, cutting him off. “Nope. Sorry, Brock. For two reasons. In the first place, there would be a conflict of interest. I’m working for Ravenhurst, and if he doesn’t want me to work for you, then it would be unethical for me to take the job.

“In the second place, my fees are standardized. Oh, I can allow a certain amount of fluctuation, but I’m not a physician or a lawyer; my services are not necessary to the survival of the individual, except in very rare cases, and those cases are generally arranged through a lawyer when it’s a charity case.

“No, colonel, I’m afraid I couldn’t possibly work for you.”

He thought that over for a long time. Finally, he nodded his head very slowly. “I see. Yeah, I get your point.” He scowled down at his drink.

“But,” I said, “it would be a pleasure to work with you.”

He looked up quickly. “How’s that?”

“Well, let’s look at it this way: You can’t hire me because I’m already working for Ravenhurst; I can’t hire you because you’re working for Ravenhurst. But since we may need each other, and since we’re both working for Ravenhurst, there would be no conflict of interest if we co-operate.

“Or, to put it another way, I can’t take money for any service I may render you, but you can pay off in services. Am I coming through?”

His broad smile made the scars on his face fold in and deepen. “Loud and clear. It’s a deal.”

I held up a hand, palm toward him. “Ah, ah, ah! There’s no ‘deal’ involved. We’re just old buddies helping each other. This is for friendship, not business. I scratch your back; you scratch mine. Fair?”

“Fair. Come on down to my office; I want to give you a headful of facts and figures.”

“Will do. Let me finish my guzzle.”

* * * *

Seven and a half hours later, the phone in the bedroom of the company apartment that Brock had arranged for me made loud musical sounds, and I rolled over in bed and slapped at the “audio only” switch.

“Yeah?” I said sleepily.

“You asked to be called at oh eight hundred, sir,” said a pleasant feminine voice.

“Yah. O.K., thanks. I’m awake.”

“You’re welcome, sir.”

I cut off and blinked the sleep out of my eyes. I’d spent an hour and a half in Brock’s office, soaking up all the information he gave me and giving him all the information I could. I hoped that he had been more honest and straightforward with me than I had been with him. The trouble with being a double agent is that you frequently have to play dirty with someone you like, respect, and trust.

I looked at the watch on my wrist. Oh eight oh six, Greenwich Standard Time. The girl had been a little late in calling, but it didn’t matter that much.

All over the Solar System, except on Earth itself, the clocks read the same as they do in Greenwich, England. Time zones don’t mean anything anywhere except on Earth, where the natives feel that the sun should be at the zenith when the clock says twelve. An irrational concept, to say the least.

Well, not really. Let’s say that it’s an emotional concept. A man feels better if he has the comfortable notion that the position of the sun has something to do with the numbers on the clock. It gives him a sense of security. Only the fact that a man in the Belt—or anywhere else in the System, for that matter—is not dependent on Sol for lighting purposes makes it possible to establish a Standard Time for everyone.

Oddly enough, Greenwich Standard Time serves an emotional and religious purpose, too. It’s only by the clock that a Jew can tell when the Sabbath begins; it’s only by the clock a Catholic can tell when to begin his abstinence on Friday; it’s only by the clock that a Moslem can tell when to begin and end the fasts of Ramadan.

And it is only by the clock that the various eight-hour work shifts can operate in the Belt. On Earth, the four-hour workday is standard, but there’s a lot more work to be done in the Belt.

I got up and got dressed and took the tubeway to Viking Test Area Four, where McGuire was the ruler of the roost. The guard at the main door took one look at my pass, smiled me in, and headed for his phone as soon as I went inside. By the time I had arrived at the office of Chief Engineer Sven Midguard, the whole staff had been alerted, and the top men were waiting for me in Midguard’s office.

Midguard himself met me in his outer office—a graying man in his sixties, still handsome in the telly-idol way, but running a bit to paunch now that he was approaching middle age.

“Mr. Oak! So glad to see you! So glad we could get you to help us.”

“Happy to be of service,” I said.

“Yes, yes, of course. Come along, come on in and meet the staff. They’re…uh…anxious to meet you.”

I’d have bet they would be. As far as they knew, I was just the guy who was supposed to take the boss’ daughter to school on Luna, empowered only to make sure she didn’t get into trouble, and had accidentally become McGuire’s lord and master when I’d gone to take her off the ship. I was an errand boy who’d managed to get control of a spaceship that was worth millions, a layman who was holding up the work of responsible scientists and technicians. In simple words, a jerk.

In spite of the socially acceptable smiles on all their faces, every one of them managed to convey his or her opinion of me by facial expression alone when Miguard introduced me around.

* * * *

Ellsworth Felder was short, big-bellied, round-faced, and slightly red-nosed, like a well-shaved Santa Claus. He was introduced as the head of the Viking robotics staff, and he shook hands firmly when he said he was glad to meet me.

Irwin Brentwood, the electronocist, was a slight, spare man with the body of a young boy and a gentle, soft tenor voice. His “How do you do, Mr. Oak?” was almost apologetic, and his small hand in mine exerted more pressure than I’d expected.

Theodore Videnski looked more like a wrestler than a robotics expert. He was as tall as I was and much wider and heavier, and his expression and voice conveyed the idea that he could have lived a good deal longer without missing my acquaintance.

Vivian Devereaux was the only one of the five who gave the impression that she could, if given a chance, begin to like me. She was a tough-cored, no-nonsense, finely-muscled, alert, and very pretty woman in her late twenties—a not uncommon type in the Belt, although they usually don’t come as lovely as that. The red, silver, and blue pattern of her union suit didn’t at all distract my attention from the magnificently molded body beneath; I made a mental note to write a letter to the editor of a certain psychological journal. I decided that if this gal could think as good as she looked, she was probably one hell of a fine mathematician.

The conference room was small, cozy, and ringed with couches. On Earth, they would have been called padded benches, and they would have been uncomfortably hard, but you don’t need innersprings and sponge rubber when your weight has dropped by ninety-seven percent.

Midguard served coffee all around while we all kept up a patter of chatter that served to get us acquainted before we launched into deep thinking and heavy conversation.

“Well,” said Midguard, when he finally sat down, “now that Mr. Oak is here, I suggest we begin scheduling our program.”

There was a momentary silence, then the boyish Brentwood said, “I think we ought to explain to Mr. Oak just what our problem is.”

That was generally agreed on, and for the next half hour I heard another re-run of information I already had. I just tried to look receptive and kept my mouth shut.

“… So you see,” Midguard finally wound up, “in order to put McGuire through his paces, your co-operation is vitally necessary.”

“The first thing to do,” rumbled the barrel-chested Videnski, “is to run a verbal check on him, to see how the brain is functioning.”

“His circuits should be checked, too,” said Brentwood softly. “But that can be done later. I’ll get my testing equipment ready, so that I can hook it in immediately after you get through with the verbal check.” He looked over at Miss Deveraux. “Vivian?”

“I thought perhaps it might be quicker if we ran a few straight math checks on him before the verbal check,” she said. “It wouldn’t take long, and if there’s anything wrong in that area, we’ll know what to look for in the later checks. Would that be all right with you, Ted?”

Videnski nodded. “Certainly, certainly. Save us some backtracking, maybe.”

Nobody asked me anything. I was just a tool; I was the switch that would turn on the machine these people wanted to play with, that was all. I could see a long, boring day ahead for Daniel Oak.

* * * *

If anything, my prediction was short-sighted. Not only was that day boring, but so were the next three. In effect, I told McGuire that he should let the nice people into his hull and answer all their pretty questions.

After that, there was nothing much to do but stand around and watch while the others worked. Mostly, I watched Brentwood doing his circuit checks; it was a great deal more interesting to watch lights flash and meter needles wiggle and lines dancing on oscilloscope plates than it was to listen to conversations that sounded as if they’d been lifted from C. L. Dodgson’s treatise on logic.

“A man is marooned on an asteroid without food or water and only one day’s supply of air in the tanks of his vac suit. If there is an emergency air tank on the asteroid, it contains enough air to last him for two weeks. If there is a flare bomb on the asteroid, then there is an air tank. There is either a dismantled communicator on the asteroid or an emergency water supply, but not both. There is either an emergency food package, or flare bomb, or a single hibernine injection; or there is both an emergency food package and a flare bomb, but no hibernine. If there is an emergency water supply, it contains enough water to last the man four days. If there is a hibernine injection, then there is a dismantled communicator on the asteroid. If there is an emergency food package, there is enough in it to last him for one day, and there is a dismantled communicator, but if they are not both there, then neither is there. If there is emergency air tank, then there is an emergency water supply.

“If there is a flare bomb, he can set it off immediately, and rescue will arrive within two days. If there is a dismantled communicator, it will take the man one day to put it together before he can call for help, and rescue will arrive in an additional two days.

“If there is an emergency water tank, there is either a single hibernine injection or a food package or both. If there is a hibernine injection, the man can use it to put himself into suspended animation for exactly twenty-four hours, during which time he will need neither air, nor food, nor water. If there is air, or water, or food on the asteroid, or any two of them or all three, the man will use each at the normal rate until it is exhausted, or the man dies, or he is rescued.

“Assuming that, without hibernine, the man can live for exactly two days without water, exactly one week without food, and exactly five minutes without air, can he be rescued? If so, how long will it be before he is rescued? If not, what is his maximum survival time?

“Does this problem have more than one valid answer? If so, give and explain both.

“Or is the problem unsolvable as given? If so, explain why it is unsolvable.”

Sit around listening to that sort of stuff for very long, and you begin to wish you were out on an uninhabited asteroid somewhere. Problems like that are the sort of thing that any simple-minded computer can solve in a fraction of a second if they’re reduced to binary notation first, but poor McGuire had to do his own mathematical interpretations from English, and the things got more complicated as they went along.

And McGuire went right on answering them in his calm, matter-of-fact baritone.

I remember that particular problem because, while Videnski was reciting it, Brentwood pointed at an oscilloscope plate that had nothing on it but a wide, bright, flickering band of light that wavered a little around the upper and lower edges.

“See that?” he asked in his tenor voice. “That’s a tracing of McGuire’s thinking processes. Actually, it’s a very thin, very bright tracing, but it’s moving over that area so fast that you can’t see it. A high-speed camera could pick it up, and if the film were projected at normal speed, you could see every little bit of data being processed.” Then he patted a small instrument that was sitting near the oscilloscope plate. “Of course, we don’t go to all that trouble; we record it directly and analyze it later.”

“And that analysis can be pretty maddening at times,” said a very lovely voice behind me. I turned around and gave Vivian Deveraux my best smile. Her close-cropped blond hair looked a little disheveled, but it didn’t make her any the less beautiful.

“What does Videnski say?” I asked. “Is McGuire still passing his exams?”

She smiled. “Ted says that if this keeps up, we can get McGuire a scholarship at Cal Tech.” Then she frowned slightly. “It all depends on the analysis, of course. We’ll have to see how his timing is, and how many actual computations he’s using for each problem. It’ll take a lot of work.”

I could hear Videnski’s voice still droning away in the control room, alternating with an occasional answer from McGuire. Normally, McGuire only used the speaker in whatever compartment I happened to be in, but I’d given him orders to stick with Videnski during the testing. I’d also had him shut off his pick-ups every-[36]where in the control room, so that our chatter wouldn’t be going into his brain along with Videnski’s.

In the lounge, where we were, Brentwood had removed a panel that gave him access to the testing circuits. To actually get into McGuire’s inner workings and tamper with him would be a lot tougher. McGuire wouldn’t allow it unless I told him to, but even if he did, getting to the brain required three separate keys and the knowledge of the combination on the dial of the durasteel door to the tank that held his brain. Explosives would wreck the brain if they were powerful enough to open the door, and so would a torch. Viking Spacecraft had taken every precaution to make sure that nobody stole their pet.

“How long before we can give McGuire his test flight?” I asked. McGuire had been into space once, but it hadn’t been a shakedown cruise.

Vivian looked at Brentwood. “Tomorrow, unless something unforeseen shows up, huh, Irwin?”

“That’s what the schedule says,” murmured Brentwood.

“Great,” I said. “Just great. There’s schedule, and no one’s told me anything about it. Anything else I should know about, perhaps? Some little thing like where we’re going, or whether I should pack a bag, or whether I’m even invited along?”

Vivian Devereaux blinked. It was a very pretty blink. “Oh, my goodness. I’m sorry. I guess we haven’t kept you very much in touch, really, have we? We’re so used to working together that.…” She let the words trail off with a sheepish smile.

Brentwood chuckled a soft, good-humored chuckle. “I thought the Chief had told you.” By “the Chief,” he meant Ellsworth Felder, the head robotocist. As far as these people were concerned, Sven Midguard was just a spacecraft engineer.

“Not a word,” I said, mentally making a note to find out why Santa Claus Felder had failed to notify me.

“Well, bring a suitcase,” Vivian said. “We—or, rather, you—are taking McGuire on a test hop to Phobos. Mars is pretty close right now, so it’ll be an easy drive sunwards.

“If all goes well, you’re to set him down at Syrtisport, for his first planet landing. Then to Luna for a day or two. Then directly to Earth and Long Island Spaceport. We should know by then how he behaves.”

“Why Earth?” I asked. There didn’t seem much point to it.

“Keep it under your hat,” she said. “Manager Ravenhurst is planning a big publicity campaign. First ship to make the voyage without a human hand at the controls, and all that. I don’t know why, but he wants to make a big splash on Earth if McGuire has checked out perfectly as far as Luna.”

“Oh. Well, Ravenhurst’s the boss.” I knew why. The general public didn’t know how shaky Viking Spacecraft was, and neither, presumably, did the robotics staff. That knowledge was strictly managerial level. But a big splash on Earth would boost Viking’s prestige tremendously, with a possible rise in stock values which would take some of the shakiness out of Viking.

* * * *

By the time the day’s work was over, I’d heard all of Videnski’s rumbling baritone that I wanted to hear. I was grateful to get back to the relative silence of my apartment.

I opened a beer, lit a cigarette, and relaxed on my bed for a few minutes before I made a phone call. I punched BANning 6226, and got an answer almost immediately. The screen didn’t come to life, but a voice said: “Marty here. Hullo, Oak.” He could see me, even if I couldn’t see him. If anyone punched that number by accident, Marty would simply turn on a recording that said: “The number you have punched is not a working number; please disconnect and punch again; this is a recorded message.” There is no point in letting just anyone get in touch with the Ceres branch of the Political Survey Division through their secret channels.

“Marty,” I said, “the test hop is tomorrow.” I gave him all the details as I knew them.

“Hm-m-m.” He sounded thoughtful. “If either Thurston or Baedecker agents are going to try anything, it seems as though this would be the time to do it.”

“I think so, too. Do you have any new information at all?”

“Not much. Thurston’s men don’t know what Baedecker is up to, as far as we can gather. But the Baedecker agents have an idea that Thurston is trying to take over Viking, and they don’t mind at all; they’re evidently hoping that the Ravenhurst-Thurston battle will create enough confusion so that it won’t take much push on their part to topple the whole mess and take control. We know most of the regular agents on both sides, and we’ve managed to get a lot of that information to Colonel Brock so that he can handle quite a bit of the work for us.” Marty chuckled a little. “That’s what I call a really secret agent. Brock has no idea that he’s an agent for a service he doesn’t even know exists.”

“Harrington Brock is a good man, Marty. Don’t underestimate him.”

“I don’t. It’s a shame he just doesn’t have quite what it takes to be good PSD material.”

“I hate to be referred to as ‘material’, good or bad. Do you have any idea how Baedecker or Thurston might be going to pull the grand-stand play?”

“Not a one, so far. How about that robotics team, or the engineers who are working on the ship? Think any of them could be in the pay of a rival?”

“It’s possible,” I said, “but I don’t know which one or ones it might be. I’ve been watching them for three days, and they all seem on the up-and-up to me. And that worries me.”

“How so?”

“You’d think that at least one of them would behave suspiciously by accident once in a while. You know—nerves or jumpiness from purely personal reasons. Hang-over, maybe, or woman trouble. But, no.”

“The clue of the dog in the night, huh? Does that mean you suspect all of them?” he asked dryly.

“Sure. Isn’t that what a good detective is supposed to do?”

“I wouldn’t know; I’m just an information post. I will say this, though: If any of that bunch is connected with either Baedecker or Thurston, he isn’t a professional. He’s someone who’s been contacted secretly and offered a heavy bribe. We’re checking back on all of them now, to see if there’s anything in their pasts which might indicate that their ethics are not what they should be. Or any unusual circumstance that might indicate blackmail or financial pressure.”

“Nothing so far, though?”

“Nothing.”

I thought for a second, then said: “Is there any known rival agent in any position to sabotage McGuire on Phobos, Mars, or Luna?”

“Several, in each place. But we’ll have agents there to keep an eye on them. To be honest with you, Oak, I don’t think there’s much to worry about. I don’t mean you shouldn’t keep your eyes open, but—”

“I know what you mean,” I said. “Do my own worrying, and don’t worry you with it. All right. Meanwhile, if you get anything I can use, call me. And I’ll let you know at this end.”

“Fair enough. Good luck.”

I wished him the same, and cut off.

* * * *

I had time for one drag off my cigarette and one swallow of beer before the phone chimed. I put my beer down and pushed the switch for the audio only.

“Yes?” I said.

The face that came on the screen was one I’d never seen before. A man about my age, I thought, or maybe a few years older. His skin was tanned—whether by heredity or sunlight was hard to tell; his features were not distinctive enough to be sure. His hair was medium brown and cut rather longer than the crew cut which is common in the Belt.

“I’m calling for Mr. Daniel Oak,” he said in a low tenor voice.

I touched the “vision” button and let the pick-up transmit my image to him. No point in playing cagy just at that time. “Speaking,” I said.

“You’re Mr. Daniel Oak, of New York?” he asked.

“That’s right.”

“The confidential expediter?” He seemed to want to make very certain of his quarry.

“That’s right,” I repeated.

His smile was a little stiff. “My name is Venuccio, Mr. Oak; André Venuccio. I’d like to speak to you about a matter of employment.”

“You mean you want a job?” This is a conversational gimmick known as The Deliberate Misunderstanding, or The Innocent Needle.

He twitched his head a little, which might have been a negative shake. “No, no. I wish to employ you, Mr. Oak.”

“Well, I’m pretty busy right now, and I—”

He cut me off with: “Mr. Oak, I have come all the way from Earth to speak to you. I assure you that this is most important. I would like very much to discuss it with you.”

“Well, all right. Go ahead.”

“Not over the phone. There is a possibility of its being tapped. I would like to meet you personally.”

I took a couple of seconds out for thought. There are a lot of places on Earth where a phone line can be tapped with fairly cheap equipment simply because, for economic reasons, the phone company hasn’t installed new equipment. But on Ceres, everything goes through a synchronized random scrambler circuit, just as it does in the more modern cities on Earth. Nobody’s been able to crack it yet without a good-sized computer and a lot of luck. Still—

“Very well, Mr. Venuccio; if you could be here in half an hour—”

“No, no,” he said quickly. “Your apartment might be bugged.”

He had a point there. He couldn’t know that I’d already made sure that my apartment was bug-proof. A self-contained broadcaster isn’t much use inside Ceres; the metal walls stop almost any radiation before it can get very far. If my place was bugged, conductors of some kind would have to be used, and I’d gone over the place thoroughly to make sure there was no such thing.

In addition, I’d used one of my favorite gadgets: a non-random noise generator. Because a conversation is patterned, it is possible to pick it out of a “white,” purely random background noise, even if the background is louder than the conversation. But my little sweetheart was a multiple recording of ten thousand different conversations, all meaningless, plus a lot of “white” noise. After the gadget is connected up, the walls vibrate with jabber that can’t be analyzed even by the best of differential analyzers. Only in the hush area away from the walls is it quiet.

But my caller couldn’t be expected to know that, and I didn’t feel like telling him.

I decided to see how far he’d go.

“Mr. Venuccio,” I said in an apologetic tone, “I’m sorry, but my present work will require several more weeks, and—”

“I understand that,” he said quickly. He seemed to be a great one for interruptions. “But I assure you that I can make it worth your while. What would you charge for an hour of your time?”

“It would depend on what I’d have to do.”

“All you will have to do is listen to me explain my problem and my proposition to you. An hour, at the very most. I could meet you at the Seven Sisters in half an hour. This is very urgent, Mr. Oak.”

Not to me, it wasn’t. But my intuition told me that there was something here I ought to know about. “All right, Mr. Venuccio; I’ll be there. It’ll cost you a hundred in cash for the consultation fee. Have it with you.” In case he didn’t know what I charged, that ought to give him some idea.

He didn’t flinch. “Very good, Mr. Oak. I’ll see you in half an hour, then. Good-by.” And his image vanished.

Interesting, I thought. There was something definitely phony about Mr. André Venuccio. His manner of speaking didn’t sound natural; it was as though he were attempting to pretend to be something he wasn’t.

I made a few phone calls and came up with more information. The last ship directly from Earth had landed four days ago. Mr. Venuccio could have come in by flitterboat, but it didn’t seem likely, if he had, as he claimed, come all the way from Earth to see me. Aside from the fact that my staff in my New York office wouldn’t have told him where I was, there was also the fact that no André Venuccio had come in on the last ship.

I made two more calls—one to Marty and one to Colonel Brock—and then began to get ready for my appointment with the enigmatic Mr. Venuccio.

* * * *

The Seven Sisters is one of the most elaborate dining clubs on Ceres. It caters strictly to the moneyed class, and is positively drenched in snob appeal. The food is good, the liquor is good, and the entertainment is adequate. Since all three have to be imported from Earth, the first two are expensive and the last one is the best they can get, because most of the top-flight entertainers of Earth don’t feel that it’s worth their while to go asteroid-hopping.

It is one of the few public places in the Belt where you will be expected to “dress” for dinner. That means a jacket and Bermuda shorts over your union suit.

As far as decoration goes, the Seven Sisters is the lushest place in the Belt. The walls of the main dining room, which is about sixty by sixty feet in floor area, are paneled with white oak up to a height of eight feet. Wood is expensive in the Belt; forests on the asteroids share the null class with snowflakes on the sunward side of Mercury.

Above the paneling, the ceiling is domed and black, and a pattern of bright pinlights representing the Pleiades—greatly enlarged—glitters against the blackness.

The floor is decorative traction tile, white and pale blue, with rust-red geometric designs on it. In the middle of the floor, there is a hollow, transparent column, brightly illuminated from below. Four feet in diameter, it rises a dozen feet above the floor to a flat, truncated top that is opaque to prevent the light from hitting the dome overhead and ruining the pseudo-sky effect, and mirrored on the underside to reflect the light back down the column. Inside, thousands of tiny, faceted, plastic gems are kept constantly in motion by forced air currents, swirling up and down the inside of the transparent column—easy enough to do under Cerean gravity. Each spinning gem, scarcely larger than a pinhead, catches the light and scatters it around the room. It’s a sort of macroscopic Tyndall effect that is quite impressive.

I told the headwaiter that I wanted Mr. Venuccio’s table, and was escorted straight to it. Venuccio was waiting for me.

He stood up as I approached and gave me his stiff smile. He was short—not more than five foot six—and rather lean. I got the impression that his jacket was padded to make his shoulders appear wider than they were.

“Sit down, Mr. Oak,” he said in that oddly forced voice of his. “Would you care for something to eat? Or a drink, perhaps?” He already had a drink, still three-quarters full.

“Not just yet. Later, maybe.”

I had watched him as he stood up, and I went right on watching him while we sat down. For a man who was just in from Earth, he handled himself remarkably well under low gee. “We may order later,” he said to the waiter.

As soon as the waiter was out of earshot, Venuccio leaned toward me, and suddenly he was all business.

One hand slid a banknote across the table. “Here is the hundred we agreed upon, Mr. Oak. I can state my proposition very quickly; you have only to listen.”

I palmed the hundred and slipped it out of sight. “You have rented yourself a pair of ears, Mr. Venuccio.”

“Very good.” He kept his voice low and even. “Do you know anything of the Cronos Water Corporation?”

“Sure. Cronos is one of the companies that mines the rings of Saturn. A lot of the water here in the Belt comes from the ice they ship in. Why?”

“Not exactly,” he said, ignoring my question. “They now have full control of their only rival, Titan Enterprises. I am a stockholder in Titan, and I am convinced that there was chicanery involved in the transfer of managership. The Cronos Corporation intends to raise the price of water in the Belt and make a lot of fast money.”

“Does the Government know about this?”

“No. Even I can’t prove it on paper. That’s why I want you to go out there and get the information. It will have to be done quickly, before Cronos can file notice of new prices.”

“What do you mean, ‘quickly’?”

“You’ll have to take the Warbow, which is leaving for Luna this evening, in order to catch the Plunger, which is leaving Luna for Saturn. There won’t be another chance for three weeks, and that will be too late.”

It was all very pretty. Saturn was on the other side of the System at the time, and it would be a nice, long trip.

I shook my head. “Sorry, Mr. Venuccio, but, as I told you, I’m already engaged. You’ll have to get someone else.”

He looked suddenly desperate. “I will pay you well. I’ll buy out your present contract, and I’ll pay you double for the work.”

* * * *

We spent the rest of his bought-and-paid-for hour haggling. Or, rather, he haggled. I asked a lot of questions, and he tried to answer them in order to convince me that I should go, and I just asked more questions.

Exactly one hour from the time I’d been handed the hundred, I stood up. Venuccio was in the middle of a sentence, but I said: “Your hour’s up, Mr. Venuccio. The answer is still no. Thank you for your business.”

“But—” He started to rise, started to grasp my sleeve.

“Sit down.” I didn’t say it harshly or angrily, just firmly. He sat. “I don’t want to be bothered by any more of this kind of thing. Ever again. Is that understood, Mr. Venuccio?”

He nodded wordlessly, and I left him sitting there.

As I moved toward the door, the headwaiter came towards me. Before he could say anything, I said: “Mr. Venuccio is taking care of the check.”

“I know that, Oak,” he said in a low voice. “We’ll have him tailed when he leaves here.” I never would have recognized him; it was Colonel Harrington Brock, wearing a plexiskin mask. “Got any idea of what he wants or who he’s working for?”

“He wants me to leave Ceres, which would hold up the testing of McGuire. Offered me plenty for it, too. I’m pretty sure he’s wearing a plexiskin mask, too; and I’m almost certain I’ve heard that voice before, but I can’t quite place it.”

“We’ll find out,” Brock said grimly.

Then he gave me a headwaiter’s smile and went on his way. I went on out through the ornate doors of the Seven Sisters.

* * * *

When I got back to my apartment, I looked it over carefully. It didn’t look as though anyone had made an unauthorized search. I called Marty, and he assured me that the men watching the place had seen no one go in. But I was already fairly certain that the purpose of Mr. Venuccio’s appointment had not been to lure me away from my apartment. He wanted me to go a lot farther than that.

I drank a couple more beers and smoked four or five cigarettes while I thought things through, then I got ready for bed, cut the lights, and went to sleep.

* * * *

The next morning, I showed up at Viking’s Testing Area Four with a hot breakfast inside me and my vac suit outside, ready to go sky-climbing with McGuire. McGuire’s tall blue spire shone brightly in the sunlight, and looked, as he always did, as though ready to take the leap at any time.

There would be only five of us aboard. Besides myself, there was the short, chubby Ellsworth Felder, head of the robotics staff; the boyish Irwin Brentwood; the tough, taciturn Theodore Videnski; and the lovely Vivian Devereaux.

We made the last-minute checks to make sure everything was ready for the hop to Phobos, and then I took command.

“Plot a one-gee orbit to Phobos, McGuire. Take-off in five minutes.”

“Yes, sir,” said McGuire. He thought for a minute, then said: “Course plotted, sir.”

“Good.” I glanced at Brentwood, who had set up his instruments in a semipermanent installation for the trip. “Did you get that, Brentwood?” He nodded.

“All right, McGuire; we’re going to be doing a few tests out in space, so, for right now, just follow the curve of the first half—up to five minutes before turnover. I’ll let you know what to do then. Warn me at five minutes before turnover; otherwise, just keep going until I give you further orders.”

“Yes, sir.”

“How much longer until take-off time?”

“Three and a half minutes, sir.”

“Begin a countdown at minus thirty seconds. One count every five seconds until minus five seconds, one count per second from there to zero. Lift at zero.”

“Yes, sir.”

We got everything settled, made sure there were no loose tools lying around, and sat down in the lounge chairs to wait for the lift. Pretty soon, McGuire said: “Minus thirty seconds.” Finally, he said “Five…four…three…two…one…zero.”

And we all sank down in the chairs, under the pull of a full Standard Gee of acceleration—one thousand centimeters per second squared.

Ceres fell away from beneath us and slowly receded in the vast blackness of space.

I got up and stretched my muscles, and the others began doing the same. It takes time to get used to a full gee again after spending time in the Belt. Even in a flitterboat, you’re in a bucket seat, lying on your back; you can’t do any walking around in a flitterboat.

The change in Ellsworth Felder was remarkable. All that chubbiness that had ballooned out under the low gravity of Ceres and made him look like the Cheerful Cherub was pulled into sagging folds under the pull of the ship’s acceleration. It made him look fifteen years older. None of the others seemed to be bothered much.

Felder kept his good humor, though. He didn’t seem to know that there’d been any change in his appearance. He rubbed his hands together and said: “I, for one, always get hungry when the gravity goes up. May I suggest an early lunch?”

Nobody disagreed with him.

* * * *

We settled into a routine pretty quickly. There wasn’t much to do, since McGuire was taking care of the jobs that require a crew on an ordinary ship. To avoid boredom, we’d brought books and a few decks of cards and various other time-wasters. Several times, McGuire had to change course slightly because of rocks in his path, and Brentwood would always glance at his instruments when that happened, watching the squiggles that indicated McGuire’s replotting.

Those occasional rocks were our reason for waiting before we tried any fancy tricks with McGuire. We wanted to get out into the relatively clear space between Mars and the Belt.

I beat Videnski out of a ten-spot at gin rummy, which, oddly enough, seemed to raise his respect for me. Vivian Deveraux talked with Brentwood for a while, then settled down to reading a book entitled “Some Applications of Discontinuity in Pattern Theory.” Felder munched apples and read a magazine.

We ate another meal amid pleasant chatter, and I went into one of the two bedrooms for a nap. Miss Devereaux had one of the bedrooms all to herself. We men had drawn straws, and Felder and I had ended up with the bedroom while Videnski and Brentwood got the couches in the lounge.

I dozed off, but it was only a light doze. If there were an emergency, I would be the only one who could order McGuire around, and I wanted to be ready to wake up at a moment’s notice.

I’d been snoozing for half an hour or so when I heard the noise that woke me up. I’d been lying with my face to the wall, and, for a moment, I couldn’t figure out what had awakened me.

Then I heard it again. Just the faintest sound of a footstep near the bunk. I moved just in time. I sat up and turned to see Irwin Brentwood standing near me, holding a hypospray gun in one hand. I jumped him, knocking the gun aside, but his hand didn’t lose his grip on it as we went down in a tangle.

He was a lot tougher than he looked. That boyish figure was all wiry muscle, and I was still dopey from sleep—not much, but just enough to impair my efficiency. I got a grip on his gun hand and began slowly twisting it while we rolled over and over on the floor. Then, somehow, he managed to get his other arm loose, and he drove an elbow into my throat.

There was an instant of blinding pain, and I heard the hypogun go chuff! as my muscles tightened with the searing fire in my throat.

The next thing I knew, somebody was wiping my face with a cold, wet towel. I opened my eyes. It was Vivian Deveraux. I tried to say something, but nothing came out. There was only a terrible aching in my throat.

Videnski was standing near a chair where Brentwood was seated. Brentwood looked a little dazed; Videnski looked furious.

So did Felder, who was looking at the hypospray gun he was holding in his hand. “Who hired you, Brentwood?” he asked sharply. There was nothing Santa Clausy about him now.

“A man named Borodin,” Brentwood said, in an uninterested voice.

I managed to force air past my bruised larynx. All that came out was a whisper. “What happened?”

“He tried to use pythantin on you,” Felding said. “But he got the dose himself. That’s why he’s co-operative.”

I nodded and stopped when a pain went through my throat. Pythantin would have made me receptive to any suggestions Brentwood wanted to make.

“What were you supposed to do after you dosed Daniel Oak?” Felder asked the electronicist.

“Tell him to order McGuire to change course, to go to Asteroid MJ3-1990.”

I sat up. It was nice just to lie there and have Vivian bathe my brow, but I had more pressing things to do. I didn’t feel in the pink of condition, and my throat hurt like hell, but I wasn’t in too bad a shape.

“This Borodin,” I whispered, “who was he working for?”

“I don’t know,” Brentwood said. “He didn’t say.”

* * * *

We questioned him for another half hour, but it soon became apparent that he didn’t know very much. He’d been offered a tremendous amount of money to do the job, and he didn’t have the stamina to refuse it. It’s guys like Brentwood who gave rise to the saying that every man has his price.

“What’ll we do now?” Felding asked at last. “Go on to Phobos, or go back to Ceres?”

“Back to Ceres,” I whispered. “Colonel Brock will know what to do with him.”

I’d been uneasy ever since my calls to Brock and Marty that morning had disclosed that Venuccio had lost the men who were supposed to be tailing him. It’s fairly easy to do on Ceres, if you know how.

“It won’t mean much of a delay,” I went on. “Ravenhurst can still have his big splash on Earth.”

We herded Brentwood into the lounge and bound him to a chair. Then I said: “McGuire?”

“Yes, sir?”

“We’re changing course. Return to Ceres.”

And McGuire said: “I’m sorry, sir; I cannot obey any orders except those of Mr. Daniel Oak.”

I just stood there for a long minute. “I am Daniel Oak,” I whispered. But I was fairly certain that the declaration would do me no good whatever.

I was right. “No, sir. You are not Mr. Oak.” McGuire is always polite to anyone who speaks to him, even if he doesn’t regard that person as human.

“McGuire,” I said patiently, “can you see Mr. Oak? Is he on board?”

“Yes, sir. I perceive him seated on the starboard couch in the main lounge.”

“Fine. Then your directional audio pick-ups should be able to tell you where this voice is coming from.”

“Yes, sir. It is coming from the approximate volume of space now occupied by Mr. Oak’s head. But it is definitely not Mr. Oak’s voice.”

Felder put a hand over his eyes and moaned.

Videnski, who had carefully lighted a cigarette, blew out a cloud of smoke and looked at me. “I got to admit he’s right. That is not Daniel Oak’s voice.”

“Which came first the chicken or the egg?” Vivian said abstractedly.

“What’s that got to do with it?” Videnski asked with a scowl.

“A matter of definition,” Vivian said. “Somewhere along the line of chicken evolution, it would have been possible to point at a specific bird and say, ‘This is a chicken, but its parents were not chickens.’ Now, do you define a chicken egg as an egg laid by a chicken or an egg that hatches out a chicken?”

“That’s right,” Felder said. “Do you define Oak’s voice as any voice coming from Oak or as any voice that sounds like Oak’s?”

“Well, you people ought to be able to answer that,” I said. “Which is it?”

“Both,” said Felder in a dull voice. “When you activated him by giving him his first order, he identified you and the voice as parts of the same unit. If you’d gone hoarse slowly, step-by-step, as it were, McGuire could have made logical adjustments to the change. But this sudden change is too big a jump for his logic to follow; he hasn’t got the intermediate steps he needs to put it into syllogistic form.”

There was another question I wanted to ask of McGuire. “McGuire, you are not supposed to allow Mr. Oak to come to any harm. Yet you did so. Why?” I was wondering how he’d managed to let Brentwood get away with his attack on me, without at least warning me.

“Mr. Oak was in no danger, sir. He has come to no harm.”

“What about Brentwood’s attack?”

“Mr. Brentwood did not attack Mr. Oak, sir; Mr. Oak attacked Mr. Brentwood.”

The other three looked at me. “In a way, he’s right,” I said quickly. “When I saw Brentwood standing there with the hypospray, I jumped him.”

“That’s another one of our problems,” said Felder. “How do you define ‘harm’? If you broke your arm and a doctor tried to set it without an anesthetic, what would McGuire think when you yelled? Could you and I engage in a friendly boxing match? And since McGuire is supposed to prevent harm, he has to be able to define it in advance. Oh, we’ve had a lot of fun with that one, I’ll tell you.” There was a thin edge of bitterness in his voice.

“You see what this means, don’t you?” Videnski asked, eying me through a cloud of blue cigarette smoke.

“Sure,” I whispered. “It means that McGuire will go right on accelerating until I tell him to stop, and I can’t tell him that until my larynx heals—if it ever does.”

“If it takes a week or two, which is likely,” Vivian said, “we’ll be saying good-by to the Solar System.”

“By the time this heals,” I said, “we’ll be so far out we won’t be able to come back. At that distance, the amount of sunlight McGuire will be able to pick up will be negligible, and the atomic fuel will be gone.”

Nobody bothered to suggest that we call for help. McGuire had the communications system under control, too.

“One of us,” I said, “had better think of something.”

* * * *

In the next several hours, every one of us thought of something, one way or another. Not that it did much good, because none of the ideas were worth much, directly. Indirectly, they told us plenty about what not to try.

When Brentwood finally came out from under the effects of the pythantin, even he started thinking furiously about some way out of our predicament. We kept him locked in the bedroom for obvious reasons, but he had just as much stake in getting us back in control of McGuire as we did. After all, there’s no law against industrial espionage, and we couldn’t prove any charge of sabotage. Even a charge of attempted kidnapping or attempted larceny would be almost impossible to make stand up in court. With a good lawyer, he could get out from under an assault and battery charge. He’d lose his job with Viking, of course, but that was better than losing his life.

His failure to deliver McGuire to Baedecker Metals & Mining might lose him some of the money he’d been promised, but he was prepared for that, too. I knew he was a Baedecker agent, even if he didn’t, because I knew who Borodin worked for.

Meanwhile, five brains were trying frantically to think of some way of convincing McGuire that he should obey my orders.

First, I tried reasoning with him.

“McGuire, do you understand what it is that generates the human voice?”

“Yes, sir. A flow of slightly compressed air from the lungs causes vibration of the vocal cords, and this sound is modified by the lips, tongue, and teeth.”

“Very well. Now, you see Mr. Oak, do you not?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And you see that this voice is being generated by Mr. Oak?”

“I cannot tell that, sir. I have no way of sensing the operation of Mr. Oak’s vocal equipment.”

“But you can tell that this voice is coming from Mr. Oak?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then it must be Mr. Oak’s voice.”

“That does not coincide with the facts, sir, therefore the logic is faulty. A comparison of the present voice with the voice of Mr. Oak shows too few points of similarity for identification.”

“You won’t get anywhere that way,” Felder said wearily. “None of the data you give him verbally is used in his final computations, since it doesn’t come from Daniel Oak, by his own reasoning.”

“That is correct, sir,” said McGuire.

“Idiot machine!” said Vivian Deveraux angrily.

I shut up and did some more thinking. Talking only made my throat hurt.

Nobody could argue impressively with McGuire except Daniel Oak, and as far as McGuire was concerned Mr. Oak was keeping an impressive silence.

“Maybe I could write out the orders,” I said.

“Nope,” said Videnski. “He can read, but information coming in that way isn’t counted as orders, not even from you. We should have installed a teletyper, too, but this is a little late for thinking of that.”

“McGuire,” I whispered, “what sort of proof would be needed to show you that this is the voice of Daniel Oak?”

“I’m sorry, sir,” McGuire said after a moment, “but that information is not in my banks.”

“Maybe somebody could imitate Dan’s voice,” Vivian said hopefully. Videnski and Felder shook their heads in unison.

“No dice,” Videnski said rumblingly. “It not only has to sound like Oak, it has to come from Oak.”

“Ventriloquism?” Vivian said with a half-hearted grin.

“Wouldn’t fool McGuire for an instant,” Felder said. “That’s an audio-visual trick of the human mind, not of a robot’s.”

The ship kept on moving. McGuire went serenely on, following his last orders.

We finally reached the point where we were too tired to think, and sleep became imperative. We were nearly two days out of Ceres.

When I announced my intention of taking a snooze, Felder looked at me through groggy, bloodshot eyes. “Hadn’t we better sleep in two shifts? I mean, just in case there’s another spy among us?”

I shook my head. “No spy would try anything now. There isn’t anything to try. We’re all safe, as far as that’s concerned. I’ll go in and sleep in my assigned room. Not even Brentwood could or would do anything to me now.”

“For that matter,” Felder said, “it’s senseless to keep him locked up now. He’s harmless until we reestablish control over McGuire. When that happens, we can lock him up again.”

“My sentiments exactly,” I said in my new hoarse, breathy, susurrant voice.

Brentwood didn’t say much when I gave him the news; he just thanked me. I got into bed and worried for a while, but lack of sleep soon cut off my ability to worry. I only woke up once in the next nine hours, when McGuire changed course a trifle to avoid some unseen meteor. Not even the ache in my throat kept me from sleep.

* * * *

It was Videnski’s voice that woke me up. The door of my room was slid open a little, and I could hear him in the lounge. I got to my feet fast, shoved open the door, and went out.

Videnski had grabbed Brentwood by the front of his union suit, and had lifted him off his feet and slammed his back up against the wall. His free hand was swinging back and forth in open-handed slaps that looked as though any one of them should have torn the smaller man’s head off. Felder was ineffectually trying to pull Videnski away from Brentwood, but the big man didn’t even seem to notice it. Vivian Devereaux was nowhere in sight.

Videnski’s harsh baritone was filled with invective that should have made the air as glowingly blue as the inside of an old-fashioned rectifier tube.

I ran across the room, grabbed Videnski by the shoulder and said: “Stop that!”

He stopped. When I throw out an emotional field like that, only a very exceptional man can disobey.

“Let him go,” I said.

Videnski released him, and Brentwood slid down the wall, just this side of unconsciousness.

“What’s the idea?” I asked.

“I … I’m sorry,” Videnski rumbled. “Lost my temper, I guess. That … I mean, he—” He stopped, fumbling for words.

“I know. I heard what you were saying. Sure it’s his fault my voice sounds the way it does. Sure he’s a spy and probably a saboteur. And if we die, he’ll be morally guilty of manslaughter. And suicide—remember that.

“But slapping him around like that isn’t going to do any of us any good, and we need all the thinking we can get if we intend to pull ourselves out of this mess.

“So leave him alone, Videnski. Hear?”

My whispery voice didn’t sound very authoritative, but a crisp, firm, commanding baritone does not authority make, any more than iron bars a cage.

“Yeah,” he said apologetically. “I’m sorry, Oak. I sort of lost my head. It won’t happen again.”

I knelt down and took a look at Brentwood. He wasn’t actually damaged much, but his face was going to be swollen and bruised. Somehow, I couldn’t feel very sorry for him.

I got him to his feet. “Come on, Brentwood; let’s go lie down for a while. You’ll feel better.”

“Yeah,” he mumbled through thickening lips. “Thanks.”

I got him into his bunk, closed the door on him, and came back to the lounge.

“Anybody dream up any solutions in his sleep?” I asked.

It was apparent that they hadn’t. “Maybe Vivian has,” Felder said. “She’s still asleep.”

“Let’s not bank on it,” I said.

“Oh, I did have one idea,” Felder said dispiritedly. “Ted, here, and I were working on it when Brentwood came out. When it didn’t pan out, well, that’s when the fight started.”

“What was your idea?”

“I asked McGuire if he realized what would happen to Mr. Oak if he just kept going. He said he did; that if he ran out of fuel, you’d be marooned and would die. So he’s figured out a nice, complicated orbit that will allow him to obey your last order until the very last possible moment. He’ll land us on Titan at the very last moment. The trouble is, we forgot to tell him how much food we have aboard, and he’s made the assumption that there’s plenty for everybody, for an indefinite length of time. But we’re going to be plenty hungry by the time we get there. Can you last twelve days without food?”

“I don’t want to try it. And of course it wouldn’t do any good for you to tell him that we haven’t enough food. How about letting him take a look at the food supply?”

“He doesn’t know how much is necessary, and he would only have our word for it that there was no more aboard. One thing I can tell you: if we ever get back to rebuild McGuire, one of the things he’s going to have is a lot more sensory devices, so that he can judge more facts on his own hook.”

“Agreed,” said another voice; “right now, we’re dealing with a half-blind idiot.” Vivian Devereaux had stepped out of her room and had been listening to Felder explain what he’d tried. Sleep hadn’t done her as much good as it might have under other circumstances; the strain was showing on her face.

Breakfast was a half-hearted affair. Brentwood stayed in his room, though he accepted the cup of coffee I brought him. The rest of us didn’t eat much more than that. I was trying to think our way out of the fix, and so were the others.

Something, some sort of an idea, had been sitting quietly at the bottom of my mind, just barely discernible through the semipermeable barrier that separates the conscious from the subconscious, but I couldn’t fish it out.

When I managed to grasp part of it, I said: “Look. The trouble is that McGuire is incapable of connecting my present voice with the voice he’s used to. Then it seems to me that our job is to supply him with the missing steps.”

“How?” asked Felder.

“One of you—or all of you, if it took that to convince him—could fake a hoarse, whispery voice. You could slowly make your voice worse and worse, so that he could see the steps involved.”

Vivian brightened, but Felder and Videnski shook their heads together like the Bobbsey Twins sorrowing over a lost pet.

“What we may do voluntarily,” said Felder, “over a relatively long period of time, has nothing to do with what happened to you suddenly and involuntarily. You see, in the long run, he really doesn’t care about our voices. He doesn’t pay any attention to us, really, except as incidental cargo. He has no concept of intelligence, actually; he can’t accept any statements of ours unless they’re verifiable by McGuire himself.”

“Well, we could at least try it,” said Vivian.

We did, and Felder was right. McGuire seemed almost condescending in his sorrow for our inability to see that there was no logical connection between their whispers and the voice of his Lord and Master, Daniel Oak.

Vivian, who had been standing near Videnski while we were talking to McGuire, suddenly blew up when McGuire assured us that our whispering was a waste of time. She grasped her book—“Some Applications of Discontinuity in Pattern Theory”—and threw it at the wall speaker from which McGuire’s voice came. It bounced harmless off the protective grill and fell to the floor. Vivian Devereaux burst into tears.

I put my arm around her, gave Videnski and Felder the high sign to keep thinking, and led her to her room. As soon as I got her settled, I said: “Relax. No matter what happens, we’ll get out of it alive. If we stretch our rations, we’ll be able to make it to Titan without being more than underweight and hungry.”

“It’s not that,” she said tearfully, “it’s the delay. All that time off the schedule.”

“But I thought that was what you wanted,” I said gently.

“Not any more. I—” She stopped suddenly and looked up at me, her eyes widening. “What are you talking about?” Her voice was as whispery as mine.

“It was the insistence on meeting me at the Seven Sisters that gave you away,” I said. “Dyeing your hair and combing it straight back, and putting on that plexiskin mask and the contact lenses—none of that helped conceal that lush figure of yours. It can’t be done under a union suit. So you had to put on jacket and shorts, and that meant you had to meet me in some plush restaurant like the Seven Sisters or you’d look out of place.

“I knew all that talk about being afraid of being overheard was just that—talk. A directional beam microphone could have picked up every word at our table.

“What made you change your mind about delaying the work on McGuire?”

“Buh-Buh-Brentwood. I duh-didn’t know they’d go that far in trying to stop the work. Nuh-nuh-not kih-kidnapping and piracy.” She took a deep breath and forced herself to stop sobbing. “I guess they didn’t trust me, anyway. Otherwise they wouldn’t have put Brentwood on the same job without telling me.”

* * * *

She didn’t know that Brentwood was working for Baedecker rather than for the Thurston group. How could she? The difference lay in their tactics. Thurston wanted to take over Viking as a going concern—a little under the weather, perhaps, but still functioning. That meant that they wanted the work on McGuire delayed and complicated, but they didn’t want to put him out of the picture completely, since they expected to take over the work as soon as they got control of Viking.

Baedecker, on the other hand, didn’t give a care about Viking Spacecraft. They wanted to take over Ceres for their own firm. If that meant that getting rid of McGuire completely would give them what they wanted, then they’d get rid of McGuire.

“Why’d you take the job?” I asked.

“Money. I’m sick of the Belt. I want to go back home, to Earth.” Her eyes were quite dry by now, and there was a choked sort of fear in them. “I hate it out here. There’s death all around you all the time; sometimes it’s just outside your skin, on the other side of the fabric of your vac suit. I wanted to get back home. But all the money is out here in the Belt. Back there, it’s all eaten up in taxes and welfare, and nobody has a chance to get a job that really pays. So when they offered me the money—” She stopped and closed her eyes. “I’m scared, that’s all. I’ve been scared ever since I came out here. And now—” She shuddered. “And now we’re at the mercy of this idiot machine. I get so scared that I get mad, every time I hear his voice.”

If somebody had set a thermonuclear bomb off inside my skull, there couldn’t have been more sudden illumination.

I patted her on the shoulder. “You may get your money and more besides,” I said.

She shook her head. “I wouldn’t take their money now.”

I stood up. “I think I can talk you into changing your mind, but right now, I think I have a way of getting McGuire to listen to me, thanks to you.”

She looked up at me. “What did I do?”

“You threw a book,” I said. “That’s enough to win you a pardon as far as I’m concerned. You sit tight and don’t let on that I know anything. Nobody else knows anything at all. Not even Brentwood. So keep quiet.”

She dried her face quickly and stood up, too. “All right. Whatever you say.”

As we went back out into the lounge, I felt a little pleased with myself. If things worked out right—and they would—we now had a double agent inside Thurston’s organization. It wouldn’t take too long to clear things up, and Miss Devereaux could go back to Earth with a nice piece of change in her pocket.

“What are you looking so happy about?” Videnski asked suspiciously when he saw us.

“I’ll show you,” I said. “Where’s the tool kit?”

* * * *

Ten minutes later, I had the wall speaker in the lounge out of its housing, but still connected. McGuire hadn’t interfered with the work, as he might have if someone else had tried to do it, because he could see perfectly well that it was Daniel Oak who was doing the job, even though Oak hadn’t been speaking to him much lately.

Then I said: “McGuire, can you hear me?”

“Yes, sir; I can hear you,” came his voice from the speaker.

“Can you hear your own voice?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Very well. Now, are you watching what Mr. Oak is doing?”

“Yes, sir.”

I picked up a small ball-peen hammer and hit the speaker—not too gently—at just the right place.

“Did you see that, McGuire?” I asked.

“Yes, sir. I saw it.” His voice sounded hoarse, muffled, and whispery coming through the damaged speaker.

“Do you see what sudden damage can do to speaking apparatus?”

“I must test,” McGuire said, an almost hesitant note in his new voice. He spent fifteen seconds or so saying a series of nonsense syllables that are used as a test for a robot’s speaking apparatus. They contain every sound used in English.

When that was over, he said: “The damage inflicted has radically changed the basic patterns of the voice. If an equivalent amount of damage was done to Mr. Oak’s vocal apparatus, then the voice which has been speaking must belong to Mr. Oak.”

“You saw the damage being done in each case,” I said quickly. “You also see that it is the source of the voice that becomes important when the pattern has changed.”

“Yes, Mr. Oak. I see that.”

I breathed a deep, heartfelt sigh of relief.

Felder looked at me in a sort of numb awe. “How did you figure that out?”

“It came to me in a flash, but the clues were all over the place. McGuire didn’t stay on the course I gave him; he couldn’t, if he wanted to avoid meteors. And then, too you said that he ought to have more sensory apparatus, so that he could judge facts. The facts that come into his brain from his own sensory apparatus have to be utilized in his memory banks. He didn’t have to know all the steps in reasoning that would lead from one voice pattern to another if it could be demonstrated as a fact—as an axiom, if you like.

“If you tell him that he must change course, he isn’t obliged to pay any attention; but if he spots a meteor, he has to accept that as a fact, and he changes course to allow for it. In a sense, then, the meteor is capable of giving McGuire orders, and you aren’t.”

Felder didn’t look any too happy; no one likes to have a point in his own field explained to him by a layman. But he couldn’t argue with me.

“There’s a great deal more to be done before McGuire can be put into practical service,” he said heavily. “We may as well head back to Ceres.”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “McGuire’s in good enough shape to let us make the big splash on Earth that Ravenhurst wants to make. He’ll need it if Viking is to have enough financial leeway to go on with this project.”

“What about…what about Brentwood?” Vivian Devereaux asked.

“We can get rid of him at Phobos just as easily as we can at Ceres. If there’s any explaining of any kind to do, we can lay the blame on him. He won’t be in any position to deny it.”

She nodded, understanding exactly what I meant.

There were still plenty of bugs to be worked out of McGuire, but now I could see our way clear to getting both Thurston and Baedecker off our backs for a while.

At that point, Brentwood stuck his head in the door. “What’s going on?” he asked in his soft voice.

“We’re going on to Phobos, Brentwood,” I said. “Go on back to your room and stay there.” He withdrew his head. I looked at Videnski. “Go lock him in, Ted. He gives me a pain in the neck.”

I got the first laugh I’d heard in forty-eight hours.

BACK TO JULIE, by Richard Wilson

Originally published in Galaxy Science Fiction, May 1954.

You 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 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 filling in a single tooth. Fortunately, 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 percent 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.

* * * *

“Honest” John Krasnow was 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 laterali, 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.

* * * *

Fed, and filling my stolen 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 superjet out there.

* * * *

I had no trouble posing as a 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 Krasnow is, and he’s willing to 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.

* * * *

There are some obvious questions 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.

BRIGHTSIDE CROSSING, by Alan E. Nourse

Originally published in Galaxy, January 1956.

James Baron was not 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 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 name. He said you’d want to see him. He will be back by eight.”

Now 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?”

The 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. “Great balls of fire, 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 lived 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.

* * * *

I’d been interested in the 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 2082, 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—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, did a good deal of the original mapping and surveying for the Colony there. 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?”

He looked me over. “How much do you weigh, Peter?”

I told him one-thirty-five.

“That much!” he said. “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. “At 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, I thought, somebody would cross it.

I wanted to be along.

* * * *

The Twilight Lab near the northern pole of Mercury, was the obvious jumping-off 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.

Twilight 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 770° F. at perihelion and the Darkside runs pretty constant at -410° F. No permanent installation with a human crew could survive at either extreme. But with Mercury’s wobble, the twilight zone between Brightside and Darkside offers something closer to survival temperatures.

Sanderson built the Lab up near the pole, where the zone is about five miles wide, so the temperature only varies 50 to 60 degrees with the libration. The Solar ’scope could take that much change and they’d get good clear observation of the Sun for about seventy out of the eighty-eight days it takes the planet to wheel around.

The Major was counting on Sanderson knowing something about Mercury as well as the Sun 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 twenty-five, 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.

We dug right in. With 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 McIvers?”

“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 McIvers 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 McIvers. 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, McIvers 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.”

Stone nodded. “Sanderson 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 millennia ago—but there was CO^2, 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 McIvers were thick as thieves, and everything was set for an early departure after we got some rest.

* * * *

“And that,” said Baron, finishing his drink and signaling the waiter for another pair, “was your first big mistake.”

Peter Claney raised his eyebrows. “McIvers?”

“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 770 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 camp-fire.”

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, that was all. But I’m getting to that.”

He settled back in his chair and continued.

* * * *

We jumped off from Twilight on a course due southeast with thirty days to make it to the Center of Brightside. If we could cross an average of seventy 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 two thousand miles to the opposite twilight zone. Sanderson was to meet us on the other side in the Laboratory’s scout ship, approximately sixty 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. McIvers, you’ll have the job of dragging the sledges, 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?”

McIvers and Stone exchanged glances. McIvers said: “Jack and I were planning to change around. We figured he could take the sledges. That would give me a little more mobility.”

The Major looked up sharply at Stone. “Do you buy that, Jack?”

Stone shrugged. “I don’t mind. Mac wanted—”

McIvers 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.” McIvers 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.”

McIvers 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—any time, any place.”

McIvers 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?”

McIvers 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.”

It was hot. If I forget everything 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 McIvers crawling out behind me, their pillow tires taking the rugged floor of the gorge smoothly. Behind them, Stone dragged the sledges.

Even at only 30 percent 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 twenty 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 seventy-five degrees Fahrenheit 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 sixty or seventy 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 have 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 McIvers would say how good a beer would taste, and off we’d go. We’d have murdered our grandmothers for one ice-cold bottle of beer.

After a few driving periods, 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 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 limestone and granite ash, filling crevices 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.

McIvers’ restlessness was beginning 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, more 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 McIvers’ 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 standing 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-track 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.

* * * *

On the fifth driving period 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 McIvers 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 McIvers’ Bug suddenly lurched forward. It rolled down past me, picked up speed, with McIvers hunched behind the wheel like a race driver. He was heading past me straight for the gray ledge.

My shout caught in my throat; I heard the Major take a huge breath and roar: “Mac! Stop that thing, you fool!” and then McIvers’ 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 McIvers’ 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 McIvers 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—”

McIvers’ 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.

“McIvers? 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 McIvers. I mean the kid.”

“Jack? What about him?”

“Take a look.”

Stone was shaking. He was 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 Hero 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 McIvers had taken and the whole sheet could snap like a dry pine board. And it wasn’t McIvers’ fault that it hadn’t.

Five hours later, we were 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, McIvers 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 McIvers wouldn’t let me forget it. We had made only about three hundred twenty miles in six driving periods, so we were about a hundred miles or even more behind schedule.

“We’re not going to make it,” McIvers 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 McIvers 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 547° F. and getting hotter. It was no place to start rushing ahead.

I tried it anyway. I took 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 my eye. It was an overhanging shell that trembled under me as I stopped.

McIvers’ 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 McIvers 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 McIvers’ 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.”

The 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 gave 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, McIvers 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.

* * * *

Peter Claney leaned back, 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 McIvers’ 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 McIvers 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.”

THOUGHT AND SPACE, by Ray Bradbury

Originally published in Futuria Fantasia, Summer 1939.

Space—thy boundaries are

Time and time alone.

No earth-born rocket,

seedling skyward sown,

Will ever reach your cold,

infinite end,

This power is not Man’s to

build or send.

Great deities laugh down,

venting their mirth,

At struggling bipeds on

a cloud-wrapped Earth,

Chained solid on a war-swept,

waning globe,

For FATE, who witnesses,

to pry and probe.

BUT LIST! One weapon have

I stronger yet!

Prepare Infinity! And

Gods regret!

Thought, quick as light,

shall pierce the veil,

To reach the lost beginnings

Holy Grail.

Across the sullen void on

soundless trail,

Where new spawned suns and

chilling planets wail,

One thought shall travel

midst the gods’ playthings,

Past cindered globes where

choking flame still sings.

No wall of force yet have ye

firmly wrought,

That chains the supreme

strength of purest thought.

Unleashed, without a body’s

slacking hold,

Thought leaves the ancient

Earth behind to mold.

And when the galaxies have

heeded DEATH,

And welcomed lastly SPACE’S

poisoned breath,

Still shall thought travel

as an arrow flown.

SPACE—thy boundaries are

TIME—AND TIME ALONE!

THE SECRET OF THE SCARAB, by Ron Goulart

Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, April 2005.

The portly magician, frowning, abruptly stopped talking. Leaving the rigid blonde young woman in the flowing white gown floating just five feet above the stage, he hurried over to the gas-lit footlights. Pointing up at a shadowy box seat with his ivory-tipped wand, the Great Lorenzo shouted, “Harry, my boy, you’re about to head into great danger. Be certain to see me after the show.”

He adjusted his top hat and returned to the floating lady. “As I was saying,” he resumed, “I acquired the power of levitation well over a decade ago while studying with certain obscure holy men in a remote and especially mystical region of far-off India. Now, my dear, be so kind as to continue your heavenward journey.”

The magician made a few circular motions with the wand. The robust blonde rose, slowly, upward until she achieved an altitude of about ten feet. There was a large flash of yellow lightning and she vanished entirely.

The Great Lorenzo’s crimson-lined cape swirled outward as he bowed toward the audience in the London theater.

As he straightened up, smiling broadly, the several hundred enthusiastic patrons applauded.

Harry Challenge skirted the huge gilded cabinet that Lorenzo used in his Famous Oriental Escape Illusion and made his way through the backstage area toward the door of his friend’s dressing room.

He was a lean, clean-shaven man of thirty-three, a bit above average height. He wore, since his father felt it helped the image of their agency, a conservative dark business suit and a bowler hat. He also wore a shoulder holster containing a .38 revolver.

Harry was an American private inquiry agent who now and then handled an occult case. It was late in May of 1899 and he was spending a few days in London prior to heading to Ruritania to consult with a client who suspected that his recently inherited castle contained a ghost.

The star attached to Lorenzo’s door was large and lopsided, looking as though it had been cut out of a sheet of yellow wrapping paper and glued there. Someone had penciled the word Great over the typed name Lorenzo on the small name card.

“Come in, Harry,” called the magician after Harry knocked.

He entered, grinning. “You’ve changed the act,” he said, settling into the listing Morris chair. “Yelling at me isn’t usually part of it.”

The heavyset man was studying his face in the mirror at his dressing table, making certain he’d removed every trace of stage makeup. “That was an authentic warning, my boy, not a diversion for my adoring audience.”

“You knew I’d drop in after the show,” Harry reminded, taking one of his thin cigars out of his case. “There was no need to—”

“As you are aware, Harry, I am, pure and simple, an illusionist,” Lorenzo told him as he turned his chair to sit facing him. “However, now and then I am visited with what I deem a true premonition, a vision of what’s to come. Some of them have in the past, as you may recall, helped you to avoid serious trouble.”

“Yep, that’s true,” agreed Harry, lighting his cigar with a wax match. “So I take it you’ve had another glimpse into my possible future?”

The magician fluffed his ample sideburns, nodding. “Exactly. It occurred while I was involved in elevating Olivia.”

“Isn’t her name Delphine?”

“This is an entirely different blonde, Harry, and one that is a good fifteen pounds heavier than the departed Delphine.”

“It’s a good thing, then, that you learned levitation in India,” observed Harry, exhaling smoke. “What sort of premonition about me did you have?”

The Great Lorenzo sighed. “Just as I was about to send Olivia onward and upward, I experienced severe pains in my chest and stomach,” he explained. “A sure sign of either indigestion or an oncoming vision. Seconds later, I beheld a very clear and sharp picture of you. I was exceedingly disturbed, because…”

“Because what?”

In a lowered voice Lorenzo answered, “You were dead.”

Harry leaned forward. “Details?”

“As you know, Harry, some of my peeks into tomorrow are partially symbolic,” he said. “At any rate, my boy, I saw you quite clearly lying dead in an ornate Egyptian mummy case. There were several Egyptian artifacts in the background, and plunged into your heart was a wicked-looking dagger with a great golden beetle engraved on its hilt.”

Harry took a thoughtful puff of his stogie. “That’s it?”

The Great Lorenzo nodded. “I was so unnerved that I interrupted my act to warn you at once.”

“So what exactly should I be avoiding, Lorenzo? Trips to Egypt? Sleeping in mummy cases? What?”

Frowning, the plump magician answered, “Surely you’re working on a case here in London? Something involving Egyptology perhaps. It occurred to me that you were investigating what the newspapers have been referring to as ‘The Curse of King Ibis the Second’s Tomb.’”

“Yellow journalism.”

“Two of the men who opened the tomb in the Valley of the Jackals in 1896 have been murdered and robbed within the past three weeks,” amplified the magician. “You weren’t hired to investigate this matter, my boy? After all, curses are something you’ve had considerable experience—”

“I am simply spending a few days in London before I catch a boat train and then sail to Ruritania,” said Harry, grinning. “Fellow who inherited a castle near Zenda suspects he may be haunted.”

The magician’s frown deepened. “This is most odd, Harry, since I seldom get all the details wrong in one of my… Ah, perhaps this is it.” He nodded at the closed door to his dressing room.

Someone knocked politely.

“Come in, my dear,” he invited.

The erstwhile floating blonde, wearing a checked flannel robe, entered. There was a cablegram envelope in her hand. “This was just delivered at the stage door for Mr. Challenge. Good evening, Mr. Challenge, I’m Olivia Claybrook.”

He accepted the cablegram. “Thanks, Miss Claybrook.”

She glanced at the magician. “Are we still having a late supper, Lorenzo?”

“Quite probably.” He made a shooing motion.

She moved to the doorway. “I was most pleased to meet you, Mr. Challenge,” she said and exited.

Harry opened the message.

It read:

DEAR SON: INSTEAD OF STAGGERING AROUND LONDON WITH THAT DISSOLUTE MAGICIAN, GET TO WORK. SlR LIONEL DANVERS WANTS YOU TO INVESTIGATE A POSSIBLE CURSE. SEE HIM TONIGHT AT 11 P.M. AT THE LONDON MUSEUM OP EGYPTOLOGY. HE’S FILTHY RICH AND THIS MEANS A LARGE FEE FOR THE AGENCY. YOUR LOVING FATHER, THE CHALLENGE INTERNATIONAL DETECTIVE AGENCY.

Taking a couple puffs on his cigar, Harry handed the cablegram to the magician.

After reading it, Lorenzo said, “Ah, as I foretold, Egyptian trappings. Are you going to accept the case?”

“Sure.”

“I’d accompany you to the museum, since it’s only a short walk from Piccadilly Circus here,” he said apologetically, “but, as you know, I promised to dine with the fair Olivia. Later in the evening, I tentatively suggested to a local duchess that I might—”

“That’s okay, Lorenzo.” Harry consulted his pocket watch, then stood up. “Now that I’m forewarned, I won’t get into any mummy cases or let anyone get near me with a golden dagger.”

The magician rose up. “I’m serious, Harry,” he said. “You must be very careful.”

“That’s one of my policies,” Harry assured his friend.

They didn’t have daggers.

The three large hooded men who came charging out of the thick night fog were armed with clubs.

Harry judged he was less than a half block from the London Museum of Egyptology when the figures materialized from out of the chill mist.

“Stay away from the bloody museum, Challenge,” suggested the first lout as he swung his gnarled cudgel at Harry’s head.

Dodging the blow, Harry dived to his left. His shoulder slammed hard against a high wrought-iron fence that blossomed out of the gray fog.

The impact knocked off Harry’s bowler hat.

A second assailant lunged toward him, brandishing a stout bludgeon.

Yanking his pistol out, Harry fired at the wide man.

The slug hit the man in the thigh. He howled, causing his dark silken hood to billow out. He went stumbling backward and was swallowed by the fog.

Standing wide-legged and alert, revolver in hand, Harry watched the surrounding mist. He couldn’t spot either of the other two thugs.

Then suddenly a rough scarf was jerked around his neck from behind. As it tightened, he began to choke, making harsh hacking sounds in his throat.

Harry tried to fire his gun back over his shoulder to hit the strangler. But then a club came swinging out of the mist to swat his gun hand.

The .38 fell to the pavement. He didn’t seem to be able to take in any air at all, was growing dizzy, started seeing zigzag bursts of fuzzy-colored light in the thick night fog.

“That’s quite enough of that, you rowdies,” commanded a young feminine voice. “Begone.”

Two pistol shots followed.

Harry heard someone cry, “You’ll regret this, Zuleika.” He passed out.

As Harry gradually returned to awareness, he had the initial impression that a baboon was chastising him. In critical, and somewhat nasal tones, the three-foot high creature was saying, “…highly, one might say extremely, disappointed in the manner of your advent, Challenge. I mean to say, one of our guards noticed you staggering up the steps of the museum in a state that can only be classified as extreme drunkenness. No sooner had he admitted you than you passed out completely, nearly damaging an exhibit case of rare polychrome unguent vessels. Your conduct thus far, I need hardly point out, fails to add anything in the way of luster to the reputation of the Challenge International Detective Agency.”

“Whoa now,” said Harry in a fuzzy, croaking voice. He coughed twice, tried again to speak. “I’m not drunk. I always stagger after somebody tries to garrote me.”

His vision had been clearing and he was now able to discern that the baboon was a life-size quartzite statue resting atop a refectory table near the armchair in which he had awakened.

“A rather feeble explanation,” remarked the small almost bald man behind the desk facing Harry. He was pale and thin, about sixty years of age, wearing a rumpled Norfolk jacket. “I am relying on you, after all, to investigate a most puzzling case, involving as it does murder and the possibility that an ancient Egyptian curse is being fulfilled. If you’re not up to remaining in control of your faculties, Challenge, perhaps the museum had best contact the Pinkerton agency or perhaps Bums or some other—”

“C’mon, Professor Danvers,” cut in Harry, “you know damned well that Pinkerton or Bums can’t tackle anything that smacks of the supernatural. In fact, Bums would hide under his desk if anybody so much as mentioned an Egyptian curse to him.” By pushing on the arms of the fat green chair, he got, wobbling some, to his feet. “However, if you’re going to be a stubborn, pigheaded—”

“Sit down, old man,” suggested Danvers. “Perhaps I’ve been a bit offensive. It is, I am told, an unfortunate habit of mine. I’m well aware of the excellent reputation of your father’s detective agency in matters of this—”

“We’re equal partners,” corrected Harry, settling back into the chair.

“Of course, forgive me.” Leaving his chair, Danvers moved toward a small claw-footed table that held a bottle of wine and four glasses. “Might I offer you a glass of sherry? I find it helps clear one’s head after any—”

“Nope.”

The professor’s office was large, lit by two hanging lamps and shadowy around the edges. It was oak-paneled and rich with wall cases that held Egyptian artifacts such as alabaster chalices, gold amulets, pendants of gold and turquoise, Canopic jars, and scarabs. Leaning against a wall was a gold-overlaid wooden coffin lid taken from a tomb.

After Professor Danvers poured himself a glass of sherry, he returned to his desk. “Now to the business at hand,” he said after sipping his wine.

“It involves a curse?”

“That I am not altogether certain of, old man,” said the Egyptologist. “Which is one reason why I sought the help of the Challenge International Detective Agency. As you may be aware, I was one of those leading an expedition to Egypt four years ago.”

“I’m aware of that, yeah,” said Harry. “You and your colleagues discovered the tomb of King Ibis the Second in the Valley of the Jackals. There was supposedly a curse that threatened anyone who defiled the tomb.”

Danvers nodded. “That’s a common factor associated with such excavations,” he said. “We thought little or nothing of it at the time. However, just a month ago, one of the six leaders of the Ibis the Second expedition was killed in a most gruesome manner. That was poor Sir Rodlow Coddington, who was found brutally stabbed in his town house in Bloomsbury—quite near to our museum. The motive, Scotland Yard decided, was burglary, since quite a few valuable pieces from the tomb of Ibis the Second were stolen.”

“How come Sir Rodlow had stuff like that around the house?” asked Harry. “Weren’t you fellows obliged to turn everything over to the museum here, since they financed the excavation?”

“We had a special agreement, which allowed all six of us to split up a small percentage of the findings.”

“Was there something specific in what he had that burglars might’ve been after? Or were they simply gathering loot?”

Danvers hesitated, sipped his sherry. Shaking his head, he answered, “No specific item, to the best of my knowledge.”

“Sir Rodlow isn’t the only one of the six who’s died,” said Challenge quietly.

Sighing, the professor said, “Only two weeks since Malcolm Tubridy, at seventy-four the oldest of our group, was bludgeoned to death at his country estate in Somerset near the village of Dowlish Wake. Again mostly artifacts from the tomb of Ibis the Second were stolen.”

“What’s Scotland Yard say about the second killing?”

“They believe, in both instances, that they’re dealing with a gang of art thieves, Challenge,” he answered. “As you may know, some of the more sensation-minded London newspapers have already suggested that the curse is to blame for the two deaths thus far. For myself, I am not at all certain.” He stood up again. “I would, I assure you, very much like to prevent further deaths—whatever their cause.”

Harry took out his cigar case, extracted one of the thin cigars he favored but did not light it. “I want names of the remaining members of your party and their addresses.”

From beneath an alabaster vase, Danvers slid a sheet of bond paper. “Here are the three others besides myself.”

“All of them reside in or near London,” said Challenge after studying the list. “Does Scotland Yard have men watching all of you?”

The professor replied, “They have not taken me into their confidence, Challenge. Nor am I certain that they believe that the rest of us are in danger.”

“I’ll talk to somebody I know at Scotland Yard and see what precautions they’re taking,” said the detective. “I can contact a local agency we work with and have them keep an eye on you fellows if need be.” He opened the cigar case again, put the stogie away. “You don’t actually believe there’s a curse, do you?”

“Frankly, I do not completely accept the notion,” admitted Professor Danvers. “Still, I’d like someone with your occult experience to make absolutely certain.”

“Outside of theft, what other reason can you think of for somebody murdering your friends?”

“I don’t know, Challenge,” said Danvers. “That’s why I’m paying the Challenge agency a nearly outrageous fee to find out exactly what’s afoot here.”

Harry folded the list of names twice, slipped it into the breast pocket of his coat. “Do you know anyone named Zuleika?”

Danvers frowned, eyes narrowing. “My wife, sir, happens to be named Zuleika.”

“No, I was thinking of a younger woman who might—”

“My second wife is considerably younger than I am,” he said evenly. “Why, may I ask, are you—”

“Nothing important.” He stood up. “Who did you tell you were hiring me?”

“Only my colleagues from the expedition.”

“Not your wife?”

“Certainly, since I believe in sharing my concerns with my wife. Are you implying that—”

“I’m implying that somebody knew I Was coming to call on you tonight.” He moved toward the oaken door of the office. “Somebody who apparently wanted to discourage me from working on this case.”

“Yes, that hadn’t occurred to me earlier,” he admitted. “I am, alas, at a loss to account for it.”

“That’s one more thing I’ll have to find out.” Harry grinned, very briefly, and took his leave of the professor and the museum.

The large poisonous snake had apparently grown restless. It came slithering out from under the four-poster canopy bed just after Harry tugged on his night shirt. It didn’t wait until he was in bed and asleep to attempt an attack.

Executing what was, considering the circumstances and the amount of massive furniture crowded into his second floor hotel room, a very graceful back flip, Harry put a greater distance between himself and the serpent.

From atop the heavy mahogany bureau he grabbed his .38 revolver and, half-turning, fired at the snake.

He missed and, producing, an annoyed hiss, the reptile slithered closer.

“Let’s do better this time,” Harry urged himself, firing again.

This time he successfully decapitated the snake.

“I say,” shouted the tenant of the room next to his, “it’s a bit late for that sort of thing, don’t you think, old man?”

Shrugging, Harry kept his pistol gripped in his hand and approached the remnants of the snake. “Looks like an imported viper,” he decided. “That indicates that somebody resourceful has taken an interest in doing me in.”

He was contemplating the dead creature when the balcony window snapped open, the heavy brocaded drapes flapped and fog came spilling in from the chill night outside.

Harry pivoted, his revolver aimed at the window.

“I have reason to believe, Mr. Challenge,” announced the handsome young woman who stepped in off the balcony, “that another attempt will be made on your life this evening.”

“In addition to the snake?”

She glanced down in the direction he was pointing with the barrel of his gun. “Ah, that’s the snake I was anticipating,” she said. “If my hansom cab hadn’t been overturned after a collision with a beer wagon, I’d have been here a good quarter of an hour ago.” She nodded her approval. “You’re apparently more competent than I had reason to believe.”

Harry refrained from mentioning that it had taken him two shots to dispatch the damned snake. After returning the gun to the bureau top, he put on a robe. “Why exactly are you trying to be my bodyguard, Mrs. Danvers?”

She pursed her Ups. “So you’re aware of my identity. I suppose,” said Zuleika Danvers, “that’s because you’re a detective.”

Harry seated himself in one of the bedroom’s several fat Morris chairs. “I heard your voice when you shot at that trio of louts near the museum,” he told her. “I heard those would-be assassins call you Zuleika and later your husband mentioned your name. How come those guys know you?”

Zuleika was a tall handsome woman in her late twenties. Blonde, with a Burne-Jones look, she was wearing riding breeches, boots, and a heavy mariner’s sweater. “That’s another reason why I wished to talk to you,” she said, sitting down on a candy-striped love seat.

Finding a thin cheroot in the pocket of his robe, Harry lit it. “You know more than your husband does about these murders,” he suggested, exhaling smoke.

“You ought not to smoke, Mr. Challenge,” said Zuleika. “Not only is it an offensive habit, but it undoubtedly affects your health.”

He ground out his cigar in a stoneware ashtray. “The murders?”

The handsome young woman looked directly at him, her hazel eyes bright. “My husband is a highly intelligent man, much respected in the field of Egyptology,” she began. “He is also, regrettably, nearly sixty years of age and far from his prime.”

“So, ma’am, this involves a younger fellow?”

Lowering her head, Zuleika sighed. “I fear that it does,” she admitted. “Although I was not aware of it when I began the affair, he is one of the most dangerous men in London. I would list him third, close on the heels of Professor Moriarty and then Dr. Grimshaw, in the ranks of criminal masterminds. Once I learned his true nature, I severed the relationship.”

“His name?”

In a lowered voice she answered, “Ambrose Winward, who passes himself off as a decadent illustrator in the manner of Aubrey Beardsley. In actuality he is a practitioner of the black arts as well as a thief and a murderer.”

“And you didn’t know this when you took up with the guy?”

“Alas, no. Have you heard of him?”

“Rumors only,” answered Harry. “He heads a secret organization called the Brotherhood of Anubis, an outfit that mixes worship of assorted ancient Egyptian gods with the execution of some fairly audacious crimes. The law hasn’t been able to bring Winward to book as yet.”

“Ambrose is cunning as well as, I must admit, charming.”

“Okay, so what has this got to do with the attacks on your husband’s cronies?”

Standing, the booted young woman began, as best she could in the cluttered bed chamber, to pace. “When Ambrose and I were still meeting secretly—all that ended nearly two months ago—he asked me to tell him many details of the King Ibis the Second expedition, which the professor had outlined to me in great and sometimes tedious detail.” She paused, resting a hand on the back of Harry’s fat chair. “Ambrose was very much interested in that expedition to the Valley of the Jackals. He was also gratified to hear that the six leaders of the excavation had kept some of the loot for themselves.”

“Loot in general or something specific?”

She replied, “Ambrose was, as I look back on it, most especially curious about a half dozen scarabs, each made of green jasper and set in gold.”

“Why?”

“He never specified the reason for his keen interest in them, Mr. Challenge.”

“Who ended up in possession of the scarabs?”

“Each of the six leaders took one.” She returned to the love seat. “I am very much afraid that Ambrose Winward is determined to possess all six of those Egyptian scarabs.”

“Or maybe he only wants one and doesn’t know which fellow has it,” he said, leaning forward in his chair. “Now explain how come you knew three thugs were going to jump me.”

She folded her hands in her lap, sighing again. “I met a disgruntled member of his Brotherhood of Anubis at a literary salon near Russell Square this afternoon and he revealed their plans to me, knowing that my husband had hired you.”

“Who exactly were those unsuccessful assassins?”

“I don’t believe, Mr. Challenge, that they meant to kill you—at least not until you shot one of them,” said Zuleika. “All three are members of a group that Ambrose uses to do his dirty work and unpleasant chores. They call themselves the Limehouse Assassins.”

“Any bunch that give themselves a name like that probably meant me no good from the start,” he told her. “How come one of them knew your name?”

“I met some of them, in their unmasked state, while attending some of Ambrose’s rather decadent parties at his London townhouse,” she said. “I’m not certain which one it was who recognized me.”

“What’s the name of the disgruntled fellow who tipped you off?”

“That will do you no good, since he was planning to take the boat train earlier this evening and is probably on his way to Calais by now.”

Harry rose up off his chair. “Looks as though I’ll have to gather up the rest of the scarabs myself before Ambrose and the Brotherhood of Anubis gets around to swiping the damn things.”

“You must be very careful,” she warned. “He’s an extremely dangerous man.”

“So am I,” Harry assured her.

Harry looked up from his breakfast coffee when a large cloud of pale green smoke rose up and engulfed the empty chair across the marble table from him.

This unexpected manifestation caused considerable murmuring, and some complaining, among the other guests enjoying breakfast at the surrounding tables in the hotel’s dome-lit restaurant.

“Good morning, Lorenzo,” said Harry, returning his attention to his cup of coffee.

As the smoke dissipated the portly form of the Great Lorenzo, clad in a nubby tweed suit and a deerstalker cap, could be discerned standing beside the chair.

The magician bowed to his left, then to his right. “The Great Lorenzo, appearing nightly at the Crown Royale Theatre,” he announced, fluffing his side whiskers. “Credited by all astute critics of the day as being the most amazing and baffling magician ever to grace the major stages in England and the Continent. Tickets still available for all of the remaining dozen performances.” He sat down.

“Deuced bad taste,” muttered the white-mustached, decidedly military old gentleman at a nearby table.

“Good morning, my boy.” Lorenzo plucked a scone from the silver serving dish. He gestured and a thick dab of marmalade appeared upon it. “You caused me a rather sleepless night.”

Picking up his fork, Harry turned his attention to the kipper upon his plate. “Another vision?”

The magician nodded. “I saw you trapped within an ancient pyramid,” he explained between bites of scone. “A large horde of voracious greenish beetles were making a meal of you.”

“Scarabs, huh?” Harry, thoughtfully, set his fork aside. “What else did you see?”

“As I’ve often stated, Harry, I make no claims as to the authenticity of my visions.” He wiped a scatter of crumbs from his whiskers. “However, I was next favored with the image of a longtime London acquaintance of mine, the illustrious Madame Tandofsky.”

“That fat lady who’s been working the fake spiritualist dodge over in a flat near the Embankment?”

“Rebecca Tandofsky is a very respectable charlatan,” the magician said in her defense. “The point of this particular premonition is, I truly conclude, that she is also an extremely erudite scholar of the occult arts.”

“So?”

“As I tossed and turned in my bed—or rather the bed of a by-this-time moderately annoyed duchess—as I tossed and turned, a voice spoke to me.”

“The duchess’s husband?”

His narrowed left eye and scornful expression indicated what Lorenzo thought of Harry’s remark. “This voice told me, quite distinctly, ‘Madame Tandofsky can reveal to Harry Challenge the secret of the scarab.’” He leaned back in his chair, smiling. “Am I correct in imagining that this mysterious nocturnal message from beyond may possibly have some meaning to you?”

“Your hunches have been helpful in the past,” he said. “Including the stuff about assassins last night.”

“Ah, I was wondering about that. Tell me what—”

“Eventually,” promised Harry. “First, though, yeah, I am interested in a bunch of scarabs. They tie in with this new case.”

The Great Lorenzo smiled again. “Judging that such might well be the case, my boy, I telephoned Rebecca and arranged for us to call on the gifted lady at one o’clock this very day,” he informed Harry. “Does that meet with your approval?”

“It does,” Harry said.

“I am very fond,” said Madame Tandofsky, “of owls.”

“So I suspected.” Harry seated himself in one of the bentwood chairs in the medium’s jasmine-scented parlor.

Atop the dark wood bookcases that covered two of the shadowy room’s walls sat eleven owls. At least ten of them, Harry estimated, were stuffed.

Lorenzo, after patting the heavyset Madame Tandofsky fondly on the shoulder, settled onto a purple ottoman. “You are looking, Rebecca, as fetching as usual.”

“I’ve gained another three stone since last we met, Renzo,” she said. “But then, there are those who find fat ladies fetching.” She weighed close to two hundred and fifty pounds and was wearing a voluminous, shapeless gown of dark velvet along with a rather dusty headdress composed of bedraggled peacock feathers and one yellowed ostrich plume.

“True, you’re not exactly svelte, dear lady, and yet—”

“Since you’re Renzo’s friend, Challenge, I’ll only charge you double my usual fee.” The padded rocker she filled creaked and quivered when she turned toward Harry.

“She usually charges three times her mediumistic fee for occult research,” explained the magician.

“Two guineas.” She extended a pudgy palm toward Harry.

Fishing coins out of his vest pocket, he leaned across the deal table to deposit them in her hand. “What can you tell me about the six scarabs found in the tomb of—”

“The sacred scarabs of King Ibis the Second, ah yes.” She held out her other hand. “Renzo, my dear.”

Rising from the ottoman, the magician helped the large medium get to her feet. “At your service, dear lady.”

Waddling slightly, the hem of her dark gown brushing at the faded Persian carpet, she made her way to one of the bookcases. “Are you still feeling peaked, Oskar?”

The third owl from the left made a raspy hooting noise, fluttering his wings.

“Oskar, I fear, is suffering from the pip.” Madame Tandofsky, grunting some, tugged a thick, leather-bound book from a shelf, sending motes of dust spinning.

The owl sneezed.

Wheezing a bit, the medium returned to her rocker and set the book on the wobbly table in front of her. “This is the infamous suppressed edition of Count Monstrodamus’s The Vile Art of Dark Sorcery & How to Apply It to Great Advantage Without the Risk of Eternal Damnation. All save three copies of the first edition were burned over two centuries ago at the order of the then-Pope.” When Madame Tandofsky patted the book, dust rose up from its cover. “For untold centuries, long, long before the sacred resting place of Ibis the Second was defiled, it was known among certain adepts that one of the half dozen carved beetles buried with him was the key to a significant mystical secret. This scarab came to be known in sorcery circles as the Blazing Scarab and it is said to bestow the gift of eternal life on whomsoever uses it in the proper manner.”

Harry was skeptical. “Why didn’t Ibis the Second use it for himself?”

“He already believed he was going on to glory, to the Egyptian equivalent thereof,” she answered. “If, as dear Renzo informed me, that black-hearted scoundrel Ambrose Winward is gathering together the scarabs, it can only mean he knows that one of them must be the fabled Blazing Scarab.”

“Why’s it called blazing?”

She grunted again in opening the book of sorcery. Finding the page she sought, wheezing more pronouncedly, Madame Tandofsky poked a pudgy finger at the paragraph on the foxed page. “When the proper scarab of the six is inserted into a certain spot upon the lid of the sarcophagus of King Ibis the Second, it will glow with an intense crimson flame. That’s according to the nefarious Count Monstrodamus, who, keep in mind, Challenge, had nothing in the way of firsthand knowledge in this matter. After the scarab flares crimson, a secret compartment in the lid will slide open to reveal a parchment upon which will be found the secret of eternal life.”

Rubbing his hands together, Lorenzo observed, “Perhaps I can incorporate something like this into an amazing illusion. ‘For the first time on any stage in the entire world, the Blazing Scarab Illusion, which—’”

“Is there any way,” Harry asked the medium, “to tell which scarab is the right one?”

She shook her head. “Only by placing it in this proper slot,” she replied, pointing to a wood engraving on the page of the ancient book. “They are otherwise identical and that is why Winward is gathering up the entire half dozen of the things.”

Getting up from his chair, Harry studied the drawing. “I intend to gather the rest of them ahead of Winward.”

She gave him a sympathetic glance. “Opposing him will be very dangerous, young man,” she warned.

“Even so,” he said.

Things went fairly smoothly until Harry arrived to collect the fourth and last of the remaining scarabs. It was the evening of the day of his illuminating visit to Madame Tandofsky. Rain was falling heavily as the hansom cab dropped him off in front of the three-story stone house in the small square off Euston Road.

He went sprinting across the sidewalk toward the wrought-iron gate that guarded the grounds surrounding the home of Sir Nigel Marshwood. Chained to his left wrist was a venerable attache case holding the three other scarabs that he had, with the help of letters and phone calls from Professor Danvers, already gathered up today.

The black gate hung partially open, creaking slightly as the rain-laden wind brushed at it.

Slowing, Harry approached the front steps more cautiously.

The heavy carved oaken door was partially open. The pale gaslight from the wall lamps in the corridor beyond spilled out to illuminate a constable’s helmet that had fallen on its side atop the worn welcome mat.

Sliding his .38 from his shoulder holster, Harry moved carefully up the wide brick steps.

Above the sound of the heavy night rain hitting on the gabled roofs of Sir Nigel’s house, Harry became aware of a low moaning.

When he reached the topmost step, he stood listening. He heard another, weaker, moan from within the house.

He booted the door open, then pressed back against the porch wall.

Harry allowed nearly a half minute to pass before he ventured across the threshold into the carpeted corridor.

Blotching the sylvan carpet designs were several fresh muddy footprints. They led along the empty corridor toward the open door of the dark-paneled study.

Inside the gas-lit room, sprawled on the thick carpet, was the body of a gaunt man. He was face down, in his fifties, bald, wearing a silk smoking jacket.

This was, judging by the description he’d been given by his client, the body of Sir Nigel Marshwood. There were two exit wounds in his back and he’d apparently died while Harry was making his way along the hall.

Books had been swept from shelves. A large glass case, its top smashed, lay on its side near the corpse of the Egyptologist.

Straightening up after kneeling beside the remains of Sir Nigel, Harry said aloud, “Looks like they got themselves another scarab. But at least I have three of the damned things.”

“Not for long, old chap,” observed the hooded man who appeared in the study doorway.

Harry grinned. “One of the Limehouse Assassins, I presume.”

The thickset man gestured with the Luger in his gloved left hand. “Drop your gun down beside the dear departed, Challenge, and back up against the bookcase, if you please.”

Harry didn’t comply.

Instead, he dived suddenly toward the right, the attached attache case flipping out to knock a three-foot high alabaster statue of Osiris off its stand. Harry fired at the hooded assassin while he was midway between his upright position and the floor.

His slug caught the man in the left arm. The man’s gloved fingers went splaying out. The Luger dropped, hitting the fallen display case and shattering more of its glass panels.

Harry rose, his gun aimed at the wounded man. “Looks like my collection of scarabs,” he said, “is going to grow by one more.”

“I don’t believe,” said Sir Lionel Danvers, “that you’ve met my wife, Challenge.”

“I haven’t, nope,” lied Harry as he unchained the attache case from his wrist. He set it upon a workbench in the center of the large, lofty work room of the London Museum of Egyptology. “A pleasure, Lady Danvers.”

Wearing an opened dark cloak over an off-white and low-cut evening gown, the young woman was standing beside the ornate quartzite sarcophagus of King Ibis II that rested on a sturdy pine pallet. “It’s a pity,” she said, “that you weren’t able to gather together the entire six scarabs, Mr. Challenge.”

Danvers cleared his throat. “I took the liberty,” he said, “of telling Zuleika your theory that one of the half dozen scarabs we found in the tomb might be the allegedly magical Blazing Scarab.”

Opening the attache case, Harry extracted the chamois pouch that contained the four scarabs he’d spent the day collecting. “If we’re lucky, one of these may be the right one,” he said. “And it’s not my theory, but that of an alleged sorcerer who called himself Count Monstrodamus. Others apparently believe in the notion or they wouldn’t have been after the scarabs.”

“You have no idea,” asked the professor, “who’s been murdering my colleagues and committing the thefts?”

Harry shook the scarabs out of the bag into his hand. “Some notions, but no proof as yet,” he answered. “But the Limehouse Assassin I caught at Sir Nigel’s may eventually provide an answer. He’s being detained by Scotland Yard at the moment, though not yet in a talkative mood.”

“Dreadful that poor Nigel was also murdered,” said Danvers, sighing. “Bit of a bore, but otherwise a very decent chap.”

“The assassin slugged the constable who was keeping an eye on the place, trussed him up and tossed him in the shrubbery,” said Harry, approaching the sarcophagus with the quartet of beetles clutched in his fist. “We found the butler in a similar state in the parlor and I found the fourth scarab in the lout’s waistcoat pocket, along with a cheap watch.”

“So much death,” said Zuleika quietly, backing away from the sarcophagus. “It causes one to believe there may well have been a curse in effect.” She stopped in the shadows near two upright wooden mummy cases that were propped against the buff-colored wall.

Engraved on the lid of the sarcophagus were two hawks, facing each other, beaks almost touching. Between the tips of the beaks was a concavity the size of a scarab. “According to the engraving in the count’s account,” explained Harry, “this is where the Blazing Scarab has to be inserted in order to do its job.”

“On with it, young man, try them out,” urged Professor Danvers, moving closer to him.

Selecting one, Harry fit it in the depression.

Nothing happened.

After waiting a full minute, he pried it free and auditioned a second green jasper beetle.

Again nothing happened.

“Perhaps,” commented Danvers, “this is all nonsense.”

“Perhaps, yeah.” Harry tested the third scarab.

The heavy sarcophagus lid produced a faint grating sound.

Then, dimly at the outset, the scarab began to glow. It turned from green to red, flaring more brightly.

“Jove, the Blazing Scarab,” exclaimed Professor Danvers in an awed whisper.

The sarcophagus rattled, made a chattering noise, and then a small ornamental panel, also inscribed with two hawks, popped open.

“That’s it.” Harry reached toward the emerging compartment.

“This, I very much fear, is going to be awfully frustrating for you, Challenge. But then, anticipation is often much more pleasing than gratification.” One of the gilded mummy cases had swung open with a whining creak and a tall, pale, moderately overweight man of about forty, built roughly along the lines of Oscar Wilde, stepped into the workshop. He held an ornately filigreed dueling pistol grasped in his hand.

“It’s Winward,” gasped Zuleika, bringing her hand up to her pale cheek.

“This is the fellow who’s been gathering scarabs,” said Harry, his hand poised near the compartment.

“I’ve read of him.” Danvers scowled at the intruder. “He’s a wastrel and a decadent reprobate.”

“Yes, the newspapers do tend to flatter me.” Winward waved Harry back from the sarcophagus with his gun hand. “In actuality, dear professor, I am a satanic sorcerer and vicious master criminal.”

“And a second-rate artist,” added Harry, backing a few paces.

“That good, do you think?” Winward’s pleased smile broadened. “Now then, Challenge, old man, if you’ll move even farther away, I’ll collect the papyrus that I’ve been seeking. I must admit that I’m rather eager to learn the secret of eternal life.”

Professor Danvers asked, “You killed three men for that?”

“I’m merely following one of the basic principles of our imperialist British diplomatic policy,” Winward pointed out, easing closer to the sarcophagus. “You kill a batch of your inferiors so that you yourself may thrive.”

Gun aimed at Harry, Winward thrust his free hand into the open stone compartment. “Once I decipher this ancient…damme!”

He yanked back his pale, plump hand, grimacing, shaking it violently. The tip of his forefinger was bleeding.

“A poisoned needle, I’ll wager,” said the professor.

Windward turned to him. “One of the few occasions when you’ve ever been right about…” He shuddered, swayed, fell against the sarcophagus and then dropped to the parquet floor where his body twitched for about ten seconds. The fallen dueling pistol had gone skittering toward Zuleika.

She ran to the fallen man, cloak swirling. “Ambrose,” she said, genuflecting beside him.

Kneeling next to her, Harry reached out to take hold of Winward’s wrist. “No pulse,” he said, standing up. “I’ll go to your office, professor, and use the telephone to summon the police.”

Very carefully, Danvers crouched and squinted into the compartment. “This is totally empty,” he said. “If there ever was a document inside, it was removed centuries ago and the poisoned needle installed.”

“There’s probably a lesson here for us all.” Harry crossed to the doorway.

As he started down the shadowy museum hallway, he heard the professor ask his wife, “How is that you addressed this scoundrel by his first name, my dear?”

REINVENTING CARL HOBBS, by James Glass

Originally published in Analog, April 2005.

The limo swerved left out of the traffic pattern at level four and descended rapidly. Melody didn’t react to the sudden move, but Tom Lesko gasped and clutched at his stomach. Twenty hours on high alert was beginning to tell on him, she thought.

“You’re not going to get sick on me, are you?” Melody uncrossed her long legs and pushed herself deeper into the cushioned seat, but in the confinement of armrests and a protruding wet bar their knees were almost touching.

“Not funny,” said Tom. “I’m paid to take death-threats seriously, even if you don’t.”

“That’s why I have Carl, and he can do the worrying without getting an ulcer over it. Relax, Tom; try to have some fun tonight.”

“You have the fun. I’ll watch The Property,” said Tom, and frowned at something he was hearing from the tiny receiver in his ear.

Melody laughed. “That’s me. The Property. Global couldn’t survive a week without me.”

“That’s more true than you realize,” said Tom. “Bring up your glamorous self, now. We’re coming in. There’s one aisle through the crowd. Take Carl’s left arm, and my right. No autographs. We’re going straight inside.”

“Yes, sir,” she said, giving a mock salute that drew the hint of a smile from him. “I hear and obey, sir.”

“That’ll be the day I relax,” said Tom.

The limo swerved again, and slowed. Through tinted polymer, Melody could barely see the theater below, and the crowd of expectant fans packed at the entrance. Laser beams scribed pulsating patterns on the surrounding towers of steel and glass, and ‘Ariel’s Vision’ was lit up in meter-high letters on the theater’s marquee. All the opening-night ceremonies she’d attended, and it was still a thrill for her. For the moment it was easy for her to forget that among her countless fans out there, one did not wish her well tonight, or any other night. One wished only to share in the experience of her death.

They descended straight down, outside the traffic patterns of levels three and two. Laser beams found them and played over the descending car. A sea of faces looked up, sprouting a forest of waving arms.

“Ariel’s theme kicks in the second you get out of the car. Try to look like you’re in love,” said Tom.

Ariel’s theme, from the love scene with Ariel and Nathan, their flawless white bodies entwined on a beach of black sand. Melody had gone deeply into her artistic soul to find the love, the agonizing want and passion for the scene, the synaptic multiplexer in her skull behind her left ear processing the data for narrow band transmission to the recorder for later multiplexing with the music on the sound track. Low to high frequency, passion to fear, the subliminal modulations were received by the viewing audience, inducing in them the same feelings and emotions experienced by the artist during her performance.

Melody Lane was a strikingly beautiful woman, but it was not beauty that made her the number one Holostar of Global Studios. It was the depth and intensity of her soul.

The limo touched down with a bump. Even in her sealed compartment, Melody could hear the screams outside. She thought of her lover, a faceless man in dreams. She sighed, and reached for the door.

“Wait for Carl,” said Tom. “Let him take your hand.”

Melody started to pull back her hand, but then the limo door was opened from outside. The sudden noise was deafening, and she squinted in the light. A black-gloved hand reached for her; she took it gently, and exited the limo. Carl Hobbs stood tall beside her, his plastic face shining brightly in the lights, dark glasses masking the stare of his huge eyes. He smelled like warm polymer and cutting oil, and his arm was hard as stone when she grasped it.

Tom Lesko exited right behind her, and Melody hugged his arm, smiling serenely as the sound of Ariel’s theme burst forth from speakers above the entrance to the theater.

People screamed, and wept. Bodies strained against thick ropes bordering the red carpet leading into the theater. Police stationed along the way pushed them back. Carl moved quickly, pulling Melody and Tom into a near trot. Misha and Andrus, her human bodyguards, were right behind them, were never more than a few feet away when Melody was in public. Dressed in tuxedos, they still looked like thugs.

* * * *

Hands reached out to her. She smiled back, but couldn’t see faces in the bright lights. Ahead of her there was a scuffle. Someone had broken through the rope barrier, a young man in baggy pants and a loose-fitting woolen shirt. A policeman grabbed for him, but missed. The man sprinted towards her, holding out something sparkling with colors in his hand. His eyes seemed glazed, and his mouth hung open in a crazy grin.

“Carl,” said Melody Lane.

Carl’s right hand shot out like a piston and hit the man in the throat. The man fell heavily at Melody’s feet, gurgling. The thing in his hand bounced once and came to rest. It was an artist’s paperweight, filled with swirling colors.

Misha and Andrus hauled him roughly to his feet. The man coughed hard, his face tinted blue. He looked at Melody with the saddest eyes she’d ever seen, and pointed at the colorful glass at her feet. “I just wanted to give you a gift,” he croaked, “but they won’t let anyone get near you.”

Tom leaned over and picked up the paperweight as police pulled the man to one side. He caught the man’s eye and gestured to show the gift was received.

Carl pulled them ahead again, but Tom pulled back.

“God damn it, Carl, slow down! Do you realize what a mess you’ve just made?”

“He was protecting me, Tom.”

“By striking an over-zealous fan in the throat? You’ve violated a fundamental principle, Carl, and you’re supposed to be better than that. I want you in my office for assessment tomorrow morning.”

Carl was mute. They entered the theater: plush red carpet, a crystal chandelier hanging from a high dome ceiling, a wide staircase leading up to balcony level. People rushed towards them: producers, directors and a few of Melody’s peers. Melody felt a shiver pass through Carl’s arm. She looked up at him, saw his mouth opening and closing without sound. His entire body began to shake.

“Oh, no,” said Melody.

Tom took one look, and rolled his eyes. “Shit,” he said softly.

Melody went up the stairs to her balcony seat with Misha as her escort. Unlike Carl, Misha’s arm was warm, and though muscular, had the tell-tale elasticity of human flesh.

Tom stayed behind long enough to be sure Carl was loaded safely into a van for transport to Shutz Fabrik, where early the next morning he was cleared of a crippling logic loop and rebooted for further service.

* * * *

“Why don’t you stop defending him?” asked Tom.

“And why don’t you stop trying to tell me what to do?” said Melody. “You’re my manager. You manage my business, not my personal life.”

“Sorry. I just don’t understand your patience. You certainly don’t have any with me.”

“You’re human. No excuses for you. Carl is limited by his program, and his logic isn’t fuzzy enough. They’ve made him too rigid. A good AI learns from mistakes, and Carl seems to break down every time he makes one. It’s like he’s continually anxious, and every mistake pushes him over the edge.”

“So now you’re an expert on artificial intelligence.”

“Why not? Being an actress doesn’t make me stupid. I think I can help him.”

“How? Why?”

“I like having my own AI, Tom. I feel safe with him, and he’s not demanding or too familiar like Misha and Andrus. I can talk to him. Input, you know. Let him know it’s okay to make a mistake. For a moment last night I was really scared, Tom, and that’s what triggered him. The error he made could have been made by any human under the same circumstances.”

“You have scripts to read and another shoot in three weeks. Let Shutz Fabrik do the work with Carl.”

Melody glared at him. “You weren’t listening to me a minute ago. I want Carl assigned to my suite. I’ve caught Misha and Andrus asleep three times now. If my stalker shows up, I want someone awake to defend me.”

“We don’t know you’re being stalked. Someone’s just sending you threatening letters.”

“It’s more than that. I can feel it. There are times I’m alone, and I know I’m being watched. I keep waiting for someone to jump out at me from any closed door. I know it sounds stupid, but the feeling is real.”

“Sounds more dramatic than stupid,” said Tom, and immediately regretted it.

Melody’s eyes narrowed to slits. “You work for me, Tom. Either get Shutz to assign Carl for duty in my suite, or find yourself another job. I want him to carry out any voice command I give, and I want to be able to teach him. Is that dramatic enough for you?”

“Clear enough,” said Tom. “I’ll get on it.”

“What are you smiling at?”

Tom grinned. “Oh, I just get a kick out of dealing with strong-willed women. I’ll have Shutz Fabrik call you by this evening and tell you when Carl will be ready.”

“It had better be soon,” said Melody.

And it was, for that evening she received another threatening letter.

* * * *

Misha and Andrus were not happy with the new arrangement. “What happens if he freezes up again, or goes nuts? He could kill you with a single squeeze before we can react,” said Misha.

“I’m willing to take that chance,” said Melody.

“If he attacks you I’ll blow his head off, and I won’t wait for your permission to do it.”

“Fair enough,” said Melody, but shuddered at the look in Misha’s eyes. She could not question his loyalty, only his competence.

Now, in the quiet of her suite, she felt safe again. The suite covered half of the twentieth floor of the Globus building, and looked out at the ocean. Up the beach, the Santa Monica shopping ring looped far out to sea. The walls and furniture were in beige, and lit by full spectrum tubes in ceiling panels to supplement the sunlight even in daytime. Melody snuggled in deep pillows on a sofa, a pile of scripts in her lap, a few placed to one side, many scattered on the floor after her rejection. Misha and Andrus patrolled the outside hallway while Carl made random rounds inside the suite. He moved silently, but always there was the odor of warm polymer and cutting oil in his presence. Melody looked up as he entered the room to check the sliding doors to the balcony.

“Talk to me, Carl. I’m tired of reading these things. Most of them are awful.”

“One moment, Melody,” said Carl, his voice a soothing and mellow baritone. He checked the balcony, the area above and below it, then closed the doors and sat down stiffly in a plush chair facing her. “What do you want to talk about today?” he asked. His mouth moved out of synch with his words, and without his dark glasses on, his large fisheye lenses made him look even more artificial.

“You,” said Melody.

“Will you teach me today?”

“Maybe. Are you happy here, Carl?”

“Happy? I am fulfilled by my tasks.”

“And how are you rewarded for that?” Melody put down the script she’d been reading, and cupped her chin in one hand.

“My reward is the completion of a task. There is a reset pulse, and it modulates my powerpac. I am energized.”

“Clever,” said Melody. “With humans it’s biochemicals that affect parts of the brain to produce pleasurable sensations. Do you want to be more human, Carl?”

“That is one of my tasks. I learn by watching humans react to stimuli; I copy their average behavior for a given circumstance.”

“There’s a wide variety of human reactions. What happens when you choose the wrong one, when your reaction is not appropriate? I really want to know what happened to you at the theater the other night, when you hit that man who tried to give me a gift.”

“That was an error in perception. My task was to protect you, Melody, but you were not in danger. I injured a human without reason. When I paused to correct the error there was no way to accomplish it and undo the injury I’d caused. I was caught in a logic loop for all processors simultaneously, and my task was not ended.”

“You reacted hastily, perhaps, but you did protect me, Carl. That man was coming at me fast, and I was frightened. His behavior brought about his injury, not you. Your response was basically correct.”

“Mister Lesko pointed out my error instantly. He was my human control at the time, and his opinion overrode my own.”

“He was wrong, and now I’m your control. If you want to be more human you must be willing to tolerate mistakes you make, and learn from them. Rules are not cast in stone, Carl. If I’m threatened I want your response instantly. I do not want you worrying about hurting someone.”

“You are frightened again. I can see it in your eyes, and the wrinkles in your brow.”

“I’m an actress. I let my emotions show. If you can read my face you can learn my feelings the same way my audience does, by watching and listening to my performances. I want you to do that, a little each day. I’ll sit with you.”

“This is important to you,” said Carl, a statement, not a question.

“Yes, it is,” said Melody. “I want to make you better than you are. I want you to be more human.”

* * * *

Their routine was unbroken for two weeks, but then there was one frightening afternoon when Carl was picked up by a Shutz Fabrik van for upgrades ordered by Melody herself. The hard plastic of his face was to be replaced by soft polymer, and new lenses installed to get rid of his bug-eyed look. The work was routine, though expensive, and he was gone only five hours, but when he returned he found the hallway filled with police, and Melody was curled up in a little ball on her bed, crying softly. She reached out and held his hand when he stood by her bed, and she was suddenly calm.

“I was reading scripts, and something struck the door. I went to it, saw an envelope pushed beneath the door, a shadow moving. I called out, but nobody answered. It wasn’t like the other letters, Carl. Those were full of sexual fantasies. This one describes how he wants to kill me, and soon. I was scared, then mad. I screamed until Misha and Andrus came. I’m afraid I called them some very bad names, and now I feel badly about it.”

So yet another letter had been hand-delivered, slipped under her door in broad daylight. Talking to the police, Carl learned that whoever had delivered it had gained roof access to the elevator shaft and a service tunnel and dropped into the hall from an air return vent while Misha and Andrus were checking out the arrival of an empty elevator from ground floor. It had all happened in less than a minute.

Tom Lesko had been called, but had not yet arrived. Carl returned to Melody, and sat down on the edge of the bed when she ordered it. She clung to him like a little child.

“Whoever it was knew I was away,” he said. “You should not send me away for any reason, Melody. The person must be watching you.”

“He even knows what I wear to bed,” sobbed Melody. “He says I should wear the purple teddy when he comes for me. He wants to have sex, and then watch my face while he slowly strangles me. Do you understand what I’m saying, Carl?”

“Yes.” Carl stroked her hair with hard, stiff fingers. “He must be found by others. I will protect you. No human is as strong or quick as I. You’ll feel better after you sleep, that thing you do when your eyes close at night. Sometimes your eyes move, and you say things. I have watched.”

“I dream,” said Melody. “It’s a human way of reorganizing memories, analyzing things, sort of recreating myself each night. Tonight my dreams could be bad. If you’re not in this room with me tonight I won’t be able to sleep.”

“I’ll be here,” said Carl.

Melody was more composed a few minutes later when Tom Lesko arrived, but felt even better after he held her hands and gushed over her. He even said something nice to Carl.

“What happened here was not your fault,” he said.

“I know,” said Carl. “The fault is in trusting humans to protect her.”

Tom smiled. “How human of you, Carl. Arrogance is a human trait, but I think you’ll have to share the responsibility for Melody’s safety.”

Tom turned to Melody. “You seem to be giving him a lot of freedom, dear.”

“Maybe he needs even more. Misha and Andrus keep slipping up. That’s four times, now. All it seems to take is a small distraction to make their attention wander.”

“I understand your feeling, but I still want you to keep a leash on your personal bodyguard here. I don’t want another person hurt without reason. I was lucky to keep the last incident out of the press.”

“I see,” said Melody. “It’s okay, then, if I’m murdered in my bed.”

Tom leaned close and softly said, “We don’t really have to worry about that, do we. This is a terror campaign being waged by a demented fan. He could have broken in here, but didn’t.”

“He didn’t have the time. Some night he will, and we’ll be waiting for him. I’m tired of this conversation, Tom. I want to go to sleep. See Mister Lesko out, Carl, and come back here.”

There was no arguing with her when she was like this. Tom gave up without a fight, allowed Carl to escort him out of the suite. Once outside he ordered Misha and Andrus to remain seated by the double doors to the suite, and talked to the police, who’d found nothing useful in their investigation. There was only the grate popped out of the hallway ceiling, and the letter under the door. Nothing else. The occupants of the suites across the hall from Melody’s had not been home at the time. It bothered Tom that those suites had not been searched, but a police sergeant assured him they would be as soon as the owners returned and gave their permission. He was also bothered by the sloppy work of Misha and Andrus. Before leaving, he told both of them that one more letter would cost them their jobs. Neither man seemed to be bothered by his remarks, and he vowed to have them replaced within the week.

Back in her bedroom, Melody began to relax again. Carl stood in the doorway. In low light, his new eyes and face made him look almost human. “My protector,” she said, and smiled.

“Yes,” said Carl.

Melody yawned, and stretched. “I want to have nice dreams tonight, Carl. This has been a terrible day.”

“I’ll be right here until you sleep,” he said.

Her eyes were already closed, and he felt her slip away, her brain still active, but going into a different state to reorganize and refresh. He’d watched her do this many times. She’d even given him a soundtrack made just for him, sweetly modulated sound allowing him to follow her into slumber. Once there, a part of her mind moved in random fashion, flitting here and there, while another part remained totally awake and ready for instant response to stimuli. Carl was amazed by the mix, but had been so far unable to duplicate it for himself. Melody’s patient teaching had brought him to a point where, a few minutes each day, he would lie down and consciously shut out all visual and audio stimuli to review the events of the day, positives and negatives, and then build alternative scenarios to better fit his assigned tasks. The change had been gradual, but he felt it. It was as if, a few minutes each day, he was reinventing himself.

Melody’s breathing was now slow and deep. Carl pondered the day’s events, but remained alert. Something wasn’t right. Something wasn’t the way it seemed. He’d built several scenarios for the delivery of the threatening letter, and one of them disturbed him deeply. If true, it could mean that Melody was still in immediate danger.

Carl did not do his usual random checks of the suite that night. Instead, he stationed himself in a dark corner of the front room and near the double-door entrance.

He did not have to wait long for something to happen.

* * * *

It was after dark when the police left.

Misha and Andrus remained at their station by the doors for about an hour, and then began wandering the halls again. Their attention spans seemed quite short, even by human standards. They spoke softly, but Carl’s hearing was acute. Still, they were often far enough away to exceed his audio detection limit.

The elevator came and went several times, and he heard a door open and close twice, but otherwise there was only Misha and Andrus engaged in inane conversation, and not paying attention to their duties.

Well after midnight it was suddenly silent outside the suite, but only for a while. Minutes later, Carl could hear snoring; Melody’s human guards were asleep again, and impotent. He resisted the temptation to go outside and awake them in a frightening way, not to injure them but to encourage their wakefulness. They were, after all, Melody’s first line of defense.

Sometime later, in the darkness of his corner, Carl heard a faint thud, and felt a transient vibration in the floor. There was a sustained scuffing sound after that, and then the elevator arrived, a sharp note signaling the opening of the doors. The doors closed, and there was the whine of the motor running the elevator. Silence again, then a scraping, ripping sound, metal on metal. Carl left his corner, took several steps towards the doors and listened again.

More scuffing sounds, something hard dragging on the carpet outside. Something rattled metallically, and then there was a distant tone as if a great bell had been struck, a hollow sound with overtones, fading quickly. Carl stepped up to one side of the doors, his audio sensitivity ramped to maximum.

At first there was nothing, though he continued to sense weak, transient vibrations in the floor. Suddenly there was a scratching sound from low on the doors, and then a soft moan. A human moan. Carl felt a single shock pass through the floor, and reached for the door latch, his left arm cocked and ready to deliver a lethal blow.

Nobody was there. The chairs by the doors were empty. The long hallway was empty. The doors to the elevator were open, but it was dark inside, and someone had ripped the air-return grate again from the ceiling and thrown it against a wall, damaging the wallpaper there.

Carl stepped outside, closed and locked the doors behind him. There was a red spot on the carpet by the doors, and two faint grooves in the fabric ran off towards the elevator. He followed them, nanoscale parallel processors busily building scenarios in his head as he noted his surroundings.

He even noticed that the door to the suite nearest the elevator was slightly ajar, but a sound ahead suddenly distracted him.

Three feet from the open elevator doors he realized the elevator wasn’t there; he was looking into the open shaft at the black cables supporting the elevator somewhere below. He peered over the edge. The elevator cab was far below him, probably at ground level. There was a click behind him; he started to turn around.

Something heavy slammed into him, knocking him headlong into the elevator shaft. His arms and legs flailed wildly. In the six seconds of his fall, his brain reviewed nine different scenarios of what was happening now, and could happen soon. He chose one as his right hand caught a cable and squeezed. The only variable left was the identity of Melody’s assailant. His hand crushed down on the cable, slowing him rapidly, but he crashed onto the top of the elevator car with considerable force.

A body was there, a human body, crushed and broken by a long fall. It was Andrus.

Carl dropped through the trapdoor in the ceiling of the elevator, found the controls smashed, and pried open the doors in one move with his hands. A few people waiting in the lobby jumped back in terror at the sight and sound of ripped and torn metal as he sprinted away towards the staircase.

* * * *

Melody heard a sound, and was instantly awake. “Carl?” she asked, but there was no answer. It was cold when she got out of bed in her underclothes. She went to the closet, slipped into a silk robe and heard the front door open and close.

“I’m up, Carl. What’s going on?”

Still no answer, but Carl often waited to reply when he was finishing a task. Melody pulled up her hair and tied it into a tail as she walked out into the front room. “I heard a noise,” she said.

She was two steps into the room when someone grabbed her roughly from behind, a strong arm encircling her and a hand clamping down tightly over her mouth. The man’s breath was hot in her ear.

“Your boyfriend is gone, and he ain’t coming back. Time to party, bitch. Let’s see if you’re wearin’ that purple thing I like so much.”

Melody twisted, tried to drop out of Misha’s grasp, but he pulled her up again, her feet leaving the floor and banging ineffectually against his massive legs. He grabbed her right wrist, twisted her around and tried to pull her right arm up behind her, but the arm wouldn’t move for him. “Stronger than you look,” he said. “This’ll be more fun than I thought.” He lifted her again, and began backing towards the bedroom.

Melody the actress moaned, and let herself go limp. As they reached the bedroom doorway, Misha’s grip slackened for an instant as he began to change his hold on her. She suddenly kicked backwards off the door jamb and slammed him into a bedpost, twisted away and sprinted towards the front room. He caught up with her halfway to the doors, and grabbed her by the hair, jerking her back so hard her skullcap came loose and she was dangling from his hand by a thin sheet of polymer.

“What’s this?” asked Misha. “What the fuck is this?”

The doors shattered into a thousand splinters as Carl came through them. And in the last second of his life, Misha seemed astonished by the sight of him. Carl caught him by the throat, swept him up in a high arc and slammed him head first into the floor.

Melody sobbed, and clutched at the back of her head. Carl stepped up to her, put one hand on her shoulder, the other touching the long tail of dangling hair at her back.

“I know, Melody. I know,” he said. “I’ve always known.”

* * * *

“It looks like he was trying to set up Andrus as the killer,” said Tom. “The drug ampoule we found was probably meant for Misha. We’d find him stoned out of his mind, and Carl with Andrus. He was willing to give up a profession to get at Melody. Guy was a deranged woman hater for sure. I don’t think his story would have held up.”

Carl sat close by Melody on the couch. “Do the police know about Melody, about her—?”

“No need for that, Carl. The guy’s intent was murder. That makes it justifiable homicide. Melody and Nathan are Global Studios’ best kept secrets, and we’re not about to change that. If the press didn’t know you’re an AI I bet I could get you a part in Melody’s next film.” Tom smiled. “You two look like a couple, sitting there.”

“Two peas in a pod,” said Melody, and Carl looked at her.

“We’re alike,” she said. “You know, I would have taught you differently if I’d realized you knew about me.”

“I had to tell him,” said Tom. “Had to keep the pecking order straight, but it amazes me how quickly he picked up on your obstinacy.”

“You love my obstinacy; it makes me more human, you said.” Melody paused, then, “Tom, I want Carl to stay with me.”

“I want that too,” said Carl.

“Fine with me,” said Tom. “I’m not even surprised. Let’s see how far you can develop together, how human you can really become. Just remember to document everything; that’s what pays the service bills for Carl, dear, and I’d like to keep it that way. Be good, now. I have to leave. Do whatever you do to rest. You’ll be doing a lot of traveling soon. Showbiz. I love it.”

He left them sitting on the sofa, exiting through newly installed but as yet unpainted doors. Melody held up a small, metallic ball with four fine wires hanging from it. “I have a new toy,” she said.

“A toy? A thing to play with?”

She laughed. “It’ll directly connect our synaptic multiplexers. You have one too, you know. I have a new disk to play, and I want to try out my imagination on you.”

Melody took his hand, led him into the bedroom and put him down on his back on the bed.

“What are we doing?” he asked.

“We’re being more human,” she said, then turned on the disk player and lay down beside him. Sweet sound filled the room as she connected herself to him, and then draped an arm across his chest.

“Close your eyes,” she said, and he did.

“Follow me where I go,” she whispered. “We’re going to reinvent you again.”

And they slept.

THE OLD SHILL GAME, by H.B. Fyfe

Originally published in Analog Science Fiction, January 1967. Copyright © 1967 by H.B. Fyfe

Vendor Number Twelve stood silent and motionless on its small foot wheels, barely living on a stand-by current while Joe Olson extracted tapes of the previous day’s sales.

The shortish, spare man brushed a wisp of faded blond hair from his eyes, then gnawed a thumbnail as he studied the totals. Grimacing guiltily, he paused to open a chest hatch and remove a square of flavored gum.

The business of unwrapping this provided a moment for consideration. He swung the hatch wider to examine the various small packets remaining. Finding that the stock more or less checked with the records, indicating no malfunction, he chomped disgustedly on his gum and peered along the narrow shop. The robovendor stared stolidly ahead.

“Neil!” called the man. “Come over here an’ look at old ‘Dozen’ a minute, hey! We gotta think of a new line for ’im, or maybe a new beat.”

From the end of a row of twenty-odd machines, where he had been tinkering with a newer vendor, Neil Dyer looked back. A beefy youth with close-cropped reddish hair, he amiably tucked his wrench into a breast pocket of his coveralls. These, to match the vendors, were sky-blue with maroon trim. The robots were much cleaner.

“What now, Joe?” he demanded, strolling along the line. Large white teeth gleamed amid a spatter of freckles. “Somebody jimmy the coin stack?”

“Of what?” groaned Olson. “There’s hardly anythin’ to steal. Makin’ a lousy dime gets tougher an’ tougher!”

“Nobody’s even minted a dime for years and years. With nico-gum, shoe zippers and Relaxies a buck apiece, we’re lucky they coin a two-centimeter dollar.”

“I know, Neil, I know. It’s just an old sayin’.”

“It must be our fault if he isn’t selling. Old Dozen can’t actually think, after all—he just goes where we send him.”

The robovendor suffered this lukewarm defense in silence except for the nearly inaudible hum that indicated he was recharged and ready for business.

“Yeah…there must be some way—”

They glanced back as a door opened fifteen feet behind Olson. A trim little brunette, her shimmering raincape fluttering about her, charged in from the hall toward the tiny, plastic-enclosed office at the rear of the shop.

“‘Morning, Boss… Neil!”

“Hello, Dora,” answered Olson.

He examined his watch.

“Ninety seconds,” he predicted.

“Till she sheds her cape and that thing that’s meant to be a hat,” agreed Neil.

They waited patiently. In just under two minutes, Dora stamped out of the office. Being short, she favored heels of a height that made her stride do a lot for the snug azure business slacks and blouse she wore.

“Neil!” she cried. “You didn’t leave the tapes again! How can I keep the books up and order new stock if you don’t—”

“Right away, Dora! They’re on the way,” promised Olson, prodding Neil.

They hastily snatched out the sales records of machines not serviced the previous evening and stacked them in Dora’s outstretched hands.

Neil watched fondly as she pounded back into the office. Then, returning to the matter at hand, he raised his fingers to the light to check for traces of oil.

“Well, if it’s merchandising, it’s your baby,” he said. “I’m just the robotech here. You tell me what you want him to do, and I’ll work out the circuits.”

“Now, Neil! Two heads…an’ all that! I know you boys have a great union, an’ you draw compensation of eighty percent durin’ layoffs.”

“Which usually aren’t long.”

“…But ain’t it more interestin’ to make the other twenty percent by outthinkin’ the competition?”

“Naw…it’s more interesting to make it by doping out a new program.”

Olson shrugged and gave it up.

Neil regarded him with amiable sympathy. He said, “You know, no matter how we set these vendors, the real problem is having too many against us. We have Dozen working the Mars Avenue Concourse between the monorails and the subway. How many other robovendors are on the same beat?”

“Too damn’ many!” growled Olson. “Five or six other companies go in there. A poor human runnin’ between escalators don’t know which one to… Hey!”

He stared silently at the blank wall.

From the office echoed the subdued clacking of an automatic typewriter reproducing a list of items Dora was dictating into its microphone.

Olson continued to gaze past Dozen’s head. The robot, still switched to “inactive,” stared glassily back at him with its pseudohuman face mask presenting a permanent, polite little smile.

“You had an idea—I heard your top gears shift to power,” Neil grinned. “What now? Ads on their backs again? Free commercials with the musitapes?”

“No, no…wait a minute!” Olson glanced down the line of vendors awaiting servicing and reloading. “What draws people faster than anythin’ else?”

“A cute blond model with no— Oh, all right…what?”

“Other people. A crowd. Right? You ever see it start on the street or a busy subway concourse? Somebody drops a dollar coin, the fellow with ’im stoops to help look, another walks into him an’ yells, an’ pretty soon you got twenty stretchin’ their necks to see what’s goin’ on.”

Neil scratched his freckled nose gently and waited.

“So here in the shop we got a ready-made crowd…if you could just program them right. Real cloaks an’ hats for the humanoid models. Then have ’em line up to buy paper combs an’ nico-gum!”

Neil’s reddish eyebrows crept upward. His toothy grin began to dawn.

“Shills!” he exclaimed. “That’s what they used to call people who worked that trick. Why not? Let’s try it and see how it works!”

* * * *

Still early that day, Dozen invaded the Mars Avenue subway complex to begin his vending beat. The main crowds of the morning had not yet coagulated into the usual frenzied mass, but a constant trickle of human traffic flowed there at any hour of the twenty-four. Later, when the monorails and helicopters delivered waves of commuters, the broad passage would become a bottleneck.

At the moment, however, the average human on the scene plodded along in too subdued a mood to admire the cheerfully luminous ceiling or the beautiful mosaics of street scenes between the posters. He was a poor prospect for nicotine gum, news tapes, or notions. Following arrows on the plastic flooring was enough.

Dozen rolled slowly along one wall of the concourse, facing the walkers enroute from an express subway station to the escalators, elevators, and moving walkways that would bear them to other subways, sub-surface building entrances, or even to an open street, or heliport far above.

He unfurled a sign over his chest to announce song tapes at special prices. Presently, a human paused to study the list. Dozen halted politely.

“Musitapes—‘Space Song’ and ‘Deep as Love’!” said the customer.

Dozen extended his left hand, registered the fact that two-dollar coins had been inserted into the palm-slot, and internally released a pair of foil packets containing the self-playing tapes. These slid out of a small hatch where his navel might have been and onto a projection meant to resemble a serving tray. The hatch snapped shut like a camera shutter. The man scooped up the tapes and departed.

Several minutes later, a petite girl stopped him with an order for a pair of stockings. Dozen’s built-in procedures caused him to inquire the size after the ten-dollar “eagle” had activated his circuits. He next took in a dollar for nico-gum. A small man stopped him for a miniature glue-stick, the standard repair for a paper shirt. Then there was a lull until a larger man bought two musitapes.

Dozen was no thinker, but this last gentleman registered upon his scanners with exactly the same pattern as his first customer of the morning.

In a short while, he detected another duplication, the small girl. This time, she purchased a lip brush loaded with “Aldabaran Red.” The slight man who had been the fourth customer registered his pattern again. The first pattern returned for a sports newstape. A human not in the series was sold a packet of Zooms because Dozen’s scanners defined him as an adult. The tape man came back.

This time, the shorter man and the girl accompanied him, and he reached for a covered switch on Dozen’s shoulder.

“That’ll be enough, Boy,” he said. “We’ll go home now.”

Dozen’s urge to vend damped out. He pivoted and followed the human as directed.

“Watch it!” objected the smaller man as they approached an escalator. “That’s for humans only. We gotta take ’im in a freight elevator.”

“Aw, the cops are mostly robots, too.”

“Not the sergeant in charge of the concourse. It’d be just my luck to get a restriction slapped on our vendin’ license!”

“He worries too much, Dora,” said the large man cheerfully.

Nevertheless, he led the way to an elevator. Dozen followed, listened stolidly as the humans gave a level number to that machine, and trailed them out of the car when it stopped. A moving walkway eventually deposited them at a corridor leading to the inner door of the shop.

Dozen was halted just inside. The large man switched him to “inactive.”

“Don’t know why you quit so soon, Joe,” he complained. “Sure—there wasn’t much life in folks at this hour, but a few took the bait.”

“Maybe it’ud work, Neil. Maybe they were already watchin’ for a vendor. Anyways, we can’t all three of us go scootin’ around from vendor to vendor. We’d wear our feet to the ankle bones!”

“Mine feel that way already,” announced Dora. “Do you mind if I go back to the books and shift my weight?”

“Go ahead,” said Olson, “but first look up some costume shops and see where we can rent some cloaks an’ hats. We might as well try it for real.”

“I’ll get the main crew rolling,” said Neil, thoughtfully observing Dora’s retreat, “and then see what I can work out.”

He moved down the line, switching on restocked machines and dispatching them directly onto the concourse through the large door at his end of the shop…

At about the same time the following morning, with a somewhat altered ego, Dozen rolled along the concourse. Now, when a figure stopped to scan the list of musitapes, he scanned back in a more sophisticated manner than heretofore. Neil had programmed him to know a robot from a human in spite of a flexible face mask and human clothing.

Therefore, when the robovendor electronically “felt” two one-dollar coins click into his palm, he dropped into his tray foil envelopes of dummy tapes.

A passerby glanced fleetingly at the little wheels detectable beneath the soles of the “customer’s” shoes, but another figure had already replaced the patron.

Again, Dozen detected metal. He “sold” a square of fake nico-gum.

The third robot-shill was forestalled by a legitimate human, who apparently had been reminded by sight of the previous transactions that he had left home in a disheveled state. Dozen sold him a legitimate hard-paper comb, and scanned two competing robovendors who stood unheeded in the vicinity.

A flurry of commuters swirled past—cloaks flying and sandals squeaking on the plastic walkway—and left a momentary lull. Dozen moved a few yards toward the nearest escalator, placing himself well ahead of the other vendors.

Choosing a spot where a handsome mural of a park many levels above had been permitted to peep between advertising posters, but some distance from the possible distraction of a primitive, immobile coffee server mounted inside the wall, he broadcast the “beep” that sent his assigned robot shills into their program.

This time, he worked them through it twice before a passing human proved suggestible, but the first real customer was followed by four more. Dozen retailed notions, sportapes, and nico-gum—always a good seller in the subways, though requiring a quick scan for childish outlines before the sale—as fast as he could accept coins through the slot in his left hand.

The flow of human traffic presently changed. Instead of little groups spurting past, a swelling tide flowed from the express and monorail exits.

Other robovendors arrived by various routes. Some, wastefully programmed to travel from out-of-the-way shops, appeared from the direction of the local subways. A few descended from street level via escalators, and one was electronically ticketed by a robocop for getting in the way of humans. A good many stationary shoe shiners and servers of food or drink merely slid open wall panels and lit up.

Dozen paid no attention to these last. They were immobile installations with no semblance of human form except for representations of faces flaunting what their proprietors fondly hoped would look like jolly expressions.

The humanoids, however—the movers, the competitors—they attracted his attention. One of his scanning devices took note of every one that approached within a fifty-foot radius, and Dozen automatically moved to place himself between the newcomer and fresh prospects. He was programmed to compete, too.

“Hey!” exclaimed one of a pair of huffing customers who had paused in their rush toward an escalator. “Who…what’s that in line—another robot?”

Neil had foreseen that contingency despite the human suits, cloaks and hats obtained by Dora. Dozen beamed another signal to his shills, who immediately decamped. He activated his voice tape, selected an appropriate phrase to forestall loss of a sale, and inquired, “What is your desire, sir?”

“Pen refill, purple, an’ a three-pack o’ nico-gum!” ordered the patron, gazing after the retreating robots in a vain effort to detect whether their humanly striding feet were actually rolling on small wheels.

The crowd was too thick. As he craned, he missed Dozen’s left hand with his coin. It rattled down the robovendor’s casing toward the trampled floor.

The vendor scanned it all the way down. At the correct instant, he projected metal-mesh net from his shin. His motors hummed as the net positioned the coin magnetically and neatly flipped it upward into his waiting palm. Only then did his built-in instructions permit him to discharge the desired products and the correct change. The customer clawed up his purchases almost before the vendor’s right hand had deposited the change on the tray. As he rushed off, glaring at his watch, another took his place.

When the flurry had ended with a tall girl who bought a two-second spray of Sublime Orgy, Dozen’s cheaper scent, he moved onward. His scanners had detected several competitors gradually converging upon his active location.

For two hours, the peak of the rush, Dozen more or less repeated the sequence. He opened fresh territory with the precedent of his shills, sold all he could before the opposition caught up, then moved to another spot.

* * * *

Olson was amazed when he returned to the shop for restocking well before noon.

“Dora!” he yelled. “What else have we got that we could push?”

“Hold on!” objected Neil as the petite bookkeeper bustled out of the office. “There are just so many cubic centimeters inside that casing. We’ve already got him selling paper combs, shoe zippers, musitapes, sportapes, cosmetics, perfume, Relaxies and Zooms, nico-gum for those that don’t smoke and cough-gum for those who do, ball points for pens, glue-sticks for shirts—”

“All right, Neil, all right! Without you addin’ that bulge in back that’s just inside the regs on humanoid shape, we wouldn’t get in as much as we do. Maybe add a few of them Skin-Wate girdles in the little tube…this is a big change for us!”

“Well…uh…

“Well, ain’t it?”

“Pretty soon,” Neil said slowly, “the other boys will smell something wrong. Somebody will catch on. That’s the day we should plan for.”

“So then it’ll be all even again. Meanwhile, we beat their brains out!”

“Maybe not quite even. Let me think about it a little more. What we’ll have to do is set Dozen up ahead of time to handle the competition.”

“The other robovendors?”

“Yeah. Uh…if you were running those outfits, and caught on to what we’re doing…well, what would you try first?”

Olson frowned at his sandals. He wagged his head thoughtfully.

“Block him some way. Set a few machines to crowd him aside?”

“They’d take up your license for that!”

“Yeah. So I’d put out shills of my own…lessee…an’ some to jam the line by Dozen so no humans could buy from ’im. I’d sell the stuff later myself.”

“If it were salable.”

Olson began to grin.

“Dora!” he called. “Dora, how many gallons we stuck with of that rotten perfume? The Corona Cloud?”

“Plenty!” said the girl, appearing at the door of her cubbyhole. “I told you not to buy that essence de skunk, but you said it was cheap—”

“We’ll sell it yet! Listen, Neil—can you fix him so if a robot comes up that ain’t ours, it gets a squirt in its scanner, no matter what it pays for?”

Dora wandered over as Neil nodded slowly, a speculative glaze in his eyes.

“Just make sure he doesn’t have an accident around here!” she warned.

Neil flashed his big white teeth, then shrugged away whatever vision had crossed his mind. He left the girl reminding Olson of other clinkers in the inventory and strolled toward the far end of the shop, fumbling through his coveralls for paper and ballpoint as he went.

As it turned out, the additional profits flowed for more than two weeks before Olson, on one of his hurried inspection trips, recognized a rival proprietor and two of his staff loitering on the concourse.

Not only were the three observing Dozen with intent hostility, but one was also making notes, as if counting and classifying the vendor’s customers.

“Any day now!” he warned Neil upon returning to the shop.

“I’m about ready,” said the robotech. “I’ve stuffed in a bellyful of new procedure tapes and enough printed circuits to play poker with.”

“Switch them in tomorrow, an’ he can handle them, huh?”

“I think so. In fact, I’m working on the next step: what can he do with all the extra weight of coinage he’ll take in? I think he should be set to unload it somewhere, without taking time to come back here to the concourse limit.”

“He can always go to a change booth,” suggested Olson airily.

Neil smirked.

“Confidentially, our vendors are already set to do that when they run out of change. Trouble is we can’t make the robochangers take dollars and give hundreds.”

“Oh,” said Olson. He scratched his head and added, “Maybe I oughta open another account at the bank. Well, think about it while I check the receipts!”

He wore the look of a man reveling in the unaccustomed luxury of putting such trivialities out of mind while he labored to comprehend the extent of his affluence. The cure of the difficulty was up to Neil.

* * * *

The actual effecting of the program lay with Dozen a few days later. By then, Olson’s rivals had begun to strike back.

The robovendor, laden with large coins but only half sold out because of heavy patronage by certain nonhuman shoppers, was moved by various nuances of internal balance to home upon a robochanger.

To a human, it might have appeared that the opposition shills had been programmed to present eagles and even hundreds in payment for minor purchases. Mostly set to demand one unimaginative item—nico-gum and Zooms being most popular—they had by now become so fragrant that humans pointedly avoided them.

Their combined efforts, however, had an effect. The relative weights of coin columns within Dozen’s arms warned that he was overloaded with eagles and silver hundreds, but short of copper fives, dollars, and half-dollars.

His scanners automatically oriented him according to certain landmarks of the concourse. Pivoting on his small foot-wheels, he rolled toward a point in the broad walkway opposite a subway escalator.

He had to brake several times to permit humans to cross his path. Once, he was halted by an individual on whom other humans might have detected evidence of a hangover. To him Dozen sold a packet of Zooms.

At length, he reached his goal: a square booth of stainless steel about seven feet high. Large yellow letters glowed above the panel he approached, proclaiming, “Change!”

At about the center of the panel, above a small opening, a number of lenses stared out. Some designer afflicted with a bad case of the cutes had incorporated them—as eyes and other features—into a simpering face enameled on the panel. Beneath the “chin” was a counter recess about a foot high, the same deep, and two feet wide with a trough-like shelf projecting from the bottom.

Three humans were in line there as Dozen rolled to a stop. The first scooped up several coins and hurried off. The next tossed a ten-dollar eagle into the opening. A light flashed briefly, the coin was tilted into the bowels of the mechanism by the flick of a little trapdoor, and a quantity of smaller coins rattled into the trough from a chute at the left.

Dozen waited until the humans had obtained change for their fares, moved aside for another who arrived behind him, then confronted the panel.

As if making change, he released an eagle from his right hand. It was engorged with a blink of light. Down the chute poured eight dollars and four half-dollars. With a meticulous clumsiness that hinted of shop-improvised alterations, he flipped the coins one-by-one into his left palm.

At the fifth such transaction, the robochanger hesitated noticeably. The seventh time, it rattled another eagle back at him. A screen lit where a mouth belonged in the picture. In glowing red letters, it proclaimed, “No change!”

Dozen withdrew and circled around to the adjacent face of the booth, which flaunted the same simpering expression. He put down an eagle.

This panel obediently began to eject the customary eight-and-four, until some internal connection made good after the fourth operation. Then, it scanned him, buzzed and clicked irritably, and flashed another sign.

“A maximum of one hundred dollars is required to be changed.” Dozen patiently wheeled away to approach the rear of the booth, where he was confronted by an identical smile and array of lenses. Here, he changed two more eagles before provoking the statement, “Service for patrons only!”

Dozen backed off, scanning the surrounding concourse. His shills waited a short distance away and a few humans were passing, but there seemed no direct cause for the changer to warn him out of the way of possible human patrons. He rolled up to the fourth face and clinked down a hundred.

Ten eagles slid down the chute. Something about the silence that ensued definitely suggested a suspension of operations. The sign here flashed, “You are cautioned against illegal transactions!”

Accepting the officialese as normal, Dozen rolled away on a fifty-foot radius, scanning an approaching robocop as he did so. He succeeded in placing the booth between them by the time the next human stopped for change. The man obtained his coins and walked off, doggedly trailed by the robocop. Dozen returned to his vending…

* * * *

During the following week, Neil Dyer ran the number of vendor-and-shill teams in action up to five. Olson began to speculate aloud about buying more machines. Although the sales of each team tapered off after an initial peak, as his rivals discovered them, his profits climbed higher and higher.

Neil took to trying new ideas on Dozen as a matter of course. He felt somehow that he did better when building upon his first success. Some tricks that worked immediately with Dozen failed in other machines, or required several bouts of trial and error adjustments.

“It’s funny,” he told Olson one day, “how often we dream up the latest wrinkle from something he does or needs to be able to do.”

“Ah, if I had a hundred like him!” murmured Olson. “Well, now, how you gonna set him to use that new account I opened?”

“Here’s the identity card,” said Neil, returning to practical matters. “I bonded it to a magnetized metal plate that will clamp itself to his chest. Back plain—it’ll look like a patch. When the banking window speaks, he’ll reach up for this.”

“Shows the scanners the number, an’ we get credited with the deposit?”

“Right. He’ll hold out his right hand, one of the places where his serial number shows. I just added a variation to the standard response to a demand for identification, only now the card number will show instead.”

“Great!” chuckled Olson. “Now he’ll be operating all the time he’s out. He’ll sell, get change when he needs it, deposit the receipts—Neil, you got him so close to thinkin’ that we hardly have to come to the shop at all!”

It was almost true, except for loading stock into the vendor’s casings.

Dozen continued to attract a number of customers by the suggestive use of his shills, and he usually kept a few minutes ahead of the competition. Sometimes, the shills “happened” to get in the way of other vendors. Most of the imitations now invading the concourse were outmatched. One day, Dozen permitted one of them to purchase ten shots of rank perfume in a row.

Having fleeced the poor machine to the limit of its cash, he rolled away that much richer. Something inside him performed a sort of calculation which in a human might have been termed an analysis…an estimate…a guess.

He must do something about his internal imbalance: he could stop at a robochanger…he could stop at a banking window…the nearest banking window was closer than the nearest robochanger.

He zigzagged through the crowd to a wall of the concourse, along which he led his shills until he reached the banking window. This was situated between a cheery coffee panel and a mosaic of soaring buildings behind which the stars seemed to shift with the viewer’s approach.

“May I help you?” inquired a friendly voice as the window recess lit up.

Dozen removed from his chest the magnetic tag with the number of Olson’s account, identifiable from any window of the bank that served the concourse, and presented it to the scanner for the necessary split-second. He reversed the motion and it became again a patch on his casing.

The amenities concluded, he extended both hands and poured coins onto the counter. The banking window ingested them with efficient rapidity, informed him the sum was already credited to his account, and invited him to call again.

Having handled the first item, Dozen set out to find a robochanger booth. He was now completely empty of coins, a minor problem with his new sophistication.

At the first panel, he broadcast the inaudible beep used to control his shills. As he had learned recently, it operated more or less the same with a robochanger. Coins rattled down the chute. Dozen swept them into his palm slot. More slid down…and more…and more.

Red letters flashed rapidly from one pre-taped sign to another as Dozen gained weight at the changer’s expense. Finally, the cascade of coins ran dry and the admission, “Out of order!” flashed on.

Dozen moved to the next panel.

This jolly face could no more withstand him than the first. Somewhere inside, however, a humble, little-used protective circuit took action. As Dozen rolled around to the third panel, he was confronted by a robocop which had just arrived.

The minion of the law flashed a signal which, could it have been slowed down and translated into distinct bits, would have been understood by a human in terms of an order to cease and desist from trespassing upon the human prerogative of patronizing a change booth.

It further instructed him to produce identification and added that his number would be recorded at the central files. Notice of the fine, payable in ten days, would be forwarded to his owner.

Dozen detached the metal patch from his chest and presented it to the robocop’s scanners. The ordinary procedure was for the cop to scan the serial number from his hand and beam a signal instructing the robot to lower the hand again. In the present instance, lowering the hand as ordered resulted in the magnetic tag attaching itself to Dozen’s leg as the hand came down.

The final instruction was the robotical equivalent of the age-old order, “And now get the hell out of here!”

Dozen rolled away. His shills picked up his trail. The robocop headed toward a disturbance in the opposite direction…and the change booth remained unhappily in place, buzzing and clicking sulkily as it counted and recounted its sums but failed to balance.

At the first banking window along the wall, roughly opposite the one he had last patronized, Dozen was greeted by the same friendly voice. He tapped his chest and presented his empty hand to the winking light before depositing all the coins wrung from the robochanger. The organ of commerce recorded his serial number and accepted the money.

Having completed that business, Dozen left to transact more.

* * * *

After another hour, he had disposed of the bulk of his stock and was headed home. About then, his sensors took note that his route was being dogged by a dark green vendor.

Dozen paused to analyze their relative positions in respect to the density of potential customers. An ill-clothed figure headed for the other vendor.

Olson’s machine scanned the imitation human approaching his competitor. His own programming urged him to roll between them to intercept the “purchaser.”

“Nico-gum!” ordered the voice tape of the thing facing him.

Dozen extended his left palm. It was crossed by a coin from the right hand of the disguised robot. As soon as the metal registered inside his arm, Dozen released a squirt of Corona Cloud.

The shill hesitated, not because of the perfume but because the pattern it scanned was not that of the dark green vendor from its own shop. Dozen beamed the supersonic beep that urged it to action. It transferred another coin to him and instantly received another baptism of Corona Cloud.

The green vendor inquired, “What is your desire, sir?” and tried to roll around Dozen’s left side.

Olson’s vendor edged slightly to the left, emitted another beep, collected another coin, and spat in the shill’s face yet again.

The green robovendor tried the right flank, but was smoothly blocked in that direction, too. Meanwhile, a stream of coins flowed in a silvery blur from the shill to Dozen and the surrounding air took on the aroma of a swamp in bloom.

“What is your desire, sir?” insisted the green vendor.

Dozen engorged the last of the shill’s coins and turned upon its leader.

Beep!

The green one extended its change hand and slipped a coin into Dozen’s left palm. It suffered a squirt of Corona Cloud.

Beep! Beep! Beep!

The green vendor produced coins faster and faster. Each tribute purchased another snappy jet of perfume. Another beep…another coin…another squirt…

By the time Dozen ran out of Corona Cloud, an area for fifty feet around the three robots had become and remained completely clear of humans. By the time the green vendor ran out of money, Dozen was loaded beyond Olson’s wildest hopes. His motors labored audibly as he rolled off, scanning about for a banking window.

The green robovendor held its territory for some little time thereafter, querulously demanding, “What is your desire, sir?” Its shill retained enough of its programming in an unshocked state to repeat the gesture of proffering a coin, and the vendor continued to meet the hand with his own left palm.

Since neither money nor stock changed hands, a passing hobbyist was moved to haul out a pocket camera and shoot six inches of minitape, with which he conclusively proved that evening that robots could argue among themselves.

Finally, the vendor rolled away, on whatever route would lead it back to its own shop for restocking. The shill experienced trouble in following when its drive wheels slipped in the puddle of Corona Cloud that had trickled down its casing.

Discreetly followed by his shill team, Dozen headed in the general direction of home base. At the next banking window he passed, he paused to deposit the fruits of his latest extortions. Then, reacting to the condition of being without stock of any kind, he continued on his return journey.

Occasionally, a competing robovendor crossed his path, and it was now an automatic reaction for Dozen to beep it into standing and delivering.

The fourth time this occurred, an uproar ensued.

A short, round, very red-faced human dropped his cup beside a coffee server and charged across the concourse, shouting expressions that for the most part did not register in Dozen’s memory bank. Some resembled a cease-and-desist command. There was also an implication of extensive repair, or perhaps total dismantling.

One loudly repeated phrase, echoing along the concourse, produced the sound of a politely modulated siren: a robocop on the way at full speed.

Dozen headed for the far side of the concourse. The round man scuttled into his path, forcing him to turn away, whereupon he bumped into the vendor he had just halted. Dozen maneuvered around that machine but came mask-to-face with the human again. The bellowing man, even redder, jiggled up and down in a frenzy. The siren sounded very close. Other humans were turning to stare.

Dozen wheeled away and beamed a full-power beep at the other vendor.

A shower of coins rained from that machine’s palms to clink upon the plastic floor and roll in all directions. One or two humans stooped to retrieve them.

“What is the complaint here?” inquired the robocop, braking to an abrupt stop barely in time to avoid butting the broad posterior of one stooper.

The red-faced man began to shout at it. Dozen signaled his shills and made for an escalator. About two dozen humans were now scrambling after the spinning coins. The robocop swung from one to another, demanding to hear a complaint.

Dozen rolled onto the escalator with his shills behind him. The last scan he directed to the rear revealed the robocop completely entangled in a crowd of jostling humans. The red-faced man had both arms wrapped around his robovendor, which he seemed to be trying to drag from the melee.

Reaching the lower level, Dozen and each of his retinue were electronically ticketed by another robocop for riding a human escalator. Immediately upon release, he resumed the journey, and went as far as possible before the detection of certain programmed landmarks caused him to chance using an “up” escalator. Something seemed to have jarred his setting; he molested no more vendors on the way.

* * * *

It was only a few days later that Olson showed Neil an advertisement. The robotech was servicing number Twenty, a specialty vendor that dealt profitably in sympathy tapes. Perhaps it was the vast impersonality of the city that made so many people seek cheering up via an understanding, intimate voice which soothingly assured them that their true worth was not appreciated, that they were much better than they realized, that tomorrow might be their big day…and so on.

Neil had just sampled one of the self-playing tapes as a spot check. It had driven him to valve a mug of sudsy liquid from a two-foot cubical contraption he kept mounted on the wall.

He sang softly to himself:

“Oh, Dozen helps Neil in the workshop,

Brewing the synthetic beer—

Twenty sells love for a dollar,

Oh, Lord, we’ll get rich around here!”

“Hah!” grunted Olson, walking up. “We are already. Draw me one, too!”

He obliged. Olson took his beer and waved some papers at the other.

“Dunno how, but Dora’s figures say we take in even more than we thought. I ain’t complainin’, but it don’t add up.”

“I have the others making direct bank deposits now,” Neil reminded him. “True, sometimes I find an identity card stuck to the wrong part of a casing, but the new bank account must be growing.”

“Yeah,” mused Olson. “Well, anyway, we got about enough.”

He flourished another paper.

“I was already lookin’ around when this ad came in the mail. There are three or four local robovendor outfits for sale at quite a bargain.”

Neil reached for the circular. It had been sent by a business-exchange agency to Olson’s account number in care of the bank.

“Find you everywhere, don’t they?” he murmured. “Some of the machines brought these back from the banking windows, too. I meant to give them to you.”

“They must hit every big account. But that’s O.K.—just what I want!”

“What for?”

“To sell out!” Olson grinned, running a hand through his sandy hair. “Don’t worry, Neil. We’re gonna do it again, but bigger an’ better. Who’s got the only vendor service in this corner of the city that’s makin’ money?”

“Why…I guess you have.”

“An’ here’s a list of companies that’re losin’, an’ discouraged, an’ ready to sell out cheap. But they might go good—with the right management!”

Neil’s toothy grin emerged slowly. He wiped his oily hands on the chest of his coveralls as he considered the possibilities.

“If you take more than one, I’ll have to have some help,” he said.

“You watch!” said Olson. “With a good price for this outfit, I’ll get three or four, an’ you an’ Dora can have whatever help you want.”

In the end, after much correspondence and many visiphone calls to the bank, Olson accomplished what he promised. The buyer found by the business-exchange agency demanded a confidential transaction, which Olson suspected meant the offer came from a chain operator, but the price was more than satisfactory. The money enabled Olson to close deals with four near-bankrupt competitors.

The only disappointment developed when the purchaser insisted that someone familiar with the shop be allowed to remain. Olson salved his conscience by getting the business exchange to promise a large salary increase for Dora.

Then he and Neil set about inspecting and modifying the operations of Olson’s new combined resources.

They immediately began to make money, by the ton.

Then they made it by the handful.

In a month, they were breaking even.

After that, they began to lose, no matter how they scrambled. Olson had to lay off some of Neil’s help.

He found the robotech one day with three of the green robovendors all but eviscerated, parts strewn over his new workbench. Neil wiped a smear of oil from his forehead with the back of his hand.

“These are still programmed the way they tried to match us,” he reported. “I can do better now.”

“I wish you could,” said Olson gloomily.

“Sure I can. I’ve already got seven vendor-and-shill teams operating. Just give me a chance to catch up to the rest of these. Then I can get at the Tru-Blu Company lineup, and—”

“An’ they won’t work any better’n what we got out now,” said Olson.

“Huh?”

“All the greens just came in empty, just like the models you ain’t touched.”

“But they couldn’t! I don’t think I—”

Olson held up a hand.

“It ain’t your fault, Neil. Nobody could do what you done. But the sale was on condition that nothin’ would be changed. Whatever Dozen an’ the others were doin’, I guess they still are…somehow.”

“But they can’t! I set these machines to match our old ones, except maybe Dozen, and he can’t be everywhere!”

Olson sat himself carefully on an empty crate, and stared blankly at the floor.

Neil scratched his head with the screwdriver he had been using.

“Who’s running the old outfit now?” he asked. “Did you ever find out?”

“Naw. I phoned Dora a few times. Her instructions come by the fax machine, the goods get loaded by a coupla kids she was told to hire, an’ the money gets deposited by the robots. You can bet some of it’s our money, if only we knew how!”

“And she doesn’t know how?”

“She don’t know how. You don’t know how. I don’t know how. But I know one thing—we’re pushin’ these babies here into another beat instead of the concourse, even if they have to take trains somewhere!”

Neil leaned against his workbench, brow furrowed.

“You know, there’ll be somebody already operating in any other territory,” he reminded Olson. “It might be tough to break in.”

His boss looked up at him.

“How to break in I know just fine,” he told Neil. “We do a swell job of that. What I can’t figure is how to keep from bein’ broke in on.”

“There must be some way,” mused Neil. “If we could just figure out who’s doing this to us, maybe we could—”

“Don’t think about it,” Olson advised him grimly.

He rose from his crate and ambled toward the door.

“I thought about it all night, an’ maybe I got the answer. It’d give you heartburn, too, an’ you prob’ly wouldn’t believe it anyway.”

He opened the door and peered out with a haunted look.

“But—”

“Just don’t!” Olson repeated.

He shut the door gently behind him.

NOTES TOWARD A NEW TRAIT AS REVEALED BY CORRELATION AMONG ITEMS OF THE MMMPI, by M. Purrzillo, U. R. A. Ferball, and C. Kitirun

Originally published in Analog, Sept. 1999, under the direction of Mary A. Turzillo.

Abstract

The Maine Mauser Multichoice Psychological Index (MMMPI) is used to categorize personality types and disorders. Based on newly found correlations, we propose a new trait, Type F Personality Cluster.

Discussion

Researchers note a puzzling correlation in selected subjects between item 401: I am seized with terror at the thought of being immersed in water and item 447: I bathe several times a day (Hunter and Pounce, 1968). The authors have discovered a third perplexing correlation, with item 68: I find it relaxing to torture small animals. In the present paper, a new trait is proposed, strongly correlated with these and other items in the MMMPI. After rejecting such names as oral cleanliness fixation, hedonistic sadism, and self-induced catatonia, the authors decided to call the trait Type F Personality.

The authors’ clinical practices contain patients who appear tormented by their housemates’ capricious behavior. We therefore undertook a study of 43 individuals who cohabit with our patients in therapy.

The patients typically remark that “X is driving me crazy” or “I never know what she’s going to do next,” but exhibit extreme distress if the possibility of severing the relationship is suggested. Clearly, the housemates contribute to a therapeutically negative climate in the homes of these patients.

The authors administered the MMMPI to these 43 housemates in an attempt to recognize traits complementary to the those seen in the patients. We hypothesized a codependency between the anxiety of the patients and the obsessive cleanliness, skittishness, and narcissism described as typical of the housemates.

The researchers requested that the housemates make office appointments in order to respond to the MMMPI. However, we were told by the patients that the housemates “do not travel well,” or “would scratch and claw me if I tried to get her into the car.”

The researchers recognized immediately the dysfunctional relationship that had developed between these patients and their housemates. However, pragmatism suggested that the test could be taken home and administered in a domestic setting.

Some patients complained that the housemates simply lay down on the form, or attempted to tear it up, or, in one case, urinated on it. However, 7 more or less completed answer sheets were returned.

To the researchers’ surprise, a clear—if very puzzling—pattern emerged at once. The subjects answered in the affirmative to the following items:

18: I enjoy throwing up.

96: I often stare at spots on the carpet until my eyes cross.

201: Among outdoor sports, I much prefer hunting over swimming.

258: I sleep over eighteen hours per day.

397: Thunder and lightning terrify me.

437: I lick my body all over several times a day.

636: When company visits, I like to hide under the bed.

These correlations suggest a personality configuration, the Type F Personality, that could trigger many of the neurotic traits of the patients themselves: most notably coming in to therapy sessions with clothing matted with long fibers, and a compulsion to leave the session early in order to buy King’s Ransom brand tuna before the deli closes.

One of the researchers (Ferball) suggests that the relationship with the Type F housemates might actually be therapeutic to subjects who suffer from anxiety or attention deficit disorder (ADD). These patients are encouraged to sit quietly for long periods of time when the housemates settle on their laps and prevent them from moving. Kitirun suggests further that the presence of an uncritical bed mate might be a positive force. However, many of the Type F housemates are described as arising in the middle of the night and dashing around knocking over lamps. This could scarcely contribute to the tranquility of an already anxious therapeutic client.

The authors propose the development of a new instrument to measure the Type F Personality, containing the following items:

String and yarn excite me.

I find closed doors personally offensive.

Birdwatching is a favorite hobby of mine.

When I am embarrassed, washing makes me feel better.

I sometimes eat bugs between meals.

I like to play with my food before killing it.

Further studies must include individual interviews with the housemates. The authors plan to undertake such a series of interviews and are applying for federal funding to supply King’s Ransom brand tuna.

THE SLEEPER IS A REBEL, by Bryce Walton

Originally published in Thrilling Wonder Stories, February 1948.

CHAPTER I

Surrender

With bitter resignation, Deker faced the two immaculately clothed Psych Staffmen. His figure was gaunt, wild, that of a savage anachronism. His dirt-caked face cracked in a wry smile.

The staffmen’s faces showed fear.

“I’m surrendering,” Deker said. “I thought I could live alone, but I couldn’t. My abnormality isn’t that kind.”

Their fears of violence placated, the two Psychos led him to the small waiting gyro. He sat between them and watched the wild expanse of forest diminish beneath them as they headed for City Three. It had been a dangerous freedom in the sea of unsullied North American forest, living precariously from what he could squeeze from a well-stocked but selfish Nature. He had almost starved until he had learned the rudiments of survival.

And then—the brooding loneliness.

Man cannot live alone. He is a social animal. But Deker was also an off-sized cog, a misfit that would never find a place in the perfectionistic mechanism of the Hundred Cities Utopian Federation.

“You will volunteer for the Experimental Labs of course,” the man on his right said. “Scientist Brenn needs volunteers. I can’t understand why you haven’t accepted Nirvana before this, Deker! Ordinarily, an Abnormal is more than willing to accept it. It’s for the good of the Federation, you know!”

“I know,” said Deker.

The Federation was the only thing that mattered. A lone, maladjusted pariah labeled Deker didn’t matter. From the time the individuals of the Federation were artificially semenated, placed in a row of generation jars in the Embryo wards, they were conditioned to take their predestined place in the social machinery.

But if an abnormality, a misfit, appeared he was tolerated, though socially ostracized, psychologically forced to volunteer to be done away with, legally. “Nirvana”—a kind, soft word for extermination.

They didn’t kill you, for such a thing would be unthinkable in the perfect order. One slept, was put to permanent gelid sleep in Brenn’s encystment capsule. Deker had tried to escape. But there was no escape for an abnormal. Nothing but Nirvana.…

* * * *

Deker stood, looking across a gleaming desk at the head of the Psych Council for City Three. From having been here for consultation many times before, Deker knew this man’s name as Jak. He was eighty years old, though his voice and face were still young, virile, enthusiastic. The Conditioners did well.

“You surrendered voluntarily,” Jak said, his eyes unwaveringly on Deker’s. “It’s fortunate that your ill-advised attempt to escape ended so amicably.”

Deker’s thin lips curled. “I wonder if you’ve considered the fact that your ‘perfect’ system is responsible for me, an imperfection?”

“Of course. But this is only 2160 A.D. At this early stage, we must expect incidental imperfections. The Federation is not yet two centuries old. It’s the glorious whole of our Hundred Cities one must consider. A little too much thyroxine injection, or a slight irregularity in the saline schedule, and you resulted. A martyr to the ultimate planned perfection of the Hundred Cities! If only you had reacted properly to the Conditioners!”

Deker walked to the great window overlooking Bellamy Square. Yes, outwardly it was Bellamy’s Utopian dream. But…

He turned back toward Jak.

“For five years I forced myself to be a lathe worker. But I hated it. So to compensate, I illegally studied books, all the books I could get, and that made me even more maladjusted. You speak of perfection! But we’re physico-chemical structures. We’re variable, subject to unpredictable alterations. I’m one of many abnormals decanted from the wards. Perhaps only small insignificant errors. But you have no way of foreseeing or preventing big errors, Jak! It’s tinsel veneering. A house of glittering sound.”

Jak shook his head sadly. “Too bad they don’t proceed with the space-flight development. A splendid release for your type. But no benefit to the Federation, so it must be dropped. However, I’m glad you’ve volunteered for Nirvana. Brenn badly needs more subjects for his suspended animation experiments.”

Deker remembered then how desperately they had tried to correct their decanting error by reconditioning processes. The individual was conditioned from prenatal stage on to perform specific tasks in the social machinery, and he was also conditioned to think that specific task simply wonderful. But not for Deker. He was too negativistic. The machinery droning over and over into his brain, month after futile month those words:

“The lathe worker is the most necessary worker in the Federation. No other worker is so important as those who operate the lathes. I’m proud to be a lathe worker.” Or: “I’m so very, very glad I’m a lathe worker.” Or again: “I could never, never be anything but a lathe worker.”

Deker looked at Jak. “You labeled me a negativist. Because after five years of that, I decided that being a lathe worker was about the most sorry job a human being could have, in this socialized futility.”

Jak exuded sympathy from his clear, eager eyes.

“For you, yes,” he agreed. “That’s why it is best for you and the Federation that you accept Nirvana. It’s too bad, really, that the Federation cannot use you. Potentially, you have a high-A mental capacity. But you’ve destroyed any possibility of specialization by the secret studying you did during those years you worked on your lathe. Generalized knowledge is dead.”

After an empty, painful silence, Deker said: “I’m ready to go, Jak. I’ve never even been smiled at by a woman, and my life’s a third gone. I think that has decided me more than anything else. Imagine how you would feel if every woman stared and shied away from you as though you were some kind of animal out of a zoo!”

Jak coughed, motioned. The two staff men entered.

“Good-by, Deker,” Jak said. “You may go into the experimental labs happily, knowing you are contributing to the ultimate and eternal glory of the Federation.”

Deker walked out between them, was taken to the scientist, Brenn. Enroute, he saw or heard little because of a shock-absorbing haze of amnesia. A haze that broke immediately when he met Brenn for the first time and became aware of a startling, stunning fact:

Brenn, himself, was an Abnormal!

Brenn was motioning nervously about his laboratory, after the two staffmen had left. Motioning at the elaborate machinery, the time-encystment capsules suspended from the ceiling like pendular streamlined coffins.

Small, erratic, in soiled plastic working gown, Brenn was a man whose eyes gleamed with secrecy. Small, blue-veined hands twisted constantly. Deker couldn’t believe it. Brenn, one of the Federation’s top ranking research psych-physicists, an Abnormal! Surely the Class One Intellectuals knew!

“You recognize me for what I am, Deker,” Brenn said. “So do they. But they can’t prove it, officially. But I’m a different kind of Abnormal than you and these others asleep in my capsules. Mine isn’t a result of physiological error during embryo or prenatal. In spite of the Conditioners, I developed high degree insight and free agency. I’ve been able to conceal my abnormality deliberately and make a socially acceptable adjustment. You could have done the same—with insight.” He added with a sly wink, “Many have.”

Brenn commenced pacing the length of the time-vault.

“I’ve explained to the others before I put them in stasis,” he said. “I can explain to you now.”

Deker dropped down on an alloy bench, slightly dizzy with amazement.

“Deker,” Brenn went on, “you have probably realized that the Federation is a silly dream punctured with holes. The fabric glitters, but it’s false.”

Deker nodded.

The scientist continued in a grave tone: “Created out of desperation because of the sudden mastery of basic energies, the World Federation seeks final standardization, socialization, as the only defense against self-annihilation. That’s wrong. It will be solved by individual development or not at all. At any time incurable inherent factors in human nature may spawn a will-to-power fanatic who, with knowledge of basic energy, can destroy all our wonderful Hundred Cities overnight. There are, for example, the Anarchs.”

Deker started at Brenn, his amazement growing.

“You’re surprised that there actually is an underground organization of Anarchs? So would be many others. And there may be other organizations and individuals who are not a part of the Federated system. Destructives. That’s why I’m working with my experiments here in suspended animation. You sleepers may survive the disaster.”

Deker looked around as Brenn paused. Eleven capsules were suspended from the low metal ceiling. Inside each capsule, a body, a freak, an Abnormal from prenatal and embryo wards. Each body would live, never aging, while it was administered to properly. Suspended animation.

“You see,” said Brenn, enjoying the dramatic effect. “I’m responsible for you. For you and those others here in the capsules. I intentionally caused your abnormalities!”

Deker was immunized now to shock. He only blinked.

“By my Class One rating,” explained Brenn, “I have been legally admitted to the embryo wards whenever I desired. Secretly I caused the alterations in certain normally developing embryos. I caused teratological freaks to emerge instead of sponges for the colorless liquids poured from the conditioning machines. Physically, I’ll admit some of the results are ugly.” He indicated the hanging capsules. “In that capsule sleeps a two-headed man. There, a hunchback; and there, a Cyclopean monster with three eyes and a ferocious temper. There is an albino, a trembling raw lump of sensitivity. There is one who almost sprouted wings and became a birdman. Like you, some are only mentally distorted. Remember the woman, Shar, who tried to commit suicide? She’s here.”

Deker couldn’t hate Brenn. Even being a twisted freak was preferable to being a mindless child of the Conditioners, happy because of a total lack of free associative thought.

“Individuals and organizations like the Anarchs,” said Brenn, “could destroy all the Hundred Cities of Utopia overnight. Civilization as we recognize it now may not survive. But my hope is that you will. This vault is surrounded by tons of protective sheeting. I needed subjects for this experiment in suspended animation, and used the only legal method there was for obtaining them.”

“And you?” asked Deker.

“No importance. I will die. Humanity must persist! That’s the only thing that matters. The position of humans will at times become so precarious that survival will seem impossible. But humanity will keep driving forward, Deker. It must. I’m putting my faith in that.”

Brenn explained something about the encystment principle. Temperature mean down to 7.1 degrees centigrade. Could go on living indefinitely. Human organism a chemical complex. His life short and fast, because it’s hot. But all these suspended sleepers were cold, cold.

But Deker had lost interest. He was tired. He wanted escape. Nirvana. And later, outstretched within the capsule, he hardly realized that his consciousness was beginning to fade.

A sharp strange odor closed over his face like a sticky gas. Brilliant flashes of light circled round and round his head like bursting novae. He was swimming in a pool of dark red. It was like blood, only it was thin and wonderfully cool. Slowly and more slowly he swam until he was floating weightless, looking up into an endlessly swirling green mist.

Then somewhere a bell clanged loudly. It rang three times.

CHAPTER II

The Gods Awake

Deker floated on the red sea long after he began hearing the bell. And he knew that the key threshold which Brenn had left open for activation had been stimulated. Sometime later, he was fully conscious.

He stretched his body, felt the strong new pumping of blood that had been flowing with such infinite slowness. Flooding oxygen lifted him to his elbows with a dizzy exuberance. He pressed a stud, and the cowling above the capsule slid back noiselessly. Deker climbed out onto the vault floor.

One by one the others were climbing from their capsules, transforming the metal-lined vault abruptly into a weird, distorted nightmare. The hunchback swung his stocky, humped figure to the floor on enormous arms. He stood uncertainly a moment, running big hands through a bush of black hair. His gargoyle face smiled with sardonic humor, then he motioned with a sweeping gesture toward the others.

The two-headed man, both heads misshapen and ugly, groaned softly. He opened his two pairs of pain-riddled eyes, glared at Deker and the hunchback, then buried the eyes in thin, pale arms.

“He’s always in pain,” the hunchback explained with easy friendliness. “They kept him doped with hypnosene for years before he finally consented to accept Nirvana. Nothing here in the vault to alleviate his pain. And who knows what’s outside?”

The white-haired albino came hopping nervously across the floor, waving white hands, sighing with fear. The giant three-eyed man’s middle eye gave a bright, evil glare.

The manic-depressive, Shar, who had tried to commit suicide by jumping from City Three’s highest building, walked past the Cyclops and stood close to Deker. Black, feverish eyes matched the shining black of her hair. Deker saw nothing except the moist full redness of her lips.

There were others—drab, colorless women, an insignificant little bald-headed man, and the man who had almost grown wings. But the slightly clothed figure of the woman, Shar, demanded most of Deker’s attention.

“Who are you, friend?” the hunchback said in a deep rich basso. “I’m Gans.”

“Deker.” He walked a few steps back and forth tentatively. Feeling was still coming into his limbs.

“No sign of Brenn, so at least we must have slept longer than he lived,” suggested Shar in a deep, husky voice. She shifted her hips sinuously.

“Or maybe he’s outside the vault,” whispered Deker, watching Shar. She also watched him. No woman had ever looked at Deker that way.

“True,” said the hunchback. “These opaque sections allow the morbidly curious to see inside, though we can’t see out. I wonder how long it’s been?”

The distorted face grinned. And, surprisingly enough, he began to sing. A deep, droning chant. He began swinging his arms with the music.

Shar undulated nearer Deker.

“Well”—her ripe lips curled with bitter malice—“Brenn’s failed us.”

Her arms swept round the interior of the vault. There were no openings in it other than the tightly-sealed series of three heavy metal doors. Deker could still hear the steady beat of the metronome.

“We’re right back in reality again,” she said and, with her eyes on Deker, she added softly, “But reality can be interesting, sometimes.”

Deker shook off part of the woman’s spell with an uneasy laugh.

“Reality,” he said. “Only time gives it meaning. But for us—we could have been in suspended animation for ten seconds, or ten million years.”

Shar looked at him oddly. “You came in here after we did. Did you volunteer for this trap?”

Deker’s solid line of eyebrow wriggled like a caterpillar. “I volunteered. Finally.”

The albino, squealing in high falsetto, scuttled across the floor.

“Listen, the metronome’s stopped! That means the whole thing’s quit!” He ran wildly around the base of the smooth walls, scurrying like a giant white rat.

“Take it easy, Red,” cautioned Deker. “We can get out. They can see us in here, and we’ve been revived only a little while.”

Shar slid over, leaned against him. He had never had a woman do that before. Not in reality.

The Cyclops shambled over toward him, his middle eye blazing anger, and Shar moved away, looking both frightened and pleased. Deker moved between Shar and the Cyclops. The middle eye shone with a blind insensate jealousy.

“Shar is mine,” the Cyclops said sullenly. “Mine.”

“Are you?” Deker asked Shar.

The albino was huddled in a far corner. The hunchback was singing again. The two-headed man was sitting on the vault floor, a head in each hand, moaning.

“I don’t belong to anyone,” Shar replied. Her eyes blinked slowly at Deker. “Yet.”

The metal door opposite Deker began sliding open slowly. Everyone turned toward it, breathlessly waiting. The lower half of the door was dark, the upper part of the oval a deep soft blue, and a little to the left of the horizon line, a full reddish moon shone. A cold wind entered, and the sparsely clothed freaks shivered. Otherwise nothing happened.

Standing there, Deker suffered a strange thrill. Things were so different now. Even a woman, Shar, desired him. Among these freaks, he was certainly the most desirable in a physical sense. With sudden surging enthusiasm, he realized that he had escaped!

They all undoubtedly were in a far future time now. And surely this new era, whenever and whatever it was, held new hope and promise for him!

“Everything’s changed out there,” squealed the frightened albino, nervously. “City Three was never cold. And we can see the sky, and the moon too. When we came into this vault we were buried in the very heart of City Three. Now we’re in the open.”

And the hunchback’s deep voice sang. He improvised, sometimes in free verse, sometimes in rhyme, as the mood hit him:

The sky is blue with cold, and bitter is the wind.

The moon is red, blood-red is the moon.

The cold wind blows where once the City rose.

And what has happened to the world we knew?

Now, no one knows.

Staring at the hunchback, Deker felt something of the situation’s timeless fantasy, the abnormality. Lost in time. Unsuited perhaps to any era except some legendary scene. This hunchback might be some sly jester from the court of an ancient king; the girl, Shar, a frustrated princess escaped from a tower. And the others, the teratological freaks, seemed part of a dusty mythology.

A wind sighed from the strange and otherwise silent world outside, bringing a cloud of fine dust. Shar cowered against Deker. Instinctively, he held her tightly, felt deeply her warm, slightly tremulous flesh. It was difficult now to remember the Hundred Cities Utopian Federation. Dead, buried, forgotten, the perfect order.

Or was it?

Then they heard the weird chanting of many voices outside the vault. The gong sounded again, much louder. Then the chanting rose to a fanatical, droning dirge.

“Let’s go,” said Deker. He kept his arm about Shar and led the others toward the exit. But the Cyclops stayed beside Shar, eyes balefully on Deker. The others fell cowering behind, the albino moaning, the two-headed man stumbling with pain. There were fifty feet of metal passageway before they stood in the ruin of the final exit. The chanting stopped.

A single wailing voice intoned:

“The gods have awakened! Hail, all hail god Deker. Our salvation and our light!”

Deker peered through the moonlight. A thin, ragged figure stood before a mass of prone bodies that quivered with emotion like the surface of a lake. Behind them towered the jagged pattern of a colossal and terribly twisted ruins.

The voice droned on: “Hail to Him of the Three Eyes of the All-Seeing Vision! Hail to the Two-Headed One of Wisdom! Hail to the Dark Goddess! Hail to the Gnarled One, the Storm Chief! Hail to the White One who knows of the evil things that crawl beneath the Earth!

“Begin the sacrifice. Blood shall bathe the City’s ruins. Offer up yourselves to the gods who have arisen to save us from—the beasts!”

A roar rose up from the bowed bodies.

“Hail the gods who will conquer the Beasts that Run in the Night!”

Deker shivered against the cold wind and the brittle red moonlight. And against something he could not name. Shar trembled against him, and the hunchback ran a hairy hand over his thick lips.

To Deker’s right, three bent peeled poles leaned together, supporting the huge gong. Two ragged figures stood beside it with clubs in their hands. It was difficult to make out details characterizing the horde groveling on the slope that stretched from the vault into a dark valley of warped metal and molten plastic. The vault was still covered with the mountain of protective sheeting. Brenn had indeed prepared well for the holocaust.

The small, filthy-bearded man who had been exhorting the horde ran and fell on his face at Deker’s feet. The moonlight reflected his gleaming, fanatical eyes. Eyes with little intelligence, only superstitious awe. An aged, cracked voice climbed up in trembling ecstasy.

“God Deker of the City that Was, and of The City That Shall Be Again, your people who have waited long for your awakening welcome you!”

He beat his forehead a number of times, then scurried crablike backward before turning and again facing the horde of kneeling worshipers.

“Let the sacrificial fires burn brighter than the moon!” he screamed. “There need never again be fear. The Temple Gods of Brenn will protect us!”

Deker turned toward the gnarled ruins in the valley. He shuddered as his gaze lost itself among those starkly wrenched remains of what had once been the gleaming structures of City Three. His eyes probed into the impenetrable blackness beyond.

He turned. Behind him the others were whispering, staring, stunned with inability to comprehend.

“Don’t leave the vault yet,” cautioned Deker, “until we make sure of what’s going on.

The hunchback laughed heavily, then he sang again. Deker was shaken by the weird unreality of their circumstances as the man sang:

Out of the sable night of time

The dead gods rise to battle beasts and find

Salvation for the ragged ones who keep

The sacrificial flames afire!

The fires leaped into roaring life, blown into erratic patterns by the mountain winds. Strange, contorted dances began. After a few moments of discussion on the part of the gods, two haggled creatures in roughly dyed robes of several brilliant colors led the arisen sleepers to a crude platform of stones and metal overlooking the sacrificial ritual. It wasn’t far from the vault, to which they could return if necessary.

From this Olympus, Deker and his godlings looked down.

CHAPTER III

The Beasts

Through pools of red-tinged moonlight, hysterical screaming celebrants twisted and leaped. Altar fires flared and, in the light, showed the quivering faces of those who wailed with released fear. Around the altars, stones ran deep with the darkest red of all.

It was a far cry from the dignified perfection of City Three, yet these yammering savages were still human. And so was Deker. The wailing rhythm was a bitter-sweet poison in his brain. His blood ran hotly and his temples throbbed.

He looked at Shar. She was bent forward. Her face was high lighted shadow, flushed and terror-stricken with an instinctive fascination. The albino cringed with his pinkish hands on either side of his chin like a rat’s paws. The two-headed man groaned, unimpressed by the ritual. He was too pain-raddled to care. In this savage environment, he couldn’t survive long. But for that matter would any of them?

The hunchback, whom these savages had labeled “The Gnarled One, God of The Storm,” swayed sensually to the pristine dirge. His long arms swung.

The “Temple Gods of Brenn” had been seated with Deker in front, Shar, the hunchback, and the Cyclops beside him, the others indistinct behind. Two high priests stood a few feet from Deker. He had questioned them. They chanted an alternating answer while the Cyclops kept his eyes fixed on Deker, waiting.

Priest I: “The lightning gods of the Anarchs brought their bolts from the skies and the great cities melted in the supernal sun fires.”

Priest II: “Long have we waited for the awakening of the gods. Now shall the Anarchs die within their glowing shields.”

Priest I: The Beasts that Run in the Night shall be driven back into the mountains beside the blue river and shall never again dare attack us and eat our women and children.”

Priest II: “Faithfully the Priests of Brenn have kept the altar fires.”

Priest I: “Protect us against the Anarchs and the Beasts and the Roaring Winds, and the Ice, and the Burning Death that comes from the Ruins.”

Priest II: “We have fulfilled the Prophecy of Brenn. His temple has been kept inviolate. The cities of the Utopes shall reach again to the stars.”

A wail of sonorous supplication rose in mighty chorus:

“Hail, all hail, the Temple Gods of Brenn!”

The high priests draped the gods in fur robes to protect them from the cold, a long-haired white one for Deker, a tawny yellow and black-striped skin for Shar. The alternating black matched the black of her eyes and the blue-black of her hair.

“Shar,” said Deker, “this sickens me. I’m not atavistic enough to appreciate it.”

Shar said nothing. Intently, unalterably fascinated by the bloody spectacle before her, she stared, and her fists were clenched, her full lips taut. Deker shrugged and shifted away from her, hardly knowing that he was doing it. There seemed to be something about this primitive libation that was fully appreciated by Shar’s feminine masochism. She had been even more abnormal in that Utopian past than he. For even to him, self-destruction had been unthinkable. At least he had volunteered for Nirvana instead of being compelled to accept it. Shar was truly primitive.

Yet if all the feminine remains of the Hundred Cities were as these yammering troglodytes, then Shar was perhaps the only woman in the world for him. But he shook her from his immediate mind. The decay of the Federation had been only a matter of time and fate, as he had known. But what had contributed directly to the final devastation?

“The lightning gods of the Anarchs.”

Brenn had mentioned an underground of Anarchs who still carried on some esoteric cultish worship of their individualistic philosophy as opposed to the strict socialism of the Federation.

“The Anarchs brought their bolts from the skies and the great cities melted in the supernal sun fires.”

Evidently the utilization of basic atomic energies to destroy the Federation which Brenn had mentioned as a possibility had became catastrophic reality. The will-to-power fanaticism—they hadn’t been able to condition that out of certain stubborn inherent characteristics. The Anarchs, then, had struck unexpectedly, destroyed the rigidly disciplined collectivism they had despised for so long.

With a soft ironic laugh, Deker recalled the code of the Utopes who had established the Hundred Cities Federation from the stuff dreams were then made of. Something from the works of Bellamy:

With a tear for the dark past, turn we then to the dazzling future, and veiling our eyes, press forward.

The fanatical chanting came back to him, the quivering filthy faces, the sea of leaping, whirling celebrants. This—this was the dazzling future. An Utopian thought it had been, to attempt to escape from an imperfect society into one conceived to fulfill ideal human values. But the word, Utopia, was from an ancient race, the Greeks, and significantly enough meant: “Nowhere.”

They had ignored the temper of individuals, variable human nature—which they had thought to control by conditioning—or the inevitable opposition of entrenched groups such as the Anarchs. And now that magnificent but deluded civilization had been reduced to a pack of shivering, superstition-haunted primates, whining and grubbing about in the ruins of a former glory they had forgotten except as glittering myth and frightful legend.

The scientific hierarchy which had guarded the encystment-vault had altered only slightly to become a hierarchy of priesthood. And the unwanted freaks of the Hundred Cities had become gods!

Deker stiffened. His eyes probed outward beyond the firelight where a distorted cry had cut off the other shrieks of the celebrants. The two high priests sank down, murmuring incantations against evil. The ragged mob around the fires were frozen into taut outlines staring toward the valley to the north.

“What is it now?” the hunchback murmured into Deker’s ear. “What awful world have we found, trying to escape that other one?”

Shar gripped his arm tightly. With a terrible abruptness then, from a thousand or so straining throats, the cry was torn:

“The Beasts!”

Deker was on his feet, eyes fighting the glimmering vagueness of fires and moonlight. The two-headed man moved his two puckered mouths in a desperate effort to speak. Finally he formed halting words:

“Deker! My pain was padded with dreams before. Now there can be no more dreaming. Deker, I must die! Kill me!”

The priests were marching away. Deker heard them exhorting the shivering mob with hysterical boldness.

“Fight, children of Utopia. The Temple Gods of Brenn stand over us. Slay the Beasts. Revenge! Kill!”

After a pulsing silence, Deker thought he could feel the waves of growing courage beating round him. With it, in himself, grew an ecstatic surging longing. Then his straining eyes saw the vague loping forms dodging through the leaning ruins. They seemed to be half the height of the Utopes, but long, slender, and fast. These were only soft, delicate padding sounds as they moved in closer to the kill.

Deker turned toward the lesser gods on the platform with him. He saw their white, desperate faces, knew they were groping, trying to comprehend the vastness of the circumstances into which time and the vagaries of an old man had thrown them. Some of them had made adjustments to their own abnormalities back in their own time, had accepted Nirvana, to escape a world that despised them. And instead of a rewarding sleep, dreams, Lethe, they got this! There was no equipment here to send them once more out of reality. Unless they returned to the vault to the encystment capsules. Deker wondered.

He clenched his fists. He cursed Brenn. Yet, without Brenn, he might have remained just another cog in an uninteresting static machine until he was destroyed. Now, at least, he lived.

“These are our people, still,” he said tensely, quickly. “Maybe no one survives in the other cities, but these Utopes still live because we gave them hope, and faith. We were misfits in the Federation, but we’re gods now. Do whatever you choose. I’m going to fight.”

He jumped from the platform. And even as he hit the ground he felt the hunchback beside him.

“Fool, Deker!” he heard Shar hiss. “Come back! Let’s not die among those dogs!” But Deker didn’t even look at Shar.

The hunchback swung along beside him, his wide, heavy mouth stretched in a gleaming grin. His deep-set eyes above bony cheeks shone with bright anticipation.

“Götterdämmerung.” He chuckled. “A short, sweet life for the gods.”

The priests were screaming commands. The tattered horde had formed into a rough defense line. Behind it huddled a group of cowering women and naked children with bloated stomachs. Around them stood old men with clubs. The others, preparing to fight, held crude swords beaten from heat-softened metal.

* * * *

Aside from the hunchback, four others of the “gods” had followed Deker—the albino, the two-headed man, the little bald-headed freak with the pallid skin, and the other oddity with a delicate airy stride who seemed almost to have been a bird. There were bulges on each shoulder that could have been wings. Together they edged their way through the trembling, tightly-packed Utopes.

As Deker broke through the front line, he stopped. The hunchback drew in his breath hoarsely, then began humming a strange wordless dirge. The albino squealed and hid behind the hunchback.

No firelight here. A jagged mass of steely splinters jutted upward behind the Beasts. They stood silently, only partially visible in the purple black shadows and the splashing pools of moonlight, about fifty feet from Deker. Then their long sleek lengths began rising upward, growing before Deker’s startled gaze. They became taller than Deker, and their forepaws were making motions to each other! Then he heard them talking—talking!

“The sport is over. They must all be killed now.”

“Yes. They who have been awakened might make the others able to fight us.”

“Those who have awakened are different. Get them first. Kill!”

Deker shot a desperate glance to either side. For one incredulous instant he realized the significance of what he was seeing, hearing. These creatures still appeared more feline than human, but they walked upright. They had a crude human speech. And their forepaws had become—hands! Hands with long, flexing talons.

Deker flung himself to one side. He heard a rising moan of fear—fear and something else. Tortured mental conflict. The Utopes turned. They were routed without even a gesture of resistance. Their clubs and crude words clanged in piles as they threw them away and scrambled back, pawing, mouths twisting with fear. While Deker fought, dazedly as though in a nightmare, he saw the expanse behind him suddenly barren of all Utopes.

Only their gods remained to battle the Beasts!

Deker rolled along the partly frozen ground. His hand closed over the rough handle of an abandoned sword. He leaped at a grinning, whiskered face. He saw the hunchback beside him, a club in one hand, a dripping sword in the other. The albino, of whom Deker caught darting glimpses, was squeaking furiously, leaping about with nervous frantic speed, his blade flashing in and out like a needling fang.

A swishing talon spun Deker’s weapon from his hand. His left arm was suddenly numb. As agony stunned his brain, he fell to his knees. Above him was the Beast’s grinning face, with brilliant probing green eyes. He saw the talon sweeping down, retracting, coyly playing. It struck again.

“Götterdämmerung!” repeated the hunchback, with a panting laugh.

CHAPTER IV

Ruins of Death

When the blow failed to fall, Deker shifted his eyes upward and saw why. The two-headed man was wrapped in the Beast’s arms. Blood streamed from the Beast’s throat from a wound the two-headed man’s sword had put there. Deker heard the crunching sounds as the Beast smashed the two heads one after the other. The Beast then fell sprawling over the body of the two-headed man, its tail twitching even after it was dead.

Deker managed to gain his feet. Five Beasts still remained to battle the gods. The others—how many Deker didn’t know—had sped off in pursuit of the fleeing Utopes. The hunchback and the albino stood on either side of Deker, swords ready. Two Beasts lay motionless on the ground.

“Let’s fall back deeper into the ruins,” suggested Deker weakly.

The albino squealed. “Yes! They want me more than anyone.”

Then Deker remembered. “Where’s Shar?”

He eyed the silent Beasts whose green and yellow eyes stared fixedly. As if in answer, Deker heard a long, roaring laugh. He turned. The Cyclops ran past with Shar thrown over his shoulder. She was yelling, beating with impotent fists on the Cyclop’s broad back. They disappeared beneath the high mound of twisted metal.

A Beast started to spring after them.

“Back, Jharl!” another warned. “The death waits there. Back!”

Deker swayed toward the dark mass hiding the Cyclops and Shar.

“Easy,” cautioned the hunchback. “We’ll retreat after them, but take your time. These Beasts aren’t so tough. They hate cold steel.”

“All right,” agreed Deker.

They backed slowly toward the decline leading under the pile of metal. But the Beasts seemed reluctant to follow. Nowhere could Deker see a sign that any Utopes had remained behind near their crude shelters to fight beside their gods. But from varied distances he did hear the cries of the fleeing and the dying.

“We at least gave them courage,” said Deker drily. “For a few thousand years. Gave them hope anyway. We were effective gods all right—as long as we slept.”

One of the Beasts started to cut off their retreat. But again one of the four ordered him back. Deker knew the Beasts were playing with them.

The Beasts were comparatively tireless; they could wait. Soon many more of their kind would return from the slaughter. And unless some unforeseeable development occured fast, the remaining gods would soon join the others. The two-headed man’s pain was ended forever. The man who might have had wings no longer dreamed of what he might have been. The little pallid bald-headed man was dead. Gone from their brief, unsought Olympus.

But what really mattered was what had happened to Shar! Mentally the Cyclops had conditioned himself by brooding introspection and reading to assume the attitudes his physical appearance suggested. A monstrous, three-eyed colossus out of legend.

The nearest Beast gestured frantically. He called—a high mewling cry.

“Back, Jharl!”

Deker glanced behind him. They were at the head of the long slope ending in the heart of the pile concealing Shar and the Cyclops. It was then Deker noticed the slight emanating glow. A sentient cold. Radio-activity!

“Wait,” Deker said harshly. “Hold it, Red!”

The albino stopped. The Beasts had already stopped some distance away, though one of them kept impatiently easing toward Deker, then jumping back, trembling with frustration.

Deker knew enough about physics from his compensatory studying those long evenings after working with his despised lathe, to know why they might die. “The Burning Death.” The priests had said it came out of the atom-blasted ruins. For perhaps thousands of years these metals filled with neutrons had radiated their poisons, might continue to do so for many more.

The unstable nuclei of the metal which had captured the wandering neutrons were still disintegrating slowly. If a living organism got too much, the blood corpuscles would disintegrate too. The area was a deadly pool of rays and radio-active particles. Only this heart of the field still remained deadly after so long a time.

Deker explained while the Beasts stood off, silently waiting.

“We evidently have only two choices,” he finished. “Stay here where the Beasts are afraid to follow, and die—unpleasantly—in some unpredictable future. Or go back out now and fight the Beasts.”

Deker knew what he had to do—go into the very heart of the radiation after Shar. He wondered why he hadn’t done it before. Then the moon went down behind a black cloudbank. After that the only light was the soft bluish glow from the fissioning ruins.

The albino’s eyes were small red glares in the dark. The hunchback’s big hands closed on Deker’s arm. He heard a deep laugh. Then the strange song coming out of the dark chilled Deker, yet soothed him.

Cold steel in the heart and final sleep;

Cold steel and the claws of the Beast

“No!” whined the albino. “Not me. I’ll take the gamma rays—anything but the Beasts! Stay here with me!”

Ten slitted yellow-green eyes glowed back at Deker as he stood there waiting. Then from behind them Deker heard Shar scream. He heard the bellowing roar of the Cyclops. Shar screamed again. After that came a terrible silence that went on, a timeless pulsing fear. Deker pawed the darkness. He must go after Shar. But what could he do against the Cyclops, with his swelling helpless arm?

“How long can we stay within the radiation field without being fatally affected?” asked the hunchback.

“I don’t know,” said Deker. “We can stand some without damage. We’re just within the field evidently. Shar and the Cyclops are in its heart. However, there’s no way of knowing how long after exposure the symptoms will appear, then death.”

“We should take the chance until dawn,” the hunchback reasoned. “We wouldn’t have a chance against the Beasts in the dark. They can see. We can’t—except the albino. And it’s quite plain that he doesn’t want to fight them anyway.”

“Let’s wait until dawn,” begged the albino, “wait with me.”

“All right, Red,” Deker agreed. “I want some kind of chance. At least I want to see. We need some rest, too.”

Deker felt of his arm. It was swelling rapidly, pain growing with the increased size. He gripped his crude sword.

“Deker!” the albino was asking desperately. “What does it mean? These Beasts becoming almost human?”

“Natural evolutionary processes wouldn’t account for it,” said Deker. “Unless we’ve been in suspended animation for millions of years instead of merely thousands. And I don’t believe we have.”

“Abnormal evolutionary development rate,” said the hunchback with unexpected profundity.

“Probably,” agreed Deker. “The radioactivity from the hundred blasted cities has created a freak world into which we fit no better than in the world we left. No telling what hard radiation has done to the normal processes we once knew. But why haven’t the Utopes changed, too? Accelerated evolutionary growth, if it’s caused by the radiation, should apply to all living organisms.”

“Why bother with logic here?” sighed the hunchback. “Accept what we find, as we find it. Logic is false; it can never be complete. The Utopian Federation was based on mechanistic logic. It’s gone.”

During a pause, Deker could hear the distant cries of Beasts and sometimes a cry that might have been human. The hunchback broke the depressing silence with an appropriate chant:

Gone, gone the crystalline heights

Of Tyre and Sodom and Gomorrah.

Alexandria and Ninevah and New York, too, are gone.

And the Hundred Cities’ dust has mingled without song.

Ah, Deker, no man is infallible.

No city—no city is immortal.

“You sing well,” commented Deker wearily, his eyes drooping with fever and fatigue. “When could you have learned to be a singer of verse in the unemotional Federation?”

“You studied at nights, Deker, to take your mind from your inherent feelings of inferiority, of not belonging. Well, I sang. In the museum libraries, illegally of course, I read of the darkest histories of man; for I knew that only in the past would I have ever fitted in. I never thought I would find my world in a distant future. Yet I should have known that dark always must follow the light. And the light the dark.”

Deker started away into the heart of the radio-active field after Shar. But the hunchback seemed to sense his movements in the dark. Powerful arms wrapped around him, held him back.

Deker explained, and the hunchback softly called him a fool.

“She isn’t worthy of you, Deker. She is too abnormal, even for you. Her mind is more bestial than those who wait for us. She could have escaped the Cyclops, followed us into battle. She loves the Cyclops, his brute strength, mastery and savagery. She isn’t for you, Deker.”

“It’s a thing I’ve got to do,” whispered Deker. He tried to fight free.

“No, Deker. You aren’t going. Listen!”

Decker heard it. It was close at first, then began fading as the two ran away together on the far side of the radio-active debris. Shar’s laughter. Not demented laughter, but sly, triumphant.

As Deker slumped down, his heart was heavy with the pain of defeat. He stretched out unfeeling on the hard, partly frozen ground. Finally he felt nothing at all except an infinite thickening softness. He would sleep.…

* * * *

Some time later he felt hands shaking him. He opened burning eyes. The hunchback’s gargoyle face was grinning close above his, eyes gleaming with cynical humor.

“There’s no escape for us through sleep, Deker,” the hunchback said. “We tried it for a long time. We’ve always got to wake up to realities. It’s time now, Deker. It’s dawn.”

Deker rolled over, watching the serrated outline of the crumbled city against a crimson sunrise. Then, coming on over on an elbow, he saw the Beasts. Five of them still standing there fully erect on their strangely bent haunches, fixed with terrible patience. The dew of the night had settled like minute jewels over their sleek glistening fur.

“All right,” said Deker, climbing painfully to his feet. His body was stiff with cold, and chills of fever jerked uncontrollably over the length of his throbbing body. His arm was a swollen useless lump.

“It’s time, so let’s go.”

He gripped the sword in his good hand.

The albino screamed, but Deker didn’t hear him. He didn’t hear anything as he walked forward, except the mad pounding of his own heart. But his fevered brain was groping frantically for some last strategic effort. A seething anger clutched him as he ran toward the Beasts. He didn’t want to die yet.

He heard himself yelling. Roaring, the hunchback was beside him. And the Beasts moved, blurs of feral lightning energy.

Deker realized then how weak and useless he was as he stumbled, went down. Again and again he swung the blade, shearing only cold morning mist. Hooked talons raked down, then just short of decapitating him, the claws flexed inward, and a sadistic slap sent him sprawling. A Beast was straddling him, its tongue licking through gleaming fangs.

A paw gave him a playful cuff, and he rolled across the thawing ground. Dazed, Deker saw that the hunchback had been more successful. His sword dripped red. A Beast was twitching on the ground. The hunchback laughed as he ran to Deker, stood over him.

The Beast that had been toying with Deker fell back, its emotionless round face staring. It was still breathing normally in spite of the short, intense skirmish.

“You can fight,” it said. “Last night you fought, but we thought it only an exceptional instance. You can still fight! Why is this? None of the Utopes or the Glowing Ones fight.”

Deker could detect fear. Not of any immediate danger from himself or the hunchback or the albino, but of this mysterious ability to fight.

Deker frowned through a mist of fevered weariness. It wasn’t at all normal. Whatever else the human species had lacked they had always been children of conflict. They thrived on barriers to achievement. But the humans of this era had never been known to fight the Beasts.

Why?

The Utopes here were groveling in cowardice, helplessly fleeing in constant terror of the Beasts. They had made swords, but they couldn’t use them. They had made them in anticipation of the gods awakening and giving them courage.

But the gods had failed.

“What has happened that you humans can fight?” the Beast asked again.

So Deker bluffed. “Not us alone. All the Utopes have changed. Soon we’ll all be hunting you again. For sport. You’ve been good hunting for a long time.”

With snarling screams, the Beasts leaped in again. Deker reasoned this to be his last combat. But he didn’t care. Deep beneath his fear, was a gladness for all that had happened.

How much better a way was this than even Nirvana.

He managed to get to his feet, swaying. Then the woman in the sphere appeared. Waiting behind a column of twisted metal, she had been watching the strange combat, watching and listening.

CHAPTER V

Perl of the Sphere

From behind the blackened heap, the woman came near before Deker realized that she was there. First he saw only the shimmering sphere moving noiselessly over the ground, then he saw the woman through the translucent shell.

She didn’t seem human, glowing with an argent brilliance through shifting hues. Her hair was red-gold. Her tall body was soft rich bronze covered slightly with glittering stuff. She was walking with austere measured strides over the debris, and the coruscating globe encircling her followed her movements faithfully like an enwrapping splendid shadow.

Rather boredly she moved straight toward the Beasts. They sprang back with long leaps of thirty feet. They landed crouched, tongues licking and eyes flaming. The one that had spoken with Deker trembled down the tawny sleekness of its body.

“A Glowing One!” it growled to its followers, then lapsed into a slurred spitting gibberish.

Then they ran. Long, frightened bounds took them away with startling speed, down the long slope of ruin, sent them diving headlong into the thick sea fog of the valley.

The girl moved past the panting hunchback, toward Deker. The albino crept up beside the hunchback, crying, his little pink hands rubbing at his eyes.

Deker made some exclamation of awe, while the girl came as near to him as was possible without the translucent sphere touching him. It had about a ten-foot radius. It seemed to be a sphere within a sphere, the outside one rotating around the other. The sphere represented great danger—and power.

Deker backed away. The sphere followed, and the hunchback laughed. But the girl didn’t seem to notice, as she studied Deker. He felt small again, inferior, embarrassed. He hated her a little then, with the resentment he had felt for the exalted environment of the Federation.

The albino edged closer, leaving the hunchback. Deker waited, for what, he didn’t know. He only knew this woman was in a position to make the first, maybe even the final, gesture.

He blinked with pain, holding his shoulder. His arm seemed ready to burst. The woman didn’t seem interested in his arm.

“There were really men sleeping in the vault then,” she finally said.

The protection surrounding her had no nullifying effect on her voice which was rich and low and coldly impersonal.

Deker nodded. Her arrogant cyanogen-blue eyes narrowed.

“You have slept in that vault a very long time, if the myth of the Utopes is fact. Our history also speaks of you sleepers, but I hardly believed it. You came from before the Change? That is almost too incredible. I wouldn’t believe it, except that you can fight. It is odd to see a human with that ability—disgusting and terrible too. Tell me, what was the date in which you were put into this—sleep?”

Deker said in a faint whisper, “Twenty-one-sixty.”

Awe broke the cold mask of detachment for an instant. But her interest was only that of an indurated scientist who had coldly drawn something new out of a test-tube.

She started to speak, then jerked her head with a startled gesture toward the sky. Deker followed her gaze. A cloud of flying things in perfect formation was descending, growing larger with fearful speed. A distant buzzing grew into a sullen roar.

“Flies!” the hunchback yelled wildly. “Flies, twice as big as a man!”

“I would advise you two to seek shelter,” the girl in the sphere said calmly. “They cannot touch me inside this composite protective field.”

The formation of bee-flies was hurtling straight for Deker. His eyes frantically sought shelter, though the beauty of the attacking giants penetrated his fear.

The black velvet bodies into which the sunlight sank and disappeared; the fringe of golden hairs along their bodies, the steel-gray many-faceted eyes of which their heads were made. He saw the incredibly delicate formation of their wings which seemed to have a spread of almost thirty feet, so thin the light in passing through them was refracted into rainbow tints so that the whole sky was a blaze of color.

“You probably find it rather amazing what has happened even to flies in forty thousand years,” the woman said carelessly.

But Deker was running in slow painful haste, with the hunchback and the albino. The sky was a riotous blaze of fantastic coloration as the bee-flies circled overhead, huge lancets below enormous compound eyes expanding and dripping with hunger as they reached down, preparing to draw the blood from their prey.

Deker saw the hunchback now, crawling under the debris. But a sound had stopped Deker. Not an ordinary scream, even of terror. But a soul-wrenching cry that sent little pockets of fear bursting inside Deker’s stomach, chilling his back.

Deker turned. The albino fell. Evidently he had badly injured his foot or ankle for he repeatedly fell. And just above him a bee-fly hovered, its wings quivering, its lancet projecting down long and bristling, a filamented mouth gaping at its tip.

Deker wondered why he did it. He didn’t care for the albino, a queer little helpless wretch in a perpetual funk. But in spite of the giant bee-flies, Deker started back to help the albino. He managed to retrieve his sword. He retched as the long lancet smacked, stuck against the Albino’s twitching back.

The translucent wings beat in shimmering waves as the blood-sucking instruments fixed inexorably on the albino. Deker threw some last bit of burning energy into his wavering brain and tottering legs—but the bee-fly was taking his meal with him, up into the air. Deker saw the albino’s red eyes bulging with final horror. The white face opened, and a last tattered cry ripped out.

Leaping upward, Deker futilely swung his sword. Around him there seemed suddenly a thousand sucking lancets. Then one moment of bursting pain. His mind seemed to explode. There was a ripping agony as though every atom in him were flying apart.

Then the gently swaying music. The caress of soft depthless clouds. And no more pain. Somehow he felt that the pain could never return. It was the last impression he remembered before the dark cloud released him from all the others.…

Deker opened his eyes. He was inside the sphere! He was lying at the girl’s small sandaled feet, and she was looking down at him with detached interest.

“You live,” she stated. “Remarkable. I didn’t think you would. Though I had to take the chance, for the bee-flies would certainly have killed you. You must be radically different physically from the ordinary human, or you would never have passed through the shield, even though I did lower its rate as much as possible.”

He turned on his side. The world out there was a shimmering unreality as though viewed through watered glass. High up, the bee-flies were winging away across the fogbound valley. The hunchback was out there staring, sword poised.

He reached out with the blade.

“No!” Deker heard the girl exclaim. “Don’t touch the shield. You will die!”

“I’m just as inhuman as he is.” The hunchback grinned. “But you’re the boss right now, lady. You, Deker—you all right?”

Deker tried to speak, failed.

“He is very ill,” the girl said. Her voice held no compassion. “I’m taking him with me to my sanctum.”

“And where is your—sanctum?”

“Not so far from here. I will go slowly so that if you are his—friend, is that the word?—then you may follow us.”

“Why are you taking Deker with you?”

“Is that his name? Odd—Deker. Anyway, I’m taking him because of a certain curiosity. I’ve often wondered about the ancient Utopes who were said to be sleeping in the vault. I will cure him of his wound by ray treatment. I would learn more of his ability to fight. In our world, only Beasts can do that.”

There it was again, mused Deker, half asleep. The outsiders, the freaks.

Again reality faded for him, and he dreamed. How easy it was anymore for him to return to sleep as an escape from reality. Well, his body had certainly been conditioned to it long enough. But it was a weakness now. He slept too easily.

Peculiar woman, his fading thoughts decided. Unpleasantly arrogant and emotionless and egotistical, but so pleasantly beautiful and desirable. And she was controlling nuclear forces in a world shattered to barbarism by the atom, reduced to another dark age of half human horrors, accelerated evolution, monsters, in which the only other humans he had seen were little more than crawling apes.

But he slept.…

* * * *

He felt much better after he awoke, ate, drank some bitter-sweet juice, and found that his arm had almost healed. He had slept for five days.

Her sanctum was a high naked tower of metal four miles from the remains of City Three. It was built on the side of a heavily forested slope at the foot of mist-softened mountains, beside a clear cold stream. And her sanctum had never been intended for anyone else but her. It’s interior was a simple, utilitarianly designed cylindrical shell. Its walls were the same as the sphere in which she traveled, a composite force shield against any interference in her individual pathway of existence.

* * * *

Gans, the hunchback, sat outside in the warm noonday sun, singing beside the mountain water. Deker, sprawled out on pneumatic cushions beneath the window from which he could see distant peaks and past which an occasional winged monster broodingly flapped. He listened to the hunchback’s resigned, introspective, and rather sad song:

Never shall I strain my dull eyes more For hidden meaning; I shall be as one Who in his dim perception of the skies Sees but the certain glory of the sun And does not care to question or devise An answer to his own oblivion.

The girl stood looking out the window. Her body, now free of the protective shield, was bronzed, and almost too beautiful in the sunlight which was strangely bright in her red-gold hair. Her name was Perl. She had no other name. She was an Anarch.

Deker wondered how these philosophies could endure through eons of wars and even beyond the final war of all. A simple little philosophy that could be traced back, according to Perl, to a time-lost philosopher called Zeno the Stoic, the first Anarch.

Perl turned, eyes shining with fanatical self-conviction, withdrawn into her lonely self-sufficiency. She repeated the code of the Anarchs: “‘Every man is his own government, his own law, his own church, a system within himself.’ It has never died, our philosophy,” she said. “It has reechoed through the ages. And there was never a greater need for it than during the reign of the Utopes who had submerged the individual completely to the mechanistic dictates of government.”

“Your Anarch ancestors launched the lightning gods that finished civilization?” asked Deker.

She shook her head. “The Utopes. They cannot admit that their own faulty system destroyed itself, so they blame the Anarchs. But the Federation was undermined by its own weak base, by erratic though very human madness that is inevitable in a social order.”

Yes. No one had suspected Brenn of being anything other than a scientist devoted to the Federation. So there had been others.

“The Fascios built an underground scientific hierarchy,” Perl explained. “They devised weapons of terrible destructiveness. They had no reason—they were human, victims of socialization. They wanted power. They launched their attack and, a few hours later, all the Hundred Cities were destroyed.”

Beneath her cold exterior she was quivering with a growing fear, a terrible fear that Deker could feel only as vague tendrils clawing on his consciousness. From behind her eyes deep stark shadows shone. And Deker knew a racial memory persisted in this girl’s mind of madness beyond comprehension.

“Maybe only a few Utopes remain in the world now,” she said. “And they have been dying rapidly. They have learned too much to fight for survival. So they must die, and that is best.”

CHAPTER VI

“Humanity Is Doomed!”

Interest grew in Deker as he listened to Perl talk. He asked her about the Anarchs who had survived the destruction, retaining a high scientific culture.

“Ours isn’t a society,” she said with sudden vehemence. “Society is evil. We have reached the final logical stage of man. This is ultimate individualism. The highest and only sane law is that of individual expression. Compulsion, for whatever purpose, serves only to corrupt otherwise normal individual activities.”

“But man is naturally social,” said Deker. “He’s always been. He managed to survive because he cooperated. The trouble with the Utopian Federation is simply that it became too standardized.”

Perl solemnly shook her head. “Perhaps that was true, in the beginning. But being cooperative was only a step upward in the evolutionary scale. We have evolved beyond that stage. We have found individual perfectionism, absolute anarchism. Any social group demands leaders; that means power in individuals over the others which in its very nature is a pernicious influence. Those who rule are bound, even against their best intentions, to become self-seeking, unmindful of those whom they represent.” There was an exalted pause, then she added, “We have reached perfection. The individual is his own god!”

Deker thought of the ironic twist. He had escaped one system of final and static socialism into one of equally static and suicidal individualism.

“How many of you Anarchs survived the Atom War?” he asked.

“Not many. We were far underground where we built our laboratories. We knew that the rest of the socialistic Hundred Cities would be annihilated. And when the—the awful destruction came, we survived. Everything about our individual order has remained exactly the same. We have the dominant intelligence.”

“To dominate over what?” asked Deker.

“Ourselves, whom we have learned to control and guide completely. Free from any social restriction, any communal government or organization, man is in his perfect state.” Her expression changed. Her line of thought had altered. “You actually lived before the Change?” she said. “What were you in that other terrible time?”

Deker smiled wryly. “I was a freak there, as I am here. I hated that world as much as your Anarch ancestors did—maybe more. Standardization killed individual freedom. But this Anarch system of yours, by following an entirely divergent path, has reached the same gray end of stagnation and futility.”

She didn’t comment. He went on, told her all about the encystment vault.

“But how have you preserved, intact, the culture with which you started?” he asked then. “How has your race survived if the individual is so—er—inviolate?”

“I’ve said there is—procreation. A form of marriage.” She revealed emotion for the first time, a brief blush. She turned away, again looking out the window as she talked. “Each composite protective shield, both of the sanctums and the spheres, is attuned to the individual vibratory pattern. Sometime during our lives we may find another Anarch whose vibratory pattern is similar. If that should happen we consider such vibratory rapport all that is necessary for mating. If such a meeting occurs we must mate. It is our only law, and that is strictly for survival of the species. We terminate the association as quickly as possible.”

Deker smiled openly. “You’re not even fooling yourself, Perl. You say no one except one suitable for mating with you can penetrate your composite shield. I did. You say it’s because I’m physically not human. Why not admit that my vibratory pattern is almost identical with yours? That is why I was able to penetrate your commuting shield and the walls of your sanctum.”

Perl’s reaction was violent. Her face flushed a deep red, then paled.

“You!” she said, with dripping acidity.

It hurt, the way she said it.

“Physically, that’s the only explanation,” he said. “We’re for each other, Perl, according to your own implacable laws, whether you like it or not.”

“It’s ridiculous. As soon as your arm is completely healed you can leave. In fact, your arm is well enough now. Good-by! Go back and marry one of your bestial Utopes!”

“If there are any left,” said Deker harshly. “The Beasts were pursuing them. It seems as though the Beasts have let the Utopes live for sporting purposes. Now, since we awoke, they’re out to kill every remaining Utope for fear they’ll develop the ability to fight. And there’s nothing we can do.” Deker was on his feet now, standing close to her, looking straight into her eyes. “Unless you help us, Perl!”

She trembled with repugnance and horror.

“You are primitive and brutal indeed. You actually would destroy?”

“For survival, Perl! You have the knowledge, the power the Beasts don’t have—yet. Use it now before the Beasts overtake and surpass you scientifically. You’ve got to help or humanity’s finished. You think you can survive in your individual egoistic shell, but you’re dying the same as the Utopes. Man can’t live isolated. I found that out one time. You can’t survive. You need the associative processes of society to develop. You said yourself that nothing about your culture has changed in thousands of years.

“Listen, Perl! Help me fight the Beasts! Help me organize the Utopes, make them sane again so they can fight to survive. We can begin a new civilization over the old ruins, start the long trail back up. The human race is almost gone. Unless we organize a social group, start soon on the road back—unless we do, we’ll die here. The Beasts will rule!”

Perl fell back. A huge black form passed across the window. Deker caught a quick glance of a gigantic beak. It was a bird much larger than the body of a man.

“It was the Atom War,” she said softly. Her lips quivered, her eyes smoldered with that rising fear tide. “It’s a racial memory which no human can lose from his mind. Man’s socialized aggressiveness led to that war, his inherent desire to evolve. He’s lost that now, because he had to. To preserve sanity he adopted an attitude of nonchange, the only logical attitude. The horrors of the war into which his desire to progress led him changed his entire psychology. Those of us who are Anarchs, and even the Utopes, can worship only immediacy. There is a fear blockage against all change.”

“But the Utopes still have the spark,” said Deker. “They want to fight, progress. They summoned us as gods to help them.”

“But they’re social minded,” she said. “That isn’t the right road. This is the only logical state, this individual perfectionism. Progressive evolution, as you call it, led only to mass self-annihilation, and things even worse.” Her voice broke, shivered like shattered glass. “Billions slaughtered—blood—rivers and oceans of it!”

Her voice sank to a low moan. Her hands shook as Deker looked at them. She swayed. He was quickly at her side. For an instant she accepted him there, and he felt her warm young softness. Then she indignantly pushed him away. Frantically, desperately, Deker argued:

“Your introspective life can’t last. Change is a natural law. Without it, an organism atrophies and dies. If you can’t see that, then you’re truly lost. Your generation might survive; maybe even the next, or the next. But humanity is doomed, unless you use the power you have and fight. Fight, Perl! Fight like a beast in the jungle!”

He turned from her, a gasping girl, wild-eyed with shock. He looked out. The hunchback still lolled lazily by the stream, singing, eyes closed. His brown fur robe was thrown back, and his twisted massive body drank in the sun like a thirsty plain.

Sensing Deker above him, he opened his eyes. They crinkled in a laugh.

“It’s time we were leaving, Deker. There’s nothing here for us. We’re alone here, even more than the other time.”

Deker wordlessly turned from Gans the Hunchback.

“You haven’t decided yet to use your knowledge of power, and work with us and with the Utopes against the Beasts,” he said to Perl. A pause, and he added, “Then you will never decide. It’s your burden, your conscience—the death of the human species. It’s terribly wrong, because it’s possible that man deserves another chance.”

Deker thought that she wanted to cry, but couldn’t.

“The rapidly evolving Beasts are overtaking you rapidly,” he went on. “And even in your own isolated Anarch shells, they will eventually find and destroy you!”

A faint cry shivered from her. She staggered, sank down on a couch.

“Get out!” she cried in tortured shuddering anguish. “Get out!”

Never having had the opportunity to understand women, Deker walked to the wall.

“Very well. But somewhere in this twisted, defeated world we’ll find humans who are really human, who will fight with us against the Beasts.”

From far away he heard her trembling voice.

“There are no such people any more. I know. Even the Utopes have developed too far for that.”

Her hand moved with trembling slowness. A section of the wall dissolved. Deker walked out into the sunshine. The hunchback rose lazily and they walked down toward the wide plain leading from the foothills toward a river flanked by willows.

Deker saw her shining red-gold hair framed by the window of her ivory tower. He waved, tried to bury the ache in his heart. She didn’t wave back, but stood immobile in the window’s frame. The hunchback laughed briefly, then bitterly sang:

She is lonely enough, dissatisfied and cold.

There is no crowd to take her to its mocking din,

Infold her in its grasp; tighten its faulty hold.

There she kneels, secluded and apart,

To worship, in the chapel of her heart.

Deker stared with new awe at the hunchback as they walked on through the pungent-smelling thickness of the lengthening grass. A wandering minstrel of time.

“Life has little meaning for you now, Gans?” he asked.

“Maybe it has none,” said the hunchback. “We’ll see what happens, where this adventure leads us. Until then:

The sand, the sun, the sea,

The moon a gentle gleam.

A memory. The fragment of a dream.”

Turning, Deker could still see the shining of her red-gold hair through the window’s frame.

“She is like Semele,” said the hunchback.

“Who was Semele?”

“She was the daughter of Cadmus and mother of Dionysius. Zeus having promised her whatsoever she should ask, she begged to behold him in his splendor, and was destroyed by his lightnings.”

CHAPTER VII

Defeat

Now it was sunset, and the valley was again fog-bound. As Deker and the hunchback approached the ruined city, he could hear the roars of the animals grazing madly on the plains, animals Deker had grown too familiar with during the months he and Gans had wandered over an insane, distorted continent.

They had managed to survive mainly and precariously by constant flight and desperate concealment. They had seen other Anarchs, each with his or her ivory tower and force shields. But wherever they had gone and whomever or whatever they had seen, the story was the same: No human being was free from the psychic fear blockage against any kind of evolutionary change.

In contrast to this disease of unchange, they had seen the ferocious, terribly accelerated trail of the Beasts streaking with frightening speed ahead along their roadway of evolution. And none of the humans cared. They had rationalized their position. They cared nothing about the continued survival of their species.

Their own immediate generation, particularly their own individual egos, was all that mattered. For their sanity, they would pay the rather exorbitant price of racial extinction.

The two gaunt, leanly muscled wanderers trudged over a low hill and down toward the massive plain of wrenched and molten steel. Small cooking fires sent up straight streamers of smoke through breathless air. A few dark figures scurried like nervous animals among the ruins.

“A few Utopes still live,” commented the hunchback. “They can never leave the city of their fathers, the place where their gods once gave them hope.”

As they walked in among the cooking fires, the tattered scrawny things that had been human, stared, cried out in confused fear, and streaked into their holes.

But Deker headed straight for the encystment vault. And as much as he had hated that world of the past, some part of it was far better than this futile aberrated world poisoned by radiation and by human defeat.

As Deker and the hunchback approached the jagged opening leading into the tunneled entrance to the vault, a towering figure stepped out, regally clothed in white furred robes and glittering metal bracelets.

“The Cyclops,” muttered the hunchback. “He still lives. But he’s sick, very sick.”

His middle eye was blacker now, deeply hollowed and fiery. Shar appeared from behind the Cyclops. She clung to him for support.

The shine was gone from her black hair which clung down in a scalp mop. A yellow beast-skin hung loosely over a skeletal form that was barely skin and bone. Red stones whirled, glistening futilely from her ears. Deep down inside a dirty white face, her feverish black eyes blazed out at Deker. Talons gripped the Cyclops’ wasting arm.

“The radiation,” said Deker. “I thought you had gone too far into it.”

“We didn’t know,” rasped the Cyclops painfully. “We’ve found out. It hit us only recently.”

“You’re still faithful to the Utopes,” said Deker softly. “You’re their god.”

“That’s right,” said the Cyclops. “And I’m remaining so.”

“While you live, you’re a god,” said the hunchback as he sat down lazily on a porous, time-eaten chunk of metal.

While the Hunchback sat there with his eyes partly closed, Deker told the Cyclops and his mate everything he had discovered about the world of the Anarchs, the accelerated evolutionary development of the Beasts who were overtaking and would surpass man. The sickening death’s head skull of the Cyclops nodded.

“I know. I’ve tried to drive them against the Beasts. But they run until they drop, or hide. I’ve organized defense methods. We have signals, and stand watches so we can hide before the Beasts can surprise us. I’ve had them store up food, too, so they can stay in hiding for long periods. That’s all I could do.” He coughed.

“You’ve been a good god,” commented Deker.

The Cyclops shook off Shar’s emaciated arm, tottered forward. There was a horrible impression of great strength despite his wasted body. His right hand came from behind him grasping a heavy double-hilted sword.

“And I’m going to remain their ruler.” He repeated it with growing ferocity, his middle eye glaring.

“Why worry about it if you’ll soon die?” asked the hunchback.

“I’ll die a god!” said the Cyclops dramatically. “As I’ve lived.”

“Wait!” began Deker, but already the skeletal figure of the Cyclops was shambling forward, swinging the polished blade.

Deker managed a crude parry and dodged away. Then the Cyclops fell, fell gasping, battering in slowing desperation with fleshless arms. Deker dragged him off, while the awful outline of Shar fell on him like a thing from a grave, clawing frantically. Deker flung her away. She began to die there. The Cyclops crawled to her, crying with a dark bestial loneliness.

Deker was sick as he watched. They had clung precariously to life, but this sudden abnormal effort was ending it. They had got a tremendous dose of gamma rays and neutrons. Intestinal tracts had gradually broken down, and their bodies had been unable to manufacture enough white blood corpuscles.

It took Shar a long time to die, and before she was dead, the Cyclops joined her as though he wanted to. They both went into a coma and died together, an hour later.

“Well, they died as gods,” said the hunchback, “and that’s what they wanted. One by one they’ve all found what they wanted, except us, Deker.”

They stood in the entrance to the vault, and this time the hunchback had no song to sing.

Deker led the way without any further conversation into the tunnel. They stood in the dim luciferin glow of the cold light that could burn on for centuries more.

“Are you sure you don’t mind staying here, Gans?”

“Are you sure you want to return to Nirvana, Deker?”

“I’m sure. My original purpose—and yours—in choosing Nirvana was to escape an intolerable world. I awoke too soon, or too late. It doesn’t matter now. I want to go back to sleep.”

“And I want to remain here,” said the hunchback. “I seek no further for the chimera. One can search forever through the winding labyrinth and somewhere at the end of the quest, the minotaur always waits. I’ve had enough.”

“You’re bitter,” said Deker. “You’ll be lonely. And I’m afraid all your songs will be sad.”

“My life will be short in such a world as this,” declared the hunchback. “But I no longer care about escaping. There’s no place to go. Who knows what conditions you will awaken to? Besides, one of us must remain behind. One must administer to the other until the encystment process is activated again.”

“All right,” said Deker with a conclusion arrived at several times before.

“Anyway,” the hunchback added, “now that the Cyclops is gone, what few Utopes remain alive need a god. I don’t think it quite fair that all their gods should abandon them.”

They studied the records Brenn had left. All the necessary information was there. For Deker, who had studied and become so thoroughly educated in basic principles, it was fairly simple.

So again Deker was inside the capsule, suspended from the low ceiling of the vault like a pendulum so that even the Earth’s movement would not disturb his sleep. All sensory stimuli were shut out, permitting the vasomotor centers complete freedom from disturbance in the hermetically sealed capsule. Again the temperature would lower to the 7.1 level and another stage of Nirvana would begin. And end—except that Nirvana should have no ending.

He closed his eyes. It was much easier for him now. For almost immediately, from long conditioning, his mind, his entire nervous system responded, and he began slipping away, deep deep down into that gloriously soft dream-sea. He heard the metronomes working again, far away—and fading, fading, the last soft chanting of the hunchback, Gans, as he sang above him, or somewhere through the falling curtain of mist:

I shall not go far, Deker.

I have my story and my laugh.

And always something happens, someone comes.

Long solitude will make the bargain fair;

The exchange even. I need but wait.

* * * *

It was easier this time for Deker to awake. The mechanism was so arranged that one comparatively simple threshold was left at normal waking level. When this one threshold level was activated by the metronome, it started a chain reaction, as the temperature gradually returned to normal, to an activation of all his bodily faculties.

This time there was little stiffness or pain. This—time?

Opening his eyes, he looked straight up through the transparent plastic cowling of the encystment capsule. He waited a long time before he moved any other part of his body, thinking. He made one resolve then, that he knew he would keep. He would never go into the sleep again. No matter what happened, he knew he was finished with Nirvana.

Because for some reason, the thought of returning again and again to Nirvana was frightening. It was too abnormal, in a temporal sense, too vast in its possible implications. He might continue with this process forever, if that word held any meaning for him. Go on and on, beyond the race, beyond all life, find himself in some deserted sunset where there was nothing left—only dust and mute evidence of a final destruction, nothing save dust and a hot dry wind.

But as Deker looked out through the vault—everything else had changed!

Deker shivered as he pressed the button at his side. The cowling slid back. He was outside the capsule, looking across the small enclosure of the vault. Outside was incredible alteration. The protective mountain of sheeting, lead and plasticrete and steel had been removed. Parts of the steel walls of the vault had been replaced with translucent paneling.

Beyond, Deker could see towering walls and long gently winding halls that gave off a soothing pattern of shifting harmonic lights. Narrow columns rose from varied-colored pastel flooring, blossoming outward and up like monstrous flowers.

Men and women, a small group, were walking toward him down the hall. They were more or less grand, Deker decided, in brilliantly colored sandals and brief shorts—tall, willowy golden men and women with the carriage of kings and queens. They were gesticulating with a dignified excitement.

They came to the vision panels and stood looking in at him.

Deker’s eyes fell down, saw his ragged fur skin hanging to his bony frame, saw the scarred flesh, the ragged, dirty nails curling on the ends of his hands. He glanced up again at his audience who were staring back with increasing curiosity, but with a high austere curiousness as though Deker were some sort of animal in an ostentatious zoo.

Animal—in a zoo!

A terrible familiar sickness hit him. There was a difference, but also an almost terrifying similarity with that other time, now how long ago? Perhaps he could never determine. Was there never, never to be an escape?

He shrugged off the growing sick fear. It was a selfish attitude to take in the face of the magnificent fact that man had survived!

Deker meant to find out how, and the finding would be worth all the terror and frustration. From those futile Anarchs in their egoistic shells, and from the groveling Utopes, these super-beings had developed.

A feeling of tremendous pride in his species pulsed through him as he stood there, an object of their polite disapprobation. His species were indefatigable, eternal. Their survival value was infinite, regardless of what sloughs of autodelusion and fantasy they allowed to entrap them.

* * * *

A translucent panel slid back, and the two men stepped inside and approached him cautiously. How familiar their perfect masklike faces were, thought Deker, with that old returning bitterness. How lacking in individuality.

“We greet you, Sleeper,” said one of them, uncomfortably it seemed, as though condescending toward some level he couldn’t understand. “You—you may come with us.”

Deker was fighting against that enroaching humility, that smothering sensation of inferiority, of not belonging.

“Is that an order, or a statement?” he said with exaggerated defiance.

The language the men spoke was strangely distorted, but Deker understood it in general. He had no difficulty there, and neither did they.

The man stammered an answer, looked slightly frightened.

“What—why, it’s a request naturally. There is no coercion here.”

“Of course not.” Deker grinned sardonically. “Anyway, not so you would notice it. However, I would like to change into some other clothes, get something to—some nourishment. It will seem strange to feel human again.”

Had he ever?

The tension sagged somewhat. Deker followed them through the staring crowd outside. He noticed how the women drew back from him with obvious distaste and antipathy they could not conceal. There was pity, too; and that was worse.

It was too infernally familiar!

For an instant, a terrible instant, Deker thought all the eons of frustration were converging in his eyes, that he was going to cry.

CHAPTER VIII

The City of Perl

Brought into a room, Deker saw that it was queerly patterned, flooded with shifting hues of monochromatic lights. It was large, with a few couches, and a table supported by a single blossoming column from the ceiling. The two men motioned toward a couch and Deker sat down.

A small square in the wall slid to one side and a tray projected itself. There was a glass on it full of colorless liquid. One of the men motioned toward it with forced politeness.

“Drink, Sleeper. It will restore your strength.”

“Not that you particularly care,” thought Deker as he nodded and drank.

Immediately he felt strong, and the highly emotional feeling of desperate futility eased somewhat.

“This is an odd situation, socially,” the man who had invited him to drink then said. “I hardly know how to approach you.”

“Not as a human being,” thought Deker. “Anything but that.”

“You are so alien, you know,” the man said, and Deker winced. “We’re almost as shocked as you are. You have been something of a shrine since long before our objectively recorded history began. You have been a subject of much conjecture. Not even a High Scientist has been permitted to enter your vault. Your exact status and purpose has also been only conjecture.

“Frankly, we hardly expected you ever to awaken. Few even thought you were living, in the physico-chemical sense. This must be a great shock to you. Adjusting yourself to our highly advanced perfectly socialized culture will undoubtedly be difficult for you. We will, of course, help you all we can.” He sounded dubious.

Deker said something vague; he didn’t remember what. Then a man brought in some shorts and sandals, and Deker put them on. They were weightless and astonishingly thin, clinging to his flesh with an uncanny persistence.

The man who came bustling in then was obviously a man of real importance. He appeared older than anyone Deker had seen so far, though there were no outward physical signs of age. It was the light behind his eyes that was old. Somehow, he suggested Jak, of City Three, or perhaps it was only Deker’s imagination.

“I’m Kahl, Mental Adjustment Specialist for World City,” he said. “You’ll need me soon enough, so let us begin readjustment proceedings right now, shall we? Of course you’ll want to be reconditioned?”

He nodded to the two other men. They left.

Ominous despair thickened about Deker.

“Mental adjustment—reconditioning?” he heard himself murmuring.

He was sick. He was mad. He wanted to run far away, but there was no place to go.

“Naturally. This is my study. My laboratories adjoin. You see, everything in the City of Perl has his assigned duties to the city for which he is conditioned from his period of artificial semenation upward. Of course I don’t know what your—er—scientific background is now. But you’ll soon learn the rudiments of our glorious state.”

Deker was staring. A wave of dizzy dampness swirled through the inchoate confusion of his mind. A queer crying tightness filled his throat.

“What? What did you say? The City of Perl!”

“Why yes. I suppose you would be more interested in our myths than our present day realities. The name, City of Perl, stems from the legendary beginning of our socialistic state. An odd myth, purely animistic of course. Incredibly enough, our species were savages in those days—gods and goddesses were born. Men saw many activities they could not emulate, they beheld the fall of the thunderbolt, the violence of the winds, the agitation of the waves. They imagined beings more powerful than themselves, capable of producing these great effects.”

Deker listened, a chilling wind in his brain, a growing sense of magnificant irony and defeat in his feverish blood.

“There are legends from our beginning of two-headed gods and Cyclopean monsters—you know, with three eyes—and legends of animals that were like men and men who were like animals. And the myth of course includes a goddess, a race mother so to speak, called Perl. According to this quaint flowery legend, this Perl goddess brought great powers from the sun and destroyed the animals and bestowed her gifts on the savages who later formed our glorious city. Until the last five-thousand-year plan, our ancestors considered this Perl our race mother, in a sense, not too literally, of course. Interesting, but depressingly emotional and infantile, isn’t it? But to get back to our program of reconditioning. You—”

But Deker wasn’t listening now. He was thinking deeply while his heart cried out with regret, and his mind reeled with dim-remembered pain. If only he had waited with the hunchback! Perl the Anarch had listened to him, and had acted for humanity after all. Moved by his urging, she had returned to the ruins of City Three sometime after he had gone back to Nirvana. She had given those fear-haunted aborigines her power, and in time had overcome their psychic blockage against aggressive action so that they had been able to conquer the Beasts. But he could never know exactly what had happened in that fantastically distorted time eons before.

Deker wanted to cry out his frustration, the growing madness of this futile escape. But there was no turning back for him now. He asked how long he had been in the encystment capsule.

Kahl shook his head. “Your past has been repeatedly theorized upon for at least ten thousand years. You have emerged as part of that pre-objective barbaric myth pattern along with Perl, the race mother, and the others. Your origin is a mystery. There is no definite computation possible of the length of your—er—sleep.”

“What city is this?” asked Deker.

“There is only one city. World City we prefer to call it rather than the City of Perl. One tremendous city. A perfect architectural symbol of man’s omnipotence. We have found ruins of other cities scattered over the earth, a very inferior pre-dawn age culture, of course. At one time a former stage of psuedo-civilized humanity heavily populated the earth, living in many cities. The perfect cooperative socialized pattern and standardization of effort such as we have must have been impossible under those conditions.”

“Yes,” whispered Deker wearily. “It was indeed. But I can tell you this. Perl—she was no myth. She lived. It was—” He couldn’t continue.

Explaining his origin, and his knowledge of dusty pasts was futile. Later he tried to explain again, several times, but he was part of irrational myth and legend. He told them about the Beasts and their accelerated evolutionary processes that were overtaking and surpassing man; of the Anarchs who had found the ultimate perfection of individualism, of how, even then, he had slept for 40,000 years.

He told them of that astonishingly older world order of the Hundred Cities Utopian Federation that had also been cooperative standardized perfection like World City, and of the Atom War that had destroyed that other “perfect” socialized civilization. He explained his ideas about the reality of the Perl Mother and of how she had destroyed the Beasts and returned the race to the pathway of progressive change.

He tried to make them understand the terrifying trap of the repetitive cycle of futility into which he had fallen. But it was impossible to convince them. There could never have been a civilization like theirs before, or it could not have perished.

World City had reached a state of mechanistic cooperative statism that made the Hundred Cities Federation seem like a form of anarchy. The inhabitants couldn’t conceive of there ever having been any similar society, especially one that had destroyed itself. For how could socialized perfection reach such an illogical destructive end?

“Yes,” Kahl was explaining to Deker a week later as Deker reported for his five hours of reconditioning, his suggestivity shots, his new integration checkup. “World City is probably man’s ultimate and perfect system for survival.”

“Yes, I know,” said Deker. “You have reached it. Again!”

Deker was laughing inwardly. He remembered how the hunchback had laughed, and he imagined if he laughed aloud he would sound that way.

“These psycho-grams show a dubious possibility for your adjustment into our society,” said Kahl.

He leaned over his desk, a tubular glass construction with row on row of info-screens connected with every library and branch director in World City.

“You understand that we sympathize with you, Deker,” he said. “But you must also understand that there can be no Such thing as ‘individual’ consideration, divorced from the broader and primary consideration of World City. At first I thought we might possibly recondition your mind so that eventually you might be able to most satisfactorily serve the city and, indirectly, yourself. But you rejected that possibility because of your peculiarly primitive individualistic attitudes.”

“That’s true,” said Deker, with a slow dry agony. “This time, I’m staying just as I am.”

* * * *

Deker had decided on his second day in the City of Perl what he was going to do. Now he had had two weeks to study and plan; two weeks of maddening loneliness in another pseudo-perfectionistic socialistic culture in which he had no place. He moved now, carried out the first step of his violent repetitive plan. He had tried this once before and though it hadn’t worked out, he would try it again. He hit Kahl on the point of the jaw.

It was not a forceful blow, but Kahl crumbled without a sound across his desk.

Deker had determined once more to try living alone.…

He went out through the dissolving wall, entered an elevator. He emerged finally onto a narrow ramp to which two atomurbinic aircraft were held by magnetic grapples. He jumped into one, conscious of the overpowering sense of inadequacy and nervous defeatism.

High above the endlessly stretching chrome-plated grandeur of the most colossal city the world had ever seen, he felt dwarfed into individual insignificance. He didn’t like that feeling. He hated the city with a suffocating hate as he sent the atomurbinic machine streaking through the clear cold air high above the city.

Deker understood the principle upon which the aircraft operated. He intended to fly it to some desolate area in the North and try again to isolate himself, again live fully his eternal rôle as the pariah.

The turbine, almost as old as history itself, had been combined with atomic power to produce the only practical approach to an atomic-powered skycraft. The turbine, geared down considerably, turned a small propellor; and the exhaust gas from the turbine, although not essential for flight, gave an added boost to that supplied by the propellor. The critical size for the self-explosion of U-235 was much too large for small vehicles.

Once settled in a well-hidden spot, Deker intended to use the machine to set up a small efficient living unit with plenty of heat and power. That would be a good beginning for his fight to survive in the Northern wilderness.

Deker hadn’t really expected to escape. But his flight ended much sooner than he anticipated. They cheated him out of even a brief thrill of flight.

An invisible magno-beam clamped on his plane. Electronic automatic radasoles severed the power circuit. He was held suddenly motionless and impotent in the air above the seemingly limitless expanse of World City. Other planes rose, took him down again and directly back to the Mental Readjustment Specialist, Kahl, who was waiting for him in stolid silence.

Five men stood behind Kahl for protection now. Three others held Deker, regarding him as little better than a mad savage.

“I knew you would rebel in some fashion,” said Kahl sorrowfully. “It was evident on your thought tracings. But I was hardly prepared for such—such atavism, such barbaric methods. However, this quality of yours makes it much easier for me to conclude our conversation, which was so rudely interrupted.”

Deker hardly listened. The gray cloud of defeat had thickened, dulling all sound and sight. He slumped there in stunned passive disillusionment and blighted hope. He heard distantly:

“We have considered returning you to this suspended animation from which you recently awoke. But that, according to our implacably just laws, demands your personal permission, and you have refused us that.”

“Yes,” mumbled Deker.

“So, Deker, there is only one alternative, one I have hitherto failed to mention because it was not certain then what your basic psychological characteristics were. Now I know. Now I’m sure the Ship is the only answer.”

Deker said wearily. “What is this alternative?”

“This should appeal to your newly evidenced atavism,” said Kahl. “Our glorious order has perfected—space travel!”

CHAPTER IX

Final Escape

Hearing what Kahl said, Deker began to laugh. He laughed until a wave of weakness stopped the laughter in a choking cry. He felt different after that. The face of Kahl was clearer, as was his voice.

“The research was started long ago, Deker,” Kahl was explaining. “But according to our Council Judiciary Code, unless scientific discoveries or inventions are known to contribute directly to the progress of the city, they are not exploited. It is obvious that it would be a waste of city energy and time to develop interplanetary travel unless it could be shown to be of some benefit to the city. So far, no such benefit had been apparent until the concept of space flight was applied to the problem of our Unstables.

“Other than for that reason, space flight may never be necessary for World City. Our birth rate is perfectly regulated, you know. The population will remain at a chosen balanced level. Because everyone is perfectly satisfied, there is no pioneering spirit or desire to colonize—those being symptomatic of psychological maladjustment—as in your case.

“However,”—Kahl coughed delicately—“half a century ago a rather strange discovery was made in psycho-surgery. It was found that certain types of recalcitrants or abnormals suffered from inherent incurable anti-social attitudes. These exceptional cases are negativistic to our conditioning programs. We call these rare but somewhat persistent types Unstables.”

“They’ve always had some sort of label,” said Deker. “Imperfections within the perfect.”

Yes, in a broad, terribly ironic sense, history did repeat itself—for him. But this certainly might be an unexpected way out. Space travel. He had come a long time to find it. Space travel. Something about the phrase lifted him, transported him celestially into some far height of elation.

Kahl had ignored his remark. “These Unstables appear now and then despite our most exhausting efforts to the contrary. They are erratically intelligent, capable in their own unique ways. But they are totally unsuited to our socialistic standardized system. Being unhappy, maladjusted themselves, this space travel as an escape method has appealed strongly to all our Unstables. They have been more than willing to volunteer as crew members to man the first known space ship from Earth.”

“I can understand their reaction,” said Deker.

“The first experimental flight is theoretically destined for the planet, Venus. You—have some acquaintinship with astronomy, Deker?”

“Vaguely,” said Deker wryly.

“The Council has established a Solar Colonization Bureau which includes scientists who have been especially conditioned for this particular specialization. Well, Deker, are you interested?”

“I am,” said Deker hoarsely. “You may never know how very interested.”

“Of course there will be no returning,” said Kahl. “That’s part of the plan.”

“That, too, is most agreeable to me,” said Deker.

“Take him to the Unstable Wards,” Kahl said to the men who were still holding Deker. “During the next few weeks he will undergo basic training under Morlo’s supervision, and will get acquainted with his fellow crew members. I believe Deker will make Morlo a full crew.” Kahl turned to Deker. “Good luck to you. You may feel proud that, in spite of your unfortunate background, your mysterious and unavoidable alienage, you have found a magnanimous and unforgettable place in the selfless history of our World City.”

Deker was taken to the Unstable Wards.…

A reality Deker had never before known came in a burst of quickening, pulsing lust for life there in the Unstable Wards, there among his own kind, the maladjusted, the freaks, the men and women who were rebels and who could never fit into the social order.

After five weeks of basic training, Deker was with Giles, the chief astrogator, a fiery little man with flaring yellow hair, talking. They were aboard the Ship, standing on the little balcony ridge outside the control turret. Through the opaque glassite dome around them, they could see the distant gleam of the colossal city reflecting like a gigantic jewel against the night sky, and reflecting back again on the yellow desert sand on which the Ship’s cradle had been constructed.

Giles was slowly recovering from a persecution complex contracted before he had finally volunteered as a crewman on the Ship. All the Unstables who made up the crew of the Ship were extremely capable, though neurotic. Deker had became pretty well acquainted with all of them, except the captain.

Now all of them were aboard to stay. They could never set foot on Earth again. During that week before blasting they were to acquaint themselves thoroughly with the Ship and with their specific duties.

* * * *

The Ship was a large blunt engine of inexhaustible atomic power, gleaming silver and black, with a platinum hull insulating it against heat. It could not be oxidized or burned.

It took Deker a long time to realize that he was assistant astrogator. But it had been easy for him. His mind seemed keener and more flexible now than it had ever been, fired with an enthusiasm he had never imagined himself capable of feeling. He knew a sharp sense of growing importance, of belonging, of serving a purpose.

The crew respected him for his knowledge and his mystery, a mystery he could never clarify for them. They couldn’t conceive of there ever having been preceding cultures as great as he described.

But Deker had memories of many other kinds of social orders, including those jumbled sovereign governmental ideologies existing even before the Hundred Cities Federation—Democracy, Unionism, Syndicalism, Communism, Fascism, and countless others. Deker could remember many of them. And each had been a working system, including the Federated Utopia of the Hundred Cities, a fact inconceivable to these people of World City, or the City of Perl. His unbelievable revelations were considered the delusions of a high neurotic or even a potential psychotic.

“Space will cure you,” they told him kindly.

He was convinced that it would. He knew that once out in space nothing concerning Earth would be of any importance again. Anyway, they were glad to be rid of him and the other Unstables. The Ship was the only legal method they could utilize to rid their perfectly balanced order of its erratic elements. Capital punishment was, of course, not only illegal, but incomprehensible.

The only alternative to sending the Unstables away in the Ship were the Reconditioning Wards, but these Unstables wouldn’t recondition. They either were completely negativistic, or they merely changed their form of instability.

Deker had spent his time wandering through the Ship, luxuriating in its beauty and gleaming utilitarian power, and he had become thoroughly familiar with its most minute part. He had come to know every crew member well, but he hadn’t met the captain at all.

“The captain is a hard person to get along with,” Giles was saying, “even if you manage to meet informally.”

“Why is the captain so hard to see?” asked Deker indifferently.

“I don’t know, exactly,” said the fiery little Giles. “They say the captain is a brooding introspective neurotic, whatever that means. Spends all the time alone.”

“But the symptoms of Unstables,” said Deker, “are symptoms of our desire to escape World City and all the things it represents. Surely the captain should have a new attitude now that we are getting away from World City entirely.”

Giles grinned slyly. “Deker, you have an amazingly intuitive grasp of so many fields of learning, especially the workings of the human mind. Sometimes I almost feel that you are a traveler through time, that you actually have known pasts and peoples of which we cannot even dream. Anyway, maybe you can help the captain.”

Giles looked at his chronodisk.

“The captain retires every night at precisely twenty-four hundred,” he said. “You still have an hour. I think it would be an excellent idea if you talked with the captain. You have such a remarkable understanding of mental processes that you might be of benefit. And it will be unpleasant out there”—he motioned toward the stars—“with a captain who remains a neurotic. It might be disastrous.”

Deker saw some kind of ulterior motive gleaming in Giles’ eyes. He shrugged.

“All right, Giles. I’ve got to meet this mysterious captain anyway. And, I’m sure he won’t make the first gesture.…”

Deker felt entirely at ease, confident, strong and proud in the brown heavy-duty plasticloth space suit as he made his way to the Captain’s room. He knocked lightly on the metal door. There was a long pause. Deker felt unexpectedly ill at ease as he hesitantly knocked again. There was a tense feeling of suspense he could not analyze. And then the captain opened the door and stood framed in its opening, looking at him.

His mind reeled. He stumbled back, blinked, tried to speak. But he could only gasp while his mind plummeted back through time to a wild scene at the foothills of high mountains, a running stream, a singing hunchback, a high lonely tower with an opening, an opening framing a face.

This girl’s—the captain’s face!

Her red-gold hair. Her captain’s uniform was a glossy black, snug-fitting so that the highlights of her beautiful figure had a shine on them. Her arrogant blue eyes—yes, they were the same blue—were brooding as they studied him.

She was Perl! Physically, there was not one minute difference. Everything about her was Perl, except the uniform. The red-gold hair, the blue eyes, the probing gaze, other intangible qualities only Deker would remember. It seemed to be Perl, but Deker had grown suspicious, distrustful of reality evaluated temporally.

The cycles spiraled without end, with inevitable repetitions. Only details seemed to alter. But given time, even all the most minute details might return.

Deker brushed a hand over his face.

“Perl—” he mumbled once, then managed to get hold of himself, stiffened, bowed slightly. “I thought it was about time I introduced myself,” he said. “I’m Deker. Perhaps you’ve heard about the man who has been sleeping in the encystment vault. I am that man.”

She stepped aside, invited him in. It was a small, delicate, feminine room, draped in blue. Incense burned. She motioned to a capacious couch, but she sat in a deep chair facing him. Her voice was soft, gentle, persuasive.

“You are the man who speaks of lost times no one believes ever were?”

“Yes,” said Deker in a husky whisper. Even her voice was Perl’s voice.

“What would you say if I said that I believed you—Deker?” Her eyes were infinitely soft, deep, as he looked into them. “For I do believe your tales of the past. For I have dreamed the same things. All the horror and darkness and terrifying vistas which you have spoken of, I have experienced in my dreams.”

“I’ve traveled a long time, come a long way,” said Deker. “But this ship ends the quest for me The Ship is the chimera and we have found it. Maybe out there, given time, I can make you understand. All these years—eons—I’ve been trying to escape. I’m beginning to realize now what I was trying to escape from. It was Earth.”

“Then this isn’t the end for you—for US, Deker. But the beginning.…”

The endlessness of space opened for Deker after that. The feeling of futility and of uselessness, and of not belonging, the sense of hopeless dusty dreariness and despair of spinning cycles—it all dropped away with the fading dull red ball of Earth. And he knew none of it would ever obsess him again.

The feeling of inferiority, of being an abnormality—that fell away too. For he knew that he and his kind did belong, that they belonged to something incredibly vaster than the smug immediacy of the systems which had created them, and then rejected them as unfit.

They would die down there in their own narrow complacency and auto-delusion. His kind would always rebel and escape into space. His kind had always rebelled, sought newness, and escape from the dull finalities in search of the broader meanings.

His arm was about Perl’s slim waist. She used another name now, but to him she would always be Perl. Perl the Anarch who had changed, and saved the human species from decay and death. They stood in the control turret watching the receding Earth in the ultraview screen.

Dimly, in a haze, Deker saw the sun setting beyond the Earth, surrounded by its corona and zodiacal light. Beyond it he saw the moon, slightly blue, with a white rim. The Earth was all dark except where the sun splattered down on its far half, a pool of light, bright white in its center and graduating outward into dissipating orange and brown.

Then the whole scene was gone, and there was a mind-reeling blackness with only stark cold dots of untwinkling white.

Deker looked at the blue and white astrocharts. His arm tightened about Perl’s pliant waist. The Earth was gone. And he knew that it was gone forever.

“This is what we’ve been searching for,” he heard himself whispering. “They’ll never have any problem with people like us any more. It was a disease. It’s cured now. We were Earthbound, but now we’re free!”

Venus waited for Deker and the captain he called Perl, and the rest of the crew of the Ship. And beyond Venus—infinity.

THE TEACHER FROM MARS, by Eando Binder

Originally published in Thrilling Wonder Stories, February 1941.

The afternoon Rocket Express train from Chicago came into the station, and I stepped off. It was a warm spring day. The little town of Elkhart, Indiana, sprawled lazily under the golden sunshine. I trudged along quiet, tree-shaded streets toward Caslon Preparatory School for Boys.

Before I had gone far, I was discovered by the children playing here and there. With the dogs, they formed a shrill, raucous procession behind me. Some of the dogs growled, as they might at a wild animal. Housewives looked from their windows and gasped.

So the rumors they had heard were true. The new teacher at Caslon was a Martian!

I suppose I am grotesquely alien to human eyes, extremely tall and incredibly thin. In fact, I am seven feet tall, with what have often been described as broomstick arms and spindly legs. On an otherwise scrawny body, only the Martian chest is filled out, in comparison with Earth people. I was dressed in a cotton kimona that dangled from my narrow shoulders to my bony ankles. Chinese style, I understand.

Thus far I am pseudo-human. For the rest, a Martian is alien, from the Earth viewpoint. Two long tentacles from the back of my shoulders hang to my knees, appendages that have not vanished in Martian evolution like the human tail. The top of my skull is bulging and hairless, except for a fringe of silver-white fur above large conch-shaped ears. Two wide-set owlish eyes, a generous nose and a tiny mouth complete my features. All my skin is leathery and tanned a deep mahogany by the Sun of our cloudless Martian skies.

Timidly I stopped before the gates of Caslon Prep and looked within the grounds. The spectacles on my large nose were cup-shaped and of tinted glass that cut down the unnatural glare of the brighter, hotter Sun. I felt my shoulders drooping wearily from the tug of more than twice the gravity to which I was conditioned.

Luckily, however, I had brought leg-braces. Concealed by my long robe, they were ingenious devices of light metal, bracing the legs against strain. They had been expensive—no less than forty dhupecs—but they were worth even that much.

Gripping my cane and duffle-bag, I prepared to step into the sanctuary of the school grounds. It looked so green and inviting in there, like a canalside park. It would be a relief to escape from those Earth children. They had taken to tossing pebbles at me, and some of the canines had snapped at my heels. Of course I didn’t blame them, nor must I resent the unwelcome stares I had felt all around me, from adult Earthlings. After all, I was an alien.

I stepped forward, between the gates. At least here, in the school that had hired me to teach, I would be accepted in a more friendly fashion.… Ssss!

The hiss of a thousand snakes filled the air. I reacted violently, dropping my bag and clamping my two hands around my upraised cane. For a moment I was back on Mars, surrounded by a nest of killer-snakes from the vast deserts. I must beat them off with my cane!

But wait. This was Earth, where snakes were a minor class of creature, and mainly harmless. I relaxed, then, panting. The horrible, icy fear drained away. Perhaps you human beings can never quite know the paralyzing dread we have of snakes.

Then I heard a new sound, one that cheered me somewhat.

A group of about fifty laughing boys trooped into view, from where they had been hidden behind the stone wall circling Caslon’s campus. They had made the hissing sound, as a boyish prank. How foolish of me to let go of my nerves, I thought wryly.

I smiled at the group in greeting, for these were the boys I would teach.

“I am Professor Mun Zeerohs, your new teacher,” I introduced myself in what, compared with the human tone, is a reedy voice. “The Sunshine upon you. Or, in your Earthly greeting, I am happy to meet you.”

Grins answered me. And then murmurs arose.

“It talks, fellows.”

“Up from the canals!”

“Is that thing alive?”

One of the boys stepped forward. He was about sixteen, with blue eyes that were mocking.

“I’m Tom Blaine, senior classman. Tell me, sir, is it true that Mars is inhabited?”

It was rather a cruel reception, though merely another prank. I waved my two tentacles in distress for a moment, hardly knowing what to do or say next.

“Boys! Gentlemen!”

A grown man with gray hair came hurrying up from one of the buildings. The boys parted to let him through. He extended a hand to me, introducing himself.

“Robert Graham, Dean of Caslon. You’re Professor Mun Zeerohs, of course.” He turned, facing the group reprovingly. “This is your new instructor, gentlemen. He will teach interplanetary history and the Martian language.”

A groan went up. I knew why, of course. The Martian tongue has two case endings to every one in Latin.

“Now, gentlemen, this is for your own good,” Dean Graham continued sternly. “Remember your manners. I’m sure you’ll like our new professor—”

“I’m sure we won’t!” It was Tom Blaine again. Behind him, an air of hostility replaced the less worrisome mockery. “We’ve never had a Martian teacher before, and we don’t want one!”

“Don’t want one?” The dean was more aghast than I.

“My father says Martians are cowards,” Tom Blaine continued loudly. “He ought to know. He’s in the Space Patrol. He says that in the War, the Martians captured Earthmen and cut them to pieces slowly. First their hands, then—”

“Nonsense!” Dean Graham snapped. “Besides, the War is over. Martians are in the Space Patrol, too. Now no more argument. Go to your dormitory. Professor Zeerohs will begin conducting class tomorrow morning. Oscar, take the professor’s bag to his quarters.”

Oscar, the school’s menial robot, obediently stalked forward and picked up the bag. Somehow, I felt almost a warm tide of friendship for the robot. In his mechanical, rudimentary reflex mind, it was all the same to him—Martian or Earthman. He made no discrimination against me, as these human boys did.

As Oscar turned, Tom Blaine stood as though to block the way. Having his orders, the robot brushed past him. A metal elbow accidentally jabbed the boy in the ribs. Deciding against grabbing the bag away from steel fingers, Tom Blaine picked up a stone and flung it clanging against the robot’s metal body. Another dent was added to the many I could see over Oscar’s shiny form.

The rebellion was over—for the time being.

I realized that the boys were still hostile as I followed the dean to his rooms. My shoulders seemed to droop a little more.

“Don’t mind them,” the dean was saying apologetically. “They’re usually outspoken at that age. They’ve never had a Martian teacher before, you see.”

“Why have you engaged one for the first time?” I asked.

Graham answered half patronizingly, half respectfully.

“Many other schools have tried Martian teachers, and found them highly satisfactory.” He didn’t think it necessary to add, “And cheaper.”

I sighed. Times had been hard on Mars lately, with so many dust storms raging up and down the canal regions, withering the crops. This post on Earth, though at a meager salary, was better than utter poverty. I was old and could live cheaply. Quite a few Martians had been drifting to Earth, since the War. By nature, we are docile, industrious, intelligent, and make dependable teachers, engineers, chemists artists.

“They always haze the new teachers,” Dean Graham said, smiling uneasily. “Your first class is at nine o’clock tomorrow morning. Interplanetary History.”

Freshened after a night’s sleep, I entered the class room with enthusiasm for my new job. A hundred cold, unfriendly eyes watched me with terrifying intensity.

“Good morning,” I greeted as warmly as I could.

“Good morning, Professor Zero!” a chorus bellowed back, startling me.

So the hazing campaign was still on. No, I wouldn’t correct them. After all, even the Martian children I had taught had invariably tagged me with that name.

I glanced around the room, approving its high windows and controlled sunlight. My eyes came to rest on the blackboard behind me. A chalk drawing occupied its space. It depicted, with some skill, a Martian crouching behind an Earthman. Both were members of the Space Patrol and apparently were battling some space desperado. It was young Tom Blaine’s work, no doubt. His father claimed all Martians to be cowards and weaklings.

My leathery face showed little of my feelings as I erased the humiliating sketch. Ignoring the snickers behind me, I grasped two pieces of chalk in both tentacles, writing with one and listing dates with the other.

1945—Discovery of anti-gray force, on Earth

1955—First space flight

1978—Earthmen claim all planets

1992—Pioneer-wave to Mars

2011—Rebellion and war

2019—Mars wins freedom

2040—Earth-Mars relations friendly today

“Interplanetary History,” I began my lecture, “centers about these dates and events. Not till Nineteen fifty-five were Earth people assured that intelligent beings had built the mysterious canals of Mars. Nor were we Martians positive till then that the so-called Winking Lights of your cities at night denoted the handiwork of thinking creatures.

“The exploring Earthmen of the last century found only the Martians equal to them in intelligence. Earth has its great cities, and Mars has its great canal-system, built ten thousand Martian years ago. Civilization began on Mars fifty centuries previous to that, before the first glimmering of it on Earth—”

“See, fellows?” Tom Blaine interrupted loudly. “I told you all they like to do is rub that in.” He became mockingly polite. “Please, sir, may I ask why you brilliant Martians had to wait for Earthmen to open up space travel?”

I was shocked, but managed to answer patiently.

“We ran out of metal deposits for building, keeping our canals in repair. Our history has been a constant struggle against the danger of extinction. In fact, when Earth pioneers migrated in Nineteen ninety-two, it was just in time to patch up the canals and stave off a tremendous famine for Mars.”

“And that was the appreciation Earth got,” the boy charged bitterly. “Rebellion!”

“You forget that the Earth pioneers on Mars started the rebellion against taxation, and fought side by side with us—”

“They were traitors,” he stated bluntly.

I hurdled the point, and continued the lecture.

“Mars won its independence after a nine-year struggle—”

Again I was interrupted.

“Not won. Earth granted independence, though it could have won easily.”

“At any rate,” I resumed quietly, “Earth and Mars today, in Twenty-forty, are amicable, and have forgotten that episode.”

“We haven’t forgotten!” Tom Blaine cried angrily. “Every true Earthman despises Martians.”

He sat down amidst a murmur of defiant approval from the others. I knew my tentacles hung limply. How aggressive and intolerant Earth people were! It accounted for their domination of the Solar System. A vigorous, pushing race, they sneered at the Martian ideals of peaceful culture. Their pirates, legal and otherwise, still roamed the spaceways for loot.

Young Tom Blaine was representative of the race. He was determined to make things so miserable here for me that I would quit. He was the leader of the upper-class boys. Strange, that Earthpeople always follow one who is not wise, but merely compelling. There would have to be a test of authority, I told myself with a sinking heart.

“I am the teacher,” I reminded him. “You are the pupil, Mr. Blaine.”

“Oh, yes, sir,” he retorted in false humility. “But you’d better teach history right, Professor Nothing, or not at all!”

I hastily switched to the Martian language.

“The Martian language as is well known, is today the official language of science and trade,” I went on guardedly. “Through long usage, the tongue has become perfected. Official Earth English is comparatively cumbersome. For instance, the series of words meaning exaggerated size—big, large, great, huge, enormous, mighty, cyclopean, gargantuan. Is ‘big’ more than ‘large’, or less? You cannot tell. In Martian, there is one root, with a definite progression of size suffixes.”

I wrote on the blackboard: bol, bola, bob, bolo, bolu—bolas, bobs, bolos, bolus—bolasa, bolisi, boloso, bolusu

“Martian is a scientific language, you see.”

“Bragging again,” sneered a voice. An eraser sailed toward me just as I turned from the board. It struck full in my face in a cloud of chalk-dust. As if at a signal, a barrage of erasers flew at me. They had been sneaked previously from the boards around the classroom. I stood helplessly, desperately warding off the missile with my tentacles. The boys were yelling and hooting, excited by the sport.

The pandemonium abruptly stopped as Oscar stumped into the room. His mechanical eyes took in the scene without emotion. One belated eraser flew toward him. His steel arm reflexively raised, caught it, then hurled it back with stunning force. To a robot, anything that came toward it must be returned, unless otherwise commanded. Tom Blaine yelped as the eraser bounced off his forehead

“Dean Graham,” said Oscar like a phonograph, “wants to know if everything is going along smoothly.”

I could see the boys hold their breaths. Oscar went the rounds daily, asking that routine question in all the classes. If this disturbance were reported, the boys would lose an afternoon of freedom.

“Everything is well,” I murmured, though for a moment I was sadly tempted to take revenge. “You may go, Oscar.”

With a click of internal relays, the robot left impassively. He had seen or heard nothing, without being otherwise commanded.

“Afraid to report it, eh?” Tom Blaine jeered. “I told you Martians are yellow!”

It was more than gravity now that made my shoulders sag. I dreaded the days that must follow.

* * * *

Even outside the classroom, I was hounded. I can use only that word. Tom Blaine thought of the diabolical trick of deliberately spilling a glass of water before my eyes.

“Don’t—don’t!” I instinctively groaned, clutching at the glass.

“What’s the matter, Professor?” he asked blandly. “This is nothing but water.”

“It’s sacrilege—”

I stopped there. They wouldn’t understand. How horrible to see water spill to the ground in utter waste! For ten thousand years, on Mars, that precious fluid has been the object of our greatest ingenuity.

It hurt to see it wantonly flung away, as they might flinch if blood were shed uselessly before them.

As I stumbled away from their laughter, I heard Tom Blaine confide to his cohorts:

“I got the idea last night, looking in his room. He was playing with a bowl of water. Running it through his fingers, like a miser. I’ve got another idea, fellows. Follow me to the kitchen.”

I wasn’t aware till half through the solitary evening meal in my rooms that the food tasted odd. It was salty! The boys had stolen into the kitchen and salted my special saltless foods. My stomach revolted against the alien condiment. Mars’ seas, from which our life originated long ago, held no sodium chloride, only magnesium chloride, with which all Martian food is “salted.”

I went to bed, groaning with a severe headache and upset stomach from an outraged metabolism. Worse, it rained that night. I tried to shut my ears to that pattering sound. Millions of gallons of water were going to waste, while millions of Martians on my homeworld, were painfully hoarding water for their thirsty crops.

The pains eased before morning. What torment would Tom Blaine and his relentless pack think of next? The answer came when I found my spectacles missing. My eyes were almost blinded that day, more from glare than senile failing of vision. They watered and blinked in light that was fifty percent stronger than on more remote Mars.

“Lower the blinds, Oscar,” I ordered the robot when he appeared as usual.

“But, Professor,” Tom Blaine protested, jumping up as though waiting for the moment, “think of our eyes. We can’t read our lessons in the dark.”

“Never mind, Oscar,” I said wearily. The robot stood for a moment, relays clashing at the reversed orders. When he finally left, he seemed to shrug at the strange doings of his masters, Earthmen and Martians alike.

“Have you any idea where my glasses are, Mr. Blaine?” I asked in direct appeal. I tried not to sound timid.

“No, of course not,” he retorted virtuously.

I nodded to myself and reached for the lower left-hand drawer of my desk, then changed my mind.

“Will you all help me look for them?” I pleaded.

They ransacked the desk with deliberate brutality.

“Why, here they are, Professor!” Tom held them up from the lower left-hand drawer in mock triumph. I put them on with trembling hands.

“How careless of me to leave them here yesterday.” I smiled. “One must have a sense of humor about these things. Now we will decline the verb krun, to move.”

I went on as though nothing had happened, but my whole head ached from hours of straining my eyes against the cruel glare.

That night, utterly exhausted, I went to bed only to find my anti-gravity unit jammed, obviously by human hands. One of my few pleasures was the ability to sink into restful slumber in the low-gravity field, after suffering the tug of Earth gravity at my vitals all day. Earthmen on Jupiter know how agonizing it becomes.

I passed a sleepless night, panting and aching under what grew to be the pressure of a mountain.

How could I go on against such heartlessness? Tom Blaine and his friends were ruthlessly determined to drive out their despised Martian teacher. If I complained to Dean Graham, it would be an admission of cowardice. I didn’t want to betray my race. But I was miserably aware that I had not a single friend in the academy.

Oscar appeared in the morning, with a message from Dean Graham. The mechanical servant waited patiently to be told to go. When I swayed a little, he caught me. His reflexes had been patterned not to let things fall.

“Thank you, Oscar.” I found my hand on the robot’s shiny hard shoulder. It was comfortingly firm. “You’re my only friend, Oscar. At least, you’re not my enemy. But what am I saying? You’re only a machine. You may go, Oscar.”

The message read:

Today and tomorrow are examination days. Use the enclosed forms. At three o’clock today, all classes will be excused to the Television Auditorium.

The examinations were routine. Despite my unrested body and mind, I felt an uplift of spirit. My class would do well. I had managed, even against hostility, to impart a sound understanding of Interplanetary History and the Martian language.

I looked almost proudly over the bowed, laboring heads. Suddenly I stiffened.

“Mr. Henderson,” I said gently, “I wouldn’t try that if I were you.”

The boy flushed, hastily crammed into his pockets the notes he had been copying from. Then he gaped up in amazement. Tom Blaine, at the desk beside him, also looked up startled. The question was plain in his eyes. How could I know that Henderson was cheating, when even Tom, sitting next to him hadn’t suspected?

“You forget,” I explained hesitantly, “that Martians use telepathy at will.”

Tom Blaine stared, his mouth hanging open. Then he jumped up.

“Are we going to stand for that? Spying on us, even in our minds—” He gasped at a sudden thought. “You knew all the time about the glasses. You didn’t expose me.” He flushed, but in anger rather than embarrassment. “You made a fool of me!”

“One must have a sense of humor about those things,” I said lamely.

The rest of the examination period passed in bristling silence. More than ever, now, they were hostile to me. More than ever would they show their antagonism. How could I ever hope to win them, if patience was taken for cowardice, understanding for malice, and telepathy for deliberate spying?

Why had I ever left Mars, to come to this alien, heart-breaking world?

* * * *

At three o’clock, examinations were over for that day. The class filed to the Television Auditorium.

A giant screen in the darkened room displayed a drama on Venus, then news-flashes from around the system. An asteroid, scene of the latest radium rush. Ganymede, with its talking plant show. Titan’s periodic meteor shower from the rings of Saturn. A cold, dark scene on Pluto, where a great telescope was being built for interstellar observations. Finally Mars, and a file of Earthmen and Martians climbing into a sleek Space Patrol ship.

“The Patrol ship Greyhound,” informed the announcer, “is being dispatched after pirates. Captain Henry Blaine is determined to blast them, or not come back.”

“My father,” Tom Blaine said proudly to his classmates.

“My son,” I murmured, leaning forward to watch the last of the Martians vanish within.

When the armed ship leaped into space, the television broadcast was over.

There were no more classes that day. I dragged across the campus toward the haven of my rooms, for I needed rest and quiet.

A shriek tore from my throat the instant I saw it. A horrible, wriggling snake lay in my path! It was only a small, harmless garden snake, my reason told me. But a million years of instinct yelled danger, death! I stumbled and fell, trying to run against gravity that froze my muscles. I shrank from the squirming horror as it stopped and defiantly darted out its forked tongue.

The outside world burst into my consciousness with a thunderclap of laughter. Tom Blaine was holding up the wriggling snake. Once the first shock was over, I managed to keep my nerves in check.

“It’s only a garter snake,” he mocked. “Sorry it frightened you.”

But what would they say if a hungry, clawing tiger suddenly appeared before them? How would they feel? I left without a word, painfully compelling my trembling limbs to move.

I was beaten. That thought hammered within my skull.

They had broken my spirit. I came to that conclusion after staring up at a red star that winked soberly and seemed to nod in pity. There was my true home. I longed to go back to its canals and deserts. Harsh they might be, but not so harsh as the unfeeling inhabitants of this incredibly rich planet.

I went to my rooms and started to pack.

Angry voices swiftly approached my door. The boys burst in, led by Tom Blaine.

“Murderer!” Tom yelled. “A man was strangled in town two hours ago, by a rope—or a tentacle! You looked murder at us this afternoon. Why did you kill him? Just general hate for the human race?”

How fantastic it sounded, yet they weren’t mere boys, now. They were a blood-lusting mob. All their hate and misunderstanding for me had come to a head. I knew it was no use even to remonstrate.

“Look, fellows! He was packing up to sneak away. He’s the killer, all right. Are you going to confess, Professor Zeerohs, or do we have to make you confess!”

It was useless to resist their burly savagery and strong Earth muscles. They held me and ripped away the light metal braces supporting my legs. Then I was forced outside and prodded along. They made me walk up and down, back of the dormitory, in the light of subatomic torches.

It became sheer torture within an hour. Without the braces, my weak muscles sagged under my weight. Earth’s gravity more than doubled the normal strain.

“Confess!” Tom snapped fiercely. “Then we’ll take you to the police.”

I shook my head, as I had each time Tom demanded my confession. My one hopeless comfort was the prayer of an earthly prophet, who begged the First Cause to forgive his children, for they knew not what they did.

For another hour, the terrible march kept up. I became a single mass of aching flesh. My bones seemed to be cracking and crumbling under the weight of the Universe. My mental anguish was still sharper, for the tide of hate beat against me like a surf.

Where was Dean Graham? Then I remembered that he had gone to visit his relatives that evening. There was no one to help me, no one to stop these half-grown men who saw their chance to get rid of me. Only the winking red eye of Mars looked down in compassion for the suffering of a humble son.

“Oscar’s coming!” warned a voice.

Ponderously the robot approached, the night-light in his forehead shining. He made the rounds every night, like a mechanical watchman. As he eyed the halted procession, his patterned reflexes were obviously striving to figure out what its meaning could be.

“Boys will go to the dormitory,” his microphonic voice boomed. “Against regulations to be out after ten o’clock.”

“Oscar, you may go,” barked Tom Blaine.

The robot didn’t budge. His selectors were set to obey only the voices of teachers and officials.

“Oscar—” I began with a wild cry.

A boy clamped his hand over my mouth. The last of my strength oozed from me, and I slumped to the ground. Though I was not unconscious, I knew my will would soon be insufficient to make me resist. The boys looked frightened.

“Maybe we’ve gone too far,” one said nervously.

“He deserves it,” shrilled Tom uneasily. “He’s a cowardly murderer!”

“Tom!” Pete Miller came running up, from the direction of the town. “Just heard the news—the police caught the killer—a maniac with a rope.” He recoiled in alarm when he saw my sprawled form. “What did you do, fellows? He’s innocent, and he really isn’t such a bad old guy.”

The boys glanced at one another with guilty eyes. Fervently I blessed young Miller for that statement.

“Don’t be sentimental,” Tom Blaine said much too loudly. “Martians are cowards. My father says so. I’m glad we did this, anyway. It’ll drive him away for sure. We’d better beat it now.”

The group melted away, leaving me on the ground. Oscar stalked forward and picked me up. Any fallen person must be helped up, according to his patterned mind. But his steel arms felt softer than Tom Blaine’s heartless accusation.

* * * *

The class gasped almost in chorus the next morning, when their Martian professor entered quietly, as though nothing had happened the night before.

“Examinations will continue,” I announced.

It was small wonder that they looked surprised. First, that I had appeared at all, weak and spent by the night’s cruel ordeal. Second, that I had not given up and left. Third, that I hadn’t reported the episode to Dean Graham. The punishment would have been severe.

Only I knew I was back because it would be cowardly to leave. Mentally and physically I was sick, but not beaten. Besides, I had heard young Miller insist that I was not such a bad old guy, after all. It was like a well of cool water in a hot desert.

Examinations began. Oscar entered, handed me a spacegram and clanked out again. Nervously I opened and read the message. My tentacles twitched uncontrollably at the ends, then curled around the chair arms and clung desperately. Everything vanished before my eyes except the hideous, shocking words of the spacegram.

My world was ended. Mars or Earth—it made no difference. I could not go on. But existence must continue. I could not let this break me. Grimly I folded the paper and laid it aside.

I looked with misted eyes at their lowered heads. I needed a friend as never before, but hostility and hatred were the only emotions they felt for me as I tuned to them one by one. They hated their teacher, though they knew him to be wise, humble, patient, as Martians are by nature.

And I was beginning to hate them. They were forcing me to. Savagely I hoped they would all fail in their examinations.

I switched back to young Miller, who was biting his pencil. Forehead beaded with sweat, he was having a difficult time. Thoughts were racing through his brain.

Wanted so much to pass…enter Space Point…join the Space Patrol some day… Not enough time to study…job in spare time after school hours…help parents… In what year did the first explorer step on Neptune’s moon? Why, Nineteen-seventy-six! Funny how that came all of a sudden… Now what was the root for “planet” in Martian? Why, jad, of course! It isn’t so hard after all…

Wish that old Martian wouldn’t stare at me as if he’s reading my mind… How many moons has Jupiter? Always get it mixed up with Saturn.

Eighteen, six found by space ships! Funny, I’m so sure of myself… I’ll lick this exam yet… Dad’s going to be proud of me when I’m wearing that uniform….

I turned my eyes away from Miller’s happy face. A deserving boy, he would be a credit to the Space Patrol. Others had their troubles, not just I.

Abruptly there was an interruption. Oscar came clanking in hurriedly. “Dean Graham wishes all classes to file out on the campus, for a special event,” he boomed.

The boys whispered in curiosity and left the classroom at my unsteady order. The campus was filled with the entire school faculty and enrollment. My group of senior classmen was allowed to stand directly in front of the bandstand. I felt weak and in need of support, but there was no one to give it to me.

Dean Graham raised a hand. “A member of the Space Patrol is here,” he spoke, “having come from Space Point by rocket-strato for an important announcement. Major Dawson.”

A tall, uniformed man, wearing the blue of the Space Patrol, stepped forward, acknowledging the assembly’s unrestrained cheer with a solemn nod. The Patrol is honored throughout the System for its gallant service to civilization.

“Many of you boys,” he said, “hope to enter Space Point some day, and join the Service. This bulletin, received an hour ago, will do honor to someone here.”

He held up the paper and read aloud. “Captain Henry Blaine, in command of Patrol ship Greyhound, yesterday was wounded in the daring rout of pirates off the Earth-Mars run.”

All eyes turned to Tom Blaine, who was proud of the ceremony in honor of his father. The official held up a radium-coated medal—the Cross of Space, for extraordinary service to the forces of law and order in the Solar System. Dean Graham whispered in his ear. He nodded, stepping down from the rostrum and advancing.

My gasp of surprise was deeper than those of the others as he brushed past Tom Blaine. Stopping before me, he pinned the glowing medal on my chest. Then he grasped my hand.

“I think you’ll be proud to wear that all your life!” He turned, reading further from his bulletin.

“Captain Blaine’s life was saved by a youthful Martian recruit, who leaped in front of him and took the full blast that wounded the Earthman. His name was—”

I found myself watching Tom Blaine. He didn’t have to hear the name. He was staring at the spacegram he had stolen from my desk, but hadn’t had a chance to read till now. He had sensed my momentary agitation over it, and had hoped perhaps to use it against me. It read:

WE DEEPLY REGRET TO INFORM YOU OF THE DEATH OF YOUR SON, KOL ZEEROHS, IN HEROIC SERVICE FOR THE SPACE PATROL—THE HIGH COMMAND, SPACE PATROL.

But now my weakness overwhelmed me. I was aware only of someone at my side, supporting me, as my knees threatened to buckle. It must have been Oscar.

No—it was a human being!

“Every one of us here,” Tom Blaine said, tightening his grip around me, “is your son now—if that will help a little. You’re staying of course, Professor. You couldn’t leave now if you tried.”

We smiled at each other, and my thin hand was nearly crushed in his young, strong grasp. Yes, the teacher from Mars would stay.

NIF’S WORLD, by Lawrence Watt-Evans

Copyright © 2015 by Lawrence Watt-Evans.

Nif watched, enraptured, as the colors poured out through the worldstalk, blue and green and white. Her fingers tightened around her companions’ hands in a final squeeze before they separated into their individual environment bubbles and soared apart, each bound for her own sprouting worldlet.

Nif did not take the first worldlet she saw, nor the second; she knew what she wanted, and in time she spotted it. Ahead, a little to one side, a worldlet was blooming outward, already a full sphere and approaching its final dimensions, with all the green-coated land on one side, the shining blue of the ocean on the other. That was what she needed, a world with only a single continent.

She flapped a wing and steered for it. Her wings were non-functional in the vacuum of space, of course, but the environment bubble registered the motion and fed the information to her propulsion unit.

She exulted at the sight of her chosen miniplanet. She had been planning this for pentads, dreaming and scheming for the day when she would at last sail into the pocket universe, the shaping power placed ready in her mind. She knew that her teachers doubted her talents, and she was determined to prove what she could do.

The purple mists of ylem were clearing as she swooped down toward the globe she had selected and prepared to nip it free of its nurturing tendrils.

Once she cut it free of the stalk there was no going back; that would commit her to shape this worldlet and no other. She did not hesitate, but sheared the stalk quickly and let the planet spin free.

It was all hers. She was on her own now. In her classroom assignments she had never been alone, not really; she had had her textmemories to refer to, and more importantly, she had had Qui and Skir to help out.

Now, though, her two best friends were off to their own worldlets, and she had nothing she could draw on but her own skills and talent and desire.

The desire was there, certainly. She wanted to be an artist, a world-shaper, more than anything else she could imagine. She had always wanted that. The talent, she was certain, was inside her somewhere, lurking within, buried still beneath the awkwardness of her youth, waiting an opportunity to blossom forth.

The skills, however, were lacking. She knew that. She simply was not very proficient with the shaping power. Her conceptions were not clear enough, not detailed enough, for the enabling mechanisms to follow them through quickly and easily. She had to go over every little thought and image over and over, correcting flaws, filling in gaps, and even reshaping concepts. Often, unfortunately, her concepts didn’t work.

It was an unfathomable wonder to her that Qui could bring forth her ornate creations in a single sweeping work, whole invented realities purring and ticking like fine machinery—though of course, until now, Qui had never had to fill an entire world. In her earlier projects, though, Qui had never been troubled by details, and Nif had no doubt that world-shaping would go as well for her. Qui’s creations always worked, and worked right the first time, without tinkering.

Skir was almost as good, creating her works not all at once, as Qui did, but in a smooth progression, like a flower opening.

Nif’s were more like a child’s card houses, rickety and uneven and likely to collapse under close inspection.

All the same, skills lacking or not, she had made it this far. She had reached the Competition. She had skirted the very edges of cheating to do it, of course, getting the most help that she could possibly be allowed from Qui and Skir and the household AIs. She had spent pentads plotting and planning, thinking what she could do that would impress the judges with her undeveloped raw talent, that would show she had the audacity to be a fine world-shaper even if she lacked the polish of her competitors.

She had known that any wholly original concept would not work. Under the intense pressure of the Competition, with the terrifyingly short time limit, she knew that she could only botch one of her own muddled ideas. She wouldn’t have the time to go back and patch it together after the initial shaping.

She had searched for something she could adapt, instead, a concept she could take, ready-made, to shape a world. She had dug back through history and myth for something clear and simple, so that she could handle it, but so stunningly appropriate and powerful that the judges would have no choice but to recognize its value.

And, at last, she had found what she wanted.

She approached her chosen worldlet and studied it.

Yes, it was just as it should be. Ready to drop from the stalk, it was roughly three kilometers in diameter—in the warped reality of the Competition’s artificially-opened pocket universe, that would support a fully-realized, miniature, Earthlike environment.

It had a molten metal core, a thick stone mantle, a fragile crust of tectonically-active plates that she could manipulate if she chose, and enough water to cover almost four-fifths of the surface with oceans, all in perfect miniature. The land surfaces, both dry and suboceanic, were coated with a thin layer of easily-modified, high-speed genetic material, ready for her to shape.

She reached out, in communion with the shaping power, and began to bring forth her dream. The gene-stuff grew and blossomed at her command, burgeoning wildly, until it had entirely covered her world’s single continent with a tame, peaceful, luxuriant garden. She needed no deserts, no mountains, no badlands for her creation, simply a single continent-sized garden.

When that was done she reached out again—thinking, as she did, that Qui was probably done already, with some magnificent, intricate work—and raised up fauna from the newly-formed, still-unstable flora. Beasts that crawled and walked and flew, that swam or burrowed, she brought forth as many as she could devise, all herbivorous, all calm, placid, peaceful. Her world was to be a paradise, not a battlefield.

When the beasts were finished, adequately if not well, she concentrated on the small open plain at the center of the single continent. There she put a single great tree, a tree bearing biocybernetic fruit. Each fruit carried a semi-sentient pseudo-organism, self-contained, which, if ingested by a humanoid would become a symbiote bonded to the human nervous system, feeding information and the accumulated moral knowledge of the human race into the eater’s mind.

She had worked on that aspect, all by itself, for more than a pentad, in planning her project. She had mentioned something to Qui about her preparations, and Qui had laughed.

“You can’t plan everything, Nif,” she had said. “You need to see what fits on the world you choose. The judges want to see us make the best use of the material we’re given, not just impose our own order upon it.”

That was all very well for Qui, Nif thought, but not everyone was as skillful as she.

Nif was ready for the centerpiece of her work now. She reached out to a pair of near-apes, one male and one female, that she had kept handy, and placed them beneath her biocybernetic tree. There she reshaped them, shifting and sorting their genes until they were virtually indistinguishable from true humans, save for their size, the speed at which they lived, and the peculiar nature of the other-universal matter that made up their bodies.

She herself, of course, was not exactly a true human, since her ancestors had been modifying their genes to suit their whims, or the whims of fashion, for millennia. Her wings were the most obvious manifestation of that. She was not interested in creating beings in her own image, however, and stuck closely to the genetic blueprint for humanity as it had originally evolved.

Adam and Eve, she called them when she was done, and the worldlet, of course, was Eden. It was perfect. She registered the name with the Competition’s administrators, then floated above her central tree, admiring her handiwork.

The little people hurried about their lives, gathering fruit from the Garden, playing with the animals, spending long seconds—hours, by their time-scale—just lying on the grass enjoying the world that Nif had given them.

She smiled down at them, delighted with her creation. They were so cute, so helpless! And the way they stayed close to each other, embraced, made love, walked about arm in arm—Nif could hardly stand it.

She had almost forgotten why she had made them in the first place when the three judges sailed into view, their environment bubbles gleaming golden in the warm light of the artificial sun.

Nif saw them approaching and waited expectantly. As she had been instructed she ascended, watching but well away from her work, so as to allow the judges their first look without interference. When they were ready she would swoop down and explain it all, tell them of the ancient myths, explain how her Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil worked, and then, modestly, she would await their assessment.

She was certain that she had created her masterpiece. Qui would probably outdo her, and Zik, and maybe Skir, but there were a dozen openings to be had this time around, and she would surely rate one of them.

The judges were taking their first good look at her world, and she found herself unable to resist. She had a trace of the shaping power left, and she used it, almost without meaning to, to tap into their private communications as they judged her Eden, her adorable little people.

The first judge spoke almost immediately after reaching the planet, before she could possibly have seen more than the most obvious features, and her words froze Nif’s heart.

“Oh, Creation!” she said. “Not Adam and Eve again!”

“That’s the third Garden of Eden this time around,” the second judge remarked, shaking his head.

“You’d think the kids would learn,” the third said. “But every time, it’s the same old things, Eden or dinosaurs.” He registered a rejection for Nif’s world; neither of his fellows countered it. Without speaking to Nif at all, they moved on toward the next worldlet.

Nif stared after them. She threw a glance down at her Adam and her Eve, happy in their garden; what would happen to them? She turned to the judges again.

“Wait,” she called. “Wait!”

A MAN OBSESSED, by Alan E. Nourse

Originally published in 1955.

CHAPTER ONE

Jeffrey Meyer sat back in his chair and waited. He could hardly breathe in the stifling air of the place. His hand clenched his glass until the knuckles were white, and his lip curled slightly as he watched the crowd around him. His whole body was tense. His legs, knotted tightly under the seat, were ready to move in an instant, and his eyes roved from the front to the back of the place. They were pale gray eyes that were never still—moving, watching, waiting. He had waited for so long, waited and hunted with bitter patience. But now he knew the long wait was drawing to a close. He knew that Conroe was coming and the trap was set.

For the thousandth time that evening, a shiver of chilly pleasure passed through him at the thought. He squirmed in eagerness, hardly daring to breathe. With his free hand he caressed the cool plastic handle of the gun that was close to his side, and a tight smile appeared on his thin lips. Conroe was coming…at last…at last.… And tonight he would kill Conroe.

The place was a madhouse around him. In the front of the room, by the street door, was a long horseshoe bar. It was already crowded by the early revelers. A screechie in the corner blatted out the tinny, nervous music that had recently become so popular, and a loud, hysterical burst of feminine laughter echoed to the back of the room.

Jeff Meyer rubbed his eyes, smarting from the bluish haze filling the long, low-ceilinged room. The unhealthy laughter broke out again, and someone burst into a bellow of song, half giggle, half noise.

At the adjoining table an alky-siky stirred, muttered something unintelligible and returned his nose sadly to his glass. Jeff’s eyes flicked over the man with distaste. The scrawny neck, the sagging jaw, the idiotic, almost unearthly expression of intent listening on the vapid face: a typical picture of the type. Jeff watched him for a moment in disgust, then moved his eyes on, still watching as a flicker of apprehension passed through his mind.

A girl, quite naked except for the tray slung at her waist, strolled by his table, wagging her hips and turning on her heaviest personality smile.

“Drive a nail, mister?”

“Beat it.”

The smile cooled slightly on the girl’s lips. “Just askin’,” she whined. “You don’t have to get—”

“Beat it!” Jeff shot her a venomous look, trying frantically to keep his attention from straying from the front of the room. It would be too much to slip up now, more than he could stand to make a mistake like the last time.

The trap was perfect. It couldn’t fail this time. Each step of the way had been carefully sketched, plotted through long sleepless nights of conference and planning. They couldn’t have hunted a man like Conroe all these years without learning something about him—about his personality, about the things he liked and disliked, the things he did, the places he frequented, the friends he made.

Last time, after Jeff’s own blundering error had allowed him to slip through the net at the last frantic minute, there seemed to be no hope. Everything seemed all the more hopeless when the man had disappeared as completely as if he were dead. But then they had found the girl—the key to his hiding place. She had formed the top link in the long, meticulous chain which had been drawn tighter each day, drawing Paul Conroe at last closer and closer to the hands of the man who was going to kill him. And now the trap was set; there could be no slip this time. There might never be another chance.

The street door opened sharply, and a short, bull-necked man with sandy hair walked in. He was followed by two other men in neat business suits. The first man stepped quickly to the bar, shouldering his way through the crowd, and stood sipping beer for several minutes. He glanced closely at the people around the bar and the surrounding tables before he walked toward the back and seated himself next to Meyer. Looking at Jeff with an indefinable expression, he finished his beer at a gulp and set the glass down on the table top with a snap.

“What’s up?” Jeff said hoarsely.

“Something’s funny.” The sandy-haired man’s voice was a smooth bass, and a frown appeared on his pink forehead. “He should have been here by now. He left the hotel over in Camden-town an hour ago, private three-wheeler, and he headed for here.”

Jeff leaned forward, his face going white. “You’ve got somebody on him?”

“Yes, yes, of course.” The man’s voice was sharp, and there were tired lines around his eyes. “Take it easy, Jeff. You wouldn’t be able to get him if he did come in—the way you are. He’d spot you in two seconds.”

Jeff’s hand trembled as he gripped his glass, and he settled tensely back in his chair. “It can’t go wrong, Ted. It’s got to come off.”

“It should. The girl is here and she got word from him last night.”

“Can she be trusted?”

The sandy-haired man shrugged. “Don’t be silly. In this game, nobody can be trusted. If she’s scared enough, she’ll play along—okay? We’ve done our best to scare her. We’ve scared the hell out of her. Maybe she’s more scared of Conroe—I don’t know. But it looks cold to me. On a platter. So get a grip on yourself.”

“It’s got to come off.” Jeff growled the words savagely, and drained his glass at a gulp. The sandy-haired man blinked, his pale little eyes curious. He leaned back thoughtfully. “Suppose it doesn’t, Jeff? Suppose something goes wrong? Then what?”

Jeff’s heavy hand caught the man’s wrist in a grip that was like a vise. “You don’t talk like that,” he grated. “Your men I don’t mind, but not you—understand? It can’t go wrong. That’s all there is to it. No if’s, no maybe’s. You got that now?”

Ted rubbed his wrist, his face red. “All right,” he muttered. “So it can’t go wrong. So I shouldn’t talk, I shouldn’t ask questions. But if it does go wrong, you’re going to be dead. Do you know that? Because you’re killing yourself with this—” He sighed, staring at Meyer. “What’s it worth, Jeff? This constant tearing yourself apart? You’ve been obsessed with it for years. I know, I’ve been working with you and watching you for the last five of them—five long years of hunting. And for what? To get a man and kill him. That’s all. What’s it worth?”

Jeff took a deep breath and took a pack of cigarettes from his jacket. “Drive a nail,” he said, offering the pack. “And don’t worry about me. Worry about Conroe. He’s the one who’ll be dead.”

Ted shrugged and took the smoke. “Okay. But if this blows up, I’m through. Because this is all I can take.”

“Nothing will blow up. I’ll get him. If I don’t get him now, I’ll get him the next time, or the next, or the next. With or without you, I’ll get him.” Jeff took a trembling breath, his gray eyes cold under heavy black brows. “But there hadn’t better be any next time.”

He sat back in his chair, his face falling into the lines so familiar to Ted Bahr. Jeff Meyer had been a handsome man, before the long years of hate had done their work on his face. He was a huge, powerfully built man, heavy-shouldered, with a strong neck and straight nose, and a shock of jet black hair, neatly clipped. Only his face showed the bitterness of the past five years—years filled with anger and hatred, and a growing savagery which had driven the man almost to the breaking point.

The lines about his eyes and mouth were cruel—heavy lines that had been carved deeply and indelibly into the strong face, giving it a harsh, almost brutal cast in the dim light of the bistro. He breathed regularly and slowly as he sat, but his pale eyes were ice-hard as they moved slowly across the little show floor. They took in every face, every movement in the growing throng.

He was out of place and he knew it. He had no use for the giddy, half-hysterical people who crowded these smoke-filled holes night after night. They came in droves from the heart of the city to drink the watery gin and puff frantically on the contraband cigarettes as they tried desperately to drive off the steam and pressure of their daily lives.

Meyer hated the smell and stuffiness of the place; he hated the loud screams of laughter, the idiotic giggles; he hated the blubbering alky-sikys who crowded the bars with their whisky and their strange, unearthly dream-worlds. Above all, he hated the horrible, resounding artificiality, the brassiness and clanging noise of the crowd. His skin crawled. He knew that he couldn’t possibly disappear into such a crowd, that he was as obvious, sitting there, as if he had been painted with red polka dots. And he knew that if Conroe spotted him a second before he spotted Conroe—He eased back in the chair and fought for control of his trembling hands.

The lights dimmed suddenly and a huge red spotlight caught the curtain at the back of the show floor. Jeff heard Bahr catch his breath for a moment, then let out a small, uneasy sigh. The crowd hushed as the girl parted the curtains and stepped out onto the middle of the floor, to a fanfare of tinny music. Jeff’s eyes widened as they followed her to the center of the red light.

“That’s her.”

Jeff glanced sharply at Bahr. “The girl? She’s the one?”

Bahr nodded. “Conroe knows how to pick them. He’s supposed to meet her later. This is her first show for the evening. Then she has another at ten and another at two. He’s supposed to take her home.” He glanced around the room carefully. “Watch yourself,” he muttered, and silently slipped away from the table.

The girl was nervous. Jeff sat close enough to see the fear in her face as she whirled around the floor. The music had shifted into a slow throbbing undertone, as she started to dance. She moved slowly, circling the floor. Her hair was long and black, flowing around her shoulders, and her body moved with carefully calculated grace to the music. But there was fear in her face as she whirled, and her eyes sought the faces on the fringe of the circle.

The music quickened imperceptibly and Jeff felt a chill run up his spine. The upper part of the shimmering gown slipped from the girl’s shoulders, and slowly the tempo of the dance began to change from the stately rhythm it had a moment before. The throb of the music became hypnotic, moving faster and faster. Jeff’s hands trembled as he tried to draw his eyes away from the undulating figure. There had been nothing to mark the change, but suddenly the dance had become obscene as the music rose—so viciously obscene that Jeff nearly gagged.

He felt the tension in the crowd around him. He heard their breathing rise, felt the desperate eagerness in their hard, bright eyes as they watched. The nervousness had left the girl’s face. She had forgotten her fear, and a little smile appeared on her face as her body moved in abandon to the quickening beat.

Slowly she moved toward the tables, and the spotlight followed her, playing tricks with her hair and gown, concealing and revealing, twisting and swaying.… Jeff felt his body freeze. He fought to move, fought to take his eyes from the writhing figure as she drew closer and closer—

And then she was among the people, moving from table to table, never slowing her motion, graceful as a cat, twisting and twirling in the flickering red light. In and out she moved until she reached Jeff’s table, her face inscrutable—a peacefully smiling mask. With amazing grace she leaped up on the table top and gave Jeff’s glass a kick that sent it spinning onto the floor with a crash. And then the red light hit him full in the face—

“Get out of the light!”

Like a cat he threw his chair back and struck the girl, knocking her from the table. Someone screamed and the light swung to the girl, then back to him. The table went over. He rolled out of the light, twisting and fighting through the stunned and screaming crowd. His gun was in his hand, and he frantically searched the shouting room with his eyes.

“Get him! There he goes!”

He heard Bahr’s voice roar from the side of the room. Jeff swung sharply to the sound of the voice. He saw the tall, slender figure crouched with his back to the bar, eyes wide with fear and desperation. There was no mistaking the face, the hollow cheeks and the high forehead, the graying hair. It was the face he had seen in his dreams, the twisted lips, the evil, ghoulish face of the man he had hunted to the ends of the earth. For a fraction of a second he saw Paul Conroe, crouched at bay, and then the figure was gone, twisting through the crowd toward the door—

“Stop him!” Jeff swung savagely into the crowd, screaming at Bahr across the room. “He’s heading for the street! Get him!” The gun kicked sharply against his hand as he fired at the moving head. Rising for an instant, it disappeared again into the sea of heads. A scream rose at the shot. Women dropped to the floor, glasses crashed, tables went over. Someone clawed ineffectually for Jeff’s leg. Then, abruptly, the lights went out and there was another scream.

“The door, the door—Don’t let him get out—”

Jeff plunged to the side of the room, wrenched open the emergency exit and plunged down the dark, narrow walkway to the street. He heard shots as he ran. Turning the corner of the building, he saw the tall figure running pell-mell down the wet street.

“There he goes! Get him!”

Ted Bahr hung from the door. He gasped as he held his side, his face twisted in pain. “He hit me,” he panted. “He’s broken away—” A jet car slid from the curb and whined down the street toward the fleeing figure. “He can’t make it—I’ve got men on every corner in cars. They’ll get him, drive him back—”

“But where’s he going?” A sob of rage choked Jeff’s voice. “She sold us out, the bitch. She fingered me when she saw him come in—” His whole body trembled and the words tumbled out, almost incoherent. “But he must know the streets are blocked. Where’s he running?”

“You think I’m a mind reader? I don’t know. There are no open buildings in the whole block but this place and the Hoffman Center. He can’t go anywhere else and he can’t get out of the block. We’ve got every escapeway sewed up tight. He’ll have to come back here or be shot down out there.”

They watched the gloomy street, tears of rage in Jeff’s eyes. His hands shook uncontrollably and his shoulders sagged in exhaustion and defeat. The tavern door had burst open and people were crowding out. Jeff and Ted Bahr moved back into the shadows of the alleyway and waited and listened.

“There’s got to be a shot!” Jeff burst out. “He couldn’t have slipped through.” He turned to Bahr frantically. “Could he have gone into the Center?”

“On what pretense? They’d throw him to the Mercy Men—or the booby hatch, one or the other. He’d know better than to try.” The sandy-haired man sank down on his haunches and gripped his side tightly. “He’ll be back or we’ll hear the shooting. He couldn’t have slipped through.”

A three-wheeled jet car slid in to the curb, and a man came up to them, eyes wide. “Get him?”

Bahr scowled. “No sign. How about the other boys?”

The man blinked. “Not a whisper. He never reached the end of the block.”

“Did you check with Klett and Barker?”

“They haven’t seen a soul down here.”

Bahr glanced at Jeff sharply. “How about the streets behind? Any chance of a breakthrough there?”

The man’s voice was matter-of-fact. “It’s airtight. He couldn’t get through without somebody seeing him.” He stepped back to the car and spoke rapidly into the talker for a moment or two. “Nothing yet.”

“Damn. How about Howie and the boys inside the place?”

“Nothing from them either.”

Jeff’s face darkened. “The Hoffman Center,” he said slowly. “He got into the Center, somehow. He must have.”

“He’d have to have gilt-edged medical credentials to get in after hours. They don’t mess around over there. And what would it gain him?”

Jeff peered at Bahr in the darkness. “Maybe he wanted to be thrown to the Mercy Men. Maybe he’s figured that as a last resort, he’ll go in and volunteer, make a stab at the Big Cash.”

Bahr stared at the big man in horror. “Look—Conroe may be desperate, but he hasn’t lost his mind. My God, man! He isn’t crazy.”

“But he’s scared.”

“Of course he’s scared, but—”

“How scared?”

Bahr shrugged angrily. “He’d have to be on his last legs to take a gamble like that.”

“But they’d take him. They wouldn’t ask any questions. They’d swallow him up; they’d hide him, whether they knew it or not.” Jeff’s voice rose in excitement. “Look. We’ve hunted him down for years. We’ve never rested; we’ve never quit. He knows that and he knows why. He knows me. He knows I’m not going to quit until I get him. And he knows I will get him, sooner or later. I’m cutting too close; I’m undermining his friends; I’m always moving closer. Everywhere he goes, everything he does, I’m onto him. And he knows when I do get him, he’s going to die. What does that add up to?”

Bahr blinked in silence. Jeff’s face hardened. “Well, I’ll tell you what it adds up to. A man can take just so much. He can slide and twist and hide and keep moving just so long. Then he finds there aren’t any more hiding places. But there’s one last place a man can go to hide—if he’s really at the end of his tether—and that’s the Mercy Men. Because there he could vanish as though he’d never existed.”

Ted Bahr carefully lit a smoke. “If that’s where he went, we’re through, Jeff. We’ll never get him. We don’t even need to worry about trying. Because if he’s gone there, he’ll never come out again.”

“Some of them do.”

Bahr grunted. “One in a million, maybe. The odds are so heavy that there’s no sense thinking about it. If Paul Conroe has gone to the Mercy Men, then he’s dead. And that is that.”

Jeff returned his weapon to his pocket sharply and walked out to the car at the curb. “Keep your men where they are,” he said to Bahr. “Keep them there for the rest of the night. If he’s found a loophole, I want to know it. If he’s hidden in the buildings, he’ll have to come out sometime. Get some men to search the roofs, and you and I can start on the alleyways. If he’s out there, we’ll get him.” He straightened his shoulders and the sullen fire was back in his eyes—an angry, bitter fire. “And if he’s gone into the Center, we’ll still get him.”

Bahr’s eyes were wide. “He’ll never come out if he’s gone where you think, Jeff. We could wait weeks or months, even years, and we still wouldn’t know. Even if he did come out, we might never recognize him.”

“I’ll recognize him,” Jeff snarled, looking down into Bahr’s face. “I’m going to kill him. I’m going to know that he’s dead, because I’ll see him die. And I’ll kill him if I have to follow him into the Center to do it.”

CHAPTER TWO

The news report blatted in Jeff Meyer’s ear from the little car radio. The words came through, but he hardly heard them as his eyes watched the huge glass doors of the administration building of the Hoffman Medical Center.

…no word has yet been received, but it is believed that the Eurasian governments may be in session several hours more in an attempt to stem the inflation. On the home front, the stock-market nosedive, which resulted from the new Senate taxation bill yesterday, leveled off when the Secretary of Corporative Business announced this morning that the government would abandon attempts to enforce the new law, at least for the time being. Secretary Barnes stated that further study of the bill would be undertaken when more pressing governmental problems had been cleared—

Jeff snapped off the switch with a snarl. The street passing the Center was crowded. Lines of cars moved into and out of the traffic stream from the huge Center parking tiers. The building rose high, tier upon tier. Its walls gleamed white in the bright morning sunlight, reflecting brilliant facets of golden light from thousands of polished windows.

It was an immense building, sprawling across six perfectly landscaped city blocks, tall trees and cool green terraces setting off the glistening beauty of the architecture. The structure sent tower after tower up from the dingy street below, and at the foot of the towers was a buzz of furious activity. Supply trucks, carrying food and supplies for the twenty-two thousand beds and the people in them, and for the additional thirteen thousand people who worked day and night to keep the huge hospital running, moved toward the unloading platforms.

The Hoffman Medical Center was an age-old dream which had finally come true. Even those who had conceived it had not realized the tremendous need it would fulfill. From its very inception, no expense had been spared. The finest architects had thrown up the shimmering ward-towers, turned toward the sun, to bring light to the sick and injured who rested and healed within. Equipment unequaled anywhere in the world had filled the Center’s dressing and surgical rooms. The doctors, nurses, researchers and technicians who staffed the institution had been gathered from the world over. And all the world had conceded the Hoffman Center its place as leader in the realm of medicine, ever since the cornerstone had been laid that rainy morning in the spring of the year 2085. Twenty-four years had passed since that day, and in those years the Hoffman Center had never once faltered in its leadership.

The men in the car sat in stony silence. Finally, Jeff Meyer stirred, extended his hand briefly to Ted Bahr. “You’ll cover things out here?”

“Don’t worry about it.” Bahr shook the hand. “Well wait to hear from you.” He watched, almost wistfully, as the huge man cut through the traffic and headed for the large glass doors. Then, with a sigh, he stepped on the starter button and snaked the little jet car into the stream of traffic moving toward the city.

* * * *

Jeff Meyer stopped in the great, bustling lobby and stared about him almost in awe. He had never been inside the Hoffman Center before, though he had heard of it many times and in many places. Since it had taken over service of the huge metropolis of Boston-New Haven-New York-Philadelphia, the newspapers and TV had been full of stories of the lifesaving and healing that had gone on within its walls. The disease research, conducted by specialists in all phases of medicine who were for the first time gathered together under one agency, had startled the world again and again.

But there had been other stories, too—not from the papers and TV, not these stories. These tales had come by word of mouth: a short sentence or two, a nervous laugh, a sneering joke, a rumor, a whispered story from a wide-eyed alky hanging over a bar. Not the sort of stories one really believed, but the sort that made one wonder.

Several dozen white-garbed women moved across the floor of the huge lobby and talked quietly among themselves. Jeff sniffed uneasily. There was a curiously distasteful odor in the air, an odor of almost unhealthy cleanliness and spotless preservation. The lobby was a mill of activity: the elevators and interbuilding jitneys terminated here; people moved briskly, carrying with them the familiar air of hurry and vast pressure that infected the whole world outside.

Jeff watched, spotting the corridor leading to the main administrative offices. He saw the elevators constantly rising to and returning from the huge admission offices. He noted the corridor twisting off to the staff living quarters. He stood silent, his quick gray eyes cautiously probing and watching. He tried to print an indelible picture in his mind of the layout of the building and was almost floored by the hive-like bustle of the place. There was a complexity in the curved doorways and the brightly lighted corridors.

Somewhere here he could find Paul Conroe. Somewhere in this maze of buildings and passageways was the man he had hunted for. Logic told him that. They had spent the night searching every possible alternative. His muscles ached and his eyes were red from sleeplessness, but there was a hot, angry glow in his heart. He knew that this was the only place that Conroe could have gone. Yet the place where he must be hiding was a place Jeff had heard of only in rumor, a place whose mention carried with it a half-knowledge of staggering wealth and almost indescribable horror.

Someone tapped him on the shoulder. He turned, startled, to face a huge, burly man with a suspicious face and a gray uniform. “You got business here, mister, or are we just sight-seeing?”

Jeff forced a grin. “I don’t know where to go,” he said truthfully.

“Maybe you should go back out then. No visitors until this afternoon.”

“No, I’m not a visitor. I’m looking for the Volunteer’s Bank. The ads said to come to the administration offices—”

The guard’s face softened a little. He pointed a finger toward a corridor marked RESEARCH ADMINISTRATION. “Right over there,” he said. “Office is the first door to your right. The nurse will take care of you.”

Meyer strolled toward the corridor, his mind fumbling with the rumors and bits of half-knowledge that were all that he had to work on: stories of drunks stumbling into the Emergency Rooms and never coming out; tales of quiet, swift raids on narcotics houses, of people who never reached the police stations.

But how could he make the right contact here? “Research Administration” covered a multitude of meanings. He had read the advertisements for Hoffman volunteers in all the buses, in the ’copters, on the roads. Newspapers and TV had carried them for years. Meyer glanced down at his unpolished shoes, rubbed a finger over his purposely unshaven chin. What would they expect a volunteer to look like? How could they detect a fraud, an interloper? He shivered as he faced the office door. It would be a gamble, a terrible chance. Because with all the other publicity, no mention had ever been made of the Mercy Men. He glanced back, found the guard still staring at him, and walked into the office.

Several people sat along the wall. A small, mousy-looking man with a bald head and close-set eyes had just sat down in the chair before the desk. He waited for the prim-looking woman wearing a ridiculous little white hat to put down her pen. She didn’t even glance up as Jeff took a seat, and she kept writing for several minutes before turning her attention to the little bald man. Then she looked up and gave a frosty smile at him. “Yes, sir?”

“Dr. Bennet asked me to come back today,” the little man said. “Follow-up on last week’s work.”

“Name please?” The woman took his name and punched the button on a panel before her; an instant later a card flipped down in a slot. She checked it, made an entry and nodded to the man. “Dr. Bennet will be ready for you at eleven. You’ll find magazines in the lounge.” She indicated another door, and the little man disappeared through it.

Another person, a middle-aged woman, moved to take the little man’s place before the desk. Jeff felt restless and glanced at his watch. It was almost eleven. Must she move so slowly? Nothing seemed to hurry her. She worked from person to person, smiling, impersonal, just a trifle chilly. Finally she nodded to Jeff, and he moved to the chair.

“Name, please?”

“You don’t have a card on me.”

She looked up briefly. “A new volunteer? We’re happy to have you, sir. Now if you’ll give me your name, I can start the papers through.”

Jeff cleared his throat, felt his pulse pounding in his forehead. “I’m not sure just what I want to volunteer for,” he said cautiously.

The woman smiled. “We have a rather large selection to choose from. There are the regular ’mycin drug runs every week on Tuesdays and Thursdays. You take the drug by mouth in the morning and give blood samples at ten, two and four. Many of our new Volunteers start on that. It pays six dollars and your lunch while you’re here. Or you could give blood, but the law restricts you to once every three months on that, and it only pays thirty-five dollars. Or—”

Jeff shook his head and leaned forward. He looked directly into her eyes. “I don’t think you understand,” he said softly. “I want money. Lots of it. Not five or ten dollars.” He looked down at the desk. “I’ve heard you have other kinds of work.”

The woman’s eyes narrowed. “There are higher-paying categories of Volunteer work, of course. But you must understand that they are higher paying because they involve a greater risk to the health of the Volunteer. For instance, we’ve been running circulation studies with heart catheterizations. We pay a hundred dollars for these, but there is an appreciable risk involved. Or sternal marrow punctures for blood studies. Usually we start—”

“I said money,” said Jeff implacably. “Not peanuts.”

Her eyes widened and she stared at him for a long moment. It was a strange, penetrating stare that took him in from his face to his feet. Her smile faded and her fingers were suddenly nervous. “Have you any idea what you’re talking about?”

“I have. I’m talking about the Mercy Men.”

She stood up abruptly and disappeared into an inner office. Jeff waited, his whole body trembling. Beads of sweat broke out on his forehead, and he gave a visible start when the woman opened the door again.

“Come in here, please.”

Then he was on the right track. He tried to conceal the excitement in his eyes as he took a seat in the small room. He waited, fidgeting. The woman packed up a small telephone on the desk and punched several buttons in rapid succession. The silence was almost intolerable as he waited, a silence that was alive and vibrant. Finally a signal light flickered and she took up the receiver.

“Dr. Schiml? This is the Volunteer office, Doctor.” She shot Jeff a swift glance. “There’s another man here to see you.”

Meyer felt his heart pound. He shifted in his chair and started to take out a cigarette. Then he checked himself.

“That’s right,” the woman was saying, eyeing him as if he were a biological specimen. “I’m sorry, he hasn’t given a name.… Ten minutes? All right, Doctor, I’ll have him wait.” With that, she replaced the receiver and left the room without a word.

Jeff stood up, stretched his legs and looked about the room. It was small, with just a desk and two or three chairs. Obviously it served as a conference room of some sort. One wall held the panel of file buttons; another held the telephone and visiphone viewer. Over the visiphone screen, a large lighted panel announced the date in sharp black letters: 32 April, 2109. Below it, the little transistor clock had just changed to read 11:23 A.M. Almost noon. And every passing minute his quarry drew farther and farther away.

He glanced out the window at the rising tiers of buildings. Across the courtyard the first of the ward-towers rose. To one side of it were a series of long, low structures with skylights. These were the kitchens, perhaps, or maintenance buildings. There were dozens of them—any one of which could be hiding Paul Conroe. Jeff clenched his hands until the nails bit his palms. He stared down at the buildings. Conroe could be anywhere down there. Another man had already seen Dr. Schiml.…

A door clicked behind him and he turned sharply. A man entered the room and closed the door behind him. Smiling, he walked over to the desk. Meyer nodded and watched the man. He felt a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. For the briefest instant the doctor had caught his eye, and Jeff felt everything that he had planned to say crumble like dust around him.

The man hardly looked like a doctor, although his white jacket was immaculate and a stethoscope peeped from his side pocket. He was tall and slender, almost fifty years old, with round, cheerful pink cheeks and a little pug nose that seemed completely out of place on his face.

A harmless-looking man, Jeff thought, except for his eyes. But his eyes—they were the sharpest, most penetrating eyes Jeff had ever seen. And they were watching him. Quite independent of the smiling face, they watched his every move, studying him. The eyes were full of wisdom, but they were also tinged with caution.

The doctor sat down and motioned Jeff to the seat facing the desk. He pushed a cigar case across the desk to him.

Jeff hesitated, then took one. “I thought these were slightly illegal,” he said.

The doctor grinned. “Slightly. Thanks to us, as you probably know. We did most of the work here on tobacco smoke and cancer—actually got legislation pushed through on it.” He leaned back easily in his chair as he lit his own cigar. “Still, one once in a while won’t do too much harm. And there’s nothing like a good smoke to get things talked out. I’m Roger Schiml, by the way. I didn’t get your name.”

“Meyer,” said Jeff. “Jeffrey Meyer.”

The doctor’s eyes narrowed quizzically. “I hope my girl didn’t bother you too much. She channels most of the volunteer work here, as you see. Then, occasionally, cases come in which she’d rather turn over to me.” He paused for a moment. “Cases like yours, for instance.”

Jeff blinked, his mind racing. It would take acting, he thought, real acting to fool this man. The face was deceptively young and benign, almost complacent. But the eyes were far from young. They were old, old eyes. They had seen more than eyes should see. They missed nothing. To fool a man with eyes like that—Jeff took a deep breath and said, “I want to join the Mercy Men.”

Dr. Schiml’s eyes widened very slightly. For a long moment he said nothing, just stared at the huge man before him. Then he said, “That’s interesting. It’s also very curious. The name, I mean—oh, I can understand the attraction such an idea might have for people, but the name that’s become so popular—it baffles me. ‘Mercy Men.’ It gives you a curious feeling, don’t you think? Brings up mental pictures of handsome young interns fighting the forces of evil and death, the brave heroes giving their all for the upward flight of humanity—all that garbage, you know.” The eyes hardened quite suddenly. “Where did you hear of the Mercy Men, I wonder?”

Jeff shrugged. “The word’s been around for quite a while. A snatch here, a story there—even though it isn’t advertised too openly.”

Dr. Schiml looked him straight in the eye. “And suppose I told you that there is no such organization, either here or anywhere else on Earth that I know of?”

A tight smile appeared on Jeff’s face. “I’d call you a class-A liar.”

Schiml’s eyebrows went up. “I see. That’s a big word. Maybe you can support it.”

“I can. There are Mercy Men here. There have been for several years.”

“You’re sure of that.”

“Quite. I know one. He was a skid-rower with a taste for morphine when I first ran into him—a champagne appetite to go with a beer income. Then he went out of circulation for about six months. Now he has a place up in the Catskills, with many, many thousands of dollars in the bank. Of course, he uses the money to feed several hundred cats in his basement.” Jeff’s eyes narrowed. “He never liked cats very much before he left here. There are other funny things he does—nothing serious, of course, but peculiar. Still, he doesn’t need the dope any more.”

Schiml smiled and put his fingers together. “That would be Luke Tandy. Yes, Luke was a little different when he left, but the work was satisfactory and we paid off.”

“Yes,” said Jeff softly. “One hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Cash on the line. To him or his heirs. He was lucky.”

“So what are you doing here?”

“I want a hundred and fifty thousand dollars too.”

The doctor’s eyes met Jeff’s squarely. “And you are a liar too.”

Jeff reddened. “What do you mean—”

“Look, let’s get this straight right now. Don’t lie to me. I’ll catch you every time.” The doctor’s eyes were hard. “I see a man who’s eaten well for a long time, wearing dirty but expensive clothes, who doesn’t drink, who doesn’t use drugs, who is young and strong and capable. He tells me he wants to join the Mercy Men for money. He tells me a lie. Now I’ll ask you again: why are you here?”

“For money. For one hundred and fifty thousand dollars.”

The doctor sighed and leaned back. “All right, no matter. We’ll go into it later, I suppose. But I think you’d better understand certain things. It’s no accident that your information on the Mercy Men is so vague. We’ve been careful to keep it that way, of course. The more vague the stories, the fewer curiosity-seekers and busybodies we have to contend with. Also, the more distasteful the stories, the more desperate people will become before they come to us. This we particularly desire. Because the work we do here requires a very desperate man to volunteer.”

As he talked, the doctor brought out a pack of cards from the desk and began riffling them nervously in his fingers. Jeff’s eyes caught them and a chill went down his back. They were curious cards, not the regular playing variety. These were smaller, with a peculiar marking system in bright red on the white faces. Jeff shivered and he was puzzled at the chill that gripped his body. He shifted in his chair in growing tension and tried to take his eyes from the cards.

The doctor snubbed out his cigar, leaned back in the chair and gave the cards a riffle and regarded Jeff closely. “We’ve done a lot here since the Center opened—work based on years of background research. A century or more ago there were terrible medical problems to be faced: polio was a killer then; they had no idea of cancer control; they were faced with a terrific death rate from heart disease. All those things are beaten now, a thing of the past. But as the old killers moved out, new ones took their place. Look at the half-dozen NVI plagues we’ve had in the past few years—neurotoxic virus infections that started to appear out of nowhere twenty years ago. Look at the alky-sikys you see in every bar today, a completely new type of alcoholism-psychosis that we haven’t even been able to describe, much less cure. Look at the statistics on mental disease, rising in geometric progression almost every year.”

The tall doctor stood up and walked to the window. “We don’t know why it’s happening, but it is. Something’s on the march, something ghastly and evil among the people. Something that has to be stopped.” He gave the cards a sharp riffle and tossed them onto the desk with a sigh. “We can’t stop it until we know something about the human brain and how it works, and why it does what it does, and how. We don’t even understand fully the structure of the nervous system, much less understand its function. And we’ve learned all we can from cats and dogs and monkeys. Any further study of a monkey’s brain will give us great insight into the neuroses and complexes of monkeys, no doubt. But it won’t teach us anything more about men.” His voice was very soft. “You can see where this leads, I think.”

Jeff Meyer nodded slowly. “You need men,” he said.

“We need men. Men to study. Cruel as it may sound, men to experiment upon. We can’t learn any more from any other variety of…experimental animal. But there are problems. Toy around with a man’s brain and he is likely to die, quite abruptly. Or he may be deranged, or he may go violently insane. Most of the work, however well planned, however certain we were of results, however safe it appeared, proved to be completely unpredictable. Much of the work and many of the results were quite horrible. But we’re making progress, slow—but progress nonetheless. So the work continues.

“It hasn’t been very popular. No man in his right mind would volunteer for such a job. So we hired men. For the most truly altruistic work in the world, our workers come with the most mercenary of motives: we pay for their services and we pay well. A hundred thousand dollars is a small fee, on our scale. We have the government behind us. The sky is the limit, if we need a man for a job. The money is paid, when the work is completed, either to the man himself or to his heirs. You see why the name they’ve given themselves is so curious—Medical Mercenaries, the ‘Mercy Men.’ That’s why a man must be desperate to come to us. That’s why we must be so very careful who joins us, for what motives.”

Jeff Meyer stared at his hands and waited in the silence of the room. His eyes strayed once again to the curious cards, and the chill of fear went through him like a ghastly breeze. This was a port of last resort, a road that could end in horror and death. Ted Bahr had said it wasn’t worth it—that Conroe would never escape alive—but he knew that Conroe could. And he knew Conroe well enough to know that he would.

Jeff felt the old bitterness and hatred swell up in his mind, and his hands trembled as he sat. He had long since thrown aside his life as he had known it, cast off the veneer of civilized life that he had acquired, to hunt Paul Conroe down and kill him. There was nothing else in his life that mattered. It had been a long, grueling hunt, tracking him, following him, studying him, tracing his movements and habits, plotting trap after trap, driving the man to desperation. But there had been no indication, anywhere along the line, that Conroe would turn to such a desperate gamble as this.

But he must have known that death otherwise was inevitable. Here he could be changed. He might disappear from the face of the Earth in the oblivion of quiet death, to be sure, but he also might emerge, unscathed, to live in wealth the rest of his life, unrecognizable and safe.

Jeff Meyer looked up at the doctor and his eyes were hard. “I haven’t changed my mind,” he said. “What has to be done to join?”

Dr. Schiml sighed, and turned resignedly to the file panel. “There are tests that are necessary and rules to be obeyed. You’ll be confined and regimented. And once you’re assigned to a job and sign a release, you’re in.” He leaned forward and punched the visiphone button. Tapping his fingers idly on the desk, he waited until an image blinked and cleared on the screen. “Blackie,” he said tiredly. “Better send the Nasty Frenchman up here. We’ve got a new recruit.”

The visiphone snapped off and Jeff sat frozen to his seat, his pulse throbbing in his neck, every nerve in his body screaming in excitement. The face on the screen had been clearly visible for a moment: a pale face with large gray eyes—a woman’s face, surrounded by flowing black hair. It was a face that was impressed indelibly on his memory. It belonged to the girl who had danced the night before in the red light.

CHAPTER THREE

There was no doubt of it. She was the girl in the night club, the dancing girl with the flowing black hair and the mask-like smile, who had led him to Conroe and then brought the spotlight to his face to spring the trap too soon. Frantically Jeff fought to control his excitement. He knew his face was white and he avoided the doctor’s puzzled glance. But he couldn’t control the angry fire burning in his mind, the little voice screaming out: “He’s here; he’s here, somewhere!”

But why was she here? The doctor had called her “Blackie.” He had spoken to her with familiarity. Jeff’s mind whirled. He had the strangest feeling that he had missed something somewhere along the line, that he knew the answer but couldn’t quite grasp it. What could the girl’s sudden appearance in the Center involve?

Or had her appearance at the night club been the unusual one?

A buzzer rang and the office door opened to admit a small, weasel-faced man. The doctor looked up and smiled. “Hello, Jacques. This is Jeff Meyer, the new recruit. Take him down and get him quartered in, all right? And you might brief him a little. He’s awfully green.”

The little man scratched his long nose and regarded Jeff with a nasty smile. “A new one, huh? Where are you going to line him up?”

“No telling. We’ll see where the tests put him, first. Then we’ll talk about jobs.”

The smile widened on the little man’s face, turning down the end of his long pointed nose and revealing a dirty yellow row of teeth. His eyes ran over Jeff from head to toe. “Big one too. But then, they fall just as hard as the rest. Want me to take him right down?”

Schiml nodded. “Maybe he can still get lunch.” His eyes shifted to Jeff. “This is the Nasty Frenchman,” he said, motioning toward the little man with his thumb. “He’s been around for a long time; he can show you the ropes. And don’t let him bother you too much—his sense of humor, I mean. Like I say, he’s been around here a long time. You’ll get quarters and you’ll be expected to stay with your group for meals and everything else. That means no contacts outside the hospital as long as you’re here. You’ll get the daily news reports, and there are magazines and books in the library. If you’ve got other business outside, you haven’t any business in here. Any time you leave the Center it’s considered an automatic breach of contract.”

He paused for a long moment and gave Jeff a strange look, almost a half smile. “And you’ll find that questions aren’t appreciated around here, Jeff. Any kind of questions. The men don’t like people too much when they ask questions.”

The Nasty Frenchman shuffled his feet nervously, and Jeff started out the door. Then the little man turned back to Dr. Schiml. “They brought Tinker back from the table about ten minutes ago. He’s in pretty bad shape. Maybe you should look at him?”

“This was the big job today, wasn’t it?” Schiml’s eyes were sharp. “What did Dr. Bartel say?”

“He said no dice. It was a bust.”

“I see. Well, it may be just the diodrax wearing off now, but I’ll be down to see.”

The Nasty Frenchman grunted and turned back to Jeff. His face still wore the nasty little grin. “Let’s go, big boy,” he said, and started down the hall.

* * * *

Jeff watched the corridors as they passed, counting them one by one, trying desperately to keep himself oriented. He glanced at his watch and angrily sucked in his breath. Minutes were slipping by, precious minutes, minutes that could mean success or failure. A thousand questions crowded his mind, and behind them all was the girl. She was the key, he was sure of it. She would know where Conroe was, where he could be found.…

They reached an elevator, stepped aboard and shot down at such dizzying speed that Jeff nearly choked. Then, suddenly, they came to a jolting stop and stepped into a dingy, gray corridor that was dimly lit by bare bulbs in the ceiling.

The Nasty Frenchman punched a button in the wall and turned to regard Jeff. The sneering little smile was still on his lips as the far-off rumble of a jitney grew to a sharp clatter. A little car dropped down from its ceiling track. The little man hopped in nimbly and motioned Jeff in beside him. Then the car took off for the ceiling again, swinging crazily and speeding down the maze of corridors and curves.

Jeff stirred uneasily, growing more and more confused with every turn. “Look,” he broke out finally, “where’s this thing taking us?”

The Nasty Frenchman turned pale eyes toward him. “You worried or something?”

“Well, it looks like we’re headed for the center of the Earth. I’d like to be able to find my way out sometime—”

“Why?”

The question was so blunt that it left Jeff’s jaw sagging for a moment. “Well, I’m not planning to spend the rest of my life in here.”

The Nasty Frenchman guffawed. It was not a pleasant laugh. “Here for a nice restful vacation, huh? You wise guys are all the same. Go ahead, dream—I won’t bother you.”

The little man turned his attention to the controls and the car swung sharply to the right and headed down another corridor. Jeff scowled as he watched the lighted corridors flash by. Were they speeding so far, so deep in the depths of the building? Or was this part of a definite plan to confuse, to lose recruits in the mammoth place so completely that they could never find their way out? Jeff shrugged, finally. It really didn’t matter too much. He had one job and only one. He could worry about escape when it had been accomplished.

“That girl,” he said finally. “The doctor called her ‘Blackie.’ Is she down here where we’re going?”

“How should I know? I don’t keep her on a leash.” The little man’s face darkened and his eyes turned suspiciously to Jeff.

“I mean, is she one of the group—one of the Mercy Men?”

The Nasty Frenchman threw a switch sharply, swerving the speeding car through a long, dim passage. He ignored the question, as if he hadn’t heard it. In the dim light his skin was pasty yellow and wrinkled like a mummy. The cruelty and avarice on his face was frightening.

Jeff watched him for a moment or two, then said, “What brought you here? To the Mercy Men, I mean?”

The Nasty Frenchman’s eyes flashed poisonously, his face a horrid mask. “Did I ask you your racket before you came in?”

“No.”

“Then don’t ask me mine. And you won’t forget that, if you’re smart.” He turned his attention sharply to the controls, ignoring Jeff for several moments. Finally he said, “You’ll share a room and you’ll eat at eight, noon and six. Tests should start tomorrow morning at eight-thirty. You’ll be in your room when the doctors come for you. You won’t have any status here until you’re tested. Then you’ll sign a release and wait for a job assignment. You won’t have any choice of work; that’s just for the older ones. Some of the work is with central nervous system, some is with sympathetic; some work concentrates on spinal cord and peripherals, but most of the interest these days is in cortical lesions and repair. That pays the best, too—couple hundred thousand at a crack, with a fairly good risk.”

“And what’s a fairly good risk in here?”

The grin reappeared on the little man’s face again. It was almost savage in its cruelty. “Ten percent full recovery is a good risk. That means complete recovery from the work, no secondary infection, complete recovery of faculties—in other words complete success in the work. Then a fairly good risk runs slightly lower—more casualty, maybe five percent recovery. And a high-risk job averages two percent—”

The grin broadened. “You’ve got a better chance of living sitting under an atom bomb, my friend. And once you sign a release, relieving the hospital and the doctors of all responsibility, you’re in, and held to your contract by law. This is no vacation, but if you’re lucky enough to come through—” The little man’s eyes were bright with eagerness. “They pay off—oh, how they pay off. If you’re lucky, you’ll get a good starter, maybe a hundred thousand, with good risk.” He scratched his nose and regarded Jeff closely. “Of course, there are incomplete recoveries, too. They have trouble keeping them out of the news, if they ever leave. Pretty messy, sometimes, too.”

Jeff felt his face paling at the cruel eagerness in the little man’s voice. What could bring a man to a place like this—especially this kind of a man? Or had he been a different kind of a man before he came in? How long had he been here, waiting from experiment to experiment, waiting to live or to die, waiting for the payoff, the Big Cash that waited at the end of a job? What could such an existence do to a man? What could there be to drive him on? Jeff shuddered, then gasped as the car gave a sudden lurch around a corner and settled to the floor.

The Nasty Frenchman hopped out, motioned to Jeff to follow. They started walking toward the escalator at the end of the passageway. Jeff searched each doorway they passed, keeping alert for a sign of the black-haired woman. “Look,” he said finally. “This girl—Blackie, I mean—who is she?”

The Nasty Frenchman stopped in his tracks, glared at Jeff. “What is she, an old family friend or something? You keep asking about her.”

“I know her from somewhere.”

“So why bother me with your questions?”

Jeff’s face darkened angrily. “I want to see her, all right? Don’t get so jumpy—”

The little man whirled on him like a cat. Jeff’s arm was wrenched behind his back until he felt the tendons rip. With unbelievable strength the Nasty Frenchman twisted the huge man back against the wall and glared up at him with blazing eyes. “You’re a smart guy, coming around here, asking questions,” he snarled, giving Jeff’s arm a vicious wrench. “You think you can fool me? You ask about this, you ask about that—why so nosey? Blackie…me…everything. What are you doing here? Going after the Big Cash or asking questions?”

“The Cash!” Jeff gasped. He twisted to wriggle free of the iron-like grip.

“Then don’t ask questions! We don’t like nosey people here; we like people that roll dice square and mind their own business.” The little man gave the arm a final agonizing wrench and released it. He jumped back, poised, eyes savagely eager.

Every instinct screamed at Jeff to rush him, but he slumped against the wall. Rubbing his aching arm, he fought for control. He knew a fight now could ruin things completely. Already he had blundered terribly. He cursed under his breath. How stupid he’d been not to have realized how unpopular questions would be to people in a place like this. And surely the word would get to the girl now that he was asking about her. Unless he could get to her first—

Still rubbing his elbows painfully, he turned to the Nasty Frenchman. “Okay, let it go,” he growled. “Where do we go from here?”

The room was small and barren. Dingy and gray, it matched Jeff’s spirit perfectly. He entered it with the Nasty Frenchman at his heels and stared at the two stark hospital beds against the far wall, the two foot lockers, the two small desk-and-chair combinations. There was no window in the room. Indeed, there was nothing about the room or corridor to prove that they were not twenty miles underground. Certainly the jitney ride had been no reassurance to the contrary.

The dim wall lights glowed on scrubbed, peeling paint, and the floor was covered with clean but well-worn plastic matting. Against one wall was a TV set. Between the beds a door led into a compact lavatory and shower. Glancing in, Jeff saw the lavatory was also connected with the adjoining room.

“It’s no Grand Hotel,” the Nasty Frenchman said sourly. “But it’s clean and it’s a bed. This corridor quarters your whole unit—the C unit. Other units are on other floors, up and down.”

Jeff looked around the room gloomily. “Where can I eat?”

“The mess hall’s four flights down. Take the escalator at the end of the hall. It closes in half an hour, so you’d better step on it. And if you’re smart, you won’t go wandering around. These boys in gray you see here and there don’t like us very much.” His face creased into a sardonic grin as he started for the door. “And you’d be smart to change before you come down. The faster people stop thinking you’re new here, the happier you’ll be.” With that, he turned and disappeared down the hall.

Jeff gave a sigh, and prowled the room. One of the foot lockers held an amazing assortment of clean and dirty clothes. On the floor of it lay a large heap of dirty shirts and trousers, and nested squarely in the center of the pile was a heap of gold rings and wrist watches. Jeff blinked, not quite believing his eyes. He hadn’t thought to ask about his room-mate, but apparently he had one who had not yet made his appearance.

Apparently everyone wore similar clothing. He found the other locker filled with clean shirts and dungarees. Swiftly he started to change, his mind racing. His body was sore all over and he felt a dry, hot feeling around his ears from lack of sleep. His arm ached miserably every time he moved it. If only he could sleep for a little while. But he knew there was no time to be wasted. In the mess hall there would still be people. Somewhere among them he would find the girl.…

Carefully he considered the problem. The girl was the key. He had to find her, to make certain that Conroe was here. And he had to find her quickly, catch her unawares, before she had a chance to alibi or hide. Conroe would be hidden; he would never come into the open until he was sure that he had not been followed. He too must be taken unawares. Jeff had seen Conroe slip out of too many traps in the past. A blunder now could be the last. And if Conroe had time to plan, there would be many, many blunders.

A car buzzed down the hall as he stood in the room and stopped a little way from the door. There were voices, subdued, yet carrying a sharp note of frantic excitement. Jeff paused, listening to the combination of unfamiliar sounds: a grunt, a low curse, a rustle of whispered conversation, a low whistle. Then the door to the next room banged open and a rumble and squeak of wheels came to his ears.

“Jeez, what a job!”

“Yeah, looks bad. Did the doc see him?”

“He said he’d be down—”

“—gotta let it wear off before you can tell. This was the works, this time.”

Jeff walked quietly to the door of the connecting lavatory, his nerves tingling. A new sound was apparent, an unearthly sound of labored, gurgling breathing. Jeff shivered. He had heard a sound like that only once before in his life: in a rocket during the Asian war, when a man had been struck in the throat with a chunk of shrapnel. Carefully, he pushed the door open an inch, peered through.…

There were three men standing in the room, maneuvering a man—if it was a man—from the four-wheeled cart onto the bed. The man’s head was covered to the shoulders with bandage. A patch of fresh blood showed near the temple, and a rubber tube emerged where the mouth should have been.

“Got him down? Better cover him closer. Restrainers—he may jump around. Doc said three weeks for shock to wear off, if he makes it through the night.”

“Yeah—and this is the Big Cash for Tinker too. Harpo nearly beat him to the job, but Schiml had promised him—”

Jeff shuddered. This, then, was one of the Mercy Men, finished with a “job.” The gurgling sound grew louder, measuring itself with the man’s breathing—short, shallow, a measure of death. An experiment had been completed.

Jeff closed the door silently. His face in the mirror was pasty white and his hands were shaking. Here was the factor that had been plaguing him from the start, finally breaking through to the surface. The road he was traveling was a one-way road. He had to find Conroe and get off the road quickly, while he could. Because he dared not travel the road too far.…

* * * *

The air in the corridor seemed fresher as Jeff started for the escalator. It was almost two o’clock and he hurried, anxious to reach the mess hall before it closed. He consciously fought the picture of the man on the bed out of his mind. With effort he focused his attention once again on the girl. At the end of the corridor he stepped onto the creaky, down-going escalator.

If only he could check with Ted Bahr, make certain that the trail had really ended at the Hoffman Center, make sure that Conroe was not really somewhere outside, still hiding, still running. One thing seemed certain: if Conroe were really here, he too would be faced with the testing and classification; he too would be traveling the same grim road as Jeff himself. And as a newcomer, he too would be under suspicion and scrutiny.

Jeff stopped short on a landing. He was suddenly aware that he had lost count of the flights he had gone down. He looked back to check his bearings, then moved around to the stairs moving up. The escalator creaked and groaned, as if every turn would be its last, and Jeff stared dreamily at the moving wall, waiting—until he passed the open well to the opposite stairs.

He froze, his mind screaming. Unable to move, he stared at the pale, frightened face of the man on the down-going stairway. In the brief seconds while they passed, he stood rooted, paralyzed, unable to cry out. Then with a hoarse yell he turned. Half-stumbling, half-falling, he ran down the up-going stairs until he reached the opening.

Then he vaulted across the barrier, crashing his shoulder against the wall as he went through. He caught a glimpse of the tall, slender figure running from the bottom of the stairs into the corridor at the bottom, and he shouted again in a burst of blinding rage. He took the steps three at a time, his mind numb to the pain as his foot struck the solid floor and twisted, sending him sprawling on his face. In an instant he was on his feet again, running, frantically, blindly, to the end of the corridor.

It broke into two hallways, going off in a Y. Both were dark and both were empty. Jeff stood panting, almost screaming out in rage, his whole body trembling. He started blindly down one corridor, jerked open a door and stared in at the small, empty office. He tried another door and another. Then he turned and ran back to the Y, spun around the corner and ran pell-mell down the second corridor. Only his own desperate footfalls echoed back to him in the darkness.

Back at the Y, he sank to the floor. Still panting, he sobbed aloud in his rage, clenching his fists as he tried to regain control of his spinning mind. Rage there was—yes, and hatred and bitter frustration. But also, tumbling through his mind in a wild, elated cadence, was a cry of sheer, incoherent savage joy. Because he knew now, beyond any shadow of doubt, that Paul Conroe was among the Mercy Men.

He looked up suddenly at the two figures approaching him from the lighted corridor. One of them held a tiny, deadly scorcher pistol trained on his chest. The other, a huge, burly man, reached down and jerked Jeff’s face up into the light. “What’s your unit?” the harsh voice grated.

Jeff glimpsed the gray cloth of the man’s jacket, the official-looking black belt over his shoulder. “C unit,” he panted.

The blow caught him full on the chin, twisting his head around with a jolt. “Wise guy, wandering around without a pass,” the voice growled. “You goddam scabs think you run the place, don’t you?” Another blow struck him behind the ear, and a fist caught him hard in the pit of the stomach. As he doubled over retching, a smashing blow caught his chin, and he tasted blood in his mouth as his knees buckled under him.

* * * *

He felt them, vaguely, half-carrying, half-dragging him down the corridor. He heard a door open and fell face down on the floor. A harsh voice said, “Here’s your room-mate, scut. Keep him home from now on.” And the door slammed behind him.

Painfully, he raised himself on his hands, shook his head dazedly.

“You look like you’re sick or something.” The voice from the bed was hard and insolent.

Painfully, Jeff jerked his head up and stared. The girl blinked coldly and pulled a frazzled cigarette from her blue cotton shirt. She flicked a match with her thumb and touched off the smoke. Then she stared down at Jeff mockingly. “Sorry, Jack,” said the girl called Blackie. “But it looks like we’re roomies. So you might as well get used to the idea.”

CHAPTER FOUR

Something exploded in Jeff’s brain then, something he could no more control than the creeping, vicious hatred of Paul Conroe that had driven him for so long. The jangling, tinny music of the tavern was screaming through his mind; the indelible picture of the swerving, gyrating figure: the long raven hair, the impassive face, the full lips. His knees buckled and his head was reeling, but he lurched across the room at the girl. Catching her by the collar, he drew her face up to his with a wrench that knocked the cigarette from her hand and brought her breath out in a gasp.

“All right,” he grated. “Where is he? Come on, come on, talk! Where is he? And don’t tell me he’s not here, because I know he is, understand? I just saw him. I just chased him, down below. I know he’s here! I want to know where.”

Her foot came up sharply and caught him in the leg, sending an agony of pain into his thigh. Suddenly she began to fight like a cat, clawing, biting—blue fire in her eyes. Jeff brought his hand up and slapped her face twice, hard. With a snarl she caught him in the stomach with her foot and tore herself free, sending him reeling back against the wall.

He bounded off, then stopped dead in his tracks. A horrible realization exploded in his mind. She was standing poised, her face twisted, her eyes burning, a stream of poisonous language pouring at him. In her hand was a knife, blade up, balanced in her hand with deadly intent. But Jeff hardly noticed the knife; he didn’t hear the words as he stared unbelievingly at her face, his heart sinking. Because the face was wrong, somehow.

The lips were not right, the nose was shaped differently, the glow in the eyes was not right. His panting turned into a bitter sob of disbelief, of incredible disappointment. There couldn’t be any doubt—it simply was not the right girl.

“Where—where is he?” he asked weakly, his heart pounding helplessly in his throat.

“Not another step,” the girl snarled. “Another inch and I’ll slice you up like putty.”

“No, no—” Jeff shook his head, trying desperately to clear his mind, to understand. This was the girl he had seen in the visiphone screen. Yes, the same clothes, the same face. But she wasn’t the girl in the tavern. “Conroe,” he blurted out, plaintively. “You—you must know Conroe—”

“I’ve never heard of Conroe.”

“But you must have—last night, in that dive—dancing—”

Her jaw dropped as she stared at him in disgust. Then she gave the knife a flip into the desk top and sank down on her bed, her face relaxing. “Go away,” she said tiredly. “That goddam Frenchman’s sense of humor. Go on, beat it. I’m not rooming with any hoppy—at least until he’s off the stuff.”

“You don’t know Conroe?”

The girl looked at him closely. “Look, Jack,” she said with patient bitterness, “I don’t know who you are and I don’t know your pal Comstock or whatever it is. And I sure as hell wasn’t dancing anywhere last night. I was working in the tank last night getting some looped-up hophead cooled off for the axe this morning. And it wasn’t fun for either of us, and you’ll be down there yourself if you don’t cool off. And you won’t like it, either. So go away, don’t bother me.”

Jeff sank down on the opposite bed, his head in his hands. “You—you looked so much like her—”

“So I looked so much like her!” She spat out a filthy word and drew her legs up, glaring at him.

Jeff reddened, his whole body aching. “All right, I’m sorry. I got excited. I couldn’t help it. And I can’t leave here—I tried it a little while ago and ran into a couple of fists.”

Blackie’s lip curled. “The guards don’t like us down here. They don’t like anything about us. They’ll kill you if you give them half an excuse.”

Jeff looked up at her. “But why? I didn’t do anything.”

The girl laughed harshly. “Do you think that makes any difference to them? Look, Jack, let’s face it: you’re in a prison, understand? They don’t call it that, and there aren’t any bars. But you’re not going anywhere, and the boys in gray are here to see that you don’t. And they hate us because we’re not good enough for them, and we’re in line for the kind of money they don’t dare go after. You’re here for one thing: to make money, big money, or to get your brains jolted loose, and nothing else—” She looked up at him, her eyes narrowing. “Or are you?”

Jeff shook his head miserably. “No, nothing else. I’m waiting for testing. This other thing is an old fight, that’s all. You wouldn’t understand. You just looked so much like the girl—” He looked up at her, studying her face more closely. She wasn’t as young as he had thought at first. There were little wrinkles around her eyes, a shade too much make-up showing where her mouth crinkled when she talked. Her lips were painted too full, and there was a tiredness in her eyes, a beaten, hunted look that she couldn’t quite hide.

She leaned back on the bed, and even relaxation didn’t erase the hardness. Only the jet black hair and the smooth black eyebrows looked young and fresh.

Jeff shook his head and kept staring at her. “I don’t get it,” he said helplessly. “I was assigned to this room—”

“So was I.” The girl’s eyes hardened.

“Are you one of the…workers?”

She sneered bitterly. “You mean one of the experimental animals? That’s right. The Mercy Men. Full of mercy, that’s me.” She spat on the floor.

“But the mixed company—”

There was no humor in her laugh. “What did you think, they’d have a separate boudoir for the ladies? How do they treat any kind of experimental animal? Get off it, Jack. They don’t care what we do or how we live. All they want is good healthy human livestock when they’re ready for it. Nothing more. That means they have to feed us and bunk us down. Period. And if you’ve got any wise ideas”—her eyes widened with a look of open viciousness, shocking in its intensity—“just try something. Just once. You’ll find out a lot about Blackie in a hell of a rush.” She rolled over contemptuously, turning her back to him. “You’ll find out I don’t like loonies for roommates, for instance.”

Jeff lit a cigarette, his hands trembling. The room seemed to be spinning, and he felt his muscles sagging in pain and fatigue. He had counted so much on information from the girl. But incredible as the resemblance was, Blackie couldn’t have been the girl he had seen in the tavern. If she had recognized him, he would have spotted it. She couldn’t have hidden it completely.

Suddenly he felt terribly alone, almost beaten, helpless to go on. Where could he go? What could he do? How could he follow a trail that led straight into stone walls? He leaned back on the bed and yielded to the fatigue that plagued him. His mind sank into a confusion of hopelessness. Maybe, he thought wearily, maybe that plaguing doubt that lay in the fringes of his mind was right. Maybe he’d never find Conroe. He sighed as the darkness of utter exhaustion closed in on him, and his head sank back to the pillow—

* * * *

He knew he was dreaming. Some tiny corner of his mind stood aside, prodding him, telling him he dare not sleep, that he must be up, moving, hunting, that the danger was too grave for sleep. But he slept, and the little corner of his mind prodded and cried out and watched.…

He was walking along a brook, a walk he had taken once before, so very many years ago. A cool breeze struck down from the meadow, rumpling his hair. He heard the tinkle of the water as it sparkled across the rock. And he was afraid, so desperately afraid. The voice in his mind screamed out to him at every footstep, until he faltered and slowed and stopped.

Not here, Jeff, not here. Stop, stop now! If you go farther, you’ll be dead—

Sweat broke out on his forehead. He tried to move forward, felt an iron grip on his legs. Stop, Jeff, stop, you’ll die, Jeff—An overpowering wave of fear swept over him, and he turned. He ran like the wind, with the voice following him, crying out in his ear, following him on ghostly wings. In the dream he became a little boy again, running, screaming in fear. A man stood in his pathway, arms outstretched, and Jeff threw himself into his father’s arms, sobbing as though his heart would break, clutching at him with incredible relief, burying his face in the strong, comforting chest. Oh, daddy, daddy, you’re safe. You’re here, daddy.

He looked up at his father’s smiling face and he saw the strong, sensitive lines around the big man’s mouth, the power and wisdom in the eyes. Nowhere else was there this sense of strength, of unlimited power, of complete comfort. He buried his face again in old Jacob Meyer’s chest. A flood of deep peacefulness passed through his mind—

Jeff, Jeff, watch out!

He stiffened, his whole body going cold. The strong arms were no longer around him, and he was suddenly afraid again—afraid with a terror that bit deep into his mind. He looked up and screamed, a scream that echoed and re-echoed. It came again and again—a scream of pure terror. Because his father’s face was no longer next to him. There was another face, hanging bodiless and luminous above him. It was chalk white—a face of pure ghoulish evil, staring at him.

It was Conroe’s face. He screamed again, tried to cover his eyes, tried to shrink down into nothing. But the hideous, twisted face followed him. The horrible fear intensified, sweeping through him like a flame, twisting into fiery hate in his heart, as he watched the evil, glowing face.

He killed your father, Jeff. He butchered your father, shot him down like an animal, in cold blood—

Jeff screamed and the evil face grinned and moved closer, until the rank breath was hot on Jeff’s neck.

You must kill him, Jeff. He killed your father—

But why? Why did he do it, why…why…why? There was no answer. The voice trailed off into horrible laughter. Quite suddenly the face was gone. In its place was a tiny, distant figure—running, running like the wind, down the narrow, darkened hospital corridor. And Jeff was running too, burning with hatred, fighting desperately to catch up with the fleeing figure, to close the gap between them.

The walls were of gray stone. Conroe was running swiftly, unhindered. But horrid objects swept out of the walls at Jeff. He tripped on a wet, slimy thing on the floor and fell on his face. He scrambled up again as the figure disappeared around a far corner. The walls were gray and wet around him. He reached the Y, waiting, panting, screaming out his hatred down the empty, re-echoing hallways.

Then suddenly he glimpsed the figure and started running again, but they were no longer in the Hoffman Center. They were running down a hillside, a horrible, barren hillside, studded with long knives and spears and swords—shiny blades standing straight up from the ground, gleaming in the bluish light.

Conroe was far ahead, moving nimbly through the gauntlet of swords. But Jeff couldn’t follow his path, for new knives sprang up before him, cutting his ankles, ripping his clothes. He panted, near exhaustion, as the figure vanished in the distance. Sinking down to the ground, Jeff sobbed, his whole body shaking. And the voice screamed mockingly in his ear: You’ll never get him, Jeff. No matter how hard you try, you’ll never get him…never…never…never.…

But I’ve got to, I’ve got to. I’ve got to find him and kill him. Daddy told me to—

He woke with a jolt, his screams still echoing in the still room, sweat pouring from his forehead and body, soaking his clothes. He sat bolt upright. He searched for his watch, but couldn’t find it. How long had he slept?

His eyes shot to the opposite bed, standing empty, and he rolled out onto his feet. He had the horrible feeling that the world had passed him by, that he had missed something critical while he slept.

He stared at his wrist. The watch was definitely gone. Then, with a curse, he crossed the room and ripped open Blackie’s foot locker. Sure enough, the watch lay with the heap of gold jewelry on the dirty clothes pile. He stared at it as he re-strapped it on his wrist. Then he walked into the lavatory, splashed cold water into his face and tried to quell the fierce painful throbbing in his head. The watch said eight-thirty. He had slept for five hours—five precious hours for Conroe to hide, cover his tracks, disappear deeper into this mire of human trash.

Jeff stumbled to the door, glanced out to see two gray-clothed guards passing in the corridor. Quietly he pulled the door shut. His stomach was screaming from hunger and he searched the room restlessly. Finally, he unearthed a box of crackers and a quarter pound of cheese in the bottom of Blackie’s locker. He ate ravenously and drank some water from the lavatory tap. Then he sank down on the edge of the bed.

The dream again, the same horrible, frightening, desperate dream—the dream that recurred and recurred; always different, yet always the same. The same face that had haunted him all his life, the face that had almost driven him insane that day, five years before, when he met it face to face for the first time; the face of the man he had hunted to the ends of the earth. But never had he caught the man, never had he seen him but for brief glimpses. Conroe had slipped from every trap before it was sprung. Yet finally he had become so desperate that he was forced to retreat down a one-way road that led to hellish death.

Jeff shook his head hopelessly as he tried to piece together the situation. He was in a half-world of avaricious men and women out to sell themselves for incredible fees. It was a half-world that seemed to Jeff only slightly more insane than the warped, intense world of pressure and fear and insecurity that lay outside the Hoffman Center. And in this half-world were a doctor who knew Jeff was a fraud, a kleptomaniac girl who thought he was an addict, and somewhere—the slender figure of the man he hunted.

Again he walked to the door. After peering out cautiously, he started down the corridor. From the far end he heard a burst of laughter, the sound of many voices. The smell of coffee floated down the corridor to tantalize him. He followed the sounds and reached the large, long room that served as a lounge and library for the Mercy Men in his unit.

The room was crowded. A dozen groups were huddled on the floor in a buzz of frantic excitement. The room was blue with cigarette smoke, and the lights glowed harshly from the walls. He saw the dice rolling in the centers of the groups and he also saw half a dozen tables, crowded with bright-eyed people. He heard the riffle of playing cards and the harsh, tense laugh of a winner drawing in a pot. And then he spied the Nasty Frenchman, his eyes bright with excitement, a cup of exceedingly black coffee in one hand and a pile of white paper tags in the other.

He grinned at Jeff with undisguised malice and said, “Come on in, wise guy. Things are just beginning to get hot.”

Blinking, Jeff walked into the room.

CHAPTER FIVE

His first impulse was to turn and run. There was no explaining it, no rationalizing the feeling of dread and danger that struck him as he walked into the room. The feeling swept over him with almost overpowering intensity; something was unbearably wrong here.

Jeff walked in slowly, closing the door behind him. The door seemed to be pulled tight shut, sucked out of his hand. That was when the tension in the air struck Jeff like an almost physical force, and his mind filled with dread.

No one noticed him. He stared around himself curiously. He watched the Nasty Frenchman shoulder his way through the crowd. One of Silly Giggin’s particularly maddening nervous-jazz arrangements was squawking from a player somewhere in the room, and the air itself was filled with a jagged rattle of conversation that rose above the music.

Most of the faces were new to Jeff. There were tired, old ones, marked indelibly with lines of fear, lines of hunted hopelessness. There were faces with tight, compressed, bloodless lips; faces with eyes full of coldness and cynicism, and faces radiating sharp, perverted intelligence.

Crowds leaned tensely around the tables and watched the cards with eager, calculating eyes. Side bets were made as the hands were opened. Other groups huddled on the floor and watched the dice with beady, avaricious eyes.

The music jangled and scraped, and little bursts of harsh laughter broke out to compete with it. And through it all ran the chilling inescapable feeling of error, of something missed, something gone horribly wrong.

He moved slowly through the room and searched the faces milling around him. His eyes caught Blackie’s, far across the room, for the barest instant, and the chill of something gone wrong intensified and sent a quiver up his spine. He stopped a passerby and motioned at the nearest dice huddle. “How do you get in?” he asked.

The man shrugged, looking at him strangely. “You lay down your money and you play,” he snapped. “If you got no money, then you’ve got the next job’s payoff to bet with. ’Smatter, Jack, you new around here?” And the man moved on, shaking his head.

Jeff nodded, realization striking. What would be more natural to a group of people teetering from day to day on the brink of death? The need for excitement, for activity, would be overpowering in a dismal prison-place like this. And with the huge sums of money yet unearned to bet with—Jeff shuddered. Cut-throat games, yes, but could they really explain this strange tension he sensed? Or had something happened, something to change the atmosphere, to pervade every nook and cranny of the room with an air of explosive tension?

Jeff started moving toward the Nasty Frenchman. The little man was gulping coffee in the corner. He sucked on a long, black cigar and appeared to be in deep conversation with a bald-headed giant who leaned against the wall. Jeff spotted Blackie again. She was across the room on her knees. She faced a little buck-toothed man, as she swiftly rolled the three colored dice. Her eyes followed them, quick and unnaturally bright.

Jeff shook his head. Panmumjon was a high-speed, high-tension game—a game for the steel-nerved. Its famous dead-locks had often led to murder, as the pots rose higher and higher. The girl seemed to be winning. She rolled the dice with trance-like regularity, and the little buck-toothed man’s face darkened as his money pile dwindled.

Across the room a corner crap game was moving swiftly, with staggering sums of money passing from hand to hand; the card games, though slower, left the mark of their tension on the players’ faces. Jeff still stared, until he had seen every face in the room. Paul Conroe’s face was not one of them.

No, he had not expected that. But what had happened? It was maddening to stand there, to feel the tension in the room, sense that it was growing until it seemed to pound at his temples. No one else seemed to notice it. Was he the only one aware of the change in the air, in the sounds, even in the color of the light against the walls? Something was impelling him, urging him to run, to get away, to leave the room now while he could. Yet when he tried to analyze the creeping, poisonous fear, tried to pin it down, it wriggled away into the fringes of his mind, and mocked him.

Finally, he reached the corner of the room. His ear caught the Nasty Frenchman’s nasal voice, and he froze as he stared at the little man.

“I tell you, Harpo, I heard it with my own ears. You never saw Schiml so excited. And then Shaggy Parsons was saying that the whole unit was being split up—that’s the A unit. I saw him when I was going through this afternoon. He was all excited, too.”

“But why split it up?” The huge bald-headed man called Harpo growled, his heavy lips twisting in disgust. “I don’t trust Shaggy Parsons for nothin’, and I think you hear what you want to hear. What’s the point to it? Schiml’s coming along fine in the work he’s using us in—”

The Nasty Frenchman turned red. “That’s just it: we’ve been in and we’re going to be out, right out in the cold. Can’t you get that straight? Something’s going to break. They’re onto something—Schiml and his boys—something big. And they’ve got a new man, somebody they’re excited about, somebody that’s been knocking walls down just by looking at them, or something—”

Harpo made a disgusted noise. “You mean, the old ESP story again. So maybe they go off on another spook hunt. They’ll get over it, same as they did the last time or the time before.”

The Nasty Frenchman’s voice was tense. “But they’re changing things. And changes mean trouble.” He glanced at Jeff and his eyebrows went up. “Look, they get on a line of work, they assign men to different parts of a job, they get work lined up months in advance. Then all of a sudden something new comes along. They get excited about something and they toss out a couple dozen workers, add on a couple dozen new ones, change the fees, change the work. And they end up handing the best pay to somebody who’s just come in. I don’t like it. I’ve been in this place too long. I’ve had too many tough, lousy jobs here to just get pushed aside because they don’t happen to be interested any more in what they were doing to me before. And they never tell us! We never know for sure. We just have to wait and guess and hope.”

The little man’s eyes blazed. “But we can pick up some things, a little here, a little there—you learn how, after a while. And I can tell you, something’s wrong, something’s going to happen. You can even feel it in here.”

Jeff’s skin crawled. That was it, of course. There was something wrong. But it hadn’t happened yet. It was going to happen. He stared at a huddled group around a panmumjon game, watched the bright-colored dice cubes roll across and back, across and back. A newcomer, the Nasty Frenchman had said, someone who had come in and disrupted the smooth work schedule of the Center, someone who had the doctors suddenly excited. Someone whom they were planning to use—on a spook hunt.

What kind of a spook hunt? Why that choice of words? Could Conroe conceivably be the newcomer they had been talking about? It didn’t seem possible that it could have happened so suddenly if Conroe were the one—but who? And what did this have to do with the ever-growing sense of impending danger that pervaded the room, right now?

Jeff’s eyes wandered to the dice game, and the fear in his mind suddenly grew to a screaming torrent. Go away, Jeff. Don’t watch, don’t look—He scowled, suddenly angry. Why not look? What was there so dangerous in a dice game? He moved over to the nearby huddle and watched the moving cubes in fascination. No, Jeff, no, don’t do it, Jeff—With a curse, he dropped to his knees and reached out for the dice.

“You in?” somebody asked. Jeff nodded, his face like a rock. The voice had stopped screaming in his ear, and now something else grew in his mind: a wild exhilaration that caught his breath and swept through his brain like a whirl-wind. His eyes sparkled and he pulled money from his pocket. He laid the bills on the floor and his hands closed on the dice.

He faced a little, pimple-faced man with beady black eyes and he raised the three brightly colored dice, rolling into the familiar pattern. The dice deadlocked in four throws. He sweated out seven more with new dice. Then Jeff saw a break in the odds, boosted the ante on his next throw and caught his breath as the man facing him matched it.

The dice rolled, fell into deadlock again, and the crowd around them gasped, moved in closer around them. The third set of dice was brought out, for the attempts at dead-lock-breaking. Then a fourth set followed, as the complex structure of the game built up like a house of cards. Then Jeff’s dice at last rolled the critical number, and the structure began to break apart—throw after throw falling faster and faster into his hands.

Four or five people moved in at his side with side bets and began to collect along with him, as he moved into another game, built it up. This one he lost cold, but still he played on, his excitement growing.

And then, suddenly, pandemonium broke loose in the room. Eyes glanced up, startled, at the two men, far across the room, who stood facing each other, eyes blazing.

“Throw them down! Go on! Throw them, see how they land!”

Somebody shouted, “What happened, Archie?”

“He’s got loaded dice in here, somehow.” Archie pointed an accusing finger at the other man. “They don’t fall right. There’s something wrong with them—”

The other man snarled. “So you aren’t winning any more—so what? You brought the dice in yourself.”

“But the odds aren’t right. There’s something funny going on.”

Jeff turned back to the dice, his mind still screaming, sensing that disaster hung in the air like a heavy sword. His own game moved on, faster and faster. Somewhere across the room another fight broke out, and another. Several men dropped out of games and stood up against the walls. Their eyes were wide with anger as they watched the other players. And then Jeff rolled three sixes, fourteen times in a row. He tossed the dice down in front of his gaping opponents with a curse and walked shakily back to the corner. The whole room spun around his head.

Suddenly, in this room, probabilities had gone mad. He could feel the shifting instability of the atmosphere, as real and oppressive to him as if it were solid and he were attempting to wade through it. This was what had been bothering him, plaguing him. Quite suddenly and without explanation, something impossible had begun to happen. Cards had begun to fall in unbelievable sequences, repeating themselves with idiotic regularity; dice had defied the laws of gravity as they spun on the tables and floor.

A hubbub filled the room as the players stopped and stared at each other, unable to comprehend the impossible that was happening before their eyes. And then Blackie was passing Jeff, her face flushed, a curious light of desperation in her eyes.

An impulse passed through Jeff’s mind. He reached out an arm, stopped the girl. “Game,” he said sharply.

Her eyes flashed at him. “What game?”

“Anything.” He held up his wrist before her eyes and showed her the gold watch. “We can play for this.”

Something flared in her eyes for a moment before she gained control. Then she was down on her knees, pushing her sleeves up, a tight look of fear and dread haunting her eyes as she looked up at Jeff. “Something’s happening,” she said softly. “The dice—they’re not right.”

“I know it. Why not?” His voice was hoarse, his eyes hard on her face.

She threw him a baffled look. “There isn’t any reason. Nothing is different, but the dice don’t fall right. That’s all, they just don’t.”

Jeff grinned tightly. “Go on, throw them.”

She threw the dice, saw them dance on the floor, caught her number. Jeff rolled them, beat her on it, picked up the money. He rolled again, then again. The tightness grew around the girl’s eyes; little tense lines hardened near her mouth. Nervously, she fumbled a cigarette into her mouth, lit it, puffed as the dice rolled.

She lost. She lost again. Side bets picked up around them, the people as they watched catching the tension that was building up.

“What’s happening?”

“The dice—my God! They’ve gone crazy!”

“Blackie’s losing. What do you think—”

“—losing? She never loses on dice. Who’s the guy?”

“Never saw him before. Look, he took another one! Those dice are hexed.”

“My cards were crazy too: king high full every time, a dozen hands in a row. How can you bet on something like that, I ask you.”

The Silly Giggins record screeched louder, then gave a squawk as the record suddenly shattered in a thousand pieces. Somebody cursed and threw a pack of cards on the floor, and a scream broke out across the room. One group came suddenly to blows; several dice games tightened down to bloody conflict between individuals. A man burst into tears, suddenly, and sat back on his haunches, his face stricken. “They can’t act this way,” he wailed. “They just can’t—”

Jeff’s eyes watched the spinning dice, and again something was screaming in his ear. He felt as though his head were going to burst, but he continued to roll and he saw the girl’s face darken with each throw. He saw the fear shine out from her blue eyes. Suddenly she let out a curse, snatched the dice from Jeff’s hand and threw them sharply across the room. She stared at Jeff venomously, then glared at the people around her as if she were a cornered animal.

“It’s all of you,” she snarled. “You’re turning them against me. You’re making them fall wrong.” She spat on the floor and started for the door. Jeff moved after her but felt a restraining hand on his arm.

“Leave her alone,” said the Nasty Frenchman. “You’ll have trouble on your hands if you don’t. You see what I meant about something being wrong? The whole crowd here is on edge, as if somebody were picking them up and throwing them down. Who ever saw dice fall that way, or cards fall that way”—the little man’s eyes flashed slyly—“unless somebody was controlling them.”

Jeff’s breath was faster as he stared at the Nasty Frenchman, and his voice was hoarse. “What are you talking about?”

The little man’s lips twisted angrily. “You saw what happened in here, didn’t you?”

Jeff turned away in anger. He wove through the crowd, his jaw tight as he moved toward the door. The Nasty Frenchman could only glimpse the truth, but someone else saw more, much more. Somehow, Jeff knew that this past hour held the key to the whole problem, if he could only see it. Here was the answer to the whole tangled puzzle of the girl and Paul Conroe, of Dr. Schiml and the Mercy Men.

And he knew that when he reached the room, the girl would be waiting. She would be waiting with cold fire in her eyes, as she sat at the table, a small pair of colored dice lying before her in the dim light.

Jeff hurried down the darkened corridor, fear exploding in his brain. She would be there and he knew why she would be smoldering when he walked into the room. He had seen her eyes, seen her face as they had thrown the dice. He knew beyond any shadow of doubt who had been controlling the dice.

The girl was waiting, just as he had known she would. He stepped into the room and closed the door gently behind him, facing her desperate eyes as she rolled the colored dice back and forth in front of her. “Game,” she challenged, her voice harsh and metallic.

The room was tense with silent fear as he sank down opposite her at the table.

CHAPTER SIX

Jeff reached out and took the dice from the girl’s hand. “Put them away, Blackie,” he said softly, “You don’t have to prove anything. I know—”

“Game,” she repeated harshly, shaking her head.

“Look. Think a minute. Back there, do you know what happened in that room?”

Her eyes caught his and were wide with fear. “Game,” she whispered, her hands trembling. “You’ve got to play me!”

He shrugged, his eyes tired as he watched her face. He took the dice and rolled them out on the table. A three, a four and a five fell; he saw her eyes flash across the table, taking in the sequence. Then her hand reached out, grasped the dice, gave them a throw. The hostility in her mind struck out at him, reinforcing the terrible dread that he already felt. He fought the hostility, staring at the dice, his hands gripping the edge of the table. And the dice danced and settled down: a three, a four and a five.…

The girl’s eyes widened, staring first at him, then back at the dice. Slowly she reached out, took the cube with the five showing, sent it bouncing across the table. It spun and bounced—and settled down once again with the five exposed.

Jeff felt the blast of bitter fear strike out from the girl’s eyes. The room seemed to scream with the tension he felt. She took the dice with trembling hands, threw them out hard and clenched her fists as they fell. The three and four settled out immediately. Jeff watched the third cube, spinning on one corner, spinning…spinning.… He felt his muscles grow tense, his mind screaming, tightening down as he stared at the little cube. It was as though an iron fist held his brain in its palm and was slowly, slowly squeezing. And the little cube continued, ridiculously, to spin and spin, until it quite suddenly flipped over onto its side and lay still with the five exposed.

Blackie gave a choked scream, her face pasty white. “Then it was you.” She choked, staring at him as if he were a ghost. “You were doing it deliberately in there, throwing off the odds, twisting things around, turning the dice against me.”

Jeff shook his head violently. “No, no, not me—us—both of us. We were fighting each other, without knowing it—”

Her hand went up to her mouth, choking off the words as she stared at him. Jeff stared at the dice, his whole body trembling, huge drops of sweat running down his forehead. And as he watched, the dice hopped about on the table, like jumping beans, turning over and over, jerkily, spinning on their edges in a horrible, incredible little dance. Jeff shook his head, his eyes wide with horror as he watched the dice.

“You knew it all along,” the girl choked. “You came in there just to torment me, to show me up—”

“No, no.” Jeff turned wide eyes on her. “I didn’t know it, until I picked up the dice in that room. Something drove me to do it. I didn’t know what I was doing until all of a sudden the dice were doing what I wanted them to do—” He broke off, panting. “I never knew it, I never dreamed it.” His eyes sought the girl’s, pleading. “I didn’t understand it; I couldn’t help it. I just knew that something wrong was going on. And then I knew that somebody was fighting me. There was a tension in it. I felt it. I knew somebody was tampering with the dice. Then when I got near you, I knew it was you.”

The girl’s face was working, tears welling up in her eyes. “I had to—I had to win with them.”

“Then you knew you were doing it!” Jeff stared at her. “And when both of us started tampering, opposing each other, the probabilities governing the games went wild, completely wild.”

The girl was sobbing, her face in her hands. “I could always control it. It always worked. It was the only thing I could do that came out right. Everything else has always gone wrong.” She sobbed like a baby, her shoulders shaking as she choked out great, racking sobs.

Jeff leaned forward, almost cruelly, his eyes burning at her. “When did you find out you could…make dice fall the way you wanted them to?”

The girl shook her head helplessly. “I didn’t know it. I didn’t have any idea, until I came here. It was the only thing I could win at. Everything else I lost at. All my life I’ve been losing.”

“What have you been losing?”

“Everything, everything—everything I touch turns black, goes sour, somehow.”

“But what, what?” Jeff leaned toward the girl, his voice hoarse. “Why did you come here? How did you get here?”

The girl’s sobs broke out again, her shoulders shaking in anguish. “I don’t know, I don’t know. Oh, I could take it, up to a limit, but then I couldn’t stand it any more. Everything I tried went wrong; everyone that was near me went wrong too. Even the rackets wouldn’t work with me around.”

“What rackets?”

Her voice was weak and cracking. “Any of the rackets. I’ve been in a dozen, two dozen, ever since the war. Dad was killed in the first bombing of the Fourth War, when I was just a kid—twelve, thirteen, I can’t remember now. He died trying to get us out of the city and through to the Defense area north of the Trenton section. Radiation burns got him, maybe pneumonia, I don’t know. But it got Dad first and Mom later.”

She straightened up and wiped her eyes with her sleeve. “We never did get out of the devastated area. We were killing dogs and cats for food for a while. Then when things did get straightened out, we ran into the inflation, the burned-out crops, the whole rat-race. The dirty breaks were coming in hard then. First we were guerrillas, then we were bushwhackers. Then we came into the city again and started shaking down the rich ones that came back from the mountains where they hid.”

“But you came in here,” Jeff grated. “Why here, if you were doing so well in rackets?”

“I wasn’t. Can’t you understand? The luck—it was running wrong, worse and worse all the time. And then I got hooked on dope. Narcotics control was all shot to pieces during the war; heroin was all over the place. But they knew I had this hard-luck jinx. They caught me on it, until I was hooked bad.”

She shrugged, her face a study in pathetic hopelessness. “They hauled me in here. Schiml sold me his bill of goods. What could I lose? I was so tired, I didn’t care. I didn’t care if they jolted my brains loose, or what they did to me. All I wanted was to eat and get off the dope and get enough cash so I could try for something decent, where hard luck couldn’t touch me. And I didn’t really care if I never got out.”

“But with the dice you made out.”

“Oh, yes, with the dice—” The girl’s eyes flickered for a moment. “I found out I could make them sit up and talk for me. I played it cozy, didn’t let anybody catch on. But they always worked for me, until tonight—”

Jeff nodded, his face white. “Until tonight, when you found out you were fighting for control. Because tonight I found out they’d talk for me too. And you couldn’t beat me with them.”

Her voice was weak. “I—I couldn’t budge them. They fell the way you called them.”

“It isn’t possible, you know,” Jeff said softly. “Every time they’ve tried to prove it was, they’ve found some loophole in the study of it, something wrong somewhere. Nobody’s ever proved a thing about psychokinesis.”

The girl grinned mirthlessly. “They’ve been trying to prove it here since the year one. Every now and again they get hot on it. They’ve just tested somebody that’s got them excited and they’ll be starting the whole works over again.”

Jeff leaned over, his eyes blazing. “Yes, yes, who’s that person?”

“I don’t know. I just heard it. A new recruit, I guess.”

“A recruit named Conroe?”

Her eyes widened at the virulence in his voice. “I—I don’t know, I don’t know. I’ve only heard. I don’t even know if there is such a person.”

“Where can I find out?”

Again the fear was in her eyes. “I—I don’t know.”

Jeff’s voice was tense, his eyes fixed on the girl’s face in desperate eagerness. “Look, you’ve got to help me. I know he’s here. I must find him. I saw him this afternoon. Remember when the guards brought me in here? I saw him on the stairs. I chased him and lost him, but he’s here. He’s hiding, running away from me. I’ve got to find him, somehow. Please, Blackie, you can help me.”

Her eyes were wide on his face. “What do you want with him? Why are you after him? I don’t want to get mixed up in anything—”

“No, no, it won’t mix you up. Look, I want to kill him. Short and sweet, nothing more—just kill him. I want to send one bullet into his brain, watch his face splatter out, watch his skull break open. That’s all I want, just one bullet—”

Jeff’s voice was low, the words wrenched from his throat, and the hatred in his eyes was poisonous as it washed over the girl’s face. “He haunts me, for years he’s haunted me.” Jeff’s voice dropped, the words breaking the stillness of the room in a hoarse, terrible cadence. “He killed my father. This Conroe—he butchered my father like an animal, shot him down in cold blood. It was horrible, ruthless. Conroe was the assassin. He killed my father without a thought of mercy in his mind. And I loved my father, I loved him with all the love I had.” He stared at the girl. “I’ll kill the man that killed my father if I have to die myself in the killing.”

“And that man is here?”

“That man is here. I’ve hunted him for years. This was his last resort, his final desperate gamble for escape. He had nowhere else to turn. I’ve got the outside tied up so that he doesn’t dare to leave. Now I’ve got to track him down in here. I’ve got to find him and kill him, before I’m caught, before I’m tested and classified. I’ve got to move fast and I need help. I need help so much.”

The girl leaned toward him, her eyes dark as she stared at him. “The dice,” she said softly. “I’ve been playing it cozy. I still could—if you’ll let me.”

His eyes widened. “Anything you say,” he said. “We’ll play it cozy together. But I’ve got to have floor plans of the place, information on how to avoid the guards. I’ve got to know where their records are kept, their lists and rosters and working plans.”

“Then it’s a deal?”

His eyes caught hers, and for an instant he saw something behind the mask she wore, something of the fear that lay back there, something of a little child who fought against impossible odds to find a toehold in the world. Then the barrier was back up, and her eyes were blank and revealed nothing.

Jeff held out his hand, touched her palm lightly and clenched her fingers. “It’s a deal,” he said.

* * * *

The trip down the corridor was a nightmare. Jeff’s mind was still reeling from the incredible discovery of the dice, the sudden, unbelievable awareness that he and Blackie had been silently and fiercely battling each other for control, fighting with a fury that had somehow shattered the very warp of probability in the room where they had been. How could he have had a part in something like this? He had never had reason to suspect he might carry such a power, yet here was evidence he could not disregard. And how could it fit into the question of Paul Conroe, and the mysterious recruit to the Mercy Men who had just been tested?

A thought struck Jeff, quite suddenly. It came with such impact that he stopped cold in his tracks. It was so simple, so impossible, yet no more impossible than the things he had already seen with his own eyes. Because the incredible record of escapes that Conroe carried, the impossible regularity with which Conroe had managed to avoid capture, time after time, seemed too much to accept as coincidence. And if Conroe were indeed carrying latent extra-sensory powers, he could continue to slip from trap after trap—unless Jeff could oppose those powers with powers of his own.

Jeff cursed in his teeth. How could he tell? He had no evidence that Conroe carried any extra-sensory power whatsoever, and surely there was little enough to indicate that he had any more than most latent powers. There were so many, many possibilities, and so little concrete evidence to go on.

And if Conroe had such powers, why had he been so startled to meet Jeff on the stairs? Why the look of fear and disbelief that had streaked across his face? Jeff glanced at his watch, saw the minute hand move to eleven-thirty. He would have to hurry, for the guards would be down the escalator in a few moments. And these thoughts of his could lead to nowhere. Conroe had been jolted to see Jeff. It must have been a horrible shock for him to realize that the Hunter had followed him, even into this death trap, to know that the Hunter would have the outside so well guarded that he, the Hunted, could never get out. Now Conroe would be forced to gamble against being caught and assigned to work as a Mercy Man. Yes, it must have been a horrible jolt for Conroe, driving one last, searing bolt of fear into his already desperate mind. And what would he have tried to do?

A thousand ideas flooded Jeff’s mind. He was waiting for testing. Perhaps Conroe, somehow, had been tested already? Could Jeff succeed in stalling Schiml, especially if the rumors spinning down the dark corridors were true? There was no sure way of telling. All Jeff could do was to search the file rooms Blackie had directed him to.

He stopped at the entrance to the escalator, pored over the floor plan Blackie had sketched for him. He spotted the escalator, oriented himself on the plan. The filing rooms were two flights below. If he could reach them without being stopped.… He moved silently onto the down shaft, his eyes moving constantly for a sight of a gray-garbed prowler.

At the foot of the escalator he stopped short. Three men in white were pushing a gurney along the corridor. Jeff glanced quickly at the twitching form under the blankets. Then he looked away hurriedly. One of the men dropped behind and waved at him sharply as he stepped off the stairs. The man still wore the operating mask hanging from his neck, and his hair was tightly enclosed in the green-knit operating cap.

The doctor tipped a thumb over his shoulder and pointed down the corridor. “You coming to fix the pump?”

Jeff blinked rapidly. “That’s right,” he croaked. “Did—did Jerry come with the tools yet?”

“Nobody came in yet. We just finished. Been in there since three this afternoon, and the damned pump went kerflooey right in the middle. Had to aspirate the poor joe by hand, and if you think that’s not a job—” The doctor wiped sweat from his forehead. “Better get it fixed tonight. We’ve got another one going in at eight in the morning and we’ve got to have the pump.”

Jeff nodded, and started down the hall, his heart thudding madly against his ribs. He reached the open door to one of the operating rooms. Slipping quickly into the small dressing-room annex, he snatched one of the gowns and caps from the wall.

If they were still operating this late, it was a heaven-sent chance. No guard would bother him if he were wearing the white of a doctor or the green of a surgeon. He struggled into the clumsy gowning, tying it quickly behind his back, and slipped the cap over his head. Finally he found a mask, snapped it up under his ears as he had seen it worn by the doctors in the corridors.

In a moment he was back on the escalator, descending to the next floor. At the foot of the stairs, he started quickly down the corridor Blackie had indicated, glancing at each door as he passed. The first two had lights under them, indicating that these apparently were operating rooms still in use. Finally he stopped before a large, heavy door, with a simple sign painted on the wooden panel: Computor Technicians Only. He tried the door, found it locked. Quickly he glanced up and down the corridor, doubled a hard fist and drove it through the panel with a crunch. Then he fumbled inside for the lock.

In an instant he was inside. The torn hole in the panel glared at him. He threw the door wide open and snapped on the overhead lights, throwing the room into bright fluorescent light. Then he drew the pale-green gown closer about him and moved across the room to the huge file panel that faced him.

It was not his first experience with the huge punched-card files which had become so necessary in organizations where the numbers and volumes of records made human operatives too slow or clumsy. Quickly Jeff moved to the master-control panel, searched for the section and coding system for Research: Subject Personnel.

First he would try the simple coding for Conroe’s name, on the chance that Conroe had come in using his own name. Jeff rechecked the coding, punched the buttons which would relay through the cards alphabetically; then he waited as the machinery whirred briefly. A panel lighted near the bottom of the control board, spelling the two words: No Information.

Jeff’s fingers sped over the coding board again, as he started coding in a description. He coded in height, weight, eye color, hair color, bone contour, lip formation—every other descriptive category he could think of. Then again he punched the “Search” button.

This time several dozen cards fell down. He picked them up from the yield-slot and slowly leafed through them, glancing both at the small photograph attached to each card and at the small “date of admission” code symbol at the top of each card. Again he found nothing. Disgusted, he tried the same system again, this time adding two limiting coding symbols: Subject Personnel and Recent Admission. And again the cards were negative. Not a single one could possibly have been connected with Paul Conroe.

Jeff sat down at the desk facing the panel and he searched his mind for another pathway of identification. Suddenly a thought occurred to him. He searched through his pocket for a picture wallet, drew out the small, ID-size photo of Conroe that he carried for identification purposes.

Searching the panel, he finally found the slot he was looking for: the small, photoelectronic chamber for recording picture identification. He slipped the photo into the slot, punched the “Search” button, and waited again, his whole body tense.

The machine buzzed for a long moment. Then a single card dropped into the slot. Eagerly Jeff snatched it up, stared down at the attached photograph which almost perfectly matched the photo from his pocket. Near the top of the card was a small typewritten notation: Conroe, Paul A., Information Restricted. All File Notations Recorded in Hoffman Center Central Archives.

Below this notation was a list of dates. Jeff read them, staring in disbelief, then read them again. Incredible, those dates—dates of admission to the Hoffman Center and dates of release. It was impossible that Conroe could have been here at the times the dates indicated: ten years ago, when the Hoffman Center was hardly opened; five years ago, during the very time when Jeff had been tracking him down. Yet the dates were there, in black and white, cold, impersonal, indisputable. And below the dates was a final notation, inked in by hand: Central Archives Classification: ESP Research.

Swiftly Jeff stuffed the card into his shirt. He refiled the other cards with trembling fingers, his heart pounding a frightful tattoo in his forehead. Incredible, yet he knew, somehow, that it fit into the picture, that it was a key to the picture. He turned, started for the door, and stopped dead.

“Schiml!” he breathed.

The figure lounged against the door, green cap askew on his head, mask still dangling about his neck. There was a smile on his face as he leaned back, regarding Jeff in amusement. Nonchalantly, he tossed a pair of dice into the air, and caught them, still smiling. “Let’s go, Jeff,” said Dr. Schiml. “We’ve got some tests to run.”

“You—you mean, in the morning,” Jeff stammered, hardly believing his ears.

The smile broadened on the doctor’s lips, and he gave the dice another toss and dropped them in his pocket. “Not in the morning, Jeff,” he said softly. “Now.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

Jeff sank down in the chair, his forehead streaming sweat. He clenched his fists as he tried to regain control of his trembling muscles. How long had Schiml been standing there? Just a second or two? Or had he been watching Jeff for ten minutes, watching him punch down the filing codes, watching him stuff the filing card into his shirt? There was nothing to be told from the doctor’s face, as the man smiled down at his trembling quarry. There was nothing in the eyes of the guards who stood behind him in the hallway, their hands poised on their heavy sidearms.

Schiml turned to one of them, nodded slightly, and they disappeared, their boots clanging in the still corridor behind them. Then he turned his eyes back to Jeff, the ghost of a knowing smile still flickering about his eyes. “Find anything interesting?” he asked, his eyes narrowing slightly.

Jeff fumbled a cigarette to his lips, gripped the lighter to steady it. “Nothing to speak of,” he said hoarsely. “Been a long time since I worked one of these files.” His eyes caught Schiml’s defiantly, held them in desperation. Finally Schiml blinked and looked away.

“Looking for anything special?” he asked smoothly.

“Nothing special.” Jeff blew smoke out into the room, his trembling nerves quieting slightly.

“I see. Just sight-seeing, I suppose.”

Jeff shrugged. “More or less. I wanted to see the setup.”

A dry smile crossed Schiml’s face. “Particularly the setup in the filing room,” he said softly. “I thought I’d find you here. Blackie said you’d just stepped out for a short walk, so we just took a guess.” The doctor’s eyes hardened sharply on Jeff’s face. “And all dressed up like a doctor, too.”

He stepped across the room, jerked the cap from Jeff’s head, snapped the string to the gown with a sharp swipe of his hand. “We don’t do this around here,” he said, his voice cutting like a razor. “Doctors wear these, nobody else. Got that straight? We also do not wander around breaking into filing rooms, just looking at the setup. If the guards had caught you at it, you wouldn’t be alive right now—which would have been a dirty shame, since we have plans for you.” He jerked his thumb toward the door. “After you, Jeff. We’ve got some work to do tonight.”

Jeff moved out into the hall, took up beside the tall doctor as he started back for the escalator. “You weren’t serious about testing me tonight, surely.”

Dr. Schiml stared at him. “And why not?”

“Look, it’s late. I’ll be here in the morning.”

The doctor walked on in silence for a long moment. Jeff followed, his mind racing, a thousand questions tumbling through in rapid succession: questions he dared not ask, questions he couldn’t answer. How much did Schiml know? And how much did he suspect? A chill ran down Jeff’s back. What had he been doing with the dice? Could Blackie possibly have told him? Or could he have heard about the freakish occurrence in the game room through other channels? And what could he learn in the course of the testing that he didn’t know already?

Jeff puzzled as he matched the doctor’s rapid pace. They went up the escalator, down the twisting corridor toward an area beyond the living quarters that Jeff hadn’t seen before. Above all, he must keep his nerve, keep a tight control on his tongue, on his reactions, make sure that there were no tricks to tear information from him that he didn’t dare divulge.

He looked at Schiml, sharply, a frown on his face. “I still don’t see why this can’t wait till morning. Why the big hurry?”

Schiml stopped, turned to Jeff in exasperation. “You still think we’re running a picnic grounds here, don’t you?” he snapped. “Well, we’re not. We’re doing a job, a job that can’t wait for morning or anything else. We work a twenty-four-hour schedule here. All you do is provide the where-withal to work with—nothing more.”

“But I’ll be tired, nervous. I don’t see how I could pass any kind of test.”

Schiml laughed shortly. “These aren’t the kind of tests you pass or fail. Actually, the more tired and nervous you are, the better the results will be for you. They’ll give you an extra edge of safety when you’re assigned to a job. What the tests tell us is what we can expect from you, the very minimum. Basically, we’re working to save your life for you.”

Jeff blinked at him, followed him through swinging doors into a long, brightly lighted corridor, with green walls and a gleaming tile floor. “What do you mean, save my life? You seem to delight in just the opposite here, from what I’ve heard.”

The doctor made an impatient noise. “You got the wrong information,” he said angrily. “That’s the trouble. You people insist upon listening to and believing the morbid stories, all the unpleasantness you hear about the work here. And it’s all either completely false or only half-truth. This business of bloodthirstiness, for instance. It’s just plain not true.

“One of the biggest factors in our work here is making arrangements for optimum conditions for the success of our experiments. By ‘optimum’ we mean the best conditions from several standpoints: from the standpoint of what we’re trying to learn—the experiment itself, that is—and from the standpoint of the researcher, too. But most particularly, we’re working for optimum recovery odds for the experimental animals—you, in this case.”

Jeff snorted. “But still, we’re just experimental animals, from your viewpoint,” he said sharply.

“Not just experimental animals,” Schiml snapped angrily. “You’re the experimental animals. Working with human beings isn’t the same as working with cats and dogs and monkeys—far from it. Dogs and cats are stronger and tougher, more durable than humans, which is why they’re used for preliminary work of great success. But basically, they’re expendable. If something goes wrong, that’s too bad. But we’ve learned something, and the dog or cat can be sacrificed without too many tears. But we don’t feel quite the same about human beings.”

“I’m glad to hear that,” said Jeff sourly. “It makes me feel better.”

“I’m not trying to be facetious. I mean it. We’re not ghouls. We don’t have any less regard for human life than anyone else, just because we’re responsible for some human death in the work we’re doing. For one thing, we study every human being we use, try to dig out his strengths and weaknesses, physical and mental. We want to know how he reacts to what, how fast he recuperates, how much physical punishment his body can take, how far his mental resiliency will extend. Then when we know these things, we can fit him into the program of research which will give him the very best chance of coming out in one piece. At the same time, he will fill a spot that we need filled. No, there’s no delight here in taking human life or jeopardizing human safety.”

They turned abruptly off the corridor and entered a small office. Schiml motioned Jeff to a chair, sat himself down behind a small desk and began sorting through several stacks of forms. The room was silent for a moment. Then the doctor punched a button on the telephone panel.

When the light blinked an answer to him, he said: “Gabe? He’s here. Better come on up.”

Then he flipped down the switch and leaned back, lighting a long, slender cigar and undoing the green robe around his neck.

Jeff watched him, still puzzling over what he had just said. The doctor seemed so matter-of-fact. What he had said made sense, but somewhere in the picture there seemed to be a gaping hole. “This sounds like it’s a great setup—for you doctors and researchers,” he said finally. “But what’s it leading to? What good is it doing? Oh, I know, it increases your knowledge of men’s minds, but how does it help the man in the street? How does it actually help anyone, in the long run? How do you ever get the government to back it with the financial mess they’re facing in Washington?”

Schiml threw back his head and laughed aloud. “You’ve got the cart before the horse,” he said, when he got control of his voice. “Support? Listen, my lad, the government is running itself bankrupt just to keep our research going. Did you realize that? Bankrupting itself! And why? Because unless our work pays off—and soon—there isn’t going to be any government left. That’s why. Because we’re fighting something that’s eating away at the very roots of our civilization, something that’s creeping and growing and destroying.”

He stared at Jeff, his eyes wide. “Oh, the government knows that the situation is grave. We had to prove it to them, show it to them time and again, until they couldn’t miss it any longer. But they saw it finally. They’ve seen it growing for a century or more, ever since the end of the Second War. They’ve seen the business instability, the bank runs and the stock market dives. They’ve seen the mental and moral decay in the cities. They could see it, but it took statistics to prove that there was a pattern to it, a pattern of decay and rot and putrefaction that’s been crumbling away the clay feet of this colossal civilization of ours.”

The doctor stood up, paced back and forth across the room and sent blue smoke into the air from the cigar as he walked. “Oh, they support us all right. We don’t know for sure what we’re fighting, but we do know the answer is in the functioning of the minds and brains of man. We’re working against a disease—a creeping disease of men’s minds—and we are forced to use men to search those minds, to study them, to try to weed out the poison of the disease. And so we have the Mercy Men to help us fight.”

The doctor’s lips twisted in a bitter sneer as he sat heavily down on the chair again, crunched the cigar out viciously in the tray. “Mercy Men who have no mercy in their souls, who have no interest nor concern with what they’re doing, or what it may be accomplishing. They are interested in one thing only: the amount of money they’ll be paid for having their brains jogged loose.”

The scorn was heavy in Dr. Schiml’s eyes. “Well, we don’t care who we have: addicts, condemned murderers, prostitutes, the trash from the skid-row gutters. They’re all drawn here, like flies to a dung hill. But they’re here on errands of mercy, whether they like it or not, or know it or not. And we take them because they’re the only ones who can be bought, and we guard them for all we’re worth, so that the goal will be accomplished.” He took a deep breath and stared scornfully at Jeff. “That’s you I’m talking about, you know.”

Jeff’s hands trembled as he snuffed out his smoke. He stood up as the corridor door opened, admitting a small, dark-haired man with thick glasses. He was dressed in doctor’s whites. Jeff rubbed his chest nervously and took a deep breath, still acutely aware of the stiff card in his shirt front.

“All right,” he said hoarsely, “so you’re talking about me. When do we get started with this?”

* * * *

The little dressing room was cramped; it reeked of anesthetic. Jeff walked in, followed by Dr. Schiml and the other doctor, and started removing his shoes. “This is Doctor Gabriel,” Schiml said, indicating his myopic colleague. “He’ll start you off with a complete physical. Then you’ll have a neurological. Come on into the next room as soon as you’re undressed.” And with that the two doctors disappeared through swinging doors into an inner room.

Jeff removed his shirt and trousers swiftly, carefully folding the file card and stuffing it under the inner sole of his right shoe. It wasn’t exactly the perfect hiding place, if anyone were looking for the card. But not once during the conversation had Schiml’s eyes strayed curiously to Jeff’s shirt front. Either Schiml had not seen him take the card, or else the doctor’s self-control was superhuman. And no mention of the dice had been made, either. Jeff gave his shoes a final pat, tossed his clothes on one of the gurneys lining the walls and pushed through the doors into the next room.

It was huge, dome-ceilinged, with a dozen partitions dividing different sections from one another. One end looked like a classroom, with blackboards occupying a whole wall. Another section carried the paraphernalia of a complete gymnasium. The doctors were sitting in a corner that was obviously outfitted as an examination room: the tables were covered with crisp green sheeting, and the walls had gleaming cabinets full of green-wrapped bundles and instruments.

Schiml sat on the edge of a desk. His eyes watched Jeff closely as he lit a cigarette, leaned back and blew rings into the air. Dr. Gabriel motioned Jeff to the table and started the physical without further delay.

It was the most rigorous, painstaking physical examination Jeff had ever had. The little, squinting doctor poked and probed him from head to toe. He snapped retinal-pattern photos, examined pore-patterns, listened, prodded, thumped, auscultated. He motioned Jeff back onto the chair and started going over him with a rubber hammer, tapping him sharply in dozens of areas, eliciting a most disconcerting variety of muscular jerks and twitches. Then the hammer was replaced by a small electrode, with which the doctor probed and tested, bringing spasmodic jerks to the muscles of Jeff’s back and arms and thighs. Finally, Dr. Gabriel relaxed, sat Jeff down in a soft chair and retired to a small portable instrument cabinet nearby.

Dr. Schiml put out his smoke and stood up. “Any questions before we begin?”

Jeff almost sighed aloud. Any questions? His nerves tingled all over and his mind was full of conjecture—wild, ridiculous guesses of what they would discover in the testing, of what the results would bring. Suppose they learned about the dice? Suppose they found out that he was a fraud, that he was in the Center on a private mission, a mission of death all his own, and no party to their own missions of death? And yet, if he had to follow through, the kind of work he would be assigned to would depend upon the results of the tests—that seemed sure. But what if they rendered him unconscious, knocked him out, used drugs?

His mind raced frantically, searching for some way of stalling things, some way of slowing down the red tape of testing and assignment, to give him time to complete his own mission and get out. But he knew that already he must have aroused suspicions. Schiml must have suspected that all the cards were not on the table, yet Schiml seemed willing to overlook his suspicions. And the wheels had begun to move more and more swiftly, carrying him to the critical point where he would have to sign a release and take an assignment, or reveal his real purpose for being in the Center. If he were to find Conroe, he must find him before the chips were down.

He stared at Schiml, his mind still groping for something to hang onto. He found nothing. “No. No questions, I guess,” he said.

The doctor looked at him closely, then shrugged in resignation. “All right,” he said, tiredly. “You’ll have a whole series of tests of all kinds: physical stamina, mental alertness, reaction time, intelligence, sanity—everything we could possibly need to know. But I should warn you of one thing.” He looked at Jeff, his eyes deadly serious. “All of these future tests are subjective. All of them will tell us about you as a person: how you think, how you behave. Desperately essential stuff, if you’re to survive the sort of work we do here. What we find is the whole basis of our assignments.”

He paused for a long moment. “You’d be wise to stick to the truth. No embellishments, no fancy stuff. We can’t do anything about it if you don’t choose to take the advice. But if you falsify, you’re tampering with your own life expectancy here.”

Jeff blinked, shifting in his seat uneasily. Don’t worry about that, Jack, he thought. I won’t be around long enough for it to make any difference. Nevertheless the doctor’s words were far from soothing. If only Jeff could maintain the fraud throughout the testing, keep his wits about him as the tests progressed. Then he could get back to the hunt as soon as they were through.

He watched the doctor prepare a long paper on the desk. Then the rapid-fire series of questions began: family history, personal history, history of family disease and personal illness. The questions were swift and businesslike, and Jeff felt his muscles relaxing as he sat back. He answered almost automatically. Then: “Ever been hypnotized before?”

Something in Jeff’s mind froze, screaming a warning. “No,” he snapped.

Schiml’s eyes widened imperceptibly. “Part of the testing should be done under hypnosis, for your sake, and for the sake of speed.” His eyes caught Jeff’s hard. “Unless you have some reason for objecting—”

“It won’t work,” Jeff lied swiftly, his mind racing. “Psychic block of some kind—induced in childhood, probably. My father had a block against it too.” Every muscle in his body was tense, and he sat forward in his seat, his eyes wide.

Schiml shrugged. “It would make the testing a hundred percent easier on you if you’d allow it. Some of these tests are pretty exhausting and some take a powerful long time without hypnotic-recovery aid. And of course we keep all information strictly confidential—”

“No dice,” said Jeff hoarsely.

The doctor shrugged again, glancing over at Dr. Gabriel. “Hear that, Gabe?”

The little doctor shrugged. “His funeral,” he growled. He rolled a small, shiny-paneled instrument with earphones to Jeff’s side. “We’ll start on the less strenuous ones, then. This is a hearing test. Very simple. You just listen, mark down the signals you hear. Keep your eyes on the eyepiece; it records visio-audio correlation times, tells us how soon after you hear a word you form a visual image of it.” He snapped the earphones over Jeff’s head and moved a printed answer sheet in front of him on the desk. And then the earphones started talking.

There was a long series of words, gradually becoming softer and softer. Jeff marked them down, swiftly, gradually forgetting his surroundings, throwing his attention toward the test. The doctors retired to the other side of the room. They talked to each other in low whispers, until he no longer heard them. There was only the low, insistent whispering in the earphones.

And then the words seemed to grow louder again, but somehow he had lost track of what they meant. He listened, his eyes watching the cool gray pearly screen in the eyepieces. His fingers were poised to write down the words, but he couldn’t quite understand the syllables.

They were nonsense syllables, syllables with no meaning. His eyes opened wide, a bolt of suspicion shooting through him, and his hands gripped the arms of the chair as he began to rise.

And then the light exploded in his eyes with such agonizing brilliance that it sent shooting pain searing through his brain. He let out a stifled cry. He struggled and tried to rise from the chair. But he was blinded by the piercing beam. And then he felt the needle bite his arm, and the nonsense words in his ears straightened out into meaningful phrases. A soft, soothing voice was saying: “Relax…relax…sit back and relax…relax and rest.…

Slowly the warmth crept over his body, and he felt his muscles relax, even as the voice instructed. He eased gently back into the chair, and soon his mind was clear of fear and worry and suspicion. He was still, sleeping with the peaceful ease of a newborn child.

CHAPTER EIGHT

It could never have been done without hypnosis. Within broad limits, the human body is capable of doing just exactly whatever it thinks it is capable of. But the human body could hardly be blamed if convention had long since decided that exertion was bad, that straining to the limit of endurance was unhealthy, that approaching—even obliquely—the margin of safety of human resiliency was equivalent to approaching death with arms extended. That convention had so declared was well known to the researchers at the Hoffman Center.

But it was also known that the human body under the soothing suggestion of hypnosis could be carried up to that margin of safety and beyond. Indeed, it could be carried almost to the actual breaking point without stir, without a flicker of protest, without a sign of fear.

And these were the conditions that were critically needed in testing for the Mercy Men. Yet, though hypnosis was necessary, the men who came to the Mercy Men without fail rejected hypnosis. Always they held the fear of divulging some secret of their past. Whether because of distrust of the doctors and the testing in the Center, or plain, ordinary malignance of character—no one knew all the motives. But those who needed hypnosis the most rejected it the most vehemently. This forced the development of techniques of hypnosis-by-force.

It would have annoyed Jeff, if he had known. Indeed, it would have driven him to the heights of anger, for Jeff, among other things, was afraid. But he need not have been, and it made little difference that he was. Now Jeff was not suffering from his fear. His mind was in a quiet, happy haze, and he felt his body half-lifted, half-led across the room to the first section of the testing room.

Even now there was a tiny, sharp-voiced sentinel hiding away in a corner of his mind, screaming out its message of alertness and fear to Jeff. But he laughed to himself, sinking deeper into the peacefulness of his walking slumber. Dr. Gabriel’s voice was in his ear, his voice smooth and soothing, talking to him quietly, giving simple instructions. Quickly, he took him through the paces of a testing series that would have taken long, hard days to complete. It would have left him in psychotic break at the end, if he had not had the recuperative buffer of hypnosis to help him.

First, he was dressed in soft flannel clothing and moved into the gymnasium. Recorders were attached to his legs and arms and throat. Then he was formally introduced to the treadmill and quietly asked to run it until he collapsed. He smiled and obliged, running as though the furies were at his heels. He ran until his face went purple and his muscles knotted. At last he fell down, unable to continue.

This happened after ten minutes of top-limit running. Then came five minutes of recuperation under suggestion: “Your heart is beating slower. You’re breathing slowly and deeply…relaxing…relaxing.” Someone took his arm and he was off again, this time on the old, reliable Harvard Step-Test, jumping up on the chair and back down. He did this until once again he lay panting on the floor, hardly able to move as his pulse and respiration changes were carefully recorded.

Next in line came a lively handball game. He was handed a small, hard-rubber ball, and asked to engage in a game of catch with a machine that was stationed at the end of a cubby. The machine played hard, spinning the ball around and hurling it at Jeff with such incredible rapidity that he was forced to abandon all thinking. Instinctively, he reached out to catch the ball. His fingers burned with pain as he caught it and passed it in, only to have it hurled back out again, twice as fast. Soon he moved as automatically as a machine, catching, hurling, his mind refusing to accept the aching and swelling in his fingers, as the ball struck and struck and struck.…

Then a small ladder was rolled in. He listened carefully to instructions and then ran up and down the ladder until he collapsed off the top. He was rested gently on the floor while blood samples were taken from his arm. Then he sat, staring dully at the floor. A voice said, “Relax, Jeff, take a rest. Sleep quietly, Jeff. You’ll be ready to dig in and fight in a minute. Now just relax.”

Several people were about; one brought him a heavy, sugary drink, lukewarm and revolting. He drank it, gagging, spilling it all down his shirt front. Then he grinned and licked his lips while further blood samples were drawn. And then, he was allowed to take a drink of cool water. He was left staring at his feet for five whole minutes of recuperation before the next stage of the testing commenced.

* * * *

The lights were in three long columns. They extended as far as Jeff could see to the horizon. Some were blinking; some shone with steady intensity, while others were dark.

“Call the columns one, two and three,” said Dr. Gabriel, close by, his voice soft with patience. “Record the position of the lights as you see them now. Then when the signal sounds, start recording every light change you see in all three columns. Do it fast, Jeff, as fast as you can.”

The eye is a wonderful instrument of precision, capable of detecting an infinitude of movement and change. It is delicate enough to distinguish, if necessary, each and every still frame composing the motion picture that flickers so swiftly before it on the white screen. Jeff’s fingers moved, his pencil recorded, quickly moving from column one to column two, and on to column three. The pencil moved swiftly until the test was over.

Then on to the next test.…

Electrode leads were fastened to each of his ten toes and each of his ten fingers.

“Listen once, Jeff. Right first toe corresponds to left thumb; right second toe to right index finger. (Wonderful stuff, hypno-palamine, only one repetition to learn) When you feel a shock in a toe, press the button for the corresponding finger. Ready now, Jeff, as fast as you can.”

Shock, press, shock, press. Jeff’s mind was still, silent, a blank, an open circuit for reactions to speed through without hindrance, without modulation. Another round done and on to the next.…

Doctor Schiml’s pale face loomed up from some distant place. “Everything all right?”

“Going fine, fine. Smooth as can be.”

“No snags anywhere?”

“No, no snags. None that I can see—yet.”

* * * *

“I want a smoke.”

Dr. Gabriel relaxed, offered Jeff a smoke from a crumpled pack, extended his lighter and smiled. He noticed that Jeff’s wide eyes missed their focus, could not see the extended flame. “How do you feel, Jeff?”

“Fine, fine—”

“Still got a lot to do.”

A flicker of fear crossed the dull eyes. “Fine. Only I hope.…

“Yes?”

“…hope we finish. I’m tired.”

“Sleepy?”

“Yeah, sleepy.”

“Well, we’ll have everything on punched cards for Tilly in a couple of hours or so. All the factors about you that this testing will unearth would take a research staff five hundred years to integrate down to the point where it would mean anything. With Tilly it takes five minutes. She doesn’t make mistakes, either.”

“Nice Tilly.”

“And after the results come through, you’re assigned and you sign your release and you’re on your way to money.”

Again the flicker of fear came, deeper this time. “Money.…

* * * *

More tests, more tests. Hear a sound, punch a button. See a picture, record it. Test after endless test, dozens of records, his brain growing tired, tired. Then into the bright, gleaming room, up onto the green-draped table.

“No pain, Jeff, nothing to worry about. Be over in just a minute.”

His eyes caught the slender, wicked-looking trefine; he heard the buzz of the motor, felt the grinding shock. But there was no reaction, no pain. And then he felt a curious tingling in his arms and legs, as the small electro-encephalograph end-plates entered his skull through the tiny drilled holes.

He watched with dull eyes as the little lights on the control board nearby began blinking on and off, on and off. The flashes followed a hectic, nervous pattern, registering individual brain-cell activity onto supersensitive stroboscopic film. This, in turn, was fed down automatically to Tilly for analysis. And then the trefine holes were plugged up again and his head was tightly taped, and he was moved back into another room for another five-minute recovery.

“Hit the ink blots yet?”

“Not yet, Rog. Take it easy, we’re coming along. Ink blots and intelligence runs next, and so on.”

Something stirred deep in Jeff’s mind, even through the soothing delusions of hypnosis. It stirred and cried out at the first sign of the strange, colored forms on the cards. Something deep in Jeff’s mind forced its way out to his lips as Dr. Gabriel said softly, “Just look at them, Jeff, and tell me what you see.”

“No! Take them away.”

“What’s that? Gently, Jeff. Relax and take a look.”

Jeff was on his feet, backing away, a wild, helpless, cornered fire in his eyes. “Take them away. Get me out of here. Go away—”

“Jeff!” The voice was sharp, commanding. “Sit down, Jeff.”

Jeff sank down in the seat, gingerly, eyes wary. The doctor moved his hand and Jeff jumped a foot, his teeth chattering.

“What’s the matter, Jeff?”

“I—I don’t like…those…cards.”

“But they’re only ink blots, Jeff.”

Jeff frowned and squinted at the cards. He scratched his head in perplexity. Slowly he sank back down in the chair, didn’t even notice as the web-belt restrainers closed over his arms and legs, tightened down.

“Now look at the pictures, Jeff. Tell me what you see.”

The perplexity grew on his heavy face, but he looked and talked, slowly, hoarsely. A dog’s head, a little gnome, a big red bat.

“Gently, Jeff. Nothing to be afraid of. Relax, man, relax.…

Then came the word-association tests: half an hour of words and answers, while fear curled up through Jeff’s brain, gathering, crouching, ready to spring, waiting in horrible anticipation for something, something that was coming as sure as hour followed hour. Jeff felt the web restrainers cutting his wrists, as the words were read. He trembled in growing foreboding.

Dr. Schiml’s face was back, still concerned, his eyes bright. “Going all right, Gabe?”

“Dunno, Rog. Something funny with the ink blots. You can glance at the report. Word association all screwed up too. Can’t spot it, but there’s something funny.”

“Give him a minute’s rest and reinforce the palamine. Probably got a powerful vitality opposing it.”

Dr. Gabriel was back in a moment, and another needle nibbled Jeff’s arm briefly. Then the doctor walked to the desk, took out the small, square plastic box. He dropped the cards out into his hand. They were plain-backed little cards with bright red symbols on their faces.

Dr. Gabriel held them under Jeff’s nose. “Rhine cards,” he said softly. “Four different symbols, Jeff. Look close. A square, a circle.…

It was like a gouge, jammed down through Jeff’s mind, ripping it without mercy. A red-hot, steaming poker was being rammed into the soft, waxy tissue of his brain.

“My God, hold him!”

Jeff screamed, wide awake, his eyes bulging with terror. With an animal-like roar he wrenched at his restrainers, ripped them out of the raw wood and plunged across the room in blind, terrified flight. He ran across the room and struck the solid brick wall full face. He hit with a sickening thud, pounded at the wall with his fists, screaming out again and again. And then he collapsed to the floor, his nose broken, his face bleeding, his fingers raw with the nails broken.

And as he slid into merciful unconsciousness, they heard him blubbering: “He killed my father…killed him…killed him…killed him…killed him.…

* * * *

Hours later he stirred. He almost screamed out in pain as he tried to move his arm. His chest burned as he breathed. When he opened his eyes, an almost unbearable, pounding ache struck down through his skull. He recognized his room, saw the empty bed across from him. Then he raised an arm, felt the bandaging around his face, his neck.

He listened fearfully and his ears caught only the harsh, gurgling breathing of the man in the next room: the man called Tinker, whose doom as a Mercy Man had not been quite sealed, who breathed on, shallowly, breaking the deadly silence.

What had happened?

Jeff sat bolt upright in the darkness, ignoring the stabbing pain that shot through his chest and neck. What had happened? Why was he bandaged? What was the meaning of the pure, naked, paralyzing fear that was gripping him like a vise? He stared through the darkness at the opposite bed, and blinked. What had happened…what…what?

Of course. He had been in the file room. He’d been caught. Schiml had caught him and he had been taken down for testing. And then: a bright light, nonsense words in his ear, a needle.…

Gasping with pain, Jeff rolled out of bed, searched underneath for his shoes. With an audible sob, he retrieved the crumpled card from under the inner sole. Then they hadn’t gotten the card. They didn’t know. But what could have happened? Slowly, other things came back: there had been a scream; he had felt a shock, as though molten lead had been sent streaming through his veins, and then he had struck the wall like a ten-ton truck.

He groped for his watch, stared at it, hardly believing his eyes. It read seven P.M. It had been almost one A.M. when they had taken him down to Dr. Gabriel. It couldn’t be seven in the evening again. Unless he had slept around the clock. He listened to the watch; it was still running. Whatever had happened had thrown him, thrown him so hard that he had slept for almost twenty-four hours. And in the course of that time.…

The horrible loss struck him suddenly, worming its way through to open realization. Twenty-four hours later—a day gone, a whole day for Conroe to use to move deeper into hiding. He sank back on the bed and groaned, despair heavy in his mind. A day gone, a precious day. Somewhere the man was in the Center. But to locate him now, after he had had such time—how could Jeff do it?

He felt a greater urgency now. No matter what they had found in the testing, he had no time left to hunt. The next step on this one-way road was assignment and the signing of a release—the point of no return.

And through it all, something ate at his mind: some curious question, some phantom he could not pin down, a shadow figure which loomed up again and again in his mind, haunting him—the shadow of fearful doubt. Why the shock? Why had he broken loose? What had driven him to punish his arms and legs so mercilessly on the restrainers? What monstrous demon had torn loose in his mind? What gaping sore had the doctors scraped over to drive him to such extremes of fear and horror? And why was the same feeling there in his mind whenever he thought of Paul Conroe?

He sighed. He needed help and he knew it. He needed help desperately. Here, in a whirlpool of hatred and selfishness, he needed help more than he had ever needed it, help to track down this phantom shadow, help to corner it, to kill it. And the only ones he could ask for help were those around him, the Mercy Men themselves. He needed their help, if only to escape becoming one of them.

* * * *

He dozed, then woke a little later and listened. There was an air of tension in the room, a whisper of something gone sharply wrong. Jeff forced himself up on his elbow, tried to peer through the darkness. Something had happened just before he awoke. He listened to the deathly stillness in the room.

And then he knew what it was. The breathing in the next room had stopped.

He lay back, his heart pounding, listening to the rasping of his own breath, fear and despair rising up to new heights in his mind. Death had come, then. One man who would never see the payoff he so eagerly awaited. Jeff had felt death pass over the room, and he knew, instinctively, that the entire unit would know it too without a single word passing from a single mouth. For the sense of death was a tangible thing here, moving with silent, imponderable footfalls from room to room.

For the first time, Jeff felt a kinship, a depth of understanding to share with the Mercy Men. And there was a depth of fear, deep down, which he knew now that he must share with them too. Painfully, he rolled over on his side and stared into the darkness for long minutes before he fell into fitful sleep.

CHAPTER NINE

A voice was talking across the room, a muffled, mysterious rumble of up-and-down sounds. Slowly Jeff dragged his mind out of the clinging depths of nightmare, back to the stuffy, dimly lit room. How long had he slept? And how late was it now? The soft voices across the room gave no clue, and his aching mind was too tired to care any more. He just lay in the dim light, every muscle aching, his mind returning again and again to the nightmare he had been reliving for the thousandth time.

It had been horribly sharp this time, clear as noonday: the same subject as always, the same face, the same horrible knowledge, and the same soul-wrenching hatred welling up and bubbling over in his mind. Always it was hatred without plan or form, pure, disorganized animal fury. But this time the dream had been more coherent, clearer, more unmistakable and vicious.

He had been walking down the street in the heart of the city. Yes, it was mid-morning. The sun’s heat was unbearable already, and his jacket and shirt were damp. What was he doing that morning? Was he on his way to the survey depot with some information on the next Mars run? It didn’t really matter. But he turned into the building and then it hit him.

It was like the shock that had struck him in the testing room, he thought. He had run into the man bodily. Stepping back to beg his pardon, he saw the man’s face. That’s where the dream went wild, just as his mind had gone wild on that sunny morning so long ago. He saw the man turn and run like the wind, snaking into the flowing stream of people on the street. Jeff followed, shouting, his fists and legs churning through the masses of people. He screamed in hoarse, maddened despair as he saw the figure vanish before his eyes.

And then he was leaning against the wall, panting, tears streaming down his face. Unable to understand, knowing only that this was the man whose face had haunted his dreams all his life, he acknowledged this was the man he would have to kill.

His eyes snapped open. The voices across the room were louder. Jeff listened. One voice was a woman’s—Blackie’s, of course. There was no mistaking the Nasty Frenchman’s nasal twang. But the third voice—Jeff blinked his eyes. He moved his head to see the little group across the room.

They were huddled around a small infra-red coffee maker: Blackie, the Nasty Frenchman, and the huge, bald-headed man called Harpo. Blackie’s voice was sharp and pleading as she echoed the Nasty Frenchman in angry protest. Harpo’s heavy bass rumbled an undertone to the whispered discussion. Painfully, Jeff drew himself up on an elbow and turned his ear in the direction of the huddle, as the words drifted to him, unclearly:

“I say find out who and do something about it,” the Nasty Frenchman was insisting angrily. His face was red and spiteful, and his eyes flashed as he glared up at Harpo. “We’re out of it completely. Don’t you see that? Because of this switch, we’re off the payroll—ditched like common scum! Well, the job I’ve been on was to pay two hundred thousand dollars, with practically no risk involved. And I’ll kill the man that’s cutting me out of it.”

Harpo’s voice was soothing. “So maybe you’re daydreaming. Maybe there won’t be any switch of jobs at all.”

“I saw the report, I tell you. It was signed by Schiml himself.”

Harpo looked up sharply. “You actually saw Schiml’s signature on it?”

“I saw it. I’m taken off assignment and so are you. We’re both shoved out. Can’t you get that straight? After all this time—and just because they get somebody in here that gets them excited.”

Harpo snorted. “So they’ve gone off on these spook hunts before. Where do you think it’ll take them this time? Extra-sensory powers!” The huge man spat in disdain. “Have you ever seen anybody with extra-sensory powers? Well, neither have I. Look, Jacques, let’s face it: Schiml would give his left arm at the shoulder to have proof of extra-sensory powers in any form.” Harpo grinned unpleasantly. “You’ve seen proof of that before. He believes in it, he wants to prove it. And every now and then he’s going to have a try at it just to keep himself happy, just to keep in form. There’s no call to get excited.”

“But he’s got a solid prospect this time,” Blackie snapped. “From the stories I’ve heard the guy is a phenomenon. Hit top scores on the cards—highest they’ve ever recorded here. Other things too, like peeling the paper off the walls just by looking at them, or closing up opened wounds in ten minutes.”

“So you hear stories! Around here I don’t believe anything I hear.” Harpo shifted uneasily. “If there was anything tangible, anything we could put our hands on, I’d listen. But there’s not—no proof, no nothing but a lot of wild stories. And I’ve even heard better stories in my time. You can’t go around fighting stories—”

Jeff sat bolt upright, something shouting out in his brain. He grabbed for his shoes, oblivious to the agonizing pain in his muscles, fumbled eagerly, his mind screaming in excitement. “What kind of proof do you want?” he growled.

Harpo stared up at him, as though seeing a ghost. “You awake!” he gasped. And then: “Any kind of proof!”

“Then take a look at this.” And Jeff tossed the crumpled card down in the middle of the huddle.

Blackie was on her feet, her eyes eager. “Didn’t know you were anywhere near ready to wake up,” she said. “You look like they really gave you the works.”

“Well, something happened, all right. I don’t know whether I’m coming or going.”

Blackie nodded. “You never do, after testing. They came here for you, and I told them you’d gone out for a stroll. But I guess they found you.” She put a cup of coffee in Jeff’s hand and motioned toward the card. “You got that out of the file without being spotted?”

Jeff’s eyes met hers for the briefest instant. “That’s right. And I heard what you were talking about.” He caught the little note of warning in her eyes: the silent, helpless appeal. He shook his head imperceptibly. He knew then that she hadn’t told the others about their battle over the dice. He pointed to the card. “I think that answers a lot of things.”

Harpo’s eyes were suspicious. “How do you know that’s the man?”

“Because I drove him in here, that’s why.” Jeff’s voice was a snarl; it sounded sharp in the quiet room. “I knew he was here because he came here to escape me. But I didn’t know he had any connection with ESP until I saw the card.”

Harpo stared at the card, then at Jeff. “You mean you drove him in here?”

“That’s right. Because I’d have killed him if he didn’t come.” Jeff’s face was dark as he turned to the girl. “Tell him, Blackie. Tell him why I’m here.”

Blackie told them. They listened with widening eyes, and the room was still as a tomb.

“And you came in here to kill this man—nothing more?” Harpo’s voice was incredulous. “But man, you’re on thin ice, very thin ice. If they tested you last night, you’ll be assigned. Why, you could be forced to sign a release any time.”

“I know it, I know it. Can’t you see why there isn’t time to bicker now?” Jeff’s voice cracked in the still room, sharp and urgent. “This is the man, the one I’m looking for and the one you’re looking for, the one with ESP that’s got Schiml and his men so excited! It’s here on the card!”

Harpo’s eyes were narrow. “Any other proof besides the card that Conroe is the man?”

Jeff’s voice was low with hate. “Look. I’ve been hunting the man down for five years. A long time. I’ve hunted him wherever he’s gone. I’ve had the best detective agency in North America working with me hand and foot, tracking him down. But they haven’t caught him. We’ve almost caught him, we’ve haunted him, we’ve run him back and forth across the country and world until he’s ragged. But we’ve never caught him. Isn’t there some significance to that? Time and again we’ve come so close that we couldn’t miss—and then we missed. We’ve come too close too many times for coincidence. There’s another factor, a factor that’s giving Conroe warning, time after time. It’s allowed him to slip out of perfectly sealed traps—a factor like precognition, for instance.”

There was a long silence. Then the Nasty Frenchman was on his feet, his lips stretched in a malicious grin. “If we move fast enough, we can stop it—cut it off at the bud. We’re off the payroll now. But we can get back on it again, if their boy wonder dies.”

Harpo’s eyes flashed. “And how do you plan to do it?”

“Nothing simpler in the world. We just find the guy.” The Nasty Frenchman’s grin widened. “Then after we find him, we tell our friend Jeff about it. Nothing more. Jeff’ll take it from there. Right, Jeff?”

Jeff’s heart pounded against his ribs. “That’s right,” he said, his voice hoarse with eagerness. “Just find him for me.”

Harpo bent over slowly, poured another cup of coffee. “Then let’s talk plans,” he said softly.

* * * *

The planning went smoothly. Jeff sat forward eagerly. The despair and hopelessness of an hour before evaporated, leaving fingers of wild excitement creeping through his muscles, up and down his spine. These people knew where they were; they knew how to hunt in this evil place, where to go, what to do. This was the help he needed to complete his mission, the help he’d needed from the start. And now, at last, nothing would go wrong. Carefully, the last trap was laid—the final drive in this manhunt that had lasted so long and been so fruitless. This time there would be no slip.

Harpo fingered the card thoughtfully. “These dates must have some significance. Were there any signs of Conroe’s visits here at those times?”

Jeff shook his head. “No sign. He couldn’t have been here for more than three days at a time, or I’d have known about it.”

Harpo grunted, his eyes sharp on Jeff’s face. “And you had no definite, direct evidence that he was somehow using an extra-sensory talent in eluding you?”

Jeff scowled. “No direct evidence. I’m afraid not. There was no reason to suspect it, until I found the card. Then hindsight started filling in funny things that had gone unnoticed before.”

Harpo nodded. “Yes. That’s the way it would be. But Schiml must have had direct enough evidence. This ESP study is just like space travel was. They’ve been after it for years; they start after it time after time, every time a new angle comes up. Because if they succeed it could mean so much to so many people.”

The Nasty Frenchman snorted. “Sure. Like running us out of paying jobs for good and all, after all the risks we’ve taken. Open the door to ESP for them, and there wouldn’t be any other work in the Center for twenty years. And if we don’t happen to be what they’re looking for—” He ran his finger across his throat and scowled. “The man is here. We’ve got to have information on him, past and present. That means we’ll have to search the Archives. There’s no better approach.” He turned his sharp little eyes on Jeff. “You know how the electronic files work. You’re the one that can dig out what we need to know in the Archives.”

Jeff nodded. “But I’ll need time to work without interruption. Can you get me into the Archive files without being caught?”

The Nasty Frenchman nodded eagerly. “Nothing to it. Give us half an hour to clear the way and get the guards taken care of.” He glanced up at Harpo. “The old fire-alarm gag should do it, all right. Then you can walk right down.”

“And can you keep it clear for me, say, for an hour or so?”

“For five hours, if necessary.” Harpo stood up sharply. “We’ll start now to get things lined up. When it’s clear, I’ll give you a flicker on the phone. Don’t answer it. Just come along. Blackie can draw you a map while you wait.” The bald-headed giant started to leave, then turned back. “And don’t let any alarm bells disturb you. We’ve found ways of occupying guards before.” He touched his forehead briefly, and he and the Nasty Frenchman disappeared into the corridor.

* * * *

“I think it’ll work,” Jeff breathed, tucking Blackie’s crude penciled map into his pocket. “I think we’ve got him. Once we know where he is and what they’re going to do with him—” He grinned up at her, his eyes shining. “His time’s running out, Blackie. He’s as good as dead.”

The girl leaned forward, pouring coffee, sitting silently. Jeff watched her face, as if seeing it for the first time. Indeed, for the first time, the girl’s face seemed softer. In the dim light of the room, the hard lines melted away, magically. Her face appeared younger and fresher, as though some curious mask had dropped away in the course of the evening.

But her eyes were troubled as she watched Jeff and lifted her coffee cup in mock salute. “To the Hunter,” she said softly.

Jeff raised his own cup. “Yes. But not for long now.”

“It can’t go on much longer, Jeff. Your number’s up next.”

“For assignment?” Jeff’s eyes flashed. “Do you think that makes any difference to me? I’m following through to the end on this, no matter what happens.”

“But, Jeff, you can’t sign a release.”

Jeff stared at her in the silent room. “Why not? If it’s the only thing I can do—”

Her eyes were wide and very dark. “Oh, Jeff, you’re in terrible danger here.”

“I know that.”

“You don’t, you don’t.” The girl was shaking her head, tears rising to her eyes. “You don’t know anything, Jeff, about the Mercy Men or the kind of work they do. Oh, I know, you think you do. But you don’t, really. Look, Jeff—look at it straight—you’re young, you’re smart. There are other ways to spend your life, more important things for you to do. Can’t you see that? No man is worth throwing your life away for, no matter what he’s done to you. That’s what you’re doing. You’re walking down a blind alley, into a death trap! Get out, while you can.”

Jeff’s head was shaking, his lips tight, until the color fled them, leaving pale gray lines. “I can’t get out. I just can’t. Nothing anyone could say could drive me out now.”

“But you’ve got to run while you can! Oh, yes, go down there tonight if you must, try to find him. But if you don’t find him, cut and run. Jeff, get out, tonight. They can’t stop you; they have no legal hold on you, yet. But once they bring in a release, you’re hooked. It’ll be too late then.”

Jeff’s eyes narrowed, and he sat down on the bed and faced the girl. There was an elfin expression on her face, a curious intensity in her large gray eyes that he had never seen before. “What do you care?” he asked suddenly. “What do you care what I do?”

The girl’s voice was low, and the words tumbled out so rapidly that he could hardly follow them. “Look, Jeff, you and me—we could work as a team. Don’t you see what we could do? We could get out of here, together. We could get out of the city, go to the West Coast. The dice, think of the dice, man—we could clean up! You don’t belong in here on the rack for slaughter. And I wouldn’t belong here, either, if we could work together—”

Somewhere in the distance an alarm bell began ringing, insistently, clang-clanging down the corridors. Then there was a rush of feet, shouted orders and calls up and down the hallway, and the squeak of three jitneys passing by in rapid succession. Then, abruptly, the corridor fell silent again.

Jeff hardly noticed the clamor. He stared at the girl, his hands trembling. “Blackie, Blackie, think what you’re saying. The tough-luck jinx. Have you forgotten? You’re safe from it here. But outside, what would happen? We might make a go of it, yes, but what if the jinx followed us?”

“Oh, but Jeff, that’s silly.” She swallowed, her eyes almost overflowing as she tried to blink back the tears. “It isn’t just selfishness, Jeff. I could stay here. I talked to Schiml this afternoon, before Harpo and Jacques started talking. They’re out—yes. But I’m not. He wants me to stay, says there’s a place for me in the work. But I don’t want to stay.”

Jeff was shaking his head slowly, his eyes tired. “It’s no dice, Blackie. Not now. After I get Conroe, after I get out of here, then maybe I could think about it. But I haven’t given this dice business any thought at all. Can’t you see? I’d have to think it out, carefully, all its ramifications. And I haven’t been able to do that. It hasn’t mattered enough. I’ve got a man to kill, first, before anything else. And I’m going to kill him. I’m going to kill him tonight.”

“Then do it for sure. Get him tonight! And then get out, before something happens—”

In the corner the phone gave two sharp rings, then lapsed into silence. Their eyes met, sharply, desperately. “Nothing’s going to happen,” Jeff said softly. “Don’t worry about it. I’ve been at this too long for anything to happen.”

There was a frantic light in the girl’s gray eyes as she looked up at him, a depth and sincerity he had never seen before. Her eyes pleaded with him. “You don’t know, you don’t know.…

And then they were in each other’s arms, drawing each other close, desperately. His hard lips met her soft ones, met and held. Then when they parted there was another look in her eyes, and he heard her breath cut sharply by his ear. “Jeff—”

Gently he put a finger to his lips, loosened her arms from around him. “Don’t say it,” he whispered. “Not now, Blackie. Not now—”

And then he was outside, in the corridor. The cool air caught him and he ran down the corridor toward the stairs. He hurried against the time the men had prepared for his safety. And as he ran, he felt his heart pounding in his ears, and he knew the hour was drawing close.

CHAPTER TEN

Jacques and Harpo were waiting for him at the head of the escalator. He nodded and followed them down the corridor to the small jitney car that was waiting.

“All set?”

“All set. The guards are all busy up in N unit putting out a fire. They won’t be down to bother us for a couple of hours.” The Nasty Frenchman scowled disdainfully. “But you’ll have to hurry. When they come back, we’ll have a time stalling them again.”

Jeff nodded. “That should be enough. Then maybe we’ll have other things to occupy the guards tonight.”

The jitney started with a lurch and a squawk. Harpo handled the controls, running the little car swiftly down the corridor. It swung suddenly into a pitch-black tunnel, took an abrupt dip and began to spiral downward at a wild rate. Jeff grabbed the hand rail and gasped.

“It’s a long way down,” Harpo chuckled, sitting back in the darkness. “The Archives hold the permanent records of the entire Hoffman Center since it was first opened. That’s why it’s a vault, so that bombing won’t destroy it. It’s one of the most valuable tombs in history.”

The jitney shot out into a lighted corridor. Jeff swallowed and felt his ears pop. The little car whizzed through a maze of tunnels and corridors. Finally it settled down to the floor before the heavy steel doors at the end of a large corridor.

Without a word, Harpo moved down to the end of the corridor, and drew the jitney car with him. He opened the motor hood, started pawing around busily inside.

The Nasty Frenchman chuckled. “If anyone wanders by, that jitney alarm siren goes off, and Harpo’s just a poor technician trying to make it stop.” The little man walked quickly to the steel doors. “It’s not the first time I’ve had to work on these,” he said slyly. “We wanted in here a few months ago, when they were trying to pull a shakedown deal on some of us. I worked out the combination pattern then; it took me three days. They change the combination periodically, of course, but the pattern is built into the lock.”

He opened a small leather case and placed an instrument up against the lock. A long, thin wire was poised and ready in his other hand. Jeff heard several muffled clicks; then Jacques inserted the wire sharply into something. An alarm bell above the door gave one dull, half-hearted clunk and relapsed into silence, as though changing its mind at the last moment. A moment later the little Frenchman looked up and winked, and the steel vault door rolled slowly back.

The place smelled damp and empty. Three walls and half of the fourth were occupied with electronic file controls. The bulk of the room was taken up with tables, microviewers, readers, recorders, and other study-apparatus. There was nothing small in the room; the whole place breathed of bigness, of complexity, of many years of work and wisdom, of many lives and many, many deaths. It was a record-room that many lives had built.

Jeff moved in toward the control panel. He located the master coder and sat down in a chair before it, his eyes running over it carefully, sizing up the mammoth filing machine. And then, quite suddenly, he felt terribly afraid. A knot grew in his stomach and a cold sweat broke out on his forehead. A face was again looming up sharply in his mind. It was the huge, ghoulish face that had come to him again and again in his dreams; the face full of hatred and viciousness—pale and inhuman.

It was the face of a heartless, pointless, bloody assassin. But was that all? Or was there more to that face, more to that dream than Jeff had ever suspected? Something deep in his mind stirred, sending a chill down his spine. His hand trembled as he ran a hand over the control panel. A ghost was there at his elbow, a ghost that had followed him on this nebulous trail of bitterness and hatred for so long—a trail which would end in this very room.

He shook his head angrily. There was no time for panic, no time for ruminating. He picked the panel-code combination for the Mercy Men and the research unit. Then he computed the coding for Conroe’s name. With trembling fingers, he typed out the coding, punched the tracer button and sat back, his heart thumping wildly. He watched the receiver slot for the telltale file cards and folio.

The file squeaked and chattered and whirred and moaned, and finally the pale instruction panel lighted up: No Information.

Jeff blinked, a chill running up his back. These files were the final appeal; the information had to be here. Quickly, he computed a description coding, fed it in and waited again in mounting tension. Still no information. He picked the code card from his pocket, the card from the Mercy Men’s file up above, the card with the Hoffman Center’s own picture of Conroe on it. He fed it into the photoelectric tracer, marked in the necessary coding for an unlimited file search: “Any person resembling this description in any way: any information on—” Again he sat back, breathing heavily.

The whirring went on and on. Then, inexorably, the little panel flickered and spelled out a single word:

“Unknown.”

Jeff choked. He stared at the panel, his whole body shaking, and went through the coding again, step by step, searching for an error, finding none. It was impossible, it couldn’t be so—and yet, the files were empty of information. As though there had never been a Paul Conroe. There was not even a reference card to the card in the Mercy Men’s files.

He stared at the panel, his mind rebelling in protest. Nothing, not even a trace in the one place where there had to be complete information. He had come to a dead end—the last dead end there could be in the Hoffman Center.

The Nasty Frenchman lit a cigarette and watched Jeff from bright eyes. “No luck?”

“No luck,” said Jeff, brokenly. “We’re beaten. That’s all.”

“But there must be—”

“Well, there’s not!” Jeff slammed his fist down on the table with a crash, his eyes blazing. “There’s not a trace, not a whisper of the man in here. There has to be—and there’s not. It’s the same as every other time: a blank wall. Blank wall after blank wall. I’m getting tired of them, so miserably tired of running into blind alley after blind alley.” He stood up, his shoulders sagging. “I’m too tired of it to keep it up. There’s no point to gambling any longer. I’m getting out of here while I’ve got a whole skin.”

“Maybe you’ve got more time than you think.” The Nasty Frenchman eyed him in alarm. “This is no time to run out. It may be weeks before you’re assigned.”

Jeff stared at him. “Well, I know one way to find out.” He walked over to the control panel, stabbed an angry finger at the master coder, picked out the coding for “J. Meyer.” “They’ll have me here too,” he snapped. “The whole works about me: what the testing said, what they’re going to do to me. That’s one way to find out.” Quickly, he typed out the coding, punched the tracer button.…

The machinery whirred again, briefly. Then there was a click in the receiver slot and another and another. Jeff blinked at it as the microfilm rolls continued to fall down. Then he reached out to the single white card which fell on top of the rolls. His fingers were damp as he took the card. His own death warrant, perhaps? He glanced at the card and froze. His head began pounding as if it would burst.

“J. Meyer” he had punched in, and that was what the card said—but not Jeffrey Meyer. The card held a photo of a middle-aged, gray-haired man, and the typewritten name at the top said: Jacob Meyer.

And the picture was a photograph of his father’s face.

* * * *

It was impossible, incredible, but he stared at the card in his hand. It did not disappear; it stayed there. It still said: “Jacob Meyer”; it still showed the beloved features of his father, staring up at him blankly from the card. His father!

His heart pounded as he stared at the brief typewritten notation below the picture: “Born 11 August, 2050, Des Moines, Iowa; married 3 Dec. 2077, wife died childbirth 27 November 2078; one son Jeffrey born 27 November 2078.” Then below were a series of dates: date of bachelor’s degree, date of Master’s and Doctorate; Associate Professor of Statistics at Rutgers University, 2079-2084; joined Government Bureau of Statistics in 2085. Finally, at the bottom of the card were a long series of reference numbers to microfilm files.

Jeff sank down in the chair, his mind spinning helplessly. He turned dazed eyes to the Nasty Frenchman. “You might as well go,” he said. “I’ve got to do some reading.”

Feverishly, he scooped up the microfilm rolls, carried them to the nearest reader, twisted the spool into the machine and bent his eyes to the viewing slot, his heart pounding in his throat.…

The first roll was a long, detailed series of abstracts of statistical papers, all written by Jacob A. Meyer, Ph.D., all covered with marginal notes in a scrawling, spidery hand and initialed “R.D.S.” The papers covered a multitude of studies; some dealt with the very techniques of statistical analyses themselves, others were concerned with specific studies that had been done.

The papers were written in scholarly manner, perfectly well documented, but the marginal notes found fault continually, both with the samplings noted and the conclusions drawn. Jeff read through some of the papers and he scowled. They dated over a period of the four years when his father had been teaching statistics. There were several dozen papers, all with marginal notes, none of which made much sense to Jeff. With a sigh, he pulled out the roll, fed in another.

This one seemed a little more rewarding. It was a letter, signed by Roger D. Schiml, M.D., dated almost twenty years before, addressed to the Government Bureau of Statistics. Jeff’s eyes skimmed the letter briefly, catching words here, phrases there:

…as director of research at the Hoffman Center, considered it my duty to bring this unbelievable condition to the attention of higher authorities.… Naturally, a statistical analysis must be made of the matter before it can be concluded that there has been a marked increase in mental illness of any kind in the general populace…have followed Dr. Meyer’s analyses in the past with much interest, and would be pleased if he could come to the Hoffman Center within the next month to commence such a study.…

There was nothing tangible, nothing that made sense. Jeff shuffled through the rolls, popped another into place in the reader. This time he read much more closely a letter from an unknown person to Dr. Schiml. It was dated almost a year later than the former letter. This note referred in several places to the “Almost unbelievable results of the statistical study done several months ago.” It also referred to the investigation just concluded of possible disturbing elements in the analysis. The final paragraph Jeff read through three times, his eyes nearly popping.

There was no doubt that the data was sound, and properly collected; naturally, the results of the analysis followed mathematically from the data. It seemed, therefore, that we were dealing with a disturbing factor heretofore quite unsuspected. Our investigation leads us to the inavoidable, though hardly credible, conclusion that Dr. Jacob A. Meyer was himself the sole disturbing factor in the analysis. No other possibility fits the facts of the picture. We recommend therefore that an intensive study of Dr. Meyer’s previous work be undertaken, with a view to answering the obvious questions aroused by such a report. We also recommend that this be undertaken without delay.

At the top of the letter, in red letters, was the government’s careful restriction: Top Secret.

Another roll went into the reader. This held the letter-head of a New York psychiatrist. Jeff’s eyes caught the name and he read eagerly:

Dear Dr. Schiml:

We have studied the microfilm records you posted to us with extreme care, and undertaken the study of Jacob Meyer, as instructed. Although it is impossible to make a positive diagnosis without interviewing and examining the patient in person, we are inclined to support your views as stated in your letter. As to the possibility of other more remarkable phenomena occurring, we are not prepared to comment. But we must point out that this man almost certainly undergoes a regular manic-depressive cycle, may be dangerously depressed, even suicidal, in a depressive low, and may endanger himself and others in a manic period of elation. Such a person is extremely dangerous and should not be allowed freedom to go as he chooses.

Jeff looked up, tears streaming from his eyes. His whole body was wet with perspiration. He could hardly keep his balance as he stood up. What lies! The idea that his father could have been insane, that he could have falsified any sort of statistical report that he had done—it was impossible, a pack of incredible lies. But they were here, on the files of the greatest medical center on the face of the earth—lies about his father, lies that Jeff couldn’t even attack because he could not understand them.

The door swung open sharply, and the Nasty Frenchman stuck his head in, panting. “Better get going,” he snarled. “There are guards coming.” His head disappeared abruptly, and Jeff heard Harpo’s voice bellow at him: “Come on, we’ve got to run!”

Jeff’s legs would hardly move. He felt numb as though a thousand nerve centers had been suddenly struck all at once. He fumbled, pouring the microfilm rolls into his pockets, his mind whirling. There was no sense to it: no understanding, no explanation. Somehow, he knew, there was a tie-in between these records of his father, taken so long ago, and the absence of any information on Paul Conroe in the files. But he couldn’t find the link.

He ran out into the hall, leaped into the jitney car. He hung on for dear life as it sped up through the tunnel, into the blackness of the spiral once again. Suddenly, in his ears, another sound exploded, the loud, insistent clang of an alarm bell.

Harpo looked at the Nasty Frenchman and then at Jeff. “Oh, oh,” he said softly. “They’re onto something; that’s a general muster. We’d better get back to quarters—and fast!”

He shoved the controls ahead a bit further, and Jeff felt the car leap ahead. Finally it settled down in the quarters corridor. They leaped out, Harpo set the dials for the car to return, and the three men ran for their quarters, the bell still clanging in their ears.

In Jeff’s mind thoughts were tumbling as he ran—hopeless thoughts, uneasy thoughts. As he had ridden up, little chinks had fallen into place in his mind. Little spaces that he had never understood suddenly began to make sense, adding up to questions, big questions. It was too pat, too easy that Conroe should come in here and vanish as if he had never been alive. Things didn’t happen that way, not even for Conroe.

Other things came into focus, slowly, flickering briefly through his mind—things that had happened years before, things that seemed, suddenly, to mean something. Then, just as they came into focus, they flickered back out of reach again. They were incidents like the night in the gambling room; like the night in the nightclub with the dancer swaying before him; like the sudden, shocking jolt that had awakened him from the depths of hypnosis and driven him face-first into a stone wall; things like the curious viciousness of his hatred for Paul Conroe—a hate that had carried him to the ends of the earth. But now that hate lay stalemated, and new and more frightening information threatened to descend on him.

What did it mean?

Jeff felt the uneasiness crystallize into real fear. He broke into a run down the corridor toward his room. Fear pounded through his mind, suddenly, unreasonably. He tore open the door, fell inside, closed it tight behind him before snapping on the lights.

The room was empty. The coffee pot still stood on the little table. It was still hot, still steaming. Blackie was gone and a cigarette still burned on the edge of the tray.

He had to get out! He knew it then, knew that was at the bottom of the unreasonable fear. The bell was still clanging in the hallway, loudly piercing the still air of the room. He had to flee while he could. Instinctively now he knew that he’d never find Paul Conroe in the Center, never in a thousand years of searching. The fear grew stronger, a little voice screaming in his ear, “Don’t wait. Run, run now, or it’s too late.”

He tore open his foot locker, stared at the empty hooks. The locker was cleaned out, empty of every stitch of clothing. His bag was gone, his shoes, his coat.

It’s too late. Don’t wait.

His pulse pounded in his temples and a sweat broke out on his forehead. The escalator! If he could get to it, then make the turn into the next corridor, and get a jitney car.… It was the only way to get out and he had no choice. Panting, he broke out into the hall once again, ran pell-mell down the corridor toward the escalator. Then, when he was almost there, a wire cage slammed down across the corridor and blocked his path completely.

Jeff stopped short, his shoes scraping against the concrete floor. His heart pounded a deafening tattoo in his ears as he stared at the wire grill. Then he whirled and ran back down the corridor as fast as his legs would move. If he could get back to the offices, back to the main corridor before they stopped him, he could get a car there. Far ahead he saw the bright light of the main corridor. His breath came in a hoarse whine as he tried to run faster. And then, ten yards ahead, he saw another grill clank down, cutting him off, falling directly in his path.

He cried out, a helpless, desperate cry. He was trapped, caught in the one length of corridor. His mind spun dizzily to Blackie. She had been gone. Where to? Where had everybody gone? He started back, frantically jerking open doors on either side of the corridor, staring into room after room, his breath catching in his throat as he ran. All the rooms were empty. Jeff felt his mind spinning. He felt a curious inevitability, a fantastic pattern falling into shape as he stared into the empty rooms. Finally he reached his own again. Wide-eyed and panting, he threw the door open, strode in and threw himself down in the chair and waited.

He did not wait long. For a few moments there was no sound. Then he heard the sounds of feet coming down the corridor. He tightened his grip on the chair arm. He wasn’t thinking any longer. Cold beads of sweat stood out on his forehead as he waited, hearing the steps draw nearer. For the first time that he could remember, sheer terror crept through his mind, paralyzing him. He knew he had waited too long. His chance to jump the road was gone; there was no longer any escape.

Then the door was filled by some figures. One of them was the tall, white figure of Dr. Schiml. He walked into the room and smiled like the cat that ate the canary. Sinking down on the bed with a sigh, he was still smiling at Jeff. The girl followed him into the room. Her eyes were downcast. She tossed a little pair of ivory dice into the air and caught them as they fell.

The doctor smiled, and drew a crisp white paper from his pocket, began unfolding it slowly. “A matter of business,” he said, almost apologetically. “It’s time we got down to business, I think.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Jeff raised his eyes to the doctor’s face. His throat felt like sandpaper. He tried to swallow and couldn’t. “Sorry,” he grated. “I’ve changed my mind. I’m not talking business.”

Dr. Schiml smiled, his head slowly moving back and forth. “I hear you’re quite handy at the dice, Jeff.”

Jeff jumped out of the chair, fists clenched, eyes blazing at the girl. “You bitch,” he snarled. “You two-bit tramp stoolie. You’d sell your grandmother short for a bag of salt, wouldn’t you? Come to me with your sob stories, beg me to move out of here with you.” His voice was biting. “How much did they pay you to sell out? A hundred thousand, maybe? Or was this just a little routine affair? Maybe a thousand or two?”

The girl’s face darkened, her eyes bewildered as she stared at him. “No, that’s not true. I didn’t—”

“Well, it won’t do them any good, no matter how much they paid you. Because I’m not signing a release, now or ever.”

A guard grabbed Jeff’s arm, forcing him back into the chair.

Dr. Schiml still smiled, clasping his knee with his hands. “I guess you didn’t quite understand me,” he said pleasantly. “You mustn’t blame Blackie. She didn’t sell you short. She just couldn’t help answering a few perfectly innocent questions.” His eyes returned to Jeff, coldly. “We’re not asking you to sign a release, Jeff. We’re telling you.”

Jeff stared at him in amazement. “Don’t be silly,” he blurted. “I’m not signing a release to you people. Do you think I’m out of my mind? Take it away, burn it and get yourself another guinea pig.”

Dr. Schiml smiled quietly and shook his head. “We don’t want another guinea pig, Jeff. That’s just it. We want you.”

A little line of sweat broke out on Jeff’s forehead. “Look,” he said hoarsely. “I’m not signing anything, do you understand? I’ve changed my mind. I don’t care for the work here. I don’t like the company.”

Schiml’s smile faded. He shrugged and tucked the white paper back into his white coat. “Just as you wish,” he said. “The release is just a formality. Bring him along, boys.”

“Wait!” Jeff was on his feet again, facing the guards, his eyes wide with fright. His eyes caught Schiml’s. “Look, you’ve got things wrong. I’m a fake in here, a fraud. Can’t you understand that? I didn’t come in here to volunteer. I never intended to volunteer, never planned to go even as far as I did. I came here—”

Schiml made an impatient face and held up a hand. “Oh, yes, yes, I know all that. You came into this place because you’d followed a man in here and you wanted to kill him. You’d been hunting him for years, because you thought he murdered your father in cold blood and nothing would do but you kill him. Right?” Schiml blinked at Jeff, his voice heavy with boredom. “So you came in here and went through testing, hunting down your man, trying to find him. But you didn’t find him. Now things have suddenly become too hot for your liking, so you figure that it’s time to pull out. Right? Or are some of the details wrong?”

Jeff’s jaw sagged, his face going pasty. “That slut girl—”

Schiml grimaced. “No, not Blackie. Blackie is discreet, in her own quiet way. She hasn’t had anything to do with it. We’ve known about you all along, Jeff. And through a much more reliable source than Blackie.” He glanced over his shoulder at one of the guards. “Bring him in,” he said abruptly.

The door to the adjoining room opened and a man walked into the room. He was a tall, lean man; a gaunt-faced man with sallow cheeks and large, sad eyes; a weary-looking man whose hair was graying about the temples—a man whose whole body looked desperately tired.

And Schiml looked at the man and then he looked at the ceiling. “Hello, Paul,” he said softly. “There’s someone here who’s been looking for you—”

A scream broke from Jeff’s lips as he stared across the room. A raw animal scream ripped from his mouth like a knife. His lips twisted and he wrenched at the guards who were holding his arms, his face going purple, his eyes bulging.

With a roar he lunged at Conroe, bellowing, a torrent of hatred and abuse pouring from his lips. Again and again he screamed, his eyes blazing with an unholy fire of hatred. Conroe jerked back with a cry, and then Schiml was on his feet as Jeff lunged again, his muscles tightening like bands of steel under the flimsy shirt.

The guards fought to restrain him, and then the doctor was holding him too, crying: “Get out, Paul, quick!”

But Paul Conroe stood stock still, writhing from his hands to his head, his eyes filling with horrible pain. Suddenly the coffee cup jerked from the table, spun in the air and hurled straight for Conroe’s head. It missed, smashing against the wall.

Jeff screamed again and the walls and ceiling began powdering off, plaster peeling down in great chunks, smashing off the walls onto the floor. A huge chunk fell from the ceiling, and then the curtains suddenly started to blaze, as if ignited by some magic fire. Finally, Conroe’s clothing began smoking and smoldering.

Blackie screamed, staring at Jeff in open horror. Schiml’s voice roared through the bedlam: “Get him! Sedate him, for God’s sake, before he tears the place down on our ears!” Again Jeff roared his virulent hatred, and this time Conroe was the one who shouted:

“Stop him! He’s tearing me apart inside. My God, stop him!”

Someone stepped between Jeff and Conroe. There was a flicker of glass and silver as a plunger was pressed home. Then suddenly Jeff’s muscles gave out. His legs walked out from under him, and he felt himself sliding to the floor. But still he screamed, the face of the man who had tormented him all his life growing closer and closer, more and more vicious. Then suddenly everything around him went black. His last conscious impression was that of Blackie. She had her face in her hands and she was sobbing like a child in the corner.

* * * *

He lay on the long table, wrapped in cool green surgical linens, motionless, barely breathing. His eyes were wide open, but sightless. They seemed to be staring straight up at the pale, glowing skylight in the ceiling. It was as if they were staring beyond, eons beyond, into some strange world that no human foot had ever trod.

His breath came slowly, a harsh sound in the still room. Sometimes it slowed almost to a stop, sometimes it accelerated. Dr. Schiml paused motionless by his side, waiting, watching breathlessly until the ragged wheeze slowed once again to normal.

Jeff lay like a corpse, but he was not dead. Near his head the panel of tiny lights flickered on and off, brighter and dimmer, carrying their simple on-or-off messages from the myriad microscopic endings on the tiny electrode that probed through the soft brain tissue.

No human being could ever analyze the waxing and waning of patterns on that panel, not even in five lifetimes. But a camera could film the changes, instant upon instant, flickering and flashing and glowing dully on and off, in a thousand thousand different figures and movements. And the computor could take these patterns from the film and analyze them and compare them. It would integrate them into the constantly changing picture that appeared on the small screen by the bedside.

It was a crude instrument, indeed, for the study of so exquisitely delicate and variable an instrument as a human brain, and no one knew this more painfully than Roger Schiml. But even such a crude instrument could probe into that strange half-world that they had sought so long to enter.

Near the bedside Paul Conroe sat motionless, his face drawn, his gaunt cheeks sunken. His eyes were wide and fearful as he watched the picture panel and his fingers trembled as he lit his pipe. He kept watching.

“It could be so dangerous,” he murmured finally, turning to look at Schiml. “So terribly dangerous.”

Schiml nodded gravely, adjusting the microvernier that controlled the probing instrument. “Of course it could be dangerous, but not too much so. Twenty years ago he’d have been dead already, but we haven’t been wasting time all these years we’ve been waiting for him. Particularly in this cell-probing technique, we’ve ironed out the bugs. He’ll survive, all right, unless we run into something mighty—”

Conroe shook his head. “Oh, no, no. I don’t mean dangerous for him. I mean dangerous for us. Even he doesn’t realize his power. How can we predict what sort of power it might be?” He looked up at Schiml, his eyes wide. “That room—it would have been gone in another five minutes, simply torn apart into molecular dust. He did it—and yet, I’d swear he didn’t know what he was doing. I doubt if he even realized what was happening. And the fire—that was real fire, Roger. I know, I felt it burn me.”

Schiml nodded eagerly. “Of course it was real fire! Set molecules to spinning at terrifically accelerated rates and you have fire. But those are the things we have to learn, Paul.”

Conroe shook his head, fearfully. “We could both see the fire, but there was something else. You couldn’t feel the hatred that was in that room. I could.” He looked up, his eyes haunted. “God, Roger, how could a man hate that way? It was thick; it ran out into the room like syrup. Oh, I’ve felt hatred before in the minds I’ve contacted, many times. I’ve felt vile hatred before, but this was alive, crawling hate—” He sighed, his hands trembling. “It’s in his mind, Roger. We don’t know what else he might do, even under anesthetic, if we hit the right places. But it’s in his mind. That we know. But why?”

Schiml nodded again. “That’s the key question, of course. Why does he hate you so much? When we know that”—the doctor spread his hands—“we’ll have the answer to twenty years’ work, perhaps. And dangerous as it is, we’ve got to find out, while we have a chance, Paul. You know that. We can’t stop now, not with what we know. We know that Jeff’s insanity is far less active right now than his father’s was. But unless we can locate the areas, find the location of both factors, the psychosis and the extra-sensory powers, we’re lost. We’d have no recourse but to turn our findings over to the authorities. And you know what that would mean.”

Conroe nodded wearily. “Yes, I know. Mass slaughter, sterilization, fear, panic—all the wrong answers. And even the panic alone would be fatal in our psychotic world.”

Dr. Schiml shrugged and went back to the bedside. “We’ll know soon, one way or the other,” he said softly. “We’re coming through right now.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

The needle moved, probed ever so slightly, stimulating deep, deep in the soft, fragile tissue…seeking, probing, recording. A twinge, the barest trace of shock, a sharp series of firing nerve cells, a flicker of light, a picture—Jeff Meyer shifted, his eyelids lowering very slightly, and a muscle in his jaw began twitching involuntarily.…

* * * *

He was floating gently on his back, resting on huge, fluffy, billowing clouds. He didn’t know where he was, nor did he care. He just lay still, spinning gently, like a man in free fall, feeling the gentle clouds around him pressing him downward and downward. His eyes were closed tightly—so tightly that no ray of light might leak in. He knew as he floated that whatever happened, he dare not open them.

But then there were sounds around him. He felt his muscles tighten and he clasped his chest with his arms. There were things floating through the air around him, and they were making little sounds: tiny squeaks and groans. He shuddered, suddenly horribly afraid. The noises grew louder and louder, whispering into his ear, laughing at him.

He opened his eyes with a jolt, staring at the long, black, hollow tunnel he was falling through. He was spinning, end over end, faster and faster down the tunnel. He strained to see through the darkness to the bottom, but he couldn’t. Then the laughter started. First little, quiet giggles, quite near his ear, but growing louder and louder—unpleasant laughs, chuckles, guffaws. They followed each other, peal upon peal of insane laughter, reverberating from the curved tunnel walls, growing louder and louder, more and more derisive. They were laughing at him—whoever they were—and their laughs rose into screams in his ears. Then to gain silence he was forced to scream out himself. And he clasped his hands to his ears and shut his eyes tight—and abruptly the laughter stopped. Everything stopped.

He lay tense, listening. No, not everything. There were some sounds. Somewhere in the distance he could hear the bzz-bzz-bzz of a cicada. It sounded sharp in the summer night air. He rolled over, felt the crisp sheets under him, the soft pillow, the rustling of the light blanket. Where?…

And then it came to him, clearly. He was in his room, waiting, waiting and expecting.

Daddy! Quite suddenly, he knew that Daddy had come home. There had been no sound in the dark house; he hadn’t even heard the jet-car go into the garage, nor the front door squeak. But he had known, just the same, that Daddy was here. He blinked at the darkness, and little chills of fright ran up his spine. It was so dark, and he didn’t like the dark, and he wished Daddy would come up and turn on the light. But Daddy had said ever since Mommy died that he must be a brave little man, even if he was only four.…

He lay and shivered. There were other noises: outside the window, in the room—frightening noises. It was all very well to be a brave little man, but Daddy just didn’t understand about the dark and the noises. And Daddy didn’t understand about how he wanted somebody to hold him close and cuddle him and whisper to him.

And then he heard Daddy’s step on the stair and felt him coming nearer. He rolled over and giggled, pretending to be asleep. Not that he’d fool Daddy for a minute. Daddy would already know he was awake. They played the same game night after night. But it was fun to play little games like that with Daddy. He waited, listening until he heard the door open, and the footsteps reach his bed. He heard Daddy’s breathing. And then he rolled over and threw the covers off and jumped up like a little white ghost, shouting, “Boo! Did I scare you, Daddy?”

And then Daddy took him up on his shoulders and laughed, and said he was a big white horse come to carry little Jeff on a long journey. So they took the long journey down to the study for milk and cookies, just as they always did when Daddy came home. He knew Daddy didn’t want any milk, of course. Daddy never drank milk at night with him. Daddy was much more interested in the funny cards, the cards he had watched Daddy make that day a year ago. Daddy had him run through them over and over and over…circle, spiral, figure eight, letter B, letter R.… It was a letter R, Daddy? But it couldn’t have been, I know—oh, you’re trying to catch me! Can we play with the marbles now, Daddy? Or the dice tonight? The round-cornered ones—they’re much easier, you know.

But Daddy would watch him as he read the cards, wrinkling up his nose and calling out the figure. And he would see Daddy mark down each right one and each wrong one. And then he would feel Daddy almost beaming happiness and satisfaction. And he would wait eagerly for Daddy to get out the dice, because they were so much more fun than the cards. The square-cornered dice, Daddy? Oh, Daddy, they’re so much harder. Oh, another game, a new one? Oh, good, Daddy. Teach me a new game with them, please. I’ll try very hard to make them come out right.

And then after the new game, Daddy told him a story before bed. It was one of his funny stories, where he talked the story, but put in all the fun and jokes and private things without any words.

It was funny. None of the others, like Mary Ann down the block, could feel their daddies like he could. Sometimes he wondered about it. He would tell Mary Ann about it as a special secret, but she wouldn’t believe him. Nobody can hear their daddies without their daddies talking, she said. But he knew better.

And then there were thoughts creeping through his mind, feelings coming from Daddy that were uncomfortable feelings. He sat up suddenly in Daddy’s arms and felt the chill pass through him.

“Daddy.…

“Yes, son.”

“Why—why are you afraid, Daddy? What are you afraid of?”

And Daddy laughed and looked at him in a strange way and said, “Afraid? What do you mean, afraid?” But the afraidness was still there. Even when he went to bed and Daddy left him again, he could still feel the afraidness.…

And then, abruptly, he was swinging into a vast, roaring whirlpool that swung around his head. He felt his body twisting in the blackness, swirling about, carried along without effort. He knew, somehow, that he was Jeff Meyer. And he knew that the needle was there, probing in his mind; he could feel it approach and withdraw. He could feel the twinge of recognition, the almost intangible sudden awareness and realization of a truth.

Then the seeker was gone: the probe finished in that area and moved on to the next. The whirlpool was a tunnel of rushing water, swinging about him, whirling him with lightning speed up…up…up; around, then down with a sickening rush. Then up again, as though he were riding the Wall of Death in a circus, around and around…yet always drawing him in closer…closer…closer.…

To what?

He knew he was fighting it, twisting with all his strength to fight against the impossible whirlpool which choked and carried him like a feather. He clenched his fists and fought, gritting his teeth, desperate, suddenly horribly afraid, more horribly afraid than he had ever been in his life. Down at the end of the tumultuous whirlpool, something lay—something horrid and ugly, something that had been wiped out of his mind, scoured out and disposed of long, long ago. It was something he dared not face, never again. Suddenly Jeff screamed and tried to force his mind back to that place. He tried desperately to remember, tried to see where the whirlpool was leading him before it was too late—before it killed him!

Something lay down there, waiting for him. It was more hideous than his mind could imagine—something which could kill him. Closer and closer he swept, helpless, his body growing rigid with fear, fighting, blood rushing through his veins. But he couldn’t escape that closed, frantic alleyway to death.

Daddy was afraid. The thought screamed through Jeff’s mind with the impact of a lightning bolt. It paralyzed his thoughts, tightened his muscles into rigid knots. Daddy was afraid…afraid…afraid—so horribly afraid.

The thought swept through him, congealing his blood. He cried out, shaking his head, trying to fight away the seeping stench of deadly fear, trying to clear it out of his mind. His face twisted in agony and his whole body wrenched. Suddenly, he was screaming and pounding his face against the ground. He was alone and his mind was wracked and obsessed by that horrible fear.

He opened his eyes and saw the turf under his head. Dimly, through the pain sweeping through his mind, he saw the grassy meadow on which he lay, completely by himself. The little singing brook was a few feet away. The afternoon sun was high, but the willow tree hung over him, covering him with cool shade. From somewhere a bird was singing.

“Daddy!” The word broke from his lips in a small scream, and he sat bolt upright, his hair tousled, his small, keen-featured eight-year-old face twisted with the pain and fear that tore through his mind. Some corner of his brain, so very remote, told him that he was not eight, that he was a grown man. But he saw his tiny hands, grubby with the dirt of the barnyard and lane through which he had walked in coming here. He had been driven here by the pain and fear and hatred that had been streaming into his mind.

It was Daddy. He knew it was Daddy, and Daddy was afraid. Daddy was running, with the desperation of a hunted animal, running down a corridor, his mind in a frenzy of fear. He was peering back over his shoulder, his breath coming in great gasps as he reached the end of the hall, wrenched vainly at the door and then collapsed against it. And while he sobbed in great gasps, tears of fear and desperation ran down his cheeks.

Jeff saw the door; he felt Daddy’s body heaving, heard the furious pulse pounding in his own head. He saw the cold, darkened corridor, and his mind was picked up in the frenzied sweep of his father’s thoughts, carried in a rush he could neither understand nor oppose. Stronger than ever before, his thoughts were Daddy’s thoughts. He saw through Daddy’s eyes; he felt through Daddy’s body. In the closest rapport they had ever known, though Jeff lay here on the grassy plot, his body writhed with the pain and fear that Daddy was suffering miles distant.

They’re coming, his mind screamed. Trapped, trapped—what can I do? Daddy was racing back up the corridor now, his eye catching an elevator standing open. He ran inside, groped frantically for the switch. He had to get away, had to get down below, somehow get to the street! Oh, God, what a mistake to walk into this place—an office building, of all places, where they could so easily follow him in, cut him off, trap him!

Why had he come? Why? He’d known they were hunting for him, knew they’d been getting closer and closer. But how could he have sensed that this day would bring a panic, that the stock market would take its nosedive this one particular day, putting the finger on him without any question, spotting him, pointing out his exact location to his hunters, beyond shadow of doubt?

How could he have known? This was to have been the final test, the test to prove the force he had in his mind—the force which had been destroying and destroying and destroying. And it had emanated from his own mind in some unspeakable way, uncontrolled, unbelieved and misunderstood. It was the force which had brought the hunters to him.

But not now! Oh, please, please, not now—not when he was so close to the answer. Not when he was so close. Slowly, helpless anger seethed through his mind. They had no right to stop him now. In another day, another week, he could have the answer. In another few days he would have corralled this frightening power, controlled it. He knew he could find the answer. He stood on the very brink. But now the hunters had trapped him—

Why, Daddy? Why are they hunting you? Oh, Daddy, Daddy, please, I’m so scared! Please, Daddy, come home. Please don’t be so much afraid, Daddy. I’m so frightened.…

The elevator gave a lurch. He fell against the door as the car ground to a halt between floors. Frantically, he pounded the button, waited through long eternities as the car sat, silent, motionless. Then his fingers ran hastily along the cracks in the car door, seeking a hold, trying desperately to wrench open the locked door.

He felt them coming, somewhere above him, somewhere below him. Then something tore loose in his mind; some last dam of control broke, and he was screaming his defiance at them, screaming his hatred, his bitterness. They had him, they were going to kill him without trial, shoot him down like a mad dog. He felt them flinch and cower back at the stream of hatred roaring out of his mind, felt them move back. They were afraid of him, but they were determined to kill him.

A sound above! He flattened back against the elevator wall, wrenching at the metal grating with superhuman strength, trying to twist open the metal, to find some way into the shaft below. Someone was coming down from above, down onto the top of the elevator; someone whose mind was filled with fear, but who moved with determination. There was a scraping sound from above, a dull twang of cable striking against cable.

They could be cutting the car loose.

He leaped for the ceiling of the car, stabbing up with his fingers for the little escape doorway. Sheer hatred drove his legs as he jumped and jumped again, until the door flew up. His hand caught the rim, and he dragged his body up. He jerked his shoulders through the small opening, heaving and lunging through to the top of the car.

He looked up. He saw a face, a single face, hanging mistily above him. Dimly he made out the form of a man hanging on the cable twenty feet above. His legs were wrapped around the cables and one hand carried the small, dully gleaming weapon. His mind screamed hatred at the man, and he grabbed at the cables, wrenching them, shaking them like a huge tree. He saw the man slowly moving down, spinning back and forth helplessly as the cables vibrated. But he held on tenaciously, moving closer.

Daddy! Stop him! Daddy, don’t let him kill you.

The face came into clearer view: a thin face, an evil one, twisted with fear and pain. The figure moved slowly down the cables, slowly turning, lifting the arm with the weapon, patiently trying to take aim. It was a gaunt face, with high cheekbones, slightly bulging eyes, high flat forehead, graying hair. Remember that face, Jeff. Never forget that face, that face is the face of the man who is butchering your father. Hatred streamed out at the face; he crouched back against the wall of the shaft, wrenching at the cables, trying vainly to shake the killer loose. He had to get him first; he had to stop him. He’s so close; he’s turning; the gun is raising. I’ll never get him—

The face, hovering close, eyes wide—the face of a ghoul—and below the face was the dull, round hole of the gun muzzle, just inches away. A finger tightened. A horrible flash came, straight in the eyes—

Daddy!

The thoughts screamed through his mind: the bitter, naked hatred, the hatred of madness, streaming out in one last searing inferno. Then came a sickening lurch, a lurch of maddened fear and hate. And there was the snuffing out of a light, leaving darkness.…

Daddy! No, Daddy. No, I can’t feel you any more, Daddy. What have they done to you? Oh, please, Daddy, talk to me. Talk to me. No, no, no. Oh, Daddy, Daddy, Daddy.…

Dr. Schiml looked up from the pale, prostrate form after a long time; his forehead was beaded with sweat. The color had drained almost completely from Jeff’s face, and his skin had taken a waxy cast. His breathing was so shallow it was hardly audible in the still room, and the panel of flickering lights had become almost completely still.

“We can’t go on yet,” said Dr. Schiml, his voice hoarse. “We’ll have to wait.” He turned and walked across the room, trying to keep his eyes away from the prostrate form on the bed; yet everywhere he went, it seemed his eyes caught the idiotic stare in the man’s blank eyes. “Well have to wait,” he repeated, and his voice was almost a sob.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Paul Conroe moved for the first time, running a hand through his thick gray hair as he glanced up at Schiml. “Some of that came through to me, even now,” he said weakly. His face, also, was ashen and his eyes were haunted. “To think that he hated me that much, and to think why he hated me—” He shook his head and buried his face in his hands. “I never knew about the old man and the son. I just never knew. If I’d known, I’d never have done it.”

The room was still for a long moment. Then Schiml blinked at Conroe, his hands trembling. “So this is the tremendous power, the mutant strain we’ve been trying to trace for so long.”

“This is one of the tremendous powers,” Conroe replied wearily. “Jeff probably has all the power that his father had, though it hasn’t all matured yet. It’s just latent, waiting for the time that the genes demand of his body for fulfillment. Nothing more. And other people have the same powers. Hundreds, thousands of other people. Somewhere, a hundred and fifty years ago, there was a change—a little change in one man or one woman.”

He looked up at Schiml, the haunted look still in his large eyes. “Extra-sensory powers—no doubt of it, a true mutant strain, but tied in to a sleeper—a black gene that spells insanity. One became two and two spread to four—extra-sensory power and gene-linked insanity. Always together, growing, insidiously growing like a cancer. And it’s eating out the roots of our civilization.”

He stood up, walked across the room and stared down at the pallid-faced man in the bed. “This answers so many things, Roger,” he said finally. “We knew old Jacob Meyer had a son, of course. We even suspected then that the son might share some of his powers. But this! We never dreamed it. The father and son were practically two people with one mind, in almost perfect mutual rapport. Only the son was so young he couldn’t understand what was wrong. All he knew was that he ‘felt’ Daddy and could tell what Daddy was thinking. Actually, everything that went on in his father’s mind—everything—was in his mind too. At least, in the peak of the old man’s cycle of insanity—”

Schiml looked up sharply. “Then there’s no doubt in your mind that the old man was insane?”

Conroe shook his head. “Oh, no. There was no doubt. He was insane, all right. A psychiatric analysis of his behavior was enough to convince me of that, even if following him and watching him wasn’t. He had a regular cycle of elation and depression, so regular it could almost be clocked. He’d even spotted the symptoms of the psychosis himself, back in his college days. But of course he hadn’t realized what it was. All he knew was that at certain times he seemed to be surrounded by these peculiar phenomena, which happened rapidly and regularly at those times when he was feeling elated, on top of the world. And at other times he seemed to carry with him an aura of depression. Actually, when he hit the blackest depths of his depressions, he would be bringing about whole waves of suicides and depression—errors and everything else.”

Conroe took a deep breath. “We knew all this at the time, of course. What we didn’t know was that the old man had been seeking the answer himself, actively seeking it. All we knew was that he was actively the most dangerous man alive on Earth, and that until he was killed he would become more and more dangerous—dangerous enough to shake the very roots of our civilization.”

Schiml nodded slowly. “And you’re sure that his destructive use of his power was a result directly of the insanity?”

Conroe frowned. “Not quite,” he said after a moment. “Actually, you couldn’t say that Jacob Meyer ‘used’ his extra-sensory powers. They weren’t, for the most part, the kind of powers he could either control or ‘use.’ They were the sort of powers that just happened. He had a power, and when he was running high—in a period of elation, when everything was on top of the world—the power functioned. He fairly exuded this power that he carried, and the higher he rose in his elation, the more viciously dangerous the power became.”

Conroe stopped, staring at the bed for a long moment. “The hellish thing was that it couldn’t possibly be connected up with a human power at all. After all, how can one human being have an overwhelming effect on the progress of a business cycle? He can’t, of course, unless he’s a dictator, or a tremendously powerful person in some other field. And Jacob Meyer was neither. He was a simple, half-starved statistician with a bunch of ideas that he couldn’t even understand himself, much less sell to anyone who could do anything with them. Or how can a man, just by being in the vicinity, tip the balance that topples the stock market into an almost irreparable sag?”

Conroe leaned forward, groping for words. “Jacob Meyer’s psychokinesis was not the sort of telekinesis that we saw Jeff turning against me in that room a couple of hours ago. He could probably have managed that, too, if he had hated me enough. But if Jacob Meyer’s mind had merely affected physical things—the turn of a card, the fall of the dice, the movement of molecules from one place to another—he would have been a simple problem. We could have isolated him, studied him. But it wasn’t that simple.”

Paul Conroe sat back, regarding Schiml with large, sad eyes. “It would have been impossible to prove in a court of law. We knew it and the government knew it. That was why they appointed us assassins to deal with him. Because Jacob Meyer’s mind affected probabilities. By his very presence, in a period of elation, he upset the normal probabilities of occurrences going on around him. We watched him, Roger. It was incredible. We watched him in the stock market, and we saw the panic start almost the moment he walked in. We saw the buyers suddenly and inexplicably change their minds and start selling instead of buying. We saw what happened in the Bank of the Metropolis that first day we tried for him. He was scared, his mind was driven into a peak of fear and anger; it started a bank run that morning that nearly bankrupted the most powerful financial house on the East Coast! We saw this one little man’s personal, individual influence on international diplomacy, on finances, on gambling in Reno, on the thinking and acting of the man on the street. It was incredible, Roger.”

“But surely Jacob Meyer wasn’t the only one—”

“Oh, there were others, certainly. We’ve a better idea of that, now, after all these years of study. There were and are thousands and thousands—some like me, some much worse—all carrying some degree of extra-sensory power from that original mutant strain, all with the gene-linked psychosis paired up with it every time. And we’ve seen our civilization struggling against these thousands just to keep its feet. But Jacob Meyer was the first case of the whole, full-blown change in one man that we’d ever found. He was running wild, his mind was completely insane. And the extra-sensory powers he carried were so firmly enmeshed in the insanity that there was no separating the two. Meyer tipped us off. He set us on the trail, and the trail led to his son after he was dead—”

“Yes, the son. We have the son.” Schiml scowled at the shallow-breathing form on the bed. “We should have had him before—years before.”

“Of course we should. But the son vanished after his father’s death. We never knew why he vanished—until now. But now we know that when we killed his father, we did more than just that. We almost killed our last chance to catch this thing and study it before it was too late. Because when we killed Jeff’s father, we killed Jeff Meyer too.”

Schiml scowled. “I don’t follow. He’s still alive.”

“Oh, of course he’s still alive. But can’t you see what happened to him? He was living in his father’s mind; he knew everything his father knew—but he didn’t understand it. He thought with his father’s thoughts, he saw through his father’s eyes, because they were mutually and completely telepathic. He felt his father’s fear and frustration and bitterness when we trapped him in that office building finally. He lay screaming on the ground on a farm somewhere, but actually he was in his father’s mind.

“It was a mad mind, a mind rising to the highest screaming heights of mania, as he waited for me to come down and kill him. And Jeff was surrounded with his father’s hatred. He saw my face through his father’s eyes, and all he could understand was that his daddy was being butchered and that I was butchering him. When the bullet went into his father’s brain and split his skull open, Jeff Meyer felt that too. When his father died, Jeff died too—a part of him, that is. They were one mind and part of that one mind was destroyed.”

Conroe paused, his forehead covered with perspiration. The room was silent except for the hoarse breathing of the man on the table. Conroe’s face, as he looked down, was that of a ghost.

“No wonder the boy disappeared,” he whispered. “He’d been shot through the head. He was almost virtually dead. He must have gone into shock for years after such a trauma, Roger. He must have spent years roaming that farm, cared for by an aunt or uncle or cousin, while he slowly recovered. No wonder we could find no trace. And then, when he did get well, all he knew was that his father had been murdered. He didn’t know how; he didn’t know why, and he dared never remember the truth. Because, the truth was that he had been killed. All he dared recognize was my face—a recurrent, nightmarish hallucination, rising out of his dreams, plaguing him on the streets, tormenting him day and night.”

“But you were hunting him.”

“Oh, yes, we were hunting him. It was inevitable that sooner or later we would come up face to face. But when we did, I received such a horrible mental blow that I couldn’t even look to see what he looked like. I could do nothing but scream and run. When he saw me that day in the night club, he took complete leave of his senses. He exploded into hatred and bitterness. And then he resolved to hunt me down and kill me for killing his father.”

Conroe spread his hands apologetically. “It seemed good sense to use that hatred and singleness of purpose to draw him here. But it was torture. He followed me with his mind, without even knowing it. It was old Jacob Meyer’s face that haunted me everywhere I went. I didn’t know why, then, because I didn’t know Jeff had been part of that mind. And Jeff didn’t know that he carried and broadcast that horror wherever he went.”

Conroe leaned back, his body limp in exhaustion. “We needed Jeff so desperately. Yes, we needed him in here, for testing, for this study. It’s been a long, tedious job, studying him, observing him, photographing him, learning how much of his father’s power he had. And we dared not bring him in here until we were sure it was safe. And now, with what he knows, he is more vitally dangerous than his father ever was. There are hundreds that carry the change, in larger or smaller part, all gene-linked with insanity. And Jeff Meyer is insane as any of the rest of them. But at least there’s hope, because we can study him now. Because unless we can somehow separate the function of the insanity from the function of the psychokinesis, we have no choice left, no hope.”

Schiml looked up, his eyes wide. “No choice—”

“—but to kill them, every one. To hunt out the strain and wipe it from the face of the Earth so ruthlessly and completely that it can never rise again. And to wipe out with it the first new link in the evolution of Man since the dawn of history.”

Slowly Roger Schiml’s eyes traveled from Jeff Meyers’ form on the bed to Paul Conroe’s grave face. “There’s no other way?”

“None,” said Paul Conroe.

* * * *

“Jeff,” said Dr. Schiml. “Jeff Meyer.”

The figure on the cot stirred ever so slightly. The eyes slowly closed, then reopened, looking slightly less blank. Jeff’s lips parted in an almost inaudible groan, hardly more than a breath.

“Jeff. You’ve got to hear me a minute. Listen, Jeff, we’re trying to help you. Can you hear that? We’re trying to help you, Jeff, and we need your help.”

The eyes shifted, turned to Schiml’s face. They were haunted eyes—eyes that had seen the grave and beyond it.

“Please, Jeff. Listen. We’re hunting. We’re trying to find a way to help you. You know about your father now, the truth about your father, don’t you?”

The eyes wavered, came back, and the head nodded ever so slightly. “I know,” came the sighing reply.

“You’ve got to tell us what to do, Jeff. There are good powers here in your mind, and there are terrible powers, ruinous powers. We’ve got to find them both, find where they lie, how they work. You must tell us, as we probe—tell us when we strike the good, when we strike the bad. Do you understand, Jeff?”

Again the head nodded. Jeff’s jaw tightened a trifle and an expression of infinite fatigue crossed his face. “Go on, Doc.”

Dr. Schiml leaned over the proper controls and moved the dial on the microvernier. He moved it again, watching, moving it still again. A fine sweat broke out on his forehead as he worked, and he felt Conroe’s soft eyes on him, waiting, hoping.…

And then a whimper broke from Jeff’s lips, an indefinable sound, helpless and childlike, a little cry of terror. Dr. Schiml looked up, his heart thumping in his throat. Jeff’s eyes were wide again, staring lifelessly, and his breath was shallow and thready. Schiml glanced quickly at Conroe, then back, his eyes reflecting the fear and tension in his mind. And as he worked his shoulders slumped forward, prepared for defeat. Because what he was doing was impossible, and he knew it was impossible. But he knew, above all, that it had to succeed.

* * * *

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

He was spinning like a top, end over end, as though he had sprung off a huge, powerful diving board. He rose higher and higher into the air. Lying tense, Jeff knew that his body was still on the soft bed, yet he felt his feet rising, his head sinking, as he spun head over heels through the blackness. And he could feel the tiny probing needle, seeking, hunting, stimulating.…

A siren noise burst in his ears: a shimmering blast of screeching musical sound that sent cold shivers down his back. Then it leveled off to an up-and-down whine that gradually became a blat of static in his ear. Somewhere, out of the uneven grating of the noise, he heard a voice whispering in his ear, hoarsely. He paused, straining to hear, trying to catch an occasional word.

He knew that there were no voices outside of his body. He was sure of that. Yet he heard the sound, deeper in his ear, louder and softer, then louder again. It whispered to him, carrying a note of deepest urgency in the soft sibilants. Quite suddenly, it seemed vitally important to hear what the voice was saying, for the words were clearly directed at him. He shifted slightly and listened harder, until the words came through clearly.

And then he gasped, a feeling of panic sweeping through him. He heard the words and they were nonsense words, sounds without meanings. Something stirred in his mind, some vague memory of nonsense words, of a horrible shock. Had there been a shock? But the strange sounds frightened him, driving fear down through the marrow of his bones. The whispering sounds were sinister: babbling sounds, sounds of words that needed meaning and had none—half-words, garbled, twisted, meaningless.

Cautiously he opened his eyes, peered through the murky blackness to see the whisperers. His eyes fastened on two shapeless forms, tall, ghostly, in black robes with hoods drawn up over their faces. The figures leaned on their sticks and held their heads together. They babbled nonsense to each other with such fierce earnestness that they seemed somehow horridly ridiculous. Taking a deep breath, Jeff started toward the two figures, then stopped short, his heart pounding wildly in his throat.

Because the moment he had made a move toward them, the figures turned sharply toward him, and their nonsense voices had suddenly become clear for the briefest moment. They became clear and unmistakable and heavy with horrible meaning: “Stay away, Jeff Meyer. Stay away.”

He stared about, trembling, trying to place himself, trying to find some landmark. The hooded figures turned back to each other and began babbling once again. But now they seemed to be standing before an archway—a gloomy, gray archway which they seemed to be guarding. Slowly, slyly, Jeff started to move away from them. But he watched them from stealthy eyes, and as he moved away the gloom about him cleared, and things were suddenly brighter. And then there was singing in his ears, joyous choruses bursting forth in happy song. A great feeling of relief and complacency settled down upon him like a mantle. He smiled and breathed deeper and started to roll over.

“What was that, Jeff? What did we strike?”

He shook his head violently, a frown creasing his face. “Stay away,” he muttered. “The old men, they were there.” Suddenly he felt himself twist around until he was facing the hooded figures again, and his feet were moving him toward them again, involuntarily, inexorably. And then the nonsense words settled out again, more menacingly, louder this time than before: “No closer, Jeff Meyer. Stay away—away—away.”

“Can’t go there,” he muttered aloud.

“Why not, Jeff?”

“They won’t let me. I’ve got to stay away.”

“What are they guarding, Jeff?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know, I tell you. I’ve got to stay away!”

And then suddenly the singing dissolved into a hideous cacophony of clashing sounds, a din that nearly deafened him. A huge wave suddenly swept up around him. It was like a breaker at the ocean’s edge, swirling up, surrounding him, catching him up and hurling him head over heels down a long, whirling tunnel. Desperately he fought for balance and finally found his feet under him once again. But then the ground was moving under him. He ran frantically, until his breath came in short gasps and his blood pounded in his ears. Then he caught a branch that swept by near him, and raised himself up as the flooding water roared underneath him.

The sky around him was clouding over blackly. Far in the distance he saw a blinding flash of lightning, ripping through the sky, bringing the bleak, wind-torn landscape into sharp relief in his mind as he clung to the branch. He heard a flapping of wings as a huge, black vulture skimmed by. And then the rain began to fall, a cold, soaking rain that ate through his clothes and soaked his skin. It ran in torrents into his eyes and ears and mouth.

And then he heard voices all around him. How could there be voices here? For there were no people, no sign of warm-blooded life. But there were voices, pleasant ones. They came from all sides. He could see no one, but he could feel them.

Feel them! He gasped in pure joy, shooting out his mind eagerly, unbelievingly, searching out the sudden feeling of perfect, warm contact he had just felt. And then his mind was running from person to person, dozens of persons, and he could feel them all, as clearly, as wondrously as he had ever felt his father—sharply, beautifully.

He cried out, he cried out for joy. Tears of unrelieved happiness rolled down his cheeks as he stretched out his mind and embraced the thoughts of the people he could feel but not see. And he felt his own thoughts being met, being caught and embraced and understood.

“Right here!” he shouted. “Schiml, this is it, don’t lose it, man. This is the center. I’m controlling it. You’ve got it now. Work it, Schiml. Work it for all you’ve got.”

And then he looked at the black, menacing sky around him, and his mind laughed and cried out for the clouds to go away. And there was a wild whirling of clouds and they broke, and the sun was streaming down upon him suddenly. He threw himself from the tree, ran down the hillside. He felt a wonderful, overpowering freedom he had never felt before, his mind free to soar and soar without hindrance. There was nothing now to stand between it and complete understanding of all men. It was a mind which could go wherever he wanted it to go, do whatever he wished.

He ran down toward the bottom of the hill and felt his control growing with every step he took. He knew when he reached the bottom of the hill that the battle would be won, so he ran all the faster.

And then, like some horrible nightmare, the hooded figures loomed up directly in his path, long bony fingers stabbing out at him accusingly. He fell flat on his face at the overpowering warning in the voices that struck him. And he lay at the feet of the figures and sobbed, his whole body shaking with bitter, hopeless sobs. And the dark clouds gathered again. He was too late, too late.

“What are they guarding, Jeff?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know. I can’t break through.”

“You’ve got to, Jeff. You’ve got to! We’ve got the extra-sensory center. We’ve found it, but something is blocking it. Jeff, something is keeping you away. You’ve got to see what—”

“I can’t. Oh, I can’t. Please, don’t make me!”

“You must, Jeff!”

“No!”

“Go on, Jeff.”

He stood up, facing the hood figures, cowering, his whole body trembling. Deep in his mind he could feel the probing needle, moving, slowly moving, forcing him nearer and nearer to the grim figures. Slowly his feet moved, dragging in fear, a paralyzing fear that demanded every ounce of strength he possessed to make his legs function. And the voices, laden with menace, were grating in his ear, “Stay out, stay away. If you want to live, stay away…away…away.…

He moved closer and closer to the hooded figures, leaned forward to peer around them toward the gray, ghastly gate they guarded—a gate heavy with mold and rusty iron braces.

And then he reached up and threw back the hood of the first figure, stared at the face it had covered, and burst into a scream.

It was his own face!

He turned and threw back the other hood and peered intently, fighting to see the face before the features blurred out beyond recognition. It was his face, too, unmistakable. With a roar of anger and frustration he reached out, tore away the hoods, ripped them off, one with each hand, and wrenched away the enclosing shrouds.

The figures were skeletons with his face! He struck them and they shattered like thin glass, falling down in pieces at his feet. And he brushed his feet through the debris and turned to press his shoulder against the gate, heaving against it until it swung open, creaking on rusty hinges. It swung open—on the face of madness.

He screamed twice, short, frantic screams, as he tried to hide his eyes from the rotten, writhing horror behind the gate.

“Here!” he screamed. “It’s here. You’re at the right place. This is what you’re looking for. Cut it out. Slice it away. Please, I can’t stand it any longer.”

His feet moved through the horrible gate, into the swarming, loathsome, horror-ridden madness that lay beyond. And he screamed again as he saw the bright flash. He felt the wrenching, sickening lurch that took him and threw him to the ground, down the long, twisting channels of darkness, as the pain struck through his head.

Suddenly there was another blinding flash, and he felt his muscles and his mind crumble into dust. He fell and quivered and lay helplessly, as his mind sifted and drained away into the porous earth beneath him.

* * * *

When he opened his eyes, he saw Conroe’s face. He was tense for a moment, every muscle going into spasm. Then suddenly he relaxed and blinked and stared up at Conroe’s face, his eyes filled with wonder.

“I’m sorry, Jeff. I don’t know the words to tell you how sorry.” There were tears in Conroe’s eyes, and Jeff watched them and felt a chill of wonder run down his spine. For Conroe was not using words at all and yet he knew what Conroe wanted to say.

Wordlessly he reached up, took the man’s hand, pressed it briefly and let it fall on the blanket again. “There aren’t those kinds of words,” he murmured.

“And you feel all right?”

Jeff blinked, sudden wonder dawning in his eyes. “I—I—I’m alive!” He struggled to sit up, felt the twinge of pain shoot down his spine.

Schiml moved up to the bedside and gently eased him back into the softness of the bed. “Yes,” he said happily, “you’re alive. And you’re well. And there’s no irony in calling you a Mercy Man.” His eyes gleamed in happy triumph. “You’re a whole man, Jeff—the way you were intended to be—for the first time in your life.”

The words came to him clearly, yet Jeff knew that not a single word had been audible in the room. “Just like my father,” he murmured. “I just felt him, just knew what he was thinking.”

Tears were running down Schiml’s cheeks, and his face was so infinitely happy that he hardly seemed the same man. He raised a finger, silently pointed to the water glass on the table and looked at Jeff. Jeff turned his eyes to the glass, and it rose half an inch from the table and hung there, glowing slightly in the dim light of the room. Then it gently set back on the stand.

“Control,” Jeff said softly. “I have control.”

“The power was chained down to something else,” Schiml said softly. “You had the extra-sensory power, yes, but it was linked to something that would have prevented you from ever gaining control. A degenerative insanity, part and parcel of the extra-sensory power. You’re not alone, Jeff. There are many hundreds like you, in greater or lesser degrees. Conroe is like you, to a very limited extent. And he’s been seeking a way to separate the two, for years. That’s why you’re really a Mercy Man. We knew there were two centers, but we knew no way to separate them. We had to have you to guide us, Jeff. We had to find the center of insanity in your brain to cut it out and deliver you. That’s what we’ve waited twenty years for. And you’re free, now. It’s gone. And now we have a technique we can use to free a thousand others like you.”

Jeff stared at them wonderingly. Sunlight streamed in the window. Across the way, he could see the ward-towers of the Hoffman Medical Center, white and gleaming. He took a deep breath of the fresh air and turned again to the two men standing by the bedside.

“Then it was you who were hunting me,” he murmured. “Strange, isn’t it. It wasn’t me hunting Conroe. It was my father, the ghost of my father still in my mind. The ghost of a madman—” His eyes narrowed and he stared at Schiml closely. “Then there were others who knew too. Blackie knew. She must have been the girl in the night club.”

“She was. A little heavy make-up, a little light plastic, those made enough change to deceive you. But she never knew why. Hypnotics can be powerful and they can erase all memory.” He paused, smiling at Jeff. “Blackie will be next. We need her so much in the work we have to do, almost as much as we need you. But you’ve freed Blackie too. She’ll be happier than she’s ever been since the cloak of bad luck began broadcasting from her mind ten years ago. She’ll be happier by far.”

* * * *

Hours later, Jeff woke again in the still room. The men were gone and the shadows were lengthening in the room, and his mind was filled with many thoughts.

“You can go if you want,” Paul Conroe had said before they left. “Or you can stay, as you see fit. If you go, we can’t stop you. But we beg you to stay. We need you so very much.”

There would be others staying, Jeff thought. The Nasty Frenchman would stay—sneering, laughing, hating—aiming at the big money that always lurked in the future, unaware completely of the errand of mercy he was running with his life. And Harpo would stay, and all the others.…

And Blackie would stay too. Poor, helpless Blackie—beautiful Blackie, desperate Blackie. For her there was a new lease. And there was no way of telling the person she would be after the new lease was signed for her.

And Conroe would stay, delivered after all these years of the burden he carried.

Wearily, yet happily, Jeff stared at the ceiling. He breathed deeply of the quiet air, his mind filled with a maze of wondering thoughts. He knew that thinking now was useless, that there really wasn’t any issue any more.

He knew, as he closed his eyes again, that Jeff Meyer would stay too.

FIRST LENSMAN, by E.E. “Doc” Smith [Part 1]

Originally published in 1950.

DEDICATION

To E. Everett Evans

CHAPTER 1

The visitor, making his way unobserved through the crowded main laboratory of The Hill, stepped up to within six feet of the back of a big Norwegian seated at an electrono-optical bench. Drawing an automatic pistol, he shot the apparently unsuspecting scientist seven times, as fast as he could pull the trigger; twice through the brain, five times, closely spaced, through the spine.

“Ah, Gharlane of Eddore, I have been expecting you to look me up. Sit down.” Blonde, blue-eyed Dr. Nels Bergenholm, completely undisturbed by the passage of the stream of bullets through his head and body, turned and waved one huge hand at a stool beside his own.

“But those were not ordinary projectiles!” the visitor protested. Neither person—or rather, entity—was in the least surprised that no one else had paid any attention to what had happened, but it was clear that the one was taken aback by the failure of his murderous attack. “They should have volatilized that form of flesh—should at least have blown you back to Arisia, where you belong.”

“Ordinary or extraordinary, what matter? As you, in the guise of Gray Roger, told Conway Costigan a short time since, ‘I permitted that, as a demonstration of futility.’ Know, Gharlane, once and for all, that you will no longer be allowed to act directly against any adherent of Civilization, wherever situate. We of Arisia will not interfere in person with your proposed conquest of the two galaxies as you have planned it, since the stresses and conflicts involved are necessary—and, I may add, sufficient—to produce the Civilization which must and shall come into being. Therefore, neither will you, or any other Eddorian, so interfere. You will go back to Eddore and you will stay there.”

“Think you so?” Gharlane sneered. “You, who have been so afraid of us for over two thousand million Tellurian years that you dared not let us even learn of you? So afraid of us that you dared not take any action to avert the destruction of any one of your budding Civilizations upon any one of the worlds of either galaxy? So afraid that you dare not, even now, meet me mind to mind, but insist upon the use of this slow and unsatisfactory oral communication between us?”

“Either your thinking is loose, confused, and turbid, which I do not believe to be the case, or you are trying to lull me into believing that you are stupid.” Bergenholm’s voice was calm, unmoved. “I do not think that you will go back to Eddore; I know it. You, too, as soon as you have become informed upon certain matters, will know it. You protest against the use of spoken language because it is, as you know, the easiest, simplest, and surest way of preventing you from securing any iota of the knowledge for which you are so desperately searching. As to a meeting of our two minds, they met fully just before you, operating as Gray Roger, remembered that which your entire race forgot long ago. As a consequence of that meeting I so learned every line and vibration of your life pattern as to be able to greet you by your symbol, Gharlane of Eddore, whereas you know nothing of me save that I am an Arisian, a fact which has been obvious from the first.”

In an attempt to create a diversion, Gharlane released the zone of compulsion which he had been holding; but the Arisian took it over so smoothly that no human being within range was conscious of any change.

“It is true that for many cycles of time we concealed our existence from you,” Bergenholm went on without a break. “Since the reason for that concealment will still further confuse you, I will tell you what it was. Had you Eddorians learned of us sooner you might have been able to forge a weapon of power sufficient to prevent the accomplishment of an end which is now certain.

“It is true that your operations as Lo Sung of Uighar were not constrained. As Mithridates of Pontus—as Sulla, Marius, and Nero of Rome—as Hannibal of Carthage—as those self-effacing wights Alcixerxes of Greece and Menocoptes of Egypt—as Genghis Khan and Attila and the Kaiser and Mussolini and Hitler and the Tyrant of Asia—you were allowed to do as you pleased. Similar activities upon Rigel Four, Velantia, Palain Seven, and elsewhere were also allowed to proceed without effective opposition. With the appearance of Virgil Samms, however, the time arrived to put an end to your customary pernicious, obstructive, and destructive activities. I therefore interposed a barrier between you and those who would otherwise be completely defenseless against you.”

“But why now? Why not thousands of cycles ago? And why Virgil Samms?”

“To answer those questions would be to give you valuable data. You may—too late—be able to answer them yourself. But to continue: you accuse me, and all Arisia, of cowardice; an evidently muddy and inept thought. Reflect, please, upon the completeness of your failure in the affair of Roger’s planetoid; upon the fact that you have accomplished nothing whatever since that time; upon the situation in which you now find yourself.

“Even though the trend of thought of your race is basically materialistic and mechanistic, and you belittle ours as being ‘philosophic’ and ‘impractical’, you found—much to your surprise—that your most destructive physical agencies are not able to affect even this form of flesh which I am now energizing, to say nothing of affecting the reality which is I.

“If this episode is the result of the customary thinking of the second-in-command of Eddore’s Innermost Circle…but no, my visualization cannot be that badly at fault. Overconfidence—the tyrant’s innate proclivity to underestimate an opponent—these things have put you into a false position; but I greatly fear that they will not operate to do so in any really important future affair.”

“Rest assured that they will not!” Gharlane snarled. “It may not be—exactly—cowardice. It is, however, something closely akin. If you could have acted effectively against us at any time in the past, you would have done so. If you could act effectively against us now, you would be acting, not talking. That is elementary—self-evidently true. So true that you have not tried to deny it—nor would you expect me to believe you if you did.” Cold black eyes stared level into icy eyes of Norwegian blue.

“Deny it? No. I am glad, however, that you used the word ‘effectively’ instead of ‘openly’; for we have been acting effectively against you ever since these newly-formed planets cooled sufficiently to permit of the development of intelligent life.”

“What? You have? How?”

“That, too, you may learn—too late. I have now said all I intend to say. I will give you no more information. Since you already know that there are more adult Arisians than there are Eddorians, so that at least one of us can devote his full attention to blocking the direct effort of any one of you, it is clear to you that it makes no difference to me whether you elect to go or to stay. I can and I will remain here as long as you do; I can and I will accompany you whenever you venture out of the volume of space protected by Eddorian screen, wherever you go. The election is yours.”

Gharlane disappeared. So did the Arisian—instantaneously. Dr. Nels Bergenholm, however, remained. Turning, he resumed his work where he had left off, knowing exactly what he had been doing and exactly what he was going to do to finish it. He released the zone of compulsion, which he had been holding upon every human being within sight or hearing, so dexterously that no one suspected, then or ever, that anything out of the ordinary had happened. He knew these things and did these things in spite of the fact that the form of flesh which his fellows of the Triplanetary Service knew as Nels Bergenholm was then being energized, not by the stupendously powerful mind of Drounli the Molder, but by an Arisian child too young to be of any use in that which was about to occur.

Arisia was ready. Every Arisian mind capable of adult, or of even near-adult thinking was poised to act when the moment of action should come. They were not, however, tense. While not in any sense routine, that which they were about to do had been foreseen for many cycles of time. They knew exactly what they were going to do, and exactly how to do it. They waited.

“My visualization is not entirely clear concerning the succession of events stemming from the fact that the fusion of which Drounli is a part did not destroy Gharlane of Eddore while he was energizing Gray Roger,” a young Watchman, Eukonidor by symbol, thought into the assembled mind. “May I take a moment of this idle time in which to spread my visualization, for enlargement and instruction?”

“You may, youth.” The Elders of Arisia—the mightiest intellects of that tremendously powerful race—fused their several minds into one mind and gave approval. “That will be time well spent. Think on.”

“Separated from the other Eddorians by inter-galactic distance as he then was, Gharlane could have been isolated and could have been destroyed,” the youth pointed out, as he somewhat diffidently spread his visualization in the public mind. “Since it is axiomatic that his destruction would have weakened Eddore somewhat and to that extent would have helped us, it is evident that some greater advantage will accrue from allowing him to live. Some points are clear enough: that Gharlane and his fellows will believe that the Arisian fusion could not kill him, since it did not; that the Eddorians, contemptuous of our powers and thinking us vastly their inferiors, will not be driven to develop such things as atomic-energy-powered mechanical screens against third-level thought until such a time as it will be too late for even those devices to save their race from extinction; that they will, in all probability, never even suspect that the Galactic Patrol which is so soon to come into being will in fact be the prime operator in that extinction. It is not clear, however, in view of the above facts, why it has now become necessary for us to slay one Eddorian upon Eddore. Nor can I formulate or visualize with any clarity the techniques to be employed in the final wiping out of the race; I lack certain fundamental data concerning events which occurred and conditions which obtained many, many cycles before my birth. I am unable to believe that my perception and memory could have been so imperfect—can it be that none of that basic data is, or ever has been available?”

“That, youth, is the fact. While your visualization of the future is of course not as detailed nor as accurate as it will be after more cycles of labor, your background of knowledge is as complete as that of any other of our number.”

“I see.” Eukonidor gave the mental equivalent of a nod of complete understanding. “It is necessary, and the death of a lesser Eddorian—a Watchman—will be sufficient. Nor will it be either surprising or alarming to Eddore’s Innermost Circle that the integrated total mind of Arisia should be able to kill such a relatively feeble entity. I see.”

Then silence; and waiting. Minutes? Or days? Or weeks? Who can tell? What does time mean to any Arisian?

Then Drounli arrived; arrived in the instant of his leaving The Hill—what matters even inter-galactic distance to the speed of thought? He fused his mind with those of the three other Molders of Civilization. The massed and united mind of Arisia, poised and ready, awaiting only his coming, launched itself through space. That tremendous, that theretofore unknown concentration of mental force arrived at Eddore’s outer screen in practically the same instant as did the entity that was Gharlane. The Eddorian, however, went through without opposition; the Arisians did not.

* * * *

Some two thousand million years ago, when the Coalescence occurred—the event which was to make each of the two interpassing galaxies teem with planets—the Arisians were already an ancient race; so ancient that they were even then independent of the chance formation of planets. The Eddorians, it is believed, were older still. The Arisians were native to this, our normal space-time continuum; the Eddorians were not.

Eddore was—and is—huge, dense, and hot. Its atmosphere is not air, as we of small, green Terra, know air, but is a noxious mixture of gaseous substances known to mankind only in chemical laboratories. Its hydrosphere, while it does contain some water, is a poisonous, stinking, foully corrosive, slimy and sludgy liquid.

And the Eddorians were as different from any people we know as Eddore is different from the planets indigenous to our space and time. They were, to our senses, utterly monstrous; almost incomprehensible. They were amorphous, amoeboid, sexless. Not androgynous or parthenogenetic, but absolutely sexless; with a sexlessness unknown in any Earthly form of life higher than the yeasts. Thus they were, to all intents and purposes and except for death by violence, immortal; for each one, after having lived for hundreds of thousands of Tellurian years and having reached its capacity to live and to learn, simply divided into two new individuals, each of which, in addition to possessing in full its parent’s mind and memories and knowledges, had also a brand-new zest and a greatly increased capacity.

And, since life was, there had been competition. Competition for power. Knowledge was worth while only insofar as it contributed to power. Warfare began, and aged, and continued; the appallingly efficient warfare possible only to such entities as those. Their minds, already immensely powerful, grew stronger and stronger under the stresses of inter-necine struggle.

But peace was not even thought of. Strife continued, at higher and even higher levels of violence, until two facts became apparent. First, that every Eddorian who could be killed by physical violence had already died; that the survivors had developed such tremendous powers of mind, such complete mastery of things physical as well as mental, that they could not be slain by physical force. Second, that during the ages through which they had been devoting their every effort to mutual extermination, their sun had begun markedly to cool; that their planet would very soon become so cold that it would be impossible for them ever again to live their normal physical lives.

Thus there came about an armistice. The Eddorians worked together—not without friction—in the development of mechanisms by the use of which they moved their planet across light-years of space to a younger, hotter sun. Then, Eddore once more at its hot and reeking norm, battle was resumed. Mental battle, this time, that went on for more than a hundred thousand Eddorian years; during the last ten thousand of which not a single Eddorian died.

Realizing the futility of such unproductive endeavor, the relatively few survivors made a peace of sorts. Since each had an utterly insatiable lust for power, and since it had become clear that they could neither conquer nor kill each other, they would combine forces and conquer enough planets—enough galaxies—so that each Eddorian could have as much power and authority as he could possibly handle.

What matter that there were not that many planets in their native space? There were other spaces, an infinite number of them; some of which, it was mathematically certain, would contain millions upon millions of planets instead of only two or three. By mind and by machine they surveyed the neighboring continua; they developed the hyper-spatial tube and the inertialess drive; they drove their planet, space-ship-wise, through space after space after space.

And thus, shortly after the Coalescence began, Eddore came into our space-time; and here, because of the multitudes of planets already existing and the untold millions more about to come into existence, it stayed. Here was what they had wanted since their beginnings; here were planets enough, here were fields enough for the exercise of power, to sate even the insatiable. There was no longer any need for them to fight each other; they could now cooperate whole-heartedly—as long as each was getting more—and more and MORE!

Enphilisor, a young Arisian, his mind roaming eagerly abroad as was its wont, made first contact with the Eddorians in this space. Inoffensive, naive, innocent, he was surprised beyond measure at their reception of his friendly greeting; but in the instant before closing his mind to their vicious attacks, he learned the foregoing facts concerning them.

The fused mind of the Elders of Arisia, however, was not surprised. The Arisians, while not as mechanistic as their opponents, and innately peaceful as well, were far ahead of them in the pure science of the mind. The Elders had long known of the Eddorians and of their lustful wanderings through plenum after plenum. Their Visualizations of the Cosmic All had long since forecast, with dreadful certainty, the invasion which had now occurred. They had long known what they would have to do. They did it. So insidiously as to set up no opposition they entered the Eddorians’ minds and sealed off all knowledge of Arisia. They withdrew, tracelessly.

They did not have much data, it is true; but no more could be obtained at that time. If any one of those touchy suspicious minds had been given any cause for alarm, any focal point of doubt, they would have had time in which to develop mechanisms able to force the Arisians out of this space before a weapon to destroy the Eddorians—the as yet incompletely designed Galactic Patrol—could be forged. The Arisians could, even then, have slain by mental force alone all the Eddorians except the All-Highest and his Innermost Circle, safe within their then impenetrable shield; but as long as they could not make a clean sweep they could not attack—then.

Be it observed that the Arisians were not fighting for themselves. As individuals or as a race they had nothing to fear. Even less than the Eddorians could they be killed by any possible application of physical force. Past masters of mental science, they knew that no possible concentration of Eddorian mental force could kill any one of them. And if they were to be forced out of normal space, what matter? To such mentalities as theirs, any given space would serve as well as any other.

No, they were fighting for an ideal; for the peaceful, harmonious, liberty-loving Civilization which they had envisaged as developing throughout, and eventually entirely covering the myriads of planets of, two tremendous Island Universes. Also, they felt a heavy weight of responsibility. Since all these races, existing and yet to appear, had sprung from and would spring from the Arisian life-spores which permeated this particular space, they all were and would be, at bottom, Arisian. It was starkly unthinkable that Arisia would leave them to the eternal dominance of such a rapacious, such a tyrannical, such a hellishly insatiable breed of monsters.

Therefore the Arisians fought; efficiently if insidiously. They did not—they could not—interfere openly with Eddore’s ruthless conquest of world after world; with Eddore’s ruthless smashing of Civilization after Civilization. They did, however, see to it, by selective matings and the establishment of blood-lines upon numberless planets, that the trend of the level of intelligence was definitely and steadily upward.

Four Molders of Civilization—Drounli, Kriedigan, Nedanillor, and Brolenteen, who, in fusion, formed the “Mentor of Arisia” who was to become known to every wearer of Civilization’s Lens—were individually responsible for the Arisian program of development upon the four planets of Tellus, Rigel IV, Velantia, and Palain VII. Drounli established upon Tellus two principal lines of blood. In unbroken male line of descent the Kinnisons went back to long before the dawn of even mythical Tellurian history. Kinnexa of Atlantis, daughter of one Kinnison and sister of another, is the first of the blood to be named in these annals; but the line was then already old. So was the other line; characterized throughout its tremendous length, male and female, by peculiarly spectacular red-bronze-auburn hair and equally striking gold-flecked, tawny eyes.

Nor did these strains mix. Drounli had made it psychologically impossible for them to mix until the penultimate stage of development should have been reached.

While that stage was still in the future Virgil Samms appeared, and all Arisia knew that the time had come to engage the Eddorians openly, mind to mind. Gharlane-Roger was curbed, savagely and sharply. Every Eddorian, wherever he was working, found his every line of endeavor solidly blocked.

Gharlane, as has been intimated, constructed a supposedly irresistible weapon and attacked his Arisian blocker, with results already told. At that failure Gharlane knew that there was something terribly amiss; that it had been amiss for over two thousand million Tellurian years. Really alarmed for the first time in his long life, he flashed back to Eddore; to warn his fellows and to take counsel with them as to what should be done. And the massed and integrated force of all Arisia was only an instant behind him.

* * * *

Arisia struck Eddore’s outermost screen, and in the instant of impact that screen went down. And then, instantaneously and all unperceived by the planet’s defenders, the Arisian forces split. The Elders, including all the Molders, seized the Eddorian who had been handling that screen—threw around him an impenetrable net of force—yanked him out into inter-galactic space.

Then, driving in resistlessly, they turned the luckless wight inside out. And before the victim died under their poignant probings, the Elders of Arisia learned everything that the Eddorian and all of his ancestors had ever known. They then withdrew to Arisia, leaving their younger, weaker, partially-developed fellows to do whatever they could against mighty Eddore.

Whether the attack of these lesser forces would be stopped at the second, the third, the fourth, or the innermost screen; whether they would reach the planet itself and perhaps do some actual damage before being driven off; was immaterial. Eddore must be allowed and would be allowed to repel that invasion with ease. For cycles to come the Eddorians must and would believe that they had nothing really to fear from Arisia.

The real battle, however, had been won. The Arisian visualizations could now be extended to portray every essential element of the climactic conflict which was eventually to come. It was no cheerful conclusion at which the Arisians arrived, since their visualizations all agreed in showing that the only possible method of wiping out the Eddorians would also of necessity end their own usefulness as Guardians of Civilization.

Such an outcome having been shown necessary, however, the Arisians accepted it, and worked toward it, unhesitatingly.

CHAPTER 2

As has been said, The Hill, which had been built to be the Tellurian headquarters of the Triplanetary Service and which was now the headquarters of the half-organized Solarian Patrol, was—and is—a truncated, alloy-sheathed, honey-combed mountain. But, since human beings do not like to live eternally underground, no matter how beautifully lighted or how carefully and comfortably air-conditioned the dungeon may be, the Reservation spread far beyond the foot of that gray, forbidding, mirror-smooth cone of metal. Well outside that farflung Reservation there was a small city; there were hundreds of highly productive farms; and, particularly upon this bright May afternoon, there was a Recreation Park, containing, among other things, dozens of tennis courts.

One of these courts was three-quarters enclosed by stands, from which a couple of hundred people were watching a match which seemed to be of some little local importance. Two men sat in a box which had seats for twenty, and watched admiringly the pair who seemed in a fair way to win in straight sets the mixed-doubles championship of the Hill.

“Fine-looking couple, Rod, if I do say so myself, as well as being smooth performers.” Solarian Councillor Virgil Samms spoke to his companion as the opponents changed courts. “I still think, though, the young hussy ought to wear some clothes—those white nylon shorts make her look nakeder even than usual. I told her so, too, the jade, but she keeps on wearing less and less.”

“Of course,” Commissioner Roderick K. Kinnison laughed quietly. “What did you expect? She got her hair and eyes from you, why not your hard-headedness, too? One thing, though, that’s all to the good—she’s got what it takes to strip ship that way, and most of ’em haven’t. But what I can’t understand is why they don’t.…” He paused.

“I don’t either. Lord knows we’ve thrown them at each other hard enough, and Jack Kinnison and Jill Samms would certainly make a pair to draw to. But if they won’t…but maybe they will yet. They’re still youngsters, and they’re friendly enough.”

If Samms père could have been out on the court, however, instead of in the box, he would have been surprised; for young Kinnison, although smiling enough as to face, was addressing his gorgeous partner in terms which carried little indeed of friendliness.

“Listen, you bird-brained, knot-headed, grand-standing half-wit!” he stormed, voice low but bitterly intense. “I ought to beat your alleged brains out! I’ve told you a thousand times to watch your own territory and stay out of mine! If you had been where you belonged, or even taken my signal, Frank couldn’t have made that thirty-all point; and if Lois hadn’t netted she’d’ve caught you flat-footed, a kilometer out of position, and made it deuce. What do you think you’re doing, anyway—playing tennis or seeing how many innocent bystanders you can bring down out of control?”

“What do you think?” the girl sneered, sweetly. Her tawny eyes, only a couple of inches below his own, almost emitted sparks. “And just look at who’s trying to tell who how to do what! For your information, Master Pilot John K. Kinnison, I’ll tell you that just because you can’t quit being ‘Killer’ Kinnison even long enough to let two good friends of ours get a point now and then, or maybe even a game, is no reason why I’ve got to turn into ‘Killer’ Samms. And I’ll also tell you.…”

“You’ll tell me nothing, Jill—I’m telling you! Start giving away points in anything and you’ll find out some day that you’ve given away too many. I’m not having any of that kind of game—and as long as you’re playing with me you aren’t either—or else. If you louse up this match just once more, the next ball I serve will hit the tightest part of those fancy white shorts of yours—right where the hip pocket would be if they had any—and it’ll raise a welt that will make you eat off of the mantel for three days. So watch your step!”

“You insufferable lug! I’d like to smash this racket over your head! I’ll do it, too, and walk off the court, if you don’t.…”

The whistle blew. Virgilia Samms, all smiles, toed the base-line and became the personification and embodiment of smoothly flowing motion. The ball whizzed over the net, barely clearing it—a sizzling service ace. The game went on.

And a few minutes later, in the shower room, where Jack Kinnison was caroling lustily while plying a towel, a huge young man strode up and slapped him ringingly between the shoulder blades.

“Congratulations, Jack, and so forth. But there’s a thing I want to ask you. Confidential, sort of…?”

“Shoot! Haven’t we been eating out of the same dish for lo, these many moons? Why the diffidence all of a sudden, Mase? It isn’t in character.”

“Well…it’s… I’m a lip-reader, you know.”

“Sure. We all are. What of it?”

“It’s only that…well, I saw what you and Miss Samms said to each other out there, and if that was lovers’ small talk I’m a Venerian mud-puppy.”

“Lovers! Who the hell ever said we were lovers?… Oh, you’ve been inhaling some of dad’s balloon-juice. Lovers! Me and that red-headed stinker—that jelly-brained sapadilly? Hardly!”

“Hold it, Jack!” The big officer’s voice was slightly edged. “You’re off course—a hell of a long flit off. That girl has got everything. She’s the class of the Reservation—why, she’s a regular twelve-nineteen!”

“Huh?” Amazed, young Kinnison stopped drying himself and stared. “You mean to say you’ve been giving her a miss just because.…” He had started to say “because you’re the best friend I’ve got in the System,” but he did not.

“Well, it would have smelled slightly cheesy, I thought.” The other man did not put into words, either, what both of them so deeply knew to be the truth. “But if you haven’t got…if it’s O.K. with you, of course.…”

“Stand by for five seconds—I’ll take you around.”

Jack threw on his uniform, and in a few minutes the two young officers, immaculate in the space-black-and-silver of the Patrol, made their way toward the women’s dressing rooms.

“…but she’s all right, at that…in most ways…I guess.” Kinnison was half-apologizing for what he had said. “Outside of being chicken-hearted and pig-headed, she’s a good egg. She really qualifies…most of the time. But I wouldn’t have her, bonus attached, any more than she would have me. It’s strictly mutual. You won’t fall for her, either, Mase; you’ll want to pull one of her legs off and beat the rest of her to death with it inside of a week—but there’s nothing like finding things out for yourself.”

In a short time Miss Samms appeared; dressed somewhat less revealingly than before in the blouse and kilts which were the mode of the moment.

“Hi, Jill! This is Mase—I’ve told you about him. My boat-mate. Master Electronicist Mason Northrop.”

“Yes, I’ve heard about you, ’Troncist—a lot.” She shook hands warmly.

“He hasn’t been putting tracers on you, Jill, on accounta he figured he’d be poaching. Can you feature that? I straightened him out, though, in short order. Told him why, too, so he ought to be insulated against any voltage you can generate.”

“Oh, you did? How sweet of you! But how…oh, those?” She gestured at the powerful prism binoculars, a part of the uniform of every officer of space.

“Uh-huh.” Northrop wriggled, but held firm.

“If I’d only been as big and husky as you are,” surveying admiringly some six feet two of altitude and two hundred-odd pounds of hard meat, gristle, and bone, “I’d have grabbed him by one ankle, whirled him around my head, and flung him into the fifteenth row of seats. What’s the matter with him, Mase, is that he was born centuries and centuries too late. He should have been an overseer when they built the pyramids—flogging slaves because they wouldn’t step just so. Or better yet, one of those people it told about in those funny old books they dug up last year—liege lords, or something like that, remember? With the power of life and death—‘high, middle, and low justice’, whatever that was—over their vassals and their families, serfs, and serving-wenches. Especially serving-wenches! He likes little, cuddly baby-talkers, who pretend to be utterly spineless and completely brainless—eh, Jack?”

“Ouch! Touché, Jill—but maybe I had it coming to me, at that. Let’s call it off, shall we? I’ll be seeing you two, hither or yon.” Kinnison turned and hurried away.

“Want to know why he’s doing such a quick flit?” Jill grinned up at her companion; a bright, quick grin. “Not that he was giving up. The blonde over there—the one in rocket red. Very few blondes can wear such a violent shade. Dimples Maynard.”

“And is she…er…?”

“Cuddly and baby-talkish? Uh-uh. She’s a grand person. I was just popping off; so was he. You know that neither of us really meant half of what we said…or…at least.…” Her voice died away.

“I don’t know whether I do or not,” Northrop replied, awkwardly but honestly. “That was savage stuff if there ever was any. I can’t see for the life of me why you two—two of the world’s finest people—should have to tear into each other that way. Do you?”

“I don’t know that I ever thought of it like that.” Jill caught her lower lip between her teeth. “He’s splendid, really, and I like him a lot—usually. We get along perfectly most of the time. We don’t fight at all except when we’re too close together…and then we fight about anything and everything…say, suppose that that could be it? Like charges, repelling each other inversely as the square of the distance? That’s about the way it seems to be.”

“Could be, and I’m glad.” The man’s face cleared. “And I’m a charge of the opposite sign. Let’s go!”

* * * *

And in Virgil Samms’ deeply-buried office, Civilization’s two strongest men were deep in conversation.

“…troubles enough to keep four men of our size awake nights.” Samms’ voice was light, but his eyes were moody and somber. “You can probably whip yours, though, in time. They’re mostly in one solar system; a short flit covers the rest. Languages and customs are known. But how—how—can legal processes work efficiently—work at all, for that matter—when a man can commit a murder or a pirate can loot a space-ship and be a hundred parsecs away before the crime is even discovered? How can a Tellurian John Law find a criminal on a strange world that knows nothing whatever of our Patrol, with a completely alien language—maybe no language at all—where it takes months even to find out who and where—if any—the native police officers are? But there must be a way, Rod—there’s got to be a way!” Samms slammed his open hand resoundingly against his desk’s bare top. “And by God I’ll find it—the Patrol will come out on top!”

“‘Crusader’ Samms, now and forever!” There was no trace of mockery in Kinnison’s voice or expression, but only friendship and admiration. “And I’ll bet you do. Your Interstellar Patrol, or whatever.…”

“Galactic Patrol. I know what the name of it is going to be, if nothing else.”

“…is just as good as in the bag, right now. You’ve done a job so far, Virge. This whole system, Nevia, the colonies on Aldebaran II and other planets, even Valeria, as tight as a drum. Funny about Valeria, isn’t it.…”

There was a moment of silence, then Kinnison went on:

“But wherever diamonds are, there go Dutchmen. And Dutch women go wherever their men do. And, in spite of medical advice, Dutch babies arrive. Although a lot of the adults died—three G’s is no joke—practically all of the babies keep on living. Developing bones and muscles to fit—walking at a year and a half old—living normally—they say that the third generation will be perfectly at home there.”

“Which shows that the human animal is more adaptable than some ranking medicos had believed, is all. Don’t try to side-track me, Rod. You know as well as I do what we’re up against; the new headaches that inter-stellar commerce is bringing with it. New vices—drugs—thionite, for instance; we haven’t been able to get an inkling of an idea as to where that stuff is coming from. And I don’t have to tell you what piracy has done to insurance rates.”

“I’ll say not—look at the price of Aldebaranian cigars, the only kind fit to smoke! You’ve given up, then, on the idea that Arisia is the pirates’ GHQ?”

“Definitely. It isn’t. The pirates are even more afraid of it than tramp spacemen are. It’s out of bounds—absolutely forbidden territory, apparently—to everybody, my best operatives included. All we know about it is the name—Arisia—that our planetographers gave it. It is the first completely incomprehensible thing I have ever experienced. I am going out there myself as soon as I can take the time—not that I expect to crack a thing that my best men couldn’t touch, but there have been so many different and conflicting reports—no two stories agree on anything except in that no one could get anywhere near the planet—that I feel the need of some first-hand information. Want to come along?”

“Try to keep me from it!”

“But at that, we shouldn’t be too surprised,” Samms went on, thoughtfully. “Just beginning to scratch the surface as we are, we should expect to encounter peculiar, baffling—even completely inexplicable things. Facts, situations, events, and beings for which our one-system experience could not possibly have prepared us. In fact, we already have. If, ten years ago, anyone had told you that such a race as the Rigellians existed, what would you have thought? One ship went there, you know—once. One hour in any Rigellian city—one minute in a Rigellian automobile—drives a Tellurian insane.”

“I see your point.” Kinnison nodded. “Probably I would have ordered a mental examination. And the Palainians are even worse. People—if you can call them that—who live on Pluto and like it! Entities so alien that nobody, as far as I know, understands them. But you don’t have to go even that far from home to locate a job of unscrewing the inscrutable. Who, what, and why—and for how long—was Gray Roger? And, not far behind him, is this young Bergenholm of yours. And by the way, you never did give me the lowdown on how come it was the ‘Bergenholm’, and not the ‘Rodebush-Cleveland’, that made trans-galactic commerce possible and caused nine-tenths of our headaches. As I get the story, Bergenholm wasn’t—isn’t—even an engineer.”

“Didn’t I? Thought I did. He wasn’t, and isn’t. Well, the original Rodebush-Cleveland free drive was a killer, you know.…”

“How I know!” Kinnison exclaimed, feelingly.

“They beat their brains out and ate their hearts out for months, without getting it any better. Then, one day, this kid Bergenholm ambles into their shop—big, awkward, stumbling over his own feet. He gazes innocently at the thing for a couple of minutes, then says:

“‘Why don’t you use uranium instead of iron and rewind it so it will put out a wave-form like this, with humps here, and here; instead of there, and there?’ and he draws a couple of free-hand, but really beautiful curves.

“‘Why should we?’ they squawk at him.

“‘Because it will work that way,’ he says, and ambles out as unconcernedly as he came in. Can’t—or won’t—say another word.

“Well in sheer desperation, they tried it—and it WORKED! And nobody has ever had a minute’s trouble with a Bergenholm since. That’s why Rodebush and Cleveland both insisted on the name.”

“I see; and it points up what I just said. But if he’s such a mental giant, why isn’t he getting results with his own problem, the meteor? Or is he?”

“No…or at least he wasn’t as of last night. But there’s a note on my pad that he wants to see me sometime today—suppose we have him come in now?”

“Fine! I’d like to talk to him, if it’s O.K. with you and with him.”

The young scientist was called in, and was introduced to the Commissioner.

“Go ahead, Doctor Bergenholm,” Samms suggested then. “You may talk to both of us, just as freely as though you and I were alone.”

“I have, as you already know, been called psychic,” Bergenholm began, abruptly. “It is said that I dream dreams, see visions, hear voices, and so on. That I operate on hunches. That I am a genius. Now I very definitely am not a genius—unless my understanding of the meaning of that word is different from that of the rest of mankind.”

Bergenholm paused. Samms and Kinnison looked at each other. The latter broke the short silence.

“The Councillor and I have just been discussing the fact that there are a great many things we do not know; that with the extension of our activities into new fields, the occurrence of the impossible has become almost a commonplace. We are able, I believe, to listen with open minds to anything you have to say.”

“Very well. But first, please know that I am a scientist. As such, I am trained to observe; to think calmly, clearly, and analytically; to test every hypothesis. I do not believe at all in the so-called supernatural. This universe did not come into being, it does not continue to be, except by the operation of natural and immutable laws. And I mean immutable, gentlemen. Everything that has ever happened, that is happening now, or that ever is to happen, was, is, and will be statistically connected with its predecessor event and with its successor event. If I did not believe that implicitly, I would lose all faith in the scientific method. For if one single ‘supernatural’ event or thing had ever occurred or existed it would have constituted an entirely unpredictable event and would have initiated a series—a succession—of such events; a state of things which no scientist will or can believe possible in an orderly universe.

“At the same time, I recognize the fact that I myself have done things—caused events to occur, if you prefer—that I cannot explain to you or to any other human being in any symbology known to our science; and it is about an even more inexplicable—call it ‘hunch’ if you like—that I asked to have a talk with you today.”

“But you are arguing in circles,” Samms protested. “Or are you trying to set up a paradox?”

“Neither. I am merely clearing the way for a somewhat startling thing I am to say later on. You know, of course, that any situation with which a mind is unable to cope; a really serious dilemma which it cannot resolve; will destroy that mind—frustration, escape from reality, and so on. You also will realize that I must have become cognizant of my own peculiarities long before anyone else did or could?”

“Ah. I see. Yes, of course.” Samms, intensely interested, leaned forward. “Yet your present personality is adequately, splendidly integrated. How could you possibly have overcome—reconciled—a situation so full of conflict?”

“You are, I think, familiar with my parentage?” Samms, keen as he was, did not consider it noteworthy that the big Norwegian answered his question only by asking one of his own.

“Yes…oh, I’m beginning to see…but Commissioner Kinnison has not had access to your dossier. Go ahead.”

“My father is Dr. Hjalmar Bergenholm. My mother, before her marriage, was Dr. Olga Bjornson. Both were, and are, nuclear physicists—very good ones. Pioneers, they have been called. They worked, and are still working, in the newest, outermost fringes of the field.”

“Oh!” Kinnison exclaimed. “A mutant? Born with second sight—or whatever it is?”

“Not second sight, as history describes the phenomenon, no. The records do not show that any such faculty was ever demonstrated to the satisfaction of any competent scientific investigator. What I have is something else. Whether or not it will breed true is an interesting topic of speculation, but one having nothing to do with the problem now in hand. To return to the subject, I resolved my dilemma long since. There is, I am absolutely certain, a science of the mind which is as definite, as positive, as immutable of law, as is the science of the physical. While I will make no attempt to prove it to you, I know that such a science exists, and that I was born with the ability to perceive at least some elements of it.

“Now to the matter of the meteor of the Patrol. That emblem was and is purely physical. The pirates have just as able scientists as we have. What physical science can devise and synthesize, physical science can analyze and duplicate. There is a point, however, beyond which physical science cannot go. It can neither analyze nor imitate the tangible products of that which I have so loosely called the science of the mind.

“I know, Councillor Samms, what the Triplanetary Service needs; something vastly more than its meteor. I also know that the need will become greater and greater as the sphere of action of the Patrol expands. Without a really efficient symbol, the Solarian Patrol will be hampered even more than the Triplanetary Service; and its logical extension into the Space Patrol, or whatever that larger organization may be called, will be definitely impossible. We need something which will identify any representative of Civilization, positively and unmistakably, wherever he may be. It must be impossible of duplication, or even of imitation, to which end it must kill any unauthorized entity who attempts imposture. It must operate as a telepath between its owner and any other living intelligence, of however high or low degree, so that mental communication, so much clearer and faster than physical, will be possible without the laborious learning of language; or between us and such peoples as those of Rigel Four or of Palain Seven, both of whom we know to be of high intelligence and who must already be conversant with telepathy.”

“Are you or have you been, reading my mind?” Samms asked quietly.

“No,” Bergenholm replied flatly. “It is not and has not been necessary. Any man who can think, who has really considered the question, and who has the good of Civilization at heart, must have come to the same conclusions.”

“Probably so, at that. But no more side issues. You have a solution of some kind worked out, or you would not be here. What is it?”

“It is that you, Solarian Councillor Samms, should go to Arisia as soon as possible.”

“Arisia!” Samms exclaimed, and:

“Arisia! Of all the hells in space, why Arisia? And how can we make the approach? Don’t you know that nobody can get anywhere near that damn planet?”

Bergenholm shrugged his shoulders and spread both arms wide in a pantomime of complete helplessness.

“How do you know—another of your hunches?” Kinnison went on. “Or did somebody tell you something? Where did you get it?”

“It is not a hunch,” the Norwegian replied, positively. “No one told me anything. But I know—as definitely as I know that the combustion of hydrogen in oxygen will yield water—that the Arisians are very well versed in that which I have called the science of the mind; that if Virgil Samms goes to Arisia he will obtain the symbol he needs; that he will never obtain it otherwise. As to how I know these things…I can’t…I just…I know it, I tell you!”

Without another word, without asking permission to leave, Bergenholm whirled around and hurried out. Samms and Kinnison stared at each other.

“Well?” Kinnison asked, quizzically.

“I’m going. Now. Whether I can be spared or not, and whether you think I’m out of control or not. I believe him, every word—and besides, there’s the Bergenholm. How about you? Coming?”

“Yes. Can’t say that I’m sold one hundred percent; but, as you say, the Bergenholm is a hard fact to shrug off. And at minimum rating, it’s got to be tried. What are you taking? Not a fleet, probably—the Boise? Or the Chicago?” It was the Commissioner of Public Safety speaking now, the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces. “The Chicago, I’d say—the fastest and strongest thing in space.”

“Recommendation approved. Blast-off; twelve hundred hours tomorrow!”

CHAPTER 3

The superdreadnought Chicago, as she approached the imaginary but nevertheless sharply defined boundary, which no other ship had been allowed to pass, went inert and crept forward, mile by mile. Every man, from Commissioner and Councillor down, was taut and tense. So widely variant, so utterly fantastic, were the stories going around about this Arisia that no one knew what to expect. They expected the unexpected—and got it.

“Ah, Tellurians, you are precisely on time.” A strong, assured, deeply resonant pseudo-voice made itself heard in the depths of each mind aboard the tremendous ship of war. “Pilots and navigating officers, you will shift course to one seventy eight dash seven twelve fifty three. Hold that course, inert, at one Tellurian gravity of acceleration. Virgil Samms will now be interviewed. He will return to the consciousnesses of the rest of you in exactly six of your hours.”

Practically dazed by the shock of their first experience with telepathy, not one of the Chicago’s crew perceived anything unusual in the phraseology of that utterly precise, diamond-clear thought. Samms and Kinnison, however, precisionists themselves, did. But, warned although they were and keyed up although they were to detect any sign of hypnotism or of mental suggestion, neither of them had the faintest suspicion, then or ever, that Virgil Samms did not as a matter of fact leave the Chicago at all.

Samms knew that he boarded a lifeboat and drove it toward the shimmering haze beyond which Arisia was. Commissioner Kinnison knew, as surely as did every other man aboard, that Samms did those things, because he and the other officers and most of the crew watched Samms do them. They watched the lifeboat dwindle in size with distance; watched it disappear within the peculiarly iridescent veil of force which their most penetrant ultra-beam spy-rays could not pierce.

They waited.

And, since every man concerned knew, beyond any shadow of doubt and to the end of his life, that everything that seemed to happen actually did happen, it will be so described.

Virgil Samms, then, drove his small vessel through Arisia’s innermost screen and saw a planet so much like Earth that it might have been her sister world. There were the white ice-caps, the immense blue oceans, the verdant continents partially obscured by fleecy banks of cloud.

Would there, or would there not, be cities? While he had not known at all exactly what to expect, he did not believe that there would be any large cities upon Arisia. To qualify for the role of deus ex machina, the Arisian with whom Samms was about to deal would have to be a super-man indeed—a being completely beyond man’s knowledge or experience in power of mind. Would such a race of beings have need of such things as cities? They would not. There would be no cities.

Nor were there. The lifeboat flashed downward—slowed—landed smoothly in a regulation dock upon the outskirts of what appeared to be a small village surrounded by farms and woods.

“This way, please.” An inaudible voice directed him toward a two-wheeled vehicle which was almost, but not quite, like a Dillingham roadster.

This car, however, took off by itself as soon as Samms closed the door. It sped smoothly along a paved highway devoid of all other traffic, past farms and past cottages, to stop of itself in front of the low, massive structure which was the center of the village and, apparently, its reason for being.

“This way, please,” and Samms went through an automatically-opened door; along a short, bare hall; into a fairly large central room containing a vat and one deeply-holstered chair.

“Sit down, please.” Samms did so, gratefully. He did not know whether he could have stood up much longer or not.

He had expected to encounter a tremendous mentality; but this was a thing far, far beyond his wildest imaginings. This was a brain—just that—nothing else. Almost globular; at least ten feet in diameter; immersed in and in perfect equilibrium with a pleasantly aromatic liquid—a BRAIN!

“Relax,” the Arisian ordered, soothingly, and Samms found that he could relax. “Through the one you know as Bergenholm I heard of your need and have permitted you to come here this once for instruction.”

“But this…none of this…it isn’t…it can’t be real!” Samms blurted. “I am—I must be—imagining it…and yet I know that I can’t be hypnotized—I’ve been psychoed against it!”

“What is reality?” the Arisian asked, quietly. “Your profoundest thinkers have never been able to answer that question. Nor, although I am much older and a much more capable thinker than any member of your race, would I attempt to give you its true answer. Nor, since your experience has been so limited, is it to be expected that you could believe without reservation any assurances I might give you in thoughts or in words. You must, then, convince yourself—definitely, by means of your own five senses—that I and everything about you are real, as you understand reality. You saw the village and this building; you see the flesh that houses the entity which is I. You feel your own flesh; as you tap the woodwork with your knuckles you feel the impact and hear the vibrations as sound. As you entered this room you must have perceived the odor of the nutrient solution in which and by virtue of which I live. There remains only the sense of taste. Are you by any chance either hungry or thirsty?”

“Both.”

“Drink of the tankard in the niche yonder. In order to avoid any appearance of suggestion I will tell you nothing of its content except the one fact that it matches perfectly the chemistry of your tissues.”

Gingerly enough, Samms brought the pitcher to his lips—then, seizing it in both hands, he gulped down a tremendous draught. It was GOOD! It smelled like all appetizing kitchen aromas blended into one; it tasted like all of the most delicious meals he had ever eaten; it quenched his thirst as no beverage had ever done. But he could not empty even that comparatively small container—whatever the stuff was, it had a satiety value immensely higher even than old, rare, roast beef! With a sigh of repletion Samms replaced the tankard and turned again to his peculiar host.

“I am convinced. That was real. No possible mental influence could so completely and unmistakably satisfy the purely physical demands of a body as hungry and as thirsty as mine was. Thanks, immensely, for allowing me to come here, Mr.…?”

“You may call me Mentor. I have no name, as you understand the term. Now, then, please think fully—you need not speak—of your problems and of your difficulties; of what you have done and of what you have it in mind to do.”

Samms thought, flashingly and cogently. A few minutes sufficed to cover Triplanetary’s history and the beginning of the Solarian Patrol; then, for almost three hours, he went into the ramifications of the Galactic Patrol of his imaginings. Finally he wrenched himself back to reality. He jumped up, paced the floor, and spoke.

“But there’s a vital flaw, one inherent and absolutely ruinous fact that makes the whole thing impossible!” he burst out, rebelliously. “No one man, or group of men, no matter who they are, can be trusted with that much power. The Council and I have already been called everything imaginable; and what we have done so far is literally nothing at all in comparison with what the Galactic Patrol could and must do. Why, I myself would be the first to protest against the granting of such power to anybody. Every dictator in history, from Philip of Macedon to the Tyrant of Asia, claimed to be—and probably was, in his beginnings—motivated solely by benevolence. How am I to think that the proposed Galactic Council, or even I myself, will be strong enough to conquer a thing that has corrupted utterly every man who has ever won it? Who is to watch the watchmen?”

“The thought does you credit, youth,” Mentor replied, unmoved. “That is one reason why you are here. You, of your own force, can not know that you are in fact incorruptible. I, however, know. Moreover, there is an agency by virtue of which that which you now believe to be impossible will become commonplace. Extend your arm.”

Samms did so, and there snapped around his wrist a platinum-iridium bracelet carrying, wrist-watch-wise, a lenticular something at which the Tellurian stared in stupefied amazement. It seemed to be composed of thousands—millions—of tiny gems, each of which emitted pulsatingly all the colors of the spectrum; it was throwing out—broadcasting—a turbulent flood of writhing, polychromatic light!

“The successor to the golden meteor of the Triplanetary Service,” Mentor said, calmly. “The Lens of Arisia. You may take my word for it, until your own experience shall have convinced you of the fact, that no one will ever wear Arisia’s Lens who is in any sense unworthy. Here also is one for your friend, Commissioner Kinnison; it is not necessary for him to come physically to Arisia. It is, you will observe, in an insulated container, and does not glow. Touch its surface, but lightly and very fleetingly, for the contact will be painful.”

Samms’ finger-tip barely touched one dull, gray, lifeless jewel: his whole arm jerked away uncontrollably as there swept through his whole being the intimation of an agony more poignant by far than any he had ever known.

“Why—it’s alive!” he gasped.

“No, it is not really alive, as you understand the term…” Mentor paused, as though seeking a way to describe to the Tellurian a thing which was to him starkly incomprehensible. “It is, however, endowed with what you might call a sort of pseudo-life; by virtue of which it gives off its characteristic radiation while, and only while, it is in physical circuit with the living entity—the ego, let us say—with whom it is in exact resonance. Glowing, the Lens is perfectly harmless; it is complete—saturated—satiated—fulfilled. In the dark condition it is, as you have learned, dangerous in the extreme. It is then incomplete—unfulfilled—frustrated—you might say seeking or yearning or demanding. In that condition its pseudo-life interferes so strongly with any life to which it is not attuned that that life, in a space of seconds, is forced out of this plane or cycle of existence.”

“Then I—I alone—of all the entities in existence, can wear this particular Lens?” Samms licked his lips and stared at it, glowing so satisfyingly and contentedly upon his wrist. “But when I die, will it be a perpetual menace?”

“By no means. A Lens cannot be brought into being except to match some one living personality; a short time after you pass into the next cycle your Lens will disintegrate.”

“Wonderful!” Samms breathed, in awe. “But there’s one thing…these things are…priceless, and there will be millions of them to make…and you don’t.…”

“What will we get out of it, you mean?” The Arisian seemed to smile.

“Exactly.” Samms blushed, but held his ground. “Nobody does anything for nothing. Altruism is beautiful in theory, but it has never been known to work in practice. I will pay a tremendous price—any price within reason or possibility—for the Lens; but I will have to know what that price is to be.”

“It will be heavier than you think, or can at present realize; although not in the sense you fear.” Mentor’s thought was solemnity itself. “Whoever wears the Lens of Arisia will carry a load that no weaker mind could bear. The load of authority; of responsibility; of knowledge that would wreck completely any mind of lesser strength. Altruism? No. Nor is it a case of good against evil, as you so firmly believe. Your mental picture of glaring white and of unrelieved black is not a true picture. Neither absolute evil nor absolute good do or can exist.”

“But that would make it still worse!” Samms protested. “In that case, I can’t see any reason at all for your exerting yourselves—putting yourselves out—for us.”

“There is, however, reason enough; although I am not sure that I can make it as clear to you as I would wish. There are in fact three reasons; any one of which would justify us in exerting—would compel us to exert—the trivial effort involved in the furnishing of Lenses to your Galactic Patrol. First, there is nothing either intrinsically right or intrinsically wrong about liberty or slavery, democracy or autocracy, freedom of action or complete regimentation. It seems to us, however, that the greatest measure of happiness and of well-being for the greatest number of entities, and therefore the optimum advancement toward whatever sublime Goal it is toward which this cycle of existence is trending in the vast and unknowable Scheme of Things, is to be obtained by securing for each and every individual the greatest amount of mental and physical freedom compatible with the public welfare. We of Arisia are only a small part of this cycle; and, as goes the whole, so goes in greater or lesser degree each of the parts. Is it impossible for you, a fellow citizen of this cycle-universe, to believe that such fulfillment alone would be ample compensation for a much greater effort?”

“I never thought of it in that light.…” It was hard for Samms to grasp the concept; he never did understand it thoroughly. “I begin to see, I think…at least, I believe you.”

“Second, we have a more specific obligation in that the life of many, many worlds has sprung from Arisian seed. Thus, in loco parentis, we would be derelict indeed if we refused to act. And third, you yourself spend highly valuable time and much effort in playing chess. Why do you do it? What do you get out of it?”

“Why, I…uh…mental exercise, I suppose… I like it!”

“Just so. And I am sure that one of your very early philosophers came to the conclusion that a fully competent mind, from a study of one fact or artifact belonging to any given universe, could construct or visualize that universe, from the instant of its creation to its ultimate end?”

“Yes. At least, I have heard the proposition stated, but I have never believed it possible.”

“It is not possible simply because no fully competent mind ever has existed or ever will exist. A mind can become fully competent only by the acquisition of infinite knowledge, which would require infinite time as well as infinite capacity. Our equivalent of your chess, however, is what we call the ‘Visualization of the Cosmic All’. In my visualization a descendant of yours named Clarrissa MacDougall will, in a store called Brenleer’s upon the planet…but no, let us consider a thing nearer at hand and concerning you personally, so that its accuracy will be subject to check. Where you will be and exactly what you will be doing, at some definite time in the future. Five years, let us say?”

“Go ahead. If you can do that you’re good.”

“Five Tellurian calendar years then, from the instant of your passing through the screen of ‘The Hill’ on this present journey, you will be…allow me, please, a moment of thought…you will be in a barber shop not yet built; the address of which is to be fifteen hundred fifteen Twelfth Avenue, Spokane, Washington, North America, Tellus. The barber’s name will be Antonio Carbonero and he will be left-handed. He will be engaged in cutting your hair. Or rather, the actual cutting will have been done and he will be shaving, with a razor trade-marked ‘Jensen-King-Byrd’, the short hairs in front of your left ear. A comparatively small, quadrupedal, grayish-striped entity, of the race called ‘cat’—a young cat, this one will be, and called Thomas, although actually of the female sex—will jump into your lap, addressing you pleasantly in a language with which you yourself are only partially familiar. You call it mewing and purring, I believe?”

“Yes,” the flabbergasted Samms managed to say. “Cats do purr—especially kittens.”

“Ah—very good. Never having met a cat personally, I am gratified at your corroboration of my visualization. This female youth erroneously called Thomas, somewhat careless in computing the elements of her trajectory, will jostle slightly the barber’s elbow with her tail; thus causing him to make a slight incision, approximately three millimeters long, parallel to and just above your left cheek-bone. At the precise moment in question, the barber will be applying a styptic pencil to this insignificant wound. This forecast is, I trust, sufficiently detailed so that you will have no difficulty in checking its accuracy or its lack thereof?”

“Detailed! Accuracy!” Samms could scarcely think. “But listen—not that I want to cross you up deliberately, but I’ll tell you now that a man doesn’t like to get sliced by a barber, even such a little nick as that. I’ll remember that address—and the cat—and I’ll never go into the place!”

“Every event does affect the succession of events,” Mentor acknowledged, equably enough. “Except for this interview, you would have been in New Orleans at that time, instead of in Spokane. I have considered every pertinent factor. You will be a busy man. Hence, while you will think of this matter frequently and seriously during the near future, you will have forgotten it in less than five years. You will remember it only at the touch of the astringent, whereupon you will give voice to certain self-derogatory and profane remarks.”

“I ought to,” Samms grinned; a not-too-pleasant grin. He had been appalled by the quality of mind able to do what Mentor had just done; he was now more than appalled by the Arisian’s calm certainty that what he had foretold in such detail would in every detail come to pass. “If, after all this Spokane—let a tiger-striped kitten jump into my lap—let a left-handed Tony Carbonero nick me—uh-uh, Mentor, UH-UH! If I do, I’ll deserve to be called everything I can think of!”

“These that I have mentioned, the gross occurrences, are problems only for inexperienced thinkers.” Mentor paid no attention to Samms’ determination never to enter that shop. “The real difficulties lie in the fine detail, such as the length, mass, and exact place and position of landing, upon apron or floor, of each of your hairs as it is severed. Many factors are involved. Other clients passing by—opening and shutting doors—air currents—sunshine—wind—pressure, temperature, humidity. The exact fashion in which the barber will flick his shears, which in turn depends upon many other factors—what he will have been doing previously, what he will have eaten and drunk, whether or not his home life will have been happy…you little realize, youth, what a priceless opportunity this will be for me to check the accuracy of my visualization. I shall spend many periods upon the problem. I cannot attain perfect accuracy, of course. Ninety nine point nine nines percent, let us say…or perhaps ten nines…is all that I can reasonably expect.…”

“But, Mentor!” Samms protested. “I can’t help you on a thing like that! How can I know or report the exact mass, length, and orientation of single hairs?”

“You cannot; but, since you will be wearing your Lens, I myself can and will compare minutely my visualization with the actuality. For know, youth, that wherever any Lens is, there can any Arisian be if he so desires. And now, knowing that fact, and from your own knowledge of the satisfactions to be obtained from chess and other such mental activities, and from the glimpses you have had into my own mind, do you retain any doubts that we Arisians will be fully compensated for the trifling effort involved in furnishing whatever number of Lenses may be required?”

“I have no more doubts. But this Lens… I’m getting more afraid of it every minute. I see that it is a perfect identification; I can understand that it can be a perfect telepath. But is it something else, as well? If it has other powers…what are they?”

“I cannot tell you; or, rather, I will not. It is best for your own development that I do not, except in the most general terms. It has additional qualities, it is true; but, since no two entities ever have the same abilities, no two Lenses will ever be of identical qualities. Strictly speaking, a Lens has no real power of its own; it merely concentrates, intensifies, and renders available whatever powers are already possessed by its wearer. You must develop your own powers and your own abilities; we of Arisia, in furnishing the Lens, will have done everything that we should do.”

“Of course, sir; and much more than we have any right to expect. You have given me a Lens for Roderick Kinnison; how about the others? Who is to select them?”

“You are, for a time.” Silencing the man’s protests, Mentor went on: “You will find that your judgment will be good. You will send to us only one entity who will not be given a Lens, and it is necessary that that one entity should be sent here. You will begin a system of selection and training which will become more and more rigorous as time goes on. This will be necessary; not for the selection itself, which the Lensmen themselves could do among babies in their cradles, but because of the benefits thus conferred upon the many who will not graduate, as well as upon the few who will. In the meantime you will select the candidates; and you will be shocked and dismayed when you discover how few you will be able to send.

“You will go down in history as First Lensman Samms; the Crusader, the man whose wide vision and tremendous grasp made it possible for the Galactic Patrol to become what it is to be. You will have highly capable help, of course. The Kinnisons, with their irresistible driving force, their indomitable will to do, their transcendent urge; Costigan, back of whose stout Irish heart lie Erin’s best of brains and brawn; your cousins George and Ray Olmstead; your daughter Virgilia.…”

“Virgilia! Where does she fit into this picture? What do you know about her—and how?”

“A mind would be incompetent indeed who could not visualize, from even the most fleeting contact with you, a fact which has been in existence for some twenty three of your years. Her doctorate in psychology; her intensive studies under Martian and Venerian masters—even under one reformed Adept of North Polar Jupiter—of the involuntary, uncontrollable, almost unknown and hence highly revealing muscles of the face, the hands, and other parts of the human body. You will remember that poker game for a long time.”

“I certainly will.” Samms grinned, a bit shamefacedly. “She gave us clear warning of what she was going to do, and then cleaned us out to the last millo.”

“Naturally. She has, all unconsciously, been training herself for the work she is destined to do. But to resume; you will feel yourself incompetent, unworthy—that, too, is a part of a Lensman’s Load. When you first scan the mind of Roderick Kinnison you will feel that he, not you, should be the prime mover in the Galactic Patrol. But know now that no mind, not even the most capable in the universe, can either visualize truly or truly evaluate itself. Commissioner Kinnison, upon scanning your mind as he will scan it, will know the truth and will be well content. But time presses; in one minute you leave.”

“Thanks a lot…thanks.” Samms got to his feet and paused, hesitantly. “I suppose that it will be all right…that is, I can call on you again, if…?”

“No,” the Arisian declared, coldly. “My visualization does not indicate that it will ever again be either necessary or desirable for you to visit or to communicate with me or with any other Arisian.”

Communication ceased as though a solid curtain had been drawn between the two. Samms strode out and stepped into the waiting vehicle, which whisked him back to his lifeboat. He blasted off; arriving in the control room of the Chicago precisely at the end of the sixth hour after leaving it.

“Well, Rod, I’m back…” he began, and stopped; utterly unable to speak. For at the mention of the name Samms’ Lens had put him fully en rapport with his friend’s whole mind; and what he perceived struck him—literally and precisely—dumb.

He had always liked and admired Rod Kinnison. He had always known that he was tremendously able and capable. He had known that he was big; clean; a square shooter; the world’s best. Hard; a driver who had little more mercy on his underlings in selected undertakings than he had on himself. But now, as he saw spread out for his inspection Kinnison’s ego in its entirety; as he compared in fleeting glances that terrific mind with those of the other officers—good men, too, all of them—assembled in the room; he knew that he had never even begun to realize what a giant Roderick Kinnison really was.

“What’s the matter, Virge?” Kinnison exclaimed, and hurried up, both hands outstretched. “You look like you’re seeing ghosts! What did they do to you?”

“Nothing—much. But ‘ghosts’ doesn’t half describe what I’m seeing right now. Come into my office, will you, Rod?”

Ignoring the curious stares of the junior officers, the Commissioner and the Councillor went into the latter’s quarters, and in those quarters the two Lensmen remained in close consultation during practically all of the return trip to Earth. In fact, they were still conferring deeply, via Lens, when the Chicago landed and they took a ground-car into The Hill.

“But who are you going to send first, Virge?” Kinnison demanded. “You must have decided on at least some of them, by this time.”

“I know of only five, or possibly six, who are ready,” Samms replied, glumly. “I would have sworn that I knew of a hundred, but they don’t measure up. Jack, Mason Northrop, and Conway Costigan, for the first load. Lyman Cleveland, Fred Rodebush, and perhaps Bergenholm—I haven’t been able to figure him out, but I’ll know when I get him under my Lens—next. That’s all.”

“Not quite. How about your identical-twin cousins, Ray and George Olmstead, who have been doing such a terrific job of counter-spying?”

“Perhaps… Quite possibly.”

“And if I’m good enough, Clayton and Schweikert certainly are, to name only two of the commodores. And Knobos and DalNalten. And above all, how about Jill?”

“Jill? Why, I don’t…she measures up, of course, but…but at that, there was nothing said against it, either… I wonder.…”

“Why not have the boys in—Jill, too—and thrash it out?”

The young people were called in; the story was told; the problem stated. The boys’ reaction was instantaneous and unanimous. Jack Kinnison took the lead.

“Of course Jill’s going, if anybody does!” he burst out vehemently. “Count her out, with all the stuff she’s got? Hardly!”

“Why, Jack! This, from you?” Jill seemed highly surprised. “I have it on excellent authority that I’m a stinker; a half-witted one, at that. A jelly-brain, with come-hither eyes.”

“You are, and a lot of other things besides.” Jack Kinnison did not back up a millimeter, even before their fathers. “But even at your sapadilliest your half wits are better than most other people’s whole ones; and I never said or thought that your brain couldn’t function, whenever it wanted to, back of those sad eyes. Whatever it takes to be a Lensman, sir,” he turned to Samms, “she’s got just as much of as the rest of us. Maybe more.”

“I take it, then, that there is no objection to her going?” Samms asked.

There was no objection.

“What ship shall we take, and when?”

“The Chicago. Now.” Kinnison directed. “She’s hot and ready. We didn’t strike any trouble going or coming, so she didn’t need much servicing. Flit!”

They flitted, and the great battleship made the second cruise as uneventfully as she had made the first. The Chicago’s officers and crew knew that the young people left the vessel separately; that they returned separately, each in his or her lifeboat. They met, however, not in the control room, but in Jack Kinnison’s private quarters; the three young Lensmen and the girl. The three were embarrassed; ill at ease. The Lenses were—definitely—not working. No one of them would put his Lens on Jill, since she did not have one.… The girl broke the short silence.

“Wasn’t she the most perfectly beautiful thing you ever saw?” she breathed. “In spite of being over seven feet tall? She looked to be about twenty—except her eyes—but she must have been a hundred, to know so much—but what are you boys staring so about?”

“She!” Three voices blurted as one.

“Yes. She. Why? I know we weren’t together, but I got the impression, some way or other, that there was only the one. What did you see?”

All three men started to talk at once, a clamor of noise; then all stopped at once.

“You first, Spud. Whom did you talk to, and what did he, she, or it say?” Although Conway Costigan was a few years older than the other three, they all called him by nickname as a matter of course.

“National Police Headquarters—Chief of the Detective Bureau,” Costigan reported, crisply. “Between forty three and forty five; six feet and half an inch; one seventy five. Hard, fine, keen, a Big Time Operator if there ever was one. Looked a lot like your father, Jill; the same dark auburn hair, just beginning to gray, and the same deep orange-yellow markings in his eyes. He gave me the works; then took this Lens out of his safe, snapped it onto my wrist, and gave me two orders—get out and stay out.”

Jack and Mase stared at Costigan, at Jill, and at each other. Then they whistled in unison.

“I see this is not going to be a unanimous report, except possibly in one minor detail,” Jill remarked. “Mase, you’re next.”

“I landed on the campus of the University of Arisia,” Northrop stated, flatly. “Immense place—hundreds of thousands of students. They look me to the Physics Department—to the private laboratory of the Department Head himself. He had a panel with about a million meters and gauges on it; he scanned and measured every individual component element of my brain. Then he made a pattern, on a milling router just about as complicated as his panel. From there on, of course, it was simple—just like a dentist making a set of china choppers or a metallurgist embedding a test-section. He snapped a couple of sentences of directions at me, and then said ‘Scram!’ That’s all.”

“Sure that was all?” Costigan asked. “Didn’t he add ‘and stay scrammed’?”

“He didn’t say it, exactly, but the implication was clear enough.”

“The one point of similarity,” Jill commented. “Now you, Jack. You have been looking as though we were all candidates for canvas jackets that lace tightly up the back.”

“Uh-uh. As though maybe I am. I didn’t see anything at all. Didn’t even land on the planet. Just floated around in an orbit inside that screen. The thing I talked with was a pattern of pure force. This Lens simply appeared on my wrist, bracelet and all, out of thin air. He told me plenty, though, in a very short time—his last word being for me not to come back or call back.”

“Hm…m…m.” This of Jack’s was a particularly indigestible bit, even for Jill Samms.

“In plain words,” Costigan volunteered, “we all saw exactly what we expected to see.”

“Uh-uh,” Jill denied. “I certainly did not expect to see a woman…no; what each of us saw, I think, was what would do us the most good—give each of us the highest possible lift. I am wondering whether or not there was anything at all really there.”

“That might be it, at that.” Jack scowled in concentration. “But there must have been something there—these Lenses are real. But what makes me mad is that they wouldn’t give you a Lens. You’re just as good a man as any one of us—if I didn’t know it wouldn’t do a damn bit of good I’d go back there right now and.…”

“Don’t pop off so, Jack!” Jill’s eyes, however, were starry. “I know you mean it, and I could almost love you, at times—but I don’t need a Lens. As a matter of fact, I’ll be much better off without one.”

“Jet back, Jill!” Jack Kinnison stared deeply into the girl’s eyes—but still did not use his Lens. “Somebody must have done a terrific job of selling, to make you believe that…or are you sold, actually?”

“Actually. Honestly. That Arisian was a thousand times more of a woman than I ever will be, and she didn’t wear a Lens—never had worn one. Women’s minds and Lenses don’t fit. There’s a sex-based incompatibility. Lenses are as masculine as whiskers—and at that, only a very few men can ever wear them, either. Very special men, like you three and Dad and Pops Kinnison. Men with tremendous force, drive, and scope. Pure killers, all of you; each in his own way, of course. No more to be stopped than a glacier, and twice as hard and ten times as cold. A woman simply can’t have that kind of a mind! There is going to be a woman Lensman some day—just one—but not for years and years; and I wouldn’t be in her shoes for anything. In this job of mine, of.…”

“Well, go on. What is this job you’re so sure you are going to do?”

“Why, I don’t know!” Jill exclaimed, startled eyes wide. “I thought I knew all about it, but I don’t! Do you, about yours?”

They did not, not one of them; and they were all as surprised at that fact as the girl had been.

“Well, to get back to this Lady Lensman who is going to appear some day, I gather that she is going to be some kind of a freak. She’ll have to be, practically, because of the sex-based fundamental nature of the Lens. Mentor didn’t say so, in so many words, but she made it perfectly clear that.…”

“Mentor!” the three men exclaimed.

Each of them had dealt with Mentor!

“I am beginning to see,” Jill said, thoughtfully. “Mentor. Not a real name at all. To quote the Unabridged verbatim—I had occasion to look the word up the other day and I am appalled now at the certainty that there was a connection—quote; Mentor, a wise and faithful counselor; unquote. Have any of you boys anything to say? I haven’t; and I am beginning to be scared blue.”

Silence fell; and the more they thought, those three young Lensmen and the girl who was one of the two human women ever to encounter knowingly an Arisian mind, the deeper that silence became.

CHAPTER 4

“So you didn’t find anything on Nevia.” Roderick Kinnison got up, deposited the inch-long butt of his cigar in an ashtray, lit another, and prowled about the room; hands jammed deep into breeches pockets. “I’m surprised. Nerado struck me as being a B.T.O.… I thought sure he’d qualify.”

“So did I.” Samms’ tone was glum. “He’s Big Time, and an Operator; but not big enough, by far. I’m—we’re both—finding out that Lensman material is damned scarce stuff. There’s none on Nevia, and no indication whatever that there ever will be any.”

“Tough…and you’re right, of course, in your stand that we’ll have to have Lensmen from as many different solar systems as possible on the Galactic Council or the thing won’t work at all. So damned much jealousy—which is one reason why we’re here in New York instead of out at The Hill, where we belong—we’ve found that out already, even in such a small and comparatively homogeneous group as our own system—the Solarian Council will not only have to be made up mostly of Lensmen, but each and every inhabited planet of Sol will have to be represented—even Pluto, I suppose, in time. And by the way, your Mr. Saunders wasn’t any too pleased when you took Knobos of Mars and DalNalten of Venus away from him and made Lensmen out of them—and put them miles over his head.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that…exactly. I convinced him…but at that, since Saunders is not Lensman grade himself, it was a trifle difficult for him to understand the situation completely.”

“You say it easy—‘difficult’ is not the word I would use. But back to the Lensman hunt.” Kinnison scowled blackly. “I agree, as I said before, that we need non-human Lensmen, the more the better, but I don’t think much of your chance of finding any. What makes you think… Oh, I see…but I don’t know whether you’re justified or not in assuming a high positive correlation between a certain kind of mental ability and technological advancement.”

“No such assumption is necessary. Start anywhere you please, Rod, and take it from there; including Nevia.”

“I’ll start with known facts, then. Interstellar flight is new to us. We haven’t spread far, or surveyed much territory. But in the eight solar systems with which we are most familiar there are seven planets—I’m not counting Valeria—which are very much like Earth in point of mass, size, climate, atmosphere, and gravity. Five of the seven did not have any intelligent life and were colonized easily and quickly. The Tellurian worlds of Procyon and Vega became friendly neighbors—thank God we learned something on Nevia—because they were already inhabited by highly advanced races: Procia by people as human as we are, Vegia by people who would be so if it weren’t for their tails. Many other worlds of these systems are inhabited by more or less intelligent non-human races. Just how intelligent they are we don’t know, but the Lensmen will soon find out.

“My point is that no race we have found so far has had either atomic energy or any form of space-drive. In any contact with races having space-drives we have not been the discoverers, but the discovered. Our colonies are all within twenty six light-years of Earth except Aldebaran II, which is fifty seven, but which drew a lot of people, in spite of the distance, because it was so nearly identical with Earth. On the other hand, the Nevians, from a distance of over a hundred light-years, found us…implying an older race and a higher development…but you just told me that they would never produce a Lensman!”

“That point stopped me, too, at first. Follow through; I want to see if you arrive at the same conclusion I did.”

“Well…I…I…” Kinnison thought intensely, then went on: “Of course, the Nevians were not colonizing; nor, strictly speaking, exploring. They were merely hunting for iron—a highly organized, intensively specialized operation to find a raw material they needed desperately.”

“Precisely,” Samms agreed.

“The Rigellians, however, were surveying, and Rigel is about four hundred and forty light-years from here. We didn’t have a thing they needed or wanted. They nodded at us in passing and kept on going. I’m still on your track?”

“Dead center. And just where does that put the Palainians?”

“I see…you may have something there, at that. Palain is so far away that nobody knows even where it is—probably thousands of light-years. Yet they have not only explored this system; they colonized Pluto long before our white race colonized America. But damn it, Virge, I don’t like it—any part of it. Rigel Four you may be able to take, with your Lens…even one of their damned automobiles, if you stay solidly en rapport with the driver. But Palain, Virge! Pluto is bad enough, but the home planet! You can’t. Nobody can. It simply can’t be done!”

“I know it won’t be easy,” Samms admitted, bleakly, “but if it’s got to be done, I’ll do it. And I have a little information that I haven’t had time to tell you yet. We discussed once before, you remember, what a job it was to get into any kind of communication with the Palainians on Pluto. You said then that nobody could understand them, and you were right—then. However, I re-ran those brain-wave tapes, wearing my Lens, and could understand them—the thoughts, that is—as well as though they had been recorded in precisionist-grade English.”

“What?” Kinnison exclaimed, then fell silent. Samms remained silent. What they were thinking of Arisia’s Lens cannot be expressed in words.

“Well, go on,” Kinnison finally said. “Give me the rest of it—the stinger that you’ve been holding back.”

“The messages—as messages—were clear and plain. The backgrounds, however, the connotations and implications, were not. Some of their codes and standards seem to be radically different from ours—so utterly and fantastically different that I simply cannot reconcile either their conduct or their ethics with their obviously high intelligence and their advanced state of development. However, they have at least some minds of tremendous power, and none of the peculiarities I deduced were of such a nature as to preclude Lensmanship. Therefore I am going to Pluto; and from there—I hope—to Palain Seven. If there’s a Lensman there, I’ll get him.”

“You will, at that,” Kinnison paid quiet tribute to what he, better than anyone else, knew that his friend had.

“But enough of me—how are you doing?”

“As well as can be expected at this stage of the game. The thing is developing along three main lines. First, the pirates. Since that kind of thing is more or less my own line I’m handling it myself, unless and until you find someone better qualified. I’ve got Jack and Costigan working on it now.

“Second; drugs, vice, and so on. I hope you find somebody to take this line over, because, frankly, I’m in over my depth and want to get out. Knobos and DalNalten are trying to find out if there’s anything to the idea that there may be a planetary, or even inter-planetary, ring involved. Since Sid Fletcher isn’t a Lensman I couldn’t disconnect him openly from his job, but he knows a lot about the dope-vice situation and is working practically full time with the other two.

“Third; pure—or rather, decidedly impure—politics. The more I studied that subject, the clearer it became that politics would be the worst and biggest battle of the three. There are too many angles I don’t know a damned thing about, such as what to do about the succession of foaming, screaming fits your friend Senator Morgan will be throwing the minute he finds out what our Galactic Patrol is going to do. So I ducked the whole political line.

“Now you know as well as I do—better, probably—that Morgan is only the Pernicious Activities Committee of the North American Senate. Multiply him by the thousands of others, all over space, who will be on our necks before the Patrol can get its space-legs, and you will see that all that stuff will have to be handled by a Lensman who, as well as being a mighty smooth operator, will have to know all the answers and will have to have plenty of guts. I’ve got the guts, but none of the other prime requisites. Jill hasn’t, although she’s got everything else. Fairchild, your Relations ace, isn’t a Lensman and can never become one. So you can see quite plainly who has got to handle politics himself.”

“You may be right…but this Lensman business comes first.…” Samms pondered, then brightened. “Perhaps—probably—I can find somebody on this trip—a Palainian, say—who is better qualified than any of us.”

Kinnison snorted. “If you can, I’ll buy you a week in any Venerian relaxerie you want to name.”

“Better start saving up your credits, then, because from what I already know of the Palainian mentality such a development is distinctly more than a possibility.” Samms paused, his eyes narrowing. “I don’t know whether it would make Morgan and his kind more rabid or less so to have a non-Solarian entity possess authority in our affairs political—but at least it would be something new and different. But in spite of what you said about ‘ducking’ politics, what have you got Northrop, Jill and Fairchild doing?”

“Well, we had a couple of discussions. I couldn’t give either Jill or Dick orders, of course.…”

“Wouldn’t, you mean,” Samms corrected.

“Couldn’t,” Kinnison insisted. “Jill, besides being your daughter and Lensman grade, had no official connection with either the Triplanetary Service or the Solarian Patrol. And the Service, including Fairchild, is still Triplanetary; and it will have to stay Triplanetary until you have found enough Lensmen so that you can spring your twin surprises—Galactic Council and Galactic Patrol. However, Northrop and Fairchild are keeping their eyes and ears open and their mouths shut, and Jill is finding out whatever she can about drugs and so on, as well as the various political angles. They’ll report to you—facts, deductions, guesses, and recommendations—whenever you say the word.”

“Nice work, Rod. Thanks. I think I’ll call Jill now, before I go—wonder where she is?…but I wonder…with the Lens perhaps telephones are superfluous? I’ll try it.”

“JILL!” he thought intensely into his Lens, forming as he did so a mental image of his gorgeous daughter as he knew her. But he found, greatly to his surprise, that neither elaboration nor emphasis was necessary.

“Ouch!” came the almost instantaneous answer, long before his thought was complete. “Don’t think so hard, Dad, it hurts—I almost missed a step.” Virgilia was actually there with him; inside his own mind; in closer touch with him than she had ever before been. “Back so soon? Shall we report now, or aren’t you ready to go to work yet?”

“Skipping for the moment your aspersions on my present activities—not quite.” Samms moderated the intensity of his thought to a conversational level. “Just wanted to check with you. Come in, Rod.” In flashing thoughts he brought her up to date. “Jill, do you agree with what Rod here has just told me?”

“Yes. Fully. So do the boys.”

“That settles it, then—unless, of course, I can find a more capable substitute.”

“Of course—but we will believe that when we see it.”

“Where are you and what are you doing?”

“Washington, D.C. European Embassy. Dancing with Herkimer Third, Senator Morgan’s Number One secretary. I was going to make passes at him—in a perfectly lady-like way, of course—but it wasn’t necessary. He thinks he can break down my resistance.”

“Careful, Jill! That kind of stuff.…”

“Is very old stuff indeed, Daddy dear. Simple. And Herkimer Third isn’t really a menace; he just thinks he is. Take a look—you can, can’t you, with your Lens?”

“Perhaps… Oh, yes. I see him as well as you do.” Fully en rapport with the girl as he was, so that his mind received simultaneously with hers any stimulus which she was willing to share, it seemed as though a keen, handsome, deeply tanned face bent down from a distance of inches toward his own. “But I don’t like it a bit—and him even less.”

“That’s because you aren’t a girl,” Jill giggled mentally. “This is fun; and it won’t hurt him a bit, except maybe for a slightly bruised vanity, when I don’t fall down flat at his feet. And I’m learning a lot that he hasn’t any suspicion he’s giving away.”

“Knowing you, I believe that. But don’t…that is…well, be very careful not to get your fingers burned. The job isn’t worth it—yet.”

“Don’t worry, Dad.” She laughed unaffectedly. “When it comes to playboys like this one, I’ve got millions and skillions and whillions of ohms of resistance. But here comes Senator Morgan himself, with a fat and repulsive Venerian—he’s calling my boy-friend away from me, with what he thinks is an imperceptible high-sign, into a huddle—and my olfactory nerves perceive a rich and fruity aroma, as of skunk—so… I hate to seem to be giving a Solarian Councillor the heave-ho, but if I want to read what goes on—and I certainly do—I’ll have to concentrate. As soon as you get back give us a call and we’ll report. Take it easy, Dad!”

“You’re the one to be told that, not me. Good hunting, Jill!”

Samms, still seated calmly at his desk, reached out and pressed a button marked “GARAGE”. His office was on the seventieth floor; the garage occupied level after level of sub-basement. The screen brightened; a keen young face appeared.

“Good evening, Jim. Will you please send my car up to the Wright Skyway feeder?”

“At once, sir. It will be there in seventy five seconds.”

Samms cut off; and, after a brief exchange of thought with Kinnison, went out into the hall and along it to the “DOWN” shaft. There, going free, he stepped through a doorless, unguarded archway into over a thousand feet of air. Although it was long after conventional office hours the shaft was still fairly busy, but that made no difference—inertialess collisions cannot even be felt. He bulleted downward to the sixth floor, where he brought himself to an instantaneous halt.

Leaving the shaft, he joined the now thinning crowd hurrying toward the exit. A girl with meticulously plucked eyebrows and an astounding hair-do, catching sight of his Lens, took her hands out of her breeches pockets—skirts went out, as office dress, when up-and-down open-shaft velocities of a hundred or so miles per hour replaced elevators—nudged her companion, and whispered excitedly:

“Look there! Quick! I never saw one close up before, did you? That’s him—himself! First Lensman Samms!”

At the Portal, the Lensman as a matter of habit held out his car-check, but such formalities were no longer necessary, or even possible. Everybody knew, or wanted to be thought of as knowing, Virgil Samms.

“Stall four sixty five, First Lensman, sir,” the uniformed gateman told him, without even glancing at the extended disk.

“Thank you, Tom.”

“This way, please, sir, First Lensman,” and a youth, teeth gleaming white in a startlingly black face, strode proudly to the indicated stall and opened the vehicle’s door.

“Thank you, Danny,” Samms said, as appreciatively as though he did not know exactly where his ground-car was.

He got in. The door jammed itself gently shut. The runabout—a Dillingham eleven-forty—shot smoothly forward upon its two fat, soft tires. Half-way to the exit archway he was doing forty; he hit the steeply-banked curve leading into the lofty “street” at ninety. Nor was there shock or strain. Motorcycle-wise, but automatically, the “Dilly” leaned against its gyroscopes at precisely the correct angle; the huge low-pressure tires clung to the resilient synthetic of the pavement as though integral with it. Nor was there any question of conflicting traffic, for this thoroughfare, six full levels above Varick Street proper, was not, strictly speaking, a street at all. It had only one point of access, the one which Samms had used; and only one exit—it was simply and only a feeder into Wright Skyway, a limited-access superhighway.

Samms saw, without noting particularly, the maze of traffic-ways of which this feeder was only one tiny part; a maze which extended from ground-level up to a point well above even the towering buildings of New York’s metropolitan district.

The way rose sharply; Samms’ right foot went down a little farther; the Dillingham began to pick up speed. Moving loud-speakers sang to him and yelled and blared at him, but he did not hear them. Brilliant signs, flashing and flaring all the colors of the spectrum—sheer triumphs of the electrician’s art—blazed in or flamed into arresting words and eye-catching pictures, but he did not see them. Advertising—designed by experts to sell everything from aardvarks to Martian zyzmol (“bottled ecstacy”)—but the First Lensman was a seasoned big-city dweller. His mind had long since become a perfect filter, admitting to his consciousness only things which he wanted to perceive: only so can big-city life be made endurable.

Approaching the Skyway, he cut in his touring roadlights, slowed down a trifle, and insinuated his low-flyer into the stream of traffic. Those lights threw fifteen hundred watts apiece, but there was no glare—polarized lenses and wind-shields saw to that.

He wormed his way over to the left-hand, high-speed lane and opened up. At the edge of the skyscraper district, where Wright Skyway angles sharply downward to ground level, Samms’ attention was caught and held by something off to his right—a blue-white, whistling something that hurtled upward into the air. As it ascended it slowed down; its monotone shriek became lower and lower in pitch; its light went down through the spectrum toward the red. Finally it exploded, with an earth-shaking crash; but the lightning-like flash of the detonation, instead of vanishing almost instantaneously, settled itself upon a low-hanging artificial cloud and became a picture and four words—two bearded faces and “SMITH BROS. COUGH DROPS”!

“Well, I’ll be damned!” Samms spoke aloud, chagrined at having been compelled to listen to and to look at an advertisement. “I thought I had seen everything, but that is really new!”

Twenty minutes—fifty miles—later, Samms left the Skyway at a point near what had once been South Norwalk, Connecticut; an area transformed now into the level square miles of New York Spaceport.

New York Spaceport; then, and until the establishment of Prime Base, the biggest and busiest field in existence upon any planet of Civilization. For New York City, long the financial and commercial capital of the Earth, had maintained the same dominant position in the affairs of the Solar System and was holding a substantial lead over her rivals, Chicago, London, and Stalingrad, in the race for inter-stellar supremacy.

And Virgil Samms himself, because of the ever-increasing menace of piracy, had been largely responsible for the policy of basing the war-vessels of the Triplanetary Patrol upon each space-field in direct ratio to the size and importance of that field. Hence he was no stranger in New York Spaceport; in fact, master psychologist that he was, he had made it a point to know by first name practically everyone connected with it.

No sooner had he turned his Dillingham over to a smiling attendant, however, than he was accosted by a man whom he had never seen before.

“Mr. Samms?” the stranger asked.

“Yes.” Samms did not energize his Lens; he had not yet developed either the inclination or the technique to probe instantaneously every entity who approached him, upon any pretext whatever, in order to find out what that entity really wanted.

“I’m Isaacson…” the man paused, as though he had supplied a world of information.

“Yes?” Samms was receptive, but not impressed.

“Interstellar Spaceways, you know. We’ve been trying to see you for two weeks, but we couldn’t get past your secretaries, so I decided to buttonhole you here, myself. But we’re just as much alone here as we would be in either one of our offices—yes, more so. What I want to talk to you about is having our exclusive franchise extended to cover the outer planets and the colonies.”

“Just a minute, Mr. Isaacson. Surely you know that I no longer have even a portfolio in the Council; that practically all of my attention is, and for some time to come will be, directed elsewhere?”

“Exactly—officially.” Isaacson’s tone spoke volumes. “But you’re still the Boss; they’ll do anything you tell them to. We couldn’t try to do business with you before, of course, but in your present position there is nothing whatever to prevent you from getting into the biggest thing that will ever be. We are the biggest corporation in existence now, as you know, and we are still growing—fast. We don’t do business in a small way, or with small men; so here’s a check for a million credits, or I will deposit it to your account.…”

“I’m not interested.”

“As a binder,” the other went on, as smoothly as though his sentence had not been interrupted, “with twenty-five million more to follow on the day that our franchise goes through.”

“I’m still not interested.”

“No…o…o…?” Isaacson studied the Lensman narrowly: and Samms, Lens now wide awake, studied the entrepreneur. “Well…I…while I admit that we want you pretty badly, you are smart enough to know that we’ll get what we want anyway, with or without you. With you, though, it will be easier and quicker, so I am authorized to offer you, besides the twenty six million credits…” he savored the words as he uttered them: “twenty two and one-half percent of Spaceways. On today’s market that is worth fifty million credits; ten years from now it will be worth fifty billion. That’s my high bid; that’s as high as we can possibly go.”

“I’m glad to hear that—I’m still not interested,” and Samms strode away, calling his friend Kinnison as he did so.

“Rod? Virgil.” He told the story.

“Whew!” Kinnison whistled expressively. “They’re not pikers, anyway, are they? What a sweet set-up—and you could wrap it up and hand it to them like a pound of coffee.…”

“Or you could, Rod.”

“Could be.…” The big Lensman ruminated. “But what a hookup! Perfectly legitimate, and with plenty of precedents—and arguments, of a sort—in its favor. The outer planets. Then Alpha Centauri and Sirius and Procyon and so on. Monopoly—all the traffic will bear.…”

“Slavery, you mean!” Samms stormed. “It would hold Civilization back for a thousand years!”

“Sure, but what do they care?”

“That’s it…and he said—and actually believed—that they would get it without my help.… I can’t help wondering about that.”

“Simple enough, Virge, when you think about it. He doesn’t know yet what a Lensman is. Nobody does, you know, except Lensmen. It will take some time for that knowledge to get around.…”

“And still longer for it to be believed.”

“Right. But as to the chance of Interstellar Spaceways ever getting the monopoly they’re working for, I didn’t think I would have to remind you that it was not entirely by accident that over half of the members of the Solarian Council are Lensmen, and that any Galactic Councillor will automatically have to be a Lensman. So go right ahead with what you started, my boy, and don’t give Isaacson and Company another thought. We’ll bend an optic or two in that direction while you are gone.”

“I was overlooking a few things, at that, I guess.” Samms sighed in relief as he entered the main office of the Patrol.

The line at the receptionist’s desk was fairly short, but even so, Samms was not allowed to wait. That highly decorative, but far-from-dumb blonde, breaking off in mid-sentence her business of the moment, turned on her charm as though it had been a battery of floodlights, pressed a stud on her desk, and spoke to the man before her and to the Lensman:

“Excuse me a moment, please. First Lensman Samms, sir…?”

“Yes, Miss Regan?” her communicator—“squawk-box”, in every day parlance—broke in.

“First Lensman Samms is here, sir,” the girl announced, and broke the circuit.

“Good evening, Sylvia. Lieutenant-Commander Wagner, please, or whoever else is handling clearances,” Samms answered what he thought was to have been her question.

“Oh, no, sir; you are cleared. Commodore Clayton has been waiting for you…here he is, now.”

“Hi, Virgil!” Commodore Clayton, a big, solid man with a scarred face and a shock of iron-gray hair, whose collar bore the two silver stars which proclaimed him to be the commander-in-chief of a continental contingent of the Patrol, shook hands vigorously. “I’ll zip you out. Miss Regan, call a bug, please.”

“Oh, that isn’t necessary, Alex!” Samms protested. “I’ll pick one up outside.”

“Not in any Patrol base in North America, my friend; nor, unless I am very badly mistaken, anywhere else. From now on, Lensmen have absolute priority, and the quicker everybody realizes exactly what that means, the better.”

The “bug”—a vehicle something like a jeep, except more so—was waiting at the door. The two men jumped aboard.

“The Chicago—and blast!” Clayton ordered, crisply.

The driver obeyed—literally. Gravel flew from beneath skidding tires as the highly maneuverable little ground-car took off. A screaming turn into the deservedly famous Avenue of Oaks. Along the Avenue. Through the Gate, the guards saluting smartly as the bug raced past them. Past the barracks. Past the airport hangars and strips. Out into the space-field, the scarred and blackened area devoted solely to the widely-spaced docks of the tremendous vessels which plied the vacuous reaches of inter-planetary and inter-stellar space. Spacedocks were, and are, huge and sprawling structures; built of concrete and steel and asbestos and ultra-stubborn refractory and insulation and vacuum-breaks; fully air-conditioned and having refrigeration equipment of thousands of tons per hour of ice; designed not only to expedite servicing, unloading, and loading, but also to protect materials and personnel from the raving, searing blasts of take-off and of landing.

A space-dock is a squat and monstrous cylinder, into whose hollow top the lowermost one-third of a space-ship’s bulk fits as snugly as does a baseball into the “pocket” of a veteran fielder’s long-seasoned glove. And the tremendous distances between those docks minimize the apparent size, both of the structures themselves and of the vessels surmounting them. Thus, from a distance, the Chicago looked little enough, and harmless enough; but as the bug flashed under the overhanging bulk and the driver braked savagely to a stop at one of the dock’s entrances, Samms could scarcely keep from flinching. That featureless, gray, smoothly curving wall of alloy steel loomed so incredibly high above them—extended so terrifyingly far outward beyond its visible means of support! It must be on the very verge of crashing!

Samms stared deliberately at the mass of metal towering above him, then smiled—not without effort—at his companion.

“You’d think, Alex, that a man would get over being afraid that a ship was going to fall on him, but I haven’t—yet.”

“No, and you probably never will. I never have, and I’m one of the old hands. Some claim not to mind it—but not in front of a lie detector. That’s why they had to make the passenger docks bigger than the liners—too many passengers fainted and had to be carried aboard on stretchers—or cancelled passage entirely. However, scaring hell out of them on the ground had one big advantage; they felt so safe inside that they didn’t get the colly-wobbles so bad when they went free.”

“Well, I’ve got over that, anyway. Good-bye, Alex; and thanks.”

Samms entered the dock, shot smoothly upward, followed an escorting officer to the captain’s own cabin, and settled himself into a cushioned chair facing an ultra-wave view-plate. A face appeared upon his communicator screen and spoke.

“Winfield to First Lensman Samms—you will be ready to blast off at twenty one hundred?”

“Samms to Captain Winfield,” the Lensman replied. “I will be ready.”

Sirens yelled briefly; a noise which Samms knew was purely a formality. Clearance had been issued; Station PiXNY was filling the air with warnings. Personnel and material close enough to the Chicago’s dock to be affected by the blast were under cover and safe.

The blast went on; the plate showed, instead of a view of the space-field, a blaze of blue-white light. The war-ship was inertialess, it is true; but so terrific were the forces released that incandescent gases, furiously driven, washed the dock and everything for hundreds of yards around it.

The plate cleared. Through the lower, denser layers of atmosphere the Chicago bored in seconds; then, as the air grew thinner and thinner, she rushed upward faster and faster. The terrain below became concave…then convex. Being completely without inertia, the ship’s velocity was at every instant that at which the friction of the medium through which she blasted her way equaled precisely the force of her driving thrust.

Wherefore, out in open space, the Earth a fast-shrinking tiny ball and Sol himself growing smaller, paler, and weaker at a startling rate, the Chicago’s speed attained an almost constant value; a value starkly impossible for the human mind to grasp.

CHAPTER 5

For hours Virgil Samms sat motionless, staring almost unseeing into his plate. It was not that the view was not worth seeing—the wonder of space, the ever-changing, constantly-shifting panorama of incredibly brilliant although dimensionless points of light, against that wondrous background of mist-besprinkled black velvet, is a thing that never fails to awe even the most seasoned observer—but he had a tremendous load on his mind. He had to solve an apparently insoluble problem. How…how…HOW could he do what he had to do?

Finally, knowing that the time of landing was approaching, he got up, unfolded his fans, and swam lightly through the air of the cabin to a hand-line, along which he drew himself into the control room. He could have made the trip in that room, of course, if he had so chosen; but, knowing that officers of space do not really like to have strangers in that sanctum, he did not intrude until it was necessary.

Captain Winfield was already strapped down at his master conning plate. Pilots, navigators, and computers worked busily at their respective tasks.

“I was just going to call you, First Lensman.” Winfield waved a hand in the general direction of a chair near his own. “Take the Lieutenant-Captain’s station, please.” Then, after a few minutes: “Go inert, Mr. White.”

“Attention, all personnel,” Lieutenant-Captain White spoke conversationally into a microphone. “Prepare for inert maneuvering, Class Three. Off.”

A bank of tiny red lights upon a panel turned green practically as one. White cut the Bergenholm, whereupon Virgil Samms’ mass changed instantly from a weight of zero to one of five hundred and twenty five pounds—ships of war then had no space to waste upon such non-essentials as artificial gravity. Although he was braced for the change and cushioned against it, the Lensman’s breath whooshed! out sharply; but, being intensely interested in what was going on, he swallowed convulsively a couple of times, gasped a few deep breaths, and fought his way back up to normalcy.

The Chief Pilot was now at work, with all the virtuoso’s skill of his rank and grade; one of the hall-marks of which is to make difficult tasks look easy. He played trills and runs and arpeggios—at times veritable glissades—upon keyboards and pedals, directing with micrometric precision the tremendous forces of the superdreadnaught to the task of matching the intrinsic velocity of New York Spaceport at the time of his departure to the I. V. of the surface of the planet so far below.

Samms stared into his plate; first at the incredibly tiny apparent size of that incredibly hot sun, and then at the barren-looking world toward which they were dropping at such terrific speed.

“It doesn’t seem possible…” he remarked, half to Winfield, half to himself, “that a sun could be that big and that hot. Rigel Four is almost two hundred times as far away from it as Earth is from Sol—something like eighteen billion miles—it doesn’t look much, if any, bigger than Venus does from Luna—yet this world is hotter than the Sahara Desert.”

“Well, blue giants are both big and hot,” the captain replied, matter-of-factly, “and their radiation, being mostly invisible, is deadly stuff. And Rigel is about the biggest in this region. There are others a lot worse, though. Doradus S, for instance, would make Rigel, here, look like a tallow candle. I’m going out there, some of these days, just to take a look at it. But that’s enough of astronomical chit-chat—we’re down to twenty miles of altitude and we’ve got your city just about stopped.”

The Chicago slowed gently to a halt; perched motionless upon softly hissing jets. Samms directed his visibeam downward and sent along it an exploring, questing thought. Since he had never met a Rigellian in person, he could not form the mental image or pattern necessary to become en rapport with any one individual of the race. He did know, however, the type of mind which must be possessed by the entity with whom he wished to talk, and he combed the Rigellian city until he found one. The rapport was so incomplete and imperfect as to amount almost to no contact at all, but he could, perhaps, make himself understood.

“If you will excuse this possibly unpleasant and certainly unwarranted intrusion,” he thought, carefully and slowly, “I would like very much to discuss with you a matter which should become of paramount importance to all the intelligent peoples of all the planets in space.”

“I welcome you, Tellurian.” Mind fused with mind at every one of uncountable millions of points and paths. This Rigellian professor of sociology, standing at his desk, was physically a monster…the oil-drum of a body, the four blocky legs, the multi-branchiate tentacular arms, that immobile dome of a head, the complete lack of eyes and of ears…nevertheless Samms’ mind fused with the monstrosity’s as smoothly, as effortlessly, and almost as completely as it had with his own daughter’s!

And what a mind! The transcendent poise; the staggeringly tremendous range and scope—the untroubled and unshakeable calm; the sublime quietude; the vast and placid certainty; the ultimate stability, unknown and forever unknowable to any human or near-human race!

“Dismiss all thought of intrusion, First Lensman Samms…I have heard of you human beings, of course, but have never considered seriously the possibility of meeting one of you mind to mind. Indeed, it was reported that none of our minds could make any except the barest and most unsatisfactory contact with any of yours they chanced to encounter. It is, I now perceive, the Lens which makes this full accord possible, and it is basically about the Lens that you are here?”

“It is,” and Samms went on to cover in flashing thoughts his conception of what the Galactic Patrol should be and should become. That was easy enough; but when he tried to describe in detail the qualifications necessary for Lensmanship, he began to bog down. “Force, drive, scope, of course…range…power…but above all, an absolute integrity…an ultimate incorruptibility.…” He could recognize such a mind after meeting it and studying it, but as to finding it… It might not be in any place of power or authority. His own, and Rod Kinnison’s, happened to be; but Costigan’s was not…and both Knobos and DalNalten had made inconspicuousness a fine art.…

“I see,” the native stated, when it became clear that Samms could say no more. “It is evident, of course, that I cannot qualify; nor do I know anyone personally who can. However.…”

“What?” Samms demanded. “I was sure, from the feel of your mind, that you…but with a mind of such depth and breadth, such tremendous scope and power, you must be incorruptible!”

“I am,” came the dry rejoinder. “We all are. No Rigellian is, or ever will be or can be, what you think of as ‘corrupt’ or ‘corruptible’. Indeed, it is only by the narrowest, most intense concentration upon every line of your thought that I can translate your meaning into a concept possible for any of us even to understand.”

“Then what… Oh, I see. I was starting at the wrong end. Naturally enough, I suppose, I looked first for the qualities rarest in my own race.”

“Of course. Our minds have ample scope and range; and, perhaps, sufficient power. But those qualities which you refer to as ‘force’ and ‘drive’ are fully as rare among us as absolute mental integrity is among you. What you know as ‘crime’ is unknown. We have no police, no government, no laws, no organized armed forces of any kind. We take, practically always, the line of least resistance. We live and let live, as your thought runs. We work together for the common good.”

“Well… I don’t know what I expected to find here, but certainly not this.…” If Samms had never before been completely thunderstruck, completely at a loss, he was then. “You don’t think, then, that there is any chance?”

“I have been thinking, and there may be a chance…a slight one, but still a chance,” the Rigellian said, slowly. “For instance, that youth, so full of curiosity, who first visited your planet. Thousands of us have wondered, to ourselves and to each other, about the peculiar qualities of mind which compelled him and others to waste so much time, effort, and wealth upon a project so completely useless as exploration. Why, he had even to develop energies and engines theretofore unknown, and which can never be of any real use!”

Samms was shaken by the calm finality with which the Rigellian dismissed all possibility of the usefulness of inter-stellar exploration, but stuck doggedly to his purpose.

“However slight the chance, I must find and talk to this man. I suppose he is now out in deep space somewhere. Have you any idea where?”

“He is now in his home city, accumulating funds and manufacturing fuel with which to continue his pointless activities. That city is named…that is, in your English you might call it… Suntown? Sunberg? No, it must be more specific… Rigelsville? Rigel City?”

“Rigelston, I would translate it?” Samms hazarded.

“Exactly—Rigelston.” The professor marked its location upon a globular mental map far more accurate and far more detailed than the globe which Captain Winfield and his lieutenant were then studying.

“Thanks. Now, can you and will you get in touch with this explorer and ask him to call a meeting of his full crew and any others who might be interested in the project I have outlined?”

“I can. I will. He and his kind are not quite sane, of course, as you know; but I do not believe that even they are so insane as to be willing to subject themselves to the environment of your vessel.”

“They will not be asked to come here. The meeting will be held in Rigelston. If necessary, I shall insist that it be held there.”

“You would? I perceive that you would. It is strange…yes, fantastic…you are quarrelsome, pugnacious, anti-social, vicious, small-bodied and small-brained; timid, nervous, and highly and senselessly excitable; unbalanced and unsane; as sheerly monstrous mentally as you are physically.…” These outrageous thoughts were sent as casually and as impersonally as though the sender were discussing the weather. He paused, then went on: “And yet, to further such a completely visionary project, you are eager to subject yourself to conditions whose counterparts I could not force myself, under any circumstances whatever, to meet. It may be…it must be true that there is an extension of the principle of working together for the common good which my mind, for lack of pertinent data, has not been able to grasp. I am now en rapport with Dronvire the explorer.”

“Ask him, please, not to identify himself to me. I do not want to go into that meeting with any preconceived ideas.”

“A balanced thought,” the Rigellian approved. “Someone will be at the airport to point out to you the already desolated area in which the space-ship of the explorers makes its so-frightful landings; Dronvire will ask someone to meet you at the airport and bring you to the place of meeting.”

The telepathic line snapped and Samms turned a white and sweating face to the Chicago’s captain.

“God, what a strain! Don’t ever try telepathy unless you positively have to—especially not with such an outlandishly different race as these Rigellians are!”

“Don’t worry; I won’t.” Winfield’s words were not at all sympathetic, but his tone was. “You looked as though somebody was beating your brains out with a spiked club. Where next, First Lensman?”

Samms marked the location of Rigelston upon the vessel’s chart, then donned ear-plugs and a special, radiation-proof suit of armor, equipped with refrigerators and with extra-thick blocks of lead glass to protect the eyes.

The airport, an extremely busy one well outside the city proper, was located easily enough, as was the spot upon which the Tellurian ship was to land. Lightly, slowly, she settled downward, her jets raving out against a gravity fully twice that of her native Earth. Those blasts, however, added little or nothing to the destruction already accomplished by the craft then lying there—a torpedo-shaped cruiser having perhaps one-twentieth of the Chicago’s mass and bulk.

The superdreadnaught landed, sinking into the hard, dry ground to a depth of some ten or fifteen feet before she stopped. Samms, en rapport with the entity who was to be his escort, made a flashing survey of the mind so intimately in contact with his own. No use. This one was not and never could become Lensman material. He climbed heavily down the ladder. This double-normal gravity made the going a bit difficult, but he could stand that a lot better than some of the other things he was going to have to take. The Rigellian equivalent of an automobile was there, waiting for him, its door invitingly open.

Samms had known—in general—what to expect. The two-wheeled chassis was more or less similar to that of his own Dillingham. The body was a narrow torpedo of steel, bluntly pointed at both ends, and without windows. Two features, however, were both unexpected and unpleasant—the hard, tough steel of which that body was forged was an inch and a half thick, instead of one-sixteenth; and even that extraordinarily armored body was dented and scarred and marred, especially about the fore and rear quarters, as deeply and as badly and as casually as are the fenders of an Earthly jalopy!

The Lensman climbed, not easily or joyously, into that grimly forbidding black interior. Black? It was so black that the port-hole-like doorway seemed to admit no light at all. It was blacker than a witch’s cat in a coal cellar at midnight! Samms flinched; then, stiffening, thought at the driver.

“My contact with you seems to have slipped. I’m afraid that I will have to cling to you rather more tightly than may be either polite or comfortable. Deprived of sight, and without your sense of perception, I am practically helpless.”

“Come in, Lensman, by all means. I offered to maintain full engagement, but it seemed to me that you declined it; quite possibly the misunderstanding was due to our unfamiliarity with each others’ customary mode of thought. Relax, please, and come in…there! Better?”

“Infinitely better. Thanks.”

And it was. The darkness vanished; through the unexplainable perceptive sense of the Rigellian he could “see” everything—he had a practically perfect three-dimensional view of the entire circumambient sphere. He could see both the inside and the outside of the ground car he was in and of the immense space-ship in which he had come to Rigel IV. He could see the bearings and the wrist-pins of the internal-combustion engine of the car, the interior structure of the welds that held the steel plates together, the busy airport outside, and even deep into the ground. He could see and study in detail the deepest-buried, most heavily shielded parts of the atomic engines of the Chicago.

But he was wasting time. He could also plainly see a deeply-cushioned chair, designed to fit a human body, welded to a stanchion and equipped with half a dozen padded restraining straps. He sat down quickly; strapped himself in.

“Ready?”

“Ready.”

The door banged shut with a clangor which burst through space-suit and ear-plugs with all the violence of a nearby thunderclap. And that was merely the beginning. The engine started—an internal-combustion engine of well over a thousand horsepower, designed for maximum efficiency by engineers in whose lexicon there were no counterparts of any English words relating to noise, or even to sound. The car took off; with an acceleration which drove the Tellurian backward, deep into the cushions. The scream of tortured tires and the crescendo bellowing of the engine combined to form an uproar which, amplified by and reverberating within the resonant shell of metal, threatened to addle the very brain inside the Lensman’s skull.

“You suffer!” the driver exclaimed, in high concern. “They cautioned me to start and stop gently, to drive slowly and carefully, to bump softly. They told me you are frail and fragile, a fact which I perceived for myself and which has caused me to drive with the utmost possible care and restraint. Is the fault mine? Have I been too rough?”

“Not at all. It isn’t that. It’s the ungodly noise.” Then, realizing that the Rigellian could have no conception of his meaning, he continued quickly:

“The vibrations in the atmosphere, from sixteen cycles per second up to about nine or ten thousand.” He explained what a second was. “My nervous system is very sensitive to those vibrations. But I expected them and shielded myself against them as adequately as I could. Nothing can be done about them. Go ahead.”

“Atmospheric vibrations? Atmospheric vibrations? Atmospheric vibrations?” The driver marveled, and concentrated upon this entirely new concept while he—

1. Swung around a steel-sheathed concrete pillar at a speed of at least sixty miles per hour, grazing it so closely that he removed one layer of protective coating from the metal.

2. Braked so savagely to miss a wildly careening truck that the restraining straps almost cut Samms’ body, space-suit and all, into slices.

3. Darted into a hole in the traffic so narrow that only tiny fractions of inches separated his hurtling Juggernaut from an enormous steel column on one side and another speeding vehicle on the other.

4. Executed a double-right-angle reverse curve, thus missing by hair’s breadths two vehicles traveling in the opposite direction and one in his own.

5. As a grand climax to this spectacular exhibition of insane driving, he plunged at full speed into a traffic artery which seemed so full already that it could not hold even one more car. But it could—just barely could. However, instead of near misses or grazing hits, this time there were bumps, dents—little ones, nothing at all, really, only an inch or so deep—and an utterly hellish concatenation and concentration of noise.

“I fail completely to understand what effect such vibrations could have,” the Rigellian announced finally, sublimely unconscious that anything at all out of the ordinary had occurred. For him, nothing had. “But surely they cannot be of any use?”

“On this world, I am afraid not. No,” Samms admitted, wearily. “Here, too, apparently, as everywhere, the big cities are choking themselves to death with their own traffic.”

“Yes. We build and build, but never have roads enough.”

“What are those mounds along the streets?” For some time Samms had been conscious of those long, low, apparently opaque structures; attracted to them because they were the only non-transparent objects within range of the Rigellian’s mind. “Or is it something I should not mention?”

“What? Oh, those? By no means.”

One of the nearby mounds lost its opacity. It was filled with swirling, gyrating bands and streamers of energy so vivid and so solid as to resemble fabric; with wildly hurtling objects of indescribable shapes and contours; with brilliantly flashing symbols which Samms found, greatly to his surprise, made sense—not through the Rigellian’s mind, but through his own Lens:

“EAT TEEGMEE’S FOOD!”

“Advertising!” Samms’ thought was a snort.

“Advertising. You do not perceive yours, either, as you drive?” This was the first bond to be established between two of the most highly advanced races of the First Galaxy!

The frightful drive continued; the noise grew worse and worse. Imagine, if you can, a city of fifteen millions of people, throughout whose entire length, breadth, height, and depth no attempt whatever had ever been made to abate any noise, however violent or piercing! If your imagination has been sufficiently vivid and if you have worked understandingly enough, the product may approximate what First Lensman Samms was forced to listen to that day.

Through ever-thickening traffic, climbing to higher and ever higher roadways between towering windowless walls of steel, the massive Rigellian automobile barged and banged its way. Finally it stopped, a thousand feet or so above the ground, beside a building which was still under construction. The heavy door clanged open. They got out.

And then—it chanced to be daylight at the time—Samms saw a tangle of fighting, screaming colors whose like no entity possessing the sense of sight had ever before imagined. Reds, yellows, blues, greens, purples, and every variation and inter-mixture possible; laid on or splashed on or occurring naturally at perfect random, smote his eyes as violently as the all-pervading noise had been assailing his ears.

He realized then that through his guide’s sense of perception he had been “seeing” only in shades of gray, that to these people “visible” light differed only in wave-length from any other band of the complete electromagnetic spectrum of vibration.

Strained and tense, the Lensman followed his escort along a narrow catwalk, through a wall upon which riveters and welders were busily at work, into a room practically without walls and ceiled only by story after story of huge I-beams. Yet this was the meeting-place; almost a hundred Rigellians were assembled there!

And as Samms walked toward the group a craneman dropped a couple of tons of steel plate, from a height of eight or ten feet, upon the floor directly behind him.

“I just about jumped right out of my armor,” is the way Samms himself described his reactions; and that description is perhaps as good as any.

At any rate, he went briefly out of control, and the Rigellian sent him a steadying, inquiring, wondering thought. He could no more understand the Tellurian’s sensitivity than Samms could understand the fact that to these people, even the concept of physical intrusion was absolutely incomprehensible. These builders were not workmen, in the Tellurian sense. They were Rigellians, each working his few hours per week for the common good. They would be no more in contact with the meeting than would their fellows on the other side of the planet.

Samms closed his eyes to the riot of clashing colors, deafened himself by main strength to the appalling clangor of sound, forced himself to concentrate every fiber of his mind upon his errand.

“Please synchronize with my mind, as many of you as possible,” he thought at the group as a whole, and went en rapport with mind after mind after mind. And mind after mind after mind lacked something. Some were stronger than others, had more initiative and drive and urge, but none would quite do. Until—

“Thank God!” In the wave of exultant relief, of fulfillment, Samms no longer saw the colors or heard the din. “You, sir, are of Lensman grade. I perceive that you are Dronvire.”

“Yes, Virgil Samms, I am Dronvire; and at long last I know what it is that I have been seeking all my life. But how of these, my other friends? Are not some of them…?”

“I do not know, nor is it necessary that I find out. You will select…” Samms paused, amazed. The other Rigellians were still in the room, but mentally, he and Dronvire were completely alone.

“They anticipated your thought, and, knowing that it was to be more or less personal, they left us until one of us invites them to return.”

“I like that, and appreciate it. You will go to Arisia. You will receive your Lens. You will return here. You will select and send to Arisia as many or as few of your fellows as you choose. These things I require you, by the Lens of Arisia, to do. Afterward—please note that this is in no sense obligatory—I would like very much to have you visit Earth and accept appointment to the Galactic Council. Will you?”

“I will.” Dronvire needed no time to consider his decision.

The meeting was dismissed. The same entity who had been Samms’ chauffeur on the in-bound trip drove him back to the Chicago, driving as “slowly” and as “carefully” as before. Nor, this time, did the punishment take such toll, even though Samms knew that each terrific lunge and lurch was adding one more bruise to the already much-too-large collection discoloring almost every square foot of his tough hide. He had succeeded, and the thrill of success had its usual analgesic effect.

The Chicago’s captain met him in the air-lock and helped him remove his suit.

“Are you sure you’re all right, Samms?” Winfield was no longer the formal captain, but a friend. “Even though you didn’t call, we were beginning to wonder…you look as though you’d been to a Valerian clambake, and I sure as hell don’t like the way you’re favoring those ribs and that left leg. I’ll tell the boys you got back in A-prime shape, but I’ll have the doctors look you over, just to make sure.”

Winfield made the announcement, and through his Lens Samms could plainly feel the wave of relief and pleasure that spread throughout the great ship with the news. It surprised him immensely. Who was he, that all these boys should care so much whether he lived or died?

“I’m perfectly all right,” Samms protested. “There’s nothing at all the matter with me that twenty hours of sleep won’t fix as good as new.”

“Maybe; but you’ll go to the sick-bay first, just the same,” Winfield insisted. “And I suppose you want me to blast back to Tellus?”

“Right. And fast. The Ambassadors’ Ball is next Tuesday evening, you know, and that’s one function I can’t stay away from, even with a Class A Double Prime excuse.”

CHAPTER 6

The Ambassadors’ Ball, one of the most ultra-ultra functions of the year, was well under way. It was not that everyone who was anyone was there; but everyone who was there was, in one way or another, very emphatically someone. Thus, there were affairs at which there were more young and beautiful women, and more young and handsome men; but none exhibiting newer or more expensive gowns, more ribbons and decorations, more or costlier or more refined jewelry, or a larger acreage of powdered and perfumed epidermis.

And even so, the younger set was well enough represented. Since pioneering appeals more to youth than to age, the men representing the colonies were young; and their wives, together with the daughters and the second (or third or fourth, or occasionally the fifth) wives of the human personages practically balanced the account.

Nor was the throng entirely human. The time had not yet come, of course, when warm-blooded, oxygen-breathing monstrosities from hundreds of other solar systems would vie in numbers with the humanity present. There were, however, a few Martians on the floor, wearing their light “robes du convention” and dancing with meticulously mathematical precision. A few Venerians, who did not dance, sat in state or waddled importantly about. Many worlds of the Solarian System, and not a few other systems, were represented.

One couple stood out, even against that opulent and magnificent background. Eyes followed them wherever they went.

The girl was tall, trim, supple; built like a symphony. Her Callistan vexto-silk gown, of the newest and most violent shade of “radio-active” green, was phosphorescently luminous; fluorescent; gleaming and glowing. Its hem swept the floor, but above the waist it vanished mysteriously except for wisps which clung to strategic areas here and there with no support, apparently, except the personal magnetism of the wearer. She, almost alone of all the women there, wore no flowers. Her only jewelry was a rosette of huge, perfectly-matched emeralds, perched precariously upon her bare left shoulder. Her hair, unlike the other women’s flawless coiffures, was a flamboyant, artistically-disarranged, red-bronze-auburn mop. Her soft and dewy eyes—Virgilia Samms could control her eyes as perfectly as she could her highly educated hands—were at the moment gold-flecked, tawny wells of girlish innocence and trust.

“But I can’t give you this next dance, too, Herkimer—Honestly I can’t!” she pleaded, snuggling just a trifle closer into the embrace of the young man who was just as much man, physically, as she was woman. “I’d just love to, really, but I just simply can’t, and you know why, too.”

“You’ve got some duty-dances, of course…”

“Some? I’ve got a list as long as from here to there! Senator Morgan first, of course, then Mr. Isaacson, then I sat one out with Mr. Ossmen—I can’t stand Venerians, they’re so slimy and fat and repulsive!—and that leathery horned toad from Mars and that Jovian hippopotamus…”

She went down the list, and as she named or characterized each entity another finger of her left hand pressed down upon the back of her partner’s right, to emphasize the count of her social obligations. But those talented fingers were doing more—far, far more—than that.

Herkimer Third, although no little of a Don Juan, was a highly polished, smoothly finished, thoroughly seasoned diplomat. As such, his eyes and his other features—particularly his eyes—had been schooled for years to reveal no trace of whatever might be going on inside his brain. If he had entertained any suspicion of the beautiful girl in his arms, if anyone had suggested that she was trying her best to pump him, he would have smiled the sort of smile which only the top-drawer diplomat can achieve. He was not suspicious of Virgilia Samms. However, simply because she was Virgil Samms’ daughter, he took an extra bit of pain to betray no undue interest in any one of the names she recited. And besides, she was not looking at his eyes, nor even at his face. Her glance, demurely downcast, was all too rarely raised above the level of his chin.

There were some things, however, that Herkimer Herkimer Third did not know. That Virgilia Samms was the most accomplished muscle-reader of her times. That she was so close to him, not because of his manly charm, but because only in that position could she do her prodigious best. That she could work with her eyes alone, but in emergencies, when fullest possible results were imperative, she had to use her exquisitely sensitive fingers and her exquisitely tactile skin. That she had studied intensively, and had tabulated the reactions of, each of the entities on her list. That she was now, with his help, fitting those reactions into a pattern. And finally, that that pattern was beginning to assume the grim shape of MURDER!

And Virgilia Samms, working now for something far more urgent and vastly more important than a figmental Galactic Patrol, hoped desperately that this Herkimer was not a muscle-reader too; for she knew that she was revealing her secrets even more completely than was he. In fact, if things got much worse, he could not help but feel the pounding of her heart…but she could explain that easily enough, by a few appropriate wiggles… No, he wasn’t a reader, definitely not. He wasn’t watching the right places; he was looking where that gown had been designed to make him look, and nowhere else…and no tell-tale muscles lay beneath any part of either of his hands.

As her eyes and her fingers and her lovely torso sent more and more information to her keen brain, Jill grew more and more anxious. She was sure that murder was intended, but who was to be the victim? Her father? Probably. Pops Kinnison? Possibly. Somebody else? Barely possibly. And when? And where? And how? She didn’t know! And she would have to be sure… Mentioning names hadn’t been enough, but a personal appearance… Why didn’t dad show up—or did she wish he wouldn’t come at all…?

Virgil Samms entered the ball-room.

“And dad told me, Herkimer,” she cooed sweetly, gazing up into his eyes for the first time in over a minute, “that I must dance with every one of them. So you see… Oh, there he is now, over there! I’ve been wondering where he’s been keeping himself.” She nodded toward the entrance and prattled on artlessly. “He’s almost never late, you know, and I’ve…”

He looked, and as his eyes met those of the First Lensman, Jill learned three of the facts she needed so badly to know. Her father. Here. Soon. She never knew how she managed to keep herself under control; but, some way and just barely, she did.

Although nothing showed, she was seething inwardly: wrought up as she had never before been. What could she do? She knew, but she did not have a scrap or an iota of visible or tangible evidence; and if she made one single slip, however slight, the consequences could be immediate and disastrous.

After this dance might be too late. She could make an excuse to leave the floor, but that would look very bad, later…and none of them would Lens her, she knew, while she was with Herkimer—damn such chivalry!… She could take the chance of waving at her father, since she hadn’t seen him for so long…no, the smallest risk would be with Mase. He looked at her every chance he got, and she’d make him use his Lens…

Northrop looked at her; and over Herkimer’s shoulder, for one fleeting instant, she allowed her face to reveal the terrified appeal she so keenly felt.

“Want me, Jill?” His Lensed thought touched only the outer fringes of her mind. Full rapport is more intimate than a kiss: no one except her father had ever really put a Lens on Virgilia Samms. Nevertheless:

“Want you! I never wanted anybody so much in my life! Come in, Mase—quick—please!”

Diffidently enough, he came; but at the first inkling of the girl’s news all thought of diffidence or of privacy vanished.

“Jack! Spud! Mr. Kinnison! Mr. Samms!” he Lensed sharp, imperative, almost frantic thoughts. “Listen in!”

“Steady, Mase, I’ll take over,” came Roderick Kinnison’s deeper, quieter mental voice. “First, the matter of guns. Anybody except me wearing a pistol? You are, Spud?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You would be. But you and Mase, Jack?”

“We’ve got our Lewistons!”

“You would have. Blasters, my sometimes-not-quite-so-bright son, are fine weapons indeed for certain kinds of work. In emergencies, it is of course permissible to kill a few dozen innocent bystanders. In such a crowd as this, though, it is much better technique to kill only the one you are aiming at. So skip out to my car, you two, right now, and change—and make it fast.” Everyone knew that Roderick Kinnison’s car was at all times an arsenal on wheels. “Wish you were in uniform, too, Virge, but it can’t be helped now. Work your way—slowly—around to the northwest corner. Spud, do the same.”

“It’s impossible—starkly unthinkable!” and “I’m not sure of anything, really…” Samms and his daughter began simultaneously to protest.

“Virgil, you talk like a man with a paper nose. Keep still until after you’ve used your brain. And I’m sure enough of what you know, Jill, to take plenty of steps. You can relax now—take it easy. We’re covering Virgil and I called up support in force. You can relax a little, I see. Good! I’m not trying to hide from anybody that the next few minutes may be critical. Are you pretty sure, Jill, that Herkimer is a key man?”

“Pretty sure, Pops.” How much better she felt, now that the Lensmen were on guard! “In this one case, at least.”

“Good! Then let him talk you into giving him every dance, right straight through until something breaks. Watch him. He must know the signal and who is going to operate, and if you can give us a fraction of a second of warning it will help no end. Can do?”

“I’ll say I can—and I would love to, the big, slimy, stinking skinker!” As transliterated into words, the girl’s thought may seem a trifle confused, but Kinnison knew exactly what she meant.

“One more thing, Jill; a detail. The boys are coming back in and are working their partners over this way. See if Herkimer notices that they have changed their holsters.”

“No, he didn’t notice,” Jill reported, after a moment. “But I don’t notice any difference, either, and I’m looking for it.”

“Nevertheless, it’s there, and the difference between a Mark Seventeen and a Mark Five is something more than that between Tweedledum and Tweedledee,” Kinnison returned, dryly. “However, it may not be as obvious to non-military personnel as it is to us. That’s far enough, boys, don’t get too close. Now, Virge, keep solidly en rapport with Jill on one side and with us on the other, so that she won’t have to give herself and the show away by yelling and pointing, and…”

“But this is preposterous!” Samms stormed.

“Preposterous, hell,” Roderick Kinnison’s thought was still coldly level; only the fact that he was beginning to use non-ballroom language revealed any sign of the strain he was under. “Stop being so goddam heroic and start using your brain. You turned down fifty billion credits. Why do you suppose they offered that much, when they can get anybody killed for a hundred? And what would they do about it?”

“But they couldn’t get away with it, Rod, at an Ambassadors’ Ball. They couldn’t, possibly.”

“Formerly, no. That was my first thought, too. But it was you who pointed out to me, not so long ago, that the techniques of crime have changed of late. In the new light, the swankier the brawl the greater the confusion and the better the chance of getting away clean. Comb that out of your whiskers, you red-headed mule!”

“Well…there might be something in it, after all…” Samms’ thought showed apprehension at last.

“You know damn well there is. But you boys—Jack and Mase especially—loosen up. You can’t do good shooting while you’re strung up like a couple of cocoons. Do something—talk to your partners or think at Jill…”

“That won’t be hard, sir.” Mason Northrop grinned feebly. “And that reminds me of something, Jill. Mentor certainly bracketed the target when he—or she, or it, maybe—said that you would never need a Lens.”

“Huh?” Jill demanded, inelegantly. “I don’t see the connection, if any.”

“No? Everybody else does, I’ll bet. How about it?” The other Lensmen, even Samms, agreed enthusiastically. “Well, do you think that any of those characters, particularly Herkimer Herkimer Third, would let a harness bull in harness—even such a beautiful one as you—get close enough to him to do such a Davey the Dip act on his mind?”

“Oh…I never thought of that, but it’s right, and I’m glad…but Pops, you said something about ‘support in force.’ Have you any idea how long it will be? I hope I can hold out, with you all supporting me, but…”

“You can, Jill. Two or three minutes more, at most.”

“Support? In force? What do you mean?” Samms snapped.

“Just that. The whole damned army,” Kinnison replied. “I sent Two-Star Commodore Alexander Clayton a thought that lifted him right out of his chair. Everything he’s got, at full emergency blast. Armor—mark eighty fours—six by six extra heavies—a ninety sixty for an ambulance—full escort, upstairs and down—way-friskers—’copters—cruisers and big stuff—in short, the works. I would have run with you before this, if I dared; but the minute the relief party shows up, we do a flit.”

“If you dared?” Jill asked, shaken by the thought.

“Exactly, my dear. I don’t dare. If they start anything we’ll do our damnedest, but I’m praying they won’t.”

But Kinnison’s prayers—if he made any—were ignored. Jill heard a sharp, but very usual and insignificant sound; someone had dropped a pencil. She felt an inconspicuous muscle twitch slightly. She saw the almost imperceptible tensing of a neck-muscle which would have turned Herkimer’s head in a certain direction if it had been allowed to act. Her eyes flashed along that line, searched busily for milli-seconds. A man was reaching unobtrusively, as though for a handkerchief. But men at Ambassadors’ Balls do not carry blue handkerchiefs; nor does any fabric, however dyed, resemble at all closely the blued steel of an automatic pistol.

Jill would have screamed, then, and pointed; but she had time to do neither. Through her rapport with her father the Lensmen saw everything that she saw, in the instant of her seeing it. Hence five shots blasted out, practically as one, before the girl could scream, or point, or even move. She did scream, then; but since dozens of other women were screaming, too, it made no difference—then.

Conway Costigan, trigger-nerved spacehound that he was and with years of gun-fighting and of hand-to-hand brawling in his log, shot first; even before the gunman did. It was Costigan’s blinding speed that saved Virgil Samms’ life that day; for the would-be assassin was dying, with a heavy slug crashing through his brain, before he finished pulling the trigger. The dying hand twitched upward. The bullet intended for Samms’ heart went high; through the fleshy part of the shoulder.

Roderick Kinnison, because of his age, and his son and Northrop, because of their inexperience, were a few milli-seconds slow. They, however, were aiming for the body, not for the head; and any of those three resulting wounds would have been satisfactorily fatal. The man went down, and stayed down.

Samms staggered, but did not go down until the elder Kinnison, as gently as was consistent with the maximum of speed, threw him down.

“Stand back! Get back! Give him air!” Men began to shout, the while pressing closer themselves.

“You men, stand back. Some of you go get a stretcher. You women, come here.” Kinnison’s heavy, parade-ground voice smashed down all lesser noises. “Is there a doctor here?”

There was; and, after being “frisked” for weapons, he went busily to work.

“Joy—Betty—Jill—Clio,” Kinnison called his own wife and their daughter, Virgilia Samms, and Mrs. Costigan. “You four first. Now you—and you—and you—and you.…” he went on, pointing out large, heavy women wearing extremely extreme gowns, “Stand here, right over him. Cover him up, so that nobody else can get a shot at him. You other women, stand behind and between these—closer yet—fill those spaces up solid—there! Jack, stand there. Mase, there. Costigan, the other end; I’ll take this one. Now, everybody, listen. I know damn well that none of you women are wearing guns above the waist, and you’ve all got long skirts—thank God for ballgowns! Now, fellows, if any one of these women makes a move to lift her skirt, blow her brains out, right then, without waiting to ask questions.”

“Sir, I protest! This is outrageous!” one of the dowagers exclaimed.

“Madam, I agree with you fully. It is.” Kinnison smiled as genuinely as he could under the circumstances. “It is, however, necessary. I will apologize to all you ladies, and to you, doctor—in writing if you like—after we have Virgil Samms aboard the Chicago; but until then I would not trust my own grandmother.”

The doctor looked up. “The Chicago? This wound does not appear to be a very serious one, but this man is going to a hospital at once. Ah, the stretcher. So…please…easy…there, that is excellent. Call an ambulance, please, immediately.”

“I did. Long ago. But no hospital, doctor. All those windows—open to the public—or the whole place bombed—by no means. I’m taking no chances whatever.”

“Except with your own life!” Jill put in sharply, looking up from her place at her father’s side. Assured that the First Lensman was in no danger of dying, she had begun to take interest in other things. “You are important, too, you know, and you’re standing right out there in the open. Get another stretcher, lie down on it, and we’ll guard you, too…and don’t be too stiff-necked to take your own advice!” she flared, as he hesitated.

“I’m not, if it were necessary, but it isn’t. If they had killed him, yes. I’d probably be next in line. But since he got only a scratch, there’d be no point at all in killing even a good Number Two.”

“A scratch!” Jill fairly seethed. “Do you call that horrible wound a scratch?”

“Huh? Why, certainly—that’s all it is—thanks to you,” he returned, in honest and complete surprise. “No bones shattered—no main arteries cut—missed the lung—he’ll be as good as new in a couple of weeks.”

“And now,” he went on aloud, “if you ladies will please pick up this stretcher we will move en masse, and slowly, toward the door.”

The women, no longer indignant but apparently enjoying the sensation of being the center of interest, complied with the request.

“Now, boys,” Kinnison Lensed a thought. “Did any of you—Costigan?—see any signs of a concerted rush, such as there would have been to get the killer away if we hadn’t interfered?”

“No, sir,” came Costigan’s brisk reply. “None within sight of me.”

“Jack and Mase—I don’t suppose you looked?”

They hadn’t—had not thought of it in time.

“You’ll learn. It takes a few things like this to make it automatic. But I couldn’t see any, either, so I’m fairly certain there wasn’t any. Smart operators—quick on the uptake.”

“I’d better get at this, sir, don’t you think, and let Operation Boskone go for a while?” Costigan asked.

“I don’t think so.” Kinnison frowned in thought. “This operation was planned, son, by people with brains. Any clues you could find now would undoubtedly be plants. No, we’ll let the regulars look; well stick to our own…”

Sirens wailed and screamed outside. Kinnison sent out an exploring thought.

“Alex?”

“Yes. Where do you want this ninety-sixty with the doctors and nurses? It’s too wide for the gates.”

“Go through the wall. Across the lawn. Right up to the door, and never mind the frippery they’ve got all over the place—have your adjutant tell them to bill us for damage. Samms is shot in the shoulder. Not too serious, but I’m taking him to the Hill, where I know he’ll be safe. What have you got on top of the umbrella, the Boise or the Chicago? I haven’t had time to look up yet.”

“Both.”

“Good man.”

Jack Kinnison started at the monstrous tank, which was smashing statues, fountains, and ornamental trees flat into the earth as it moved ponderously across the grounds, and licked his lips. He looked at the companies of soldiers “frisking” the route, the grounds, and the crowd—higher up, at the hovering helicopters—still higher, at the eight light cruisers so evidently and so viciously ready to blast—higher still, at the long streamers of fire which, he now knew, marked the locations of the two most powerful engines of destruction ever built by man—and his face turned slowly white.

“Good Lord, Dad!” he swallowed twice. “I had no idea…but they might, at that.”

“Not ‘might’, son. They damn well would, if they could get here soon enough with heavy enough stuff.” The elder Kinnison’s jaw-muscles did not loosen, his darting eyes did not relax their vigilance for a fraction of a second as he Lensed the thought. “You boys can’t be expected to know it all, but right now you’re learning fast. Get this—paste it in your iron hats. Virgil Samms’ life is the most important thing in this whole damned universe! If they had got him then it would not, strictly speaking, have been my fault, but if they get him now, it will be.”

The land cruiser crunched to a stop against the very entrance, and a white-clad man leaped out.

“Let me look at him, please…”

“Not yet!” Kinnison denied, sharply. “Not until he’s got four inches of solid steel between him and whoever wants to finish the job they started. Get your men around him, and get him aboard—fast!”

Samms, protected at every point at every instant, was lifted into the maw of the ninety-sixty; and as the massive door clanged shut Kinnison heaved a tremendous sigh of relief. The cavalcade moved away.

“Coming with us, Rod?” Commodore Clayton shouted.

“Yes, but got a couple minutes’ work here yet. Have a staff car wait for me, and I’ll join you.” He turned to the three young Lensmen and the girl. “This fouls up our plans a little, but not too much—I hope. No change in Mateese or Boskone; you and Costigan, Jill, can go ahead as planned. Northrop, you’ll have to brief Jill on Zwilnik and find out what she knows. Virgil was going to do it tonight, after the brawl here, but you know as much about it now as any of us. Check with Knobos, DalNalten, and Fletcher—while Virgil is laid up you and Jack may have to work on both Zabriska and Zwilnik—he’ll Lens you. Get the dope, then do as you think best. Get going!” He strode away toward the waiting staff-car.

“Boskone? Zwilnik?” Jill demanded. “What gives? What are they, Jack?”

“We don’t know yet—maybe we’re going to name a couple of planets…”

“Piffle!” she scoffed. “Can you talk sense, Mase? What’s Boskone?”

“A simple, distinctive, pronounceable coined word; suggested, I believe, by Dr. Bergenholm…” he began.

“You know what I mean, you…” she broke in, but was silenced by a sharply Lensed thought from Jack. His touch was very light, barely sufficient to make conversation possible; but even so, she flinched.

“Use your brain, Jill; you aren’t thinking a lick—not that you can be blamed for it. Stop talking; there may be lip-readers or high-powered listeners around. This feels funny, doesn’t it?” He twitched mentally and went on: “You already know what Operation Mateese is, since it’s your own dish—politics. Operation Zwilnik is drugs, vice, and so on. Operation Boskone is pirates; Spud is running that. Operation Zabriska is Mase and me checking some peculiar disturbances in the sub-ether. Come in, Mase, and do your stuff—I’ll see you later, aboard. Clear ether, Jill!”

Young Kinnison vanished from the fringes of her mind and Northrop appeared. And what a difference! His mind touched hers as gingerly as Jack’s had done; as skittishly, as instantaneously ready to bolt away from anything in the least degree private. However, Jack’s mind had rubbed hers the wrong way, right from the start—and Mase’s didn’t!

“Now, about this Operation Zwilnik,” Jill began.

“Something else first. I couldn’t help noticing, back there, that you and Jack…well, not out of phase, exactly, or really out of sync, but sort of…well, as though…”

“‘Hunting’?” she suggested.

“Not exactly…‘forcing’ might be better—like holding a tight beam together when it wants to fall apart. So you noticed it yourself?”

“Of course, but I thought Jack and I were the only ones who did. Like scratching a blackboard with your finger-nails—you can do it, but you’re awfully glad to stop…and I like Jack, too, darn it—at a distance.”

“And you and I fit like precisely tuned circuits. Jack really meant it, then, when he said that you…that is, he… I didn’t quite believe it until now, but if…you know, of course, what you’ve already done to me.”

Jill’s block went on, full strength. She arched her eyebrows and spoke aloud—“why, I haven’t the faintest idea!”

“Of course not. That’s why you’re using voice. I’ve found out, too, that I can’t lie with my mind. I feel like a heel and a louse, with so much job ahead, but you’ve simply got to tell me something. Then—whatever you say—I’ll hit the job with everything I’ve got. Do I get heaved out between planets without a space-suit, or not?”

“I don’t think so.” Jill blushed vividly, but her voice was steady. “You would rate a space-suit, and enough oxygen to reach another plan—another goal. And now we’d better get to work, don’t you think?”

“Yes. Thanks, Jill, a million. I know as well as you do that I was talking out of turn, and how much—but I had to know.” He breathed deep. “And that’s all I ask—for now. Cut your screens.”

She lowered her mental barriers, finding it surprisingly easy to do so in this case; let them down almost as far as she was in the habit of doing with her father. He explained in flashing thoughts everything he knew of the four Operations, concluding:

“I’m not assigned to Zabriska permanently; I’ll probably work with you on Mateese after your father gets back into circulation. I’m to act more as a liaison man—neither Knobos nor DalNalten knows you well enough to Lens you. Right?”

“Yes, I’ve met Mr. Knobos only once, and have never even seen Dr. DalNalten.”

“Ready to visit them, via Lens?”

“Yes. Go ahead.”

The two Lensmen came in. They came into his mind, not hers. Nevertheless their thoughts, superimposed upon Northrop’s, came to the girl as clearly as though all four were speaking to each other face to face.

“What a weird sensation!” Jill exclaimed. “Why, I never imagined anything like it!”

“We are sorry to trouble you, Miss Samms.…” Jill was surprised anew. The silent voice deep within her mind was of characteristically Martian timber, but instead of the harshly guttural consonants and the hissing sibilants of any Martian’s best efforts at English, pronunciation and enunciation were flawless.

“Oh, I didn’t mean that. It’s no trouble at all, really, I just haven’t got used to this telepathy yet.”

“None of us has, to any noticeable degree. But the reason for this call is to ask you if you have anything new, however slight, to add to our very small knowledge of Zwilnik?”

“Very little, I’m afraid; and that little is mostly guesses, deductions, and jumpings at conclusions. Father told you about the way I work, I suppose?”

“Yes. Exact data is not to be expected. Hints, suggestions, possible leads, will be of inestimable value.”

“Well, I met a very short, very fat Venerian, named Ossmen, at a party at the European Embassy. Do either of you know him?”

“I know of him,” DalNalten replied. “A highly reputable merchant, with such large interests on Tellus that he has to spend most of his time here. He is not in any one of our books…although there is nothing at all surprising in that fact. Go on, please, Miss Samms.”

“He didn’t come to the party with Senator Morgan; but he came to some kind of an agreement with him that night, and I am pretty sure that it was about thionite. That’s the only new item I have.”

“Thionite!” The three Lensmen were equally surprised.

“Yes. Thionite. Definitely.”

“How sure are you of this, Miss Samms?” Knobos asked, in deadly earnest.

“I am not sure that this particular agreement was about thionite, no; but the probability is roughly nine-tenths. I am sure, however, that both Senator Morgan and Ossmen know a lot about thionite that they want to hide. Both gave very high positive reactions—well beyond the six-sigma point of virtual certainty.”

There was a pause, broken by the Martian, but not by a thought directed at any one of the three.

“Sid!” he called, and even Jill could feel the Lensed thought speed.

“Yes, Knobos? Fletcher.”

“That haul-in you made, out in the asteroids. Heroin, hadive, and ladolian, wasn’t it? No thionite involved anywhere?”

“No thionite. However, you must remember that part of the gang got away, so all I can say positively is that we didn’t see, or hear about, any thionite. There was some gossip, of course: but you know there always is.”

“Of course. Thanks, Sid.” Jill could feel the brilliant Martian’s mental gears whirl and click. Then he went into such a flashing exchange of thought with the Venerian that the girl lost track in seconds.

“One more question, Miss Samms?” DalNalten asked. “Have you detected any indications that there may be some connection between either Ossmen or Morgan and any officer or executive of Interstellar Spaceways?”

“Spaceways! Isaacson?” Jill caught her breath. “Why…nobody even thought of such a thing—at least, nobody ever mentioned it to me—I never thought of making any such tests.”

“The possibility occurred to me only a moment ago, at your mention of thionite. The connection, if any exists, will be exceedingly difficult to trace. But since most, if not all, of the parties involved will probably be included in your Operation Mateese, and since a finding, either positive or negative, would be tremendously significant, we feel emboldened to ask you to keep this point in mind.”

“Why, of course I will. I’ll be very glad to.”

“We thank you for your courtesy and your help. One or both of us will get in touch with you from time to time, now that we know the pattern of your personality. May immortal Grolossen speed the healing of your father’s wound.”

CHAPTER 7

Late that night—or, rather, very early the following morning—Senator Morgan and his Number One secretary were closeted in the former’s doubly spy-ray-proofed office. Morgan’s round, heavy, florid face had perhaps lost a little of its usual color; the fingers of his left hand drummed soundlessly upon the glass top of his desk. His shrewd gray eyes, however, were as keen and as calculating as ever.

“This thing smells, Herkimer…it reeks…but I can’t figure any of the angles. That operation was planned. Sure fire, it couldn’t miss. Right up to the last split second it worked perfectly. Then—blooie! A flat bust. The Patrol landed and everything was under control. There must have been a leak somewhere—but where in hell could it have been?”

“There couldn’t have been a leak, Chief; it doesn’t make sense.” The secretary uncrossed his long legs, recrossed them in the other direction, threw away a half-smoked cigarette, lit another. “If there’d been any kind of a leak they would have done a lot more than just kill the low man on the ladder. You know as well as I do that Rocky Kinnison is the hardest-boiled character this side of hell. If he had known anything, he would have killed everybody in sight, including you and me. Besides, if there had been a leak, he would not have let Samms get within ten thousand miles of the place—that’s one sure thing. Another is he wouldn’t have waited until after it was all over to get his army there. No, Chief, there couldn’t have been a leak. Whatever Samms or Kinnison found out—probably Samms, he’s a hell of a lot smarter than Kinnison is, you know—he learned right there and then. He must have seen Brainerd start to pull his gun.”

“I thought of that. I’d buy it, except for one fact. Apparently you didn’t time the interval between the shots and the arrival of the tanks.”

“Sorry, Chief.” Herkimer’s face was a study in chagrin. “I made a bad slip there.”

“I’ll say you did. One minute and fifty eight seconds.”

“What!”

Morgan remained silent.

“The patrol is fast, of course…and always ready…and they would yank the stuff in on tractor beams, not under their own power…but even so…five minutes, is my guess, Chief. Four and a half, absolute minimum.”

“Check. And where do you go from there?”

“I see your point. I don’t. That blows everything wide open. One set of facts says there was a leak, which occurred between two and a half and three minutes before the signal was given. I ask you, Chief, does that make sense?”

“No. That’s what is bothering me. As you say, the facts seem to be contradictory. Somebody must have learned something before anything happened; but if they did, why didn’t they do more? And Murgatroyd. If they didn’t know about him, why the ships—especially the big battlewagons? If they did think he might be out there somewhere, why didn’t they go and find out?”

“Now I’ll ask one. Why didn’t our Mr. Murgatroyd do something? Or wasn’t the pirate fleet supposed to be in on this? Probably not, though.”

“My guess would be the same as yours. Can’t see any reason for having a fleet cover a one-man operation, especially as well-planned a one as this was. But that’s none of our business. These Lensmen are. I was watching them every second. Neither Samms nor Kinnison did anything whatever during that two minutes.”

“Young Kinnison and Northrop each left the hall about that time.”

“I know it. So they did. Either one of them could have called the Patrol—but what has that to do with the price of beef C. I. F. Valeria?”

Herkimer refrained tactfully from answering the savage question. Morgan drummed and thought for minutes, then went on slowly:

“There are two, and only two, possibilities; neither of which seem even remotely possible. It was—must have been—either the Lens or the girl.”

“The girl? Act your age, Senator. I knew where she was, and what she was doing, every second.”

“That was evident.” Morgan stopped drumming and smiled cynically. “I’m getting a hell of a kick out of seeing you taking it, for a change, instead of dishing it out.”

“Yes?” Herkimer’s handsome face hardened. “That game isn’t over, my friend.”

“That’s what you think,” the Senator jibed. “Can’t believe that any woman can be Herkimer-proof, eh? You’ve been working on her for six weeks now, instead of the usual six hours, and you haven’t got anywhere yet.”

“I will, Senator.” Herkimer’s nostrils flared viciously. “I’ll get her, one way or another, if it’s the last thing I ever do.”

“I’ll give you eight to five you don’t; and a six-month time limit.”

“I’ll take five thousand of that. But what makes you think that she’s anything to be afraid of? She’s a trained psychologist, yes; but so am I; and I’m older and more experienced than she is. That leaves that yoga stuff—her learning how to sit cross-legged, how to contemplate her navel, and how to try to get in tune with the infinite. How do you figure that puts her in my class?”

“I told you, I don’t. Nothing makes sense. But she is Virgil Samms’ daughter.”

“What of it? You didn’t gag on George Olmstead—you picked him yourself for one of the toughest jobs we’ve got. By blood he’s just about as close to Virgil Samms as Virgilia is. They might as well have been hatched out of the same egg.”

“Physically, yes. Mentally and psychologically, no. Olmstead is a realist, a materialist. He wants his reward in this world, not the next, and is out to get it. Furthermore, the job will probably kill him, and even if it doesn’t, he will never be in a position of trust or where he can learn much of anything. On the other hand, Virgil Samms is—but I don’t need to tell you what he is like. But you don’t seem to realize that she’s just like him—she isn’t playing around with you because of your overpowering charm.…”

“Listen, Chief. She didn’t know anything and she didn’t do anything. I was dancing with her all the time, as close as that,” he clasped his hands tightly together, “so I know what I’m talking about. And if you think she could ever learn anything from me, skip it. You know that nobody on Earth, or anywhere else, can read my face; and besides, she was playing coy right then—wasn’t even looking at me. So count her out.”

“We’ll have to, I guess.” Morgan resumed his quiet drumming. “If there were any possibility that she pumped you I’d send you to the mines, but there’s no sign…that leaves the Lens. It has seemed, right along, more logical than the girl—but a lot more fantastic. Been able to find out anything more about it?”

“No. Just what they’ve been advertising. Combination radio-phone, automatic language-converter, telepath, and so on. Badge of the top skimmings of the top-bracket cops. But I began to think, out there on the floor, that they aren’t advertising everything they know.”

“So did I. You tell me.”

“Take the time zero minus three minutes. Besides the five Lensmen—and Jill Samms—the place was full of top brass; scrambled eggs all over the floor. Commodores and lieutenant-Commodores from all continental governments of the Earth, the other planets, and the colonies, all wearing full-dress side-arms. Nobody knew anything then; we agree on that. But within the next few seconds, somebody found out something and called for help. One of the Lensmen could possibly have done that without showing signs. BUT—at zero time all four Lensmen had their guns out—and not Lewistons, please note—and were shooting; whereas none of the other armed officers knew that anything was going on until after it was all over. That puts the finger on the Lens.”

“That’s the way I figured it. But the difficulties remain unchanged. How? Mind-reading?”

“Space-drift!” Herkimer snorted. “My mind can’t be read.”

“Nor mine.”

“And besides, if they could read minds, they wouldn’t have waited until the last possible split second to do it, unless…say, wait a minute!… Did Brainerd act or look nervous, toward the last? I wasn’t to look at him, you know.”

“Not nervous, exactly; but he did get a little tense.”

“There you are, then. Hired murderers aren’t smart. A Lensman saw him tighten up and got suspicious. Turned in the alarm on general principles. Warned the others to keep on their toes. But even so, it doesn’t look like mind-reading—they’d have killed him sooner. They were watchful, and mighty quick on the draw.”

“That could be it. That’s about as thin and as specious an explanation as I ever saw cooked up, but it does cover the facts…and the two of us will be able to make it stick…but take notice, pretty boy, that certain parties are not going to like this at all. In fact, they are going to be very highly put out.”

“That’s a nice hunk of understatement, boss. But notice one beautiful thing about this story?” Herkimer grinned maliciously. “It lets us pass the buck to Big Jim Towne. We can be—and will be—sore as hell because he picks such weak-sister characters to do his killings!”

* * * *

In the heavily armored improvised ambulance, Virgil Samms sat up and directed a thought at his friend Kinnison, finding his mind a turmoil of confusion.

“What’s the matter, Rod?”

“Plenty!” the big Lensman snapped back. “They were—maybe still are—too damn far ahead of us. Something has been going on that we haven’t even suspected. I stood by, as innocent as a three-year-old girl baby, and let you walk right into that one—and I emphatically do not enjoy getting caught with my pants down that way. It makes me jumpy. This may be all, but it may not be—not by eleven thousand light-years—and I’m trying to dope out what is going to happen next.”

“And what have you deduced?”

“Nothing. I’m stuck. So I’m tossing it into your lap. Besides, that’s what you are getting paid for, thinking. So go ahead and think. What would you be doing, if you were on the other side?”

“I see. You think, then, that it might not be good technique to take the time to go back to the spaceport?”

“You get the idea. But—can you stand transfer?”

“Certainly. They got my shoulder dressed and taped, and my arm in a sling. Shock practically all gone. Some pain, but not much. I can walk without falling down.”

“Fair enough. Clayton!” He Lensed a vigorous thought. “Have any of the observers spotted anything, high up or far off?”

“No, sir.”

“Good. Kinnison to Commodore Clayton, orders. Have a ’copter come down and pick up Samms and myself on tractors. Instruct the Boise and the cruisers to maintain utmost vigilance. Instruct the Chicago to pick us up. Detach the Chicago and the Boise from your task force. Assign them to me. Off.”

“Clayton to Commissioner Kinnison. Orders received and are being carried out. Off.”

The transfers were made without incident. The two super-dreadnaughts leaped into the high stratosphere and tore westward. Half-way to the Hill, Kinnison called Dr. Frederick Rodebush.

“Fred? Kinnison. Have Cleve and Bergenholm link up with us. Now—how are the Geigers on the outside of the Hill behaving?”

“Normal, all of them,” the physicist-Lensman reported after a moment. “Why?”

Kinnison detailed the happenings of the recent past. “So tell the boys to unlimber all the stuff the Hill has got.”

“My God!” Cleveland exclaimed. “Why, that’s putting us back to the days of the Interplanetary Wars!”

“With one notable exception,” Kinnison pointed out. “The attack, if any, will be strictly modern. I hope we’ll be able to handle it. One good thing, the old mountain’s got a lot of sheer mass. How much radioactivity will it stand?”

“Allotropic iron, U-235, or plutonium?” Rodebush seized his slide-rule.

“What difference does it make?”

“From a practical standpoint…perhaps none. But with a task force defending, not many bombs could get through, so I’d say…”

“I wasn’t thinking so much of bombs.”

“What, then?”

“Isotopes. A good, thick blanket of dust. Slow-speed, fine stuff that neither our ships nor the Hill’s screens could handle. We’ve got to decide, first, whether Virgil will be safer there in the Hill or out in space in the Chicago; and second, for how long.”

“I see… I’d say here, under the Hill. Months, perhaps years, before anything could work down this far. And we can always get out. No matter how hot the surface gets, we’ve got enough screen, heavy water, cadmium, lead, mercury, and everything else necessary to get him out through the locks.”

“That’s what I was hoping you’d say. And now, about the defense… I wonder… I don’t want everybody to think I’ve gone completely hysterical, but I’ll be damned if I want to get caught again with.…” His thought faded out.

“May I offer a suggestion, sir?” Bergenholm’s thought broke the prolonged silence.

“I’d be very glad to have it—your suggestions so far haven’t been idle vaporings. Another hunch?”

“No, sir, a logical procedure. It has been some months since the last emergency call-out drill was held. If you issue such another call now, and nothing happens, it can be simply another surprise drill; with credit, promotion, and monetary awards for the best performances; further practice and instruction for the less proficient units.”

“Splendid, Dr. Bergenholm!” Samms’ brilliant and agile mind snatched up the thought and carried it along. “And what a chance, Rod, for something vastly larger and more important than a Continental, or even a Tellurian, drill—make it the first maneuver of the Galactic Patrol!”

“I’d like to, Virge, but we can’t. My boys are ready, but you aren’t. No top appointments and no authority.”

“That can be arranged in a very few minutes. We have been waiting for the psychological moment. This, especially if trouble should develop, is the time. You yourself expect an attack, do you not?”

“Yes. I would not start anything unless and until I was ready to finish it, and I see no reason for assuming that whoever it was that tried to kill you is not at least as good a planner as I am.”

“And the rest of you…? Dr. Bergenholm?”

“My reasoning, while it does not exactly parallel that of Commissioner Kinnison, leads to the same conclusion; that an attack in great force is to be expected.”

“Not exactly parallel?” Kinnison demanded. “In what respects?”

“You do not seem to have considered the possibility, Commissioner, that the proposed assassination of First Lensman Samms could very well have been only the first step in a comprehensive operation.”

“I didn’t…and it could have been. So go ahead, Virge, with.…”

The thought was never finished, for Samms had already gone ahead. Simultaneously, it seemed, the minds of eight other Lensmen joined the group of Tellurians. Samms, intensely serious, spoke aloud to his friend:

“The Galactic Council is now assembled. Do you, Roderick K. Kinnison, promise to uphold, in as much as you conscientiously can and with all that in you lies, the authority of this Council throughout all space?”

“I promise.”

“By virtue of the authority vested in me its president by the Galactic Council, I appoint you Port Admiral of the Galactic Patrol. My fellow councillors are now inducting the armed forces of their various solar systems into the Galactic Patrol… It will not take long… There, you may make your appointments and issue orders for the mobilization.”

The two super-dreadnaughts were now approaching the Hill. The Boise stayed “up on top”; the Chicago went down. Kinnison, however, paid very little attention to the landing or to Samms’ disembarkation, and none whatever to the Chicago’s reascent into the high heavens. He knew that everything was under control; and, now alone in his cabin, he was busy.

“All personnel of all armed forces just inducted into the Galactic Patrol, attention!” He spoke into an ultra-wave microphone, the familiar parade-ground rasp very evident in his deep and resonant voice. “Kinnison of Tellus, Port Admiral, speaking. Each of you has taken oath to the Galactic Patrol?”

They had.

“At ease. The organization chart already in your hands is made effective as of now. Enter in your logs the date and time. Promotions: Commodore Clayton of North America, Tellus.…”

In his office at New York Spaceport Clayton came to attention and saluted crisply; his eyes shining, his deeply-scarred face alight.

“…to be Admiral of the First Galactic Region. Commodore Schweikert of Europe, Tellus…”

In Berlin a narrow-waisted, almost foppish-seeming man, with roached blond hair and blue eyes, bowed stiffly from the waist and saluted punctiliously.

“…to be Lieutenant-Admiral of the First Galactic Region.”

And so on, down the list. A marshal and a lieutenant-marshal of the Solarian System; a general and a lieutenant-general of the planet Sol Three. Promotions, agreed upon long since, to fill the high offices thus vacated. Then the list of commodores upon other planets—Guindlos of Redland, Mars; Sesseffsen of Talleron, Venus; Raymond of the Jovian Sub-System; Newman of Alphacent; Walters of Sirius; van-Meeter of Valeria; Adams of Procyon; Roberts of Altair; Barrtell of Fomalhout; Armand of Vega; and Coigne of Aldebaran—each of whom was actually the commander-in-chief of the armed forces of a world. Each of these was made general of his planet.

“Except for lieutenant-commodores and up, who will tune their minds to me—dismissed!” Kinnison stopped talking and went onto his Lens.

“That was for the record. I don’t need to tell you, fellows, how glad I am to be able to do this. You’re tops, all of you—I don’t know of anybody I’d rather have at my back when the ether gets rough…”

“Right back at you, chief!” “Same to you Rod!” “Rocky Rod, Port Admiral!” “Now we’re blasting!” came a melange of thoughts. Those splendid men, with whom he had shared so much of danger and of stress, were all as jubilant as schoolboys.

“But the thing that makes this possible may also make it necessary for us to go to work; to earn your extra stars and my wheel.” Kinnison smothered the welter of thoughts and outlined the situation, concluding: “So you see it may turn out to be only a drill—but on the other hand, since the outfit is big enough to have built a war-fleet alone, if it wanted one, and since it may have had a lot of first-class help that none of us knows anything about, we may be in for the damndest battle that any of us ever saw. So come prepared for anything. I am now going back onto voice, for the record.

“Kinnison to the commanding officers of all fleets, sub-fleets, and task-forces of the Galactic Patrol. Information. Subject, tactical problem; defense of the Hill against a postulated Black Fleet of unknown size, strength, and composition; of unknown nationality or origin; coming from an unknown direction in space at an unknown time.

“Kinnison to Admiral Clayton. Orders. Take over. I am relinquishing command of the Boise and the Chicago.”

“Clayton to Port Admiral Kinnison. Orders received. Taking over. I am at the Chicago’s main starboard lock. I have instructed Ensign Masterson, the commanding officer of this gig, to wait; that he is to take you down to the Hill.”

“WHAT? Of all the damned.…” This was a thought, and unrecorded.

“Sorry, Rod—I’m sorry as hell, and I’d like no end to have you along.” This, too, was a thought. “But that’s the way it is. Ordinary Admirals ride the ether with their fleets. Port Admirals stay aground. I report to you, and you run things—in broad—by remote control.”

“I see.” Kinnison then Lensed a fuming thought at Samms. “Alex couldn’t do this to me—and wouldn’t—and knows damn well that I’d burn him to a crisp if he had the guts to try it. So it’s your doing—what in hell’s the big idea?”

“Who’s being heroic now, Rod?” Samms asked, quietly. “Use your brain. And then come down here, where you belong.”

And Kinnison, after a long moment of rebellious thought and with as much grace as he could muster, came down. Down not only to the Patrol’s familiar offices, but down into the deepest crypts beneath them. He was glum enough, and bitter, at first: but he found much to do. Grand Fleet Headquarters—his headquarters—was being organized, and the best efforts of the best minds and of the best technologists of three worlds were being devoted to the task of strengthening the already extremely strong defenses of THE HILL. And in a very short time the plates of GFHQ showed that Admiral Clayton and Lieutenant-Admiral Schweikert were doing a very nice job.

All of the really heavy stuff was of Earth, the Mother Planet, and was already in place; as were the less numerous and much lighter contingents of Mars, of Venus, and of Jove. And the fleets of the outlying solar systems—cutters, scouts, and a few light cruisers—were neither maintaining fleet formation nor laying course for Sol. Instead, each individual vessel was blasting at maximum for the position in space in which it would form one unit of a formation englobing at a distance of light-years the entire Solarian System, and each of those hurtling hundreds of ships was literally combing all circumambient space with its furiously-driven detector beams.

“Nice.” Kinnison turned to Samms, now beside him at the master plate. “Couldn’t have done any better myself.”

“After you get it made, what are you going to do with it in case nothing happens?” Samms was still somewhat skeptical. “How long can you make a drill last?”

“Until all the ensigns have long gray whiskers if I have to, but don’t worry—if we have time to get the preliminary globe made I’ll be the surprisedest man in the system.”

And Kinnison was not surprised; before full englobement was accomplished, a loud-speaker gave tongue.

“Flagship Chicago to Grand Fleet Headquarters!” it blatted, sharply. “The Black Fleet has been detected. RA twelve hours, declination plus twenty degrees, distance about thirty light-years.…”

Kinnison started to say something; then, by main force, shut himself up. He wanted intensely to take over, to tell the boys out there exactly what to do, but he couldn’t. He was now a Big Shot—damn the luck! He could be and must be responsible for broad policy and for general strategy, but, once those vitally important decisions had been made, the actual work would have to be done by others. He didn’t like it—but there it was. Those flashing thoughts took only an instant of time.

“…which is such extreme range that no estimate of strength or composition can be made at present. We will keep you informed.”

“Acknowledge,” he ordered Randolph; who, wearing now the five silver bars of major, was his Chief Communications Officer. “No instructions.”

He turned to his plate. Clayton hadn’t had to be told to pull in his light stuff; it was all pelting hell-for-leather for Sol and Tellus. Three general plans of battle had been mapped out by Staff. Each had its advantages—and its disadvantages. Operation Acorn—long distance—would be fought at, say, twelve light-years. It would keep everything, particularly the big stuff, away from the Hill, and would make automatics useless…unless some got past, or unless the automatics were coming in on a sneak course, or unless several other things—in any one of which cases what a God-awful shellacking the Hill would take!

He grinned wryly at Samms, who had been following his thought, and quoted: “A vast hemisphere of lambent violet flame, through which neither material substance nor destructive ray can pass.”

“Well, that dedicatory statement, while perhaps a bit florid, was strictly true at the time—before the days of allotropic iron and of polycyclic drills. Now I’ll quote one: ‘Nothing is permanent except change’.”

“Uh-huh,” and Kinnison returned to his thinking. Operation Adack. Middle distance. Uh-uh. He didn’t like it any better now than he had before, even though some of the Big Brains of Staff thought it the ideal solution. A compromise. All of the disadvantages of both of the others, and none of the advantages of either. It still stunk, and unless the Black fleet had an utterly fantastic composition Operation Adack was out.

And Virgil Samms, quietly smoking a cigarette, smiled inwardly. Rod the Rock could scarcely be expected to be in favor of any sort of compromise.

That left Operation Affick. Close up. It had three tremendous advantages. First, the Hill’s own offensive weapons—as long as they lasted. Second, the new Rodebush-Bergenholm fields. Third, no sneak attack could be made without detection and interception. It had one tremendous disadvantage; some stuff, and probably a lot of it, would get through. Automatics, robots, guided missiles equipped with super-speed drives, with polycyclic drills, and with atomic war-heads strong enough to shake the whole world.

But with those new fields, shaking the world wouldn’t be enough; in order to get deep enough to reach Virgil Samms they would damn near have to destroy the world. Could anybody build a bomb that powerful? He didn’t think so. Earth technology was supreme throughout all known space; of Earth technologists the North Americans were, and always had been, tops. Grant that the Black Fleet was, basically, North American. Grant further that they had a man as good as Adlington—or that they could spy-ray Adlington’s brain and laboratories and shops—a tall order. Adlington himself was several months away from a world-wrecker, unless he could put one a hundred miles down before detonation, which simply was not feasible. He turned to Samms.

“It’ll be Affick, Virge, unless they’ve got a composition that is radically different from anything I ever saw put into space.”

“So? I can’t say that I am very much surprised.”

The calm statement and the equally calm reply were beautifully characteristic of the two men. Kinnison had not asked, nor had Samms offered, advice. Kinnison, after weighing the facts, made his decision. Samms, calmly certain that the decision was the best that could be made upon the data available, accepted it without question or criticism.

“We’ve still got a minute or two,” Kinnison remarked. “Don’t quite know what to make of their line of approach. Coma Berenices. I don’t know of anything at all out that way, do you? They could have detoured, though.”

“No, I don’t.” Samms frowned in thought. “Probably a detour.”

“Check.” Kinnison turned to Randolph. “Tell them to report whatever they know; we can’t wait any…”

As he was speaking the report came in.

The Black Fleet was of more or less normal make-up; considerably larger than the North American contingent, but decidedly inferior to the Patrol’s present Grand Fleet. Either three or four capital ships…

“And we’ve got six!” Kinnison said, exultantly. “Our own two, Asia’s Himalaya, Africa’s Johannesburg, South America’s Bolivar, and Europe’s Europa.”

…Battle cruisers and heavy cruisers, about in the usual proportions; but an unusually high ratio of scouts and light cruisers. There were either two or three large ships which could not be classified definitely at that distance; long-range observers were going out to study them.

“Tell Clayton,” Kinnison instructed Randolph, “that it is to be Operation Affick, and for him to fly at it.”

“Report continued,” the speaker came to life again. “There are three capital ships, apparently of approximately the Chicago class, but tear-drop-shaped instead of spherical…”

“Ouch!” Kinnison flashed a thought at Samms. “I don’t like that. They can both fight and run.”

“…The battle cruisers are also tear-drops. The small vessels are torpedo-shaped. There are three of the large ships, which we are still not able to classify definitely. They are spherical in shape, and very large, but do not seem to be either armed or screened, and are apparently carriers—possibly of automatics. We are now making contact—off!”

Instead of looking at the plates before them, the two Lensmen went en rapport with Clayton, so that they could see everything he saw. The stupendous Cone of Battle had long since been formed; the word to fire was given in a measured two-second call. Every firing officer in every Patrol ship touched his stud in the same split second. And from the gargantuan mouth of the Cone there spewed a miles-thick column of energy so raw, so stark, so incomprehensibly violent that it must have been seen to be even dimly appreciated. It simply cannot be described.

Its prototype, Triplanetary’s Cylinder of Annihilation, had been a highly effective weapon indeed. The offensive beams of the fish-shaped Nevian cruisers of the void were even more powerful. The Cleveland-Rodebush projectors, developed aboard the original Boise on the long Nevian way, were stronger still. The composite beam projected by this fleet of the Galactic Patrol, however, was the sublimation and quintessence of each of these, redesigned and redesigned by scientists and engineers of ever-increasing knowledge, rebuilt and rebuilt by technologists of ever-increasing skill.

Capital ships and a few of the heaviest cruisers could mount screen generators able to carry that frightful load; but every smaller ship caught in that semi-solid rod of indescribably incandescent fury simply flared into nothingness.

But in the instant before the firing order was given—as though precisely timed, which in all probability was the case—the ever-watchful observers picked up two items of fact which made the new Admiral of the First Galactic Region cut his almost irresistible weapon and break up his Cone of Battle after only a few seconds of action. One: those three enigmatic cargo scows had fallen apart before the beam reached them, and hundreds—yes, thousands—of small objects had hurtled radially outward, out well beyond the field of action of the Patrol’s beam, at a speed many times that of light. Two: Kinnison’s forebodings had been prophetic. A swarm of Blacks, all small—must have been hidden right on Earth somewhere!—were already darting at the Hill from the south.

“Cease firing!” Clayton rapped into his microphone. The dreadful beam expired. “Break cone formation! Independent action—light cruisers and scouts, get those bombs! Heavy cruisers and battle cruisers, engage similar units of the Blacks, two to one if possible. Chicago and Boise, attack Black Number One. Bolivar and Himalaya, Number Two. Europa and Johannesburg, Number Three!”

Space was full of darting, flashing, madly warring ships. The three Black super-dreadnaughts leaped forward as one. Their massed batteries of beams, precisely synchronized and aimed, lashed out as one at the nearest Patrol super heavy, the Boise. Under the vicious power of that beautifully-timed thrust that warship’s first, second, and third screens, her very wall-shield, flared through the spectrum and into the black. Her Chief Pilot, however, was fast—very fast—and he had a fraction of a second in which to work. Thus, practically in the instant of her wall-shield’s failure, she went free; and while she was holed badly and put out of action, she was not blown out of space. In fact, it was learned later that she lost only forty men.

The Blacks were not as fortunate. The Chicago, now without a partner, joined beams with the Bolivar and the Himalaya against Number Two; then, a short half-second later, with her other two sister-ships against Number Three. And in that very short space of time two Black super-dreadnaughts ceased utterly to be.

But also, in that scant second of time, Black Number One had all but disappeared! Her canny commander, with no stomach at all for odds of five to one against, had ordered flight at max; she was already one-sixtieth of a light-year—about one hundred thousand million miles—away from the Earth and was devoting her every energy to the accumulation of still more distance.

“Bolivar! Himalaya!” Clayton barked savagely. “Get him!” He wanted intensely to join the chase, but he couldn’t. He had to stay here. And he didn’t have time even to swear. Instead, without a break, the words tripping over each other against his teeth: “Chicago! Johannesburg! Europa! Act at will against heaviest craft left. Blast ’em down!”

He gritted his teeth. The scouts and light cruisers were doing their damndest, but they were out-numbered three to one—Christ, what a lot of stuff was getting through! The Blacks wouldn’t last long, between the Hill and the heavies…but maybe long enough, at that—the Patrol globe was leaking like a sieve! He voiced a couple of bursts of deep-space profanity and, although he was almost afraid to look, sneaked a quick peek to see how much was left of the Hill. He looked—and stopped swearing in the middle of a four-letter Anglo-Saxon word.

What he saw simply did not make sense. Those Black bombs should have peeled the armor off of that mountain like the skin off of a nectarine and scattered it from the Pacific to the Mississippi. By now there should be a hole a mile deep where the Hill had been. But there wasn’t. The Hill was still there! It might have shrunk a little—Clayton couldn’t see very well because of the worse-than-incandescent radiance of the practically continuous, sense-battering, world-shaking atomic detonations—but the Hill was still there!

And as he stared, chilled and shaken, at that indescribably terrific spectacle, a Black cruiser, holed and helpless, fell toward that armored mountain with an acceleration starkly impossible to credit. And when it struck it did not penetrate, and splash, and crater, as it should have done. Instead, it simply spread out, in a thin layer, over an acre or so of the fortress’ steep and apparently still armored surface!

“You saw that, Alex? Good. Otherwise you could scarcely believe it,” came Kinnison’s silent voice. “Tell all our ships to stay away. There’s a force of over a hundred thousand G’s acting in a direction normal to every point of our surface. The boys are giving it all the decrement they can—somewhere between distance cube and fourth power—but even so it’s pretty fierce stuff. How about the Bolivar and the Himalaya? Not having much luck catching Mr. Black, are they?”

“Why, I don’t know. I’ll check… No, sir, they aren’t. They report that they are losing ground and will soon lose trace.”

“I was afraid so, from that shape. Rodebush was about the only one who saw it coming…well, we’ll have to redesign and rebuild…”

* * * *

Port Admiral Kinnison, shortly after directing the foregoing thought, leaned back in his chair and smiled. The battle was practically over. The Hill had come through. The Rodebush-Bergenholm fields had held her together through the most God-awful session of saturation atomic bombing that any world had ever seen or that the mind of man had ever conceived. And the counter-forces had kept the interior rock from flowing like water. So far, so good.

Her original armor was gone. Converted into…what? For hundreds of feet inward from the surface she was hotter than the reacting slugs of the Hanfords. Delousing her would be a project, not an operation; millions of cubic yards of material would have to be hauled off into space with tractors and allowed to simmer for a few hundred years; but what of that?

Bergenholm had said that the fields would tend to prevent the radioactives from spreading, as they otherwise would—and Virgil Samms was still safe!

“Virge, my boy, come along.” He took the First Lensman by his good arm and lifted him out of his chair. “Old Doctor Kinnison’s peerless prescription for you and me is a big, thick, juicy, porterhouse steak.”

FIRST LENSMAN, by E.E. “Doc” Smith [Part 2]

CHAPTER 8

That murderous attack upon Virgil Samms, and its countering by those new super-lawmen, the Lensmen, and by an entire task force of the North American Armed Forces, was news of Civilization-wide importance. As such, it filled every channel of Universal Telenews for an hour. Then, in stunning and crescendo succession, came the staccato reports of the creation of the Galactic Patrol, the mobilization—allegedly for maneuvers—of Galactic Patrol’s Grand Fleet, and the ultimately desperate and all-too-nearly successful attack upon The Hill.

“Just a second, folks; we’ll have it very shortly. You’ll see something that nobody ever saw before and that nobody will ever see again. We’re getting in as close as the Law will let us.” The eyes of Telenews’ ace reporter and the telephoto lens of his cameraman stared down from a scooter at the furiously smoking, sputteringly incandescent surface of Triplanetary’s ancient citadel; while upon dozens of worlds thousands of millions of people packed themselves tighter and tighter around tens of millions of visiplates and loud-speakers in order to see and to hear the tremendous news.

“There it is, folks, look at it—the only really impregnable fortress ever built by man! A good many of our experts had it written off as obsolete, long ago, but it seems these Lensmen had something up their sleeves besides their arms, heh-heh! And speaking of Lensmen, they haven’t been throwing their weight around, so most of us haven’t noticed them very much, but this reporter wants to go on record right now as saying there must be a lot more to the Lens than any of us has thought, because otherwise nobody would have gone to all that trouble and expense, to say nothing of the tremendous loss of life, just to kill the Chief Lensman, which seems to have been what they were after.

“We told you a few minutes ago, you know, that every Continent of Civilization sent official messages denying most emphatically any connection with this outrage. It’s still a mystery, folks; in fact, it is getting more and more mysterious all the time. Not one single man of the Black Fleet was taken alive! Not even in the ships that were only holed—they blew themselves up! And there were no uniforms or books or anything of the kind to be found in any of the wrecks—no identification whatever!

“And now for the scoop of all time! Universal Telenews has obtained permission to interview the two top Lensmen, both of whom you all know—Virgil Samms and ‘Rod the Rock’ Kinnison—personally for this beam. We are now going down, by remote control, of course, right into the Galactic patrol office, right in The Hill itself. Here we are. Now if you will step just a little closer to the mike, please, Mr. Samms, or should I say…?”

“You should say ‘First Lensman Samms’,” Kinnison said bruskly.

“Oh, yes, First Lensman Samms. Thank you, Mr. Kinnison. Now, First Lensman Samms, our clients all want to know all about the Lens. We all know what it does, but what, really, is it? Who invented it? How does it work?”

Kinnison started to say something, but Samms silenced him with a thought.

“I will answer those questions by asking you one.” Samms smiled disarmingly. “Do you remember what happened because the pirates learned to duplicate the golden meteor of the Triplanetary Service?”

“Oh, I see.” The Telenews ace, although brash and not at all thin-skinned, was quick on the uptake. “Hush-hush? T. S.?”

“Top Secret. Very much so,” Samms confirmed, “and we are going to keep some things about the Lens secret as long as we possibly can.”

“Fair enough. Sorry folks, but you will agree that they’re right on that. Well, then, Mr. Samms, who do you think it was that tried to kill you, and where do you think the Black Fleet came from?”

“I have no idea,” Samms said, slowly and thoughtfully. “No. No idea whatever.”

“What? Are you sure of that? Aren’t you holding back maybe just a little bit of a suspicion, for diplomatic reasons?”

“I am holding nothing back; and through my Lens I can make you certain of the fact. Lensed thoughts come from the mind itself, direct, not through such voluntary muscles as the tongue. The mind does not lie—even such lies as you call ‘diplomacy’.”

The Lensman demonstrated and the reporter went on:

“He is sure, folks, which fact knocked me speechless for a second or two—which is quite a feat in itself. Now, Mr. Samms, one last question. What is all this Lens stuff really about? What are all you Lensmen—the Galactic Council and so on—really up to? What do you expect to get out of it? And why would anybody want to make such an all-out effort to get rid of you? And give it to me on the Lens, please, if you can do it and talk at the same time—that was a wonderful sensation, folks, of getting the dope straight and knowing that it was straight.”

“I can and will answer both by voice and by Lens. Our basic purpose is…” and he quoted verbatim the resounding sentences which Mentor had impressed so ineradicably upon his mind. “You know how little happiness, how little real well-being, there is upon any world today. We propose to increase both. What we expect to get out of it is happiness and well-being for ourselves, the satisfaction felt by any good workman doing the job for which he is best fitted and in which he takes pride. As to why anyone should want to kill me, the logical explanation would seem to be that some group or organization or race, opposed to that for which we Lensmen stand, decided to do away with us and started with me.”

“Thank you, Mr. Samms. I am sure that we all enjoyed this interview very much. Now, folks, you all know ‘Rocky Rod’, ‘Rod the Rock’, Kinnison…just a little closer, please…thank you. I don’t suppose you have any suspicions, either, any more than.…”

“I certainly have!” Kinnison barked, so savagely that five hundred million people jumped as one. “How do you want it; voice, or Lens, or both?” Then on the Lens: “Think it over, son, because I suspect everybody!”

“Bub-both, please, Mr. Kinnison.” Even Universal’s star reporter was shaken by the quiet but deadly fury of the big Lensman’s thought, but he rallied so quickly that his hesitation was barely noticeable. “Your Lensed thought to me was that you suspect everybody, Mr. Kinnison?”

“Just that. Everybody. I suspect every continental government of every world we know, including that of North America of Tellus. I suspect political parties and organized minorities. I suspect pressure groups. I suspect capital and I suspect labor. I suspect an organization of criminals. I suspect nations and races and worlds that no one of us has as yet heard of—not even you, the top-drawer newshawk of the universe.”

“But you have nothing concrete to go on, I take it?”

“If I did have, do you think I’d be standing here talking to you?”

* * * *

First Lensman Samms sat in his private quarters and thought.

Lensman Dronvire of Rigel Four stood behind him and helped him think.

Port Admiral Kinnison, with all his force and drive, began a comprehensive program of investigation, consolidation, expansion, redesigning, and rebuilding.

Virgilia Samms went to a party practically every night. She danced, she flirted, she talked. How she talked! Meaningless small talk for the most part—but interspersed with artless questions and comments which, while they perhaps did not put her partner of the moment completely at ease, nevertheless did not quite excite suspicion.

Conway Costigan, Lens under sleeve, undisguised but inconspicuous, rode the ether-lanes; observing minutely and reporting fully.

Jack Kinnison piloted and navigated and computed for his friend and boat-mate:

Mason Northrop; who, completely surrounded by breadboard hookups of new and ever-more-fantastic complexity, listened and looked; listened and tuned; listened and rebuilt; listened and—finally—took bearings and bearings and bearings with his ultra-sensitive loops.

DalNalten and Knobos, with dozens of able helpers, combed the records of three worlds in a search which produced as a by-product a monumental “who’s who” of crime.

Skilled technicians fed millions of cards, stack by stack, into the most versatile and most accomplished machines known to the statisticians of the age.

And Dr. Nels Bergenholm, abandoning temporarily his regular line of work, devoted his peculiar talents to a highly abstruse research in the closely allied field of organic chemistry.

The walls of Virgil Samms’ quarters became covered with charts, diagrams, and figures. Tabulations and condensations piled up on his desk and overflowed into baskets upon the floor. Until:

“Lensman Olmstead, of Alphacent, sir,” his secretary announced.

“Good! Send him in, please.”

The stranger entered. The two men, after staring intently at each other for half a minute, smiled and shook hands vigorously. Except for the fact that the newcomer’s hair was brown, they were practically identical!

“I’m certainly glad to see you, George. Bergenholm passed you, of course?”

“Yes. He says that he can match your hair to mine, even the individual white ones. And he has made me a wig-maker’s dream of a wig.”

“Married?” Samms’ mind leaped ahead to possible complications.

“Widower, same as you. And.…”

“Just a minute—going over this once will be enough.” He Lensed call after call. Lensmen in various parts of space became en rapport with him and thus with each other.

“Lensmen—especially you, Rod—George Olmstead is here, and his brother Ray is available. I am going to work.”

“I still don’t like it!” Kinnison protested. “It’s too dangerous. I told the Universe I was going to keep you covered, and I meant it!”

“That’s what makes it perfectly safe. That is, if Bergenholm is sure that the duplication is close enough…”

“I am sure.” Bergenholm’s deeply resonant pseudo-voice left no doubt at all in any one of the linked minds. “The substitution will not be detected.”

“…and that nobody knows, George, or even suspects, that you got your Lens.”

“I am sure of that.” Olmstead laughed quietly. “Also, nobody except us and your secretary knows that I am here. For a good many years I have made a specialty of that sort of thing. Photos, fingerprints, and so on have all been taken care of.”

“Good. I simply can not work efficiently here,” Samms expressed what all knew to be the simple truth. “Dronvire is a much better analyst-synthesist than I am; as soon as any significant correlation is possible he will know it. We have learned that the Towne-Morgan crowd, Mackenzie Power, Ossmen Industries, and Interstellar Spaceways are all tied in together, and that thionite is involved, but we have not been able to get any further. There is a slight correlation—barely significant—between deaths from thionite and the arrival in the Solarian System of certain Spaceways liners. The fact that certain officials of the Earth-Screen Service have been and are spending considerably more than they earn sets up a slight but definite probability that they are allowing space-ships or boats from space-ships to land illegally. These smugglers carry contraband, which may or may not be thionite. In short, we lack fundamental data in every department, and it is high time for me to begin doing my share in getting it.”

“I don’t check you, Virge.” None of the Kinnisons ever did give up without a struggle. “Olmstead is a mighty smooth worker, and you are our prime coordinator. Why not let him keep up the counter-espionage—do the job you were figuring on doing yourself—and you stay here and boss it?”

“I have thought of that, a great deal, and have.…”

“Because Olmstead can not do it,” a hitherto silent mind cut in, decisively. “I, Rularion of North Polar Jupiter, say so. There are psychological factors involved. The ability to separate and to evaluate the constituent elements of a complex situation; the ability to make correct decisions without hesitation; as well as many others not as susceptible to concise statement, but which collectively could be called power of mind. How say you, Bergenholm of Tellus? For I have perceived in you a mind approximating in some respects the philosophical and psychological depth of my own.” This outrageously egotistical declaration was, to the Jovian, a simple statement of an equally simple truth, and Bergenholm accepted it as such.

“I agree. Olmstead probably could not succeed.”

“Well, then, can Samms?” Kinnison demanded.

“Who knows?” came Bergenholm’s mental shrug, and simultaneously:

“Nobody knows whether I can or not, but I am going to try,” and Samms ended—almost—the argument by asking Bergenholm and a couple of other Lensmen to come into his office and by taking off his Lens.

“And that’s another thing I don’t like.” Kinnison offered one last objection. “Without your Lens, anything can happen to you.”

“Oh, I won’t have to be without it very long. And besides, Virgilia isn’t the only one in the Samms family who can work better—sometimes—without a Lens.”

The Lensmen came in and, in a surprisingly short time, went out. A few minutes later, two Lensmen strolled out of Samms’ inner office into the outer one.

“Good-bye, George,” the red-headed man said aloud, “and good luck.”

“Same to you, Chief,” and the brown-haired one strode out.

Norma the secretary was a smart girl, and observant. In her position, she had to be. Her eyes followed the man out, then scanned the Lensman from toe to crown.

“I’ve never seen anything like it, Mr. Samms,” she remarked then. “Except for the difference in coloring, and a sort of…well, stoopiness…he could be your identical twin. You two must have had a common ancestor—or several—not too far back, didn’t you?”

“We certainly did. Quadruple second cousins, you might call it. We have known of each other for years, but this is the first time we have met.”

“Quadruple second cousins? What does that mean? How come?”

“Well, say that once upon a time there were two men named Albert and Chester.…”

“What? Not two Irishmen named Pat and Mike? You’re slipping, boss.” The girl smiled roguishly. During rush hours she was always the fast, cool, efficient secretary, but in moments of ease such persiflage as this was the usual thing in the First Lensman’s private office. “Not at all up to your usual form.”

“Merely because I am speaking now as a genealogist, not as a raconteur. But to continue, we will say that Chester and Albert had four children apiece, two boys and two girls, two pairs of identical twins, each. And when they grew up—half way up, that is.…”

“Don’t tell me that we are going to suppose that all those identical twins married each other?”

“Exactly. Why not?”

“Well, it would be stretching the laws of probability all out of shape. But go ahead—I can see what’s coming, I think.”

“Each of those couples had one, and only one, child. We will call those children Jim Samms and Sally Olmstead; John Olmstead and Irene Samms.”

The girl’s levity disappeared. “James Alexander Samms and Sarah Olmstead Samms. Your parents. I didn’t see what was coming, after all. This George Olmstead; then, is your.…”

“Whatever it is, yes. I can’t name it, either—maybe you had better call Genealogy some day and find out. But it’s no wonder we look alike. And there are three of us, not two—George has an identical twin brother.”

The red-haired Lensman stepped back into the inner office, shut the door, and Lensed a thought at Virgil Samms.

“It worked, Virgil! I talked to her for five solid minutes, practically leaning on her desk, and she didn’t tumble! And if this wig of Bergenholm’s fooled her so completely, the job he did on you would fool anybody!”

“Fine! I’ve done a little testing myself, on the keenest men I know, without a trace of recognition so far.”

His last lingering doubt resolved, Samms boarded the ponderous, radiation-proof, neutron-proof shuttle-scow which was the only possible means of entering or leaving the Hill. A fast cruiser whisked him to Nampa, where Olmstead’s “accidentally” damaged transcontinental transport was being repaired, and from which city Olmstead had been gone so briefly that no one had missed him. He occupied Olmstead’s space; he surrendered the remainder of Olmstead’s ticket. He reached New York. He took a ’copter to Senator Morgan’s office. He was escorted into the private office of Herkimer Herkimer Third.

“Olmstead. Of Alphacent.”

“Yes?” Herkimer’s hand moved, ever so little, upon his desk’s top.

“Here.” The Lensman dropped an envelope upon the desk in such fashion that it came to rest within an inch of the hand.

“Prints. Here.” Samms made prints. “Wash your hands, over there.” Herkimer pressed a button. “Check all these prints, against each other and the files. Check the two halves of the torn sheet, fiber to fiber.” He turned to the Lensless Lensman, now standing quietly before his desk. “Routine; a formality, in your case, but necessary.”

“Of course.”

Then for long seconds the two hard men stared into the hard depths of each other’s eyes.

“You may do, Olmstead. We have had very good reports of you. But you have never been in thionite?”

“No. I have never even seen any.”

“What do you want to get into it for?”

“Your scouts sounded me out; what did they tell you? The usual thing—promotion from the ranks into the brass—to get to where I can do myself and the organization some good.”

“Yourself first, the organization second?”

“What else? Why should I be different from the rest of you?”

This time the locked eyes held longer; one pair smoldering, the other gold-flecked, tawny ice.

“Why, indeed?” Herkimer smiled thinly. “We do not advertise it, however.”

“Outside, I wouldn’t, either; but here I’m laying my cards flat on the table.”

“I see. You will do, Olmstead, if you live. There’s a test, you know.”

“They told me there would be.”

“Well, aren’t you curious to know what it is?”

“Not particularly. You passed it, didn’t you?”

“What do you mean by that crack?” Herkimer leaped to his feet; his eyes, smoldering before, now ablaze.

“Exactly what I said, no more and no less. You may read into it anything you please.” Samms’ voice was as cold as were his eyes. “You picked me out because of what I am. Did you think that moving upstairs would make a boot-licker out of me?”

“Not at all.” Herkimer sat down and took from a drawer two small, transparent, vaguely capsule-like tubes, each containing a few particles of purple dust. “You know what this is?”

“I can guess.”

“Each of these is a good, heavy jolt; about all that a strong man with a strong heart can stand. Sit down. Here is one dose. Pull the cover, stick the capsule up one nostril, squeeze the ejector, and sniff. If you can leave this other dose sitting here on the desk you will live, and thus pass the test. If you can’t, you die.”

Samms sat, and pulled, and squeezed, and sniffed.

His forearms hit the desk with a thud. His hands clenched themselves into fists, the tight-stretched tendons standing boldly out. His face turned white. His eyes jammed themselves shut; his jaw-muscles sprang into bands and lumps as they clamped his teeth hard together. Every voluntary muscle in his body went into a rigor as extreme as that of death itself. His heart pounded; his breathing became stertorous.

This was the dreadful “muscle-lock” so uniquely characteristic of thionite; the frenzied immobility of the ultimately passionate satisfaction of every desire.

The Galactic Patrol became for him an actuality; a force for good pervading all the worlds of all the galaxies of all the universes of all existing space-time continual. He knew what the Lens was, and why. He understood time and space. He knew the absolute beginning and the ultimate end.

He also saw things and did things over which it is best to draw a kindly veil, for every desire—mental or physical, open or sternly suppressed, noble or base—that Virgil Samms had ever had was being completely satisfied. EVERY DESIRE.

As Samms sat there, straining motionlessly upon the verge of death through sheer ecstasy, a door opened and Senator Morgan entered the room. Herkimer started, almost imperceptibly, as he turned—had there been, or not, an instantaneously-suppressed flash of guilt in those now completely clear and frank brown eyes?

“Hi, Chief; come in and sit down. Glad to see you—this is not exactly my idea of fun.”

“No? When did you stop being a sadist?” The senator sat down beside his minion’s desk, the fingertips of his left hand began soundlessly to drum. “You wouldn’t have, by any chance, been considering the idea of…?” He paused significantly.

“What an idea.” Herkimer’s act—if it was an act—was flawless. “He’s too good a man to waste.”

“I know it, but you didn’t act as though you did. I’ve never seen you come out such a poor second in an interview…and it wasn’t because you didn’t know to start with just what kind of a tiger he was—that’s why he was selected for this job. And it would have been so easy to give him just a wee bit more.”

“That’s preposterous, Chief, and you know it.”

“Do I? However, it couldn’t have been jealousy, because he isn’t being considered for your job. He won’t be over you, and there’s plenty of room for everybody. What was the matter? Your bloodthirstiness wouldn’t have taken you that far, under these circumstances. Come clean, Herkimer.”

“Okay—I hate the whole damned family!” Herkimer burst out, viciously.

“I see. That adds up.” Morgan’s face cleared, his fingers became motionless. “You can’t make the Samms wench and aren’t in position to skin her alive, so you get allergic to all her relatives. That adds up, but let me tell you something.” His quiet, level voice carried more of menace than most men’s loudest threats. “Keep your love life out of business and keep that sadistic streak under control. Don’t let anything like this happen again.”

“I won’t, Chief. I got off the beam—but he made me so damn mad!”

“Certainly. That’s exactly what he was trying to do. Elementary. If he could make you look small it would make him look big, and he just about did. But watch now, he’s coming to.”

Samms’ muscles relaxed. He opened his eyes groggily; then, as a wave of humiliated realization swept over his consciousness, he closed them again and shuddered. He had always thought himself pretty much of a man; how could he possibly have descended to such nauseous depths of depravity, of turpitude, of sheer moral degradation? And yet every cell of his being was shrieking its demand for more; his mind and his substance alike were permeated by an over-mastering craving to experience again the ultimate thrills which they had so tremendously, so outrageously enjoyed.

There was another good jolt lying right there on the desk in front of him, even though thionite-sniffers always saw to it that no more of the drug could be obtained without considerable physical exertion; which exertion would bring them to their senses. If he took that jolt it would kill him. What of it? What was death? What good was life, except to enjoy such thrills as he had just had and was about to have again? And besides, thionite couldn’t kill him. He was a super-man; he had just proved it!

He straightened up and reached for the capsule; and that effort, small as it was, was enough to bring First Lensman Virgil Samms back under control. The craving, however, did not decrease. Rather, it increased.

Months were to pass before he could think of thionite, or even of the color purple, without a spasmodic catching of the breath and a tightening of every muscle. Years were to pass before he could forget, even partially, the theretofore unsuspected dwellers in the dark recesses of his own mind. Nevertheless, from the store of whatever it was that made him what he was, Virgil Samms drew strength. Thumb and forefinger touched the capsule, but instead of picking it up, he pushed it across the desk toward Herkimer.

“Put it away, bub. One whiff of that stuff will last me for life.” He stared unfathomably at the secretary, then turned to Morgan and nodded. “After all, he did not say that he ever passed this or any other test. He just didn’t contradict me when I said it.”

With a visible effort Herkimer remained silent, but Morgan did not.

“You talk too much, Olmstead. Can you stand up yet?”

Gripping the desk with both hands, Samms heaved himself to his feet. The room was spinning and gyrating; every individual thing in it was moving in a different and impossible orbit; his already splintered skull threatened more and more violently to emulate a fragmentation bomb; black and white spots and vari-colored flashes filled his cone of vision. He wrenched one hand free, then the other—and collapsed back into the chair.

“Not yet—quite,” he admitted, through stiff lips.

Although he was careful not to show it, Morgan was amazed—not that the man had collapsed, but that he had been able so soon to lift himself even an inch. “Tiger” was not the word; this Olmstead must be seven-eighths dinosaur.

“It takes a few minutes; longer for some, not so long for others,” Morgan said, blandly. “But what makes you think Herkimer here never took one of the same?”

“Huh?” Again two pairs of eyes locked and held; and this time the duel was longer and more pregnant. “What do you think? How do you suppose I lived to get as old as I am now? By being dumb?”

Morgan unwrapped a Venerian cigar, settled it comfortably between his teeth, lit it, and drew three slow puffs before replying.

“Ah, a student. An analytical mind,” he said, evenly, and—apparently—irrelevantly. “Let’s skip Herkimer for the moment. Try your hand on me.”

“Why not? From what we hear out in the field, you have always been in the upper brackets, so you probably never had to prove that you could take it or let it alone. My guess would be, though, that you could.”

“The good old oil, eh?” Morgan allowed his face and voice to register a modicum, precisely metered, of contempt. “How to get along in the world; Lesson One: Butter up the Boss.”

“Nice try, Senator, but I’ll have to score you a clean miss.” Samms, now back almost to normal, grinned companionably. “We both know that if I were still in the kindergarten I wouldn’t be here now.”

“I’ll let that one pass—this time.” Under that look and tone Morgan’s underlings were wont to cringe, but this Olmstead was not the cringing type. “Don’t do it again. It might not be safe.”

“Oh, it would be safe enough—for today, at least. There are two factors which you are very carefully ignoring. First, I haven’t accepted the job yet.”

“Are you innocent enough to think you’ll get out of this building alive if I don’t accept you?”

“If you want to call it innocence, yes. Oh, I know you’ve got gunnies all over the place, but they don’t mean a thing.”

“No?” Morgan’s voice was silkily venomous.

“No.” Olmstead was completely unimpressed. “Put yourself in my place. You know I’ve been around a long time; and not just around my mother. I was weaned quite a number of years ago.”

“I see. You don’t scare worth a damn. A point. And you are testing me, just as I am testing you. Another point. I’m beginning to like you, George. I think I know what your second point is, but let’s have it, just for the record.”

“I’m sure you do. Any man, to be my boss, has got to be at least as good a man as I am. Otherwise I take his job away from him.”

“Fair enough. By God, I do like you, Olmstead!” Morgan, his big face wreathed in smiles, got up, strode over, and shook hands vigorously; and Samms, scan as he would, could not even hazard a guess as to how much—if any—of this enthusiasm was real. “Do you want the job? And when can you go to work?”

“Yes, sir. Two hours ago, sir.”

“That’s fine!” Morgan boomed. Although he did not comment upon it, he noticed and understood the change in the form of address. “Without knowing what the job is or how much it pays?”

“Neither is important, sir, at the moment.” Samms, who had got up easily enough to shake hands, now shook his head experimentally. Nothing rattled. Good—he was in pretty good shape already. “As to the job, I can either do it or find out why it can’t be done. As to pay, I’ve heard you called a lot of things, but ‘piker’ was never one of them.”

“Very well. I predict that you will go far.” Morgan again shook the Lensman’s hand; and again Samms could not evaluate the Senator’s sincerity. “Tuesday afternoon. New York Spaceport. Space-ship Virgin Queen. Report to Captain Willoughby in the dock office at fourteen hundred hours. Stop at the cashier’s office on your way out. Good-bye.”

CHAPTER 9

Piracy was rife. There was no suspicion, however, nor would there be for many years, that there was anything of very large purpose about the business. Murgatroyd was simply a Captain Kidd of space; and even if he were actually connected with Galactic Spaceways, that fact would not be surprising. Such relationships had always existed; the most ferocious and dreaded pirates of the ancient world worked in full partnership with the First Families of that world.

Virgil Samms was thinking of pirates and of piracy when he left Senator Morgan’s office. He was still thinking of them while he was reporting to Roderick Kinnison. Hence:

“But that’s enough about this stuff and me, Rod. Bring me up to date on Operation Boskone.”

“Branching out no end. Your guess was right that Spaceways’ losses to pirates are probably phony. But it wasn’t the known attacks—that is, those cases in which the ship was found, later, with some or most of the personnel alive—that gave us the real information. They were all pretty much alike. But when we studied the total disappearances we really hit the jack-pot.”

“That doesn’t sound just right, but I’m listening.”

“You’d better, since it goes farther than even you suspected. It was no trouble at all to get the passenger lists and the names of the crews of the independent ships that were lost without a trace. Their relatives and friends—we concentrated mostly on wives—could be located, except for the usual few who moved around so much that they got lost. Spacemen average young, you know, and their wives are still younger. Well, these young women got jobs, most of them remarried, and so on. In short, normal.”

“And in the case of Spaceways, not normal?”

“Decidedly not. In the first place, you’d be amazed at how little publication was ever done of passenger lists, and apparently crew lists were not published at all. No use going into detail as to how we got the stuff, but we got it. However, nine tenths of the wives had disappeared, and none had remarried. The only ones we could find were those who did not care, even when their husbands were alive, whether they ever saw them again or not. But the big break was—you remember the disappearance of that girls’-school cruise ship?”

“Of course. It made a lot of noise.”

“An interesting point in connection with that cruise is that two days before the ship blasted off the school was robbed. The vault was opened with thermite and the whole Administration Building burned to the ground. All the school’s records were destroyed. Thus, the list of missing had to be made up from statements made by friends, relatives, and what not.”

“I remember something of the kind. My impression was, though, that the space-ship company furnished.… Oh!” The tone of Samms’ thought alerted sharply. “That was Spaceways, under cover?”

“Definitely. Our best guess is that there were quite a few shiploads of women disappeared about that time, instead of one. Austine’s College had more students that year than ever before or since. It was the extras, not the regulars, who went on that cruise; the ones who figured it would be more convenient to disappear in space than to become ordinary missing persons.”

“But Rod! That would mean…but where?”

“It means just that. And finding out ‘where’ will run into a project. There are over two thousand million suns in this galaxy, and the best estimate is that there are more than that many planets habitable by beings more or less human in type. You know how much of the galaxy has been explored and how fast the work of exploring the rest of it is going. Your guess is just as good as mine as to where those spacemen and engineers and their wives and girl-friends are now. I am sure, though, of four things; none of which we can ever begin to prove. One; they didn’t die in space. Two; they landed on a comfortable and very well equipped Tellurian planet. Three; they built a fleet there. Four; that fleet attacked the Hill.”

“Murgatroyd, do you suppose?” Although surprised by Kinnison’s tremendous report, Samms was not dismayed.

“No idea. No data—yet.”

“And they’ll keep on building,” Samms said. “They had a fleet much larger than the one they expected to meet. Now they’ll build one larger than all our combined forces. And since the politicians will always know what we are doing…or it might be… I wonder…?”

“You can stop wondering.” Kinnison grinned savagely.

“What do you mean?”

“Just what you were going to think about. You know the edge of the galaxy closest to Tellus, where that big rift cuts in?”

“Yes.”

“Across that rift, where it won’t be surveyed for a thousand years, there’s a planet that could be Earth’s twin sister. No atomic energy, no space-drive, but heavily industrialized and anxious to welcome us. Project Bennett. Very, very hush-hush. Nobody except Lensmen know anything about it. Two friends of Dronvire’s—smart, smooth operators—are in charge. It’s going to be the Navy Yard of the Galactic Patrol.”

“But Rod…” Samms began to protest, his mind leaping ahead to the numberless problems, the tremendous difficulties, inherent in the program which his friend had outlined so briefly.

“Forget it, Virge!” Kinnison cut in. “It won’t be easy, of course, but we can do anything they can do, and do it better. You can go calmly ahead with your own chores, knowing that when—and notice that I say ‘when’, not ‘if’—we need it we’ll have a fleet up our sleeves that will make the official one look like a task force. But I see you’re at the rendezvous, and there’s Jill. Tell her ‘hi’ for me. And as the Vegians say—‘Tail high, brother!’”

Samms was in the hotel’s ornate lobby; a couple of uniformed “boys” and Jill Samms were approaching. The girl reached him first.

“You had no trouble in recognizing me, then, my dear?”

“None at all, Uncle George.” She kissed him perfunctorily, the bell hops faded away. “So nice to see you—I’ve heard so much about you. The Marine Room, you said?”

“Yes. I reserved a table.”

And in that famous restaurant, in the unequalled privacy of the city’s noisiest and most crowded night spot, they drank sparingly; ate not-so-sparingly; and talked not sparingly at all.

“It’s perfectly safe here, you think?” Jill asked first.

“Perfectly. A super-sensitive microphone couldn’t hear anything, and it’s so dark that a lip-reader, even if he could read us, would need a pair of twelve-inch night-glasses.”

“Goody! They did a marvelous job, Dad. If it weren’t for your…well, your personality, I wouldn’t recognize you even now.”

“You think I’m safe, then?”

“Absolutely.”

“Then we’ll get down to business. You, Knobos, and DalNalten all have keen and powerful minds. You can’t all be wrong. Spaceways, then, is tied in with both the Towne-Morgan gang and with thionite. The logical extension of that—Dal certainly thought of it, even though he didn’t mention it—would be…” Samms paused.

“Check. That the notorious Murgatroyd, instead of being just another pirate chief, is really working for Spaceways and belongs to the Towne-Morgan-Isaacson gang. But dad—what an idea! Can things be that rotten, really?”

“They may be worse than that. Now the next thing. Who, in your opinion, is the real boss?”

“Well, it certainly is not Herkimer Herkimer Third.” Jill ticked him off on a pink forefinger. She had been asked for an opinion; she set out to give it without apology or hesitation. “He could—just about—direct the affairs of a hot-dog stand. Nor is it Clander. He isn’t even a little fish; he’s scarcely a minnow. Equally certainly it is neither the Venerian nor the Martian. They may run planetary affairs, but nothing bigger. I haven’t met Murgatroyd, of course, but I have had several evaluations, and he does not rate up with Towne. And Big Jim—and this surprised me as much as it will you—is almost certainly not the prime mover.” She looked at him questioningly.

“That would have surprised me tremendously yesterday; but after today—I’ll tell you about that presently—it doesn’t.”

“I’m glad of that. I expected an argument, and I have been inclined to question the validity of my own results, since they do not agree with common knowledge—or, rather, what is supposed to be knowledge. That leaves Isaacson and Senator Morgan.” Jill frowned in perplexity; seemed, for the first time, unsure. “Isaacson is of course a big man. Able. Well-informed. Extremely capable. A top-notch executive. Not only is, would have to be, to run Spaceways. On the other hand, I have always thought that Morgan was nothing but a windbag.…” Jill stopped talking; left the thought hanging in air.

“So did I—until today,” Samms agreed grimly. “I thought that he was simply an unusually corrupt, greedy, rabble-rousing politician. Our estimates of him may have to be changed very radically.”

Samms’ mind raced. From two entirely different angles of approach, Jill and he had arrived at the same conclusion. But, if Morgan were really the Big Shot, would he have deigned to interview personally such small fry as Olmstead? Or was Olmstead’s job of more importance than he, Samms, had supposed?

“I’ve got a dozen more things to check with you,” he went on, almost without a pause, “but since this leadership matter is the only one in which my experience would affect your judgment, I had better tell you about what happened today.…”

* * * *

Tuesday came, and hour fourteen hundred; and Samms strode into an office. There was a big, clean desk; a wiry, intense, gray-haired man.

“Captain Willoughby?”

“Yes.”

“George Olmstead reporting.”

“Fourth Officer.” The captain punched a button; the heavy, sound-proof door closed itself and locked.

“Fourth Officer? New rank, eh. What does the ticket cover?”

“New, and special. Here’s the articles; read it and sign it.” He did not add “or else”, it was not necessary. It was clearly evident that Captain Willoughby, never garrulous, intended to be particularly reticent with his new subordinate.

Samms read. “…Fourth Officer…shall…no duties or responsibilities in the operation or maintenance of said space-ship…cargo…” Then came a clause which fairly leaped from the paper and smote his eyes: “when in command of a detail outside the hull of said space-ship he shall enforce, by the infliction of death or such other penalty as he deems fit.…”

The Lensman was rocked to the heels, but did not show it. Instead, he took the captain’s pen—his own, as far as Willoughby was concerned, could have been filled with vanishing ink—and wrote George Olmstead’s name in George Olmstead’s bold, flowing script.

Willoughby then took him aboard the good ship Virgin Queen and led him to his cabin.

“Here you are, Mr. Olmstead. Beyond getting acquainted with the super-cargo and the rest of your men, you will have no duties for a few days. You have full run of the ship, with one exception. Stay out of the control room until I call you. Is that clear?”

“Yes, sir.” Willoughby turned away and Samms, after tossing his space-bag into the rack, took inventory.

The room was of course very small; but, considering the importance of mass, it was almost extravagantly supplied. There were shelves, or rather, tight racks, of books; there were sun-lamps and card-shelves and exercisers and games; there was a receiver capable of bringing in programs from almost anywhere in space. The room had only one lack; it did not have an ultra-wave visiplate. Nor was this lack surprising. “They” would scarcely let George Olmstead know where “they” were taking him.

Samms was surprised, however, when he met the men who were to be directly under his command; for instead of one, or at most two, they numbered exactly forty. And they were all, he thought at first glance, the dregs and sweepings of the lowest dives in space. Before long, however, he learned that they were not all space-rats and denizens of Skid Rows. Six of them—the strongest physically and the hardest mentally of the lot—were fugitives from lethal chambers; murderers and worse. He looked at the biggest, toughest one of the six—a rock-drill-eyed, red-haired giant—and asked:

“What did they tell you, Tworn, that your job was going to be?”

“They didn’t say. Just that it was dangerous, but if I done exactly what my boss would tell me to do, and nothing else, I might not even get hurt. An’ I was due to take the deep breath the next week, see? That’s just how it was, boss.”

“I see,” and one by one Virgil Samms, master psychologist, studied and analyzed his motley crew until he was called into the control room.

The navigating tank was covered; no charts were to be seen. The one “live” visiplate showed a planet and a fiercely blue-white sun.

“My orders are to tell you, at this point, all I know about what you’ve got to do and about that planet down there. Trenco, they call it.” To Virgil Samms, the first adherent of Civilization ever to hear it, that name meant nothing whatever. “You are to take about five of your men, go down there, and gather all the green leaves you can. Not green in color; sort of purplish. What they call broadleaf is the best; leaves about two feet long and a foot wide. But don’t be too choosy. If there isn’t any broadleaf handy, grab anything you can get hold of.”

“What is the opposition?” Samms asked, quietly. “And what have they got that makes them so tough?”

“Nothing. No inhabitants, even. Just the planet itself. Next to Arisia, it’s the God damndest planet in space. I’ve never been any closer to it than this, and I never will, so I don’t know anything about it except what I hear; but there’s something about it that kills men or drives them crazy. We spend seven or eight boats every trip, and thirty-five or forty men, and the biggest load that anybody ever took away from here was just under two hundred pounds of leaf. A good many times we don’t get any.”

“They go crazy, eh?” In spite of his control, Samms paled. But it couldn’t be like Arisia. “What are the symptoms? What do they say?”

“Various. Main thing seems to be that they lose their sight. Don’t go blind, exactly, but can’t see where anything is; or, if they do see it, it isn’t there. And it rains over forty feet deep every night, and yet it all dries up by morning. The worst electrical storms in the universe, and wind-velocities—I can show you charts on that—of over eight hundred miles an hour.”

“Whew! How about time? With your permission, I would like to do some surveying before I try to land.”

“A smart idea. A couple of the other boys had the same, but it didn’t help—they didn’t come back. I’ll give you two Tellurian days—no, three—before I give you up and start sending out the other boats. Pick out your five men and see what you can do.”

As the boat dropped away, Willoughby’s voice came briskly from a speaker. “I know that you five men have got ideas. Forget ’em. Fourth Officer Olmstead has the authority and the orders to put a half-ounce slug through the guts of any or all of you that don’t jump, and jump fast, to do what he tells you. And if that boat makes any funny moves I blast it out of the ether. Good harvesting!”

For forty-eight Tellurian hours, taking time out only to sleep, Samms scanned and surveyed the planet Trenco; and the more he studied it, the more outrageously abnormal it became.

Trenco was, and is, a peculiar planet indeed. Its atmosphere is not air as we know air; its hydrosphere does not resemble water. Half of that atmosphere and most of that hydrosphere are one chemical, a substance of very low heat of vaporization and having a boiling point of about seventy-five degrees Fahrenheit. Trenco’s days are intensely hot; its nights are bitterly cold.

At night, therefore, it rains: and by comparison a Tellurian downpour of one inch per hour is scarcely a drizzle. Upon Trenco it really rains—forty seven feet and five inches of precipitation, every night of every Trenconian year. And this tremendous condensation of course causes wind. Willoughby’s graphs were accurate. Except at Trenco’s very poles there is not a spot in which or a time at which an Earthly gale would not constitute a dead calm; and along the equator, at every sunrise and every sunset, the wind blows from the day side into the night side at a velocity which no Tellurian hurricane or cyclone, however violent, has even distantly approached.

Also, therefore, there is lightning. Not in the mild and occasional flashes which we of gentle Terra know, but in a continuous, blinding glare which outshines a normal sun; in battering, shattering, multi-billion-volt discharges which not only make darkness unknown there, but also distort beyond recognition and beyond function the warp and the woof of space itself. Sight is almost completely useless in that fantastically altered medium. So is the ultra-beam.

Landing on the daylight side, except possibly at exact noon, would be impossible because of the wind, nor could the ship stay landed for more than a couple of minutes. Landing on the night side would be practically as bad, because of the terrific charge the boat would pick up—unless the boat carried something that could be rebuilt into a leaker. Did it? It did.

Time after time, from pole to pole and from midnight around the clock, Samms stabbed Visibeam and spy-ray down toward Trenco’s falsely-visible surface, with consistently and meaninglessly impossible results. The planet tipped, lurched, spun, and danced. It broke up into chunks, each of which began insanely to follow mathematically impossible paths.

Finally, in desperation, he rammed a beam down and held it down. Again he saw the planet break up before his eyes, but this time he held on. He knew that he was well out of the stratosphere, a good two hundred miles up. Nevertheless, he saw a tremendous mass of jagged rock falling straight down, with terrific velocity, upon his tiny lifeboat!

Unfortunately the crew, to whom he had not been paying overmuch attention of late, saw it, too; and one of them, with a bestial yell, leaped toward Samms and the controls. Samms, reaching for pistol and blackjack, whirled around just in time to see the big red-head lay the would-be attacker out cold with a vicious hand’s-edge chop at the base of the skull.

“Thanks, Tworn. Why?”

“Because I want to get out of this alive, and he’d’ve had us all in hell in fifteen minutes. You know a hell of a lot more than we do, so I’m playin’ it your way. See?”

“I see. Can you use a sap?”

“An artist,” the big man admitted, modestly. “Just tell me how long you want a guy to be out and I won’t miss it a minute, either way. But you’d better blow that crumb’s brains out, right now. He ain’t no damn good.”

“Not until after I see whether he can work or not. You’re a Procian, aren’t you?”

“Yeah. Midlands—North Central.”

“What did you do?”

“Nothing much, at first. Just killed a guy that needed killing; but the goddam louse had a lot of money, so they give me twenty five years. I didn’t like it very well, and acted rough, so they give me solitary—boot, bandage, and so on. So I tried a break—killed six or eight, maybe a dozen, guards—but didn’t quite make it. So they slated me for the big whiff. That’s all, boss.”

“I’m promoting you, now, to squad leader. Here’s the sap.” He handed Tworn his blackjack. “Watch ’em—I’ll be too busy to. This landing is going to be tough.”

“Gotcha, boss.” Tworn was calibrating his weapon by slugging himself experimentally on the leg. “Go ahead. As far as these crumbs are concerned, you’ve got this air-tank all to yourself.”

Samms had finally decided what he was going to do. He located the terminator on the morning side, poised his little ship somewhat nearer to dawn than to midnight, and “cut the rope”. He took one quick reading on the sun, cut off his plates, and let her drop, watching only his pressure gages and gyros.

One hundred millimeters of mercury. Three hundred. Five hundred. He slowed her down. He was going to hit a thin liquid, but if he hit it too hard he would smash the boat, and he had no idea what the atmospheric pressure at Trenco’s surface would be. Six hundred. Even this late at night, it might be greater than Earth’s…and it might be a lot less. Seven hundred.

Slower and slower he crept downward, his tension mounting infinitely faster than did the needle of the gage. This was an instrument landing with a vengeance! Eight hundred. How was the crew taking it? How many of them had Tworn had to disable? He glanced quickly around. None! Now that they could not see the hallucinatory images upon the plates, they were not suffering at all—he himself was the only one aboard who was feeling the strain!

Nine hundred…nine hundred forty. The boat “hit the drink” with a crashing, splashing impact. Its pace was slow enough, however, and the liquid was deep enough, so that no damage was done. Samms applied a little driving power and swung his craft’s sharp nose into the line toward the sun. The little ship plowed slowly forward, as nearly just awash as Samms could keep her; grounded as gently as a river steam-boat upon a mud-flat. The starkly incredible downpour slackened; the Lensman knew that the second critical moment was at hand.

“Strap down, men, until we see what this wind is going to do to us.”

The atmosphere, moving at a velocity well above that of sound, was in effect not a gas, but a solid. Even a spaceboat’s hard skin of alloy plate, with all its bracing, could not take what was coming next. Inert, she would be split open, smashed, flattened out, and twisted into pretzels. Samms’ finger stabbed down; the Berg went into action; the lifeboat went free just as that raging blast of quasi-solid vapor wrenched her into the air.

The second descent was much faster and much easier than the first. Nor, this time, did Samms remain surfaced or drive toward shore. Knowing now that this ocean was not deep enough to harm his vessel, he let her sink to the bottom. More, he turned her on her side and drove her at a flat angle into the bottom; so deep that the rim of her starboard lock was flush with the ocean’s floor. Again they waited; and this time the wind did not blow the lifeboat away.

Upon purely theoretical grounds Samms had reasoned that the weird distortion of vision must be a function of distance, and his observations so far had been in accord with that hypothesis. Now, slowly and cautiously, he sent out a visibeam. Ten feet…twenty…forty…all clear. At fifty the seeing was definitely bad; at sixty it became impossible. He shortened back to forty and began to study the vegetation, growing with such fantastic speed that the leaves, pressed flat to the ground by the gale and anchored there by heavy rootlets, were already inches long. There was also what seemed to be animal life, of sorts, but Samms was not, at the moment, interested in Trenconian zoology.

“Are them the plants we’re going to get, boss?” Tworn asked, staring into the plate over Samms’ shoulder. “Shall we go out now an’ start pickin’ ’em?”

“Not yet. Even if we could open the port the blast would wreck us. Also, it would shear your head off, flush with the coaming, as fast as you stuck it out. This wind should ease off after a while; well go out a little before noon. In the meantime we’ll get ready. Have the boys break out a couple of spare Number Twelve struts, some clamps and chain, four snatch blocks, and a hundred feet of heavy space-line.…

“Good,” he went on, when the order had been obeyed. “Rig the line from the winch through snatch blocks here, and here, and here, so I can haul you back against the wind. While you are doing that I’ll rig a remote control on the winch.”

Shortly before Trenco’s fierce, blue-white sun reached meridian, the six men donned space-suits and Samms cautiously opened the air-lock ports. They worked. The wind was now scarcely more than an Earthly hurricane; the wildly whipping broadleaf plants, struggling upward, were almost half-way to the vertical. The leaves were apparently almost fully grown.

Four men clamped their suits to the line. The line was paid out. Each man selected two leaves; the largest, fattest, purplest ones he could reach. Samms hauled them back and received the loot; Tworn stowed the leaves away. Again—again—again.

With noon there came a few minutes of “calm”. A strong man could stand against the now highly variable wind; could move around without being blown beyond the horizon; and during those few minutes all six men gathered leaves. That time, however, was very short. The wind steadied into the reverse direction with ever-increasing fury; winch and space-line again came into play. And in a scant half hour, when the line began to hum an almost musical note under its load, Samms decided to call it quits.

“That’ll be all for today, boys,” he announced. “About twice more and this line will part. You’ve done too good a job to lose you. Secure ship.”

“Shall I blow the air, sir?” Tworn asked.

“I don’t think so.” Samms thought for a moment. “No. I’m afraid to take the chance. This stuff, whatever it is, is probably as poisonous as cyanide. We’ll keep our suits on and exhaust into space.”

Time passed. “Night” came; the rain and the flood. The bottom softened. Samms blasted the lifeboat out of the mud and away from the planet. He opened the bleeder valves, then both air-lock ports; the contaminated air was replaced by the ultra-hard vacuum of the inter-planetary void. He signaled the Virgin Queen; the lifeboat was taken aboard.

“Quick trip, Olmstead,” Willoughby congratulated him. “I’m surprised that you got back at all, to say nothing of with so much stuff and not losing a man. Give me the weight, mister, fast!”

“Three hundred and forty eight pounds, sir,” the super-cargo reported.

“My God! And all pure broadleaf! Nobody ever did that before! How did you do it, Olmstead?”

“I don’t know whether that would be any of your business or not.” Samms’ mien was not insulting; merely thoughtful. “Not that I give a damn, but my way might not help anybody else much, and I think I had better report to the main office first, and let them do the telling. Fair enough?”

“Fair enough,” the skipper conceded, ungrudgingly. “What a load! And no losses!”

“One boatload of air, is all; but air is expensive out here.” Samms made a point, deliberately.

“Air!” Willoughby snorted. “I’ll swap you a hundred flasks of air, any time, for any one of those leaves!” Which was what Samms wanted to know.

Captain Willoughby was smart. He knew that the way to succeed was to use and then to trample upon his inferiors; to toady to such superiors as were too strong to be pulled down and thus supplanted. He knew this Olmstead had what it took to be a big shot. Therefore:

“They told me to keep you in the dark until we got to Trenco,” he more than half apologized to his Fourth Officer shortly after the Virgin Queen blasted away from the Trenconian system. “But they didn’t say anything about afterwards—maybe they figured you wouldn’t be aboard any more, as usual—but anyway, you can stay right here in the control room if you want to.”

“Thanks, Skipper, but mightn’t it be just as well,” he jerked his head inconspicuously toward the other officers, “to play the string out, this trip? I don’t care where we’re going, and we don’t want anybody to get any funny ideas.”

“That’d be a lot better, of course—as long as you know that your cards are all aces, as far as I’m concerned.”

“Thanks, Willoughby. I’ll remember that.”

Samms had not been entirely frank with the private captain. From the time required to make the trip, he knew to within a few parsecs Trenco’s distance from Sol. He did not know the direction, since the distance was so great that he had not been able to recognize any star or constellation. He did know, however, the course upon which the vessel then was, and he would know courses and distances from then on. He was well content.

A couple of uneventful days passed. Samms was again called into the control room, to see that the ship was approaching a three-sun solar system.

“This where we’re going to land?” he asked, indifferently.

“We ain’t going to land,” Willoughby told him. “You are going to take the broadleaf down in your boat, close enough so that you can parachute it down to where it has to go. Way ’nuff, pilot, go inert and match intrinsics. Now, Olmstead, watch. You’ve seen systems like this before?”

“No, but I know about them. Those two suns over there are a hell of a lot bigger and further away than they look, and this one here, much smaller, is in the Trojan position. Have those big suns got any planets?”

“Five or six apiece, they say; all hotter and dryer than the brazen hinges of hell. This sun here has seven, but Number Two—‘Cavenda’, they call it—is the only Tellurian planet in the system. The first thing we look for is a big, diamond-shaped continent…there’s only one of that shape…there it is, over there. Notice that one end is bigger than the other—that end is north. Strike a line to split the continent in two and measure from the north end one-third of the length of the line. That’s the point we’re diving at now…see that crater?”

“Yes.” The Virgin Queen, although still hundreds of miles up, was slowing rapidly. “It must be a big one.”

“It’s a good fifty miles across. Go down until you’re dead sure that the box will land somewhere inside the rim of that crater. Then dump it. The parachute and the sender are automatic. Understand?”

“Yes, sir; I understand,” and Samms took off.

He was vastly more interested in the stars, however, than in delivering the broadleaf. The constellation directly beyond Sol from wherever he was might be recognizable. Its shape would be smaller and more or less distorted; its smaller stars, brilliant to Earthly eyes only because of their nearness, would be dimmer, perhaps invisible; the picture would be further confused by intervening, nearby, brilliant strangers; but such giants as Canopus and Rigel and Betelgeuse and Deneb would certainly be highly visible if he could only recognize them. From Trenco his search had failed; but he was still trying.

There was something vaguely familiar! Sweating with the mental effort, he blocked out the too-near, too-bright stars and studied intensively those that were left. A blue-white and a red were most prominent. Rigel and Betelgeuse? Could that constellation be Orion? The Belt was very faint, but it was there. Then Sirius ought to be about there, and Pollux about there; and, at this distance, about equally bright. They were. Aldebaran would be orange, and about one magnitude brighter than Pollux; and Capella would be yellow, and half a magnitude brighter still. There they were! Not too close to where they should be, but close enough—it was Orion! And this thionite way-station, then, was somewhere near right ascension seventeen hours and declination plus ten degrees!

He returned to the Virgin Queen. She blasted off. Samms asked very few questions and Willoughby volunteered very little information; nevertheless the First Lensman learned more than anyone of his fellow pirates would have believed possible. Aloof, taciturn, disinterested to a degree, he seemed to spend practically all of his time in his cabin when he was not actually at work; but he kept his eyes and his ears wide open. And Virgil Samms, as has been intimated, had a brain.

The Virgin Queen made a quick flit from Cavenda to Vegia, arriving exactly on time; a proud, clean space-ship as high above suspicion as Calpurnia herself. Samms unloaded her cargo; replaced it with one for Earth. She was serviced. She made a fast, eventless run to Tellus. She docked at New York Spaceport. Virgil Samms walked unconcernedly into an ordinary-looking rest-room; George Olmstead, fully informed, walked unconcernedly out.

As soon as he could, Samms Lensed Northrop and Jack Kinnison.

“We lined up a thousand and one signals, sir,” Northrop reported for the pair, “but only one of them carried a message, and it didn’t make sense.”

“Why not?” Samms asked, sharply. “With a Lens, any kind of a message, however garbled, coded, or interrupted, makes sense.”

“Oh, we understood what it said,” Jack came in, “but it didn’t say enough. Just ‘READY—READY—READY’; over and over.”

“What!” Samms exclaimed, and the boys could feel his mind work. “Did that signal, by any chance, originate anywhere near seventeen hours and plus ten degrees?”

“Very near. Why? How did you know?”

“Then it does make sense!” Samms exclaimed, and called a general conference of Lensmen.

“Keep working along these same lines,” Samms directed, finally. “Keep Ray Olmstead in the Hill in my place. I am going to Pluto, and—I hope—to Palain Seven.”

Roderick Kinnison of course protested; but, equally of course, his protests were over-ruled.

CHAPTER 10

Pluto is, on the average, about forty times as far away from the sun as is Mother Earth. Each square yard of Earth’s surface receives about sixteen hundred times as much heat as does each of Pluto’s. The sun as seen from Pluto is a dim, wan speck. Even at perihelion, an event which occurs only once in two hundred forty eight Tellurian years, and at noon and on the equator, Pluto is so bitterly cold that climatic conditions upon its surface simply cannot be described by or to warm-blooded, oxygen-breathing man.

As good an indication as any can be given, perhaps, by mentioning the fact that it had taken the Patrol’s best engineers over six months to perfect the armor which Virgil Samms then wore. For no ordinary space-suit would do. Space itself is not cold; the only loss of heat is by radiation into or through an almost perfect vacuum. In contact with Pluto’s rocky, metallic soil, however, there would be conduction; and the magnitude of the inevitable heat-loss made the Tellurian scientists gasp.

“Watch your feet, Virge!” had been Roderick Kinnison’s insistent last thought. “Remember those psychologists—if they stayed in contact with that ground for five minutes they froze their feet to the ankles. Not that the boys aren’t good, but slipsticks sometimes slip in more ways than one. If your feet ever start to get cold, drop whatever you’re doing and drive back here at max!”

Virgil Samms landed. His feet stayed warm. Finally, assured that the heaters of his suit could carry the load indefinitely, he made his way on foot into the settlement near which he had come to ground. And there he saw his first Palainian.

Or, strictly speaking, he saw part of his first Palainian; for no three-dimensional creature has ever seen or ever will see in entirety any member of any of the frigid-blooded, poison-breathing races. Since life as we know it—organic, three-dimensional life—is based upon liquid water and gaseous oxygen, such life did not and could not develop upon planets whose temperatures are only a few degrees above absolute zero. Many, perhaps most, of these ultra-frigid planets have an atmosphere of sorts; some have no atmosphere at all. Nevertheless, with or without atmosphere and completely without oxygen and water, life—highly intelligent life—did develop upon millions and millions of such worlds. That life is not, however, strictly three-dimensional. Of necessity, even in the lowest forms, it possesses an extension into the hyper-dimension; and it is this metabolic extension alone which makes it possible for life to exist under such extreme conditions.

The extension makes it impossible for any human being to see anything of a Palainian except the fluid, amorphous, ever-changing thing which is his three-dimensional aspect of the moment; makes any attempt at description or portraiture completely futile.

Virgil Samms stared at the Palainian; tried to see what it looked like. He could not tell whether it had eyes or antennae; legs, arms, or tentacles, teeth or beaks, talons or claws or feet; skin, scales, or feathers. It did not even remotely resemble anything that the Lensman had ever seen, sensed, or imagined. He gave up; sent out an exploring thought.

“I am Virgil Samms, a Tellurian,” he sent out slowly, carefully, after he made contact with the outer fringes of the creature’s mind. “Is it possible for you, sir or madam, to give me a moment of your time?”

“Eminently possible, Lensman Samms, since my time is of completely negligible value.” The monster’s mind flashed into accord with Samms’ with a speed and precision that made him gasp. That is, a part of it became en rapport with a part of his: years were to pass before even the First Lensman would know much more about the Palainian than he learned in that first contact; no human beings except the Children of the Lens ever were to understand even dimly the labyrinthine intricacies, the paradoxical complexities, of the Palainian mind.

“‘Madam’ might be approximately correct,” the native’s thought went smoothly on. “My name, in your symbology, is Twelfth Pilinipsi; by education, training, and occupation I am a Chief Dexitroboper. I perceive that you are indeed a native of that hellish Planet Three, upon which it was assumed for so long that no life could possibly exist. But communication with your race has been almost impossible heretofore… Ah, the Lens. A remarkable device, truly. I would slay you and take it, except for the obvious fact that only you can possess it.”

“What!” Dismay and consternation flooded Samms’ mind. “You already know the Lens?”

“No. Yours is the first that any of us has perceived. The mechanics, the mathematics, and the basic philosophy of the thing, however, are quite clear.”

“What!” Samms exclaimed again. “You can, then, produce Lenses yourselves?”

“By no means, any more than you Tellurians can. There are magnitudes, variables, determinants, and forces involved which no Palainian will ever be able to develop, to generate, or to control.”

“I see.” The Lensman pulled himself together. For a First Lensman, he was making a wretched showing indeed.…

“Far from it, sir,” the monstrosity assured him. “Considering the strangeness of the environment into which you have voluntarily flung yourself so senselessly, your mind is well integrated and strong. Otherwise it would have shattered. If our positions were reversed, the mere thought of the raging heat of your Earth would—come no closer, please!” The thing vanished; reappeared many yards away. Her thoughts were a shudder of loathing, of terror, of sheer detestation. “But to get on. I have been attempting to analyze and to understand your purpose, without success. That failure is not too surprising, of course, since my mind is weak and my total power is small. Explain your mission, please, as simply as you can.”

Weak? Small? In view of the power the monstrosity had just shown, Samms probed for irony, for sarcasm or pretense. There was no trace of anything of the kind.

He tried, then, for fifteen solid minutes, to explain the Galactic Patrol, but at the end the Palainian’s only reaction was one of blank non-comprehension.

“I fail completely to perceive the use of, or the need for, such an organization,” she stated flatly. “This altruism—what good is it? It is unthinkable that any other race would take any risks or exert any effort for us, any more than we would for them. Ignore and be ignored, as you must already know, is the Prime Tenet.”

“But there is a little commerce between our worlds; your people did not ignore our psychologists; and you are not ignoring me,” Samms pointed out.

“Oh, none of us is perfect,” Pilinipsi replied, with a mental shrug and what seemed to be an airy wave of a multi-tentacled member. “That ideal, like any other, can only be approached asymptotically, never reached; and I, being somewhat foolish and silly, as well as weak and vacillant, am much less perfect than most.”

Flabbergasted, Samms tried a new tack. “I might be able to make my position clearer if I knew you better. I know your name, and that you are a woman of Palain Seven”—it is a measure of Virgil Samms’ real size that he actually thought “woman”, and not merely “female”—“but all I can understand of your occupation is the name you have given it. What does a Chief Dexitroboper do?”

“She—or he—or, perhaps, it…is a supervisor of the work of dexitroboping.” The thought, while perfectly clear, was completely meaningless to Samms, and the Palainian knew it. She tried again. “Dexitroboping has to do with…nourishment? No—with nutrients.”

“Ah. Farming—agriculture,” Samms thought; but this time it was the Palainian who could not grasp the concept. “Hunting? Fishing?” No better. “Show me, then, please.”

She tried; but demonstration, too, was useless; for to Samms the Palainian’s movements were pointless indeed. The peculiarly flowing subtly changing thing darted back and forth, rose and fell, appeared and disappeared; undergoing the while cyclic changes in shape and form and size, in aspect and texture. It was now spiny, now tentacular, now scaly, now covered with peculiarly repellent feather-like fronds, each oozing a crimson slime. But it apparently did not do anything whatever. The net result of all its activity was, apparently, zero.

“There, it is done.” Pilinipsi’s thought again came clear. “You observed and understood? You did not. That is strange—baffling. Since the Lens did improve communication and understanding tremendously, I hoped that it might extend to the physical as well. But there must be some basic, fundamental difference, the nature of which is at present obscure. I wonder…if I had a Lens, too—but no.…”

“But yes!” Samms broke in, eagerly. “Why don’t you go to Arisia and be tested for one? You have a magnificent, a really tremendous mind. It is of Lensman grade in every respect except one—you simply don’t want to use it!”

“Me? Go to Arisia?” The thought would have been, in a Tellurian, a laugh of scorn. “How utterly silly—how abysmally stupid! There would be personal discomfort, quite possibly personal danger, and two Lenses would be little or no better than one in resolving differences between our two continua, which are probably in fact incommensurable.”

“Well, then,” Samms thought, almost viciously, “can you introduce me to someone who is stupider, sillier, and more foolish than you are?”

“Not here on Pluto, no.” The Palainian took no offense. “That was why it was I who interviewed the earlier Tellurian visitors and why I am now conversing with you. The others avoided you.”

“I see.” Samms’ thought was grim. “How about the home planet, then?”

“Ah. Undoubtedly. In fact, there is a group, a club, of such persons. None of them is, of course, as insane—as aberrant—as you are, but they are all much more so than I am.”

“Who of this club would be most interested in becoming a Lensman?”

“Tallick was the least stable member of the New-Thought Club when I left Seven; Kragzex a close second. There may of course have been changes since then. But I cannot believe that even Tallick—even Tallick at his outrageous worst—would be crazy enough to join your Patrol.”

“Nevertheless, I must see him myself. Can you and will you give me a chart of a routing from here to Palain Seven?”

“I can and I will. Nothing you have thought will be of any use to me; that will be the easiest and quickest way of getting rid of you.” The Palainian spread a completely detailed chart in Samms’ mind, snapped the telepathic line, and went unconcernedly about her incomprehensible business.

Samms, mind reeling, made his way back to his boat and took off. And as the light-years and the parsecs screamed past, he sank deeper and deeper into a welter of unproductive speculation. What were—really—those Palainians? How could they—really—exist as they seemed to exist? And why had some of that dexitroboper’s—whatever that meant!—thoughts come in so beautifully sharp and clear and plain while others…?

He knew that his Lens would receive and would convert into his own symbology any thought or message, however coded or garbled or however sent or transmitted. The Lens was not at fault; his symbology was. There were concepts—things—actualities—occurrences—so foreign to Tellurian experience that no referents existed. Hence the human mind lacked the channels, the mechanisms, to grasp them.

He and Roderick Kinnison had glibly discussed the possibility of encountering forms of intelligent life so alien that humanity would have no point whatever of contact with them. After what Samms had just gone through, that was more of a possibility than either he or his friend had believed; and he hoped grimly, as he considered how seriously this partial contact with the Palainian had upset him, that the possibility would never become a fact.

He found the Palainian system easily enough, and Palain Seven. That planet, of course, was almost as dark upon its sunward side as upon the other, and its inhabitants had no use for light. Pilinipsi’s instructions, however, had been minute and exact; hence Samms had very little trouble in locating the principal city—or, rather, the principal village, since there were no real cities. He found the planet’s one spaceport. What a thing to call a port! He checked back; recalled exactly this part of his interview with Pluto’s Chief Dexitroboper.

“The place upon which space-ships land,” had been her thought, when she showed him exactly where it was in relationship to the town. Just that, and nothing else. It had been his mind, not hers, that had supplied the docks and cradles, the service cars, the officers, and all the other things taken for granted in space-fields everywhere as Samms knew them. Either the Palainian had not perceived the trappings with which Samms had invested her visualization, or she had not cared enough about his misapprehension to go to the trouble of correcting it; he did not know which.

The whole area was as bare as his hand. Except for the pitted, scarred, slagged-down spots which showed so clearly what driving blasts would do to such inconceivably cold rock and metal, Palainport was in no way distinguishable from any other unimproved portion of the planet’s utterly bleak surface.

There were no signals; he had been told of no landing conventions. Apparently it was everyone for himself. Wherefore Samms’ tremendous landing lights blazed out, and with their aid he came safely to ground. He put on his armour and strode to the air-lock; then changed his mind and went to the cargo-port instead. He had intended to walk, but in view of the rugged and deserted field and the completely unknown terrain between the field and the town, he decided to ride the “creep” instead.

This vehicle, while slow, could go—literally—anywhere. It had a cigar-shaped body of magnalloy; it had big, soft, tough tires; it had cleated tracks; it had air- and water-propellers; it had folding wings; it had driving, braking, and steering jets. It could traverse the deserts of Mars, the oceans and swamps of Venus, the crevassed glaciers of Earth, the jagged, frigid surface of an iron asteroid, and the cratered, fluffy topography of the moon; if not with equal speed, at least with equal safety.

Samms released the thing and drove it into the cargo lock, noting mentally that he would have to exhaust the air of that lock into space before he again broke the inner seal. The ramp slid back into the ship; the cargo port closed. Here he was!

Should he use his headlights, or not? He did not know the Palainians’ reaction to or attitude toward light. It had not occurred to him while at Pluto to ask, and it might be important. The landing lights of his vessel might already have done his cause irreparable harm. He could drive by starlight if he had to…but he needed light and he had not seen a single living or moving thing. There was no evidence that there was a Palainian within miles. While he had known, with his brain, that Palain would be dark, he had expected to find buildings and traffic—ground-cars, planes, and at least a few space-ships—and not this vast nothingness.

If nothing else, there must be a road from Palain’s principal city to its only spaceport; but Samms had not seen it from his vessel and he could not see it now. At least, he could not recognize it. Wherefore he clutched in the tractor drive and took off in a straight line toward town. The going was more than rough—it was really rugged—but the creep was built to stand up under punishment and its pilot’s chair was sprung and cushioned to exactly the same degree. Hence, while the course itself was infinitely worse than the smoothly paved approaches to Rigelston, Samms found this trip much less bruising than the other had been.

Approaching the village, he dimmed his roadlights and slowed down. At its edge he cut them entirely and inched his way forward by starlight alone.

What a town! Virgil Samms had seen the inhabited places of almost every planet of Civilization. He had seen cities laid out in circles, sectors, ellipses, triangles, squares, parallelopipeds—practically every plan known to geometry. He had seen structures of all shapes and sizes—narrow skyscrapers, vast-spreading one-stories, polyhedra, domes, spheres, semi-cylinders, and erect and inverted full and truncated cones and pyramids. Whatever the plan or the shapes of the component units, however, those inhabited places had, without exception, been understandable. But this!

Samms, his eyes now completely dark-accustomed, could see fairly well, but the more he saw the less he grasped. There was no plan, no coherence or unity whatever. It was as though a cosmic hand had flung a few hundreds of buildings, of incredibly and senselessly varied shapes and sizes and architectures, upon an otherwise empty plain, and as though each structure had been allowed ever since to remain in whatever location and attitude it had chanced to fall. Here and there were jumbled piles of three or more utterly incongruous structures. There were a few whose arrangement was almost orderly. Here and there were large, irregularly-shaped areas of bare, untouched ground. There were no streets—at least, nothing that the man could recognize as such.

Samms headed the creep for one of those open areas, then stopped—declutched the tracks, set the brakes, and killed the engines.

“Go slow, fellow,” he advised himself then. “Until you find out what a dexitroboper actually does while working at his trade, don’t take chances of interfering or of doing damage!”

No Lensman knew—then—that frigid-blooded poison-breathers were not strictly three-dimensional; but Samms did know that he had actually seen things which he could not understand. He and Kinnison had discussed such occurrences calmly enough; but the actuality was enough to shake even the mind of Civilization’s First Lensman.

He did not need to be any closer, anyway. He had learned the Palainians’ patterns well enough to Lens them from a vastly greater distance than his present one; this personal visit to Palainopolis had been a gesture of friendliness, not a necessity.

“Tallick? Kragzex?” He sent out the questing, querying thought. “Lensman Virgil Samms of Sol Three calling Tallick and Kragzex of Palain Seven.”

“Kragzex acknowledging, Virgil Samms,” a thought snapped back, as diamond-clear, as precise, as Pilinipsi’s had been.

“Is Tallick here, or anywhere on the planet?”

“He is here, but he is emmfozing at the moment. He will join us presently.”

Damnation! There it was again! First “dexitroboping”, and now this!

“One moment, please,” Samms requested. “I fail to grasp the meaning of your thought.”

“So I perceive. The fault is of course mine, in not being able to attune my mind fully to yours. Do not take this, please, as any aspersion upon the character or strength of your own mind.”

“Of course not. I am the first Tellurian you have met?”

“Yes.”

“I have exchanged thoughts with one other Palainian, and the same difficulty existed. I can neither understand nor explain it; but it is as though there are differences between us so fundamental that in some matters mutual comprehension is in fact impossible.”

“A masterly summation and undoubtedly a true one. This emmfozing, then—if I read correctly, your race has only two sexes?”

“You read correctly.”

“I cannot understand. There is no close analogy. However, emmfozing has to do with reproduction.”

“I see,” and Samms saw, not only a frankness brand-new to his experience, but also a new view of both the powers and the limitations of his Lens.

It was, by its very nature, of precisionist grade. It received thoughts and translated them precisely into English. There was some leeway, but not much. If any thought was such that there was no extremely close counterpart or referent in English, the Lens would not translate it at all, but would simply give it a hitherto meaningless symbol—a symbol which would from that time on be associated, by all Lenses everywhere, with that one concept and no other. Samms realized then that he might, some day, learn what a dexitroboper actually did and what the act of emmfozing actually was; but that he very probably would not.

Tallick joined them then, and Samms again described glowingly, as he had done so many times before, the Galactic Patrol of his imaginings and plannings. Kragzex refused to have anything to do with such a thing, almost as abruptly as Pilinipsi had done, but Tallick lingered—and wavered.

“It is widely known that I am not entirely sane,” he admitted, “which may explain the fact that I would very much like to have a Lens. But I gather, from what you have said, that I would probably not be given a Lens to use purely for my own selfish purposes?”

“That is my understanding,” Samms agreed.

“I was afraid so.” Tallick’s mien was…“woebegone” is the only word for it. “I have work to do. Projects, you know, of difficulty, of extreme complexity and scope, sometimes even approaching danger. A Lens would be of tremendous use.”

“How?” Samms asked. “If your work is of enough importance to enough people, Mentor would certainly give you a Lens.”

“This would benefit me; only me. We of Palain, as you probably already know, are selfish, mean-spirited, small-souled, cowardly, furtive, and sly. Of what you call ‘bravery’ we have no trace. We attain our ends by stealth, by indirection, by trickery and deceit.” Ruthlessly the Lens was giving Virgil Samms the uncompromisingly exact English equivalent of the Palainian’s every thought. “We operate, when we must operate at all openly, with the absolutely irreducible minimum of personal risk. These attitudes and attributes will, I have no doubt, preclude all possibility of Lensmanship for me and for every member of my race.”

“Not necessarily.”

Not necessarily! Although Virgil Samms did not know it, this was one of the really critical moments in the coming into being of the Galactic Patrol. By a conscious, a tremendous effort, the First Lensman was lifting himself above the narrow, intolerant prejudices of human experience and was consciously attempting to see the whole through Mentor’s Arisian mind instead of through his Tellurian own. That Virgil Samms was the first human being to be born with the ability to accomplish that feat even partially was one of the reasons why he was the first wearer of the Lens.

“Not necessarily,” First Lensman Virgil Samms said and meant. He was inexpressibly shocked—revolted in every human fiber—by what this unhuman monster had so frankly and callously thought. There were, however, many things which no human being ever could understand, and there was not the shadow of a doubt that this Tallick had a really tremendous mind. “You have said that your mind is feeble. If so, there is no simple expression of the weakness of mine. I can perceive only one, the strictly human, facet of the truth. In a broader view it is distinctly possible that your motivation is at least as ‘noble’ as mine. And to complete my argument, you work with other Palainians, do you not, to reach a common goal?”

“At times, yes.”

“Then you can conceive of the desirability of working with non-Palainian entities toward an end which would benefit both races?”

“Postulating such an end, yes; but I am unable to visualize any such. Have you any specific project in mind?”

“Not at the moment.” Samms ducked. He had already fired every shot in his locker. “I am quite certain, however, that if you go to Arisia you will be informed of several such projects.”

There was a period of silence. Then:

“I believe that I will go to Arisia, at that!” Tallick exclaimed, brightly. “I will make a deal with your friend Mentor. I will give him a share—say fifty percent, or forty—of the time and effort I save on my own projects!”

“Just so you go, Tallick.” Samms concealed right manfully his real opinion of the Palainian’s scheme. “When can you go? Right now?”

“By no means. I must first finish this project. A year, perhaps—or more; or possibly less. Who knows?”

Tallick cut communications and Samms frowned. He did not know the exact length of Seven’s year, but he knew that it was long—very long.

CHAPTER 11

A small, black scout-ship, commanded jointly by Master Pilot John K. Kinnison and Master Electronicist Mason M. Northrop, was blasting along a course very close indeed to RA17: D+10. In equipment and personnel, however, she was not an ordinary scout. Her control room was so full of electronics racks and computing machines that there was scarcely footway in any direction; her graduated circles and vernier scales were of a size and a fineness usually seen only in the great vessels of the Galactic Survey. And her crew, instead of the usual twenty-odd men, numbered only seven—one cook, three engineers, and three watch officers. For some time the young Third Officer, then at the board, had been studying something on his plate; comparing it minutely with the chart clipped into the rack in front of him. Now he turned, with a highly exaggerated deference, to the two Lensmen.

“Sirs, which of your Magnificences is officially the commander of this here bucket of odds and ends at the present instant?”

“Him.” Jack used his cigarette as a pointer. “The guy with the misplaced plucked eyebrow on his upper lip. I don’t come on duty until sixteen hundred hours—one precious Tellurian minute yet in which to dream of the beauties of Earth so distant in space and in both past and future time.”

“Huh? Beauties? Plural? Next time I see a party whose pictures are cluttering up this whole ship I’ll tell her about your polygamous ideas. I’ll ignore that crack about my mustache, though, since you can’t raise one of your own. I’m ignoring you, too—like this, see?” Ostentatiously turning his back upon the lounging Kinnison, Northrop stepped carefully over three or four breadboard hookups and stared into the plate over the watch officer’s shoulder. He then studied the chart. “Was ist los, Stu? I don’t see a thing.”

“More Jack’s line than yours, Mase. This system we’re headed for is a triple, and the chart says it’s a double. Natural enough, of course. This whole region is unexplored, so the charts are astronomicals, not surveys. But that makes us Prime Discoverers, and our Commanding Officer—and the book says ‘Officer’, not ‘Officers’—has got to.…”

“That’s me, now,” Jack announced, striding grandly toward the plate. “Amscray, oobsbay. I will name the baby. I will report. I will go down in history.…”

“Bounce back, small fry. You weren’t at the time of discovery.” Northrop placed a huge hand flat against Jack’s face and pushed gently. “You’ll go down, sure enough—not in history, but from a knock on the knob—if you try to steal any thunder away from me. And besides, you’d name it ‘Dimples’—what a revolting thought!”

“And what would you name it? ‘Virgilia’, I suppose?”

“Far from it, my boy.” He had intended doing just that, but now he did not quite dare. “After our project, of course. The planet we’re heading for will be Zabriska; the suns will be A-, B-, and C-Zabriskae, in order of size; and the watch officer then on duty, Lieutenant L. Stuart Rawlings, will engross these and all other pertinent data in the log. Can you classify ’em from here, Jack?”

“I can make some guesses—close enough, probably, for Discovery work.” Then, after a few minutes: “Two giants, a blue-white and a bluish yellow; and a yellow dwarf.”

“Dwarf in the Trojan?”

“That would be my guess, since that is the only place it could stay very long, but you can’t tell much from one look. I can tell you one thing, though—unless your Zabriska is in a system straight beyond this one, it’s got to be a planet of the big fellow himself; and brother, that sun is hot!”

“It’s got to be here, Jack. I haven’t made that big an error in reading a beam since I was a sophomore.”

“I’ll buy that…well, we’re close enough, I guess.” Jack killed the driving blasts, but not the Bergenholm; the inertialess vessel stopped instantaneously in open space. “Now we’ve got to find out which one of those twelve or fifteen planets was on our line when that last message was sent.… There, we’re stable enough, I hope. Open your cameras, Mase. Pull the first plate in fifteen minutes. That ought to give me enough track so I can start the job, since we’re at a wide angle to their ecliptic.”

The work went on for an hour or so. Then:

“Something coming from the direction of Tellus,” the watch officer reported. “Big and fast. Shall I hail her?”

“Might as well,” but the stranger hailed first.

“Space-ship Chicago, NA2AA, calling. Are you in trouble? Identify yourself, please.”

“Space-ship NA774J acknowledging. No trouble.…”

“Northrop! Jack!” came Virgil Samms’ highly concerned thought. The superdreadnaught flashed alongside, a bare few hundred miles away, and stopped. “Why did you stop here?”

“This is where our signal came from, sir.”

“Oh.” A hundred thoughts raced through Samms’ mind, too fast and too fragmentary to be intelligible. “I see you’re computing. Would it throw you off too much to go inert and match intrinsics, so that I can join you?”

“No sir; I’ve got everything I need for a while.”

Samms came aboard; three Lensmen studied the chart.

“Cavenda is there,” Samms pointed out. “Trenco is there, off to one side. I felt sure that your signal originated on Cavenda; but Zabriska, here, while on almost the same line, is less than half as far from Tellus.” He did not ask whether the two young Lensmen were sure of their findings. He knew. “This arouses my curiosity no end—does it merely complicate the thionite problem, or does it set up an entirely new problem? Go ahead, boys, with whatever you were going to do next.”

Jack had already determined that the planet they wanted was the second out; A-Zabriskae Two. He drove the scout as close to the planet as he could without losing complete coverage; stationed it on the line toward Sol.

“Now we wait a bit,” he answered. “According to recent periodicity, not less than four hours and not more than ten. With the next signal we’ll nail that transmitter down to within a few feet. Got your spotting screens full out, Mase?”

“Recent periodicity?” Samms snapped. “It has improved, then, lately?”

“Very much, sir.”

“That helps immensely. With George Olmstead harvesting broadleaf, it would. It is still one problem. While we wait, shall we study the planet a little?”

They explored; finding that A-Zabriskae Two was a disappointing planet indeed. It was small, waterless, airless, utterly featureless, utterly barren. There were no elevations, no depressions, no visible markings whatever—not even a meteor crater. Every square yard of its surface was apparently exactly like every other.

“No rotation,” Jack reported, looking up from the bolometer. “That sand-pile is not inhabited and never will be. I’m beginning to wonder.”

“So am I, now,” Northrop admitted. “I still say that those signals came from this line and distance, but it looks as though they must have been sent from a ship. If so, now that we’re here—particularly the Chicago—there will be no more signals.”

“Not necessarily.” Again Samms’ mind transcended his Tellurian experience and knowledge. He did not suspect the truth, but he was not jumping at conclusions. “There may be highly intelligent life, even upon such a planet as this.”

They waited, and in a few hours a communications beam snapped into life.

“READY—READY—READY.…” it said briskly, for not quite one minute, but that was time enough.

Northrop yelped a string of numbers; Jack blasted the little vessel forward and downward; the three watch officers, keen-eyed at their plates, stabbed their visibeams, ultra-beams, and spy-rays along the indicated line.

“And bore straight through the planet if you have to—they may be on the other side!” Jack cautioned, sharply.

“They aren’t—it’s here, on this side!” Rawlings saw it first. “Nothing much to it, though…it looks like a relay station.”

“A relay! I’ll be a.…” Jack started to express an unexpurgated opinion, but shut himself up. Young cubs did not swear in front of the First Lensman. “Let’s land, sir, and look the place over, anyway.”

“By all means.”

They landed, and cautiously disembarked. The horizon, while actually quite a little closer than that of Earth, seemed much more distant because there was nothing whatever—no tree, no shrub, no rock or pebble, not even the slightest ripple—to break the geometrical perfection of that surface of smooth, hard, blindingly reflective, fiendishly hot white sand. Samms was highly dubious at first—a ground-temperature of four hundred seventy-five degrees was not to be taken lightly; he did not at all like the looks of that ultra-fervent blue-white sun; and in his wildest imaginings he had never pictured such a desert. Their space-suits, however, were very well insulated, particularly as to the feet, and highly polished; and in lieu of atmosphere there was an almost perfect vacuum. They could stand it for a while.

The box which housed the relay station was made of non-ferrous metal and was roughly cubical in shape, perhaps five feet on a side. It was so buried that its upper edge was flush with the surface; its top, which was practically indistinguishable from the surrounding sand, was not bolted or welded, but was simply laid on, loose.

Previous spy-ray inspection having proved that the thing was not booby-trapped, Jack lifted the cover by one edge and all three Lensmen studied the mechanisms at close range; learning nothing new. There was an extremely sensitive non-directional receiver, a highly directional sender, a beautifully precise uranium-clock director, and an “eternal” powerpack. There was nothing else.

“What next, sir?” Northrop asked. “There’ll be an incoming signal, probably, in a couple of days. Shall we stick around and see whether it comes in from Cavenda or not?”

“You and Jack had better wait, yes.” Samms thought for minutes. “I do not believe, now, that the signal will come from Cavenda, or that it will ever come twice from the same direction, but we will have to make sure. But I can’t see any reason for it!”

“I think I can, sir.” This was Northrop’s specialty. “No space-ship could possibly hit Tellus from here except by accident with a single-ended beam, and they can’t use a double-ender because it would have to be on all the time and would be as easy to trace as the Mississippi River. But this planet did all its settling ages ago—which is undoubtedly why they picked it out—and that director in there is a Marchanti—the second Marchanti I have ever seen.”

“Whatever that is,” Jack put in, and even Samms thought a question.

“The most precise thing ever built,” the specialist explained. “Accuracy limited only by that of determination of relative motions. Give me an accurate enough equation to feed into it, like that tape is doing, and two sighting shots, and I’ll guarantee to pour an eighteen-inch beam into any two foot cup on Earth. My guess is that it’s aimed at some particular bucket-antenna on one of the Solar planets. I could spoil its aim easily enough, but I don’t suppose that is what you’re after.”

“Decidedly not. We want to trace them, without exciting any more suspicion than is absolutely necessary. How often, would you say, do they have to come here to service this station—change tapes, and whatever else might be necessary?”

“Change tapes, is all. Not very often, by the size of those reels. If they know the relative motions exactly enough, they could compute as far ahead as they care to. I’ve been timing that reel—it’s got pretty close to three months left on it.”

“And more than that much has been used. It’s no wonder we didn’t see anything.” Samms straightened up and stared out across the frightful waste. “Look there—I thought I saw something move—it is moving!”

“There’s something moving closer than that, and it’s really funny.” Jack laughed deeply. “Its like the paddle-wheels, shaft and all, of an old-fashioned river steam-boat, rolling along as unconcernedly as you please. He won’t miss me by over four feet, but he isn’t swerving a hair. I think I’ll block him off, just to see what he does.”

“Be careful, Jack!” Samms cautioned, sharply. “Don’t touch it—it may be charged, or worse.”

Jack took the metal cover, which he was still holding, and by working it back and forth edgewise in the sand, made of it a vertical barrier squarely across the thing’s path. The traveler paid no attention, did not alter its steady pace of a couple of miles per hour. It measured about twelve inches long over all; its paddle-wheel-like extremities were perhaps two inches wide and three inches in diameter.

“Do you think it’s actually alive, sir? In a place like this?”

“I’m sure of it. Watch carefully.”

It struck the barrier and stopped. That is, its forward motion stopped, but its rolling did not. Its rate of revolution did not change; it either did not know or did not care that its drivers were slipping on the smooth, hard sand; that it could not climb the vertical metal plate; that it was not getting anywhere.

“What a brain!” Northrop chortled, squatting down closer. “Why doesn’t it back up or turn around? It may be alive, but it certainly isn’t very bright.”

The creature, now in the shadow of the ’Troncist’s helmet, slowed down abruptly—went limp—collapsed.

“Get out of his light!” Jack snapped, and pushed his friend violently away; and as the vicious sunlight struck it, the native revived and began to revolve as vigorously as before. “I’ve got a hunch. Sounds screwy—never heard of such a thing—but it acts like an energy-converter. Eats energy, raw and straight. No storage capacity—on this world he wouldn’t need it—a few more seconds in the shade would probably have killed him, but there’s no shade here. Therefore, he can’t be dangerous.”

He reached out and touched the middle of the revolving shaft. Nothing happened. He turned it at right angles to the plate. The thing rolled away in a straight line, perfectly contented with the new direction. He recaptured it and stuck a test-prod lightly into the sand, just ahead of its shaft and just inside one paddle wheel. Around and around that slim wire the creature went: unable, it seemed, to escape from even such a simple trap; perfectly willing, it seemed, to spend all the rest of its life traversing that tiny circle.

“‘What a brain!’ is right, Mase,” Jack exclaimed. “What a brain!”

“This is wonderful, boys, really wonderful; something completely new to our science.” Samms’ thought was deep with feeling. “I am going to see if I can reach its mind or consciousness. Would you like to come along?”

“Would we!”

Samms tuned low and probed; lower and lower; deeper and deeper; and Jack and Mase stayed with him. The thing was certainly alive; it throbbed and vibrated with vitality: equally certainly, it was not very intelligent. But it had a definite consciousness of its own existence; and therefore, however tiny and primitive, a mind. Although its rudimentary ego could neither receive nor transmit thought, it knew that it was a fontema, that it must roll and roll and roll, endlessly, that by virtue of determined rolling its species would continue and would increase.

“Well, that’s one for the book!” Jack exclaimed, but Samms was entranced.

“I would like to find one or two more of them, to find out… I think I’ll take the time. Can you see any more of them, either of you?”

“No, but we can find some—Stu!” Northrop called.

“Yes?”

“Look around, will you? Find us a couple more of these fontema things and flick them over here with a tractor.”

“Coming up!” and in a few seconds they were there.

“Are you photographing this, Lance?” Samms called the Chief Communications Officer of the Chicago.

“We certainly are, sir—all of it. What are they, anyway? Animal, vegetable, or mineral?”

“I don’t know. Probably no one of the three, strictly speaking. I’d like to take a couple back to Tellus, but I’m afraid that they’d die, even under an atomic lamp. We’ll report to the Society.”

Jack liberated his captive and aimed it to pass within a few feet of one of the newcomers, but the two fontemas did not ignore each other. Both swerved, so that they came together wheel to wheel. The shafts bent toward each other, each into a right angle. The angles touched and fused. The point of fusion swelled rapidly into a double fist-sized lump. The half-shafts doubled in length. The lump split into four; became four perfect paddle-wheels. Four full-grown fontemas rolled away from the spot upon which two had met; their courses forming two mutually perpendicular straight lines.

“Beautiful!” Samms exclaimed. “And notice, boys, the method of avoiding inbreeding. Upon a perfectly smooth planet such as this, no two of those four can ever meet, and the chance is almost vanishingly small that any of their first-generation offspring will ever meet. But I’m afraid I’ve been wasting time. Take me back out to the Chicago, please, and I’ll be on my way.”

“You don’t seem at all optimistic, sir,” Jack ventured, as the NA774J approached the Chicago.

“Unfortunately, I am not. The signal will almost certainly come in from an unpredictable direction, from a ship so far away that even a super-fast cruiser could not get close enough to her to detect—just a minute. Rod!” He Lensed the elder Kinnison so sharply that both young Lensmen jumped.

“What is it, Virge?”

Samms explained rapidly, concluding: “So I would like to have you throw a globe of scouts around this whole Zabriskan system. One detet out and one detet apart, so as to be able to slap a tracer onto any ship laying a beam to this planet, from any direction whatever. It would not take too many scouts, would it?”

“No; but it wouldn’t be worth while.”

“Why not?”

“Because it wouldn’t prove a thing except what we already know—that Spaceways is involved in the thionite racket. The ship would be clean. Merely another relay.”

“Oh. You’re probably right.” If Virgil Samms was in the least put out at this cavalier dismissal of his idea, he made no sign. He thought intensely for a couple of minutes. “You are right. I will have to work from the Cavenda end. How are you coming with Operation Bennett?”

“Nice!” Kinnison enthused. “When you get a couple of days, come over and see it grow. This is a fine world, Virge—it’ll be ready!”

“I’ll do that.” Samms broke the connection and called Dronvire.

“The only change here is for the worse,” the Rigellian reported, tersely. “The slight positive correlation between deaths from thionite and the arrival of Spaceways vessels has disappeared.”

There was no need to elaborate on that bare statement. Both Lensmen knew what it meant. The enemy, either in anticipation of statistical analysis or for economic reasons, was rationing his small supply of the drug.

And DalNalten was very much unlike his usual equable self. He was glum and unhappy; so much so that it took much urging to make him report at all.

“We have, as you know, put our best operatives to work on the inter-planetary lines,” he said finally, half sullenly. “We have secured quite a little data. The accumulating facts, however, point more and more definitely toward an utterly preposterous conclusion. Can you think of any valid reason why the exports and imports of thionite between Tellus and Mars, Mars and Venus, and Venus and Tellus, should all be exactly equal to each other?”

“What!”

“Precisely. That is why Knobos and I are not yet ready to present even a preliminary report.”

Then Jill. “I can’t prove it, any more than I could before, but I’m pretty sure that Morgan is the Boss. I have drawn every picture I can think of with Isaacson in the driver’s seat, but none of them fit?” She paused, questioningly.

“I am already reconciled to adopting that view; at least as a working hypothesis. Go ahead.”

“The fact seems to be that Morgan has always had all the left-wingers of the Nationalists under his thumb. Now he and his man Friday, Representative Flierce, are wooing all the radicals and so-called liberals on our side of both Senate and House—a new technique for him—and they’re offering plenty of the right kind of bait. He has the commentators guessing, but there’s no doubt whatever in my mind that he is aiming at next Election Day and our Galactic Council.”

“And you and Dronvire are sitting idly by, doing nothing, of course?”

“Of course!” Jill giggled, but sobered quickly. “He’s a smooth, smooth worker, Dad. We are organizing, of course, and putting out propaganda of our own, but there’s so pitifully little that we can actually do—look and listen to this for a minute, and you’ll see what I mean.”

In her distant room Jill manipulated a reel and flipped a switch. A plate came to life, showing Morgan’s big, sweating, passionately earnest face.

“…and who are these Lensmen, anyway?” Morgan’s voice bellowed, passionate conviction in every syllable. “They are the hired minions of the classes, stabbers in the back, crooks and scoundrels, TOOLS OF RUTHLESS WEALTH! They are hirelings of the inter-planetary bankers, those unspeakable excrescences on the body politic who are still grinding down into the dirt, under an iron heel, the face of the common man! In the guise of democracy they are trying to set up the worst, the most outrageous tyranny that this universe has ever.…” Jill snapped the switch viciously.

“And a lot of people swallow that…that bilge!” she almost snarled. “If they had the brains of a…of even that Zabriskan fontema Mase told me about, they wouldn’t, but they do!”

“I know they do. We have known all along that he is a masterly actor; we now know that he is more than that.”

“Yes, and we’re finding out that no appeal to reason, no psychological counter-measures, will work. Dronvire and I agree that you’ll have to arrange matters so that you can do solid months of stumping yourself. Personally.”

“It may come to that, but there’s a lot of other things to do first.”

Samms broke the connection and thought. He did not consciously try to exclude the two youths, but his mind was working so fast and in such a disjointed fashion that they could catch only a few fragments. The incomprehensible vastness of space—tracing—detection—Cavenda’s one tiny, fast moving moon—back, and solidly, to DETECTION.

“Mase,” Samms thought then, carefully. “As a specialist in such things, why is it that the detectors of the smallest scout—lifeboat, even—have practically the same range as those of the largest liners and battleships?”

“Noise level and hash, sir, from the atomics.”

“But can’t they be screened out?”

“Not entirely, sir, without blocking reception completely.”

“I see. Suppose, then, that all atomics aboard were to be shut down; that for the necessary heat and light we use electricity, from storage or primary batteries or from a generator driven by an internal-combustion motor or a heat-engine. Could the range of detection then be increased?”

“Tremendously, sir. My guess is that the limiting factor would then be the cosmics.”

“I hope you’re right. While you are waiting for the next signal to come in, you might work out a preliminary design for such a detector. If, as I anticipate, this Zabriska proves to be a dead end, Operation Zabriska ends here—becomes a part of Zwilnik—and you two will follow me at max to Tellus. You, Jack, are very badly needed on Operation Boskone. You and I, Mase, will make appropriate alterations aboard a J-class vessel of the Patrol.”

CHAPTER 12

Approaching Cavenda in his dead-black, converted scout-ship, Virgil Samms cut his drive, killed his atomics, and turned on his super-powered detectors. For five full detets in every direction—throughout a spherical volume over ten detets in diameter—space was void of ships. Some activity was apparent upon the planet dead ahead, but the First Lensman did not worry about that. The drug-runners would of course have atomics in their plants, even if there were no space-ships actually on the planet—which there probably were. What he did worry about was detection. There would be plenty of detectors, probably automatic; not only ordinary sub-ethereals, but electros and radars as well.

He flashed up to within one and a quarter detets, stopped, and checked again. Space was still empty. Then, after making a series of observations, he went inert and established an intrinsic velocity which, he hoped, would be close enough. He again shut off his atomics and started the sixteen-cylinder Diesel engine which would do its best to replace them.

That best was none too good, but it would do. Besides driving the Bergenholm it could furnish enough kilodynes of thrust to produce a velocity many times greater than any attainable by inert matter. It used a lot of oxygen per minute, but it would not run for very many minutes. With her atomics out of action his ship would not register upon the plates of the long-range detectors universally used. Since she was nevertheless traveling faster than light, neither electromagnetic detector-webs nor radar could “see” her. Good enough.

Samms was not the System’s best computer, nor did he have the System’s finest instruments. His positional error could be corrected easily enough; but as he drove nearer and nearer to Cavenda, keeping, toward the last, in line with its one small moon, he wondered more and more as to how much of an allowance he should make for error in his intrinsic, which he had set up practically by guess. And there was another variable, the cut-off. He slowed down to just over one light; but even at that comparatively slow speed an error of one millisecond at cut-off meant a displacement of two hundred miles! He switched the spotter into the Berg’s cut-off circuit, set it for three hundred miles, and waited tensely at his controls.

The relays clicked, the driving force expired, the vessel went inert. Samms’ eyes, flashing from instrument to instrument, told him that matters could have been worse. His intrinsic was neither straight up, as he had hoped, nor straight down, as he had feared, but almost exactly half-way between the two—straight out. He discovered that fact just in time; in another second or two he would have been out beyond the moon’s protecting bulk and thus detectable from Cavenda. He went free, flashed back to the opposite boundary of his area of safety, went inert, and put the full power of the bellowing Diesel to the task of bucking down his erroneous intrinsic, losing altitude continuously. Again and again he repeated the maneuver; and thus, grimly and stubbornly, he fought his ship to ground.

He was very glad to see that the surface of the satellite was rougher, rockier, ruggeder, and more cratered even than that of Earth’s Luna. Upon such a terrain as this, it would be next to impossible to spot even a moving vessel—if it moved carefully.

By a series of short and careful inertialess hops—correcting his intrinsic velocity after each one by an inert collision with the ground—he maneuvered his vessel into such a position that Cavenda’s enormous globe hung directly overhead. Breathing a profoundly deep breath of relief he killed the big engine, cut in his fully-charged accumulators, and turned on detector and spy-ray. He would see what he could see.

His detectors showed that there was only one point of activity on the whole planet. He located it precisely; then, after cutting his spy-ray to minimum power, he approached it gingerly, yard by yard. Stopped! As he had more than half expected, there was a spy-ray block. A big one, almost two miles in diameter. It would be almost directly beneath him—or rather, almost straight overhead—in about three hours.

Samms had brought along a telescope, considerably more powerful than the telescopic visiplate of his scout. Since the surface gravity of this moon was low—scarcely one-fifth that of Earth—he had no difficulty in lugging the parts out of the ship or in setting the thing up.

But even the telescope did not do much good. The moon was close to Cavenda, as astronomical distances go—but really worth-while astronomical optical instruments simply are not portable. Thus the Lensman saw something that, by sufficient stretch of the imagination, could have been a factory; and, eyes straining at the tantalizing limit of visibility, he even made himself believe that he saw a toothpick-shaped object and a darkly circular blob, either of which could have been the space-ship of the outlaws. He was sure, however, of two facts. There were no real cities upon Cavenda. There were no modern spaceports, or even air-fields.

He dismounted the ’scope, stored it, set his detectors, and waited. He had to sleep at times, of course; but any ordinary detector rig can be set to sound off at any change in its status—and Samms’ was no ordinary rig. Wherefore, when the drug-mongers’ vessel took off, Samms left Cavenda as unobtrusively as he had approached it, and swung into that vessel’s line.

Samms’ strategy had been worked out long since. On his Diesel, at a distance of just over one detet, he would follow the outlaw as fast as he could; long enough to establish his line. He would then switch to atomic drive and close up to between one and two detets; then again go onto Diesel for a check. He would keep this up for as long as might prove necessary.

As far as any of the Lensmen knew, Spaceways always used regular liners or freighters in this business, and this scout was much faster than any such vessel. And even if—highly improbable thought!—the enemy ship was faster than his own, it would still be within range of those detectors when it got to wherever it was that it was going. But how wrong Samms was!

At his first check, instead of being not over two detets away the quarry was three and a half; at the second the distance was four and a quarter; at the third, almost exactly five. Scowling, Samms watched the erstwhile brilliant point of light fade into darkness. That circular blob that he had almost seen, then, had been the space-ship, but it had not been a sphere, as he had supposed. Instead, it had been a tear-drop; sticking, sharp tail down, in the ground. Ultra-fast. This was the result. But ideas had blown up under him before, they probably would again. He resumed atomic drive and made arrangements with the Port Admiral to rendezvous with him and the Chicago at the earliest possible time.

“What is there along that line?” he demanded of the superdreadnaught’s Chief Pilot, even before junction had been made.

“Nothing, sir, that we know of,” that worthy reported, after studying his charts.

He boarded the gigantic ship of war, and with Kinnison pored over those same charts.

“Your best bet is Eridan, I think,” Kinnison concluded finally. “Not too near your line, but they could very easily figure that a one-day dogleg would be a good investment. And Spaceways owns it, you know, from core to planetary limits—the richest uranium mines in existence. Made to order. Nobody would suspect a uranium ship. How about throwing a globe around Eridan?”

Samms thought for minutes. “No…not yet, at least. We don’t know enough yet.”

“I know it—that’s why it looks to me like a good time and place to learn something,” Kinnison argued. “We know—almost know, at least—that a super-fast ship, carrying thionite, has just landed there. This is the hottest lead we’ve had. I say englobe the planet, declare martial law, and not let anything in or out until we find it. Somebody there must know something, a lot more than we do. I say hunt him out and make him talk.”

“You’re just popping off, Rod. You know as well as I do that nabbing a few of the small fry isn’t enough. We can’t move openly until we can strike high.”

“I suppose not,” Kinnison grumbled. “But we know so damned little, Virge!”

“Little enough,” Samms agreed. “Of the three main divisions, only the political aspect is at all clear. In the drug division, we know where thionite comes from and where it is processed, and Eridan may be—probably is—another link. On the other end, we know a lot of peddlers and a few middlemen—nobody higher. We have no actual knowledge whatever as to who the higher-ups are or how they work; and it’s the bosses we want. Concerning the pirates, we know even less. ‘Murgatroyd’ may be no more a man’s name than ‘zwilnik’ is.…”

“Before you get too far away from the subject, what are you going to do about Eridan?”

“Nothing, for the moment, would be best, I believe. However, Knobos and DalNalten should switch their attention from Spaceways’ passenger liners to the uranium ships from Eridan to all three of the inner planets. Check?”

“Check. Particularly since it explains so beautifully the merry-go-round they have been on so long—chasing the same packages of dope backwards and forwards so many times that the corners of the boxes got worn round. We’ve got to get the top men, and they’re smart. Which reminds me—Morgan as Big Boss does not square up with the Morgan that you and Fairchild smacked down so easily when he tried to investigate the Hill. A loud-mouthed, chiseling politician might have a lock-box full of documentary evidence about party bosses and power deals and chorus girls and Martian tekkyl coats, but the man we’re after very definitely would not.”

“You’re telling me?” This point was such a sore one that Samms relapsed into idiom. “The boys should have cracked that box a week ago, but they struck a knot. I’ll see if they know anything yet. Tune in, Rod. Ray!” He Lensed a thought at his cousin.

“Yes, Virge?”

“Have you got a spy-ray into that lock-box yet?”

“Glad you called. Yes, last night. Empty. Empty as a sub-deb’s skull—except for an atomic-powered gimmick that it took Bergenholm’s whole laboratory almost a week to neutralize.”

“I see. Thanks. Off.” Samms turned to Kinnison. “Well?”

“Nice. A mighty smart operator.” Kinnison gave credit ungrudgingly. “Now I’ll buy your picture—what a man! But now—and I’ve got my ears pinned back—what was it you started to say about pirates?”

“Just that we have very little to go on, except for the kind of stuff they seem to like best, and the fact that even armed escorts have not been able to protect certain types of shipments of late. The escorts, too, have disappeared. But with these facts as bases, it seems to me that we could arrange something, perhaps like this.…”

* * * *

A fast, sleek freighter and a heavy battle-cruiser bored steadily through the inter-stellar void. The merchantman carried a fabulously valuable cargo: not bullion or jewels or plate of price, but things literally above price—machine tools of highest precision, delicate optical and electrical instruments, fine watches and chronometers. She also carried First Lensman Virgil Samms.

And aboard the war-ship there was Roderick Kinnison; for the first time in history a mere battle-cruiser bore a Port Admiral’s flag.

As far as the detectors of those two ships could reach, space was empty of man-made craft; but the two Lensmen knew that they were not alone. One and one-half detets away, loafing along at the freighter’s speed and paralleling her course, in a hemispherical formation open to the front, there flew six tremendous tear-drops; super-dreadnaughts of whose existence no Tellurian or Colonial government had even an inkling. They were the fastest and deadliest craft yet built by man—the first fruits of Operation Bennett. And they, too, carried Lensmen—Costigan, Jack Kinnison, Northrop, Dronvire of Rigel Four, Rodebush, and Cleveland. Nor was there need of detectors: the eight Lensmen were in as close communication as though they had been standing in the same room.

“On your toes, men,” came Samms’ quiet thought. “We are about to pass within a few light-minutes of an uninhabited solar system. No Tellurian-type planets at all. This may be it. Tune to Kinnison on one side and to your captains on the other. Take over, Rod.”

At one instant the ether, for one full detet in every direction, was empty. In the next, three intensely brilliant spots of detection flashed into being, in line with the dead planet so invitingly close at hand.

This development came as a surprise, since only two raiders had been expected: a battleship to take care of the escort, a cruiser to take the merchantman. The fact that the pirates had become cautious or suspicious and had sent three super-dreadnaughts on the mission, however, did not operate to change the Patrol’s strategy; for Samms had concluded, and Dronvire and Bergenholm and Rularion of Jupiter had agreed, that the real commander of the expedition would be aboard the vessel that attacked the freighter.

In the next instant, then—each Lensman saw what Roderick Kinnison saw, in the very instant of his seeing it—six more points of hard, white light sprang into being upon the plates of guileful freighter and decoying cruiser.

“Jack and Mase, take the leader!” Kinnison snapped out the thought. “Dronvire and Costigan, right wing—he’s the one that’s going after the freighter. Fred and Lyman, left wing. Hipe!”

The pirate ships flashed up, filling ether and sub-ether alike with a solid mush of interference through which no call for help could be driven; two super-dreadnaughts against the cruiser, one against the freighter. The former, of course, had been expected to offer more than a token resistance. Battle cruisers of the Patrol were powerful vessels, both on offense and defense, and it was a known and recognized fact that the men of the Patrol were men. The pirate commander who attacked the freighter, however, was a surprised pirate indeed. His first beam, directed well forward, well ahead of the precious cargo, should have wrought the same havoc against screens and wall-shields and structure as a white-hot poker would against a pat of luke-warm butter. Practically the whole nose-section, including the control room, should have whiffed outward into space in gobbets and streamers of molten and gaseous metal. But nothing of the sort happened—this merchantman was no push-over!

No ordinary screens protected that particular freighter and the person of First Lensman Samms—Roderick Kinnison had very thoroughly seen to that. In sheer mass her screen generators out-weighed her entire cargo, heavy as that cargo was, by more than two to one. Thus the pirate’s beams stormed and struck and clawed and clung—uselessly. They did not penetrate. And as the surprised attacker shoved his power up and up, to his absolute ceiling of effort, the only result was to increase the already tremendous pyrotechnic display of energies cascading in all directions from the fiercely radiant defenses of the Tellurian freighter.

And in a few seconds the commanding officers of the other two attacking battleships were also surprised. The battle-cruiser’s screens did not go down, even under the combined top effort of two super-dreadnaughts! And she did not have a beam hot enough to light a match—she must be all screen! But before the startled outlaws could do anything about the realization that they, instead of being the trappers, were in cold fact the trapped, all three of them were surprised again—the last surprise that any of them was ever to receive. Six mighty tear-drops—vastly bigger, faster, more powerful than their own—were rushing upon them, blanketing all channels of communication as efficiently and as enthusiastically as they themselves had been doing an instant before.

Being out simply and ruthlessly to kill, and not to capture, four of the newcomers from Bennett polished off the cruiser’s two attackers in very short order. They simply flashed in, went inert at the four corners of an imaginary tetrahedron, and threw everything they had—and they had plenty. Possibly—just barely possibly—there may have been, somewhere, a space-battle shorter than that one; but there certainly was never one more violent.

Then the four set out after their two sister-ships and the one remaining pirate, who was frantically devoting his every effort to the avoidance of engagement. But with six ships, each one of which was of vastly greater individual power than his own, at the six corners of an octahedron of which he was the geometrical center, his ability to cut tractor beams and to “squirt out” from between two opposed pressors did him no good whatever. He was englobed; or, rather, to apply the correct terminology to an operation involving so few units, he was “boxed”.

To blow the one remaining raider out of the ether would have been easy enough, but that was exactly what the Patrolmen did not want to do. They wanted information. Wherefore each of the Patrol ships directed a dozen or so beams upon the scintillating protective screens of the enemy; enough so that every square yard of defensive web was under direct attack. As rapidly as it could be done without losing equilibrium or synchronization, the power of each beam was stepped up until the wildly violet incandescence of the pirate screen showed that it was hovering on the very edge of failure. Then, in the instant, needle-beamers went furiously to work. The screen was already loaded to its limit; no transfer of defensive energy was possible. Thus, tremendously overloaded locally, locally it flared through the ultra-violet into the black and went down; and the fiercely penetrant daggers of pure force stabbed and stabbed and stabbed.

The engine room went first, even though the needlers had to gnaw a hundred-foot hole straight through the pirate craft in order to find the vital installations. Then, enough damage done so that spy-rays could get in, the rest of the work was done with precision and dispatch. In a matter of seconds the pirate hulk lay helpless, and the Patrolmen peeled her like an orange—or, rather, more like an amateur cook very wastefully peeling a potato. Resistless knives of energy sheared off tail-section and nose-section, top and bottom, port and starboard sides; then slabbed off the corners of what was left, until the control room was almost bared to space.

Then, as soon as the intrinsic velocities could possibly be matched, board and storm! With Dronvire of Rigel Four in the lead, closely followed by Costigan, Northrop, Kinnison the Younger, and a platoon of armed and armored Space Marines!

Samms and the two scientists did not belong in such a melee as that which was to come, and knew it. Kinnison the Elder did not belong, either, but did not know it. In fact, he cursed fluently and bitterly at having to stay out—nevertheless, out he stayed.

Dronvire, on the other hand, did not like to fight. The very thought of actual, bodily, hand-to-hand combat revolted every fiber of his being. In view of what the spy-ray men were reporting, however, and of what all the Lensmen knew of pirate psychology, Dronvire had to get into that control room first, and he had to get there fast. And if he had to fight, he could; and, physically, he was wonderfully well equipped for just such activity. To his immense physical strength, the natural concomitant of a force of gravity more than twice Earth’s, the armor which so encumbered the Tellurian battlers was a scarcely noticeable impediment. His sense of perception, which could not be barred by any material substance, kept him fully informed of every development in his neighborhood. His literally incredible speed enabled him not merely to parry a blow aimed at him, but to bash out the brains of the would-be attacker before that blow could be more than started. And whereas a human being can swing only one space-axe or fire only two ray-guns at a time, the Rigellian plunged through space toward what was left of the pirate vessel, swinging not one or two space-axes, but four; each held in a lithe and supple, but immensely strong, tentacular “hand”.

Why axes? Why not Lewistons, or rifles, or pistols? Because the space armor of that day could withstand almost indefinitely the output of two or three hand-held projectors; because the resistance of its defensive fields varied directly as the cube of the velocity of any material projectile encountering them. Thus, and strangely enough, the advance of science had forced the re-adoption of that long-extinct weapon.

Most of the pirates had died, of course, during the dismemberment of their ship. Many more had been picked off by the needle-beam gunners. In the control room, however, there was a platoon of elite guards, clustered so closely about the commander and his officers that needles could not be used; a group that would have to be wiped out by hand.

If the attack had come by way of the only doorway, so that the pirates could have concentrated their weapons upon one or two Patrolmen, the commander might have had time enough to do what he was under compulsion to do. But while the Patrolmen were still in space a plane of force sheared off the entire side of the room, a tractor beam jerked the detached wall away, and the attackers floated in en masse.

Weightless combat is not at all like any form of gymnastics known to us ground-grippers. It is much more difficult to master, and in times of stress the muscles revert involuntarily and embarrassingly to their wonted gravity-field techniques. Thus the endeavors of most of the battlers upon both sides, while earnest enough and deadly enough of intent, were almost comically unproductive of result. In a matter of seconds frantically-struggling figures were floating from wall to ceiling to wall to floor; striking wildly, darting backward from the violence of their own fierce swings.

The Tellurian Lensmen, however, had had more practice and remembered their lessons better. Jack Kinnison, soaring into the room, grabbed the first solid thing he could reach; a post. Pulling himself down to the floor, he braced both feet, sighted past the nearest foeman, swung his axe, and gave a tremendous shove. Such was his timing that in the instant of maximum effort the beak of his atrociously effective weapon encountered the pirate’s helmet—and that was that. He wrenched his axe free and shoved the corpse away in such a direction that the reaction would send him against a wall at the floor line, in position to repeat the maneuver.

Since Mason Northrop was heavier and stronger than his friend, his technique was markedly different. He dove for the chart-table, which of course was welded to the floor. He hooked one steel-shod foot around one of the table’s legs and braced the other against its top. Weightless but inert, it made no difference whether his position was vertical or horizontal or anywhere between; from this point of vantage, with his length of body and arm and axe, he could cover a lot of room. He reached out, hooked bill of axe into belt or line-snap or angle of armor, and pulled; and as the helplessly raging pirate floated past him, he swung and struck. And that, too, was that.

Dronvire of Rigel Four did not rush to the attack. He had never been and was not now either excited or angry. Indeed, it was only empirically that he knew what anger and excitement were. He had never been in any kind of a fight. Therefore he paused for a couple of seconds to analyze the situation and to determine his own most efficient method of operation. He would not have to be in physical contact with the pirate captain to go to work on his mind, but he would have to be closer than this and he would have to be free from physical attack while he concentrated. He perceived what Kinnison and Costigan and Northrop were doing, and knew why each was working in a different fashion. He applied that knowledge to his own mass, to his own musculature, to the length and strength of his arms—each one of which was twice as long and ten times as strong as the trunk of an elephant. He computed forces and leverages, actions and reactions, points of application, stresses and strains.

He threw away two of his axes. The two empty arms reached out, each curling around the neck of a pirate. Two axes flashed, grazing each pinioning arm so nearly that it seemed incredible that the sharp edges did not shear away the Rigellian’s own armor. Two heads floated away from two bodies and Dronvire reached for two more. And two—and two—and two. Calm and dispassionate, but not wasting a motion or a millisecond, Dronvire accomplished more, in less time, than all the Tellurians in the room.

“Costigan, Northrop, Kinnison—attend!” he launched a thought. “I have no time to kill more of them. The commander is dying of a self-inflicted wound and I have important work to do. See to it, please, that these remaining creatures do not attack me while I am doing it.”

Dronvire tuned his mind to that of the pirate and probed. Although dying, the pirate captain offered fierce resistance, but the Rigellian was not alone. Attuned to his mind, working smoothly with it, giving it strengths and qualities which no Rigellian ever had had or ever would have, were the two strongest minds of Earth: that of Rod the Rock Kinnison, with the driving force, the indomitable will, the transcendent urge of all human heredity; and that of Virgil Samms, with all that had made him First Lensman.

“TELL!” that terrific triple mind demanded, with a force which simply could not be denied. “WHERE ARE YOU FROM? Resistance is useless; yours or that of those whom you serve. Your bases and powers are smaller and weaker than ours, since Spaceways is only a corporation and we are the Galactic Patrol. TELL! WHO ARE YOUR BOSSES? TELL—TELL!”

Under that irresistible urge there appeared, foggily and without any hint of knowledge of name or of spatial co-ordinates, an embattled planet, very similar in a smaller way to the Patrol’s own Bennett, and—

Even more foggily, but still not so blurred but that their features were unmistakeably recognizable, the images of two men. That of Murgatroyd, the pirate chief, completely strange to both Kinnison and Samms; and—

Back of Murgatroyd and above him, that of—

BIG JIM TOWNE!

CHAPTER 13

“First, about Murgatroyd.” In his office in The Hill Roderick Kinnison spoke aloud to the First Lensman. “What do you think should be done about him?”

“Murgatroyd. Hm…m…m.” Samms inhaled a mouthful of smoke and exhaled it slowly; watched it dissipate in the air. “Ah, yes, Murgatroyd.” He repeated the performance. “My thought, at the moment, is to let him alone.”

“Check,” Kinnison said. If Samms was surprised at his friend’s concurrence he did not show it. “Why? Let’s see if we check on that.”

“Because he does not seem to be of fundamental importance. Even if we could find him…and by the way, what do you think the chance is of our spies finding him?”

“Just about the same chance that theirs have of finding out about the Samms-Olmstead switch or our planet Bennett. Vanishingly small. Zero.”

“Right. And even if we could find him—even find their secret base, which is certainly as well hidden as ours is—it would do us no present good, because we could take no positive action. We have, I think, learned the prime fact; that Towne is actually Murgatroyd’s superior.”

“That’s the way I see it. We can almost draw an organization chart now.”

“I wouldn’t say ‘almost’.” Samms smiled half-ruefully. “There are gaping holes, and Isaacson is as yet a highly unknown quantity. I’ve tried to draw one a dozen times, but we haven’t got enough information. An incorrect chart, you know, would be worse than none at all. As soon as I can draw a correct one, I’ll show it to you. But in the meantime, the position of our friend James F. Towne is now clear. He is actually a Big Shot in both piracy and politics. That fact surprised me, even though it did clarify the picture tremendously.”

“Me, too. One good thing, we won’t have to hunt for him. You’ve been working on him right along, though, haven’t you?”

“Yes, but this new relationship throws light on a good many details which have been obscure. It also tends to strengthen our working hypothesis as to Isaacson—which we can’t prove yet, of course—that he is the actual working head of the drug syndicate. Vice-President in charge of Drugs, so to speak.”

“Huh? That’s a new one on me. I don’t see it.”

“There is very little doubt that at the top there is Morgan. He is, and has been for some time, the real boss of North America. Under him, probably taking orders direct, is President Witherspoon.”

“Undoubtedly. The Nationalist party is strictly a la machine, and Witherspoon is one of the world’s slimiest skinkers. Morgan is Chief Engineer of the Machine. Take it from there.”

“We know that Boss Jim is also in the top echelon—quite possibly the Commander-in-Chief—of the enemy’s Armed Forces. By analogy, and since Isaacson is apparently on the same level as Towne, immediately below Morgan.…”

“Wouldn’t there be three? Witherspoon?”

“I doubt it. My present idea is that Witherspoon is at least one level lower. Comparatively small fry.”

“Could be—I’ll buy it. A nice picture, Virge; and beautifully symmetrical. His Mightiness Morgan. Secretary of War Towne and Secretary of Drugs Isaacson; and each of them putting a heavy shoulder behind the political bandwagon. Very nice. That makes Operation Mateese tougher than ever—a triple-distilled toughie. Glad I told you it wasn’t my dish—saves me the trouble of backing out now.”

“Yes, I have noticed how prone you are to duck tough jobs.” Samms smiled quietly. “However, unless I am even more mistaken than usual, you will be in it up to your not-so-small ears, my friend, before it is over.”

“Huh? How?” Kinnison demanded.

“That will, I hope, become clear very shortly.” Samms stubbed out the butt of his cigarette and lit another. “The basic problem can be stated very simply. How are we going to persuade the sovereign countries of Earth—particularly the North American Continent—to grant the Galactic Patrol the tremendous power and authority it will have to have?”

“Nice phrasing, Virge, and studied. Not off the cuff. But aren’t you over-drawing a bit? Little if any conflict. The Patrol would be pretty largely inter-systemic in scope…with of course the necessary inter-planetary and inter-continental…and…um…m.…”

“Exactly.”

“But it’s logical enough, Virge, even at that, and has plenty of precedents, clear back to ancient history. ’Way back, before space-travel, when they first started to use atomic energy, and the only drugs they had to worry about were cocaine, morphine, heroin, and other purely Tellurian products. I was reading about it just the other day.”

Kinnison swung around, fingered a book out of a matched set, and riffled its leaves. “Russia was the world’s problem child then—put up what they called an iron curtain—wouldn’t play with the neighbors’ children, but picked up her marbles and went home. But yet—here it is. Original source unknown—some indications point to a report of somebody named Hoover, sometime in the nineteen forties or fifties, Gregorian calendar. Listen:

“‘This protocol’—he’s talking about the agreement on world-wide Narcotics Control—‘was signed by fifty-two nations, including the U.S.S.R.’—that was Russia—‘and its satellite states. It was the only international agreement to which the Communist countries’—you know more about what Communism was, I suppose, than I do.”

“Just that it was another form of dictatorship that didn’t work out.”

“‘…to which the Communist countries ever gave more than lip service. This adherence is all the more surprising, in view of the political situation then obtaining, in that all signatory nations obligated themselves to surrender national sovereignty in five highly significant respects, as follows:

“‘First, to permit Narcotics agents of all other signatory nations free, secret, and unregistered entry into, unrestricted travel throughout, and exit from, all their lands and waters, wherever situate:

“‘Second, upon request, to allow known criminals and known contraband to enter and to leave their territories without interference:

“‘Third, to cooperate fully, and as a secondary and not as a prime mover, in any Narcotics Patrol program set up by any other signatory nation:

“‘Fourth, upon request, to maintain complete secrecy concerning any Narcotics operation: and

“‘Fifth, to keep the Central Narcotics Authority fully and continuously informed upon all matters hereinbefore specified.’

“And apparently, Virge, it worked. If they could do that, ’way back then, we certainly should be able to make the Patrol work now.”

“You talk as though the situations were comparable. They aren’t. Instead of giving up an insignificant fraction of their national sovereignty, all nations will have to give up practically all of it. They will have to change their thinking from a National to a Galactic viewpoint; will have to become units in a Galactic Civilization, just as counties used to be units of states, and states are units of the continents. The Galactic Patrol will not be able to stop at being the supreme and only authority in inter-systemic affairs. It is bound to become intra-systemic, intra-planetary, and intra-continental. Eventually, it must and it shall be the sole authority, except for such purely local organizations as city police.”

“What a program!” Kinnison thought silently for minutes. “But I’m still betting that you can bring it off.”

“We’ll keep on driving until we do. What gives us our chance is that the all-Lensman Solarian Council is already in existence and is functioning smoothly; and that the government of North America has no jurisdiction beyond the boundaries of its continent. Thus, and even though Morgan has extra-legal powers both as Boss of North America and as the head of an organization which is in fact inter-systemic in scope, he can do nothing whatever about the fact that the Solarian Council has been enlarged into the Galactic Council. As a matter of fact, he was and is very much in favor of that particular move—just as much so as we are.”

“You’re going too fast for me. How do you figure that?”

“Unlike our idea of the Patrol as a coordinator of free and independent races, Morgan sees it as the perfect instrument of a Galactic dictatorship, thus: North America is the most powerful continent of Earth. The other continents will follow her lead—or else. Tellus can very easily dominate the other Solarian planets, and the Solar System can maintain dominance over all other systems as they are discovered and colonized. Therefore, whoever controls the North American Continent controls all space.”

“I see. Could be, at that. Throw the Lensmen out, put his own stooges in. Wonder how he’ll go about it? A tour de force? No. The next election, would be my guess. If so, that will be the most important election in history.”

“If they decide to wait for the election, yes. I’m not as sure as you seem to be that they will not act sooner.”

“They can’t,” Kinnison declared. “Name me one thing they think they can do, and I’ll shoot it fuller of holes than a target.”

“They can, and I am very much afraid that they will,” Samms replied, soberly. “At any time he cares to do so, Morgan—through the North American Government, of course—can abrogate the treaty and name his own Council.”

“Without my boys—the backbone and the guts of North America, as well as of the Patrol? Don’t be stupid, Virge. They’re loyal.”

“Admitted—but at the same time they are being paid in North American currency. Of course, we will soon have our own Galactic credit system worked out, but.…”

“What the hell difference would that make?” Kinnison wanted savagely to know. “You think they’d last until the next pay-day if they start playing that kind of ball? What in hell do you think I’d be doing? And Clayton and Schweikert and the rest of the gang? Sitting on our fat rumps and crying into our beers?”

“You would do nothing. I could not permit any illegal.…”

“Permit!” Kinnison blazed, leaping to his feet. “Permit—hell! Are you loose-screwed enough to actually think I would ask or need your permission? Listen, Samms!” The Port Admiral’s voice took on a quality like nothing his friend had ever before heard. “The first thing I would do would be to take off your Lens, wrap you up—especially your mouth—in seventeen yards of three-inch adhesive tape, and heave you into the brig. The second would be to call out everything we’ve got, including every half-built ship on Bennett able to fly, and declare martial law. The third would be a series of summary executions, starting with Morgan and working down. And if he’s got any fraction of the brain I credit him with, Morgan knows damned well exactly what would happen.”

“Oh.” Samms, while very much taken aback, was thrilled to the center of his being. “I had not considered anything so drastic, but you probably would.…”

“Not ‘probably’,” Kinnison corrected him grimly. “‘Certainly’.”

“…and Morgan does know…except about Bennett, of course…and he would not, for obvious reasons, bring in his secret armed forces. You’re right, Rod, it will be the election.”

“Definitely; and it’s plain enough what their basic strategy will be.” Kinnison, completely mollified, sat down and lit another cigar. “His Nationalist party is now in power, but it was our Cosmocrats of the previous administration who so basely slipped one over on the dear pee-pul—who betrayed the entire North American Continent into the claws of rapacious wealth, no less—by ratifying that unlawful, unhallowed, unconstitutional, and so on, treaty. Scoundrels! Bribe-takers! Betrayers of a sacred trust! How Rabble-Rouser Morgan will thump the tub on that theme—he’ll make the welkin ring as it never rang before.”

Kinnison mimicked savagely the demagogue’s round and purple tones as he went on: “‘Since they had no mandate from the pee-pul to trade their birthright for a mess of pottage that nefarious and underhanded treaty is, a prima vista and ipso facto and a priori, completely and necessarily and positively null and void. People of Earth, arouse! Arise! Rise in your might and throw off this stultifying and degrading, this paralyzing yoke of the Monied Powers—throw out this dictatorial, autocratic, wealth-directed, illegal, monstrous Council of so-called Lensmen! Rise in your might at the polls! Elect a Council of your own choosing—not of Lensmen, but of ordinary folks like you and me. Throw off this hellish yoke, I say!’—and here he begins to positively froth at the mouth—‘so that government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the Earth!’

“He has used that exact peroration, ancient as it is, so many times that practically everybody thinks he originated it; and it’s always good for so many decibels of applause that he’ll keep on using it forever.”

“Your analysis is vivid, cogent, and factual, Rod—but the situation is not at all funny.”

“Did I act as though I thought it was? If so, I’m a damned poor actor. I’d like to kick the bloodsucking leech all the way from here to the Great Nebula in Andromeda, and if I ever get the chance I’m going to!”

“An interesting, but somewhat irrelevant idea.” Samms smiled at his friend’s passionate outburst. “But go on. I agree with you in principle so far, and your viewpoint is—to say the least—refreshing.”

“Well, Morgan will have so hypnotized most of the dear pee-pul that they will think it their own idea when he re-nominates this spineless nincompoop Witherspoon for another term as President of North America, with a solid machine-made slate of hatchet-men behind him. They win the election. Then the government of the North American Continent—not the Morgan-Towne-Isaacson machine, but all nice and legal and by mandate and in strict accordance with the party platform—abrogates the treaty and names its own Council. And right then, my friend, the boys and I will do our stuff.”

“Except that, in such a case, you wouldn’t. Think it over, Rod.”

“Why not?” Kinnison demanded, in a voice which, however, did not carry much conviction.

“Because we would be in the wrong; and we are even less able to go against united public opinion than is the Morgan crowd.”

“We’d do something—I’ve got it!” Kinnison banged the desk with his fist. “That would be a strictly unilateral action. North America would be standing alone.”

“Of course.”

“So we’ll pull all the Cosmocrats and all of our friends out of North America—move them to Bennett or somewhere—and make Morgan and Company a present of it. We won’t declare martial law or kill anybody, unless they decide to call in their reserves. We’ll merely isolate the whole damned continent—throw a screen around it and over it that a microbe won’t be able to get through—one that would make that iron curtain I read about look like a bride’s veil—and we’ll keep them isolated until they beg to join up on our terms. Strictly legal, and the perfect solution. How about me giving the boys a briefing on it, right now?”

“Not yet.” Samms’ mien, however, lightened markedly. “I never thought of that way out.… It could be done, and it would probably work, but I would not recommend it except as an ultimately last resort. It has at least two tremendous drawbacks.”

“I know it, but.…”

“It would wreck North America as no nation has ever been wrecked; quite possibly beyond recovery. Furthermore, how many people, including yourself and your children, would like to renounce their North American citizenship and remove themselves, permanently and irrevocably, from North American soil?”

“Um…m…m. Put that away, it doesn’t sound so good, does it? But what the hell else can we do?”

“Just what we have been planning on doing. We must win the election.”

“Huh?” Kinnison’s mouth almost fell open. “You say it easy. How? With whom? By what stretch of the imagination do you figure that you can find anybody with a loose enough mouth to out-lie and out-promise Morgan? And can you duplicate his machine?”

“We can not only duplicate his machine; we can better it. The truth, presented to the people in language they can understand and appreciate, by a man whom they like, admire, and respect, will be more attractive than Morgan’s promises. The same truth will dispose of Morgan’s lies.”

“Well, go on. You’ve answered my questions, after a fashion, except the stinger. Does the Council think it’s got a man with enough dynage to lift the load?”

“Unanimously. They also agreed unanimously that we have only one. Haven’t you any idea who he is?”

“Not a glimmering of one.” Kinnison frowned in thought, then his face cleared into a broad grin and he yelled: “What a damn fool I am—you, of course!”

“Wrong. I was not even seriously considered. It was the concensus that I could not possibly win. My work has been such as to keep me out of the public eye. If the man in the street thinks of me at all, he thinks that I hold myself apart and above him—the ivory tower concept.”

“Could be, at that; but you’ve got my curiosity aroused. How can a man of that caliber have been kicking around so long without me knowing anything about him?”

“You do. That’s what I’ve been working around to all afternoon. You.”

“Huh?” Kinnison gasped as though he had received a blow in the solar plexus. “Me? ME? Hell’s—Brazen—Hinges!”

“Exactly. You.” Silencing Kinnison’s inarticulate protests, Samms went on: “First, you’ll have no difficulty in talking to an audience as you’ve just talked to me.”

“Of course not—but did I use any language that would burn out the transmitters? I don’t remember whether I did or not.”

“I don’t, either. You probably did, but that would be nothing new. Telenews has never yet cut you off the ether because of it. The point is this: while you do not realize it, you are a better tub-thumper and welkin-ringer than Morgan is, when something—such as just now—really gets you going. And as for a machine, what finer one is possible than the Patrol? Everybody in it or connected with it will support you to the hilt—you know that.”

“Why, I…I suppose so…probably they would, yes.”

“Do you know why?”

“Can’t say that I do, unless it’s because I treat them fair, so they do the same to me.”

“Exactly. I don’t say that everybody likes you, but I don’t know of anybody who doesn’t respect you. And, most important, everybody—all over space—knows ‘Rod the Rock’ Kinnison, and why he is called that.”

“But that very ‘man on horseback’ thing may backfire on you, Virge.”

“Perhaps—slightly—but we’re not afraid of that. And finally, you said you’d like to kick Morgan from here to Andromeda. How would you like to kick him from Panama City to the North Pole?”

“I said it, and I wasn’t just warming up my jets, either. I’d like it.” The big Lensman’s nostrils flared, his lips thinned. “By God, Virge, I will!”

“Thanks, Rod.” With no display whatever of the emotion he felt, Samms skipped deliberately to the matter next in hand. “Now, about Eridan. Let’s see if they know anything yet.”

The report of Knobos and DalNalten was terse and exact. They had found—and that finding, so baldly put, could have filled and should fill a book—that Spaceways’ uranium vessels were, beyond any reasonable doubt, hauling thionite from Eridan to the planets of Sol. Spy-rays being useless, they had considered the advisability of investigating Eridan in person, but had decided against such action. Eridan was closely held by Uranium, Incorporated. Its population was one hundred percent Tellurian human. Neither DalNalten nor Knobos could disguise himself well enough to work there. Either would be caught promptly, and as promptly shot.

“Thanks, fellows,” Samms said, when it became evident that the brief report was done. Then, to Kinnison, “That puts it up to Conway Costigan. And Jack? Or Mase? Or both?”

“Both,” Kinnison decided, “and anybody else they can use.”

“I’ll get them at it.” Samms sent out thoughts. “And now, I wonder what that daughter of mine is doing? I’m a little worried about her, Rod. She’s too cocky for her own good—or strength. Some of these days she’s going to bite off more than she can chew, if she hasn’t already. The more we learn about Morgan, the less I like the idea of her working on Herkimer Herkimer Third. I’ve told her so, a dozen times, and why, but of course it didn’t do any good.”

“It wouldn’t. The only way to develop teeth is to bite with ’em. You had to. So did I. Our kids have got to, too. We lived through it. So will they. As for Herky the Third.…” He thought for moments, then went on: “Check. But she’s done a job so far that nobody else could do. In spite of that fact, if it wasn’t for our Lenses I’d say to pull her, if you have to heave the insubordinate young jade into the brig. But with the Lenses, and the way you watch her…to say nothing of Mase Northrop, and he’s a lot of man… I can’t see her getting in either very bad or very deep. Can you?”

“No, I can’t.” Samms admitted, but the thoughtful frown did not leave his face. He Lensed her: finding, as he had supposed, that she was at a party; dancing, as he had feared, with Senator Morgan’s Number One Secretary.

“Hi, Dad!” she greeted him gaily, with no slightest change in the expression of the face turned so engagingly to her partner’s. “I have the honor of reporting that all instruments are still dead-centering the green.”

“And have you, by any chance, been paying any attention to what I have been telling you?”

“Oh, lots,” she assured him. “I’ve collected reams of data. He could be almost as much of a menace as he thinks he is, in some cases, but I haven’t begun to slip yet. As I have told you all along, this is just a game, and we’re both playing it strictly according to the rules.”

“That’s good. Keep it that way, my dear.” Samms signed off and his daughter returned her full attention—never noticeably absent—to the handsome secretary.

The evening wore on. Miss Samms danced every dance; occasionally with one or another of the notables present, but usually with Herkimer Herkimer Third.

“A drink?” he asked. “A small, cold one?”

“Not so small, and very cold,” she agreed, enthusiastically.

Glass in hand, Herkimer indicated a nearby doorway. “I just heard that our host has acquired a very old and very fine bronze—a Neptune. We should run an eye over it, don’t you think?”

“By all means,” she agreed again.

But as they passed through the shadowed portal the man’s head perked to the right. “There’s something you really ought to see, Jill!” he exclaimed. “Look!”

She looked. A young woman of her own height and build and with her own flamboyant hair, identical as to hair-do and as to every fine detail of dress and of ornamentation, glass in hand, was strolling back into the ball-room!

Jill started to protest, but could not. In the brief moment of inaction the beam of a snub-nosed P-gun had played along her spine from hips to neck. She did not fall—he had given her a very mild jolt—but, rage as she would, she could neither struggle nor scream. And, after the fact, she knew.

But he couldn’t—couldn’t possibly! Nevian paralysis-guns were as outlawed as was Vee Two gas itself! Nevertheless, he had.

And on the instant a woman, dressed in crisp and spotless white and carrying a hooded cloak, appeared—and Herkimer now wore a beard and heavy, horn rimmed spectacles. Thus, very shortly, Virgilia Samms found herself, completely helpless and completely unrecognizable, walking awkwardly out of the house between a businesslike doctor and a solicitous nurse.

“Will you need me any more, Doctor Murray?” The woman carefully and expertly loaded the patient into the rear seat of a car.

“Thank you, no, Miss Childs.” With a sick, cold certainty Jill knew that this conversation was for the benefit of the doorman and the hackers, and that it would stand up under any examination. “Mrs. Harman’s condition is…er…well, nothing at all serious.”

The car moved out into the street and Jill, really frightened for the first time in her triumphant life, fought down an almost overwhelming wave of panic. The hood had slipped down over her eyes, blinding her. She could not move a single voluntary muscle. Nevertheless, she knew that the car traveled a few blocks—six, she thought—west on Bolton Street before turning left.

Why didn’t somebody Lens her? Her father wouldn’t, she knew, until tomorrow. Neither of the Kinnisons would, nor Spud—they never did except on direct invitation. But Mase would, before he went to bed—or would he? It was past his bed-time now, and she had been pretty caustic, only last night, because she was doing a particularly delicate bit of reading. But he would…he must!

“Mase! Mase! MASE!”

And, eventually, Mase did.

Deep under The Hill, Roderick Kinnison swore fulminantly at the sheer physical impossibility of getting out of that furiously radiating mountain in a hurry. At New York Spaceport, however, Mason Northrop and Jack Kinnison not only could hurry, but did.

“Where are you, Jill?” Northrop demanded presently. “What kind of a car are you in?”

“Quite near Stanhope Circle.” In communication with her friends at last, Jill regained a measure of her usual poise. “Within eight or ten blocks, I’m sure. I’m in a black Wilford sedan, last year’s model. I didn’t get a chance to see its license plates.”

“That helps a lot!” Jack grunted, savagely. “A ten-block radius covers a hell of a lot of territory, and half the cars in town are black Wilford sedans.”

“Shut up, Jack! Go ahead, Jill—tell us all you can, and keep on sending us anything that will help at all.”

“I kept the right and left turns and distances straight for quite a while—about twenty blocks—that’s how I know it was Stanhope Circle. I don’t know how many times he went around the circle, though, or which way he went when he left it. After leaving the Circle, the traffic was very light, and here there doesn’t seem to be any traffic at all. That brings us up to date. You’ll know as well as I do what happens next.”

With Jill, the Lensmen knew that Herkimer drove his car up to the curb and stopped—parked without backing up. He got out and hauled the girl’s limp body out of the car, displacing the hood enough to free one eye. Good! Only one other car was visible; a bright yellow convertible parked across the street, about half a block ahead. There was a sign—“NO PARKING ON THIS SIDE 7 TO 10.” The building toward which he was carrying her was more than three stories high, and had a number—one, four—if he would only swing her a little bit more, so that she could see the rest of it—one four-seven-nine!

“Rushton Boulevard, you think, Mase?”

“Could be. Fourteen seventy nine would be on the downtown-traffic side. Blast!”

Into the building, where two masked men locked and barred the door behind them. “And keep it locked!” Herkimer ordered. “You know what to do until I come back down.”

Into an elevator, and up. Through massive double doors into a room, whose most conspicuous item of furniture was a heavy steel chair, bolted to the floor. Two masked men got up and placed themselves behind that chair.

Jill’s strength was coming back fast; but not fast enough. The cloak was removed. Her ankles were tied firmly, one to each front leg of the chair. Herkimer threw four turns of rope around her torso and the chair’s back, took up every inch of slack, and tied a workmanlike knot. Then, still without a word, he stood back and lighted a cigarette. The last trace of paralysis disappeared, but the girl’s mad struggles, futile as they were, were not allowed to continue.

“Put a double hammerlock on her,” Herkimer directed, “but be damned sure not to break anything at this stage of the game. That comes later.”

Jill, more furiously angry than frightened until now, locked her teeth to keep from screaming as the pressure went on. She could not bend forward to relieve the pain; she could not move; she could only grit her teeth and glare. She was beginning to realize, however, what was actually in store; that Herkimer Herkimer Third was in fact a monster whose like she had never known.

He stepped quietly forward, gathered up a handful of fabric, and heaved. The strapless and backless garment, in no way designed to withstand such stresses, parted; squarely across at the upper strand of rope. He puffed his cigarette to a vivid coal—took it in his fingers—there was an audible hiss and a tiny stink of burning flesh as the glowing ember was extinguished in the clear, clean skin below the girl’s left armpit. Jill flinched then, and shrieked desperately, but her tormentor was viciously unmoved.

“That was just to settle any doubt as to whether or not I mean business. I’m all done fooling around with you. I want to know two things. First, everything you know about the Lens; where it comes from, what it really is, and what it does besides what your press-agents advertise. Second, what really happened at the Ambassadors’ Ball. Start talking. The faster you talk, the less you’ll get hurt.”

“You can’t get away with this, Herkimer.” Jill tried desperately to pull her shattered nerves together. “I’ll be missed—traced.…” She paused, gasping. If she told him that the Lensmen were in full and continuous communication with her—and if he believed it—he would kill her right then. She switched instantly to another track. “That double isn’t good enough to fool anybody who really knows me.”

“She doesn’t have to be.” The man grinned venomously. “Nobody who knows you will get close enough to her to tell the difference. This wasn’t done on the spur of the moment, Jill; it was planned—minutely. You haven’t got the chance of the proverbial celluloid dog in hell.”

“Jill!” Jack Kinnison’s thought stabbed in. “It isn’t Rushton—fourteen seventy-nine is a two-story. What other streets could it be?”

“I don’t know.…” She was not in very good shape to think.

“Damnation! Got to get hold of somebody who knows the streets. Spud, grab a hacker at the Circle and I’ll Lens Parker.…” Jack’s thought snapped off as he tuned to a local Lensman.

Jill’s heart sank. She was starkly certain now that the Lensmen could not find her in time.

“Tighten up a little, Eddie. You, too, Bob.”

“Stop it! Oh, God, STOP IT!” The unbearable agony relaxed a little. She watched in horrified fascination a second glowing coal approach her bare right side. “Even if I do talk you’ll kill me anyway. You couldn’t let me go now.”

“Kill you, my pet? Not if you behave yourself. We’ve got a lot of planets the Patrol never heard of, and you could keep a man interested for quite a while, if you really tried. And if you beg hard enough maybe I’ll let you try. However, I’d get just as much fun out of killing you as out of the other, so it’s up to you. Not sudden death, of course. Little things, at first, like we’ve been doing. A few more touches of warmth here and there—so.…

“Scream as much as you please. I enjoy it, and this room is sound-proof. Once more, boys, about half an inch higher this time…up…steady…down. We’ll have half an hour or so of this stuff”—Herkimer knew that to the quivering, sensitive, highly imaginative girl his words would be practically as punishing as the atrocious actualities themselves—“then I’ll do things to your finger-nails and toe-nails, beginning with burning slivers of double-base flare powder and working up. Then your eyes—or no, I’ll save them until last, so you can watch a couple of Venerian slasher-worms work on you, one on each leg, and a Martian digger on your bare belly.”

Gripping her hair firmly in his left hand, he forced her head back and down; down almost to her hard-held hands. His right hand, concealing something which he had not mentioned and which was probably starkly unmentionable, approached her taut-stretched throat.

“Talk or not, just as you please.” The voice was utterly callous, as chill as the death she now knew he was so willing to deal. “But listen. If you elect to talk, tell the truth. You won’t lie twice. I’ll count to ten. One.”

Jill uttered a gurgling, strangling noise and he lifted her head a trifle.

“Can you talk now?”

“Yes.”

“Two.”

Helpless, immobile, scared now to a depth of terror she had never imagined it possible to feel, Jill fought her wrenched and shaken mind back from insanity’s very edge; managed with a pale tongue to lick bloodless lips. Pops Kinnison always said a man could die only once, but he didn’t know…in battle, yes, perhaps…but she had already died a dozen times—but she’d keep on dying forever before she’d say a word. But—

“Tell him, Jill!” Northrop’s thought beat at her mind. He, her lover, was unashamedly frantic; as much with sheer rage as with sympathy for her physical and mental anguish. “For the nineteenth time I say tell him! We’ve just located you—Hancock Avenue—we’ll be there in two minutes!”

“Yes, Jill, quit being a damned stubborn jackass and tell him!” Jack Kinnison’s thought bit deep; but this time, strangely enough, the girl felt no repugnance at his touch. There was nothing whatever of the lover; nor of the brother, except of the fraternity of arms. She belonged. She would come out of this brawl right side up or none of them would. “Tell the goddam rat the truth!” Jack’s thought drove on. “It won’t make any difference—he won’t live long enough to pass it on!”

“But I can’t—I won’t!” Jill stormed. “Why, Pops Kinnison would.…”

“Not this time I wouldn’t, Jill!” Samms’ thought tried to come in, too, but the Port Admiral’s vehemence was overwhelming. “No harm—he’s doing this strictly on his own—if Morgan had had any idea he’d’ve killed him first. Start talking or I’ll spank you to a rosy blister!”

They were to laugh, later, at the incongruity of that threat, but it did produce results.

“Nine.” Herkimer grinned wolfishly, in sadistic anticipation.

“Stop it—I’ll tell!” she screamed. “Stop it—take that thing away—I can’t stand it—I’ll tell!” She burst into racking, tearing sobs.

“Steady.” Herkimer put something in his pocket, then slapped her so viciously that fingers-long marks sprang into red relief upon the chalk-white background of her cheek. “Don’t crack up; I haven’t started to work on you yet. What about that Lens?”

She gulped twice before she could speak. “It comes from—ulp!—Arisia. I haven’t got one myself, so I don’t know very much—ulp!—about it at first hand, but from what the boys tell me it must be.…”

* * * *

Outside the building three black forms arrowed downward. Northrop and young Kinnison stopped at the sixth level; Costigan went on down to take care of the guards.

“Bullets, not beams,” the Irishman reminded his younger fellows. “We’ll have to clean up the mess without leaving a trace, so don’t do any more damage to the property than you absolutely have to.”

Neither made any reply; they were both too busy. The two thugs standing behind the steel chair, being armed openly, went first; then Jack put a bullet through Herkimer’s head. But Northrop was not content with that. He slid the pin to “full automatic” and ten more heavy slugs tore into the falling body before it struck the floor.

Three quick slashes and the girl was free.

“Jill!”

“Mase!”

Locked in each other’s arms, straining together, no bystander would have believed that this was their first kiss. It was plainly—yes, quite spectacularly—evident, however, that it would not be their last.

Jack, blushing furiously, picked up the cloak and flung it at the oblivious couple.

“P-s-s-t! P-s-s-t! Jill! Wrap ’em up!” he whispered, urgently. “All the top brass in space is coming at full emergency blast—there’ll be scrambled eggs all over the place any second now—Mase! Damn your thick, hard skull, snap out of it! He’s always frothing at the mouth about her running around half naked and if he sees her like this—especially with you—he’ll simply have a litter of lizards! You’ll get a million black spots and seven hundred years in the clink! That’s better—’bye now—I’ll see you up at New York Spaceport.”

Jack Kinnison dashed to the nearest window, threw it open, and dived headlong out of the building.

CHAPTER 14

The employment office of any concern with personnel running into the hundreds of thousands is a busy place indeed, even when its plants are all on Tellus and its working conditions are as nearly ideal as such things can be made. When that firm’s business is Colonial, however, and its working conditions are only a couple of degrees removed from slavery, procurement of personnel is a first-magnitude problem; the Personnel Department, like Alice in Wonderland, must run as fast as it can go in order to stay where it is. Thus the “Help Wanted” advertisements of Uranium, Incorporated covered the planet Earth with blandishment and guile; and thus for twelve hours of every day and for seven days of every week the employment offices of Uranium, Inc. were filled with men—mostly the scum of Earth.

There were, of course, exceptions; one of which strode through the motley group of waiting men and thrust a card through the “Information” wicket. He was a chunky-looking individual, appearing shorter than his actual five feet nine because of a hundred and ninety pounds of weight—even though every pound was placed exactly where it would do the most good. He looked—well, slouchy—and his mien was sullen.

“Birkenfeld—by appointment,” he growled through the wicket, in a voice which could have been pleasantly deep.

The coolly efficient blonde manipulated plugs. “Mr. George W. Jones, sir, by appointment.… Thank you, sir,” and Mr. Jones was escorted into Mr. Birkenfeld’s private office.

“Have a chair, please, Mr.…er…Jones.”

“So you know?”

“Yes. It is seldom that a man of your education, training, and demonstrated ability applies to us for employment of his own initiative, and a very thorough investigation is indicated.”

“What am I here for, then?” the visitor demanded, truculently. “You could have turned me down by mail. Everybody else has, since I got out.”

“You are here because we who operate on the frontiers cannot afford to pass judgment upon a man because of his past, unless that past precludes the probability of a useful future. Yours does not; and in some cases, such as yours, we are very deeply interested in the future.” The official’s eyes drilled deep.

Conway Costigan had never been in the limelight. On the contrary, he had made inconspicuousness a passion and an art. Even in such scenes of violence as that which had occurred at the Ambassadors’ Ball he managed to remain unnoticed. His Lens had never been visible. No one except Lensmen—and Clio and Jill—knew that he had one; and Lensmen—and Clio and Jill—did not talk. Although he was calmly certain that this Birkenfeld was not an ordinary interviewer, he was equally certain that the investigators of Uranium, Inc. had found out exactly and only what the Patrol had wanted them to find.

“So?” Jones’ bearing altered subtly, and not because of the penetrant eyes. “That’s all I want—a chance. I’ll start at the bottom, as far down as you say.”

“We advertise, and truthfully, that opportunity on Eridan is unlimited.” Birkenfeld chose his words with care. “In your case, opportunity will be either absolutely unlimited or zero, depending entirely upon yourself.”

“I see.” Dumbness had not been included in the fictitious Mr. Jones’ background. “You don’t need to draw a blue-print.”

“You’ll do, I think.” The interviewer nodded in approval. “Nevertheless, I must make our position entirely clear. If the slip was—shall we say accidental?—you will go far with us. If you try to play false, you will not last long and you will not be missed.”

“Fair enough.”

“Your willingness to start at the bottom is commendable, and it is a fact that those who come up through the ranks make the best executives; in our line at least. Just how far down are you willing to start?”

“How low do you go?”

“A mucker, I think would be low enough; and, from your build, and obvious physical strength, the logical job.”

“Mucker?”

“One who skoufers ore in the mine. Nor can we make any exception in your case as to the routines of induction and transportation.”

“Of course not.”

“Take this slip to Mr. Calkins, in Room 6217. He will run you through the mill.”

And that night, in an obscure boarding-house, Mr. George Washington Jones, after a meticulous Service Special survey in every direction, reached a large and somewhat grimy hand into a screened receptacle in his battered suitcase and touched a Lens.

“Clio?” The lovely mother of their wonderful children appeared in his mind. “Made it, sweetheart, no suspicion at all. No more Lensing for a while—not too long, I hope—so…so-long, Clio.”

“Take it easy, Spud darling, and be careful.” Her tone was light, but she could not conceal a stark background of fear. “Oh, I wish I could go, too!”

“I wish you could, Tootie.” The linked minds flashed back to what the two had done together in the red opacity of Nevian murk; on Nevia’s mighty, watery globe—but that kind of thinking would not do. “But the boys will keep in touch with me and keep you posted. And besides, you know how hard it is to get a baby-sitter!”

* * * *

It is strange that the fundamental operations of working metalliferous veins have changed so little throughout the ages. Or is it? Ores came into being with the crusts of the planets; they change appreciably only with the passage of geologic time. Ancient mines, of course, could not go down very deep or follow a seam very far; there was too much water and too little air. The steam engine helped, in degree if not in kind, by removing water and supplying air. Tools improved—from the simple metal bar through pick and shovel and candle, through drill and hammer and low explosive and acetylene, through Sullivan slugger and high explosive and electrics, through skoufer and rotary and burley and sourceless glow, to the complex gadgetry of today—but what, fundamentally, is the difference? Men still crawl, snake-like, to where the metal is. Men still, by dint of sheer brawn, jackass the precious stuff out to where our vaunted automatics can get hold of it. And men still die, in horribly unknown fashions and in callously recorded numbers, in the mines which supply the stuff upon which our vaunted culture rests.

But to resume the thread of narrative, George Washington Jones went to Eridan as a common laborer; a mucker. He floated down beside the skip—a “skip” is a mine elevator—some four thousand eight hundred feet. He rode an ore-car a horizontal distance of approximately eight miles to the brilliantly-illuminated cavern which was the Station of the Twelfth and lowest level. He was assigned to the bunk in which he would sleep for the next fifteen nights: “Fifteen down and three up,” ran the standard underground contract.

He walked four hundred yards, yelled “Nothing Down!” and inched his way up a rise—in many places scarcely wider than his shoulders—to the stope some three hundred feet above. He reported to the miner who was to be his immediate boss and bent his back to the skoufer—which, while not resembling a shovel at all closely, still meant hard physical labor. He already knew ore—the glossy, sub-metallic, pitchy black luster of uraninite or pitchblende; the yellows of autunite and carnotite; the variant and confusing greens of tobernite. No values went from Jones’ skoufer into the heavily-timbered, steel-braced waste-pockets of the stope; very little base rock went down the rise.

He became accustomed to the work; got used to breathing the peculiarly lifeless, dry, oily compressed air. And when, after a few days, his stentorian “Nothing Down!” called forth a “Nothing but a little fine stuff!” and a handful of grit and pebbles, he knew that he had been accepted into the undefined, unwritten, and unofficial, yet nevertheless intensely actual, fellowship of hard-rock men. He belonged.

He knew that he must abandon his policy of invisibility; and, after several days of thought, he decided how he would do it. Hence, upon the first day of his “up” period, he joined his fellows in their descent upon one of the rawest, noisiest dives of Danapolis. The men were met, of course, by a bevy of giggling, shrieking, garishly painted and strongly perfumed girls—and at this point young Jones’ behavior became exceedingly unorthodox.

“Buy me a drink, mister? And a dance, huh?”

“On your way, sister.” He brushed the importunate wench aside. “I get enough exercise underground, an’ you ain’t got a thing I want.”

Apparently unaware that the girl was exchanging meaningful glances with a couple of husky characters labelled “BOUNCER” in billposter type, the atypical mucker strode up to the long and ornate bar.

“Gimme a bottle of pineapple pop,” he ordered bruskly, “an’ a package of Tellurian cigarettes—Sunshines.”

“P-p-pine…?” The surprised bartender did not finish the word.

The bouncers were fast, but Costigan was faster. A hard knee took one in the solar plexus; a hard elbow took the other so savagely under the chin as to all but break his neck. A bartender started to swing a bung-starter, and found himself flying through the air toward a table. Men, table, and drinks crashed to the floor.

“I pick my own company an’ I drink what I damn please,” Jones announced, grittily. “Them lunkers ain’t hurt none, to speak of…” His hard eyes swept the room malevolently, “but I ain’t in no gentle mood an’ the next jaspers that tackle me will wind up in the repair shop, or maybe in the morgue. See?”

This of course was much too much; a dozen embattled roughnecks leaped to mop up on the misguided wight who had so impugned the manhood of all Eridan. Then, while six or seven bartenders blew frantic blasts upon police whistles, there was a flurry of action too fast to be resolved into consecutive events by the eye. Conway Costigan, one of the fastest men with hands and feet the Patrol has ever known, was trying to keep himself alive; and he succeeded.

“What the hell goes on here?” a chorus of raucously authoritative voices yelled, and sixteen policemen—John Law did not travel singly in that district, but in platoons—swinging clubs and saps, finally hauled George Washington Jones out from the bottom of the pile. He had sundry abrasions and not a few contusions, but no bones were broken and his skin was practically whole.

And since his version of the affair was not only inadequate, but also differed in important particulars from those of several non-participating witnesses, he spent the rest of his holiday in jail; a development with which he was quite content.

The work—and time—went on. He became in rapid succession a head mucker, a miner’s pimp (which short and rugged Anglo-Saxon word means simply “helper” in underground parlance) a miner, a top-miner, and then—a long step up the ladder!—a shift-boss.

And then disaster struck; suddenly, paralyzingly, as mine disasters do. Loud-speakers blared briefly—“Explosion! Cave-in! Flood! Fire! Gas! Radiation! Damp!”—and expired. Short-circuits; there was no way of telling which, if any, of those dire warnings were true.

The power failed, and the lights. The hiss of air from valves, a noise which by its constant and unvarying and universal presence soon becomes unheard, became noticeable because of its diminution in volume and tone. And then, seconds later, a jarring, shuddering rumble was felt and heard, accompanied by the snapping of shattered timbers and the sharper, utterly unforgettable shriek of rending and riven steel. And the men, as men do under such conditions, went wild; yelling, swearing, leaping toward where, in the rayless dark, each thought the rise to be.

It took a couple of seconds for the shift-boss to break out and hook up his emergency battery-lamp; and three or four more seconds, and by dint of fists, feet, and a two-foot length of air-hose, to restore any degree of order. Four men were dead; but that wasn’t too bad—considering.

“Up there! Under the hanging wall!” he ordered, sharply. “That won’t fall—unless the whole mountain slips. Now, how many of you jaspers have got your emergency kits on you? Twelve—out of twenty-six—what brains! Put on your masks. You without ’em can stay up here—you’ll be safe for a while—I hope.”

Then, presently: “There, that’s all for now. I guess.” He flashed his light downward. The massive steel members no longer writhed; the crushed and tortured timbers were still.

“That rise may be open, it goes through solid rock, not waste. I’ll see. Wright, you’re all in one piece, aren’t you?”

“I guess so—yes.”

“Take charge up here. I’ll go down to the drift. If the rise is open I’ll give you a flash. Send the ones with masks down, one at a time. Take a jolly-bar and bash the brains out of anybody who gets panicky again.”

Jones was not as brave as he sounded: mine disasters carry a terror which is uniquely and peculiarly poignant. Nevertheless he went down the rise, found it open, and signalled. Then, after issuing brief orders, he led the way along the dark and silent drift toward the Station; wondering profanely why the people on duty there had not done something with the wealth of emergency equipment always ready there. The party found some cave-ins, but nothing they could not dig through.

The Station was also silent and dark. Jones, flashing his head-lamp upon the emergency panel, smashed the glass, wrenched the door open, and pushed buttons. Lights flashed on. Warning signals flared, bellowed and rang. The rotary air-pump began again its normal subdued, whickering whirr. But the water-pump! Shuddering, clanking, groaning, it was threatening to go out any second—but there wasn’t a thing in the world Jones could do about it—yet.

The Station itself, so buttressed and pillared with alloy steel as to be little more compressible than an equal volume of solid rock, was unharmed; but in it nothing lived. Four men and a woman—the nurse—were stiffly motionless at their posts; apparently the leads to the Station had been blasted in such fashion that no warning whatever had been given. And smoke, billowing inward from the main tunnel, was growing thicker by the minute. Jones punched another button; a foot-thick barrier of asbestos, tungsten, and vitrified refractory slid smoothly across the tunnel’s opening. He considered briefly, pityingly, those who might be outside, but felt no urge to explore. If any lived, there were buttons on the other side of the fire-door.

The eddying smoke disappeared, the flaring lights winked out, air-horns and bells relapsed into silence. The shift-boss, now apparently the Superintendent of the whole Twelfth Level, removed his mask, found the Station walkie-talkie, and snapped a switch. He spoke, listened, spoke again then called a list of names—none of which brought any response.

“Wright, and you five others,” picking out miners who could be depended upon to keep their heads, “take these guns. Shoot if you have to, but not unless you have to. Have the muckers clear the drift, just enough to get through. You’ll find a shift-boss, with a crew of nineteen, up in Stope Sixty. Their rise is blocked. They’ve got light and power again now, and good air, and they’re working on it, but opening the rise from the top is a damned slow job. Wright, you throw a chippie into it from the bottom. You others, work back along the drift, clear to the last glory hole. Be sure that all the rises are open—check all the stopes and glory holes—tell everybody you find alive to report to me here.…”

“Aw, what good!” a man shrieked. “We’re all goners anyway—I want water an’.…”

“Shut up, fool!” There was a sound as of fist meeting flesh, the shriek was stilled. “Plenty of water—tanks full of the stuff.” A grizzled miner turned to the self-appointed boss and twitched his head—toward the laboring pump. “Too damn much water too soon, huh?”

“I wouldn’t wonder—but get busy!”

As his now orderly and purposeful men disappeared, Jones picked up his microphone and changed the setting of a dial.

“On top, somebody,” he said crisply. “On top.…”

“Oh, there’s somebody alive down in Twelve, after all!” a girl’s voice screamed in his ear. “Mr. Clancy! Mr. Edwards!”

“To hell with Clancy, and Edwards, too,” Jones barked. “Gimme the Chief Engineer and the Head Surveyor, and gimme ’em fast.”

“Clancy speaking, Station Twelve.” If Works Manager Clancy had heard that pointed remark, and he must have, he ignored it. “Stanley and Emerson will be here in a moment. In the meantime, who’s calling? I don’t recognize your voice, and it’s been so long.…”

“Jones. Shift-boss, Stope Fifty Nine. I had a little trouble getting here to the Station.”

“What? Where’s Pennoyer? And Riley? And…?”

“Dead. Everybody. Gas or damp. No warning.”

“Not enough to turn on anything—not even the purifiers?”

“Nothing.”

“Where were you?”

“Up in the stope.”

“Good God!” That news, to Clancy, was informative enough.

“But to hell with all that. What happened, and where?”

“A skip-load, and then a magazine, of high explosive, right at Station Seven—it’s right at the main shaft, you know.” Jones did not know, since he had never been in that part of the mine, but he could see the picture. “Main shaft filled up to above Seven, and both emergency shafts blocked. Number One at Six, Number Two at Seven—must have been a fault—But here’s Chief Engineer Stanley.” The works manager, not too unwillingly, relinquished the microphone.

A miner came running up and Jones covered his mouth-piece. “How about the glory holes?”

“Plugged solid, all four of ’em—by the vibro, clear up to Eleven.”

“Thanks.” Then, as soon as Stanley’s voice came on:

“What I want to know is, why is this damned water-pump overloading? What’s the circuit?”

“You must be…yes, you are pumping against too much head. Five levels above you are dead, you know, so.…”

“Dead? Can’t you raise anybody?”

“Not yet. So you’re pumping through dead boosters on Eleven and Ten and so on up, and when your overload-relief valve opens.…”

“Relief valve!” Jones almost screamed, “Can I dog the damn thing down?”

“No, it’s internal.”

“Christ, what a design—I could eat a handful of iron filings and puke a better emergency pump than that!”

“When it opens,” Stanley went stolidly on, “the water will go through the by-pass back into the sump. So you’d better rod out one of the glory holes and.…”

“Get conscious, fat-head!” Jones blazed. “What would we use for time? Get off the air—gimme Emerson!”

“Emerson speaking.”

“Got your maps?”

“Yes.”

“We got to run a sag up to Eleven—fast—or drown. Can you give me the shortest possible distance?”

“Can do.” The Head Surveyor snapped orders. “We’ll have it for you in a minute. Thank God there was somebody down there with a brain.”

“It doesn’t take super-human intelligence to push buttons.”

“You’d be surprised. Your point on glory holes was very well taken—you won’t have much time after the pump quits. When the water reaches the Station.…”

“Curtains. And it’s all done now—running free and easy—recirculating. Hurry that dope!”

“Here it is now. Start at the highest point of Stope Fifty Nine. Repeat.”

“Stope Fifty-Nine.” Jones waved a furious hand as he shouted the words; the tight-packed miners turned and ran. The shift-boss followed them, carrying the walkie-talkie, aiming an exasperated kick of pure frustration at the merrily-humming water pump as he passed it.

“Thirty two degrees from the vertical—anywhere between thirty and thirty five.”

“Thirty to thirty five off vertical.”

“Direction—got a compass?”

“Yes.”

“Set the blue on zero. Course two hundred seventy five degrees.”

“Blue on zero. Course two seven five.”

“Dex sixty nine point two zero feet. That’ll put you into Eleven’s class yard—so big you can’t miss it.”

“Distance sixty nine point two—that all? Fine! Maybe we’ll make it, after all. They’re sinking a shaft, of course. From where?”

“About four miles in on Six. It’ll take time.”

“If we can get up into Eleven we’ll have all the time on the clock—it’ll take a week or more to flood Twelve’s stopes. But this sag is sure as hell going to be touch and go. And say, from the throw of the pump and the volume of the sump, will you give me the best estimate you can of how much time we’ve got? I want at least an hour, but I’m afraid I won’t have it.”

“Yes. I’ll call you back.”

The shift-boss elbowed his way through the throng of men and, dragging the radio behind him, wriggled and floated up the rise.

“Wright!” he bellowed, the echoes resounding deafeningly all up and down the narrow tube. “You up there ahead of me?”

“Yeah!” that worthy bellowed back.

“More men left than I thought—how many—half of ’em?”

“Just about.”

“Good. Sort out the ones you got up there by trades.” Then, when he had emerged into the now brilliantly illuminated stope, “Where are the timber-pimps?”

“Over there.”

“Rustle timbers. Whatever you can find and wherever you find it, grab it and bring it up here. Get some twelve-inch steel, too, six feet long. Timbermen, grab that stuff off of the face and start your staging right here. You muckers, rig a couple of skoufers to throw muck to bury the base and checkerwork up to the hanging wall. Doze a sluice-way down into that waste pocket there, so we won’t clog ourselves up. Work fast, fellows, but make it solid—you know the load it’ll have to carry and what will happen if it gives.”

They knew. They knew what they had to do and did it; furiously, but with care and precision.

“How wide a sag you figurin’ on, Supe?” the boss timberman asked. “Eight foot checkerwork to the hangin’, anyway, huh?”

“Yes. I’ll let you know in a minute.”

The surveyor came in. “Forty one minutes is my best guess.”

“From when?”

“From the time the pump failed.”

“That was four minutes ago—nearer five. And five more before we can start cutting. Forty one less ten is thirty one. Thirty one into sixty nine point two goes.…”

“Two point two three feet per minute, my slip-stick says.”

“Thanks. Wright, what would you say is the biggest sag we can cut in this kind of rock at two and a quarter feet a minute?”

“Um…m…m”. The miner scratched his whiskery chin. “That’s a tough one, boss. You’ll hafta figure damn close to a hundred pounds of air to the foot on plain cuttin’—that’s two hundred and a quarter. But without a burley to pimp for ’er, a rotary can’t take that kind of air—she’ll foul herself to a standstill before she cuts a foot. An’ with a burley riggin’ she’s got to make damn near a double cut—seven foot inside figger—so any way you look at it you ain’t goin’ to cut no two foot to the minute.”

“I was hoping you wouldn’t check my figures, but you do. So we’ll cut five feet. Saw your timbers accordingly. We’ll hold that burley by hand.”

Wright shook his head dubiously. “We don’t want to die down here any more than you do, boss, so we’ll do our damndest—but how in hell do you figure you can hold her to her work?”

“Rig a yoke. Cut a stretcher up for canvas and padding. It’ll pound, but a man can stand almost anything, in short enough shifts, if he’s got to or die.”

And for a time—two minutes, to be exact, during which the rotary chewed up and spat out a plug of rock over five feet deep—things went very well indeed. Two men, instead of the usual three, could run the rotary; that is, they could tend the complicated pneumatic walking jacks which not only oscillated the cutting demon in a geometrical path, but also rammed it against the face with a steadily held and enormous pressure, even while climbing almost vertically upward under a burden of over twenty thousand pounds.

An armored hand waved a signal—voice was utterly useless—up! A valve was flipped; a huge, flat, steel foot arose; a timber slid into place, creaking and groaning as that big flat foot smashed down. Up—again! Up—a third time! Eighteen seconds—less than one-third of a minute—ten inches gained!

And, while it was not easy, two men could hold the burley—in one-minute shifts. As has been intimated, this machine “pimped” for the rotary. It waited on it, ministering to its every need with a singleness of purpose impossible to any except robotic devotion. It picked the rotary’s teeth, it freed its linkages, it deloused its ports, it cleared its spillways of compacted debris, it even—and this is a feat starkly unbelievable to anyone who does not know the hardness of neocarballoy and the tensile strength of ultra-special steels—it even changed, while in full operation, the rotary’s diamond-tipped cutters.

Both burley and rotary were extremely efficient, but neither was either quiet or gentle. In their quietest moments they shrieked and groaned and yelled, producing a volume of sound in which nothing softer than a cannon-shot could have been heard. But when, in changing the rotary’s cutting teeth, the burley’s “fingers” were driven into and through the solid rock—a matter of merest routine to both machines—the resultant blasts of sound cannot even be imagined, to say nothing of being described.

And always both machines spewed out torrents of rock, in sizes ranging from impalpable dust up to chunks as big as a fist.

As the sag lengthened and the checkerwork grew higher, the work began to slow down. They began to lose the time they had gained. There were plenty of men, but in that narrow bore there simply was not room for enough men to work. Even through that storm of dust and hurtling rock the timbermen could get their blocking up there, but they could not place it fast enough—there were too many other men in the way. One of them had to get out. Since one man could not possibly run the rotary, one man would have to hold the burley.

They tried it, one after another. No soap. It hammered them flat. The rotary, fouled in every tooth and channel and vent under the terrific thrust of two hundred thirty pounds of air, merely gnawed and slid. The timbermen now had room—but nothing to do. And Jones, who had been biting at his mustache and ignoring the frantic walkie-talkie for minutes, stared grimly at watch and tape. Three minutes left, and over eight feet to go.

“Gimme that armor!” he rasped, and climbed the blocks. “Open the air wide open—give ’er the whole two-fifty! Get down, Mac—I’ll take it the rest of the way!”

He put his shoulders to the improvised yoke, braced his feet, and heaved. The burley, screaming and yelling and clamoring, went joyously to work—both ways—God, what punishment! The rotary, free and clear, chewed rock more viciously than ever. An armored hand smote his leg. Lift! He lifted that foot, set it down two inches higher. The other one. Four inches. Six. One foot. Two. Three. Lord of the ancients! Was this lifetime of agony only one minute? Or wasn’t he holding her—had the damn thing stopped cutting? No, it was still cutting—the rocks were banging against and bouncing off of his helmet as viciously and as numerously as ever; he could sense, rather than feel, the furious fashion in which the relays of timbermen were laboring to keep those high-stepping jacks in motion.

No, it had been only one minute. Twice that long yet to go. God! Nothing could be that brutal—a bull elephant couldn’t take it—but by all the gods of space and all the devils in hell, he’d stay with it until that sag broke through. And grimly, doggedly, toward the end nine-tenths unconsciously, Lensman Conway Costigan stayed with it.

And in the stope so far below, a new and highly authoritative voice blared from the speaker.

“Jones! God damn it, Jones, answer me! If Jones isn’t there, somebody else answer me—anybody!”

“Yes, sir?” Wright was afraid to answer that peremptory call, but more afraid not to.

“Jones? This is Clancy.”

“No, sir. Not Jones. Wright, sir—top miner.”

“Where’s Jones?”

“Up in the sag, sir. He’s holding the burley—alone.”

“Alone! Hell’s purple fires! Tell him to—how many men has he got on the rotary?”

“Two, sir. That’s all they’s room for.”

“Tell him to quit it—put somebody else on it—I won’t have him killed, damn it!”

“He’s the only one strong enough to hold it, sir, but I’ll send up word.” Word went up via sign language, and came back down. “Beggin’ your pardon, sir, but he says to tell you to go to hell, sir. He won’t have no time for chit-chat, he says, until this goddam sag is through or the juice goes off, sir.”

A blast of profanity erupted from the speaker, of such violence that the thoroughly scared Wright threw the walkie-talkie down the waste-chute, and in the same instant the rotary crashed through.

Dazed, groggy, barely conscious from his terrific effort, Jones stared owlishly through the heavy, steel-braced lenses of his helmet while the timbermen set a few more courses of wood and the rotary walked itself and the clinging burley up and out of the hole. He climbed stiffly out, and as he stared at the pillar of light flaring upward from the sag, his gorge began to rise.

“Wha’s the idea of that damn surveyor lying to us like that?” he babbled. “We had oodles an’ oodles of time—didn’t have to kill ourselves—damn water ain’t got there yet—wha’s the big.…” He wobbled weakly, and took one short step, and the lights went out. The surveyor’s estimate had been impossibly, accidentally close. They had had a little extra time; but it was measured very easily in seconds.

And Jones, logical to the end in a queerly addled way, stood in the almost palpable darkness, and wobbled, and thought. If a man couldn’t see anything with his eyes wide open, he was either blind or unconscious. He wasn’t blind, therefore he must be unconscious and not know it. He sighed, wearily and gratefully, and collapsed.

Battery lights were soon reconnected, and everybody knew that they had holed through. There was no more panic. And, even before the shift-boss had recovered full consciousness, he was walking down the drift toward Station Eleven.

There is no need to enlarge upon the rest of that grim and grisly affair. Level after level was activated; and, since working upward in mines is vastly faster than working downward, the two parties met on the Eighth Level. Half of the men who would otherwise have died were saved, and—much more important from the viewpoint of Uranium, Inc.—the deeper and richer half of the biggest and richest uranium mine in existence, instead of being out of production for a year or more, would be back in full operation in a couple of weeks.

And George Washington Jones, still a trifle shaky from his ordeal, was called into the front office. But before he arrived:

“I’m going to make him Assistant Works Manager,” Clancy announced.

“I think not.”

“But listen, Mr. Isaacson—please! How do you expect me to build up a staff if you snatch every good man I find away from me?”

“You didn’t find him. Birkenfeld did. He was here only on a test. He is going into Department Q.”

Clancy, who had opened his mouth to continue his protests, shut it wordlessly. He knew that department Q was—

DEPARTMENT Q.

CHAPTER 15

Costigan was not surprised to see the man he had known as Birkenfeld in Uranium’s ornate conference room. He had not expected, however, to see Isaacson. He knew, of course, that Spaceways owned Uranium, Inc., and the planet Eridan, lock, stock, and barrel; but it never entered his modest mind that his case would be of sufficient importance to warrant the personal attention of the Big Noise himself. Hence the sight of that suave and unrevealing face gave the putative Jones a more than temporary qualm. Isaacson was top-bracket stuff, ’way out of his class. Virgil Samms ought to be taking this assignment, but since he wasn’t—

But instead of being an inquisition, the meeting was friendly and informal from the start. They complimented him upon the soundness of his judgment and the accuracy of his decisions. They thanked him, both with words and with a considerable sum of expendable credits. They encouraged him to talk about himself, but there was nothing whatever of the star-chamber or of cross-examination. The last question was representative of the whole conference.

“One other thing, Jones, has me slightly baffled,” Isaacson said, with a really winning smile. “Since you do not drink, and since you were not in search of feminine…er…companionship, just why did you go down to Roaring Jack’s dive?”

“Two reasons,” Jones said, with a somewhat shamefaced grin. “The minor one isn’t easy to explain, but…well, I hadn’t been having an exactly easy time of it on Earth…you all know about that, I suppose?”

They knew.

“Well, I was taking a very dim view of things in general, and a good fight would get it out of my system. It always does.”

“I see. And the major reason?”

“I knew, of course, that I was on probation. I would have to get promoted, and fast, or stay sunk forever. To get promoted fast, a man can either be enough of a boot-licker to be pulled up from on high, or he can be shoved up by the men he is working with. The best way to get a crowd of hard-rock men to like you is to lick a few of ’em—off hours, of course, and according to Hoyle—and the more of ’em you can lick at once, the better. I’m pretty good at rough-and-tumble brawling, so I gambled that the cops would step in before I got banged up too much. I won.”

“I see,” Isaacson said again, in an entirely different tone. He did see, now. “The first technique is so universally used that the possibility of the second did not occur to me. Nice work—very nice.” He turned to the other members of the Board. “This, I believe, concludes the business of the meeting?”

For some reason or other Isaacson nodded slightly as he asked the question; and one by one, as though in concurrence, the others nodded in reply. The meeting broke up. Outside the door, however, the magnate did not go about his own business nor send Jones about his. Instead:

“I would like to show you, if I may, the above-ground part of our Works?”

“My time is yours, sir. I am interested.”

It is unnecessary here to go into the details of a Civilization’s greatest uranium operation; the storage bins, the grinders, the Wilfley tables and slime tanks, the flotation sluices, the roasters and reducers, the processes of solution and crystallization and recrystallization, of final oxidation and reduction. Suffice it to say that Isaacson showed Jones the whole immensity of Uranium Works Number One. The trip ended on the top floor of the towering Administration Building, in a heavily-screened room containing a desk, a couple of chairs, and a tremendously massive safe.

“Smoke up.” Isaacson indicated a package of Jones’ favorite brand of cigarettes and lighted a cigar. “You knew that you were under test. I wonder, though, if you knew how much of it was testing?”

“All of it.” Jones grinned. “Except for the big blow, of course.”

“Of course.”

“There were too many possibilities, of too many different kinds, too pat. I might warn you, though—I could have got away clear with that half-million.”

“The possibility existed.” Surprisingly, Isaacson did not tell him that the trap was more subtle than it had appeared to be. “It was, however, worth the risk. Why didn’t you?”

“Because I figure on making more than that, a little later, and I might live longer to spend it.”

“Sound thinking, my boy—really sound. Now—you noticed, of course, the vote at the end of the meeting?”

Jones had noticed it; and, although he did not say so, he had been wondering about it ever since. The older man strolled over to the safe and opened it, revealing a single, startlingly small package.

“You passed, unanimously; you are now learning what you have to know. Not that we trust you unreservedly. You will be watched for a long time, and before you can make one false step, you will die.”

“That would seem to be good business, sir.”

“Glad you look at it that way—we thought you would. You saw the Works. Quite an operation, don’t you think?”

“Immense, sir. The biggest thing I ever saw.”

“What would you say, then, to the idea of this office being our real headquarters, of that little package there being our real business?” He swung the safe door shut, spun the knob.

“It would have been highly surprising a couple of hours ago.” Costigan could not afford to appear stupid, nor to possess too much knowledge. He had to steer an extremely difficult middle course. “After the climax of this build-up, though, it wouldn’t seem at all impossible. Or that there were wheels—plenty of ’em!—within wheels.”

“Smart!” Isaacson applauded. “And what would you think might be in that package? This room is ray-proof.”

“Against anything the Galactic Patrol can swing?”

“Positively.”

“Well, then, it might be something beginning with the letter” he flicked two fingers, almost invisibly fast, into a T and went on without a break “M, as in morphine.”

“Your caution and restraint are commendable. If I had any remaining doubt as to your ability, it is gone.” He paused, frowning. As belief in ability increased, that in sincerity lessened. This doubt, this questioning, existed every time a new executive was initiated into the mysteries of Department Q. The Board’s judgment was good. They had slipped only twice, and those two errors had been corrected easily enough. The fellow had been warned once; that was enough. He took the plunge. “You will work with the Assistant Works Manager here until you understand the duties of the position. You will be transferred to Tellus as Assistant Works Manager there. Your principal duties will, however, be concerned with Department Q—which you will head up one day if you make good. And, just incidentally, when you go to Tellus, a package like that one in the safe will go with you.”

“Oh…I see. I’ll make good, sir.” Jones let Isaacson see his jaw-muscles tighten in resolve. “It may take a little time for me to learn my way around, sir, but I’ll learn it.”

“I’m sure you will. And now, to go into greater detail.…”

* * * *

Virgil Samms had to be sure of his facts. More than that, he had to be able to prove them; not merely to the satisfaction of a law-enforcement officer, but beyond any reasonable doubt of the hardest-headed member of a cynical and skeptical jury. Wherefore Jack Kinnison and Mase Northrop took up the thionite trail at the exact point where, each trip, George Olmstead had had to abandon it; in the atmosphere of Cavenda. And fortunately, not too much preparation was required.

Cavenda was, as has been intimated, a primitive world. Its native people, humanoid in type, had developed a culture approximating in some respects that of the North American Indian at about the time of Columbus, in others that of the ancient Nomads of Araby. Thus a couple of wandering natives, unrecognizable under their dirty stormproof blankets and their scarcely thinner layers of grease and grime, watched impassively, incuriously, while a box floated pendant from its parachute from sky to ground. Mounted upon their uncouth steeds, they followed that box when it was hauled to the white man’s village. Unlike many of the other natives, these two did not shuffle into that village, to lean silently against a rock or a wall awaiting their turns to exchange a few hours of simple labor for a container of a new and highly potent beverage. They did, however, keep themselves constantly and minutely informed as to everything these strange, devil-ridden white men did. One of these pseudo-natives wandered off into the wilderness two or three days before the huge thing-which-flies-without-wings left ground; the other immediately afterward.

Thus the departure of the space-ship from Cavenda was recorded, as was its arrival at Eridan. It had been extremely difficult for the Patrol’s engineers to devise ways and means of tracing that ship from departure to arrival without exciting suspicion, but it had not proved impossible.

And Jack Kinnison, lounging idly and elegantly in the concourse of Danopolis Spaceport, seethed imperceptibly. Having swallowed a tiny Service Special capsule that morning, he knew that he had been under continuous spy-ray inspection for over two hours. He had not given himself away—practically everybody screened their inside coat pockets and hip pockets, and the cat-whisker lead from Lens to leg simply could not be seen—but for all the good they were doing him his ultra-instruments might just as well have been back on Tellus.

“Mase!” he sent, with no change whatever in the vapid expression then on his face. “I’m still covered. Are you?”

“Covered!” the answering thought was a snort. “They’re covering me like water covers a submarine!”

“Keep tuned. I’ll call Spud. Spud!”

“Come in, Jack.” Conway Costigan, alone now in the sanctum of Department Q, did not seem to be busy, but he was.

“That red herring they told us to drag across the trail was too damned red. They must be touchier than fulminate to spy-work on their armed forces—neither Mase nor I can do a lick of work. Anybody else covered?”

“No. All clear.”

“Good. Tell them the zwilnik blockers took us out.”

“I’ll do that. Distance only, or is somebody on your tail?”

“Somebody; and I mean some body. A slick chick with a classy chassis; a blonde, with great, big come-hither eyes. Too good to be true; especially the falsies. Wiring, my friend—and I haven’t been able to get a close look, but I wouldn’t wonder if her nostrils had a skillionth of a whillimeter too much expansion. I want a spy-ray op—is it safe to use Fred?” Kinnison referred to the grizzled engineer now puttering about in a certain space-ship; not the one in which he and Northrop had come to Eridan.

“Definitely not. I can do it myself and still stay very much in character.… No, I don’t know her. Not surprising, of course, since the policy here is never to let the right hand know what the left is doing. How about you, Mase? Have you got a little girl-friend, too?”

“Yea, verily, brother; but not little. More my size.” Northrop pointed out a tall, trim brunette, strolling along with the effortless, consciously unconscious poise of the professional model.

“Hm…m…m. I don’t know her, either,” Costigan reported, “but both of them are wearing four-inch spy-ray blocks and are probably wired up like Christmas trees. By inference, P-gun proof. I can’t penetrate, of course, but maybe I can get a viewpoint.… You’re right, Jack. Nostrils plugged. Anti-thionite, anti-Vee-Two, anti-everything. In fact, anti-social. I’ll spread their pictures around and see if anybody knows either of them.”

He did so, and over a hundred of the Patrol’s shrewdest operatives—upon this occasion North America had invaded Eridan in force—studied and thought. No one knew the tall brunette, but—

“I know the blonde.” This was Parker of Washington, a Service ace for twenty five years. “‘Hell-cat Hazel’ DeForce, the hardest-boiled babe unhung. Watch your step around her; she’s just as handy with a knife and knock-out drops as she is with a gun.”

“Thanks, Parker. I’ve heard of her.” Costigan was thinking fast. “Free-lance. No way of telling who she’s working for at the moment.” This was a statement, not a question.

“Only that it would have to be somebody with a lot of money. Her price is high. That all?”

“That’s all, fellows.” Then, to Jack and Northrop: “My thought is that you two guys are completely out-classed—out-weighed, out-numbered, out-manned, and out-gunned. Undressed, you’re sitting ducks; and if you put out any screens it’ll crystallize their suspicions and they’ll grab you right then—or maybe even knock you off. You’d better get out of here at full blast; you can’t do any more good here, the way things are.”

“Sure we can!” Kinnison protested. “You wanted a diversion, didn’t you?”

“Yes, but you already.…”

“What we’ve done already isn’t a patch to what we can do next. We can set up such a diversion that the boys can walk right on the thionite-carrier’s heels without anybody paying any attention. By the way, you don’t know yet who is going to carry it, do you?”

“No. No penetration at all.”

“You soon will, bucko. Watch our smoke!”

“What do you think you’re going to do?” Costigan demanded, sharply.

“This.” Jack explained. “And don’t try to say no. We’re on our own, you know.”

“We-l-l-l…it sounds good, and if you can pull it off it will help no end. Go ahead.”

The demurely luscious blonde stared disconsolately at the bulletin board, upon which another thirty minutes was being added to the time of arrival of a ship already three hours late. She picked up a book, glanced at its cover, put it down. Her hand moved toward a magazine, drew back, dropped idly into her lap. She sighed, stifled a yawn prettily, leaned backward in her seat—in such a position, Jack noticed, that he could not see into her nostrils—and closed her eyes. And Jack Kinnison, coming visibly to a decision, sat down beside her.

“Pardon me, miss, but I feel just like you look. Can you tell me why convention decrees that two people, stuck in this concourse by arrivals that nobody knows when will arrive, have got to suffer alone when they could have so much more fun suffering together?”

The girl’s eyes opened slowly; she was neither startled, nor afraid, nor—it seemed—even interested. In fact, she gazed at him with so much disinterest and for so long a time that he began to wonder—was she going to play sweet and innocent to the end?

“Yes, conventions are stupid, sometimes,” she admitted finally, her lovely lips curving into the beginnings of a smile. Her voice, low and sweet, matched perfectly the rest of her charming self. “After all, perfectly nice people do meet informally on shipboard; why not in concourses?”

“Why not, indeed? And I’m perfectly nice people, I assure you. Willi Borden is the name. My friends call me Bill. And you?”

“Beatrice Bailey; Bee for short. Tell me what you like, and we’ll talk about it.”

“Why talk, when we could be eating? I’m with a guy. He’s out on the field somewhere—a big bruiser with a pencil-stripe black mustache. Maybe you saw him talking to me a while back?”

“I think so, now that you mention him. Too big—much too big.” The girl spoke carelessly, but managed to make it very clear that Jack Kinnison was just exactly the right size. “Why?”

“I told him I’d have supper with him. Shall we hunt him up and eat together?”

“Why not? Is he alone?”

“He was, when I saw him last.” Although Jack knew exactly where Northrop was, and who was with him, he had to play safe; he did not know how much this “Bee Bailey” really knew. “He knows a lot more people around here than I do, though, so maybe he isn’t now. Let me carry some of that plunder?”

“You might carry those books—thanks. But the field is so big—how do you expect to find him? Or do you know where he is?”

“Uh-uh!” he denied, vigorously. This was the critical moment. She certainly wasn’t suspicious—yet—but she was showing signs of not wanting to go out there, and if she refused to go.…“To be honest, I don’t care whether I find him or not—the idea of ditching him appeals to me more and more. So how about this? We’ll dash out to the third dock—just so I won’t have to actually lie about looking for him—and dash right back here. Or wouldn’t you rather have it a twosome?”

“I refuse to answer, by advice of counsel.” The girl laughed gaily, but her answer was plain enough.

Their rate of progress was by no means a dash, and Kinnison did not look—with his eyes—for Northrop. Nevertheless, just south of the third dock, the two young couples met.

“My cousin, Grace James,” Northrop said, without a tremor or a quiver. “Wild Willi Borden, Grace—usually called Baldy on account of his hair.”

The girls were introduced; each vouchsafing the other a completely meaningless smile and a colorlessly conventional word of greeting. Were they, in fact as in seeming, total strangers? Or were they in fact working together as closely as were the two young Lensmen themselves? If that was acting, it was a beautiful job; neither man could detect the slightest flaw in the performance of either girl.

“Whither away, pilot?” Jack allowed no lapse of time. “You know all the places around here. Lead us to a good one.”

“This way, my old and fragrant fruit.” Northrop led off with a flourish, and again Jack tensed. The walk led straight past the third-class, apparently deserted dock of which a certain ultra-fast vessel was the only occupant. If nothing happened for fifteen more seconds.…

Nothing did. The laughing, chattering four came abreast of the portal. The door swung open and the Lensmen went into action.

They did not like to strong-arm women, but speed was their first consideration, with safety a close second; and it is impossible for a man to make speed while carrying a conscious, lithe, strong, heavily-armed woman in such a position that she cannot use fists, feet, teeth, gun or knife. An unconscious woman, on the other hand, can be carried easily and safely enough. Therefore Jack spun his partner around, forced both of her hands into one of his. The free hand flashed upward toward the neck; a hard finger pressed unerringly against a nerve; the girl went limp. The two victims were hustled aboard and the space-ship, surrounded now by full-coverage screen, took off.

Kinnison paid no attention to ship or course; orders had been given long since and would be carried out. Instead, he lowered his burden to the floor, spread her out flat, and sought out and removed item after item of wiring, apparatus, and offensive and defensive armament. He did not undress her—quite—but he made completely certain that the only weapons left to the young lady were those with which Nature had endowed her. And, Northrop having taken care of his alleged cousin with equal thoroughness, the small-arms were sent out and both doors of the room were securely locked.

“Now, Hell-cat Hazel DeForce,” Kinnison said, conversationally, “You can snap out of it any time—you’ve been back to normal for at least two minutes. You’ve found out that your famous sex-appeal won’t work. There’s nothing loose you can grab, and you’re too smart an operator to tackle me bare-handed. Who’s the captain of your team—you or the clothes-horse?”

“Clothes-horse!” the statuesque brunette exclaimed, but her protests were drowned out. The blonde could—and did—talk louder, faster, and rougher.

“Do you think you can get away with this?” she demanded. “Why, you…” and the unexpurgated, trenchant, brilliantly detailed characterization could have seared its way through four-ply asbestos. “And just what do you think you’re going to do with me?”

“As to the first, I think so,” Kinnison replied, ignoring the deep-space verbiage. “As to the second—as of now I don’t know. What would you do if our situations were reversed?”

“I’d blast you to a cinder—or else take a knife and.…”

“Hazel!” the brunette cautioned sharply. “Careful! You’ll touch them off and they’ll.…”

“Shut up, Jane! They won’t hurt us any more than they have already; it’s psychologically impossible. Isn’t that true, copper?” Hazel lighted a cigarette, inhaled deeply, and blew a cloud of smoke at Kinnison’s face.

“Pretty much so, I guess,” the Lensman admitted, frankly enough, “but we can put you away for the rest of your lives.”

“Space-happy? Or do you think I am?” she sneered. “What would you use for a case? We’re as safe as if we were in God’s pocket. And besides, our positions will be reversed pretty quick. You may not know it, but the fastest ships in space are chasing us, right now.”

“For once you’re wrong. We’ve got plenty of legs ourselves and we’re blasting for rendezvous with a task-force. But enough of this chatter. I want to know what job you’re on and why you picked on us. Give.”

“Oh, does ’oo?” Hazel cooed, venomously. “Come and sit on mama’s lap, itty bitty soldier boy, and she’ll tell you everything you want to know.”

Both Lensmen probed, then, with everything they had, but learned nothing of value. The women did not know what the Patrolmen were trying to do, but they were so intensely hostile that their mental blocks, unconscious although they were, were as effective as full-driven thought screens against the most insidious approaches the men could make.

“Anything in their hand-bags, Mase?” Jack asked, finally.

“I’ll look.… Nothing much—just this,” and the very tonelessness of Northrop’s voice made Jack look up quickly.

“Just a letter from the boy-friend.” Hazel shrugged her shoulders. “Nothing hot—not even warm—go ahead and read it.”

“Not interested in what it says, but it might be smart to develop it, envelope and all, for invisible ink and whatnot.” He did so, deeming it a worth-while expenditure of time. He already knew what the hidden message was; but no one not of the Patrol should know that no transmission of intelligence, however coded or garbled or disguised or by whatever means sent, could be concealed from any wearer of Arisia’s Lens.

“Listen, Hazel,” Kinnison said, holding up the now slightly stained paper. “‘Three six two’—that’s you, I suppose, and you’re the squad leader—‘Men mentioned previously being investigated stop assign three nine eight’—that must be you, Jane—‘and make acquaintance stop if no further instructions received by eighteen hundred hours liquidate immediately stop party one’.”

The blond operative lost for the first time her brazen control. “Why…that code is unbreakable!” she gasped.

“Wrong again, Gentle Alice. Some of us are specialists.” He directed a thought at Northrop. “This changes things slightly, Mase. I was going to turn them loose, but now I don’t know. Better we take it up with the boss, don’t you think?”

“Pos-i-tive-ly!”

Samms was called, and considered the matter for approximately one minute. “Your first idea was right, Jack. Let them go. The message may be helpful and informative, but the women would not. They know nothing. Congratulations, boys, on the complete success of Operation Red Herring.”

“Ouch!” Jack grimaced mentally to his partner after the First Lensman had cut off. “They know enough to be in on bumping you and me off, but that ain’t important, says he!”

“And it ain’t, bub,” Northrop grinned back. “Moderately so, maybe, if they had got us, but not at all so now they can’t. The Lensmen have landed and the situation is well in hand. It is written. Selah.”

“Check. Let’s wrap it up.” Jack turned to the blonde. “Come on, Hazel. Out. Number Four lifeboat. Do you want to come peaceably or shall I work on your neck again?”

“You could think of other places that would be more fun.” She got up and stared directly into his eyes, her lip curling. “That is, if you were a man instead of a sublimated Boy Scout.”

Kinnison, without a word, wheeled and unlocked a door. Hazel swaggered forward, but the taller girl hung back. “Are you sure there’s air—and they’ll pick us up? Maybe they’re going to make us breathe space.…”

“Huh? They haven’t got the guts,” Hazel sneered. “Come on, Jane. Number Four, you said, darling?”

She led the way. Kinnison opened the portal. Jane hurried aboard, but Hazel paused and held out her arms.

“Aren’t you even going to kiss mama goodbye, baby boy?” she taunted.

“Better not waste much more time. We blow this boat, sealed or open, in fifteen seconds.” By what effort Kinnison held his voice level and expressionless, he hoped the wench would never know.

She looked at him, started to say something, looked again. She had gone just about as far as it was safe to go. She stepped into the boat and reached for the lever. And as the valve was swinging smoothly shut the men heard a tinkling laugh, reminiscent of icicles breaking against steel bells.

“Hell’s—Brazen—Hinges!” Kinnison wiped his forehead as the lifeboat shot away. Hazel was something brand new to him; a phenomenon with which none of his education, training, or experience had equipped him to cope. “I’ve heard about the guy who got hold of a tiger by the tail, but.…” His thought expired on a wondering, confused note.

“Yeah.” Northrop was in no better case. “We won—technically—I guess—or did we? That was a God-awful drubbing we took, mister.”

“Well, we got away alive, anyway.… We’ll tell Parker his dope is correct to the proverbial twenty decimals. And now that we’ve escaped, let’s call Spud and see how things came out.”

And Costigan-Jones assured them that everything had come out very well indeed. The shipment of thionite had been followed without any difficulty at all, from the space-ship clear through to Jones’ own office, and it reposed now in Department Q’s own safe, under Jones’ personal watch and ward. The pressure had lightened tremendously, just as Kinnison and Northrop had thought it would, when they set up their diversion. Costigan listened impassively to the whole story.

“Now should I have shot her, or not?” Jack demanded. “Not whether I could have or not—I couldn’t—but should I have, Spud?”

“I don’t know.” Costigan thought for minutes. “I don’t think so. No—not in cold blood. I couldn’t have, either, and wouldn’t if I could. It wouldn’t be worth it. Somebody will shoot her some day, but not one of us—unless, of course, it’s in a fight.”

“Thanks, Spud; that makes me feel better. Off.”

Costigan-Jones’ desk was already clear, since there was little or no paper-work connected with his position in Department Q. Hence his preparations for departure were few and simple. He merely opened the safe, stuck the package into his pocket, closed and locked the safe, and took a company ground-car to the spaceport.

Nor was there any more formality about his leaving the planet. Eridan had, of course, a Customs frontier of sorts; but since Uranium Inc. owned Eridan in fee simple, its Customs paid no attention whatever to company ships or to low-number, gold-badge company men. Nor did Jones need ticket, passport, or visa. Company men rode company ships to and from company plants, wherever situated, without let or hindrance. Thus, wearing the aura of power of his new position—and Gold Badge Number Thirty Eight—George W. Jones was whisked out to the uranium ship and was shown to his cabin.

Nor was it surprising that the trip from Eridan to Earth was completely without incident. This was an ordinary freighter, hauling uranium on a routine flight. Her cargo was valuable, of course—the sine qua non of inter-stellar trade—but in no sense precious. Not pirate-bait, by any means. And only two men knew that this flight was in any whit different from the one which had preceded it or the one which would follow it. If this ship was escorted or guarded the fact was not apparent: and no Patrol vessel came nearer to it than four detets—Virgil Samms and Roderick Kinnison saw to that.

The voyage, however, was not tedious. Jones was busy every minute. In fact, there were scarcely minutes enough in which to assimilate the material which Isaacson had given him—the layouts, flow-sheets, and organization charts of Works Number Eighteen, on Tellus.

And upon arrival at the private spaceport which was an integral part of Works Number Eighteen, Jones was not surprised (he knew more now than he had known a few weeks before; and infinitely more than the man on the street) to learn that the Customs men of this particular North American Port of Entry were just as complaisant as were those of Eridan. They did not bother even to count the boxes, to say nothing of inspecting them. They stamped the ship’s papers without either reading or checking them. They made a perfunctory search, it is true, of crewmen and quarters, but a low number gold badge was still a magic talisman. Unquestioned, sacrosanct, he and his baggage were escorted to the ground-car first in line.

“Administration Building,” Jones-Costigan told the hacker, and that was that.

FIRST LENSMAN, by E.E. “Doc” Smith [Part 3]

CHAPTER 16

It has been said that the basic drive of the Eddorians was a lust for power; a thought which should be elucidated and perhaps slightly modified. Their warrings, their strifes, their inter-necine intrigues and connivings were inevitable because of the tremendousness and capability—and the limitations—of their minds. Not enough could occur upon any one planet to keep such minds as theirs even partially occupied; and, unlike the Arisians, they could not satiate themselves in a static philosophical study of the infinite possibilities of the Cosmic All. They had to be doing something; or, better yet, making other and lesser beings do things to make the physical universe conform to their idea of what a universe should be.

Their first care was to set up the various echelons of control. The second echelon, immediately below the Masters, was of course the most important, and after a survey of both galaxies they decided to give this high honor to the Ploorans. Ploor, as is now well known, was a planet of a sun so variable that all Plooran life had to undergo radical cyclical changes in physical form in order to live through the tremendous climatic changes involved in its every year. Physical form, however, meant nothing to the Eddorians. Since no other planet even remotely like theirs existed in this, our normal plenum, physiques like theirs would be impossible; and the Plooran mentality left very little to be desired.

In the third echelon there were many different races, among which the frigid-blooded, poison-breathing Eich were perhaps the most efficient and most callous; and in the fourth there were millions upon millions of entities representing thousands upon thousands of widely-variant races.

Thus, at the pinpoint in history represented by the time of Virgil Samms and Roderick Kinnison, the Eddorians were busy; and if such a word can be used, happy. Gharlane of Eddore, second in authority only to the All-Highest, His Ultimate Supremacy himself, paid little attention to any one planet or to any one race. Even such a mind as his, when directing the affairs of twenty million and then sixty million and then a hundred million worlds, can do so only in broad, and not in fine.

And thus the reports which were now flooding in to Gharlane in a constantly increasing stream concerned classes and groups of worlds, and solar systems, and galactic regions. A planet might perhaps be mentioned as representative of a class, but no individual entity lower than a Plooran was named or discussed. Gharlane analyzed those tremendous reports; collated, digested, compared, and reconciled them; determined trends and tendencies and most probable resultants. Gharlane issued orders, the carrying out of which would make an entire galactic region fit more and ever more exactly into the Great Plan.

But, as has been pointed out, there was one flaw inherent in the Boskonian system. Underlings, then as now, were prone to gloss over their own mistakes, to cover up their own incompetences. Thus, since he had no reason to inquire specifically, Gharlane did not know that anything whatever had gone amiss on Sol Three, the pestiferous planet which had formerly caused him more trouble than all the rest of his worlds combined.

After the fact, it is easy to say that he should have continued his personal supervision of Earth, but can that view be defended? Egotistical, self-confident, arrogant, Gharlane knew that he had finally whipped Tellus into line. It was the same now as any other planet of its class. And even had he thought it worth while to make such a glaring exception, would not the fused Elders of Arisia have intervened?

Be those things as they may, Gharlane did not know that the new-born Galactic Patrol had been successful in defending Triplanetary’s Hill against the Black Fleet. Nor did the Plooran Assistant Director in charge. Nor did any member of that dreadful group of Eich which was even then calling itself the Council of Boskone. The highest-ranking Boskonian who knew of the fiasco, calmly confident of his own ability, had not considered this minor reverse of sufficient importance to report to his immediate superior. He had already taken steps to correct the condition. In fact, as matters now stood, the thing was more fortunate than otherwise, in that it would lull the Patrol into believing themselves in a position of superiority—a belief which would, at election time, prove fatal.

This being, human to the limit of classification except for a faint but unmistakable blue coloration, had been closeted with Senator Morgan for a matter of two hours.

“In the matters covered, your reports have been complete and conclusive,” the visitor said finally, “but you have not reported on the Lens.”

“Purposely. We are investigating it, but any report based upon our present knowledge would be partial and inconclusive.”

“I see. Commendable enough, usually. News of this phenomenon has, however, gone farther and higher than you think and I have been ordered to take cognizance of it; to decide whether or not to handle it myself.”

“I am thoroughly capable of.…”

“I will decide that, not you.” Morgan subsided. “A partial report is therefore in order. Go ahead.”

“According to the procedure submitted and approved, a Lensman was taken alive. Since the Lens has telepathic properties, and hence is presumably operative at great distances, the operation was carried out in the shortest possible time. The Lens, immediately upon removal from the Patrolman’s arm, ceased to radiate and the operative who held the thing died. It was then applied by force to four other men—workers, these, of no importance. All four died, thus obviating all possibility of coincidence. An attempt was made to analyze a fragment of the active material, without success. It seemed to be completely inert. Neither was it affected by electrical discharges or by sub-atomic bombardment, nor by any temperatures available. Meanwhile, the man was of course being questioned, under truth-drug and beams. His mind denied any knowledge of the nature of the Lens; a thing which I am rather inclined to believe. His mind adhered to the belief that he obtained the Lens upon the planet Arisia. I am offering for your consideration my opinion that the high-ranking officers of the Patrol are using hypnotism to conceal the real source of the Lens.”

“Your opinion is accepted for consideration.”

“The man died during examination. Two minutes after his death his Lens disappeared.”

“Disappeared? What do you mean? Flew away? Vanished? Was stolen? Disintegrated? Or what?”

“No. More like evaporation or sublimation, except that there was no gradual diminution in volume, and there was no detectable residue, either solid, liquid, or gaseous. The platinum-alloy bracelet remained intact.”

“And then?”

“The Patrol attacked in force and our expedition was destroyed.”

“You are sure of these observational facts?”

“I have the detailed records. Would you like to see them?”

“Send them to my office. I hereby relieve you of all responsibility in the matter of the Lens. In fact, even I may decide to refer it to a higher echelon. Have you any other material, not necessarily facts, which may have bearing?”

“None,” Morgan replied; and it was just as well for Virgilia Samms’ continued well-being that the Senator did not think it worth while to mention the traceless disappearance of his Number One secretary and a few members of a certain unsavory gang. To his way of thinking, the Lens was not involved, except perhaps very incidentally. Herkimer, in spite of advice and orders, had probably got rough with the girl, and Samms’ mob had rubbed him out. Served him right.

“I have no criticism of any phase of your work. You are doing a particularly nice job on thionite. You are of course observing all specified precautions as to key personnel?”

“Certainly. Thorough testing and unremitting watchfulness. Our Mr. Isaacson is about to promote a man who has proved very capable. Would you like to observe the proceedings?”

“No. I have no time for minor matters. Your results have been satisfactory. Keep them that way. Good-bye.” The visitor strode out.

Morgan reached for a switch, then drew his hand back. No. He would like to sit in on the forthcoming interview, but he did not have the time. He had tested Olmstead repeatedly and personally; he knew what the man was. It was Isaacson’s department; let Isaacson handle it. He himself must work full time at the job which only he could handle; the Nationalists must and would win this forthcoming election.

And in the office of the president of Interstellar Spaceways, Isaacson got up and shook hands with George Olmstead.

“I called you in for two reasons. First, in reply to your message that you were ready for a bigger job. What makes you think that any such are available?”

“Do I need to answer that?”

“Perhaps not…no.” The magnate smiled quietly. Morgan was right; this man could not be accused of being dumb. “There is such a job, you are ready for it, and you have your successor trained in the work of harvesting. Second, why did you cut down, instead of increasing as ordered, the weight of broadleaf per trip? This, Olmstead, is really serious.”

“I explained why. It would have been more serious the other way. Didn’t you believe I knew what I was talking about?”

“Your reasoning may have been distorted in transmittal. I want it straight from you.”

“Very well. It isn’t smart to be greedy. There’s a point at which something that has been merely a nuisance becomes a thing that has to be wiped out. Since I didn’t want to be in that ferry when the Patrol blows it out of the ether, I cut down the take, and I advise you to keep it down. What you’re getting now is a lot more than you ever got before, and a hell of a lot more than none at all. Think it over.”

“I see. Upon what basis did you arrive at the figure you established?”

“Pure guesswork, nothing else. I guessed that about three hundred percent of the previous average per month ought to satisfy anybody who wasn’t too greedy to have good sense, and that more than that would ring a loud, clear bell right where we don’t want any noise made. So I cut it down to three, and advised Ferdy either to keep it at three or quit while he was still all in one piece.”

“You exceeded your authority…and were insubordinate…but it wouldn’t surprise me if you were right. You are certainly right in principle, and the poundage can be determined by statistical and psychological analysis. But in the meantime, there is tremendous pressure for increased production.”

“I know it. Pressure be damned. My dear cousin Virgil is, as you already know, a crackpot. He is visionary, idealistic, full of sweet and beautiful concepts of what the universe would be like if there weren’t so many people like you and me in it; but don’t ever make the mistake of writing him off as anybody’s fool. And you know, probably better than I do, what Rod Kinnison is like. If I were you I’d tell whoever is doing the screaming to shut their damn mouths before they get their teeth kicked down their throats.”

“I’m very much inclined to take your advice. And now as to this proposed promotion. You are of course familiar in a general way with our operation at Northport?”

“I could scarcely help knowing something about the biggest uranium works on Earth. However, I am not well enough qualified in detail to make a good technical executive.”

“Nor is it necessary. Our thought is to make you a key man in a new and increasingly important branch of the business, known as Department Q. It is concerned neither with production nor with uranium.”

“Q as in ‘quiet’, eh? I’m listening with both ears. What duties would be connected with this…er…position? What would I really do?”

Two pairs of hard eyes locked and held, staring yieldlessly into each other’s depths.

“You would not be unduly surprised to learn that substances other than uranium occasionally reach Northport?”

“Not too surprised, no,” Olmstead replied dryly. “What would I do with it?”

“We need not go into that here or now. I offer you the position.”

“I accept it.”

“Very well. I will take you to Northport, and we will continue our talk en route.”

And in a spy-ray-proof, sound-proof compartment of a Spaceways-owned stratoliner they did so.

“Just for my information, Mr. Isaacson, how many predecessors have I had on this particular job, and what happened to them? The Patrol get them?”

“Two. No; we have not been able to find any evidence that the Samms crowd has any suspicion of us. Both were too small for the job; neither could handle personnel. One got funny ideas, the other couldn’t stand the strain. If you don’t get funny ideas, and don’t crack up, you will make out in a big—and I mean really big—way.”

“If I do either I’ll be more than somewhat surprised.” Olmstead’s features set themselves into a mirthless, uncompromising, somehow bitter grin.

“So will I.” Isaacson agreed.

He knew what this man was, and just how case-hardened he was. He knew that he had fought Morgan himself to a scoreless tie after twisting Herkimer—and he was no soft touch—into a pretzel in nothing flat. At the thought of the secretary, so recently and so mysteriously vanished, the magnate’s mind left for a moment the matter in hand. What was at the bottom of that affair—the Lens or the woman? Or both? If he were in Morgan’s shoes…but he wasn’t. He had enough grief of his own, without worrying about any of Morgan’s stinkeroos. He studied Olmstead’s inscrutable, subtly sneering smile and knew that he had made a wise decision.

“I gather that I am going to be one of the main links in the primary chain of deliveries. What’s the technique, and how do I cover up?”

“Technique first. You go fishing. You are an expert at that, I believe?”

“You might say so. I won’t have to do any faking there.”

“Some week-end soon, and every week-end later on, we hope, you will indulge in your favorite sport at some lake or other. You will take the customary solid and liquid refreshments along in a lunch-box. When you have finished eating you will toss the lunch-box overboard.”

“That all?”

“That’s all.”

“The lunch-box, then, will be slightly special?”

“More or less, although it will look ordinary enough. Now as to the cover-up. How would ‘Director of Research’ sound?”

“I don’t know. Depends on what the researchers are doing. Before I became an engineer I was a pure scientist of sorts; but that was quite a while ago and I was never a specialist.”

“That is one reason why I think you will do. We have plenty of specialists—too many, I often think. They dash off in all directions, without rhyme or reason. What we want is a man with enough scientific training to know in general what is going on, but what he will need mostly is hard common sense, and enough ability—mental force, you might call it—to hold the specialists down to earth and make them pull together. If you can do it—and if I didn’t think you could I wouldn’t be talking to you—the whole force will know that you are earning your pay; just as we could not hide the fact that your two predecessors weren’t.”

“Put that way it sounds good. I wouldn’t wonder if I could handle it.”

The conversation went on, but the rest of it is of little importance here. The plane landed. Isaacson introduced the new Director of Research to Works Manager Rand, who in turn introduced him to a few of his scientists and to the svelte and spectacular red-head who was to be his private secretary.

It was clear from the first that the Research Department was not going to be an easy one to manage. The top men were defiant, the middle ranks were sullen, the smaller fry were apprehensive as well as sullen. The secretary flaunted chips on both shapely shoulders. Men and women alike expected the application of the old wheeze “a new broom sweeps clean” for the third time in scarcely twice that many months, and they were defying him to do his worst. Wherefore they were very much surprised when the new boss did nothing whatever for two solid weeks except read reports and get acquainted with his department.

“How d’ya like your new boss, May?” another secretary asked, during a break.

“Oh, not too bad…I guess.” May’s tone was full of reservations. “He’s quiet—sort of reserved—no passes or anything like that—it’d be funny if I finally got a boss that had something on the ball, wouldn’t it? But you know what, Molly?” The red-head giggled suddenly. “I had a camera-fiend first, you know, with a million credits’ worth of stereo-cams and such stuff, and then a golf-nut. I wonder what this Dr. Olmstead does with his spare cash?”

“You’ll find out, dearie, no doubt.” Molly’s tone gave the words a meaning slightly different from the semantic one of their arrangement.

“I intend to, Molly—I fully intend to.” May’s meaning, too, was not expressed exactly by the sequence of words used. “It must be tough, a boss’s life. Having to sit at a desk or be in conference six or seven hours a day—when he isn’t playing around somewhere—for a measly thousand credits or so a month. How do they get that way?”

“You said it, May. You really said it. But we’ll get ours, huh?”

Time went on. George Olmstead studied reports, and more reports. He read one, and re-read it, frowning. He compared it minutely with another; then sent red-headed May to hunt up one which had been turned in a couple of weeks before. He took them home that evening, and in the morning he punched three buttons. Three stiffly polite young men obeyed his summons.

“Good morning, Doctor Olmstead.”

“Morning, boys. I’m not up on the fundamental theory of any one of these three reports, but if you combine this, and this, and this,” indicating heavily-penciled sections of the three documents, “would you, or would you not, be able to work out a process that would do away with about three-quarters of the final purification and separation processes?”

They did not know. It had not been the business of any one of them, or of all them collectively, to find out.

“I’m making it your business as of now. Drop whatever you’re doing, put your heads together, and find out. Theory first, then a small-scale laboratory experiment. Then come back here on the double.”

“Yes, sir,” and in a few days they were back.

“Does it work?”

“In theory it should, sir, and on a laboratory scale it does.” The three young men were, if possible, even stiffer than before. It was not the first time, nor would it be the last, that a Director of Research would seize credit for work which he was not capable of doing.

“Good. Miss Reed, get me Rand…Rand? Olmstead. Three of my boys have just hatched out something that may be worth quite a few million credits a year to us.… Me? Hell, no! Talk to them. I can’t understand any one of the three parts of it, to say nothing of inventing it. I want you to give ’em a class AAA priority on the pilot plant, as of right now. If they can develop it, and I’m betting they can, I’m going to put their pictures in the Northport News and give ’em a couple of thousand credits apiece and a couple of weeks vacation to spend it in.… Yeah, I’ll send ’em in.” He turned to the flabbergasted three. “Take your dope in to Rand—now. Show him what you’ve got; then tear into that pilot plant.”

And, a little later, Molly and May again met in the powder room.

“So your new boss is a fisherman!” Molly snickered. “And they say he paid over two hundred credits for a reel! You were right, May; a boss’s life must be mighty hard to take. And he sits around more and does less, they say, than any other exec in the plant.”

“Who says so, the dirty, sneaking liars?” the red-head blazed, completely unaware that she had reversed her former position. “And even if it was so, which it isn’t, he can do more work sitting perfectly still than any other boss in the whole Works can do tearing around at forty parsecs a minute, so there!”

George Olmstead was earning his salary.

His position was fully consolidated when, a few days later, a tremor of excitement ran through the Research Department. “Heads up, everybody! Mr. Isaacson—himself—is coming—here! What for, I wonder? Y’don’t s’pose he’s going to take the Old Man away from us already, do you?”

He came. He went through, for the first time, the entire department. He observed minutely, and he understood what he saw.

Olmstead led the Big Boss into his private office and flipped the switch which supposedly rendered that sanctum proof against any and all forms of spying, eavesdropping, intrusion, and communication. It did not, however, close the deeper, subtler channels which the Lensmen used.

“Good work, George. So damned good that I’m going to have to take you out of Department Q entirely and make you Works Manager of our new plant on Vegia. Have you got a man you can break in to take your place here?”

“Including Department Q? No.” Although Olmstead did not show it, he was disappointed at hearing the word “Vegia”. He had been aiming much higher than that—at the secret planet of the Boskonian Armed Forces, no less—but there might still be enough time to win a transfer there.

“Excluding. I’ve got another good man here now for that. Jones. Not heavy enough, though, for Vegia.”

“In that case, yes. Dr. Whitworth, one of the boys who worked out the new process. It’ll take a little time, though. Three weeks minimum.”

“Three weeks it is. Today’s Friday. You’ve got things in shape, haven’t you, so that you can take the week-end off?”

“I was figuring on it. I’m not going where I thought I was, though, I imagine.”

“Probably not. Lake Chesuncook, on Route 273. Rough country, and the hotel is something less than fourth rate, but the fishing can’t be beat.”

“I’m glad of that. When I fish, I like to catch something.”

“It would smell if you didn’t. They stock lunch-boxes in the cafeteria, you know. Have your girl get you one, full of sandwiches and stuff. Start early this afternoon, as soon as you can after I leave. Be sure and see Jones, with your lunch-box, before you leave. Good-bye.”

“Miss Reed, please send Whitworth in. Then skip down to the cafeteria and get me a lunch-box. Sandwiches and a thermos of coffee. Provender suitable for a wet and hungry fisherman.”

“Yes, sir!” There were no chips now; the red-head’s boss was the top ace of the whole plant.

“Hi, Ned. Take the throne.” Olmstead waved his hand at the now vacant chair behind the big desk. “Hold it down ’til I get back. Monday, maybe.”

“Going fishing, huh?” Gone was all trace of stiffness, of reserve, of unfriendliness. “You big, lucky stiff!”

“Well, my brilliant young squirt, maybe you’ll get old and fat enough to go fishing yourself some day. Who knows? ’Bye.”

Lunch-box in hand and encumbered with tackle, Olmstead walked blithely along the corridor to the office of Assistant Works Manager Jones. While he had not known just what to expect, he was not surprised to see a lunch-box exactly like his own upon the side-table. He placed his box beside it.

“Hi, Olmstead.” By no slightest flicker of expression did either Lensman step out of character. “Shoving off early?”

“Yeah. Dropped by to let the Head Office know I won’t be in ’til Monday.”

“O.K. So’m I, but more speed for me. Chemquassabamticook Lake.”

“Do you pronounce that or sneeze it? But have fun, my boy. I’m combining business with pleasure, though—breaking in Whitworth on my job. That Fairplay thing is going to break in about an hour, and it’ll scare the pants off of him. But it’ll keep until Monday, anyway, and if he handles it right he’s just about in.”

Jones grinned. “A bit brutal, perhaps, but a sure way to find out. ’Bye.”

“So long.” Olmstead strolled out, nonchalantly picking up the wrong lunch box on the way, and left the building.

He ordered his Dillingham, and tossed the lunch-box aboard as carelessly as though it did not contain an unknown number of millions of credits’ worth of clear-quill, uncut thionite.

“I hope you have a nice week-end, sir,” the yard-man said, as he helped stow baggage and tackle.

“Thanks, Otto. I’ll bring you a couple of fish Monday, if I catch that many,” and it should be said in passing that he brought them. Lensmen keep their promises, under whatever circumstances or however lightly given.

It being mid-afternoon of Friday, the traffic was already heavy. Northport was not a metropolis, of course; but on the other hand it did not have metropolitan multi-tiered, one-way, non-intersecting streets. But Olmstead was in no hurry. He inched his spectacular mount—it was a violently iridescent chrome green in color, with highly polished chromium gingerbread wherever there was any excuse for gingerbread to be—across the city and into the north-bound side of the superhighway. Even then, he did not hurry. He wanted to hit the inspection station at the edge of the Preserve at dusk. Ninety miles an hour would do it. He worked his way into the ninety-mile lane and became motionless relative to the other vehicles on the strip.

It was a peculiar sensation; it seemed as though the cars themselves were stationary, with the pavement flowing backward beneath them. There was no passing, no weaving, no cutting in and out. Only occasionally would the formation be broken as a car would shift almost imperceptibly to one side or the other; speeding up or slowing down to match the assigned speed of the neighboring way.

The afternoon was bright and clear, neither too hot nor too cold. Olmstead enjoyed his drive thoroughly, and arrived at the turn-off right on schedule. Leaving the wide, smooth way, he slowed down abruptly; even a Dillingham Super-Sporter could not make speed on the narrow, rough, and hilly road to Chesuncook Lake.

At dusk he reached the Post. Instead of stopping on the pavement he pulled off the road, got out, stretched hugely, and took a few drum-major’s steps to take the kinks out of his legs.

“A lot of road, eh?” the smartly-uniformed trooper remarked. “No guns?”

“No guns.” Olmstead opened up for inspection. “From Northport. Funny, isn’t it, how hard it is to stop, even when you aren’t in any particular hurry? Guess I’ll eat now—join me in a sandwich and some hot coffee or a cold lemon sour or cherry soda?”

“I’ve got my own supper, thanks; I was just going to eat. But did you say a cold lemon sour?”

“Uh-huh. Ice-cold. Zero degrees Centigrade.”

“I will join you, in that case. Thanks.”

Olmstead opened a frost-lined compartment; took out two half-liter bottles; placed them and his open lunch-box invitingly on the low stone wall.

“Hm-m-m. Quite a zipper you got there, mister.” The trooper gazed admiringly at the luxurious, two-wheeled monster; listened appreciatively to its almost inaudible hum. “I’ve heard about those new supers, but that is the first one I ever saw. Nice. All the comforts of home, eh?”

“Just about. Sure you won’t help me clean up on those sandwiches, before they get stale?”

Seated on the wall, the two men ate and talked. If that trooper had known what was in the box beside his leg he probably would have fallen over backward; but how was he even to suspect? There was nothing crass or rough or coarse about any of the work of any of Boskone’s high-level operators.

Olmstead drove on to the lake and took up his reservation at the ramshackle hotel. He slept, and bright and early the next morning he was up and fishing—and this part of the performance he really enjoyed. He knew his stuff and the fish were there; big, wary, and game. He loved it.

At noon he ate, and quite openly and brazenly consigned the “empty” box to the watery deep. Even if he had not had so many fish to carry, he was not the type to lug a cheap lunch-box back to town. He fished joyously all afternoon, without getting quite the limit, and as the sun grazed the horizon he started his putt-putt and skimmed back to the dock.

The thing hadn’t sent out any radiation yet, Northrop informed him tensely, but it certainly would, and when it did they’d be ready. There were Lensmen and Patrolmen all over the place, thicker than hair on a dog.

And George Olmstead, sighing wearily and yet blissfully anticipatory of one more day of enthralling sport, gathered up his equipment and his fish and strolled toward the hotel.

CHAPTER 17

Forty thousand miles from Earth’s center the Chicago loafed along a circular arc, inert, at a mere ten thousand miles an hour; a speed which, and not by accident, kept her practically stationary above a certain point on the planet’s surface. Nor was it by chance that both Virgil Samms and Roderick Kinnison were aboard. And a dozen or so other craft, cruisers and such, whose officers were out to put space-time in their logs, were flitting aimlessly about; but never very far away from the flagship. And farther out—well out—a cordon of diesel-powered detector ships swept space to the full limit of their prodigious reach. The navigating officers of those vessels knew to a nicety the place and course of every ship lawfully in the ether, and the appearance of even one unscheduled trace would set in motion a long succession of carefully-planned events.

And far below, grazing atmosphere, never very far from the direct line between the Chicago and Earth’s core, floated a palatial pleasure yacht. And this craft carried not one Lensman, or two, but eight; two of whom kept their eyes fixed upon their observation plates. They were watching a lunch-box resting upon the bottom of a lake.

“Hasn’t it radiated yet?” Roderick Kinnison demanded. “Or been approached, or moved?”

“Not yet,” Lyman Cleveland replied, crisply. “Neither Northrop’s rig nor mine has shown any sign of activity.”

He did not amplify the statement, nor was there need. Mason Northrop was a Master Electronicist; Cleveland was perhaps the world’s greatest living expert. Neither of them had detected radiation. Ergo, none existed.

Equally certainly the box had not moved, or been moved, or approached. “No change, Rod,” Doctor Frederick Rodebush Lensed the assured thought. “Six of us have been watching the plates in five-minute shifts.”

A few minutes later, however: “Here is a thought which may be of interest,” DalNalten the Venerian announced, spraying himself with a couple pints of water. “It is natural enough, of course, for any Venerian to be in or on any water he can reach—I would enjoy very much being on or in that lake myself—but it may not be entirely by coincidence that one particular Venerian, Ossmen, is visiting this particular lake at this particular time.”

“What!” Nine Lensmen yelled the thought practically as one.

“Precisely. Ossmen.” It was a measure of the Venerian Lensman’s concern that he used only two words instead of twenty or thirty. “In the red boat with the yellow sail.”

“Do you see any detector rigs?” Samms asked.

“He wouldn’t need any,” DalNalten put in. “He will be able to see it. Or, if a little colane had been rubbed on it which no Tellurian could have noticed, any Venerian could smell it from one end of that lake to the other.”

“True. I didn’t think of that. It may not have a transmitter after all.”

“Maybe not, but keep on listening, anyway,” the Port Admiral ordered. “Bend a plate on Ossmen, and a couple more on the rest of the boats. But Ossmen is clean, you say, Jack? Not even a spy-ray block?”

“He couldn’t have a block, Dad. It’d give too much away, here on our home grounds. Like on Eridan, where their ops could wear anything they could lift, but we had to go naked.” He flinched mentally as he recalled his encounter with Hazel the Hell-cat, and Northrop flinched with him.

“That’s right, Rod,” Olmstead in his boat below agreed, and Conway Costigan, in his room in Northport, concurred. The top-drawer operatives of the enemy depended for safety upon perfection of technique, not upon crude and dangerous mechanical devices.

“Well, since you’re all so sure of it, I’ll buy it,” and the waiting went on.

Under the slight urge of the light and vagrant breeze, the red boat moved slowly across the water. A somnolent, lackadaisical youth, who very evidently cared nothing about where the boat went, sat in its stern, with his left arm draped loosely across the tiller. Nor was Ossmen any more concerned. His only care, apparently, was to avoid interference with the fishermen; his under-water jaunts were long, even for a Venerian, and he entered and left the water as smoothly as only a Venerian—or a seal—could.

“However, he could have, and probably has got, a capsule spy-ray detector,” Jack offered, presently. “Or, since a Venerian can swallow anything one inch smaller than a kitchen stove, he could have a whole analyzing station stashed away in his stomach. Nobody’s put a beam on him yet, have you?”

Nobody had.

“It might be smart not to. Watch him with ’scopes…and when he gets up close to the box, better pull your beams off of it. DalNalten, I don’t suppose it would be quite bright for you to go swimming down there too, would it?”

“Very definitely not, which is why I am up here and dry. None of them would go near it.”

They waited, and finally Ossmen’s purposeless wanderings brought him over the spot on the lake’s bottom which was the target of so many Tellurian eyes. He gazed at the discarded lunch-box as incuriously as he had looked at so many other sunken objects, and swam over it as casually—and only the ultra-cameras caught what he actually did. He swam serenely on.

“The box is still there,” the spy-ray men reported, “but the package is gone.”

“Good!” Kinnison exclaimed, “Can you ’scopists see it on him?”

“Ten to one they can’t,” Jack said. “He swallowed it. I expected him to swallow it box and all.”

“We can’t see it, sir. He must have swallowed it.”

“Make sure.”

“Yes, sir.… He’s back on the boat now and we’ve shot him from all angles. He’s clean—nothing outside.”

“Perfect! That means he isn’t figuring on slipping it to somebody else in a crowd. This will be an ordinary job of shadowing from here on in, so I’ll put in the umbrella.”

The detector ships were recalled. The Chicago and the various other ships of war returned to their various bases. The pleasure craft floated away. But on the other hand there were bursts of activity throughout the forest for a mile or so back from the shores of the lake. Camps were struck. Hiking parties decided that they had hiked enough and began to retrace their steps. Lithe young men, who had been doing this and that, stopped doing it and headed for the nearest trails.

For Kinnison pere had erred slightly in saying that the rest of the enterprise was to be an ordinary job of shadowing. No ordinary job would do. With the game this nearly in the bag it must be made absolutely certain that no suspicion was aroused, and yet Samms had to have facts. Sharp, hard, clear facts; facts so self-evidently facts that no intelligence above idiot grade could possibly mistake them for anything but facts.

Wherefore Ossmen the Venerian was not alone thenceforth. From lake to hotel, from hotel to car, along the road, into and in and out of train and plane, clear to an ordinary-enough-looking building in an ordinary business section of New York, he was never alone. Where the traveling population was light, the Patrol operatives were few and did not crowd the Venerian too nearly; where dense, as in a metropolitan station, they ringed him three deep.

He reached his destination, which was of course spy-ray proofed, late Sunday night. He went in, remained briefly, came out.

“Shall we spy-ray him, Virge? Follow him? Or what?”

“No spy-rays. Follow him. Cover him like a blanket. At the usual time give him the usual spy-ray going-over, but not until then. This time, make it thorough. Make certain that he hasn’t got it on him, in him, or in or around his house.”

“There’ll be nothing doing here tonight, will there?”

“No, it would be too noticeable. So you, Fred, and Lyman, take the first trick; the rest of us will get some sleep.”

When the building opened Monday morning the Lensmen were back, with dozens of others, including Knobos of Mars. There were also present or nearby literally hundreds of the shrewdest, most capable detectives of Earth.

“So this is their headquarters—one of them at least,” the Martian thought, studying the trickle of people entering and leaving the building. “It is as we thought, Dal, why we could never find it, why we could never trace any wholesaler backward. None of us has ever seen any of these persons before. Complete change of personnel per operation; probably inter-planetary. Long periods of quiescence. Check?”

“Check: but we have them now.”

“Just like that, huh?” Jack Kinnison jibed; and from his viewpoint his idea was the more valid, for the wholesalers were very clever operators indeed.

From the more professional viewpoint of Knobos and DalNalten, however, who had fought a steadily losing battle so long, the task was not too difficult. Their forces were beautifully organized and synchronized; they were present in such overwhelming numbers that “tails” could be changed every fifteen seconds; long before anybody, however suspicious, could begin to suspect any one shadow. Nor was it necessary for the tails to signal each other, however inconspicuously, or to indicate any suspect at change-over time. Lensed thoughts directed every move, without confusion or error.

And there were tiny cameras with tremendous, protuberant lenses, the “long eyes” capable of taking wire-sharp close ups from five hundred feet; and other devices and apparatus and equipment too numerous to mention here.

Thus the wholesalers were traced and their transactions with the retail peddlers were recorded. And from that point on, even Jack Kinnison had to admit that the sailing was clear. These small fry were not smart, and their customers were even less so. None had screens or detectors or other apparatus; their every transaction could be and was recorded from a distance of many miles by the ultra-instruments of the Patrol. And not only the transactions. Clearly, unmistakeably, the purchaser was followed from buying to sniffing; nor was the time intervening ever long. Thionite, then as now, was bought at retail only to use, and the whole ghastly thing went down on tape and film. The gasping, hysterical appeal; the exchange of currency for drug; the headlong rush to a place of solitude; the rigid muscle-lock and the horribly ecstatic transports; the shaken, soul-searing recovery or the entranced death. It all went on record. It was sickening to have to record such things. More than one observer did sicken in fact, and had to be relieved. But Virgil Samms had to have concrete, positive, irrefutable evidence. He got it. Any possible jury, upon seeing that evidence, would know it to be the truth; no possible jury, after seeing that evidence, could bring in any verdict other than “guilty”.

Oddly enough, Jack Kinnison was the only casualty of that long and hectic day. A man—later proved to be a middle-sized potentate of the underworld—who was not even under suspicion at the time, for some reason or other got the idea that Jack was after him. The Lensman had, perhaps, allowed some part of his long eye to show; a fast and efficient long-range telephoto lens is a devilishly awkward thing to conceal. At any rate the racketeer sent out a call for help, just in case his bodyguards would not be enough, and in the meantime his personal attendants rallied enthusiastically around.

They had two objects in view; One, to pass a knife expeditiously and quietly through young Kinnison’s throat from ear to ear; and: Two, to tear the long eye apart and subject a few square inches of super-sensitive emulsion to the bright light of day. And if the Big Shot had known that the photographer was not alone, that the big, hulking bruiser a few feet away was also a bull, they might have succeeded.

Two of the four hoods reached Jack just fractionally ahead of the other two; one to seize the camera, the other to swing the knife. But Jack Kinnison was fast; fast of brain and nerve and muscle. He saw them coming. In three flashing motions he bent the barrel of the telephoto into a neat arc around the side of the first man’s head, ducked frantically under the fiercely-driven knife, and drove the toe of his boot into the spot upon which prize-fighters like to have their rabbit-punches land. Both of those attackers lost interest promptly. One of them lost interest permanently; for a telephoto lens in barrel is heavy, very rigid, and very, very hard.

While Battling Jack was still off balance, the other two guards arrived—but so did Mason Northrop. Mase was not quite as fast as Jack was; but, as has been pointed out, he was bigger and much stronger. When he hit a man, with either hand, that man dropped. It was the same as being on the receiving end of the blow of a twenty-pound hammer falling through a distance of ninety seven and one-half feet.

The Lensmen had of course also yelled for help, and it took only a split second for a Patrol speedster to travel from any given point to any other in the same county. It took no time at all for that speedster to fill a couple of square blocks with patterns of force through which neither bullets nor beams could be driven. Therefore the battle ended as suddenly as it began; before more thugs, with their automatics and portables, could reach the scene.

Kinnison fils cursed and damned fulminantly the edict which had forbidden arms that day, and swore that he would never get out of bed again without strapping on at least two blasters; but he had to admit finally that he had nothing to squawk about. Kinnison pere explained quite patiently—for him—that all he had got out of the little fracas was a split lip, that young Northrop’s hair wasn’t even mussed, and that if everybody had been packing guns some scatter-brained young damn fool like him would have started blasting and blown everything higher than up—would have spoiled Samms’ whole operation maybe beyond repair. Now would he please quit bellyaching and get to hell out?

He got.

* * * *

“That buttons thionite up, don’t you think?” Rod Kinnison asked. “And the lawyers will have plenty of time to get the case licked into shape and lined up for trial.”

“Yes and no.” Samms frowned in thought. “The evidence is complete, from original producer to ultimate consumer; but our best guess is that it will take years to get the really important offenders behind bars.”

“Why? I thought you were giving them altogether too much time when you scheduled the blow-off for three weeks ahead of election.”

“Because the drug racket is only a small part of it. We’re going to break the whole thing at once, you know, and Mateese covers a lot more ground—murder, kidnapping, bribery, corruption, misfeasance—practically everything you can think of.”

“I know. What of it?”

“Jurisdiction, among other things. With the President, over half of the Congress, much of the judiciary, and practically all of the political bosses and police chiefs of the Continent under indictment at once, the legal problem becomes incredibly difficult. The Patrol’s Department of Law has been working on it twenty four hours a day, and the only thing they seem sure of is a long succession of bitterly-contested points of law. There are no precedents whatever.”

“Precedents be damned! They’re guilty and everybody knows it. We’ll change the laws so that.…”

“We will not!” Samms interrupted, sharply. “We want and we will have government by law, not by men. We have had too much of that already. Speed is not of the essence; justice very definitely is.”

“‘Crusader’ Samms, now and forever! But I’ll buy it, Virge—now let’s get back down to earth. Operation Zwilnik is all set. Mateese is going good. Zabriska tied into Zwilnik. That leaves Operation Boskone, which is, I suppose, still getting nowhere fast.”

The First Lensman did not reply. It was, and both men knew it. The shrewdest, most capable and experienced operatives of the Patrol had hit that wall with everything they had, and had simply bounced. Low-level trials had found no point of contact, no angle of approach. Middle level, ditto. George Olmstead, working at the highest possible level, was morally certain that he had found a point of contact, but had not been able to do anything with it.

“How about calling a Council conference on it?” Kinnison asked finally. “Or Bergenholm at least? Maybe he can get one of his hunches on it.”

“I have discussed it with them all, just as I have with you. No one had anything constructive to offer, except to go ahead with Bennett as you are doing. The concensus is that the Boskonians know just as much about our military affairs as we know about theirs—no more.”

“It would be too much to expect them to be dumb enough to figure us as dumb enough to depend only on our visible Grand Fleet, after the warning they gave us at The Hill,” Kinnison admitted.

“Yes. What worries me most is that they had a running start.”

“Not enough to count,” the Port Admiral declared. “We can out-produce ’em and out-fight ’em.”

“Don’t be over-optimistic. You can’t deny them the possession of brains, ability, man-power and resources at least equal to ours.”

“I don’t have to.” Kinnison remained obstinately cheerful. “Morale, my boy, is what counts. Man-power and tonnage and fire-power are important, of course, but morale has won every war in history. And our morale right now is higher than a cat’s back—higher than any time since John Paul Jones—and getting higher by the day.”

“Yes?” The question was monosyllabic but potent.

“Yes. I mean just that—yes. From what we know of their system they can’t have the morale we’ve got. Anything they can do we can do more of and better. What you’ve got, Virge, is a bad case of ingrowing nerves. You’ve never been to Bennett, in spite of the number of times I’ve asked you to. I say take time right now and come along—it’ll be good for what ails you. It will also be a very fine thing for Bennett and for the Patrol—you’ll find yourself no stranger there.”

“You may have something there… I’ll do it.”

Port Admiral and First Lensman went to Bennett, not in the Chicago or other superdreadnaught, but in a two-man speedster. This was necessary because space-travel, as far as that planet was concerned, was a strictly one-way affair except for Lensmen. Only Lensmen could leave Bennett, under any circumstances or for any reason whatever. There was no out-going mail, express, or freight. Even the war-vessels of the Fleet, while on practice maneuvers outside the bottle-tight envelopes surrounding the system, were so screened that no unauthorized communication could possibly be made.

“In other words,” Kinnison finished explaining, “we slapped on everything anybody could think of, including Bergenholm and Rularion; and believe me, brother, that was a lot of stuff.”

“But wouldn’t the very fact of such rigid restrictions operate against morale? It is a truism of psychology that imprisonment, like everything else, is purely relative.”

“Yeah, that’s what I told Rularion, except I used simpler and rougher language. You know how sarcastic and superior he is, even when he’s wrong?”

“How I know!”

“Well, when he’s right he’s too damned insufferable for words. You’d’ve thought he was talking to the prize boob of a class of half-wits. As long as nobody on the planet knew that there was any such thing as space-travel, or suspected that they were not the only form of intelligent life in the universe, it was all right. No such concept as being planet-bound could exist. They had all the room there was. But after they met us, and digested all the implications, they would develop the colly-wobbles no end. This, of course, is an extreme simplification of the way the old coot poured it into me; but he came through with the solution, so I took it like a little man.”

“What was the solution?”

“It’s a shame you were too busy to come in on it. You’ll see when we land.”

But Virgil Samms was quick on the uptake. Even before they landed, he understood. When the speedster slowed down for atmosphere he saw blazoned upon the clouds a welter of one many-times repeated signal; as they came to ground he saw that the same set of symbols was repeated, not only upon every available cloud, but also upon airships, captive balloons, streamers, roofs and sides of buildings—even, in multi-colored rocks and flower-beds, upon the ground itself.

“Twenty Haress,” Samms translated, and frowned in thought. “A date of the Bennettan year. Would it by any chance happen to coincide with our Tellurian November fourteenth of this present year?”

“Bright boy!” Kinnison applauded. “I thought you’d get it, but not so fast. Yes—election day.”

“I see. They know what is going on, then?”

“Everything that counts. They know what we stand to win—and lose. They’ve named it Liberation Day, and everything on the planet is building up to it in a grand crescendo. I was a little afraid of it at first, but if the screens are really tight it won’t make any difference how many people know it, and if they aren’t the beans would all be spilled anyway. And it really works—I get a bigger thrill every time I come here.”

“I can see where it might work.”

Bennett was a fully Tellurian world in mass, in atmosphere and in climate; her native peoples were human to the limit of classification, both physically and mentally. And First Lensman Samms, as he toured it with his friend, found a world aflame with a zeal and an ardor unknown to blase Earth since the days of the Crusades. The Patrol’s cleverest and shrewdest psychologists, by merely sticking to the truth, had done a marvelous job.

Bennett knew that it was the Arsenal and the Navy Yard of Civilization, and it was proud of it. Its factories were humming as they had never hummed before; every industry, every business, every farm was operating at one hundred percent of capacity. Bennett was dotted and spattered with spaceports already built, and hundreds more were being rushed to completion. The already staggering number of ships of war operating out of those ports was being augmented every hour by more and ever more ultra-modern, ultra-fast, ultra-powerful shapes.

It was an honor to help build those ships; it was a still greater one to help man them. Competitive examinations were being held constantly, nor were all or even most of the applicants native Bennettans.

Samms did not have to ask where these young people were coming from. He knew. From all the planets of Civilization, attracted by carefully-worded advertisements of good jobs at high pay on new and highly secret projects on newly discovered planets. There were hundreds of such ads. Most were probably the Patrol’s, and led here; many were of Spaceways, Uranium Incorporated, and other mercantile firms. The possibility that some of them might lead to what was now being called Boskonia had been tested thoroughly, but with uniformly negative results. Lensmen had applied by scores for those non-Patrol jobs and had found them bona-fide. The conclusion was unavoidable—Boskone was doing its recruiting on planets unknown to any wearer of Arisia’s Lens. On the other hand, more than a trickle of Boskonians were applying for Patrol jobs, but Samms was almost certain that none had been accepted. The final screening was done by Lensmen, and in such matters Lensmen did not make many or serious mistakes.

Bennett had been informed of the First Lensman’s arrival, and Kinnison had been guilty of a gross understatement indeed in telling Samms that he would not be regarded as a stranger. Wherever Samms went he was met by wildly enthusiastic crowds. He had to make speeches, each of which was climaxed by a tremendous roar of “TO LIBERATION DAY!”

“No Lensman material here, you say, Rod?” Samms asked, after the first city-shaking demonstration was over. One of his prime concerns, throughout his life, was this. “With all this enthusiasm? Sure?”

“We haven’t found any good enough to refer to you yet. However, in a few years, when the younger generation gets a little older, there certainly will be.”

“Check.” The tour of inspection and acquaintance was finished, the two Lensmen started back to Earth.

“Well, my skeptical and pessimistic friend, was I lying, or not?” Kinnison asked, as soon as the speedster’s ports were sealed. “Can they match that or not?”

“You weren’t—and I don’t believe they can. I have never seen anything like it. Autocracies have parades and cheers and demonstrations, of course, but they have always been forced—artificial. Those were spontaneous.”

“Not only that, but the enthusiasm will carry through. We’ll be piping hot and ready to go. But about this stumping—you said I’d better start as soon as we get back?”

“Within a few days, I’d say.”

“I wouldn’t wonder, so let’s use this time in working out a plan of campaign. My idea is to start out like this.…”

CHAPTER 18

Conway Costigan, leaving behind him scores of clues, all highly misleading, severed his connection with Uranium, Inc. as soon as he dared after Operation Zwilnik had been brought to a successful close. The technical operation, that is; the legal battles in which it figured so largely were to run on for enough years to make the word “zwilnik” a common noun and adjective in the language.

He came to Tellus as unobtrusively as was his wont, and took an inconspicuous but very active part in Operation Mateese, now in full swing.

“Now is the time for all good men and true to come to the aid of the party, eh?” Clio Costigan giggled.

“You can play that straight across the keyboard of your electric, pet, and not with just two fingers, either. Did you hear what the boss told ’em today?”

“Yes.” The girl’s levity disappeared. “They’re so dirty, Spud—I’m really afraid.”

“So am I. But we’re not too lily-fingered ourselves if we have to be, and we’re covering ’em like a blanket—Kinnison and Samms both.”

“Good.”

“And in that connection, I’ll have to be out half the night again tonight. All right?”

“Of course. It’s so nice having you home at all, darling, instead of a million light-years away, that I’m practically delirious with delight.”

It was sometimes hard to tell what impish Mrs. Costigan meant by what she said. Costigan looked at her, decided she was taking him for a ride, and smacked her a couple of times where it would do the most good. He then kissed her thoroughly and left. He had very little time, these days, either to himself or for his lovely and adored wife.

For Roderick Kinnison’s campaign, which had started out rough and not too clean, became rougher and rougher, and no cleaner, as it went along. Morgan and his crew were swinging from the heels, with everything and anything they could dig up or invent, however little of truth or even of plausibility it might contain, and Rod the Rock had never held even in principle with the gentle precept of turning the other cheek. He was rather an Old Testamentarian, and he was no neophyte at dirty fighting. As a young operative, skilled in the punishing, maiming techniques of hand-to-hand rough-and-tumble combat, he had brawled successfully in most of the dives of most of the solarian planets and of most of their moons. With this background, and being a quick study, and under the masterly coaching of Virgil Samms, Nels Bergenholm, and Rularion of North Polar Jupiter, it did not take him long to learn the various gambits and ripostes of this non-physical, but nevertheless no-holds-barred, political mayhem.

And the “boys and girls” of the Patrol worked like badgers, digging up an item here and a fact there and a bit of information somewhere else, all for the day of reckoning which was to come. They used ultra-wave scanners, spy-rays, long eyes, stool-pigeons—everything they could think of to use—and they could not always be blocked out or evaded.

“We’ve got it, boss—now let’s use it!”

“No. Save it! Nail it down, solid! Get the facts—names, dates, places, and amounts. Prove it first—then save it!”

Prove it! Save it! The joint injunction was used so often that it came to be a slogan and was accepted as such. Unlike most slogans, however, it was carefully and diligently put to use. The operatives proved it and saved it, over and over, over and over again; by dint of what unsparing effort and selfless devotion only they themselves ever fully knew.

Kinnison stumped the Continent. He visited every state, all of the big cities, most of the towns, and many villages and hamlets; and always, wherever he went, a part of the show was to demonstrate to his audiences how the Lens worked.

“Look at me. You know that no two individuals are or ever can be alike. Robert Johnson is not like Fred Smith; Joe Jones is entirely different from John Brown. Look at me again. Concentrate upon whatever it is in your mind that makes me Roderick Kinnison, the individual. That will enable each of you to get into as close touch with me as though our two minds were one. I am not talking now; you are reading my mind. Since you are reading my very mind, you know exactly what I am really thinking, for better or for worse. It is impossible for my mind to lie to yours, since I can change neither the basic pattern of my personality nor my basic way of thought; nor would I if I could. Being in my mind, you know that already; you know what my basic quality is. My friends call it strength and courage; Pirate Chief Morgan and his cut-throat crew call it many other things. Be that as it may, you now know whether or not you want me for your President. I can do nothing whatever to sway your opinion, for what your minds have perceived you know to be the truth. That is the way the Lens works. It bares the depths of my mind to yours, and in return enables me to understand your thoughts.

“But it is in no sense hypnotism, as Morgan is so foolishly trying to make you believe. Morgan knows as well as the rest of us do that even the most accomplished hypnotist, with all his apparatus, CAN NOT AFFECT A STRONG AND DEFINITELY OPPOSED WILL. He is therefore saying that each and every one of you now receiving this thought is such a spineless weakling that—but you may draw your own conclusions.

“In closing, remember—nail this fact down so solidly that you will never forget it—a sound and healthy mind CAN NOT LIE. The mouth can, and does. So does the typewriter. But the mind—NEVER! I can hide my thoughts from you, even while we are en rapport, like this…but I CAN NOT LIE TO YOU. That is why, some day, all of your highest executives will have to be Lensmen, and not politicians, diplomats, crooks and boodlers. I thank you.”

As that long, bitter, incredibly vicious campaign neared its vitriolic end tension mounted higher and ever higher: and in a room in the Samms home three young Lensmen and a red-haired girl were not at ease. All four were lean and drawn. Jack Kinnison was talking.

“…not the party, so much, but Dad. He started out with bare fists, and now he’s wading into ’em with spiked brass knuckles.”

“You can play that across the board,” Costigan agreed.

“He’s really giving ’em hell,” Northrop said, admiringly.

“Did you boys listen in on his Casper speech last night?”

They hadn’t; they had been too busy.

“I could give it to you on your Lenses, but I couldn’t reproduce the tone—the exquisite way he lifted large pieces of hide and rubbed salt into the raw places. When he gets excited you know he can’t help but use voice, too, so I got some of it on a record. He starts out on voice, nice and easy, as usual; then goes onto his Lens without talking; then starts yelling as well as thinking. Listen:”

“You ought to have a Lensman president. You may not believe that any Lensman is, and as a matter of fact must be incorruptible. That is my belief, as you can feel for yourselves, but I cannot prove it to you. Only time can do that. It is a self-evident fact, however, which you can feel for yourselves, that a Lensman president could not lie to you except by word of mouth or in writing. You could demand from him at any time a Lensed statement upon any subject. Upon some matters of state he could and should refuse to answer; but not upon any question involving moral turpitude. If he answered, you would know the truth. If he refused to answer, you would know why and could initiate impeachment proceedings then and there.

“In the past there have been presidents who used that high office for low purposes; whose very memory reeks of malfeasance and corruption. One was impeached, others should have been. Witherspoon never should have been elected. Witherspoon should have been impeached the day after he was inaugurated. Witherspoon should be impeached now. We know, and at the Grand Rally at New York Spaceport three weeks from tonight we are going to PROVE, that Witherspoon is simply a minor cog-wheel in the Morgan-Towne-Isaacson machine, ‘playing footsie’ at command with whatever group happens to be the highest bidder at the moment, irrespective of North America’s or the System’s good. Witherspoon is a gangster, a cheat, and a God damn liar, but he is of very little actual importance; merely a boodling nincompoop. Morgan is the real boss and the real menace, the Operating Engineer of the lowest-down, lousiest, filthiest, rottenest, most corrupt machine of murderers, extortionists, bribe-takers, panderers, perjurers, and other pimples on the body politic that has ever disgraced any so-called civilized government. Good night.”

“Wow!” Jack Kinnison yelped. “That’s high, even for him!”

“Just a minute, Jack,” Jill cautioned. “The other side, too. Listen to this choice bit from Senator Morgan.”

“It is not exactly hypnotism, but something infinitely worse; something that steals away your very minds; that makes anyone listening believe that white is yellow, red, purple, or pea-green. Until our scientists have checked this menace, until we have every wearer of that cursed Lens behind steel bars, I advise you in all earnestness not to listen to them at all. If you do listen your minds will surely be insidiously decomposed and broken; you will surely end your days gibbering in a padded cell.

“And murders? Murders! The feeble remnants of the gangs which our government has all but wiped out may perhaps commit a murder or so per year; the perpetrators of which are caught, tried, and punished. But how many of your sons and daughters has Roderick Kinnison murdered, either personally or through his uniformed slaves? Think! Read the record! Then make him explain, if he can; but do not listen to his lying, mind-destroying Lens.

“Democracy? Bah! What does ‘Rod the Rock’ Kinnison—the hardest, most vicious tyrant, the most relentless and pitiless martinet ever known to any Armed Force in the long history of our world—know of democracy? Nothing! He understands only force. All who oppose him in anything, however small, or who seek to reason with him, die without record or trace; and if he is not arrested, tried, and executed, all such will continue, tracelessly and without any pretense of trial, to die.

“But at bottom, even though he is not intelligent enough to realize it, he is merely one more in the long parade of tools of ruthless and predatory wealth, the MONIED POWERS. They, my friends, never sleep; they have only one God, one tenet, one creed—the almighty CREDIT. That is what they are after, and note how craftily, how stealthily, they have done and are doing their grabbing. Where is your representation upon that so-called Galactic Council? How did this criminal, this vicious, this outrageously unconstitutional, this irresponsible, uncontrollable, and dictatorial monstrosity come into being? How and when did you give this bloated colossus the right to establish its own currency—to have the immeasurable effrontery to debar the solidest currency in the universe, the credit of North America, from inter-planetary and inter-stellar commerce? Their aim is clear; they intend to tax you into slavery and death. Do not forget for one instant, my friends, that the power to tax is the power to destroy. THE POWER TO TAX IS THE POWER TO DESTROY. Our forefathers fought and bled and died to establish the principle that taxation without rep.…”

“And so on, for one solid hour!” Jill snarled, as she snapped the switch viciously. “How do you like them potatoes?”

“Hell’s—Blazing—Pinnacles!” This from Jack, silent for seconds, and:

“Rugged stuff…very, very rugged,” from Northrop. “No wonder you look sort of pooped, Spud. Being Chief Bodyguard must have developed recently into quite a chore.”

“You ain’t just snapping your choppers, bub,” was Costigan’s grimly flippant reply. “I’ve yelled for help—in force.”

“So have I, and I’m going to yell again, right now,” Jack declared. “I don’t know whether Dad is going to kill Morgan or not—and don’t give a damn—but if Morgan isn’t going all out to kill Dad it’s because they’ve forgotten how to make bombs.”

He Lensed a call to Bergenholm.

“Yes, Jack?… I will refer you to Rularion, who has had this matter under consideration.”

“Yes, John Kinnison, I have considered the matter and have taken action,” the Jovian’s calmly assured thought rolled into the minds of all, even Lensless Jill’s. “The point, youth, was well taken. It was your thought that some thousands—perhaps five—of spy-ray operators and other operatives will be required to insure that the Grand Rally will not be marred by episodes of violence.”

“It was,” Jack said, flatly. “It still is.”

“Not having considered all possible contingencies nor the extent of the field of necessary action, you err. The number will approach nineteen thousand very nearly. Admiral Clayton has been so advised and his staff is now at work upon a plan of action in accordance with my recommendation. Your suggestions, Conway Costigan, in the matter of immediate protection of Roderick Kinnison’s person, are now in effect, and you are hereby relieved of that responsibility. I assume that you four wish to continue at work?”

The Jovian’s assumption was sound.

“I suggest, then, that you confer with Admiral Clayton and fit yourselves into his program of security. I intend to make the same suggestion to all Lensmen and other qualified persons not engaged in work of more pressing importance.”

Rularion cut off and Jack scowled blackly. “The Grand Rally is going to be held three weeks before election day. I still don’t like it. I’d save it until the night before election—knock their teeth out with it at the last possible minute.”

“You’re wrong, Jack; the Chief is right,” Costigan argued. “Two ways. One, we can’t play that kind of ball. Two, this gives them just enough rope to hang themselves.”

“Well…maybe.” Kinnison-like, Jack was far from being convinced. “But that’s the way it’s going to be, so let’s call Clayton.”

“First,” Costigan broke in. “Jill, will you please explain why they have to waste as big a man as Kinnison on such a piffling job as president? I was out in the sticks, you know—it doesn’t make sense.”

“Because he’s the only man alive who can lick Morgan’s machine at the polls,” Jill stated a simple fact. “The Patrol can get along without him for one term, after that it won’t make any difference.”

“But Morgan works from the side-lines. Why couldn’t he?”

“The psychology is entirely different. Morgan is a boss. Pops Kinnison isn’t. He’s a leader. See?”

“Oh…I guess so.… Yes. Go ahead.”

* * * *

Outwardly, New York Spaceport did not change appreciably. At any given moment of day or night there were so many hundreds of persons strolling aimlessly or walking purposefully about that an extra hundred or so made no perceptible difference. And the spaceport was only the end-point. The Patrol’s activities began hundreds or thousands or millions or billions of miles away from Earth’s metropolis.

A web was set up through which not even a grain-of-sand meteorite could pass undetected. Every space-ship bound for Earth carried at least one passenger who would not otherwise have been aboard; passengers who, if not wearing Lenses, carried Service Special equipment amply sufficient for the work in hand. Geigers and other vastly more complicated mechanisms flew toward Earth from every direction in space; streamed toward New York in Earth’s every channel of traffic. Every train and plane, every bus and boat and car, every conveyance of every kind and every pedestrian approaching New York City was searched; with a search as thorough as it was unobtrusive. And every thing and every entity approaching New York Spaceport was combed, literally by the cubic millimeter.

No arrests were made. No package was confiscated, or even disturbed, throughout the ranks of public check boxes, in private offices, or in elaborate or casual hiding-places. As far as the enemy knew, the Patrol had no suspicion whatever that anything out of the ordinary was going on. That is, until the last possible minute. Then a tall, lean, space-tanned veteran spoke softly aloud, as though to himself:

“Spy-ray blocks—interference—umbrella—on. Report.”

That voice, low and soft as it was, was picked up by every Service Special receiver within a radius of a thousand miles, and by every Lensman listening, wherever he might be. So were, in a matter of seconds, the replies.

“Spy-ray blocks on, sir.”

“Interference on, sir.”

“Umbrella on, sir.”

No spy-ray could be driven into any part of the tremendous port. No beam, communicator or detonating, could operate anywhere near it. The enemy would now know that something had gone wrong, but he would not be able to do anything about it.

“Reports received,” the tanned man said, still quietly. “Operation Zunk will proceed as scheduled.”

And four hundred seventy one highly skilled men, carrying duplicate keys and/or whatever other specialized apparatus and equipment would be necessary, quietly took possession of four hundred seventy one objects, of almost that many shapes and sizes. And, out in the gathering crowd, a few disturbances occurred and a few ambulances dashed busily here and there. Some women had fainted, no doubt, ran the report. They always did.

And Conway Costigan, who had been watching, without seeming even to look at him, a porter loading a truck with opulent-looking hand-luggage from a locker, followed man and truck out into the concourse. Closing up, he asked:

“Where are you taking that baggage, Charley?”

“Up Ramp One, boss,” came the unflurried reply. “Flight Ninety will be late taking off, on accounta this jamboree, and they want it right up there handy.”

“Take it down to the.…”

Over the years a good many men had tried to catch Conway Costigan off guard or napping, to beat him to the punch or to the draw—with a startlingly uniform lack of success. The Lensman’s fist traveled a bare seven inches: the supposed porter gasped once and traveled—or rather, staggered backward—approximately seven feet before he collapsed and sprawled unconscious upon the pavement.

“Decontamination,” Costigan remarked, apparently to empty air, as he picked the fellow up and draped him limply over the truckful of suitcases. “Deke. Front and center. Area forty-six. Class Eff-ex—hotter than the middle tailrace of hell.”

“You called Deke?” A man came running up. “Eff-ex six—nineteen. This it?”

“Check. It’s yours, porter and all. Take it away.”

Costigan strolled on until he met Jack Kinnison, who had a rapidly-developing mouse under his left eye.

“How did that happen, Jack?” he demanded sharply. “Something slip?”

“Not exactly.” Kinnison grinned ruefully. “I have the damndest luck! A woman—an old lady at that—thought I was staging a hold-up and swung on me with her hand-bag—southpaw and from the rear. And if you laugh, you untuneful harp, I’ll hang one right on the end of your chin, so help me!”

“Far be it from such,” Costigan assured him, and did not—quite—laugh. “Wonder how we came out? They should have reported before this—p-s-s-t! Here it comes!”

Decontamination was complete; Operation Zunk had been a one-hundred-percent success; there had been no casualties.

“Except for one black eye,” Costigan could not help adding; but his Lens and his Service Specials were off. Jack would have brained him if any of them had been on.

Linking arms, the two young Lensmen strode away toward Ramp Four, which was to be their station.

This was the largest crowd Earth had ever known. Everybody, particularly the Nationalists, had wondered why this climactic political rally had been set for three full weeks ahead of the election, but their curiosity had not been satisfied. Furthermore, this meeting had been advertised as no previous one had ever been; neither pains nor cash had been spared in giving it the greatest build-up ever known. Not only had every channel of communication been loaded for weeks, but also Samms’ workers had been very busily engaged in starting rumors; which grew, as rumors do, into things which their own fathers and mothers could not recognize. And the baffled Nationalists, trying to play the whole thing down, made matters worse. Interest spread from North America to the other continents, to the other planets, and to the other solar systems.

Thus, to say that everybody was interested in, and was listening to, the Cosmocrats’ Grand Rally would not be too serious an exaggeration.

Roderick Kinnison stepped up to the battery of microphones; certain screens were cut.

“Fellow entities of Civilization and others: while it may seem strange to broadcast a political rally to other continents and to beam it to other worlds, it was necessary in this case. The message to be given, while it will go into the political affairs of the North American Continent of Tellus, will deal primarily with a far larger thing; a matter which will be of paramount importance to all intelligent beings of every inhabited world. You know how to attune your minds to mine. Do it now.”

He staggered mentally under the shock of encountering practically simultaneously so many minds, but rallied strongly and went on, via Lens:

“My first message is not to you, my fellow Cosmocrats, nor to you, my fellow dwellers on Earth, nor even to you, my fellow adherents to Civilization; but to THE ENEMY. I do not mean my political opponents, the Nationalists, who are almost all loyal fellow North Americans. I mean the entities who are using the leaders of that Nationalist party as pawns in a vastly larger game.

“I know, ENEMY, that you are listening. I know that you had goon squads in this audience, to kill me and my superior officer. Know now that they are impotent. I know that you had atomic bombs, with which to obliterate this assemblage and this entire area. They have been disassembled and stored. I know that you had large supplies of radio-active dusts. They now lie in the Patrol vaults near Weehauken. All the devices which you intended to employ are known, and all save one have been either nullified or confiscated.

“That one exception is your war-fleet, a force sufficient in your opinion to wipe out all the Armed Forces of the Galactic Patrol. You intended to use it in case we Cosmocrats win this forthcoming election; you may decide to use it now. Do so if you like; you can do nothing to interrupt or to affect this meeting. This is all I have to say to you, Enemy of Civilization.

“Now to you, my legitimate audience. I am not here to deliver the address promised you, but merely to introduce the real speaker—First Lensman Virgil Samms.…”

A mental gasp, millions strong, made itself tellingly felt.

“…Yes—First Lensman Samms, of whom you all know. He has not been attending political meetings because we, his advisers, would not let him. Why? Here are the facts. Through Archibald Isaacson, of Interstellar Spaceways, he was offered a bribe which would in a few years have amounted to some fifty billion credits; more wealth than any individual entity has ever possessed. Then there was an attempt at murder, which we were able—just barely—to block. Knowing there was no other place on Earth where he would be safe, we took him to The Hill. You know what happened; you know what condition The Hill is in now. This warfare was ascribed to pirates.

“The whole stupendous operation, however, was made in a vain attempt to kill one man—Virgil Samms. The Enemy knew, and we learned, that Samms is the greatest man who has ever lived. His name will last as long as Civilization endures, for it is he, and only he, who can make it possible for Civilization to endure.

“Why was I not killed? Why was I allowed to keep on making campaign speeches? Because I do not count. I am of no more importance to the cause of Civilization than is my opponent Witherspoon to that of the Enemy.

“I am a wheel-horse, a plugger. You all know me—‘Rocky Rod’ Kinnison, the hard-boiled egg. I’ve got guts enough to stand up and fight for what I know is right. I’ve got the guts and the inclination to stand up and slug it out, toe to toe, with man, beast, or devil. I would make and WILL MAKE a good president; I’ve got the guts and inclination to keep on slugging after you elect me; before God I promise to smash down every machine-made crook who tries to hold any part of our government down in the reeking muck in which it now is.

“I am a plugger and a slugger, with no spark of the terrific flame of inspirational genius which makes Virgil Samms what he so uniquely is. My kind may be important, but I individually am not. There are so many of us! If they had killed me another slugger would have taken my place and the effect upon the job would have been nil.

“Virgil Samms, however, can not be replaced and the Enemy knows it. He is unique in all history. No one else can do his job. If he is killed before the principles for which he is working are firmly established Civilization will collapse back into barbarism. It will not recover until another such mind comes into existence, the probability of which occurrence I will let you compute for yourselves.

“For those reasons Virgil Samms is not here in person. Nor is he in The Hill, since the Enemy may now possess weapons powerful enough to destroy not only that hitherto impregnable fortress, but also the whole Earth. And they would destroy Earth, without a qualm, if in so doing they could kill the First Lensman.

“Therefore Samms is now out in deep space. Our fleet is waiting to be attacked. If we win, the Galactic Patrol will go on. If we lose, we hope you shall have learned enough so that we will not have died uselessly.”

“Die? Why should you die? You are safe on Earth!”

“Ah, one of the goons sent that thought. If our fleet is defeated no Lensman, anywhere, will live a week. The Enemy will see to that.

“That is all from me. Stay tuned. Come in, First Lensman Virgil Samms…take over, sir.”

It was psychologically impossible for Virgil Samms to use such language as Kinnison had just employed. Nor was it either necessary or desirable that he should; the ground had been prepared. Therefore—coldly, impersonally, logically, tellingly—he told the whole terrific story. He revealed the most important things dug up by the Patrols’ indefatigable investigators, reciting names, places, dates, transactions, and amounts. Only in the last couple of minutes did he warm up at all.

“Nor is this in any sense a smear campaign or a bringing of baseless charges to becloud the issue or to vilify without cause and upon the very eve of election a political opponent. These are facts. Formal charges are now being preferred; every person mentioned, and many others, will be put under arrest as soon as possible. If any one of them were in any degree innocent our case against him could be made to fall in less than the three weeks intervening before election day. That is why this meeting is being held at this time.

“Not one of them is innocent. Being guilty, and knowing that we can and will prove guilt, they will adopt a policy of delay and recrimination. Since our courts are, for the most part, just, the accused will be able to delay the trials and the actual presentation of evidence until after election day. Forewarned, however, you will know exactly why the trials will have been delayed, and in spite of the fog of misrepresentation you will know where the truth lies. You will know how to cast your votes. You will vote for Roderick Kinnison and for those who support him.

“There is no need for me to enlarge upon the character of Port Admiral Kinnison. You know him as well as I do. Honest, incorruptible, fearless, you know that he will make the best president we have ever had. If you do not already know it, ask any one of the hundreds of thousands of strong, able, clear-thinking young men and women who have served under him in our Armed Forces.

“I thank you, everyone who has listened, for your interest.”

CHAPTER 19

As long as they were commodores, Clayton of North America and Schweikert of Europe had stayed fairly close to the home planet except for infrequent vacation trips. With the formation of the Galactic Patrol, however, and their becoming Admiral and Lieutenant-Admiral of the First Galactic Region, and their acquisition of Lenses, the radius of their sphere of action was tremendously increased. One or the other of them was always to be found in Grand Fleet Headquarters at New York Spaceport, but only very seldom were both of them there at once. And if the absentee were not to be found on Earth, what of it? The First Galactic Region included all of the solar systems and all of the planets adherent to Civilization, and the absentee could, as a matter of business and duty, be practically anywhere.

Usually, however, he was not upon any of the generally-known planets, but upon Bennett—getting acquainted with the officers, supervising the drilling of Grand Fleet in new maneuvers, teaching classes in advanced strategy, and holding skull-practice generally. It was hard work, and not too inspiring, but in the end it paid off big. They knew their men; their men knew them. They could work together with a snap, a smoothness, a precision otherwise impossible; for imported top brass, unknown to and unacquainted with the body of command, can not have and does not expect the deep regard and the earned respect so necessary to high morale.

Clayton and Schweikert had both. They started early enough, worked hard enough, and had enough stuff, to earn both. Thus it came about that when, upon a scheduled day, the two admirals came to Bennett together, they were greeted as enthusiastically as though they had been Bennettans born and bred; and their welcome became a planet-wide celebration when Clayton issued the orders which all Bennett had been waiting so long and so impatiently to hear. Bennettans were at last to leave Bennett!

Group after group, sub-fleet after sub-fleet, the component units of the Galactic Patrol’s Grand Fleet took off. They assembled in space; they maneuvered enough to shake themselves down into some semblance of unity; they practiced the new maneuvers; they blasted off in formation for Sol. And as the tremendous armada neared the Solar System it met—or, rather, was joined by—the Patrol ships about which Morgan and his minions already knew; each of which fitted itself into its long-assigned place. Every planet of Civilization had sent its every vessel capable of putting out a screen or of throwing a beam, but so immense was the number of warships in Grand Fleet that this increment, great as it intrinsically was, made no perceptible difference in its size.

On Rally Day Grand Fleet lay poised near Earth. As soon as he had introduced Samms to the intensely interested listeners at the Rally, Roderick Kinnison disappeared. Actually, he drove a bug to a distant corner of the spaceport and left the Earth in a light cruiser, but to all intents and purposes, so engrossed was everyone in what Samms was saying, Kinnison simply vanished. Samms was already in the Boise; the Port Admiral went out to his old flagship, the Chicago. Nor, in case any observer of the Enemy should be trying to keep track of him, could his course be traced. Cleveland and Northrop and Rularion and all they needed of the vast resources of the Patrol saw to that.

Neither Samms nor Kinnison had any business being with Grand Fleet in person, of course, and both knew it; but everyone knew why they were there and were glad that the two top Lensmen had decided to live or die with their Fleet. If Grand Fleet won, they would probably live; if Grand Fleet lost they would certainly die—if not in the pyrotechnic dissolution of their ships, then in a matter of days upon the ground. With the Fleet their presence would contribute markedly to morale. It was a chance very much worth taking.

Nor were Clayton and Schweikert together, or even near each other. Samms, Kinnison, and the two admirals were as far away from each other as they could get and still remain in Grand Fleet’s fighting cylinder.

Cylinder? Yes. The Patrol’s Board of Strategy, assuming that the enemy would attack in conventional cone formation and knowing that one cone could defeat another only after a long and costly engagement, had long since spent months and months at war-games in their tactical tanks, in search of a better formation. They had found it. Theoretically, a cylinder of proper composition could defeat, with negligible loss and in a very short time, the best cones they were able to devise. The drawback was that the ships composing a theoretically efficient cylinder would have to be highly specialized and vastly greater in number than any one power had ever been able to put into the ether. However, with all the resources of Bennett devoted to construction, this difficulty would not be insuperable.

This, of course, brought up the question of what would happen if cylinder met cylinder—if the Black strategists should also have arrived at the same solution—and this question remained unanswered. Or, rather, there were too many answers, no two of which agreed; like those to the classical one of what would happen if an irresistible force should strike an immovable object. There would be a lot of intensely interesting by-products!

Even Rularion of Jove did not come up with a definite solution. Nor did Bergenholm; who, although a comparatively obscure young Lensman-scientist and not a member of the Galactic Council, was frequently called into consultation because of his unique ability to arrive at correct conclusions via some obscurely short-circuiting process of thought.

“Well,” Port Admiral Kinnison had concluded, finally, “If they’ve got one, too, we’ll just have to shorten ours up, widen it out, and pray.”

“Clayton to Port Admiral Kinnison,” came a communication through channels. “Have you any additional orders or instructions?”

“Kinnison to Admiral Clayton. None,” the Port Admiral replied, as formally, then went on via Lens: “No comment or criticism to make, Alex. You fellows have done a job so far and you’ll keep on doing one. How much detection have you got out?”

“Twelve detets—three globes of diesels. If we sit here and do nothing the boys will get edgy and go stale, so if you and Virge agree we’ll give ’em some practice. Lord knows they need it, and it’ll keep ’em on their toes. But about the Blacks—they may be figuring on delaying any action until we’ve had time to crack from boredom. What’s your idea on that?”

“I’ve been worried about the same thing. Practice will help, but whether enough or not I don’t know. What do you think, Virge? Will they hold it up deliberately or strike fast?”

“Fast,” the First Lensman replied, promptly and definitely. “As soon as they possibly can, for several reasons. They don’t know our real strength, any more than we know theirs. They undoubtedly believe, however, the same as we do, that they are more efficient than we are and have the larger force. By their own need of practice they will know ours. They do not attach nearly as much importance to morale as we do; by the very nature of their regime they can’t. Also, our open challenge will tend very definitely to force their hands, since face-saving is even more important to them than it is to us. They will strike as soon as they can and as hard as they can.”

Grand Fleet maneuvers were begun, but in a day or so the alarms came blasting in. The enemy had been detected; coming in, as the previous Black Fleet had come, from the direction of Coma Berenices. Calculating machines clicked and whirred; orders were flashed, and a brief string of numbers; ships by the hundreds and the thousands flashed into their assigned positions.

Or, more precisely, almost into them. Most of the navigators and pilots had not had enough practice yet to hit their assigned positions exactly on the first try, since a radical change in axial direction was involved, but they did pretty well; a few minutes of juggling and jockeying were enough. Clayton and Schweikert used a little caustic language—via Lens and to their fellow Lensmen only, of course—but Samms and Kinnison were well enough pleased. The time of formation had been very satisfactorily short and the cone was smooth, symmetrical, and of beautifully uniform density.

The preliminary formation was a cone, not a cylinder. It was not a conventional Cone of Battle in that it was not of standard composition, was too big, and had altogether too many ships for its size. It was, however, of the conventional shape, and it was believed that by the time the enemy could perceive any significant differences it would be too late for him to do anything about it. The cylinder would be forming about that time, anyway, and it was almost believed—at least it was strongly hoped—that the enemy would not have the time or the knowledge or the equipment to do anything about that, either.

Kinnison grinned to himself as his mind, en rapport with Clayton’s, watched the enemy’s Cone of Battle enlarge upon the Admiral’s conning plate. It was big, and powerful; the Galactic Patrol’s publicly-known forces would have stood exactly the chance of the proverbial snowball in the nether regions. It was not, however, the Port Admiral thought, big enough to form an efficient cylinder, or to handle the Patrol’s real force in any fashion—and unless they shifted within the next second or two it would be too late for the enemy to do anything at all.

As though by magic about ninety-five percent of the Patrol’s tremendous cone changed into a tightly-packed double cylinder. This maneuver was much simpler than the previous one, and had been practiced to perfection. The mouth of the cone closed in and lengthened; the closed end opened out and shortened. Tractors and pressors leaped from ship to ship, binding the whole myriad of hitherto discrete units into a single structure as solid, even comparatively as to size, as a cantilever bridge. And instead of remaining quiescent, waiting to be attacked, the cylinder flashed forward, inertialess, at maximum blast.

Throughout the years the violence, intensity, and sheer brute power of offensive weapons had increased steadily. Defensive armament had kept step. One fundamental fact, however, had not changed throughout the ages and has not changed yet. Three or more units of given power have always been able to conquer one unit of the same power, if engagement could be forced and no assistance could be given; and two units could practically always do so. Fundamentally, therefore, strategy always has been and still is the development of new artifices and techniques by virtue of which two or more of our units may attack one of theirs; the while affording the minimum of opportunity for them to retaliate in kind.

The Patrol’s Grand Fleet flashed forward, almost exactly along the axis of the Black cone; right where the enemy wanted it—or so he thought. Straight into the yawning mouth, erupting now a blast of flame beside which the wildest imaginings of Inferno must pale into insignificance; straight along that raging axis toward the apex, at the terrific speed of the two directly opposed velocities of flight. But, to the complete consternation of the Black High Command, nothing much happened. For, as has been pointed out, that cylinder was not of even approximately normal composition. In fact, there was not a normal war-vessel in it. The outer skin and both ends of the cylinder were purely defensive. Those vessels, packed so closely that their repellor fields actually touched, were all screen; none of them had a beam hot enough to light a match. Conversely, the inner layer, or “Liner”, was composed of vessels that were practically all offense. They had to be protected at every point—but how they could ladle it out!

The leading and trailing edges of the formation—the ends of the gigantic pipe, so to speak—would of course bear the brunt of the Black attack, and it was this factor that had given the Patrol’s strategists the most serious concern. Wherefore the first ten and the last six double rings of ships were special indeed. They were all screen—nothing else. They were drones, operated by remote control, carrying no living thing. If the Patrol losses could be held to eight double rings of ships at the first pass and four at the second—theoretical computations indicated losses of six and two—Samms and his fellows would be well content.

All of the Patrol ships had, of course, the standard equipment of so-called “violet”, “green”, and “red” fields, as well as duodecaplylatomate and ordinary atomic bombs, dirigible torpedoes and transporters, slicers, polycyclic drills, and so on; but in this battle the principal reliance was to be placed upon the sheer, brutal, overwhelming power of what had been called the “macro beam”—now simply the “beam”. Furthermore, in the incredibly incandescent frenzy of the chosen field of action—the cylinder was to attack the cone at its very strongest part—no conceivable material projectile could have lasted a single microsecond after leaving the screens of force of its parent vessel. It could have flown fast enough; ultra-beam trackers could have steered it rapidly enough and accurately enough; but before it could have traveled a foot, even at ultra-light speed, it would have ceased utterly to be. It would have been resolved into its sub-atomic constituent particles and waves. Nothing material could exist, except instantaneously, in the field of force filling the axis of the Black’s Cone of Battle; a field beside which the exact center of a multi-billion-volt flash of lightning would constitute a dead area.

That field, however, encountered no material object. The Patrol’s “screeners”, packed so closely as to have a four hundred percent overlap, had been designed to withstand precisely that inconceivable environment. Practically all of them withstood it. And in a fraction of a second the hollow forward end of the cylinder engulfed, pipe-wise, the entire apex of the enemy’s war-cone, and the hitherto idle “sluggers” of the cylinder’s liner went to work.

Each of those vessels had one heavy pressor beam, each having the same push as every other, directed inward, toward the cylinder’s axis, and backward at an angle of fifteen degrees from the perpendicular line between ship and axis. Therefore, wherever any Black ship entered the Patrol’s cylinder or however, it was driven to and held at the axis and forced backward along that axis. None of them, however, got very far. They were perforce in single file; one ship opposing at least one solid ring of giant sluggers who did not have to concern themselves with defense, but could pour every iota of their tremendous resources into offensive beams. Thus the odds were not merely two or three to one; but never less than eighty, and very frequently over two hundred to one.

Under the impact of those unimaginable torrents of force the screens of the engulfed vessels flashed once, practically instantaneously through the spectrum, and went down. Whether they had two or three or four courses made no difference—in fact, even the ultra-speed analyzers of the observers could not tell. Then, a couple of microseconds later, the wall-shields—the strongest fabrics of force developed by man up to that time—also failed. Then those ravenous fields of force struck bare, unprotected metal, and every molecule, inorganic and organic, of ships and contents alike, disappeared in a bursting flare of energy so raw and so violent as to stagger even those who had brought it into existence. It was certainly vastly more than a mere volatilization; it was deduced later that the detonating unstable isotopes of the Black’s own bombs, in the frightful temperatures already existing in the Patrol’s quasi-solid beams, had initiated a chain reaction which had resulted in the fissioning of a considerable proportion of the atomic nuclei of usually completely stable elements!

The cylinder stopped; the Lensmen took stock. The depth of erosion of the leading edge had averaged almost exactly six double rings of drones. In places the sixth ring was still intact; in others, which had encountered unusually concentrated beaming, the seventh was gone. Also, a fraction of one percent of the manned war-vessels had disappeared. Brief though the time of engagement had been, the enemy had been able to concentrate enough beams to burn a few holes through the walls of the attacking cylinder.

It had not been hoped that more than a few hundreds of Black vessels could be blown out of the ether at this first pass. General Staff had been sure, however, that the heaviest and most dangerous ships, including those carrying the enemy’s High Command, would be among them. The mid-section of the apex of the conventional Cone of Battle had always been the safest place to be; therefore that was where the Black admirals had been and therefore they no longer lived.

In a few seconds it became clear that if any Black High Command existed, it was not in shape to function efficiently. Some of the enemy ships were still blasting, with little or no concerted effort, at the regulation cone which the cylinder had left behind; a few were attempting to get into some kind of a formation, possibly to attack the Patrol’s cylinder. Indecision was visible and rampant.

To turn that tremendous cylindrical engine of destruction around would have been a task of hours, but it was not necessary. Instead, each vessel cut its tractors and pressors, spun end for end, reconnected, and retraced almost exactly its previous course; cutting out and blasting into nothingness another “plug” of Black warships. Another reversal, another dash; and this time, so disorganized were the foes and so feeble the beaming, not a single Patrol vessel was lost. The Black fleet, so proud and so conquering of mien a few minutes before, had fallen completely apart.

“That’s enough, Rod, don’t you think?” Samms thought then. “Please order Clayton to cease action, so that we can hold a parley with their senior officers.”

“Parley, hell!” Kinnison’s answering thought was a snarl. “We’ve got ’em going—mop ’em up before they can pull themselves together! Parley be damned!”

“Beyond a certain point military action becomes indefensible butchery, of which our Galactic Patrol will never be guilty. That point has now been reached. If you do not agree with me, I’ll be glad to call a Council meeting to decide which of us is right.”

“That isn’t necessary. You’re right—that’s one reason I’m not First Lensman.” The Port Admiral, fury and fire ebbing from his mind, issued orders; the Patrol forces hung motionless in space. “As President of the Galactic Council, Virge, take over.”

Spy-rays probed and searched; a communicator beam was sent. Virgil Samms spoke aloud, in the lingua franca of deep space.

“Connect me, please, with the senior officer of your fleet.”

There appeared upon Samms’ plate a strong, not unhandsome face; deep-stamped with the bitter hopelessness of a strong man facing certain death.

“You’ve got us. Come on and finish us.”

“Some such indoctrination was to be expected, but I anticipate no trouble in convincing you that you have been grossly misinformed in everything you have been told concerning us; our aims, our ethics, our morals, and our standards of conduct. There are, I assume, other surviving officers of your rank, although of lesser seniority?”

“There are ten other vice-admirals, but I am in command. They will obey my orders or die.”

“Nevertheless, they shall be heard. Please go inert, match our intrinsic velocity, and come aboard, all eleven of you. We wish to explore with all of you the possibilities of a lasting peace between our worlds.”

“Peace? Bah! Why lie?” The Black commander’s expression did not change. “I know what you are and what you do to conquered races. We prefer a clean, quick death in your beams to the kind you deal out in your torture rooms and experimental laboratories. Come ahead—I intend to attack you as soon as I can make a formation.”

“I repeat, you have been grossly, terribly, shockingly misinformed.” Samms’ voice was quiet and steady; his eyes held those of the other. “We are civilized men, not barbarians or savages. Does not the fact that we ceased hostilities so soon mean anything to you?”

For the first time the stranger’s face changed subtly, and Samms pressed the slight advantage.

“I see it does. Now if you will converse with me mind to mind.…” The First Lensman felt for the man’s ego and began to tune to it, but this was too much.

“I will not!” The Black put up a solid block. “I will have nothing to do with your cursed Lens. I know what it is and will have none of it!”

“Oh, what’s the use, Virge!” Kinnison snapped. “Let’s get on with it!”

“A great deal of use, Rod,” Samms replied, quietly. “This is a turning-point. I must be right—I can’t be that far wrong,” and he again turned his attention to the enemy commander.

“Very well, sir, we will continue to use spoken language. I repeat, please come aboard with your ten fellow vice-admirals. You will not be asked to surrender. You will retain your side-arms—as long as you make no attempt to use them. Whether or not we come to any agreement, you will be allowed to return unharmed to your vessels before the battle is resumed.”

“What? Side-arms? Returned? You swear it?”

“As President of the Galactic Council, in the presence of the highest officers of the Galactic Patrol as witnesses, I swear it.”

“We will come aboard.”

“Very well. I will have ten other Lensmen and officers here with me.”

The Boise, of course, inerted first; followed by the Chicago and nine of the tremendous tear-drops from Bennett. Port Admiral Kinnison and nine other Lensmen joined Samms in the Boise’s con room; the tight formation of eleven Patrol ships blasted in unison in the space-courtesy of meeting the equally tight formation of Black warships half-way in the matter of intrinsic velocity.

Soon the two little sub-fleets were motionless in respect to each other. Eleven Black gigs were launched. Eleven Black vice-admirals came aboard, to the accompaniment of the full military honors customarily granted to visiting admirals of friendly powers. Each was armed with what seemed to be an exact duplicate of the Patrol’s own current blaster; Lewiston, Mark Seventeen. In the lead strode the tall, heavy, gray-haired man with whom Samms had been dealing; still defiant, still sullen, still concealing sternly his sheer desperation. His block was still on, full strength.

The man next in line was much younger than the leader, much less wrought up, much more intent. Samms felt for this man’s ego, tuned to it, and got the shock of his life. This Black vice-admiral’s mind was not at all what he had expected to encounter—it was, in every respect, of Lensman grade!

“Oh…how? You are not speaking, and… I see…the Lens…THE LENS!” The stranger’s mind was for seconds an utterly indescribable turmoil in which relief, gladness, and high anticipation struggled for supremacy.

In the next few seconds, even before the visitors had reached their places at the conference table, Virgil Samms and Corander of Petrine exchanged thoughts which would require many thousands of words to express; only a few of which are necessary here.

“The LENS… I have dreamed of such a thing, without hope of realization or possibility. How we have been misled! They are, then, actually available upon your world, Samms of Tellus?”

“Not exactly, and not at all generally,” and Samms explained as he had explained so many times before. “You will wear one sooner than you think. But as to ending this warfare. You survivors are practically all natives of your own world. Petrine?”

“Not ‘practically’, we are Petrinos all. The ‘teachers’ were all in the Center. Many remain upon Petrine and its neighboring worlds, but none remain alive here.”

“Ohlanser, then, who assumed command, is also a Petrino? So hard-headed, I had assumed otherwise. He will be a stumbling-block. Is he actually in supreme command?”

“Only by and with our consent, under such astounding circumstances as these. He is a reactionary, of the old, die-hard, war-dog school. He would ordinarily be in supreme command and would be supported by the teachers if any were here; but I will challenge his authority and theirs; standing upon my right to command my own fleet as I see fit. So will, I think, several others. So go ahead with your meeting.”

“Be seated, Gentlemen.” All saluted punctiliously and sat down. “Now, Vice-Admiral Ohlanser.…”

“How do you, a stranger, know my name?”

“I know many things. We have a suggestion to offer which, if you Petrinos will follow it, will end this warfare. First, please believe that we have no designs upon your planet, nor any quarrel with any of its people who are not hopelessly contaminated by the ideas and the culture of the entities who are back of this whole movement; quite possibly those whom you refer to as the ‘teachers’. You did not know whom you were to fight, or why.” This was a statement, with no hint of question about it.

“I see now that we did not know all the truth,” Ohlanser admitted, stiffly. “We were informed, and given proof sufficient to make us believe, that you were monsters from outer space—rapacious, insatiable, senselessly and callously destructive to all other forms of intelligent life.”

“We suspected something of the kind. Do you others agree? Vice-Admiral Corander?”

“Yes. We were shown detailed and documented proofs; stereos of battles, in which no quarter was given. We saw system after system conquered, world after world laid waste. We were made to believe that our only hope of continued existence was to meet you and destroy you in space; for if you were allowed to reach Petrine every man, woman, and child on the planet would either be killed outright or tortured to death. I see now that those proofs were entirely false; completely vicious.”

“They were. Those who spread that lying propaganda and all who support their organization must be and shall be weeded out. Petrine must be and shall be given her rightful place in the galactic fellowship of free, independent, and cooperative worlds. So must any and all planets whose peoples wish to adhere to Civilization instead of to tyranny and despotism. To further these ends, we Lensmen suggest that you re-form your fleet and proceed to Arisia.…”

“Arisia!” Ohlanser did not like the idea.

“Arisia,” Samms insisted. “Upon leaving Arisia, knowing vastly more than you do now, you will return to your home planet, where you will take whatever steps you will then know to be necessary.”

“We were told that your Lenses are hypnotic devices,” Ohlanser sneered, “designed to steal away and destroy the minds of any who listen to you. I believe that, fully. I will not go to Arisia, nor will any part of Petrine’s Grand Fleet. I will not attack my home planet. I will not do battle against my own people. This is final.”

“I am not saying or implying that you should. But you continue to close your mind to reason. How about you, Vice-Admiral Corander? And you others?”

In the momentary silence Samms put himself en rapport with the other officers, and was overjoyed at what he learned.

“I do not agree with Vice-Admiral Ohlanser,” Corander said, flatly. “He commands, not Grand Fleet, but his sub-fleet merely, as do we all. I will lead my sub-fleet to Arisia.”

“Traitor!” Ohlanser shouted. He leaped to his feet and drew his blaster, but a tractor beam snatched it from his grasp before he could fire.

“You were allowed to wear side-arms, not to use them,” Samms said, quietly. “How many of you others agree with Corander; how many with Ohlanser?”

All nine voted with the younger man.

“Very well. Ohlanser, you may either accept Corander’s leadership or leave this meeting now and take your sub-fleet directly back to Petrine. Decide now which you prefer to do.”

“You mean you aren’t going to kill me, even now? Or even degrade me, or put me under arrest?”

“I mean exactly that. What is your decision?”

“In that case… I was—must have been—wrong. I will follow Corander.”

“A wise choice. Corander, you already know what to expect; except that four or five other Petrinos now in this room will help you, not only in deciding what must be done upon Petrine, but also in the doing of it. This meeting will adjourn.”

“But…no reprisals?” Corander, in spite of his newly acquired knowledge, was dubious, almost dumbfounded. “No invasion or occupation? No indemnities to your Patrol, or reparations? No punishment of us, our men, or our families?”

“None.”

“That does not square up even with ordinary military usage.”

“I know it. It does conform, however, to the policy of the Galactic Patrol which is to spread throughout our island universe.”

“You are not even sending your fleet, or heavy units of it, with us, to see to it that we follow your instructions?”

“It is not necessary. If you need any form of help you will inform us of your requirements via Lens, as I am conversing with you now, and whatever you want will be supplied. However, I do not expect any such call. You and your fellows are capable of handling the situation. You will soon know the truth, and know that you know it; and when your house-cleaning is done we will consider your application for representation upon the Galactic Council. Good-bye.”

Thus the Lensmen—particularly First Lensman Virgil Samms—brought another sector of the galaxy under the aegis of Civilization.

CHAPTER 20

After the Rally there were a few days during which neither Samms nor Kinnison was on Earth. That the Cosmocrats’ presidential candidate and the First Lensman were both with the Fleet was not a secret; in fact, it was advertised. Everyone was told why they were out there, and almost everyone approved.

Nor was their absence felt. Developments, fast and terrific, were slammed home. Cosmocratic spellbinders in every state of North America waved the flag, pointed with pride, and viewed with alarm, in the very best tradition of North American politics. But above all, there appeared upon every news-stand and in every book-shop of the Continent, at opening time of the day following Rally Day, a book of over eighteen hundred pages of fine print; a book the publication of which had given Samms himself no little concern.

“But I’m afraid of it!” he had protested. “We know it’s true; but there’s material on almost every page for the biggest libel and slander suits in history!”

“I know it,” the bald and paunchy Lensman-attorney had replied. “Fully. I hope they do take action against us, but I’m absolutely certain they won’t.”

“You hope they do?”

“Yes. If they take the initiative they can’t prevent us from presenting our evidence in full; and there is no court in existence, however corrupt, before which we could not win. What they want and must have is delay; avoidance of any issue until after the election.”

“I see.” Samms was convinced.

The location of the Patrol’s Grand Fleet had been concealed from all inhabitants of the Solarian system, friends and foes alike; but the climactic battle—liberating as it did energies sufficient to distort the very warp and woof of the fabric of space itself—could not be hidden or denied, or even belittled. It was not, however, advertised or blazoned abroad. Then as now the newshawks wanted to know, instantly and via long-range communicators, vastly more than those responsible for security cared to tell; then as now the latter said as little as it was humanly possible to say.

Everyone knew that the Patrol had won a magnificent victory; but nobody knew who or what the enemy had been. Since the rank and file knew it, everyone knew that only a fraction of the Black fleet had actually been destroyed; but nobody knew where the remaining vessels went or what they did. Everyone knew that about ninety five percent of the Patrol’s astonishingly huge Grand Fleet had come from, and was on its way back to, the planet Bennett, and knew—since Bennettans would in a few weeks be scampering gaily all over space—in general what Bennett was; but nobody knew why it was.

Thus, when the North American Contingent landed at New York Spaceport, everyone whom the newsmen could reach was literally mobbed. However, in accordance with the aphorism ascribed to the wise old owl, those who knew the least said the most. But the Telenews ace who had once interviewed both Kinnison and Samms wasted no time upon small fry. He insisted on seeing the two top Lensmen, and kept on insisting until he did see them.

“Nothing to say,” Kinnison said curtly, leaving no doubt whatever that he meant it. “All talking—if any—will be done by First Lensman Samms.”

“Now, all you millions of Telenews listeners, I am interviewing First Lensman Samms himself. A little closer to the mike, please, First Lensman. Now, sir, what everybody wants to know is—who are the Blacks?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know? On the Lens, sir?”

“On the Lens. I still don’t know.”

“I see. But you have suspicions or ideas? You can guess?”

“I can guess; but that’s all it would be—a guess.”

“And my guess, folks, is that his guess would be a very highly informed guess. Will you tell the public, First Lensman Samms, what your guess is?”

“I will.” If this reply astonished the newshawk, it staggered Kinnison and the others who knew Samms best. It was, however, a coldly calculated political move. “While it will probably be several weeks before we can furnish detailed and unassailable proof, it is my considered opinion that the Black fleet was built and controlled by the Morgan-Towne-Isaacson machine. That they, all unknown to any of us, enticed, corrupted, and seduced a world, or several worlds, to their program of domination and enslavement. That they intended by armed force to take over the Continent of North America and through it the whole earth and all the other planets adherent to Civilization. That they intended to hunt down and kill every Lensman, and to subvert the Galactic Council to their own ends. This is what you wanted?”

“That’s fine, sir—just what we wanted. But just one more thing, sir.” The newsman had obtained infinitely more than he had expected to get; yet, good newsmanlike, he wanted more. “Just a word, if you will, Mr. Samms, as to these trials and the White Book?”

“I can add very little, I’m afraid, to what I have already said and what is in the book; and that little can be classed as ‘I told you so’. We are trying, and will continue to try, to force those criminals to trial; to break up, to prohibit, an unending series of hair-splitting delays. We want, and are determined to get, legal action; to make each of those we have accused defend himself in court and under oath. Morgan and his crew, however, are working desperately to avoid any action at all, because they know that we can and will prove every allegation we have made.”

The Telenews ace signed off, Samms and Kinnison went to their respective offices, and Cosmocratic orators throughout the nation held a field-day. They glowed and scintillated with triumph. They yelled themselves hoarse, leather-lunged tub-thumpers though they were, in pointing out the unsullied purity, the spotless perfection of their own party and its every candidate for office; in shuddering revulsion at the never-to-be-sufficiently-condemned, proved and demonstrated villainy and blackguardy of the opposition.

And the Nationalists, although they had been dealt a terrific and entirely unexpected blow, worked near-miracles of politics with what they had. Morgan and his minions ranted and raved. They were being jobbed. They were being crucified by the Monied Powers. All those allegations and charges were sheerest fabrications—false, utterly vicious, containing nothing whatever of truth. They, not the Patrol, were trying to force a show-down; to vindicate themselves and to confute those unspeakably unscrupulous Lensmen before Election Day. And they were succeeding! Why, otherwise, had not a single one of the thousands of accused even been arrested? Ask that lying First Lensman, Virgil Samms! Ask that rock-hearted, iron-headed, conscienceless murderer, Roderick Kinnison! But do not, at peril of your sanity, submit your minds to their Lenses!

And why, the reader asks, were not at least some of those named persons arrested before Election Day? And your historian must answer frankly that he does not know. He is not a lawyer. It would be of interest—to some few of us—to follow in detail at least one of those days of legal battling in one of the high courts of the land; to quote verbatim at least a few of the many thousands of pages of transcript: but to most of us the technicalities involved would be boring in the extreme.

But couldn’t the voters tell easily enough which side was on the offensive and which on the defensive? Which pressed for action and which insisted on postponement and delay? They could have, easily enough, if they had cared enough about the basic issues involved to make the necessary mental effort, but almost everyone was too busy doing something else. And it was so much easier to take somebody else’s word for it. And finally, thinking is an exercise to which all too few brains are accustomed.

But Morgan neither ranted nor raved nor blustered when he sat in conference with his faintly-blue superior, who had come storming in as soon as he had learned of the crushing defeat of the Black fleet. The Kalonian was very highly concerned; so much so that the undertone of his peculiar complexion was turning slowly to a delicate shade of green.

“How did that happen? How could it happen? Why was I not informed of the Patrol’s real power—how could you be guilty of such stupidity? Now I’ll have to report to Scrwan of the Eich. He’s pure, undiluted poison—and if word of this catastrophe ever gets up to Ploor…!!!”

“Come down out of the stratosphere, Fernald,” Morgan countered, bitingly. “Don’t try to make me the goat—I won’t sit still for it. It happened because they could build a bigger fleet than we could. You were in on that—all of it. You knew what we were doing, and approved it—all of it. You were as badly fooled as I was. You were not informed because I could find out nothing—I could learn no more of their Bennett than they could of our Petrine. As to reporting, you will of course do as you please; but I would advise you not to cry too much before you’re really hurt. This battle isn’t over yet, my friend.”

The Kalonian had been a badly shaken entity; it was a measure of his state of mind that he did not liquidate the temerarious Tellurian then and there. But since Morgan was as undisturbed as ever, and as sure of himself, he began to regain his wonted aplomb. His color became again its normal pale blue.

“I will forgive your insubordination this time, since there were no witnesses, but use no more such language to me,” he said, stiffly. “I fail to perceive any basis for your optimism. The only chance now remaining is for you to win the election, and how can you do that? You are—must be—losing ground steadily and rapidly.”

“Not as much as you might think.” Morgan pulled down a large, carefully-drawn chart. “This line represents the hide-bound Nationalists, whom nothing we can do will alienate from the party; this one the equally hide-bound Cosmocrats. The balance of power lies, as always, with the independents—these here. And many of them are not as independent as is supposed. We can buy or bring pressure to bear on half of them—that cuts them down to this size here. So, no matter what the Patrol does, it can affect only this relatively small block here, and it is this block we are fighting for. We are losing a little ground, and steadily, yes; since we can’t conceal from anybody with half a brain the fact that we’re doing our best to keep the cases from ever coming to trial. But here’s the actual observed line of sentiment, as determined from psychological indices up to yesterday; here is the extrapolation of that line to Election Day. It forecasts us to get just under forty nine percent of the total vote.”

“And is there anything cheerful about that?” Fernald asked frostily.

“I’ll say there is!” Morgan’s big face assumed a sneering smile, an expression never seen by any voter. “This chart deals only with living, legally registered, bona-fide voters. Now if we can come that close to winning an absolutely honest election, how do you figure we can possibly lose the kind this one is going to be? We’re in power, you know. We’ve got this machine and we know how to use it.”

“Oh, yes, I remember—vaguely. You told me about North American politics once, a few years ago. Dead men, ringers, repeaters, ballot-box stuffing, and so on, you said?”

“‘And so on’ is right, Chief!” Morgan assured him, heartily. “Everything goes, this time. It’ll be one of the biggest landslides in North American history.”

“I will, then, defer any action until after the election.”

“That will be the smart thing to do, Chief; then you won’t have to take any, or make any report at all,” and upon this highly satisfactory note the conference closed.

And Morgan was actually as confident as he had appeared. His charts were actual and factual. He knew the power of money and the effectiveness of pressure; he knew the capabilities of the various units of his machine. He did not, however, know two things: Jill Samms’ insidious, deeply-hidden Voters’ Protective League and the bright flame of loyalty pervading the Galactic Patrol. Thus, between times of bellowing and screaming his carefully-prepared, rabble-rousing speeches, he watched calmly and contentedly the devious workings of his smooth and efficient organization.

Until the day before election, that is. Then hordes of young men and young women went suddenly and briefly to work; at least four in every precinct of the entire nation. They visited, it seemed, every residence and every dwelling unit, everywhere. They asked questions, and took notes, and vanished; and the machine’s operatives, after the alarm was given, could not find man or girl or notebook. And the Galactic Patrol, which had never before paid any attention to elections, had given leave and ample time to its every North American citizen. Vessels of the North American Contingent were grounded and practically emptied of personnel; bases and stations were depopulated; and even from every distant world every Patrolman registered in any North American precinct came to spend the day at home.

Morgan began then to worry, but there was nothing he could do about the situation—or was there? If the civilian boys and girls were checking the registration books—and they were—it was as legally-appointed checkers. If the uniformed boys and girls were all coming home to vote—and they were—that, too, was their inalienable right. But boys and girls were notoriously prone to accident and to debauchery…but again Morgan was surprised; and, this time, taken heavily aback. The web which had protected Grand Rally so efficiently, but greatly enlarged now, was functioning again; and Morgan and his minions spent a sleepless and thoroughly uncomfortable night.

Election Day dawned clear, bright, and cool; auguring a record turn-out. Voting was early and extraordinarily heavy; the polls were crowded. There was, however, very little disorder. Surprisingly little, in view of the fact that the Cosmocratic watchers, instead of being the venal wights of custom, were cold-eyed, unreachable men and women who seemed to know by sight every voter in the precinct. At least they spotted on sight and challenged without hesitation every ringer, every dead one, every repeater, and every imposter who claimed the right to vote. And those challenges, being borne out in every case by the carefully-checked registration lists, were in every case upheld.

Not all of the policemen on duty, especially in the big cities, were above suspicion, of course. But whenever any one of those officers began to show a willingness to play ball with the machine a calm, quiet-eyed Patrolman would remark, casually:

“Better see that this election stays straight, bud, and strictly according to the lists and signatures—or you’re apt to find yourself listed in the big book along with the rest of the rats.”

It was not that the machine liked the way things were going, or that it did not have goon squads on the job. It was that there were, everywhere and always, more Patrolmen than there were goons. And those Patrolmen, however young in years some of them might have appeared to be, were space-bronzed veterans, space-hardened fighting men, armed with the last word in blasters—Lewiston, Mark Seventeen.

To the boy’s friends and neighbors, of course, his Lewiston was practically invisible. It was merely an article of clothing, the same as his pants. It carried no more of significance, of threat or of menace, than did the pistol and the club of the friendly Irish cop on the beat. But the goon did not see the Patrolman as a friend. He saw the keen, clear, sharply discerning eyes; the long, strong fingers; the smoothly flowing muscles, so eloquent of speed and of power. He saw the Lewiston for what it was; the deadliest, most destructive hand-weapon known to man. Above all he saw the difference in numbers: six or seven or eight Patrolmen to four or five or six of his own kind. If more hoods arrived, so did more spacemen; if some departed, so did a corresponding number of the wearers of the space-black and silver.

“Ain’t you getting tired of sticking around here, George?” One mobster asked confidentially of one Patrolman. “I am. What say we and some of you fellows round up some girls and go have us a party?”

“Uh-uh,” George denied. His voice was gay and careless, but his eyes were icy cold. “My uncle’s cousin’s stepson is running for second assistant dog-catcher, and I can’t leave until I find out whether he wins or not.”

Thus nothing happened; thus the invisible but nevertheless terrific tension did not erupt into open battle; and thus, for the first time in North America’s long history, a presidential election was ninety nine and ninety nine one-hundredths percent pure!

Evening came. The polls closed. The Cosmocrats’ headquarters for the day, the Grand Ballroom of the Hotel van der Voort, became the goal of every Patrolman who thought he stood any chance at all of getting in. Kinnison had been there all day, of course. So had Joy, his wife, who for lack of space has been sadly neglected in these annals. Betty, their daughter, had come in early, accompanied by a husky and personable young lieutenant, who has no other place in this story. Jack Kinnison arrived, with Dimples Maynard—dazzlingly blonde, wearing a screamingly red wisp of silk. She, too, has been shamefully slighted here, although she was never slighted anywhere else.

“The first time I ever saw her,” Jack was wont to say, “I went right into a flat spin, running around in circles and biting myself in the small of the back, and couldn’t pull out of it for four hours!”

That Miss Maynard should be a very special item is not at all surprising, in view of the fact that she was to become the wife of one of THE Kinnisons and the mother of another.

The First Lensman, who had been in and out, came in to stay. So did Jill and her inseparable, Mason Northrop. And so did others, singly or by twos or threes. Lensmen and their wives. Conway and Clio Costigan, Dr. and Mrs. Rodebush, and Cleveland, Admiral and Mrs. Clayton, ditto Schweikert, and Dr. Nels Bergenholm. And others. Nor were they all North Americans, or even human. Rularion was there; and so was blocky, stocky Dronvire of Rigel Four. No outsider could tell, ever, what any Lensman was thinking, to say nothing of such a monstrous Lensman as Dronvire—but that hotel was being covered as no political headquarters had ever been covered before.

The returns came in, see-sawing maddeningly back and forth. Faster and faster. The Maritime Provinces split fifty-fifty. Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont, Cosmocrat. New York, upstate, Cosmocrat. New York City, on the basis of incomplete but highly significant returns, was piling up a huge Nationalist majority. Pennsylvania—labor—Nationalist. Ohio—farmers—Cosmocrat. Twelve southern states went six and six. Chicago, as usual, solidly for the machine; likewise Quebec and Ottawa and Montreal and Toronto and Detroit and Kansas City and St. Louis and New Orleans and Denver.

Then northern and western and far southern states came in and evened the score. Saskatchewan, Alberta, Britcol, and Alaska, all went Cosmocrat. So did Washington, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, Newmex, and most of the states of Mexico.

At three o’clock in the morning the Cosmocrats had a slight but definite lead and were, finally, holding it. At four o’clock the lead was larger, but California was still an unknown quantity—California could wreck everything. How would California go? Especially, how would California’s two metropolitan districts—the two most independent and free-thinking and least predictable big cities of the nation—how would they go?

At five o’clock California seemed safe. Except for Los Angeles and San Francisco, the Cosmocrats had swept the state, and in those two great cities they held a commanding lead. It was still mathematically possible, however, for the Nationalists to win.

“It’s in the bag! Let’s start the celebration!” someone shouted, and others took up the cry.

“Stop it! No!” Kinnison’s parade-ground voice cut through the noise. “No celebration is in order or will be held until the result becomes certain or Witherspoon concedes!”

The two events came practically together: Witherspoon conceded a couple of minutes before it became mathematically impossible for him to win. Then came the celebration, which went on and on interminably. At the first opportunity, however, Kinnison took Samms by the arm, led him without a word into a small office, and shut the door. Samms, also saying nothing, sat down in the swivel chair, put both feet up on the desk, lit a cigarette, and inhaled deeply.

“Well, Virge—satisfied?” Kinnison broke the silence at last. His Lens was off. “We’re on our way.”

“Yes, Rod. Fully. At last.” No more than his friend did he dare to use his Lens; to plumb the depths he knew so well were there. “Now it will roll—under its own power—no one man now is or ever will be indispensable to the Galactic Patrol—nothing can stop it now!”

EPILOGUE

The murder of Senator Morgan, in his own private office, was never solved. If it had occurred before the election, suspicion would certainly have fallen upon Roderick Kinnison, but as it was it did not. By no stretch of the imagination could anyone conceive of “Rod the Rock” kicking a man after he had knocked him down. Not that Morgan did not have powerful and vindictive enemies in the underworld: he had so many that it proved impossible to fasten the crime to any one of them.

Officially, Kinnison was on a five-year leave of absence from the Galactic Patrol, the office of Port Admiral had been detached entirely from the fleet and assigned to the Office of the President of North America. Actually, however, in every respect that counted, Roderick Kinnison was still Port Admiral, and would remain so until he died or until the Council retired him by force.

Officially, Kinnison was taking a short, well-earned vacation from the job in which he had been so outstandingly successful. Actually, he was doing a quick flit to Petrine, to get personally acquainted with the new Lensmen and to see what kind of a job they were doing. Besides, Virgil Samms was already there.

He arrived. He got acquainted. He saw. He approved.

“How about coming back to Tellus with me, Virge?” he asked, when the visiting was done. “I’ve got to make a speech, and it’d be nice to have you hold my head.”

“I’d be glad to,” and the Chicago took off.

Half of North America was dark when they neared Tellus; all of it, apparently, was obscured by clouds. Only the navigating officers of the vessel knew where they were, nor did either of the two Lensmen care. They were having too much fun arguing about the talents and abilities of their respective grandsons.

The Chicago landed. A bug was waiting. The two Lensmen, without an order being given, were whisked away. Samms had not asked where the speech was to be given, and Kinnison simply did not realize that he had not told him all about it. Thus Samms had no idea that he was just leaving Spokane Spaceport, Washington.

After a few miles of fast, open-country driving the bug reached the city. It slowed down, swung into brightly-lighted Maple Street, and passed a sign reading “Cannon Hill” something-or-other—neither of which names meant anything to either Lensman.

Kinnison looked at his friend’s red-thatched head and glanced at his watch.

“Looking at you reminds me—I need a haircut,” he remarked. “Should have got one aboard, but didn’t think of it Joy told me if I come home without it she’ll braid it in pigtails and tie it up with pink ribbons, and you’re shaggier than I am. You’ve got to get one or else buy yourself a violin. What say we do it now?”

“Have we got time enough?”

“Plenty.” Then, to the driver: “Stop at the first barber shop you see, please.”

“Yes, sir. There’s a good one a few blocks further along.”

The bug sped down Maple Street, turned sharply into plainly-marked Twelfth Avenue. Neither Lensman saw the sign.

“Here you are, sir.”

“Thanks.”

There were two barbers and two chairs, both empty. The Lensmen, noticing that the place was neatly kept and meticulously clean, sat down and resumed their discussion of two extremely unusual infants. The barbers went busily to work.

“Just as well, though—better, really—that the kids didn’t marry each other, at that,” Kinnison concluded finally. “The way it is, we’ve each got a grandson—it’d be tough to have to share one with you.”

Samms made no reply to this sally, for something was happening. The fact that this fair-skinned, yellow-haired blue-eyed barber was left-handed had not rung any bells—there were lots of left-handed barbers. He had neither seen nor heard the cat—a less-than-half-grown, gray, tiger-striped kitten—which, after standing up on its hind legs to sniff ecstatically at his nylon-clad ankles, had uttered a couple of almost inaudible “meows” and had begun to purr happily. Crouching, tensing its strong little legs, it leaped almost vertically upward. Its tail struck the barber’s elbow.

Hastily brushing the kitten aside, and beginning profuse apologies both for his awkwardness and for the presence of the cat—he had never done such a thing before and he would drown him forthwith—the barber applied a styptic pencil and recollection hit Samms a pile-driver blow.

“Well, I’m a…!” He voiced three highly un-Samms-like, highly specific expletives which, as Mentor had foretold so long before, were both self-derogatory and profane. Then, as full realization dawned, he bit a word squarely in two.

“Excuse me, please, Mr. Carbonero, for this outrageous display. It was not the scratch, nor was any of it your fault Nothing you could have done would have.…”

“You know my name?” the astonished barber interrupted.

“Yes. You were…ah…recommended to me by a…a friend.…” Whatever Samms could say would make things worse. The truth, wild as it was, would have to be told, at least in part. “You do not look like an Italian, but perhaps you have enough of that racial heritage to believe in prophecy?”

“Of course, sir. There have always been prophets—true prophets.”

“Good. This event was foretold in detail; in such complete detail that I was deeply, terribly shocked. Even to the kitten. You call it Thomas.”

“Yes, sir. Thomas Aquinas.”

“It is actually a female. In here, Thomasina!” The kitten had been climbing enthusiastically up his leg; now, as he held a pocket invitingly open, she sprang into it, settled down, and began to purr blissfully. While the barbers and Kinnison stared pop-eyed Samms went on:

“She is determined to adopt me, and it would be a shame not to requite such affection. Would you part with her—for, say, ten credits?”

“Ten credits! I’ll be glad to give her to you for nothing!”

“Ten it is, then. One more thing. Rod, you always carry a pocket rule. Measure this scratch, will you? You’ll find it’s mighty close to three millimeters long.”

“Not ‘close’, Virge—it’s exactly three millimeters, as near as this vernier can scale it.”

“And just above and parallel to the cheek-bone.”

“Check. Just above and as parallel as though it had been ruled there by a draftsman.”

“Well, that’s that. Let’s get finished with the haircuts, before you’re late for your speech,” and the barbers, with thoughts which will be left to the imagination, resumed their interrupted tasks.

“Spill it, Virge!” Kinnison Lensed the pent-up thought. If Carbonero, who did not know Samms at all, had been amazed at what had been happening, Kinnison, who had known him so long and so well, had been literally and completely dumbfounded. “What in hell’s behind this? What’s the story? GIVE!”

Samms told him, and a mental silence fell; a silence too deep for intelligible thought. Each was beginning to realize that he never would and never could know what Mentor of Arisia really was.

REINCARNATE, by Lester del Rey

Originally published in Astounding, April 1940.

I

Thorne Boyd lay in a dark tarry pit under black stars that threw out hot blinding points of jagged lightning. And the lightning was aimed at him, crashing down in a steady tumult of sound that shattered into his mind and kept him from fainting. Where the pinpoint lightning struck, pain lanced out with soul-tearing force that threatened to sear his flesh from his bones. It was hot and cold, and all the sensations of a lifetime seemed determined to pile up on him in one malefic swoop.

The sensation was too much for his body; it tore itself away from him, leaving his brain stranded in the pit, and went tearing off through the turgid blackness. Without senses, his mind yet followed it, striving to draw it back.

“Come back, body!” he yelled at it, but there was no sound save the thundering yammering of the lightning. That seemed in some mysterious way to sense his ultimate nakedness, for it crashed down more fiercely, and the black stars threw off their veils, revealing themselves as vultures soaring in a murky sky. With inexorable precision, they wheeled slowly down toward him, beady red eyes feasting on the sight of his naked brain.

Wild thoughts ran through his mind. “Poe’d love this—only they aren’t ravens.” Then there was no time for thought. The monsters were so near that their wings beat a brazen cacophony in his ears. He had to leave. In a frenzied struggle, he thrust out wisps of matter from his brain to serve as legs and began running, running—but the smooth surface of the pit held him fast, and his false legs were too weak. The birds sank lower. One of them came to rest.

A strong beat, as of a heart, pulsed madly through his mind, and he let out one frantic cry that reverberated in a pitch too high for sound. Then his mind tore free and went soaring down and away, through Stygian depths that went on endlessly, toward some unknown goal. Something snapped.

“Crazy dream,” he thought. Or was it? He was still in darkness, set with jagged flashes of light that formed no pattern, and sound that rushed on in a muffled discordant roar. Pain was all about him. But the insanity of fear was gone, and he began groping for a rational solution.

He could not feel his body, though that was due to the pain, probably. There had been an accident—or was that a part of the dream? And today was to be his wedding day. He struggled to get up, but his only response was a fresh stab of pain. Well, if he had to lie there, there was no other solution. Maybe there had been an accident, fatal—and this might be Hell. It certainly wasn’t the other place.

Boyd settled his mind into rough order and subdued the larger part of the fear. The immediate past was still clouded, but perhaps if he went back over it, starting at the beginning of the day, some clue would come. If nothing else, a chronological review would take his mind off his present condition.

* * * *

It had been the big day toward which they had been working. The smokestacks were throwing out their columns of inky oil smoke, telling of power feeding into the turbines that furnished the station with a steady, dependable supply of high-voltage, direct-current electricity. Allan Moss, old and bent, but still with the hot fire that had made him the world’s greatest mathematician and physicist, was helping Boyd inspect the safety suits.

“Lot of good they’ll do if anything happens in there,” he grunted. “You better let me go in alone, Thorne.”

Boyd shook his head, and his eyes traveled past to a figure motioning for him around the corner. Moss followed his gaze and chuckled. “Go on, son, don’t keep her waiting.”

Joan Abbot’s dark hair was flying in the wind, her eyes filled with bubbling deviltry that seemed never to leave them. “Meany,” she greeted him. “I’ll bet you forgot that tomorrow was to be our day. You and your old work.”

He grinned at her awkwardly, not quite sure of her banter, but pleased by it, as always. He needed her lightness and gaiety, her willingness to find the sunnier side of everything in direct contrast to his own character. Seen through her eyes, life must be a wonderful thing. Time had taught him that under the effervescence and impulsive enthusiasm there was a mind he could meet and respect.

“I haven’t forgotten. Moss has agreed to drive us away as soon as he can get rid of your father, and I have the license in my pocket. Only I wish you’d let me tell your father we’re being married.”

“No, you can’t do that. Wait till it’s over and I’ll spring it on the old dear. Mmm, and won’t he growl, though! But it never does him any good.” She gurgled and stretched herself up on tiptoes to grab for his neck. “Let’s run away now! Let’s, Thorne.”

“No can do.” He scraped his unshaven face down against hers, grinning slowly as she slapped at him. “Anyway, you’re only teasing me.”

She crinkled her nose up at him. “How’d you guess? Mmm.” The pause that became necessary was definitely not unpleasant. “All right, Pickleface, you can go back to your work, but if you leave me at the altar—”

Moss looked up at them and tucked an almost paternal smile away in the corner of his mouth. “Been poking your nose into things that were none of your business again, youngster?” he asked her.

She nodded, peering over his shoulder at the suits. “Mm-hmm. One of the men opened the casing around your atom-smasher and let me look inside. I promised him I wouldn’t tell you who he was.”

“And did you understand anything you saw?”

“A little. I’ve been studying lately, so I’d know what Thorne is doing. He’ll talk about his work all the time, and a good wife should understand, shouldn’t she? What’s a restrictive field, Dr. Moss?”

Moss shoved the work aside and sat down opposite her. He was always willing to answer her eternal questions, and managed somehow to make it clear. Something inside the old scientist went out to the insatiable curiosity that filled her. “A restrictive field is just what its name implies. It’s a field of force generated around something and designed to hold that something within certain limits or patterns. You might say that a magnet exerts such a field on iron filings to keep them from scattering and line them up in definite patterns. Only we’re using a field to hold neutrons in the uranium ‘fuel’ and not let them dissipate uselessly as they try to. Understand?”

“Mm. Well enough.” She ran curious fingers inside the suit and examined it. “What’s this for?”

“In case there’s trouble inside. Just an added precaution.” Boyd picked her up and set her out of his way while she squeezed his nose with a little hand. The cooing sound she made embarrassed him, but he wouldn’t have made her stop it for an extra arm. “Dr. Moss and I aren’t taking any risk, you see.”

She appealed to Moss again, a serious note in her voice. “Why do either of you have to go? Couldn’t you control it from outside or use automatic machinery?”

“Not well enough. Automatic machinery can’t do things it isn’t designed for. When we start ripping atoms to pieces, we’ll have to expect the unexpected. That’s what men were built for—emergencies.”

She brushed her hair away from troubled eyes, and a frown had taken the place of her impish deviltry. “Thorne, I’m scared. Call it a sudden premonition, if you like, but don’t go in there. Or let me go with you. Please.”

“You stay out here and it’ll be over before you know it. There’s no real danger,” he assured her. “If we thought there were, we wouldn’t be going in, would we?”

“But if there’s no danger, why can’t I go in with you?”

“Because—” Feminine logic was too direct at times. “Well, your father…”

“Speaking of me?” The voice came from behind them, thin and crisp, that of a man used to giving orders without the need of backing them up with anything but money. They saw the tall, heavy figure of John Abbot entering the doorway.

Moss covered quickly. “Just warning your daughter not to go fooling around while the experiment’s in progress. She’s a science bug, you know, poking her nose into everything. Ordinarily, I like it, but not today.”

“Okay, meanies.” Joan grinned at them, though it looked a little forced, and kissed her fingers at Boyd with her back toward her father, then went tripping out, an odd look of determination on her face. Abbot squatted down on a box and watched them dourly.

“Better work,” he grunted. “Some of the men are complaining about the money we’ve invested in this, with no results for two years. I still don’t see why you needed all this for an experiment.”

“I warned you it’d take five years, maybe.” Moss had the patience with work and men that necessity develops in scientists. “And in dabbling with atoms, there is no small-scale experiment. The results gained then mean nothing. Finished, Thorne?”

“Yeah, the suits are in good condition. Mica’s clear and the asbestos hasn’t been damaged.”

“Good.” Moss picked up one and Boyd followed with the other, leaving Abbot staring after them. They slipped through the doors of the great barnlike experimental building and began donning their suits by the control table at one side of the forty-foot shell encasing the atom-blaster.

Boyd looked at Moss and voiced the question that had been troubling him for months. “How’d you ever pry the money out of Sourpuss in the first place?”

“I didn’t. He heard the government was planning to finance my experiment and came after me on double-quick. Had visions of what government control of atomic power would mean to his utilities, and got the other financiers in with him. It’s the first time he’s had an employee whose orders had to be followed, and he doesn’t like it.” Moss chuckled. “Wonder what he’ll say when you run off with his daughter?”

“Lord knows. Probably try to fire me, but I’m counting on you and her to pull me through that, if our work succeeds; anyway, if it does, he won’t kick too hard. What are you planning to do after this is over?”

“Publish my monograph on restrictive fields and mathematical concepts of atomic disruption—the one with the new type of math I’ve spent two years teaching you.” His heavily gloved fingers found the zipper on the suit finally and pulled it up, muffling his words. “After that, I’ll probably visit Norman Meisner at City Hospital. Haven’t seen him for years, and he’s invited me down to see his latest miracle.”

Thorne grunted as the zipper on his own suit slid up. “I was reading about that miracle; something about his taking a dog’s brain and putting it in some mechanical body where it learned to wag its tail, wasn’t it? The newspaper account gave practically no information.”

“Something like that. Ready?”

“Ready!” Boyd watched the indicators as Moss turned on power into the restrictive fields that would limit the spread of neutrons and stabilize atomic breakdown. For a split second he imagined he caught a flash of movement in one corner of the building, but there was nothing there when he looked. He turned back to the panel. Power was already swelling out.

Moss leaned over, yelling above the sound of the machinery. “Looks good, eh?” A sudden flash of red sent him darting back, and his hand groped for a switch. Then a roar of light, heat, and sound cascaded out from the big shell!

For a fraction of a second, there was a scream in Boyd’s ear, and he felt his hands clutch at the control switch. Then his mind blacked out, leaving only a numb nightmare of agony.

It could have been only a few seconds later when the agony brought consciousness back again. He made groping movements that sent cold throbs up to join the killing pain, and from the motions, a picture of his own condition sprang into being. His arms were half gone, there were no legs, and the body of which he had been so sure was only the withered hulk of a man—a cinder left miraculously behind to mark the fury of the atom flame! From the pain, part of his face must have been torn away, and sight and sound were gone.

Desperation killed the pain temporarily, and he fought to shout. He was on something that gave like sand, and the dull thuds around him could be only the earth vibrations of footsteps coming at a run. The blast must have thrown him free of the building, out onto the ground, and the other men were just coming up.

A faint idea was in his head, though the torture of existence fought against it. Sand below him, the stump of an arm—and no other means of telling what he wanted.

A convulsive heave threw him to what should have been his knees, and the right stump of his elbow bit down into the sand. He had only muscular memory to guide him, and the letters would have to be big. “MEISNER,” the stub scrawled, and he fought backward against restraining hands that were meant to soothe him. Then: “CITY HOSP—N—” The “Y” was only half completed when his body refused to stand more and collapsed.

Now he was here—wherever here was—with only a dim idea that too much time had passed. The review of the past had only suggested that he was dead and in Hell—or in City Hospital. And that would mean—

The brain of a dog in a metal case, wagging a tail. Meisner of City Hospital, with the charred body of what had been a man, and only the first few experiments to pave the way. Boyd writhed mentally in the fantastic horror to which he had awakened and hoped suddenly that he was dead and in Hades. That at least would give him a background of familiarity. The other possibility was beyond the imagination.

II

Norman Meisner had left Germany as a boy. Had he remained, he might have become a great engineer, as he had planned. Instead, by a long chain of circumstances, he now held the reputation of being the greatest experimental surgeon on the American continent, and his word was law in the newly built experimental wing that had been added to City Hospital. Medicine was finally learning the value of “abstract” science.

“Morning, Papa Meisner,” a trim nurse greeted him, and he chuckled amiably at the surprised expression that crossed the face of his companion.

“Discipline is not good, eh? But when it is brains that are needed, should a man bother with so small things? No, I think not. It is when they are happy they work best.”

Dr. Martin nodded in half agreement. “You seem to get results, anyway. That’s all the board’s interested in. It isn’t official yet, but they’ve decided to vote you the money you’ve been asking to continue this latest thing of yours.”

“I don’t need their money now. It is recently I have acquired a new donation—for experimental work only—from a rich man. I have work from him to do, as you shall see after this.” He led the way down the hall to his private laboratory and smiled at the tall young man waiting outside. “The reporters all here, Tom?”

“All here. Hello, Dr. Martin.”

Martin nodded at him. “Finished your course yet, Tom?”

“Full-fledged engineer now. But I’ve been helping Dad with the mechanical end of this new work—sort of ex officio.”

They followed Meisner in and worked their way through the representatives of the press until they were standing beside a gleaming metal box that lay on a bare table, with only a small magnetic speaker in front of it. Its smooth surface was broken by a hole at one end and a short rubber tube that projected from the other. From inside came a faint hum and a regular muffled thudding.

“Good morning, gentlemen,” Meisner greeted the reporters. “Now if you’ll let me run this little show to my satisfaction… Rex, wake up!”

The tube at the rear came to sudden life and began twitching in a haphazard fashion, and a rough whining sound was emitted from the speaker. The reporters stared at it curiously, though they knew roughly what it was.

One of them started to ask a question, and the tube stopped its beating at the new sound; the speaker made a hoarse, sharp noise, almost like a bark. The barking continued until Meisner made soothing sounds that quieted it. The plump little physician patted his stomach fondly, opened the top of the box, and pointed inside.

“Life,” he began, “must have food and air for energy, water to serve as a liquid medium, no? Good. And it must have blood to carry them, and something to remove the waste matter from the cells, or the blood. Also, to survive is needed white corpuscles or some other defense to kill destructive organisms, such as bacilli. Here, I have them all. When my Rex is run over, I fix him up a new body for his brain—not good, maybe, but better than nothing.

“See, here is the brain case and the big blood vessels are connected to this mechanical heart—a refinement I make on the Lindbergh-Carrel pump which you know, maybe. Here is a jet air infuser for a lung; blood goes in, loses carbonic acid gas, and picks up oxygen. So. Then up through the brain, down into this glass kidney—the same that Lindbergh also worked on—and the life-poisons come out and are a trouble no more. This is the stomach, where predigested food enters the blood by osmosis.”

The newspapermen were impressed, but hardly amazed. Most of them had seen pieces of chicken’s heart kept alive by the use of the Lindbergh pump and kidney before. This was merely a refinement of that, though the use of an entire brain was a big forward step. “I suppose you put in new blood as the old red corpuscles break down?” one of them asked.

“Ach, that is the beauty of this; blood I do not use.” Meisner waited for their reactions until satisfied that they were properly curious. “I have a new substitute for blood. It carries food, air, and water, just as does the real, but there is no breaking down. That is the great advance.”

Dr. Martin stared at him with sudden interest. “How about its effects on the cells? I suppose it’s some nontoxic organic compound with a loose affinity for oxygen, but do the cells work well with it?”

“Perfectly. And—” He tapped a small chamber that had been overlooked. “Here it is sterilized. With real blood, that could not be, no? Real blood has white bodies that fight disease, but my blood washes the germs through this and poof—they are dead. I have given my brain all that is needed for life.”

“Yeah, but how’d you get the brain in there without letting it die? And what starts the magnets that wag its ‘tail’?”

Meisner shrugged. “Have you no imagination? First the blood vessels are opened and reconnected one by one, so life does not stop, until the artificial heart does all the work. Then my liquid replaces the blood, and the brain is moved to its new case—not before. And the nerve endings, which conduct faint currents of electricity from the brain, are hooked up to platinum filaments. So. And their so faint electric impulse is boosted in relays to operate the magnets and the speaker which is connected to two modulators, one for the whine and the other a bark.”

He held up his hands to silence their instant protests. “So, you know nobody can trace out individual nerves, eh? That is true. But I can locate nerve bundles that lead to the ears, throat, and tail, and separate the sensory nerve bundles from the motor impulse bundles. I attach the bundles on the right places, not separating nerves, and hope maybe the brain gets some sensation—and it does. Two months Rex has had to learn in, and already he knows my voice and his name. Rex!”

Again the speaker whined and the tube that served as a tail twitched. It beat in a hopelessly disordered fashion, but apparently any beat seemed better than none to the dog’s mind. The reporters examined it again, checked up on their information, and began filing out.

“Going to use it on a man sometime?” one of them asked as a parting shot.

“Why not, maybe?” Meisner turned to his son as they left and he grinned. “Maybe we use it on a man, eh? Tom, shall we honor the fine Herr Doktor Martin with our latest efforts?”

Tom’s grin answered him. “If it won’t shock the esteemed Dr. Martin.”

Martin stared from one to the other, making no sense of their expressions. “Why so darned mysterious?”

Meisner took his hand on one side, and Tom marched around him to the other. “You now have the honor, Dr. Martin, of seeing—oh, skip it, come on and see for yourself. It really isn’t funny, after all.”

Dr. Charles Martin followed along meekly enough, as they led him, and light began to dawn. Unless he was mistaken seriously, what he was about to see had something to do with the reporter’s last question.

III

Boyd fought against himself in the crazy world of chaotic sensation to which he seemed doomed, and sudden darkness rolled down over him, cutting off the disordered jumble of varicolored light that had been torturing his eyes—or where his eyes had been. With a sense of pride he realized he’d done the equivalent at least of closing his eyelids.

But the dark emphasized the solitude of the place. There was still a rushing confusion of sound, but the hours he had lain there had dimmed his consciousness of it until it formed a hazy pattern in his mind. The pains were less sharp now, mercifully.

But there was no mercy for him. In spite of himself, his mind insisted on speculating on death, though the more rational thoughts insisted that this could not be death.

A sudden torrent of fresh sound struck down on him, not loud but raucous in disorder. The sounds grew louder and changed, and he guessed that something or someone was coming closer to him. He tried to see, and again his eyes acted without his knowledge of how. Stronger light lanced out, flickering for a moment, and then burning hotly. His struggles to close his eyes again only resulted in a harsher glare, as if his pupils had dilated.

The confused sounds kept on, and there was something in the rise and fall of them that suggested speech. They were clearer than the other noises. Boyd cried out, or tried to, and was startled to hear a grating jangle. It couldn’t have been his voice, yet he was sure it had come from him.

The other noises stopped momentarily, and then the sound he had made was repeated, slightly changed but recognizable. Surely no human throat could have imitated it—a hyena, perhaps, but not a man. He tried again, getting a different noise this time, and it was repeated by the other.

There was a silence for a moment, and a clear tone broke in, different from the rest. It was hoarse, but lacked the confusion of all former sounds. “Dit-dit-dit-dit,” it said in short clicks. Then there was a slight pause, and it began again, this time in longer signals mixed with the short ones. “Dit…dit-dah-dit-dit…dit-dah-dit-dit…dah dah-dah.”

The short clicks and longer ones resembled something he had heard. He groped around in his mind, seeking the answer, and finally found it. The irregular frequency was that of a telegraph sounder, and the clicks must be code. It came again, and he listened more closely, piecing out the letters. “H…E…?…?…O.”

“Hello!” That was what they were saying. But his knowledge of code was too limited. As a boy, he had known a friend who operated a ham station, but all he had ever learned were the symbols for THE, I, and SOS. That gave six letters out of twenty-six. He started to return the signal they sent with whatever noise his throat chose to make, depending on the length instead of articulation of sound, but thought better of it. If he made no reply, they might realize he could not understand.

There was a conference of noises, and the clicking again, all short this time. One click, space, two clicks, space, three—They were running over the numbers in the simplest of codes. Clumsily he repeated, and the numbering left off. Then the clicker reverted to a series of mixed short and long sounds, with spaces coming in irregular order. He counted the sounds between spaces and made out twenty-six. As the signals started again, he checked. The fifth was E, the eighth H, and the others fitted in. They were sending the alphabet for him to memorize. He selected four of the most necessary letters and concentrated on them until he was sure he could make an intelligible sentence.

“Where am I?”

There was an excited buzzing of sounds, and the clicker broke out quickly, “-o- are i- the -it- hos-ita- to -et we—.” So he was in City Hospital and they were trying to patch up what was left of him. But how much was that. Something was wrong with his sight, his hearing, and his voice, and he had no ability to move any other part—or at least could feel no response.

The alphabet was running through again, certain letters emphasized by longer space between them this time. He made a sound when satisfied that he knew them, and the sounder began picking out words slowly and carefully.

“This is Meisner. You are making out well. You must rest now. We will make you well. We must leave now. The machine that makes ABC will stay to keep teaching you. You must not worry.”

Even the simple sentences brought half comfort, suggesting as they did the possibility of communication. Boyd made the proper sounds for “yes,” and the noises that were voices began to fade away. The machine kept up its alphabetical discourse.

They were almost gone when Boyd remembered the questions he must ask and shouted. There was a series of increasing sounds, and a voice answered.

“Moss?” he spelled.

“Dead!”

“How long?”

“A month,” the answer came. “No worry. All is well.”

Then the voices receded again, and he knew he was alone. So Moss was dead, and it was a month since he had been conscious. They must have kept his mind drugged while the pain of healing was going on, and the ache he was now experiencing must come from muddled sensations. A month, while he had lain here in a fog, and the world had gone on without him.

It must have been hell for Joan, he thought. Next time the men came to see him, he’d ask about her, if he wasn’t too horrible for her to see. Perhaps it would be better if she never visited him. As a future husband, he was a washout.

The clicking of the machine called his mind back, and he turned his thoughts to the code, glad for a reason to forget all the troubles that were looming up for the future. Hours sped by, and the machine buzzed on, leaving the alphabet for simple primer sentences. He seemed to have no desire for sleep, and the light flashes finally disappeared, leaving him in darkness that was soothing. Some of the noises in the background disappeared, and he realized it was night.

The machine went back to simple words, and there was a new element “Man” it spelled out. “M.” The letter was followed by a different noise, then “A” and another. Finally the whole word was spelled in completion and a longer noise that resembled the voice sounds of the men. They were trying to teach him to speak!

The sounds that followed the letters seemed all alike at first, but slowly he noted minor differences that clarified as he studied them. They bore no resemblance to speech as he remembered it, being a jumble of whistles, buzzes, and things for which there was no name. Dutifully, he tried to imitate them, but the response was disheartening. In the hours that followed he learned there were just thirty-one sounds he could make, and that making them in any logical order was going to take education. His voice refused to respond to the old patterns of speech in any sensible fashion. And some of the sounds he had regarded as primary were now made up of more than one. A vowel might require two or more sounds blended in rapid order.

But slowly the distinctions between the sounds he could hear became plainer, and he was able to grasp in a dim way the meaning of a few words out of each simple sentence before the code form was spelled out. It was slow, grim work and only the desperate urge for knowledge of himself drove him on.

Light was streaking back again as he made his last efforts at speech. Surprisingly enough, at the twentieth time ordered sound came out. “I am.” The words that man had first spoken in the dim past when consciousness of self was new. Now they marked a milestone in his progress as great as that first effort.

He could not repeat them, though he tried. But what he had done once could be done again, in time; he might learn even to recognize the weird conglomeration that constituted speech for him with a semblance of ease. At least he would not be doomed forever to solitude.

He was! For the time, that would have to suffice.

IV

“The prince kissed her lightly,” oozed the telegraphone with nice unction, “and Sleeping Beauty opened her eyes and smiled at him. Then they were married and lived happily ever after.”

Boyd swore mentally at the recording. It wasn’t bad enough to stay awake twenty-four hours a day in Hell, but they had to furnish recordings to remind him of his sleepless condition. Not that he needed sleep, apparently. But a little merciful oblivion would have been welcome. Still, the machine was familiarizing him with the hoots and gargles that represented spoken language.

Grumbling to himself, he turned his attention to the chart that hung over him. By a series of manipulations that normally would have made his eyes act in a distinctly abnormal manner, he finally focused on it and began piecing out the characters. They all looked like blobs of wax that had been left too long in the sun, but careful study was bringing some sense out of them.

He could recognize the straight lines now, and a few letters of the alphabet, though he had to take their words about the beauty of the girl’s face in the central picture. So far, motion was the only thing that registered properly, when he could keep it in focus.

“Like using the faceted eyes of an insect,” he growled. Then it didn’t sound right; he repeated it. That was better. His new voice still insisted on getting the whistle that went with “k” mixed up with the rushing cough that stood for “e.”

Someone was at the door, coming toward him, from the sound. He waited until a moving blob registered on his eyes, looked for what he had come to know as a beard, and decided from its absence that the visitor was Tom Meisner. There was another figure with him, thinner, and also without a beard.

“Hello, Boyd.” Tom’s clear-cut English identified him further. “I’ve brought you a visitor—Mr. Abbot.”

Looking at the other, Boyd decided it did look something like Abbot. Careful inspection revealed the bald spot on the man’s head, and he felt a sudden glow of pride at his achievement. Then it disappeared into the usual gloom. “Hello,” he said slowly. “I didn’t expect to see you, Mr. Abbot.”

“And why not?” From the speed of the words, the question was probably meant to be good-natured, though the fine nuances of tone failed to register. “You’ve been costing me a small fortune, Thorne, so I figured I might as well see what was coming of it.”

“You’ve been paying for me?” It was news to Boyd, though he had wondered about the financial end of it. “Why?”

Something that might have been a chuckle came from Abbot. “Not from sentimental reasons, as you’ve guessed. I’ve been paying because I need your memory and knowledge. When I saw what you’d scrawled in the sand, I figured you’d learned something that might prove the solution to the problem of power, and took you to Meisner. What was it?”

“Mostly nothing. Instinct of self-preservation, I guess, made me write that. You’ve had experts go over the wreck?”

“Naturally, and they don’t understand it. Some of Moss’s notes are incomplete, and the equipment is pretty well ruined. The other investors in the work are yelling about the money they’ve put in, and I’ve got to show results.” Abbot paused, and Boyd guessed which one of the investors was most worried about the money. “At least, you can supply the information in the missing notes.”

“It wouldn’t do any good, sir. All I know is that the field we’d built up collapsed just after it started, and the experiment went wild before the neutrons were dissipated enough for the reaction to stop. Theory doesn’t explain that, and another test might give you more things like me. If I could go over the wreck and try again, I might find the trouble. But—”

“Good.” Abbot picked up his hat and started to leave. “Hurry up and learn to use your arms and legs, and I’ll see you don’t lose if it works.” He motioned Tom back and went out the door alone, leaving Boyd’s mind in a state of numbed shock.

Learn to use his arms and legs! He’d been thinking of himself as a brain in a box, with nothing but the senses of sight and hearing, but that was apparently false. Now, perhaps he wasn’t like the dog in the newspaper item. Perhaps—Fifty wild conjectures ran through his mind in the half second it took him to call Tom.

Young Meisner sat down within range of his sight, and his voice was low and calm. “I know, Boyd. Take it easy. We didn’t tell you about it because we wanted you to spend all your time learning to see and talk. But you’re about as complete as we can make you. Ever read any of those robot stories?”

“Yes, but—”

“Well, in a rough way, that’s what you are now. There wasn’t enough of your body left to save, so we gave you a new one. In some ways, it can’t equal the old one, but it has points of superiority. The blood system insures your brain against disease and fatigue. You’ll never need sleep because all poisons are removed as they form. You’ll never have to worry about your body wearing out, because new parts can be added. And you’ll probably live longer than Methuselah, since your brain cells are perfectly fed and cared for. For instance, the thermostatic controls that keep your brain and spinal cord at the right temperature are far more sensitive and dependable than the normal bodily methods.”

Some of those, Boyd decided, weren’t assets. He’d have given a lot for one night’s sleep and forgetfulness, and the idea of living a long time might prove a mixed blessing. But there was no use of complaining about that. “How’d you do it?”

“By combining Dad’s surgical skill with what I know of engineering, and getting a lot of outside help,” Tom answered. “Your ears are vocoders, breaking down sound into its basic elements. For a voice, you have the opposite, a voder, that takes the basic elements and recombines them. We couldn’t hope to re-create anything like the original, since nature, working with millions of unified cells, is devilishly complex. But the substitutes will serve fairly well.

“You have a television scanner for eyes, connected to the optic nerves, and the nerves governing your eye muscles are hitched on to change the focus tubes and move them about. We used a photoelectric cell to govern the iris setting, but you can control that to some extent. Incidentally, our biggest trouble was getting a television hookup that would work properly with lenses having a focal length short enough to give sufficient depth of field to your sight, and the wide-angle f:10 lenses had to be made specially.

“Most of the apparatus is located in your torso, of course, along with the new high-power accumulator coils to furnish power. Not having your atomic energy yet, that’s the best we could do, so you’ll need recharging regularly.”

“Mmm.” In a hazy way, Boyd had figured out part of that for himself, but his chief interest was in motility. “What about the muscles in arms and legs?”

“Magnets. Dad planned on using motors and sliding shafts, but that would have taken a body the size of an elephant. We used thin disk magnets with a one-tenth-inch gap between them. A hundred of them equal a ten-inch gap, and there’s no comparison between the two when it comes to pull exerted. Where the big gap might not work, the series of small ones pack in plenty of power. The old inverse-square law that applies to all force fields, you know.”

The door opened again with a faint creak, and Meisner’s thick pronunciation broke in on them. “So?” He moved over beside his son. “So you tell our Mr. Boyd all about himself, eh? All I hear is how good an engineer you are to make a body like this. How you feel, Boyd?”

“A little better, now that I won’t be cramped down in a box all my life. What about the sense that governs muscular movements?”

“You see, Dad, he wants to know. You can boast about your part when I’m finished.” Boyd made out that Tom and Meisner were grinning at each other as the younger man went on. “We used piezoelectric crystals as pressure detectors in the muscle piles. They should gauge the effort applied by the magnets and serve as a fair kinesthetic sense. Temperature sense isn’t so important to you, but we used thermocouples for that, and gyroscopes attached to the balance-organ nerves supply a sense of balance.”

Meisner nodded. “And so you are a man again. A brain and spinal cord from nature taken, a body made from skill. We hook the nerves to wire filaments, indiscriminately, and they learn again. Maybe then you are once more complete.”

“Sounds like a horrible mess to me,” Boyd stated.

“Maybe. But it is nature that makes the so horrible mess. One million cells she puts in a muscle, and makes them work as one. A hundred little habits of thought that you don’t know about she gives you by experience, to work those million cells. No, that we could not duplicate. We’ve simplified, instead. That you could do all that you did before would be impossible, but that you could approximate normal activity—yes. Good, eh?”

“If I learn. But all the sensations I get are completely distorted.”

Again Meisner disagreed. “Not distorted, but different. You are again a baby. Are the eyes of a baby incomplete? No. But he has learned no habits of understanding the messages sent by his eyes, and he cannot fully see. Even a boy of five may draw a picture that to him looks like his mother, and to you or me, like nothing.

“It is the old senses that lie as much as the new. You must forget the old habits and new ones acquire. In his head, man sees upright, but the message on the nerves is reversed. Glasses have been built to reverse this, and for a time sight seems upside down; then, in a few weeks, the brain corrects, and all looks normal. Now it is without the glasses that sight is wrong. So.

“I could sort afferent nerve bundles from efferent. I could trace the ones to the ears, to the eyes, to other parts. But the separate nerves? No, never. And they would not work with the new sensors and motors, anyhow. So the message is sent to the brain—without any system it is sent. And the brain, that great organizer, it must learn to find habits that work with them. It will. In time new habits you will learn, and then your senses will no longer distort.”

Boyd turned it over in his mind, and partly agreed. Already sound was beginning to seem more natural to him, and there was some promise of his eyes working properly. He tried to see his body, but the movement of his eye tubes was too limited for that. Meisner seemed to sense his desire.

“There is a mirror here.” He moved away for a few seconds, and came back carrying something. Tom helped him adjust it. “So. Now look, if you must.”

Boyd looked. At first, he saw only a vague blur, but as he analyzed it part by part, some meaning began to come out of what he saw. That was a straight line, that a curve, and another straight line at a forty-five-degree angle. His mind built up a picture from the separate messages sent to it.

He was big, far bigger than any normal man; probably the problems of structure had necessitated that. And his head was too large even for his body. They had made little effort to copy the human form accurately. Tubes stuck out in front of his face for eyes, and there was no nose or chin. He realized quickly that he looked less human than the various robots that had been built for stage exhibition purposes.

And in that body he was supposed to move about among the normal people of the world! There could be no concealing it in coats and hats, no hope of being anything but a freak for people to stare at. Men distrust the unknown, and he would have few if any friends. No home, no social life—no wife!

Surely he couldn’t expect Joan to marry him in such a form. Perhaps that was why they had kept her from seeing him. He was a monster, a creation that even Frankenstein would have shunned as unholy. All that was left to tie him to the world of men was a job to be finished.

“All right,” he said. “Help me sit up and put that mirror where I can watch myself. I’ve got to learn how to handle these muscles you gave me, if I can start the things twitching.”

V

The razor blade was absolutely steady in the big hand, and the hair moved toward it surely until it was split smoothly down the center. The other hand picked up one of the pieces, and this time the blade moved against the half hair, splitting it into quarters of the original.

Boyd tapped one finger against the palm of his hand in a clicking sound he used to express satisfaction; some of the old habits had been redesigned to work with the new body. Being made of metal made for steadiness, at least, as the split hair proved, and the auxiliary lenses changed the focal length of his eyes to his optional telescopic or microscopic sight. Now he slipped the lenses off and put them in the fur-lined pouch that was attached to his body.

Tom Meisner opened the door of the office and came in, his lips blue with the cold, beating his hands together to warm them. “All set, Boyd,” he said. “The transformers just came in. Want I should start the men on them?”

Boyd grunted. “Guess so. Abbot’s still climbing on me for being so slow. I’ll go along and help with the installation.” Tom had been doing good work since the return to the station, and he was glad to have the young engineer as an addition to his staff. He rose from his seat, a little jerkily as the faint giddiness of motion hit him. His balance sense still wasn’t in perfect tune, and a slight dizziness usually accompanied any change of position. For a second, he moved his legs carefully, then sureness came back.

“The X-ray plates for the transformer cores they sent okay?”

“Yeah, seem to be. I can’t find a trace of flaw in any of the stuff this time. Brr! It’s colder than Billy-be-damned. How you can stand it without an—” He caught himself suddenly. “Skip it!”

Even though he had been largely responsible for Boyd’s body, Tom still made those little mistakes. And his acceptance of Boyd as a man at such times bothered more than the frank stares of the others. It was bad enough to be an object of ridicule, but to have the other man start treating him normally and suddenly realize the difference was worse.

“I wouldn’t get much good out of an overcoat,” Boyd answered his unfinished question. “It’s a good thing you chose chrome steel for the foot plates, though, with all this slush on the ground.”

His heavy feet made harsh plopping sounds in the muck that served as a constant reminder of his strangeness. One of the men stopped his work to stare as he passed, wonder still written large on his face, though Thorne had been at the station nearly a month now. Then the man turned quickly and too obviously back to his work, avoiding Boyd’s eyes.

The men were uncomfortable, he could see, as they worked under his orders, setting the big transformers in place, coupling them up, and adjusting them. Some of them had worked with him before, on easy terms of camaraderie, and it was hardest for them. They tried their best to act toward him as if nothing had happened, and their efforts failed miserably.

Some of the new men made jokes about him behind his back and called him “Frankie,” derived mistakenly from Frankenstein. That did not worry him; if men could treat his new body as a joke and be serious about the brain in it, life would be tolerable. But they pitied him, instead, and looked down at him from superior normality. They were a little too quick to accept his orders, to address him as “Mr. Boyd,” to laugh at his attempted jokes.

He caught up one end of a beam the men were working with and twisted it around to the position they wanted. For a minute, they looked up with surprise and admiration, then it faded. Boyd’s sharp ears caught the remark one of them made. “Why shouldn’t he be strong? Automobiles got strong engines, too. He don’t need to show off in front of us.”

“Shut up, dammit!” the other growled, but there was the same hint of dislike in his voice.

That’s how it was. If he did what they couldn’t, they resented it; if he failed to do anything they could, they were condescendingly pitying. He was a freak, something hashed together from an accident, which should have killed him, and they had to take orders from him. There was no way he could win their respect or friendship, since those were reserved for men with human bodies and limitations.

Tom came back as the last transformer was being swung up and in by the donkey engine hoist. “Dad phoned he was coming out this afternoon to check up on your progress,” he said. “Should be here any minute.”

“Good.” Thorne liked Tom’s father better than anyone else he’d seen since the accident; the physician worked on bodies but respected only brains. “Abbot’s dropping over, too, to let me understand just what each day’s delay costs him.”

“He would, of course. He was decent enough about it all when we still had you back at City, but now he thinks there’s no more excuse.” Tom glanced back toward the door and waved. “There’s Dad now—hey! Watch it there!”

The friction clutch on the hoist holding the transformer was slipping and the mass of metal began to fall, wobbling sidewise. At Tom’s yell, Hennessy, who was waiting for it, started to jump back quickly, but the awkwardness of fright tripped him. He sprawled flat, clawing wildly, and the transformer began slipping more rapidly.

Boyd had no time to think of the signals his brain must send out. He shot full power into the magnets and jumped forward in two twenty-foot leaps that brought him under it, his arms up to catch it. His head spun with sudden giddiness, but the weight in his arms slowed reluctantly, came to a stop, and he stood straining at the pull of it. It threatened to carry him down, but the full strength of the body they had given him resisted, fighting to hold it and retain his balance.

The other men shut their mouths and darted in now, pulling Hennessy out from under; the man had fainted. Then they came forward to catch at the transformer and help Boyd, but Tom’s quick voice barked out. “Stop it! You’ll do more harm than good.”

Slowly Boyd moved it, edging his way forward half an inch at a time until it came to rest over its supports. He let his knees flex slightly as it settled, then it was still, ready to be bolted in. As he let go, a sick weight seemed to leave his mind. A few pounds or seconds more would have been too much.

He stopped to examine the metal on one arm, looking for dents or scratches, and finding none. For the first time, the full realization of the strength that was his came to him; four ordinary men would have buckled under the load. But there was no pride in it—the achievement was really that of the Meisners, who had built the body, not of himself. And the other men could hardly admire him for doing a mechanical job well with a machine for a body.

But the remarkable recuperative powers of his synthetic circulation system came into play almost at once, freeing his brain of the toxins of its efforts in commanding full power from the muscle piles, and he felt no ill effects. Meisner stood beside him, raging at him hotly.

“Nincompoop! Maybe it’s mountains you’ll move next, eh? Is it no gratitude that you should try to destroy the life I gave you? One slip and—ploosh!—it squashes you flat on the thin abdominal walls, and your nice new heart is kaput! Maybe you could live without a heart, eh? So? I think not!”

Boyd looked at the surgeon and there was a grin in his mind, though no change could show on his face. “Why all the fuss? You wanted to test me; there’s your test.”

“So. Maybe it is. And there is nothing now wrong with you but that you think too much about yourself and how different you are. You should forget that.”

One of the men tapped Meisner’s shoulder. “Did—you mean the accident might have killed him?” he asked.

“And why not? The brain he has—maybe—is as soft as yours, the fool. Did you think he was solid iron?”

“No. No, I guess not.” The man shook his head doubtfully and moved back to his fellows, where the unconscious Hennessy was slowly coming around.

A voice coughed from the doorway, and they turned to see Abbot standing there.

“Nice work, Thorne,” he commented. “Those transformers cost money, and having a man killed here might cause trouble.”

“As much as a day’s delay?”

“More.” Abbot chuckled. “All right, no talk of money today, then. How’s it coming?”

“Most of the new stuff is in. Be ready to make a trial next week,” Boyd decided. “And I’m glad you let me hire Tom, here. He’s been doing some fine work, and the men do well under his instructions.”

Abbot frowned slightly. “Mm-hm. A week, you say? But—All right, I said I wouldn’t say anything about it today, and I won’t. There’s someone I want to bring out when you go through with it. This…person insists on being present.”

Meisner glanced at him quickly. “You mean—Maybe it should be. The—person might benefit by it, even.”

“It’s dangerous enough for me alone, without a stranger.”

Tom stuck his oar in, shaking his head at Boyd. “It’s okay. I know whom they mean, and I think you should do it, danger or not.”

“Anyway, I’m still in charge of the station,” Abbot pointed out smoothly. He took Boyd’s reluctant consent for granted. “Good, it’s settled then. Want to ride in with me, Dr. Meisner?”

“I think so, yes. I’m not needed here. And Boyd, I shall expect to be present here when already you start the test.” Meisner slapped the metal chest and followed Abbot out. Tom and Boyd turned back to the men who were finishing their work.

One of the men gestured, and they stopped. “Well, Hennessy?”

Hennessy hesitated, looking uncomfortable, but another man urged him on. “Look, boss, I—Well, some of us are going to town tonight, boss, to take in a show, and we thought…well—want to come with us?”

For once Boyd was glad that his face was expressionless as he looked at the others and saw that they were all in on the invitation. But it wouldn’t do to embarrass them in town with his presence, especially now that they had suddenly thawed. “Thanks, boys,” he answered. “I appreciate the offer, but there’s a full night’s work waiting for me. I’m on a twenty-four-hour schedule this week.”

There was no look of relief on their faces, as he had expected, but only the look to be found whenever a friendly invitation is turned down for good reason. “Any idea what happened?” he asked Tom as they moved away.

“A little. For one thing, you saved Hennessy when they couldn’t, at some risk to yourself. They heard Dad say you could be killed, and men are funny, that way; they’re just selfish enough to dislike anyone who can’t be hurt, because they’d like that ability themselves and can’t get it. Now, because you stand about as good a chance of getting killed as they do, they’re back on even footing with you.”

Whatever the reason, it would be a blessing to work with them as a man again, even though their social life was in another world. Boyd had a mental picture of himself at a show, and it didn’t appeal to him. Companionship, even when offered, was impossible for him.

VI

There was a hint of snow in the air, and the temperature outside was so low that Boyd had been forced to wear heavy rubbers to keep the dampness from getting onto his feet and freezing the joints stiff. He clumped around in them now, thoroughly enjoying the ribbing the men were giving him about catching pneumonia. They had loosened up remarkably in the last week.

Now preparations for the test were complete, and they were waiting for Abbot and Meisner to arrive before starting. Tom was still begging to go in with him while the test was run, but Boyd was firm.

“No soap, Tom. Having this whosit of Abbot’s is bad enough. I wanted to take the risk alone, since I could probably stand another explosion fairly well, but I don’t want three in there. You’d be needed anyway to build me a new body if this one gets wrecked.” He wiggled his shoulders uncomfortably and scratched at his back. “Darn it, there’s a place on my back that itches.”

Tom grinned, then saw that he was serious. “How could it?”

“I don’t know, but it does. Every time I get cold, it itches. You must have put a defective thermostat in there, or gotten some nerves mixed up.” He tapped his back sharply. “There, that does it. A light blow works sometimes.”

“I’ll have a look at you later when Dad’s around,” Tom offered. “Maybe I’d better increase your foot heaters at the same time. Anyhow, it’s a good thing we fixed it so you had electrical heat over your whole body if you insist on running around in the cold. Otherwise, your lubrication might stiffen up.”

Boyd grunted, looking down the road. “Here comes Abbot, and your father must be with him—there are two in front, and it looks a little like someone behind. I’d rather not talk to them now, Tom, so I’m going inside, and you meet them here. Send in whosit, if Abbot still insists. By the way, is he dry behind the ears yet?”

“Partly. Had a little science in college and been studying since, but it’s mostly scientific curiosity. You’ll have no trouble, though.” Tom grinned at him, but Boyd could see nothing funny as he went into the experimental building. Even a well-trained helper might be a nuisance, and sending in a greenhorn was as idiotic a thing as he could think of.

He couldn’t help thinking of another person filled with incessant craving to know. Work and the need of relearning himself had filled his time until Joan had been pushed into the background, but now her image came surging up, bringing futile longings to his mind. Always in the background, he had missed her prying eyes and bubbling saucy grin. But they still told him that Joan was sick, too sick to see him. That was probably an excuse to spare his feelings.

Love, he supposed, was gone, since that was basically a physical sensation, but respect, fondness, and desire for her company persisted. He needed her now, more than ever.

Meisner had been right; he did think too much of himself and his own differences. Life to him was a serious thing at best, and in his new body it had assumed a tragic mood. He knew it, but with the queer twist of his brain, the knowledge only made it worse. He needed someone to laugh at him, to love him, and to show him the gaiety and humor that lay all about him, someone like Joan who could lend him her eyes and let him forget his own brooding.

To a lesser extent, Allan Moss had done the same, and he was another that Boyd missed. The old physicist’s theories and plans were familiar to him now, but he still would have welcomed the firm guidance of the scientist, now more than ever. Instead of that, they were sending a science bug to add to his troubles.

Then a metallic clanking behind him broke through his thoughts, and he swung quickly away from the control panel toward the door. Cold wonder caught at him as he saw the creature moving toward him. It was larger than a man, its shiny metal body topped by a head without either chin, neck, or face, save for tubes to serve as eyes. In every line and pattern, it might have been a mirror image of himself!

The figure moved forward calmly, holding out a hand. “Tom Meisner told me you were all ready to begin. It’s good to see you, Thorne!”

Thorne! Boyd groped numbly, hunting some streak of light. Only Moss and a few others had used his first name, and now—It had to be Moss! If he had escaped, the physicist might have also, though in little better shape. Since it had apparently taken long to recuperate and relearn, he must have been even worse hit. And Abbot had made them say he was dead so that Boyd would be willing to rush things through before the other could come out. That made sense.

He stretched out a metal hand quickly, feeling confidence again for the first time since his return to the station. “And I can’t say how glad I am to see you, sir. I’ve been trying to carry on, but you’re needed here. Want to take over?”

A funny choking sound came from the other. “I’m afraid you’ll have to do it all this time, Thorne. I’m not… I won’t be much help to you. Any idea of what caused the failure before?”

“Some idea,” he said doubtfully, taking the control seat and pulling out the chair for the other. Obviously, Moss hadn’t entirely recovered from the shock, but his mere presence helped. “It doesn’t entirely suit me, and I’d rather not mention it until I find out whether it was purely mechanical defects that caused the field to collapse. Ready?”

“Ready.”

Boyd closed the switches and watched power drain into the big shell, his eyes glued to the indicators that shifted erratically before he could balance them accurately. Then they found their marks and held. Nothing seemed wrong there. One second went by, then others followed it. He counted slowly to fifty, and still there was no sign of failure. The power needle that indicated energy release within the shell quivered and began to climb, and all was still in balance. Boyd settled back somewhat, relief spreading through his mind. It was working.

Plop! A thin red light cut on quickly and the needles quivered suddenly, crazily. He tensed himself for movement, wondering whether he could make the switch in time, and looked down. His hand was resting quietly on the switch and every needle was dead! His new arm had moved before the thought was more than beginning in his mind.

Quick reactions and no damage! That had been the trouble before; the ordinary motor impulse had traveled along Moss’s arm at a comparatively slow speed, in common with all neural impulses, and things had happened before he could reach the switch. But Boyd’s nerves were filaments of silver and the electrical impulse traveled down them with almost the speed of light, while the muscle packs threw the hand forward faster than the eye could see, before the field had entirely failed.

His companion stirred uneasily. “Is it over?”

“That test is, and a failure. Thank heaven, not a fatal one, this time.” He gathered up the kit of high-tension testing meters they used and moved from the control seat toward the shell. Now he was more than willing to have the other here. Of all the men he could have chosen for a helper, Moss in his new body alone had reaction lime quick enough for the work.

“You’ll have to watch the board, sir,” he said. “It’s in balance now, do just throw the switch on when I signal, and keep your eyes glued on the panel. If a red light comes on or the needles bob, cut it off. You’ll be able to do it in time.”

He set up the meters quickly, cutting in through the insulation mound the transformers and the box to the shell. At his motion, the switch was thrown, and his pointers began pouring out their messages, registering the surprisingly delicate balance of current on his dials. Then, while he was still analyzing them, they went dead.

“Failure again,” the other reported. “Find out what the trouble was?”

Boyd assorted the results in his head until the jigsaw pattern shaped up. “Yes. It’s simple enough, though we’d never have guessed it before that first attempt because of that simplicity. Back E.M.F. of a sort, you might say. When power starts feeding in, it induces a back pressure in our field coils, like the back current generated in a running electric motor. That current gets into the transformers and throws the balance of power feeding into the field off kilter, with the results we’ve seen. I think I know where the trouble starts.”

“But can we fix it today?”

“Why not? I suspected it, and there’s everything here to work with. We can do it together in half an hour and not bother the men.” It was strange to be explaining things to Moss and be giving orders, but the other seemed to expect it. Boyd motioned as the robot came down. “We’ll yank this section of the shell out. If my idea works, we can shunt it around harmlessly.”

Again he was thankful for the presence of his companion. Mechanical bodies, he was finding, had very definite points of superiority. They had prevented disaster twice already, and now they promised to save the necessity of making room for a crew of men and machines that would have been needed for the job. Even with Moss’s odd hesitation and uncertainty, sheer brute force coupled with good mental co-ordination could work wonders.

The half hour was only slightly past when he pulled the control chair up and cut the switch in again. There was the usual lag, and then the power needle began climbing, took a sudden lurch, and settled down at the highest mark on the dial. There was a smooth high drone in the air that continued minute after minute, spelling out power in unbelievable quantities and fully under control.

“Okay, sir,” Boyd said finally. “We’ve done it, and I’m glad you were where you could see it.”

The other figure stirred uncomfortably, then looked up at him with a sound that held amusement. “Are you, Pickleface? You didn’t seem to want me where I could see it before.”

Something that should have been the pit of Boyd’s stomach went numb, and his eyes shifted erratically out of focus. Gulping sounds came from his vocal apparatus, but they made no sense. Why should they? There was no sense left in the world itself.

Something that approximated a soft laugh came from the other. “Dad told me I wasn’t to let you know until after the experiment and warned me you might think I was Dr. Moss. You should have heard the fight I put up to get here!” Again she giggled. “Poor old Pickleface. Don’t you like me, now that I’m hairless and ugly?”

“Joan!” The numbness left him in a rush, and he dived for her, only to realize what the loss of lips meant. “Joan, you crazy little fool! So that’s what I heard before the explosion?”

Her voice was flat, as usual, but he sensed mockery and guilt in her words. “Mm-hmm. I sneaked in and hid before it began, behind the transformer bank. That’s what saved me, I guess. From what they told me, we landed not three feet apart, though I didn’t come to until I was in City Hospital. Father thought that if you had a chance at life, I should have the same. Mad at me, Thorne?”

Even without lips, he showed her he wasn’t.

Later, when some of the shouting was over and Abbot had gone in to stand over the big shell and gaze fondly at the power indicator, they found Meisner alone in the office. The doctor made room for the two big bodies, grinning at them paternally.

“So it’s married my model patient and my not-so-model one shall be, eh? Abbot has told me already.”

Boyd relaxed on the seat, realizing that his mind had refused to rest and be peaceful for months. It was almost a novelty. “Married we shall,” he answered, “though I suppose it’s mostly a formality with us. Funny thing, Abbot seems willing enough now, for some reason.”

“That isn’t so funny, is it, Papa Meisner? Dr. Moss left you his interests in this, and you’re almost rich now. Anyway, just picture poor Dad trying to get anyone else to marry me now!” Joan twisted one of his big fingers possessively. “This time, Mr. Thorne Boyd, there’ll be no convenient accidents to save you. I won’t let you out of my sight until it’s over.” Meisner patted Boyd’s metal chest. “Me, I think I shall also see there are no more delays. So. And be maybe your best man. Life is not so bad, eh?”

“With twenty-four hours a day for years and years together and never a gray hair or a wrinkle?” Joan kicked her heels together and giggled. “Even Pickleface should be happy now.”

The change had made no difference in her, Boyd thought, wondering when she would tire of the nickname; well, if she kept using it, he’d have to learn to like it yet. No, life wasn’t so bad. There was work for him now, with men who respected him, a rough friendship with Meisner and Tom, and most important of all, companionship with his own kind.

“I’m growing rather attached to this body,” he admitted. “Except for one thing. I can’t smoke. A cigarette is too small for my air vents, and any holder I’ve tried is liable to get stuck in them or else it scratches some of the filters off. If I hold it in front, I get just enough nicotine to tantalize me. Think you can fix it?”

Meisner chuckled and winked at Joan. “Never satisfied, this man of yours, I think. Well, we can fix that, maybe.” He held out a silvered case. “Try a cigar.”

Boyd grunted. He hadn’t thought of that!

THE MAN WHO LIVED FOREVER, by R. DeWitt Miller and Anna Hunger

Originally published in 1956.

CHAPTER ONE

Terra City was saffron-dusted by a combination of haze and afternoon sunlight. It had an unreal quality, as if it were about to become some sort of elf land.

In the room atop the telecast tower stillness and isolation had become so intense that the Master’s quiet voice sounded loud.

“What have I gained by living a thousand years?”

Varden, the Master’s chief assistant, did not answer for a moment. Finally he said:

“You should know better than I…”

“Answer the question.”

Varden turned, and as he did so, the ebbing sunlight flicked across his shoulders, on each of which gleamed the single silver star of a World Scientist.

“Very well, I’ll answer it.” The lightness in Varden’s tone was forced. “That the Master could live so long and learn so little is one of the reasons I don’t believe in a Supreme Spirit. Every other man on earth—except you—is too young for women part of his brief life, and too old for them during another distressing period. You never really grow old, and become young again every thirty years. And you are the one who complains.”

“We are not discussing theology.”

“I am. Do you expect me to believe in an intelligent Supreme Spirit who would allow one man and only one man to remain immortal—and then choose an idiot? No, this universe was designed by some lunatic deity escaped from the fool house of the gods.”

The Master pushed aside the stack of papers on his desk, and lit his pipe.

“Of what use is eternal life if the only woman you ever loved is dying and you can do nothing to save her?” There it was, the Master thought. He had said it, the truth everyone had known but he had never admitted, even to Varden.

“That the Master’s lady, Ellora,” Varden said gently, “has the sickness is tragedy. But it is also fate. If there is anything I could do which would in the smallest degree help either of you, I would do it. You know that.”

The Master unhooked his blue cape, and dropped it on the back of his chair. Beneath the cape, he wore the conventional dress of a World Scientist—a loose-fitting maroon tunic and trousers bloused into low, soft boots. On each shoulder was the single silver star. Only the cape designated him as the Master.

He rested his elbows on the desk and stared through the swirl of tobacco smoke. “Must I accept this, then?”

“One does not struggle against destiny.”

“Perhaps it is because I have so often altered destiny that I find it hard to accept what I cannot change.”

“I know it is presumptuous, Master, to suggest that you are illogical, but it is obvious that whether the Lady Ellora dies of the sickness or not, she would eventually die of old age—which would be unpleasant for you to witness. Fifteen, or perhaps twenty years more together…what is that brief instant to a man who has lived ten centuries and will never die?”

The unusual formality and earnestness of Varden’s words impressed the Master. Not often did the casual, somewhat ribald man show a different side of his nature. “You are lucky, Varden,” he said. “You will live only one lifetime. And you have never fallen in love.”

Varden looked at the Master and the conversation dwindled away. The Master was silent a long time. Then he said, “Upstairs in conference room C, a meeting is going on. The most outstanding physicians and scientists of Earth are gathered there for only one purpose—a great, concerted effort to discover a cure for the sickness. They may find it.”

“Yes, Master, they may.” Varden sat on the corner of the desk. He was a short, fat, balding man, with brown eyes that were usually laughing. They were now. “Master, you need something new to worry about.”

“I do?”

“Yes, and I’ve got it for you.”

“What is it?”

A committee of the Arborean Tree Protection Society is waiting downstairs with a slab of redwood. They have traveled many weary miles for the opportunity to present it to you.”

“No!”

“You agreed to the appointment two months ago. They paid to have that damned thing hauled by Continental Cargo-Sphere all the way from the West Coast. The presentation is the climax of the five hundredth anniversary of the founding of the Society. You can’t back out now.”

The Master looked steadily at Varden. “You suggested this to keep my mind off—”

“Even you have to keep appointments sometimes.”

“Very well. However, if the honorable Society has succeeded in transporting their monumental slab this far, they can certainly bring it up here. I will not go down to the Audience Hall.”

“They plan to make the presentation in this room. Of course they want a telerecord of the ceremony, and the recording equipment is up here. I will send for the technicians.”

“And you will pour me a double brandy.”

Varden poured the drink and went out. The Master’s long, powerful fingers gripped the glass, and once more his thoughts went back to the woman who was dying in the blue-walled, sunlit bedroom. The old irony stabbed at him. Ellora would die, and there was nothing he could do about it. With all the power in the world at his disposal, he could not keep one heart beating an hour longer.

In an effort to pull his thoughts away, he tried to visualize the committee of the Arborean Tree Protection Society. They would be insignificant, ordinary people, not scientists or even political emissaries. Yet they had a right to meet The Master and present him with a silly slab of redwood. They had as much right as anyone else. Much more, he thought, than most of the pompous statesmen and long-winded professors to whom he must talk.

The Master had just finished his brandy when he saw the procession coming across the bridge which connected the Telecast Tower with the main block of World Center buildings. Varden was in the lead. Behind him, four men struggled with the gigantic slab. At the rear of the group marched a young woman.

The slab stuck in the doorway but finally, with some adroit coaching by Varden, they pushed it through. When the committee members had assumed their stance beside the slab and the Master knew the speech was almost upon him, he rose and signalled the telerecord technicians.

Standing behind the desk, the Master looked even taller than the six feet three inches that the world knew so well. His age might have been anywhere from fifty to sixty. His body was spare, almost gaunt, as if the clothing of flesh were too small for his big frame. But the body of the man was only an out-of-focus background for the eyes; the flow of time itself seemed to exist in their grey depths.

“Good afternoon. May I welcome your Society to World Center.” There could be no doubt that it was the voice of the Master of the world. “This presentation by your organization is an honor which I deeply appreciate.”

The young woman stepped forward and whisked a manuscript from somewhere beneath her green robe. Her hands shook violently and she had difficulty in reading.

“This slab was cut from a giant Sequoia which died in the present year, the year 3097. Science has proven that each ring of such a tree represents one year of growth. Thus it was ascertained that this tree began its life in the year 100. As you can see, we have carefully marked certain rings which indicate important dates since that year.”

The young woman extracted a telescopic pointer from some other sanctuary beneath her robe, and began extending the rod to its full length. The Master had trouble keeping his face composed. The pointer stuck halfway, and one of the committee stepped briskly forward and helped the girl unarm it. With the end of the pointer, she indicated a date printed on a ring near the center of the slab.

“On this date the Matriarchy of Rome is said to have fallen.” She moved the pointer. “On this date a religious document, the Magna Charta, was signed.” She moved the rod again. “On this date in the year 1776, America was founded by a group of Tea Men who revolted against the Czar.”

The Master’s mind drifted off. Muddling of history was the unalienable right of educators. Suddenly the young woman’s voice changed tone.

“On this date the office of the Master was created, and you, the immortal one, came among our race. We do not know who you are, or why you never die. Your beginning is known to the Council of World Scientists, and that is enough for us.

“We know that without you men could not control science and the machine. It is impossible for anyone in the brief span of a human lifetime to acquire enough knowledge to coordinate the complexities of our civilization.

“We realize too, that the organization of World Scientists, through its control of weapons and sources of power, has forever banished the madness of which we read in our history books, the madness of War. It is obvious that the World Scientists must have for a leader a man who can live forever.

“Therefore, we, as representatives of the Arborean Tree Protection Society, present to you this slab as a symbol of the incredible truth that even the oldest living things on earth can die, but the Master cannot.”

The Master looked away a moment before he bowed slightly and answered, “I accept your gift with a deep sense of appreciation. The telerecord of this meeting will be ready in ten minutes, but I wish to express my thanks with something less cold and formal. Varden, what are the arrangements?”

“The committee dines tonight at the Pavilion. I hope the entertainment will be up to their expectations. Tomorrow I have placed at their disposal a guide who will show them through Terra City and World Center. The following day they will leave on a special ship for an overnight trip to Moon Base.”

The Master saw that the girl, surprised and without benefit of a prepared script, was wordless. He stepped from behind his desk and held out his hand. As the slim, trembling fingers closed around his, he wondered, as he sometimes did on these occasions, if it were startling to discover that his were normal human hands, things of flesh and blood. The girl tried to speak and could not.

“I hope your stay here will be pleasant.”

As she mumbled a reply, she became calmer.

He shook hands with the other members of the committee, and chatted a few minutes. Then Varden called one of the Master’s guards who escorted the group out.

The Master returned to his desk. The telerecord technicians left their plastic-enclosed booth, and the Master and Varden remained alone with the slab of redwood.

Varden poured himself a brandy, sipped it and carefully placed the glass on the slab. It stood on a ring which was marked America Discovered By Eric, A Red Man.

“What shall we do with the firewood?”

The Master looked up. “Have it mounted somewhere—anywhere. Possibly in the little patio by the pool. But take it out of here at once.”

“Always complaining.”

“Varden, I have listened to your insults and alleged humor for a good many years. I have often speculated as to what action I should take. If there were only some way that you could be made immortal.

“Isn’t there?”

The Master did not answer.

“Incidentally, how did you become the Master? Why does the world need a Master?”

“You will find complete data in the archives of World Scientists.”

“Why should I waste my time and eyesight when I can ask you?”

“To put it briefly, if there were no Master, there would be no civilization on this planet.”

“With all respect to your unmitigated egotism, Master, that isn’t an answer.”

The Master refilled his pipe. “For some reason that lies hidden behind the cosmic scheme of things, the highest form of life on this planet, Earth, is afflicted with two principal faults. All creatures in the universe have faults, but mankind’s two faults are basic.”

“The first is an insatiable desire, to build endless machinery which soon becomes so complex that it requires more than one human lifetime to understand it. Also, man seems blinded to the fact that the machine is not an end in, itself, but only a means to mankind’s happiness.

“The second fault is mankind’s uncontrollable urge to kill its own species.”

Seating himself on the redwood slab, Varden ht a cigarette. “I asked for a simple answer, not a speech.”

“You asked for enlightenment, and enlighten you shall have. To continue:

“Besides the Earth there is—as you well know—one other planet which is inhabited by intelligent creatures. Our relations with them are part of your daily work. You also know that at least one other planet within this solar system was once inhabited. Our archaeological expeditions have proven this. Then, of course, there are the creatures from other solar systems, who occasionally visit the earth.

“For some reason—which is also hidden behind the scheme of things—all of the creatures who have visited here are very similar to ourselves, and yet”—The Master leaned forward—“Nowhere—either in the creatures whom we know in life or those known only through the ruins which mark their death throes—do we find the slightest evidence of any desire to be slaves to a machine, or to kill each other. We and we alone are afflicted with such idiotic tendencies.”

Varden was standing before the great window. Outside, darkness had fallen over Terra City. He spoke without turning. “Go on.”

“Our planet was in chaos. War followed war. Civilization seemed doomed to destruction. What we needed was an organization of scientists who would use their knowledge for the fostering of human happiness; who understood that man gains nothing by killing man and that the machine should free man as an individual, not enslave him as a necessary part of the machine.”

The Master paused and gestured toward a large copy of the Oath of a World Scientist which glowed with soft fluorescence on the wall of the room.

“Read that again. The man who wrote it—he died almost ten centuries ago—was perhaps more of a poet than a law maker, but time seems to have proven that he caught the essence of the idea.”

The Chief Assistant looked at his watch and glanced up at the oath.

“I will guard mankind from the weapons mankind has invented, but I myself will not carry a weapon. I will not engage in politics. Although I may hold any religious belief I choose, or may hold none, I will not engage in any religious controversy or use any power given me as a World Scientist to promote any religion. I will be kindly, considerate and, to the best of my power, understanding to the inhabitants of this earth and those of any other world. I will not own property, but will hold the property of mankind as a trust. On the order of the Master, or the Council of World Scientists, or on my own discretion if a major war should break out, I will destroy all Final Weapons, even if it results in the destruction of the Earth. In accepting these silver stars and with them the power and honor they confer, I freely state that my life shall be of no consequence in relation to this oath.”

Varden turned back to the Master. “What does that oath prove? I took it, and I’ve administered it more times than I can remember. But that still doesn’t answer my question. Why should there be a Master?”

“World Scientists, like other men and women, have a habit of dying. Therefore, the organization must have at its head someone immortal, to form the line of continuity over the ages. Only such a person can be sufficiently unbelievable to command mankind’s belief. Ask the girl from the Arborean Society.”

“Perhaps—I—” Varden glanced again at his watch, and stopped. He dropped his hand lightly on the Master’s shoulder. “The committee in conference room C will be ready to report now,” he said.

The Master stood up. “Very well.”

As they left the room in the Telecast Tower, Varden said, “Master, if the scientists and physicians have found a solution, there is one other chance.”

The Master turned. “Yes?”

“This morning I received a letter from a man named Everling. I have briefly checked his record. At one time he did some brilliant scientific work. He, claims to have cured the sickness, and wants an appointment with you. He stated that he would arrive in Terra City tomorrow on the afternoon magno-rocket from Asia.”

“Have an exhaustive check made of his record.”

“I have already given an order for it.”

“Thank you, Varden.”

“I have also arranged for your meeting with the scientists and physicians to be held in the living room. I thought it would be better.”

The Master looked down at the balastrade of the bridge they were now crossing.

“Yes,” he said.

CHAPTER TWO

The long, low-ceilinged living room was quiet as the Master and Varden entered it. The men standing around the block crystal coffee table should have been talking.

Obviously, they had heard his footsteps. This silence, thought the Master, was his answer.

He knew these men well, as he had known thousands of others like them, but he was too tired to greet each one. They would understand. He went to the fireplace and stood with his back to the flames, watching the firelight create magic as it reflected in the crystal block.

After a moment he said, “Gentlemen?”

Irascible old Dr. Ronding, biochemist, spoke first.

“Master, there is only one answer. The sickness is caused by a virus!” He jerked out his cigar, tossed it in the fireplace and pointed his beard at the other men. “These eggheads have been talking nonsense.”

“Ronding,” the quiet voice was that of Dr. Venton, Director of Disease Control. “It is you who speak nonsense. Obviously the sickness cannot be caused by a virus. My theory is that it is caused by minute, invisible spores which float freely in space. We know these spores exist, but we do not know their origin. From time to time the earth travels through a concentration of spores, and one of them must be the cause of the sickness.”

“Ridiculous!” shouted Ronding.

“I must agree with Dr. Ronding.” It was Dr. Twining of Electronics Research. “The spore theory is untenable. I am convinced that the cause of this disease will never be found in the fields of chemistry, biology or physiology. I believe it is a disturbance of the body’s electromagnetic balance.”

No one seemed to have anything more to say. They stood silently watching the Master, Finally, he said, “In other words, gentlemen, the theories are many but the cure is not.” Still no one spoke.

“You come from all parts of the earth,” the Master went on. “The disease is worldwide. I had hopes that a general discussion of your individual experiences with it would produce a cure.” He could not resist the irony. “I even provided a patient.”

“Don’t you think, Master, that we realized your hopes?” someone asked softly.

“Yes,” he said. “I know this and appreciate it. And I also know that all of you are wondering why, if a cure for the sickness is possible, it would not be the Master who would find it. I will explain.

“There are a hundred other problems with which I am daily concerned. The sickness has not yet become so widespread as to command my full attention. If, out of selfish motives, I should devote my entire time to this work, I would cease to function as the Master, and thereby betray my trust to humanity. In any case, this problem is one for a specialist, not a coordinator. Before this conference began, I outlined to you the lines of research which my long experience suggested.”

“We have done our best, Master.” Ronding’s voice was no longer strident. It was flat, defeated.

“Yet the mark of the sickness still remains on my wife’s throat.” And, as he said the words, the room vanished and he saw only her white, graceful throat, blemished now by the horrible blue mark of the sickness.

A voice, which he did not recognize, came from that void where the room had been.

“Otherwise, the Lady Ellora is as beautiful as ever.”

The Master forced the void to once more become a room. Such things must never happen again. This was extreme weakness, and he could not allow himself such luxuries. His tone was that of the Master, or at least he hoped it was.

“Thank you, gentlemen. You have done your very best. No man can do more. I know that you are anxious to return to your homes and your work. The conference is over.” He bowed slightly. “Goodnight.”

Turning from the group he stood before the fire, his tall figure blocking out the flames. As they passed him each man murmured a word or two, which he did not hear.

Ronding was the last to go. He paused a moment beside the Master, and this time the Master heard the words.

“We did do our best, Master. Sometimes—”

“I know.”

“Damn it, we will win! But it will take time.”

“Yes, Dr. Ronding. But—there is little time—for her!” The Master drew the folds of his cloak about him, until it covered him like a blue shroud, screening him from the outside world, from the room and anyone in it.

Ronding went out quietly.

There was no sound in the room now, except for the fire, crackling and blazing. The Master loosened his cloak and let it slide from his shoulders. He sat down and his eyes moved absently from item to item of the furnishings he had collected through the centuries.

There were curiosities from everywhere: the mysterious blue of a small statue carved out of aqualite, that baffling mineral with its eleven-sided crystals, from Venus; a childsized chair brought him by an expedition who had found it in an almost obliterated city on the central canal of Mars; a bit of an asteroid in which was an impression that he believed to be a fingerprint; a table whose top was a single piece of garnet which had been cut from a gigantic blood red mass found in a fissure on the moon; an ash tray supported by a segment of dinosaur thigh bone; a seemingly indestructible rug from Asia; a long, low divan, fashioned the year before by the finest craftsman of Terra City, and selected by him for the Lady Ellora.

Cold, inanimate treasures of the world. There was small comfort in them, now.

Around the edge of the door which Ronding had left ajar, a black button of a nose considered matters. Slowly, big shoulders wriggled the door open. A large shepherd slipped into the room. On silent paws he crossed to the Master, and the black button sought and found a hand.

The Master’s fingers followed along the dog’s nose and began to scratch him behind the ears. “Flim,” he asked, “do you have a theory about the sickness?”

The dog’s tail expressed ecstasy, due to the scratching behind the ears. After a moment the Master rose.

“Shall we go and see her now?”

The dog led the way as they left the room.

The woman who was The Master’s Lady, and therefore the second greatest enigma of mankind, was in bed, although dusk had just deepened into night. She lay propped up by an assortment of gayly colored satin pillows, staring at a book which she was too tired to read.

Her pale gold hair fell loosely around features whose purity of line made them seem almost unreal, as if a supreme sculptor had moulded them out of living flesh. Her wide-spaced, luminous gray eyes, dark circled by the ravages of disease, lifted from the book and stared into the night. On the smooth, curving throat was a small, roundish mark, dark blue in color—the fatal insignia of the sickness.

Outside the huge pane of glass which formed one end of the room she could see the black dome of the night. The evening wind carried the perfume of the jasmine which twined around a small balcony. An early night-bird was singing furiously somewhere close by.

She let the book drop from her hands. He would be coming soon. She always knew when he would come, and he would never believe that she did. How long, she thought, must she exist only between the bed and the lounge by the window? The few steps from one to the other had become a daily lifespan.

Pushing back the covers, she slowly swung her feet to the floor, then rested a moment until her strength returned.

The hideous, unpredictable weariness was upon her again.

After a moment she stood up, steadying herself with one hand on the night table beside her bed. The slim beauty of her figure had wasted to thin fragility. Her erect dignity was gone and her shoulders drooped.

Once more she faced that terrible trip from the bed to the dressing table. She had sent her maid away; she must be alone when he came. Step by staggering step she made the perilous journey that four months before had been only three swift strides; and sank down on the deep-cushioned, stool.

She picked up a comb and began to arrange her hair. With each motion of the comb, she told herself that he must not see her suffer. She must always remember that it is more terrible to watch another’s agony, and be unable to help, than to bear your own. There must be no tears, no discouragement, no hopelessness. He must not see.

She finished her hair, slipped into a bed jacket of cobweb lace and once more made the long journey back to bed. A touch of perfume from a translucent jade bottle and she was ready.

It was only a moment until her gay “Come in!” answered his knock.

Flim came first, crossing to her bed with the dignity which is the right of large dogs. She was leaning over to pet him, when she felt the Master’s arms tighten around her.

For a long while he held her until she laughed and pushed him away. She tilted her head a little, frowning at him.

“What have you been doing that I won’t like? Such overwhelming ardor calls for an explanation.”

He followed her light mood. “I thought you would hear about it in spite of my strict orders. No one pays any attention to my orders, anyway. I have been to an auction.”

“You bought another musical instrument. You know you can’t learn to play.”

He shook his head. “I purchased a complete, well-trained harem with the best references and credentials.”

“Where are you going to keep the girls?”

“I shall refurnish and redecorate the International Council Room.”

“This will give world politics a new twist.”

He had been moving around restlessly while he spoke. Now he dropped into a chair at her bedside. Her face, her body were like familiar, haunting music; her movements were a constant rhythm, and her love the swelling crescendo of a great orchestra. And as he was thinking, his eyes, following the line of her throat, came to the blue mark.

Quickly she pulled her bedjacket over the mark. “You must not look at it.”

“You are my wife—your agony is my agony.” His lips twisted in a bitterly ironic smile. “I have only to give an order and World Scientists would destroy the moon. Yet the mark of the sickness remains, and I can do nothing to remove it.”

“You have accomplished great things, incredible things.”

“Perhaps. I have all the power that Earth has to give. Men think of me as a cosmic benefactor. But do they ever think of the loneliness beyond loneliness?”

She took his hand. “Please…don’t.”

After a moment she said, “What—what did they say, those men at the conference?”

The crushing of his hopes bowed his head a little, and he could not look at her nor speak. A quick, indrawn breath like a stab of pain was all the sign she gave before she reached out to touch his lowered head.

“I understand.”

He met her eyes. “They can’t help you.” Fury and frustration brought him to his feet, once more to pace the room that was her prison.

“No one can help you. I cannot.” He was near the breaking point now.

“Remember, darling. Remember our wonderful hours together!”

“Most of them spent here, within the walls of World Center. You were twenty-five when I married you—that was one of the times when I was young. For twenty years you have lived in this place. The Master’s Lady! Cursed as I am to play a role so that bungling humanity does not bring upon itself the misery and horror it so richly deserves.”

For an instant her voice had the old, calm strength.

“That is unworthy of the Master.”

“It is worthy of your husband. There is a word from long ago which is still used every day. Did we ever have a ‘honeymoon’?”

“We’ve always had a honeymoon. My world is you, dearest.”

“Thank you for the banality.”

“Thank me for the truth.”

Pausing beside the dressing table, he glanced down at the frivolities laid out with such care—jewels, perfumes, other trifles that meant Ellora. “Years without end. I am tired of the whole stupid mockery, tired of saying goodby to every human being I learn to understand and care for. To the only woman I ever loved.”

“You have had many wives before me. You loved them. You will love again.”

“Ellora, my Lady, I have had more experience than you. I have found during our time together that there really is only one most beloved. Why this should be so, I do not understand. It is. I accept it in its wonder.”

The ceaseless gnawing of the pain was too much. His eyes fell upon a low table that had been built by some long dead Martian craftsman. On the table was a plate of peaches, fresh and round. Beside the plate lay a knife. The Master picked it up.

“I am tired, Ellora, incredibly tired.” His voice had the quietness of finality. “I have said my last goodbye. I believe that there is something beyond death. The day you go to that something, I go with you.”

“Master!”

He ignored her cry.

“I have the emotions of a man, not a god.” He ran his finger along the blade of the knife, then made a light, quick cut. A thin line of red appeared on the flesh. “I have the desires, the hopes, the pain of a man.”

Red drops fell from his finger onto the table.

From some unknown reserve of energy, strength came to her. In an instant she got out of bed, crossed the room and flung herself upon him, seizing the hand that held the knife.

“Your life does not belong to you! It belongs to humanity, Master!”

The fingers that held the knife relaxed slowly, lingeringly. It had been a foolish, childish gesture. The release of death was not for him. As he put his arm around her waist and helped her back to bed, he said, “Forgive me, sweetheart. It was cruel of me to have upset you.”

For a while he stood looking down at the white, exhausted face. Then, going to the World Center IntercomVisaphone on its stand in the corner of a room, he pressed a button. The face of the central operator appeared on the small round screen.

The Master spoke softly. “Varden, please.”

The screen went blank and a moment later Varden’s face appeared.

“Have you completed your check on this man Everling?”

“It will be done in an hour.”

“Meet me in my study at eight o’clock. You said Everling was arriving tomorrow. I wish to confer with him as soon as possible.”

CHAPTER THREE

The third-class magno-rocket from Asia carried the usual polyglot. Rows of battered couches were filled with laborers, heavy-booted and wide-belted, with tunics and jackets in the bright, iridescent colors that they loved. Some of the laborers’ women were aboard; the younger ones in trim skirts and low-cut bodices, the older ones in the shapeless sort of garments that merely cover a body. Most of the men were asleep. The women chattered together or flirted casually with men who appeared to be alone.

A pale young man, who was reading, wore the graduation ribbons of the Asian University. He was obviously dreaming of becoming a World Scientist. In the couch beside him was an aging woman wearing the long robe and carefully selected jewels of Terra City Society.

On the two front couches reclined a pair who were startling, even for the third-class rocket from Asia. The man, strongly built and about forty, was dressed in what appeared to be a religious costume—but it was not the garb of any religion known on Earth. His robe, of rough, dark green material was tied with a gold sash. The leather sandals on his bare feet were fastened with gold cords, the knot of each one held in place by a single red jewel. Attached to his robe was a cowl, which was now pulled tightly about his face. Deep in the shadow his dark eyes were half closed, perhaps in meditation.

The girl wore a simple robe that was neither elegant nor plain. It was the same dark green but the sheen of the synthetic fabric created a shimmering, constantly changing pattern of radiance. The body covered by the robe was that of a young woman, but the face was that of a child. Her hands were clenched about the handle of a small cage in which a tiny yellow bird trembled.

Occasionally the girl spoke soothingly to the bird. Her soft voice did not follow the pattern of any language, not even the lilting cadence of Venusian speech. But the bird seemed to understand and gradually stopped its shivering.

The man and the girl had not spoken since boarding the rocket. Now, as the eerie stillness of magno-flight was suddenly broken by the snarl of the landing jets, the man said, “We are almost there, my child.”

His quiet voice had the quality of solemnity and peace of soul. The girl nodded, but did not answer.

The needle of the speed indicator at the front of the cabin dropped from two thousand miles per hour to three hundred, and the rocket began to circle. The man looked out the window, and pointed to something below.

“Terra City.”

“Yes, Everling.”

“Tarmo, we are here at last!”

“Why did we come? Why did we leave our peace in the old tower? Why did we leave the animals we love? Why could we bring only this one with us?”

“You do not understand, my child. It will take a little time.”

Terra City rushed up from beneath the ship. The landing jets roared a final blast and were still. Number forty-nine, third-class out of Asia for Terra City, came in for a perfect landing.

They walked together in the bright sunlight. Everling had disregarded the raucous cries of the jet car drivers, and had quietly picked up the two plain traveling cases which were their only luggage. Tarmo carried the bird cage. As they approached the center of the city, the needle-like shaft of the telecast tower took shape against a background of endlessly changing cloud patterns.

Because of the Master’s final order for decentralization, Terra City was not large, but its beauty and ceaseless activity first awed, then frightened the girl. The life with Everling in the crumbling tower in Cheenwa had prepared her for nothing like this. Her long dead mother and father were faint images; only Everling and the tower were real to her.

The bird, Tarrno thought, is safe in its cage. It does not wonder about these streets that lead like the spokes of a wheel to something unknown in the center. But it may be hungry. She touched Everling’s arm.

“He is hungry. Can you buy him some seed.”

“Of course, my child.”

They stopped before a shop in the window of which a large Klynadon from a Venusian swamp was prominently displayed. Tarmo watched the slate-gray creature pace back and forth in its atmosphere-conditioned cage, while Everling purchased a package of seeds.

As she fed the bird, Tarmo said, “He must be sad. All creatures in cages must be sad. They are not free.”

“I do not think so. Most people prefer to be slaves, safe in a protected, routine life. It is probably the same with birds.”

They walked on, past the great marble slabs which enclosed the public baths. Near the entrance to the baths, a fountain sent plumes of clear water arching against the sky. The spray fell in a curtain of mist about an exquisitely carved nude in the center of the pool. Beside the pool stood a huge statue of the President of the Union of South America who had presented the fountain to Terra City in 2542. A small bird was asleep on the statue’s nose, and a man selling lottery tickets leaned against the pedestal.

Cubes and triangles, curving lines and sharp angles had been subtly blended by the superb designers who had planned the city, built in the twenty-fourth century. Everywhere there were trees and grass, whose fresh greeness surrounded and formed a background for the magenta, coral, aquamarine, and white of the buildings.

Everling paused before a rack of free booklets which stood at the entrance of the Terra City Historical Society. He glanced through one of the pamphlets which described how the city had been built on the site of a slum-ridden horror which had been destroyed by order of the Master. He seemed especially interested in a particular sentence: The Master exercised extreme care in evacuating the inhabitants of the original city and in finding comfortable temporary homes for them elsewhere.

They walked on. Ahead of them, the television tower at World Center became more sharply defined against the eternally moving clouds.

Tarmo’s feet dragged as if she were very tired. She had lagged several yards behind Everling when he turned and said, “Why do you walk so slowly? We have some distance to go.”

She came up beside him. Her face, with its wide cheekbones and delicately slanted green eyes, was sullen.

“I don’t like this place. Let’s go home.”

“Nonsense.”

“The buildings are too big and the streets are too long. They make me afraid.”

“Terra City is the most beautiful, the most important city on Earth.”

She shook her bead, and the dark waves of hair tossed, then settled back on her shoulders. “I don’t like it here. I don’t like the voices. There are too many of them. The light hurts my eyes. It is a place that cuts.”

“You must grow up, Tarmo, and forget your fancies.” She looked far past him.

“I want the stillness. I want my animals, my birds. And I want them free.”

She had gone back with her thoughts to Cheenwa and the old tower of gray stone, half covered with moss and vines, the only human habitation in miles of primitive isolation. Around the tower the forest crowded in, the intricate patterns of branches and leaves filtering the harshness out of the light.

It was that soft, all-encompassing light that she could not find here. She loved the light as she loved the animals who had been her only companions. Once she had met two other children near a cold, clear pool in the forest. Later they came to the tower, making a pleasurably frightening game out of their visits to this strange place.

Everling had been kind to the children. He had been sad when they ceased to visit her. Then he had said, “Do not be unhappy. Life is made up of greetings and leave-takings. Learn from the animals. It is they that you love most deeply.” She had answered, “Yes.” She had really believed she did.

Someone was speaking to her. Everling’s voice, in Terra City.

“You are in need of food, Tarmo. Let us rest here a moment.”

They stopped at a sidewalk cafe, and Everling seated her at a table. As he sat down opposite her, he said, “The way of life is different here. You will soon become accustomed to it.”

When she had finished eating, he ordered a glass of Zylute for her and wine for himself. The ruby redness in his glass contrasted with the green of her synthetic drink. Everling wrapped himself in his long robe and his thoughts.

The afternoon sunlight slanted across the cafe and Tarmo’s eyes idly followed the golden bars and rays until loud voices from an adjoining table attracted her attention.

“He comes from another planet where people live longer than we do.”

“You are a fool, my friend. But there is no reason to demonstrate the obvious. Any jet pusher on a clunker run knows that the Master is the only survivor of the lost continent. You can’t explain him any other way.”

The first voice answered quickly, “You’ll never learn anything, Gondek, with your mouth open. When the great floods came and Atlantis sank, a whole civilization, a whole way of life, was gone. They had the secret of eternal life—and the Master was the only survivor.”

The tramp of heavy boots sounded on the pavement and a jolly voice called out, “Sorry I’m late. Don’t try to explain anything to Gondek. Waste of breath. I’ll buy the drinks and call the points of-discussion. One drink—life in general. Two drinks—the Master. Three drinks—love.”

Tarmo turned slightly and saw a glass in a rough, powerful hand.

“A thousand years!”

“That is your ultimate. Did you ever think how much weariness, how many partings, how much agony that many years of life would make possible? An ordinary lifetime has enough of them. Would you really want to live forever?”

“Say, that’s a funny idea. Never thought of it.”

“I suppose you don’t know there’s trouble at the Center right now. I haven’t been able to find out what it is, but the rumor is too strong not to have some foundation.”

“And you don’t know what the trouble’s about?” asked the first man. “It’s the sickness that’s causing the worry at the Center. I’ll bet ten to one that someone close to the Master has it!”

“Could it be the Master who—!”

“Of course not. People who have the sickness die.”

Tarmo turned to Everling. “Is he—the Master—a man like you?”

“I do not know.”

“Do people love him or hate him?”

“They wonder about his eternal life. A few adore him. Some envy him. Most people merely accept him, as they accept life.”

Tarmo was silent for a moment, then continued, “If the Master created this city, he is not a good man. There are too many people here. Who knows what they are thinking? Who knows what they will do?”

Everling answered indifferently. “What all men and women do. To many Terra City is their whole life. Others are here on business. Some come in hope of making their fortunes.”

“There is no fortune here for us.”

“Tarmo,” Everling was suddenly grave. “I thought you understood my purpose in coming to Terra City was my belief that it was here I could best aid mankind. To do what one considers his duty is not to seek a fortune.”

“Yes, Everling.”

He paid the waiter and they once more walked on. In half an hour they had reached one of the high, delicately tapered walls which surrounded the World Center. The wall, with its single line of carving, seemed almost fragile; something built to enhance, not to protect. But a hundred unseen devices gave protection that walls cannot give.

The most intangible of all safety measures were the words from the Oath of a World Scientist: “…I will destroy all Final Weapons, even if it results in the destruction of the Earth.”

Only the rain and the sunlight, the wind and the fragrance of flowers, the sickness, death and tomorrow could cross that wall freely.

Behind the wall, and the three others like it, were the Master’s private library, containing the best of human thought since people began to think, and his small museum. There were, also, the larger library and museum which all persons could freely visit. Within that vital rectangle were the central offices of the Committee of the World Scientists, the Master’s quarters, the telecast tower and Laboratory 1.

Everling and Tarmo paused before the main gate and watched a small boy who was bouncing a resilent monoloid crystal sphere. The tremendous resilence of the ball carried It high, and a flick of afternoon breeze dropped it on top of the wall where it hesitated a moment, then bounced over.

The boy approached one of the Master’s guards standing beside the gate and gravely surveyed him.

“Are you going to keep my ball?”

The guard grinned. “Just a minute.”

The gate was open only an instant, but Everling and Tarmo had a glimpse of great banks of flowers, a small fountain, and everywhere the green of eternal springtime. The guard returned with the ball, and the small boy bounced it on down the street.

Everling turned to Tarmo. “Come, we are going into the Center.”

He started forward, but Tarmo would not move. Everling looked at her. “Come, Tarmo.”

“I won’t go into that place. I won’t!” Terror, stark and uncontrolled, was in her voice. “If we go there they can send us to Laboratory 1. Everybody knows that. Even the children in Cheenwa. When you go into Laboratory 1, you never come out!”

Everling’s dark eyes beneath his cowl met hers steadily. He held out his hand.

“You have nothing to fear, my child. I have protected you always.”

With Tarmo clutching his hand, Everling went to the guard and presented a small packet of papers. The guard appraised them swiftly.

“These credentials are sufficient only for admission to the anteroom. You and the girl follow me.”

In the long, low-ceilinged room the guard handed the papers to a clerk at the desk. The clerk glanced at the credentials and then at the daily check list. With a quick, decisive gesture he reached for the visaphone, saying, “Be seated, sir. There will be a short delay.”

The bird can be free in this room, thought Tarmo. It is quiet here. He will not be frightened. There is nothing to harm him.

She opened the cage and the bird darted into the free air which was the only environment it understood. As it circled the room, its wings brushed the far wall. It shivered an instant, hung suspended as if supported by some unseen hand, and died as it fell to the floor.

Neither the bird nor Tarmo had knowledge of the concealed, highly charged panels which recorded, both fluoroscopically and photographically, the images of all those who entered World Center. The image of the bird had appeared on the fluorescent screen. The photographic circuit had been made. And the technicians would curse a burned out circuit.

The clerk stepped quickly from behind his desk and stooped to pick up the bird. But Tarmo, pushing him aside, gently closed her hands around the fragile thing on the floor.

CHAPTER FOUR

When Varden entered the anteroom, he was confronted by a somber, cowled man and a girl who was crying softly as she talked to a dead bird held in her lap.

Varden considered the scene. Handling unusual affairs was his business. He remembered the day he had walked into the same room and found the superintendent of Moon trying to strangle a Venusian pilot because of some protocol about the proper registry of a ship. He crossed the room and stood before the cowled man.

“You are Dr. Everling?”

“Yes, I am Everling. And you—I see that you are a World Scientist.”

“I am Varden, the Master’s chief assistant. The girl-?”

“She is my ward. She traveled here with me from Cheenwa. Her name is Tarmo.”

Varden knelt and picked up the small golden cage with its door swinging open. He carefully closed the door and snapped the catch.

“You will not need this now. What happened?”

“He is dead. I wanted him to be free, just for a few minutes. He flew against that—”

“The photo-fluorescent panel. I’m sorry. But it isn’t anyone’s fault. We do not expect pet birds to fly around this room.”

“It is dead.”

“Death is something none of us can avoid.”

“One man has avoided it,” Everling said quietly.

Varden rose from his stooping position before the girl. “That is why I am here. The Master wishes to meet you at once. If you and your ward will follow me…”

They walked silently through courts and corridors; the tall, cowled man, the Master’s chief assistant, and the girl carrying the dead bird.

As they were entering a passageway whose curved ceiling was only dimly visible, Tarmo suddenly stopped. She stood immobile, clutching the bird.

“Tarmo,” Everling spoke with firmness. “You must not lag behind. Come quickly.”

“No! He’s taking us to Laboratory 1!”

In an instant she was running back down the passage.

Everling had started after her, when Varden caught his arm.

“No, Dr. Everling, that is not the way. She will not go far.” He stepped to a recess in the wall and pressed a button. In the dimness of the passage a tiny red light appeared. Varden turned to Everling. “She is quite safe—have no fears for her. Come, the Master is waiting.”

As they emerged from the passageway the telecast tower stood before them. Varden led the way across the rosecolored bridge of marble.

The Master’s eyes showed no surprise as he extended his hand to the man from Cheenwa. He had the facts before him on his desk.

“Good afternoon, Dr. Everling. Have you been in Terra City before?”

“Almost ten year’s ago, Master. But I do not think it will have changed greatly.”

The Master touched the control that slid back the converging panel which covered the great window. The incredible gray eyes did not leave Everling’s face as the stranger studied the magnificent city.

After a moment Everling said. “No, Master, I cannot see any changes. It is eternal, as you are. Naturally, I have never seen the city from this tower which seems hung in the sky.”

“I find this room a most pleasant place. Perhaps you will understand, Dr. Everling, as I have heard that you, too, are accustomed to working in a tower.”

“Mine is somewhat different, Master. It is overgrown with primordial wilderness. But, as you point out, all towers are essentially the same.”

The Master glanced at the file folder which lay on the desk. “That file contains the pertinent data concerning you. Will you correct me if any of my information is in error?” The cowled head bowed slightly.

“Ten years ago,” the Master went on, “you were an obscure but apparently brilliant biochemist. Then, for some personal reason, you left Terra City and isolated yourself in the wilderness of Cheenwa. There you lived in an ancient tower. The archaeologists are uncertain as to the structure’s date, but it certainly predates me. Concerning what type of work you carried on in the tower I have, of course, no knowledge.

“I notice that your dress is peculiar. However, I do not associate it with any religious order.”

“All that you have is correct, Master. I do not belong to any religious organization. I consider my style of dress desirable—that is all.”

“Very, well. The important point is that you wrote me stating that you had discovered a cure for the sickness.”

“I have.” He spoke quietly, without emphasis.

Returning to his desk, the Master sat down and rested his clasped hands on the file folder. “If you have done so, you deserve humanity’s thanks—and mine. However, as you well realize, there remains the matter of proof.”

“The diagnosis of the sickness is certain because of the bluish mark. No one has ever recovered from this disease. My ward, Tarmo, had the sickness. I treated her. She recovered.”

“Where is she?”

“I brought her with me to Terra City. Unfortunately—”

“The girl was frightened,” Varden interrupted. “Some fool had told her an old wives’ tale about Laboratory 1. She bolted. I know the guards must have long since found her. Shall I have her conducted up here?”

The Master shook his head. “I will see her later.” Staring at his folded hands, he was silent a moment. “Dr. Everling, there is a fact concerning my personal life which it is vital that yow know. However, I must ask you to use discretion in speaking of it to others.”

“I understand, Master.”

“My wife has the sickness.”

“This was already known to me.”

“In that forsaken jungle of Cheenwa? My wife’s illness is known only to a trusted few.”

“There are other channels of knowledge besides the normal senses. It was through such means that I discovered I might be of use to you.”

“Most interesting. I, too, have thought along such lines. We will discuss these matters at another time. What is important now is your method of cure.”

“First, Master, I must examine my patient.”

“How much time will you require?”

“My examination should last only a few minutes.”

The Master turned to Varden. “Conduct Dr. Everling to the Lady Ellora’s bedroom. Remain there during the examination. My wife will be less disturbed if I am not present. I will follow you in ten minutes.”

Varden led the way out of the room.

Alone, the Master considered whether it would be wise to send for this girl whom Everling claimed to have cured. She was certainly young and naive. Her actions were sufficient indication of that. Moreover, she was frightened, possibly hysterical. Everling was a brilliant man, and he would know more about him in half an hour. Surely he could do without cross-questioning a child.

It was too soon yet to speculate as to Everling’s merits, or lack of them. The greatest of all intellectual blunders was to reason without sufficient data. He had learned that lesson many lifetimes ago.

The Master opened the door quietly. Varden and Everling were standing by the bed. Ellora’s white, emaciated face was very still among the bright silken pillows. He went to the bed and kissed her, but her lips could not return the pressure of his.

As he straightened up, be wished that he could sit on the bed, but that would be an unseeming gesture, something he would have done before Varden—but not before a stranger.

“Dr. Everling,” he said, “what is your conclusion?”

“The disease is obviously far advanced. The weakness is extreme, the color of the mark deep and its outline well defined. You will note that the reflexes are already partially lost, and—”

“I appreciate your thoroughness, but I do not wish to prolong this discussion. It will only tire her. There is only one essential point. Do you believe that you can cure her?”

“Master, I know I can.”

From the white drawn face on the pillows came a cry, “I must not die, Dr. Everling. I must not! The Master wants me to live.”

Exhaustion quenched the fire in her eyes and slowly closed the lids. Quickly, Varden picked up a glass of violet liquid and held it to her lips.

“This stimulant will help you.”

The Master watched as Ellora swallowed a little of the violet fluid. Then, with a motion of his expressive fingers, he indicated that Everling should follow him.

They stepped into a small alcove where a single curved glass window created the illusion that the room was floating above the moonlit gardens below.

“Her words are significant,” Everling said. “She wishes to live only because you desire it. This indicates a noble spirit—but also a great lack of vitality. It is this draining away of vitality which is the true cause of the sickness.”

“A symptom, Doctor, is not a cause. Proceed, but be brief and be specific.”

“I have spent many years far from civilization. In those years I have come closer to the basic truths of reality than your science has or ever will. But you asked me to be specific. I have found a science above and beyond the data, methods and discoveries which are symbolized by the organization of World Scientists.”

“Do you speak of a philosophy, or a proven cure for the sickness?”

“Both, Master. To understand what I have discovered, you must realize that the cure is based on the philosophy. Vitality is the result of the will to live, and the will to live is the result of struggle. Men are designed for struggle. Do they struggle now?”

The Master made no answer.

“The mathematical setting up of population quotas for each region,” Everling continued, “has taken from men the basic incentive to contend for natural resources. The great plagues and epidemics have been conquered—and with them something against which men’s bodies were designed to fight. Yet the sickness, which is increasing every day, has become mankind’s doom. What, then, has been gained by the elimination of daily struggle and of war?”

The Master looked at the full moon and wondered what the men and women who died during the final atomic shelling of Moon Base would have thought of such an argument.

Everling continued. “The sickness is merely the physical manifestation of pampered mankind’s loss of the fundamental will to live, the fundamental ability to struggle. Man was not designed—”

“You have stated that you are able to cure the sickness. Can you cure my wife?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“Long before even your time, Master, men in the countries of the East developed certain methods of training their bodies and minds. These men discovered the secret of charging themselves with that strange, but real force which science dismisses under the term vitality. Moreover, these men of long ago gained such mental control over this force that they could cause it to flow into another person.

“World histories mention such men, but they are treated as ignorant primitives or charlatans. The last of them died, along with most of the population of Asia, when that continent was deluged with atomic dust during one of the great wars. As you recall, ninety-five percent of the people Of Asia died because they had no protection from the dust.”

The Master nodded.

“From my early researches, I felt sure that a description of their methods existed. I followed a hundred false clues, but finally I discovered the ancient record in the country of Cheenwa. For ten years I lived alone, except for my ward, Tarmo, in the old tower.

“I perfected myself in the ascetic discipline. At last I became so adept in turning my vitality into another that I was able to cure Tarmo of the sickness. In the same way, I will cure your wife.”

“What is your exact procedure?”

“I inject a drug which I have compounded. This drug temporarily lulls the patient’s mind and allows me to work directly with the subconscious. Then, by an act of will, I pass some of my vitality into the patient. This gives immediate relief from the terrible weariness and depression of the sickness, and it stimulates the patient’s own dormant will to fight and live. It is this second reaction which makes the cure permanent.”

“How long would your treatment be necessary?”

“I would expect a cure within the month.”

“You may attempt the cure,” the Master said, turning away toward the bedroom.

Everling’s calm voice followed him. “There is one condition.”

“What is it?”

“No other scientist or physician must be allowed to watch my treatment, nor be in consultation with me. I must work entirely alone.”

The Master forced himself to answer calmly. “I cannot allow that.”

With a backward step, Everling spread his hands apart, palms turned out in a gesture which might have been resignation or defeat. “Then I can do nothing.”

Suddenly, the Master’s voice was biting.

“Let us presume that you actually have discovered a cure for the sickness. Then your last statement could only mean that you intend to keep the cure as your secret. In order to glory in your own power, you will allow others to die in agony. If that is the case, you are neither a great scientist nor a decent man.”

“You misunderstand me, Master. The reasons for my request are just and necessary—as I shall explain to you.”

Abruptly, the Master swung about and led the way back to the bedside of the Lady Ellora. She was sitting up, hope bright in her eyes.

“I cannot permit this man to treat you.”

“Dearest, you can’t mean—”

“Dr. Everling has spoken a great many interesting generalities. However, he has just stated that he will not allow any other scientist or physician to observe or check his methods. Such an approach leaves me no choice.”

The man in the strange robe said quietly, “Master, you do not understand me. Another physician would confuse the patient, and make the cure doubtful. No World Scientist would comprehend my approach to the problem. The very nature of the cure prohibits complexity. That is why I came directly to you.”

With her eyes fixed on the Master, Lady Ellora said softly, “If he cures me, does it matter how?”

Her words disturbed the Master. Would he ever forgive himself if he did not take this last gamble?

“It will take me several years,” Everling said, “to train men in my methods. Until I have proven my case, I would certainly not expect the Master to provide me with the opportunities for such a training program.”

“If there is a chance of helping others…” The Lady Ellora’s voice trailed away into a whisper.

“It is only common justice,” Everling said, “to allow every man a chance to prove his case.”

“You are a practically unknown scientist,” the Master said.

The old fire flamed briefly in Lady Ellora’s voice. “Every scientist was unknown once.”

“You propose to use my wife as a guinea pig.”

“Your wife before anyone else!” she cried hoarsely.

The Master stared at her, puzzled.

“I have never been able to help you in your work in any fashion. Let me have my one chance to really be the Master’s Lady.”

He watched her for a long moment. Then he turned to Everling and nodded.

Everling bowed. “I shall begin my treatment at once.” With a deep sigh, the Lady Ellora’s head sank back among the pillows.

The Master took Varden’s arm and they left the blue bedroom.

At the passageway to the telecast tower bridge they separated, and Varden turned down the corridor which led to his office. The corridor was dimly lit and he almost crashed into a guard who was carrying Tarmo. The girl was fast asleep.

Varden found the situation amusing. “Rylek,” he said, “I wouldn’t have believed it of you. But I suppose still waters do run deep.

The guard stood very erect, the girl balanced in his arms. “You do not understand, sir.”

“All I have heard all day is, ‘You do not understand.’ Doesn’t anybody understand anything?”

“No, sir.”

“I’m glad to hear it. Get on with your story—and make it good.”

“Well, sir, I was assigned to stay with her. She had this dead bird, you see. She wanted to bury it.”

“Was this accomplished?”

“We buried it in the garden by the little pool.”

“And the funeral?”

The guard hesitated. “We…we put a stick in the ground to mark the grave. It was impressive, sir.”

Varden realized the joke was played out and smiled. “I’ve got to have a laugh sometimes, Rylek. Forget it. Now carry the girl to a guest bedroom in the Master’s quarters. Inform the chief maid of the situation.”

A voice spoke from behind Varden. “I will carry her.” Everling took the sleeping girl from the arms of the guard. With the guard leading the way, they entered a side corridor.

Varden silently watched them go.

CHAPTER FIVE

“When the Master will ask the Council for a donor, and which of you chance will choose, is unknown. Nevertheless, during the coming year one of you may be called upon to go to Laboratory 1 and give his life that the Master shall not die.

“Or, to put it another way, the one life you possess may be required by the people of this world. You understood this two months ago when you accepted the oath of a World Scientist.”

Varden paused and looked at the young men in the lecture hall. Row after row of silver stars. Approximately a hundred and fifty men this year at a guess.

He realized that the men were impatient and went on: “As you know, the normal period between donations is thirty years. However, it may vary considerably. The decision as to the exact time for a donation is made by the Master.

“The basis of your selection as possible donors was your physical fitness in relation to a simple medical fact, a fact which you could not control. The final choice will be made by pure chance. You were informed of all this after you passed the World Scientist examinations, but before you took the oath. However, at that time you did not know that you would be members of the group of potential donors.

“The purpose of this meeting is to inform you of that fact. Also, to impress upon you that you must consider this as something real—not a legend. A donor may be called for this year, and if this occurs, one of you will be selected.

“I have no intention of frightening you. If you become frightened of the inevitable, you are not worthy of being World Scientists. An intelligent human being adjusts his life by taking into account all known possibilities.

“You can calculate the chance—which is small—that any of you will be called this year. Now that I have made that speech, let me say that I don’t expect any of you to be much concerned. But it is my duty, according to custom, to brief you on this matter. Perhaps I am closer than most to the reality of the donor. A donor was called during my first year as a World Scientist—and I was one of the selected group.”

A wave of uneasiness hung over the room. Earnestly, almost grimly, the men fastened their attention upon Varden.

“I am here to answer any questions which you may have.

So, gentlemen, begin.”

A man in the back row stood up. “If I were called as donor, how long would I have between notification and…”

“Two weeks.”

“Many World Scientists are women,” said another. “Why is a woman not allowed to be a donor?”

“It is not a matter of sex, as such. However, there is a reason having to do with—as I understand it—the very nature of life itself, which makes it impossible for a woman to be a donor. The technical background behind that point is known only to the Master.”

A third young man rose. “If I should be called, how would my dependents be taken care of?”

“To your wife, ten thousand villars for life. To your children, five thousand villars until they reach twenty-one. Beyond that, unlimited free education. Your wife and any dependent over twenty-one may build a house of his design at the expense of the World Scientists. For all dependents—free medical care for life.”

“What if I should refuse to be the donor?”

“The violation of the oath of a World Scientist is lifetime banishment—probably to Mars or Moon Base. The man’s name and the reason for banishment would be publicly announced.”

After a pause, Varden added, “Are there any further questions?”

There was an eloquent scuffling of feet.

Varden smiled. “You will now have the immense privilege of shaking hands with me as you leave. If it seems to waste your time, remember I did not establish the custom. Good afternoon, gentlemen, and good luck.”

Varden’s search for the Master led him to a cool patio. The sky was a pale amber from a mist veiling the sunlight, a mist which gathered in smoke-colored clouds among the branches of the gnarled old olive trees and caressed the flower starred shrubbery.

At one end of the patio was a small pool set into flagstones. Water lilies and intricately patterned magenta marzons, grown from long dormant seeds found in the labyrinth of a Martian underground city, floated on the still water.

It was a secluded spot, a scene designed for peace. But when Varden entered the patio he saw that the design had evidently gone wrong; the dove had long since grabbed an olive twig and departed.

Tarmo, half concealed by the shrubbery, was gobbling a large piece of pie. Koom, the chief cook, was screeching something unintelligible from the shadow of an archway. The girl took a final bite, and tossed the last of the crust into the pool where a large, iridescent fish snapped it up. Koom ran lumberingly from the archway. With long, easy strides Tarmo reached the pool and leaped across it. Koom, attempting to follow her, tripped and splashed among the water lillies and marzons.

As he scrambled out, he screamed, “Stupid little female! That pie was especially ordered by the Master. I’ll tell him what you’ve done. He’ll send you to Laboratory 1!”

Instantly, unbridled terror shone from her green eyes. The old specter, haunting her from childhood, formless but awesome, was at hand.

Before she could move, the quiet voice that the world knew so well spoke from the dimness of another archway. “Do not be afraid, Tarmo.”

The Master stepped out into the eerie light of the patio. Tarmo stared at the vapor-shrouded figure, then darted to a nearby wall. The wall was covered with vines whose tendrils were locked to the masonry by centuries. Frantically the girl sought for a foothold, found one and began to climb.

The Master turned to Koom. “I will attend to this. I am sorry about the pie, but I doubt if some other dessert will kill me.” With a gesture he dismissed the cook.

Tarmo paused a moment for breath and again began to climb. However, her long robe, already torn, caught in the vines and she was trapped, clinging there, half-suspended, helpless. Seen through the mist, her hair disheveled and her face covered with dust from the ancient vines, she seemed to Varden more like a trapped wild creature than a young girl.

The Master’s voice was gentle. “Come here, Tarmo.”

She had been facing the wall as her hands gripped the stout vines; now, turning towards him her robe ripped loose and she slid to the ground. There she crouched, her back against the wall alert, watching him. After a moment, the Master spoke.

“No one will harm you. Do not believe foolish stories about me or Laboratory 1.” At the mention of the Laboratory she cringed, but as the Master’s calm voice went on she became quieter. “You are safe, Tarmo. But I want you to be happy, also. Now, come to me.”

Reluctantly she took a step forward.

“You believe me, do you not?”

She nodded.

While the Master had been speaking, Flim had joined the group. He sat on the grass and watched, motionless except for the tip of his tail which undulated in a slow rhythm.

“You are my guest, Tarmo. That means we are friends—and friends do not run away from each other.”

She came a little closer, staring at him.

“Do I seem so strange to you.”

“No,” she whispered. “It’s your eyes that are strange.”

“Why?”

“Because they tell me that you know so many things. Perhaps as many as Everling. But I don’t want you to know me—to hear what I think before I speak. To know what I dream. I will be alone with myself.”

He smiled. “I am not a conqueror, my dear. Nor an invader of your spirit. You have my word.”

Holding out his hand, he waited. She came to him slowly, with sliding, tentative steps. Hesitantly, she put out her hand—and took his.

“Now we are friends, Tarmo. You will never again be frightened by the terrible Master. You can see that he is only a man.”

“Yes, Master,” she nodded.

“But,” he went on, “you must tell Koom that you are sorry. When you are hungry, ask him for something. He will give it to you.”

“I wasn’t hungry.” There was laughter now in her voice. “It was a kind of game.”

The third member of the group made his presence known by rubbing against the Master’s knee. The Master glanced down. As he scratched the dog’s head he said to Tarmo, “This is Flim. He needs someone to play his kind of games. Will you?”

Dropping down oh her knees, the girl stretched out her hands to the dog. Flim came eagerly to them and her arms encircled the big head. She began to talk into his ear, using a language that only he could understand.

Varden decided that the show was over and crossed the patio, saying:

“I looked for you, Master, for half an hour. I find you trying to promote yourself as god-father, when you’re supposed to spend your time solving the problems of humanity. The only kind of pie you should know anything about is spelled pi.”

“Who was wasting whose time by eavesdropping? Well, what is it? Moon Base again?”

“No, thank God. But I’ve been talking to Ronding. He’s screaming for better assistants.”

“You know Ronding is always screaming about something. I will go over the list of available men in the morning. Meanwhile, I shall go back to solving the problems of humanity.” He looked at the girl, who was playing with the dog. “We are friends, now, Tarmo?”

She smiled up at him and he started slowly toward the nearest archway. As he watched the tall figure, Varden realized that the Master stooped a little, and that he looked very tired.

Varden dropped into a chair beside the pool and lit a cigar. Tarmo lay flat on her stomach, drinking from the pool.

“Do you go back into a tree trunk at night, to sleep?” Varden inquired.

Tarmo looked up from the water, the curly ends of her hair dripping. “What?”

“Forget it. I pity any man but the Master who tries to tame you.”

Her eyes were wide. “Tame?”

“The dog there was wild once. Now he’s your companion. He’s been tamed.”

Her small, firm hand rubbed Flim’s nose. “He could turn wild again, couldn’t he?”

Varden wondered if she hoped he would. “Tarmo,” he said, “would you like to hunt? To kill?”

“Maybe—if somebody hurt me.”

Varden laughed. “You don’t look as if anyone could hurt you very easily. A young she-tiger couldn’t look any healthier. But Everling told me that you were very sick once.”

The sea-green eyes, flecked with amber, stared past him, into something he could not see. There was no way by which he could enter the room in the old tower into which the mist often drifted, as it was drifting around them now. Nor could he see remnants of bread and bits of cake carefully laid out for the birds. Or understand the games she had invented out of the pattern of the bedcover; games which had filled endless long hours.

“The sun went away,” she said at last. “I stayed in the dark… In my room. The birds came to the window ledge and sang for me…”

“Didn’t your playmates come to see you?”

“I had two playmates once. But they went away before I was sick. They never came back.”

“Of course it’s a wilderness out there, but Dr. Everling must have had some friends. Didn’t he bring them to see you?”

“I don’t remember.”

“How did you feel, Tarmo?”

“Sick.”

Varden laughed. “Did you like it there, in the—”

Tarmo was no longer listening. She had turned her head and Varden could see only her profile. As he watched her chin lifted inch by inch. As her eyes came into line with the second floor balcony she became still. The balcony was covered with jasmine, and beyond it was the blue bedroom of the Master’s Lady.

Everling was leaning on the balustrade. He spoke no words nor made any gesture, yet Tarmo began to run across the patio, Everling was standing outside the door of the Lady Ellora’s room when she reached the second floor. He smiled and carefully smoothed the dark hair which had fallen across her forehead.

“You wanted me?”

“Yes,” he said. “It is time to dress for dinner. And, my child, it appears that you need to dress.”

Putting his arm around her shoulders, he walked with her along the corridor. It was so safe here, she thought. All that she had ever known of home, parents, friends, were within the crook of his arm.

CHAPTER SIX

The Master chalked his cue and looked down at the three ivory billiard balls. It was one of those inexplicable days when his game was bad. For more than an hour he had been practicing and the ivory balls remained lifeless.

Perhaps it was the weather. He glanced at the sky outside the window. The veil of cirrus clouds over Terra City had taken on a leaden hue. It would be raining in an hour.

The Master turned back to the table. He missed a three-cushion carom around the corner, racked his cue, and left the billiard room.

He entered a long slanting gallery in which his footsteps followed him with persistent echoes, and emerged into afternoon grayness.

The scene before him was relentlessly harsh. High walls surrounded a courtyard surfaced with sandstone slabs, precisely fitted. In the center of the court was a squat, rectangular, windowless building. The low clouds seemed to be pressing the building into the earth, trying, the Master thought, to bury it once and for all, so that soft, green grass could grow where it had stood.

He crossed the court and stopped before the single entrance to the building. The doorway was indicated only, by the almost imperceptible cracks which outlined it, and the simple inscription engraved above it—Laboratory 1.

The Master pressed the button which opened the combination cubicle. As he carefully set the dials, his thoughts drifted to what the technician who designed the combination lock almost nine hundred years before, had said:

“Master, there are one billion, four hundred million, seven hundred and nineteen thousand, six hundred and forty-seven possible combinations. As the code cannot be deciphered by any known method, as the combination cannot be ascertained by any physical analyses, and as the use of force will automatically seal the lock, I doubt if anyone will pass through this door unless you wish them to do so.”

No one ever had. He had changed the combination every week. And he had forgotten it only once. That was around 2700 when Zelt had been his chief assistant. It had been his own fault for telling Zelt that he had forgotten the combination. For three weeks Zelt’s jokes had made his life intolerable. Then he had remembered the combination.

The massive nitron door, more than a meter thick, was swinging slowly inward. He followed it into the dimness beyond. The door, in response to the timing mechanism, silently swung back into its original position and, as it did so, soft lighting flooded the room before him. With the closing of the door, the last physical contact between the Master and mankind was severed. Except for the visaphone, which he could turn off at will, he was completely isolated.

The Master walked slowly through the maze of equipment. He could have found his way in his sleep; every magnetron, every calculator, each piece of biological or harmonic apparatus was embedded in his mind, a basic part of his consciousness.

Only the North wall of Laboratory 1 was starkly bare of instruments. The Master touched a button and the metal panels which formed the wall began to descend into recesses. They dropped individually—starting from the right and continuing to the left. As each panel slipped noiselessly into the floor, it revealed a metal cabinet. The cabinets were identical and obviously designed to contain a normal human being, standing erect. They were sealed with thick panes of transparent, unbreakable plastic.

Within each cabinet, a nude young man stood in an attitude of dignity and pride. For some reason, which even the Master had been unable to fathom, all of the young men’s faces had the same expression—a quiet smile. Destiny was over for them and they were satisfied.

Around each young man there swirled a thin, sparkling nebula. The nebula seemed almost a living thing; iridescent, rainbow-hued.

Beside each young man—and also bathed in the shimmering mist—was an urn. On the upper metal framework of every cabinet was stamped a date.

There were thirty-three cabinets. The Master walked down the long row, pausing occasionally before one of the motionless figures. After he had reached the last cabinet, he; stepped back, leaned against an atomic integrator, and looked for a long time at the vista of men and dates. Once more he touched the button and the panels began to rise from the floor, progressively, obliterating the faces with their quiet smiles.

He walked, a shadowy figure, between the great stolid machines. In the short passage that lead to the door which separated him from other men, he picked up an atomic torch from a small niche and pointed the beam at an opalescent disk set into the wall.

Instantly, the invisible radiation, matching exactly the radiation of the disk, unlocked the great door. As it moved outward, the Master replaced the torch in its niche, and went outside. Behind him the slab swung back into place. Laboratory 1 was sealed to ordinary men.

A great weight of unmeasurable fatigue, which he knew so well, settled upon him. But that was tomorrow’s problem. He must not think of that. He had not thought about it for hours, now he realized who was responsible for the relief. Varden. It was he who, had suggested that a little billiard practice might freshen him up.

Enmeshed in his thoughts, he was startled to come suddenly upon the robed figure of Everling.

Equally startled by the Master’s abrupt appearance, Everling averted his eyes and became deeply interested in a single, nondescript flower which was perched on the end of a long stem.

The flower, the Master observed, was growing out of a crack in the sandstone blocks of the courtyard. Superbly cut, there had remained one little flaw. A wind, a single seed, time—and a flower. Amusing to consider the flaw in perfect craftsmanship. More amusing to watch the man.

“Good afternoon, Dr. Everling.”

“Good afternoon, Master.” Neither the face looking out from the cowl nor the tone conveyed any emotion except slight surprise.

The Master walked past him without pausing. As he continued across the court he thought, “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but too much knowledge is equally dangerous, and makes for doubt of one’s fellow man.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

The Master’s desk was a mound of documents and reports. He decided on a frontal assault rather than meticulous efficiency. The frontal assault was beginning to produce results when Varden came in.

“Moon Base called again.”

The Master did not look up. “Oxygen plant?”

“Of course. They’re living up there on the stored supply—which won’t last forever.”

The Master wrote: More information needed on a request from the Genetics. Committee for a cut in the South American birth rate, signed a grant of one thousand villars to a young scientist, and looked up.

“That Moon Base oxygen plant was built almost four hundred years ago. We now have far better methods of extracting oxygen from oxidized ore. Write an urgent order to the Council for a requisition to build a modern plant. Send up whatever technicians are necessary to repair the old plant. Dr. Bolton should head the group. Tell him to have the old plant operating in two days—if he needs string and baling wire, I will send it by special magno-ship.”

The Master turned back to his desk. As he worked fatigue began to wash over him like an implacable wave. Somehow he could not bring his mind into sharp focus. It ran off on endless tangents. After a moment, he folded his arms on the pile of papers. Was there never any end to paper work? Slowly, his head fell forward drowsily, until it rested on his folded arms.

“Master!”

The Master’s head snapped up. He had thought Varden was gone from the room.

“You must call for a donor—”

“It is not yet time!”

“Master, it is time!” Varden went out.

As the Master worked, he became conscious of the sound of rain against the windows. He glanced up. Lightning flashed across the Sky of Terra City. This, he thought, would be a great storm.

Wind rattled the windows in their heavy metal frames. Those old-fashioned windows were an idiosyncrasy of the Master. For some reason, he had never learned to appreciate windows whose plastic panes slid noiselessly into wall recesses at the touch of a button. To him they symbolized a completely synthetic existence.

He was making a notation to change the location of two Austro-Asia magno-rocket bases, when the wind won a brief victory in its battle with the windows. A latch gave way and a pane crashed open. The wind cleared the Master’s desk with efficiency, blowing the papers in all directions. Behind it came a flood of rain.

The Master’s mind commanded his body to dive for the window and close it. But his body obeyed slowly and awkwardly. As he rose, the wind almost toppled him backwards. He stumbled to the window, groping in the rain that blurred his sight. Leaning far out, he fumbled for the metal sash.

As he did so, he glanced downward. Below him the sheer wall fell, a rain-gleaming precipice, to the courtyard a hundred feet below. For an instant the world dimmed and whirled. Then his will drove his eyes back to the corner of the sash.

It was a fight now—his numbed, outstretched fingers against wind, rain and slippery metal. Twice the wind jerked the sash loose from his grip. At last his fingers found a slightly roughened spot on the metal and held. Slowly he tugged, pulling the pane inward until he could reach the latch and jam it shut.

Swaying on his way back to his chair, he dropped into it heavily. The room suddenly filled with a gray mist. Perhaps, he thought, fog had come in with the rain. Yet fog did not come with rain… Perhaps…

He slumped over the desk, arms outstretched. Rainwater, dripping from his hair and clothes, formed a little pool on the polished wood where he rested his head and he spoke without moving. “Some brandy—quickly.”

As Varden poured the drink, he watched the Master slowly sit up and lean back in the chair.

“Window blew open. Storm—very sudden.”

Varden handed him the brandy. The Master spilled part of it.

“It will help,” Varden said gently. “But you need more than that.”

“It is thirty-seven years,” Varden continued, “since you asked the Council for a donor.”

“When I need one, I will tell you. I am merely a bit tired.”

“If this were the first time, I would agree with you. But during the last general conference of the Planning Committee you twice lost the thread of the conversation. Some of your work is months behind schedule. I’ve been with you daily for a long time—at least by my standard of time—and I think I can judge the point when you cease to be the Master and degenerate into an old man. You know what will happen then.”

“Yes, I know.”

“Then you must—”

“No, Varden. I refuse to face another young man now.”

Varden refined the Master’s glass and handed it to him.

The Master sipped the warming, strengthening liquid and when he spoke, his voice seemed to Varden an echo of the relentless rain beating against the windows.

“You do not understand. Every thirty years for a millennium I have forced myself to face a strong, intelligent young man at the door of Laboratory 1. The scene is always the same.

“I stand there and formally tell him what he already knows—that once he walks into that laboratory, he will die. I can say nothing else. Then I ask him if his affairs are in order, and if he has said his goodbyes. Usually, he merely nods. Then I say, ‘Or haven’t you told anybody that you are the donor? Do you want me to do it for you afterwards?’ Then he says, ‘Forget it. But can I have a smoke and a drink before…’ He smiles. They always smile, Varden. Why don’t they ever do anything but smile!”

Varden was staring at one of the papers which had been blown to the floor. It was a formal letter, and began: “To the office of the Master. The third commission from the Venusian Interplanetary Travel Authority wishes to point out that…”

Without looking up, Varden said, “What is the loss of one young man, compared with the destiny of a planet? Perhaps a solar system?”

The roar of the storm surrounded and compressed the silence of the room. The papers made a great crackling noise as Varden collected them. He placed them on the Master’s desk and waited.

At last the Master looked directly at his chief assistant. “Call the Council in session tomorrow. Tell them that I want a new donor. Now, hand me that Moon Base order so I can sign it.” He picked up his glass and drained it.

A young World Scientist was tapping out the rhythm, of a melody played by the dance orchestra at the Pavilion. Halfway through the song, the musicians stopped abruptly. The curtains were drawn back from the huge telecast screen.

“Special announcement. On request of the Master, the Council has chosen a new donor. The donor is, of course, a World Scientist. The names of all those who were acceptable have been placed in a mechanical selector, and fate has chosen one.”

The men and women at the tables reacted only with a dull undertone of startled conversation. To them the news meant everything—and nothing. It meant an enigma greater than life or death, or even the meaning of existence. It was the final enigma of the Master. But it also meant something that did not personally concern them.

“As has been the custom in the past” the announcer’s voice was heavy with solemnity, “there will be a pause for a few moments in honor of the man who will give his life for the Master and civilization.”

The people were silent as the screen went blank, but from the speaker poured out the opening bars of The Green Hills of Earth. As the planet’s hymn blended with the moonlight and shadow of the Pavilion, a young World scientist picked up his glass and finished his drink.

He signalled a waiter and indicated another round. The waiter handed him the check which he signed Korson.

When the hymn was over and the orchestra resumed its music, he turned to the man across the table. “I’m sorry that you didn’t pass the examinations, Lorg. Perhaps next year.”

“So you won’t lose your galley slave at the Clinic. I’ll never be a World Scientist. Remember, I’m older than you.”

“You can always try again. You can have a go at the exam for five alternate years between the ages of twenty-seven and thirty-seven. You’ve only used one try.”

As the waiter poured their drinks the men’s eyes wandered about the room. The tables were scattered around the dance floor. A dimmed eterno-light gleamed here and there.

Beyond the Pavilion’s cafes, lounges, cool recreation rooms, gardens, and open air dance floors, the largest park in Terra City stretched for miles. Outdoor and indoor swimming pools, playgrounds for children, the great stadium, groves of old olive trees, banks of colorful flowers, amphitheatres for impassioned orations and glens for whispered words; all these were within the huge park.

Two girls walking ahead of their escorts, passed the table at which the young men sat. One of the girls spoke over her shoulder, “Don’t forget the party tonight, Korson.”

“I’ll be there.”

Lorg’s big head seemed to waver on his long, fragile neck. “How do you do it? I can never take time off. Maybe a few days once or twice a year—usually when I’m sick. You know, I work longer than anyone else at the Clinic.”

“There’s more than simply a steady grind to becoming a World Scientist,” Korson answered.

“Meaning what?”

“Experimentation in any science is something like a sculptor tentatively hacking at a block of stone. Or an artist dabbing at a fresh piece of canvas. Or a musician. Part of it is inspiration. You can’t force it to come. There’s no use hacking or painting, until the idea is there. Even so, you may throw out the first idea, and the second. But you can’t work until you have something to work on.”

“I’ve lots of ideas,” Lorg said.

“Sketch them out in notes—and then forget them. While you’re busy with one thing, you’ll get an answer to something else.”

Lorg’s tense fingers dug sweaty wrinkles into the tablecloth. “I’ll do just what you said. I’ll do anything. I must pass the exam next time.”

The meal was placed before them. Lorg picked idly at the food. “Next time,” he said. “I must make it next time.”

Korson, shoveling his dinner down lustily, spoke with his mouth full. “There’s plenty of time for everything.” He swallowed his food and continued, “What you need—” A hand lightly touched his shoulder.

He turned. A man in the uniform of the Master’s Guard was standing behind him.

“You are Korson?”

“Yes.”

“I was informed at the Clinic that you could be found here.”

A paper with an official seal was held out to him. Breaking the seal, Korson read:

“Korson, donor for the Master, will present himself two weeks from this date at the World Center.”

His mind would not accept the fact. It couldn’t happen to me. Not to me!

The guard saluted and, turning, began to thread his way past the tables toward the exit. Involuntarily Korson’s hand went out in protest in appeal. “It’s too soon…” he whispered, staring at the man’s back as he went away.

Korson was on his feet, although he did not realize it. From a long way off he heard a faint little voice piping, “Korson, what is it? It—it can’t be you?”

CHAPTER EIGHT

Outside the Pavilion Korson hailed a jet car, crossed the park, and stepped out at the entrance to Terra City Clinic.

Cool, pungent dampness rose from the wide strip of grass which surrounded the clinic. A delicate scent drifted from the flowers in the two gigantic limestone urns that ranged the entrance. Above the doorway glowed a single eterno-light, around which a large moth was circling. Again and again, the moth beat with futile, disintegrating wings against the globe.

Korson entered the Clinic walked to his laboratory and opened the door. He was home, now. It was familiar here, safe. The chemical solution he had been filtering was dripping steadily, exactly as he had left it. The drops were falling in the same precise rhythm. Nothing had changed. Nothing had happened.

With-meticulous care he put on his white smock. Then he crossed to the scarred laboratory table. On the table was an old pewter mug, battered, with the single word Pavilion, engraved on it. But there was no beer in the mug, now. It was filled with those tools around which his life revolved: solution thermometers, pipettes, test tubes, indicators.

Slowly, automatically, he seated himself before the neutron microscope. From the rack of stained and mounted cultures, he selected the third from the right and placed it in the microscope. His sure fingers made the primary adjustments, locked them, and began the precise alignment. The image was in position. It was only necessary to focus.

Somehow, he could not sharpen the image. It blurred and faded. He realized that the core of his mind had withdrawn from visual sensation and had concentrated on the purely auditory—the sound of the filtered drops falling into the beaker. One every ten seconds. Hourglass of science. Light and steady was the beat of the drops, while time race faster and faster.

He turned from the microscope and picked up a letter he had received that morning. It was from his brother, Kenler.

“Kor, do you remember the day we spent together a couple of months ago? We swam in the river above the dam…”

Plunging deep into the water, Korson’s muscular, wideshouldered body moved gracefully down to the flat bottom of soft mud. Spires of grass waved gently; a lazy fish passed close to Korson’s face, and darted away in fright. Water closed round him, softly touching his eyes and lips.

Coming to the surface, his honey-colored hair plastered wetly against his head, he saw the water moving faster as it neared the rapids. He swam in that direction and soon his powerful shoulders were fighting the flood of whitecrested water which poured between narrow banks. The roar was deafening; he could not see past the green and white froth filling his eyes. One leg scraped a sharp rock.

When at last he reached the bank, dragged himself up and lay panting, his brother, watching him, shook his head. “You’ll try that once too often.”

Kenler’s grave, lean face was calm as always. He looks more like a scientist than I do, thought Korson.

Later, in the cabin over mugs of ale, Korson lay flat on the floor, a long, thin cheroot in the corner of his mouth.

“Funny,” said Kenler. “we’re so different. I’m happy living the good life—”

“Hermit stuff.”

“You in the city with your test tubes. Walking the straight and narrow past of ambition.”

“Ambition’s path, yes,” answered Korson. “But my idea is balance. Plenty of fun and plenty of work. Concentration is the secret. I practiced early. Trained myself to bring one idea into my mind and keep it there for five or ten minutes. Dropped it. Picked up another. That’s proper channeling, it’s worked.”

Kenler sighed, feeling ineffectual beside the brother who was older than himself but whom everyone thought was the younger. “Nothing can disturb that calm self-sufficiency… Sometimes I worry. You and I, since Mother and Father died—we’ve only got each other. Soon I’ll be married. When that happens, you—”

Korson sat up, staring at Kenler. “You have a peculiarly nauseating expression on your face. Did you say you were getting married? That you’re madly in love?”

Kenler nodded. “It happened suddenly.”

“It always happens suddenly!” Korson said. Then he rose and clapped his brother on the back heartily. “Good luck. Be happy.” Going to the stove he began rattling pans, preparatory to cooking the trout they had caught that morning.

Kenler eyed him gravely. “I hope you don’t become too sleek and sharp in the city, with every little cog and wheel working perfectly. All made up of nice little sanitary compartments, hermetically sealed.” His smile was crooked.

“You’d be better off for a few bits of earth and bugs to annoy you.”

The chemical solution was still dripping slowly, steadily.

Once more Korson’s eyes focused upon the letter lying on the lab table. The little sealed compartments did him no good now. Should he write Kenler and tell him?

A World Scientist who had sworn to guard the property of mankind hurled a battered mug at a neutron microscope worth fifty thousand villars.

Korson was stopped at the gate of the World Center by a guard.

“I do not recognize you, sir. May I be of any assistance?”

“Take me to the Master at once.”

“It is impossible. If you will leave your name…?”

Without answering, Korson reached into the pocket of his carefully pressed tunic and took out the donor’s summons. There was a faint smile on his face as he handed it to the guard.

The guard read the first line, and stiffened. Folding the paper he returned it to Korson. “Sorry, sir. Please follow me.”

Erect, rather arrogantly, Korson strode behind him into the anteroom.

The guard spoke to the desk clerk and at once the clerk switched on the visaphone. “Varden—urgent.”

In the dimness of his great library the Master turned around at the sound of a footstep. “Good afternoon, Varden. Moon Base?”

“Of course. Bolton just asked for you to send up the ‘string and baling wire.’ I hope you know what that phrase means. I don’t.”

“I do. Prepare an order.”

“There’s another little matter. You have a peculiar visitor. This time he doesn’t wear a weird costume. He’s just out of place—in time. To be exact, he’s seven days out of place. Korson, the donor.”

In the cone of light from the single source of illumination above the desk, the Master’s mouth twitched nervously and his voice was strained. “Never before has a donor presented himself before the appointed hour!”

He closed the book he had been reading. “Have Korson brought here at once. I’ll outline the Moon Base order later.”

As Korson stood in the doorway of the library, the Master wondered if it had finally come—the first appeal for life? The appeal even he could not grant. Well, it had to come sometime. He stepped from behind the desk, his blue caps swinging with his movements.

Korson came a few steps into the room. Among the shadows of the library, the figure of the Master was lost. Korson stood waiting, poised and challenging.

A figure emerged from the darkness of a corner. There was the click of a switch and the room was filled with rich, mellow radiance.

“I am sorry. I did not realize how dark it was.”

“I am Korson, the donor.”

“Obviously. And I, obviously, am the Master. Now will you come a little nearer?”

Korson took two halting steps.

“Much nearer, please. We are not on a duelling ground.” The Master turned to a cabinet and took from it a bottle and two glasses. Slowly he filled the glasses with a rich liqueur, aromatic with strange spices. He extended one to Korson, who took it in silence.

“It is only natural,” the Master said, “that you regard me as an enemy. But shall we not drink to the possibility of our becoming friends?”

Korson drank with the Master and said quietly, “I have no enemies, or friends, now. I have only a destiny—and I’m rotten at histrionics. I am no longer awed by anything. Including you.”

He turned his back to the Master and dropped into a deep leather chair.

“Why did you come here before your appointed time?”

“Have I embarrassed you?”

“Yes,” the Master said simply.

The calm directness bothered Korson a little. He looked at the Master. The eyes bothered him, so he glanced away.

“I want to get this business over with,” he said. “This afternoon if possible. At the latest, tonight.”

“Your approach is certainly different from all the others. Remember, you have seven days left. If you are a profound young man, you will use them to make peace with your soul.”

The authority in this unusual cloaked figure made Korson assert himself. “Aren’t you being a trifle dull about this little affair, Master?” He went to the cabinet and poured himself another drink. “I’ve left my laboratory.” For an instant his voice almost got out of control. “It’s up to you to find someone to finish my job. I don’t say farewells. As for my soul—if I have one—what could I do in seven days?”

The words hung in the air between them, for the Master did not answer.

After a moment Korson said roughly, “I could spend my time polishing my stars.”

“That remark, Korson, is unworthy of you.” He felt a wave of shame pass over him such as he had never known before, and the blood came up in his cheeks. Yet he told himself persistently that the Master was only a figurehead, who did not have to do the dying.

“Seven days. It is death, isn’t it?”

The Master did not answer.

“Finish the job now!”

“It is out of my hands. The Council sets the hour.”

Putting down his glass, Korson wandered about the library. Most of the books on the banks of shelves before him dealt with philosophy. Parchments in long forgotten languages were stored in racks. Tablets which bore strange inscriptions were encased in clear, protective plastic.

Here, and here alone on Earth, were assembled the finest, most profound thoughts of men. This was the ultimate treasure house of human wisdom and before him stood the man who should be the wisest of men. Perhaps he could find an answer in seven days. It was also the way to exact payment from the man for whom he must die.

“Master, you have about you the work of the most brilliant minds of all ages. The greatest teachers and philosophers. You have studied all of them, and weighed their arguments. Many of their discussions deal with death, and what—if anything—comes afterwards. I might learn a great deal even in seven days—with you as my instructor!”

Korson saw the blow had found its mark. The face before him became the face of a tired old man, and the voice halting.

“Force me…to see you…every day?”

“Yes.” Korson’s face was hard with victory.

“The young are cruel.”

“You will have plenty of time to recover.”

Silently, the Master turned away for a moment. At last he murmured, “That is true.”

As Korson continued; he knew that he was beaten. “You offer me nothing but death. The least you can do is give me the wisdom to meet it as I should.”

There was no help for it, the Master realized. For seven days he must accept the torment this young man demanded of him.

“You cannot expect me,” he said slowly, “to solve the final riddle in seven days or seven lifetimes. However, you may stay. A room will be assigned to you in my private quarters.” He paused and added quietly, “I ask that you look within your own innermost being and answer one question. Do you honestly believe that I am happy when I meet a donor at the door of Laboratory 1?”

CHAPTER NINE

The first day was ebbing. Korson and the Master had been talking during the late afternoon. Now, Korson rose and stood beside the desk.

“If it won’t inconvenience you, Master, I would prefer that my status here be that of a protege. It may sound odd and cause some rumors, but I would rather no one knew I was the donor.”

“I understand.”

“Thanks.”

“Our discussion has been most interesting, Korson. I wish we could continue. But that sublimely cursed Moon Base is still in trouble.”

“Can I be of any help?” Instantly, Korson realized what he had said.

The Master smiled. “I’m afraid not. I suggest you wander around the gardens and try to be happy, but if you are still determined to solve the final mystery, you might read the passages I have marked in those volumes.”

Korson picked up the stack of books.”

“The evening meal is at seven-thirty,” the Master said. “Will you join us?”

“Of course.”

Korson walked through the gardens until he reached a grove of pines that towered like grounded lances in the fading light. Laying the pile of books on the thick pad of fallen needles, he dropped down on the ground. For a moment he stared through shafts of hazy amber sunlight, upward to the sky with its eternally restless clouds. Then, settling himself comfortably, his back against a tree, he opened a book.

Concentration was difficult. The strangeness of this tiny world dominated his thoughts. That morning, as he had passed through another part of the grounds, he had seen, through the pale mist, the swiftly moving figure of a girl. Her movements had an unearthly quality. Dancing lightly, arms moving like willows in the wind, lithe young body clothed only in an iridescent gossamer robe, she had disappeared behind the coral trumpets of a Xalpan tree. He pulled his thoughts back and flipped over the pages of another book. Again he tossed it aside, and listened to the sound of birds twittering, calling to each other in soft, excited notes. For a moment he thought that he heard a human voice join the conversation, speaking not in the language of man, but in rhythmic half-tones, resembling Chinese music.

Curious, he stood up and walked in the direction of the sounds. Threading his way among the pines, his footsteps muffled by the needles, he came to a small patio in the center of which was a tiny pool.

Standing beside the pool was a girl, the same girl he had seen that morning. Her back was to Korson. A bird was perched on each of her shoulders, another on her wrist. Korson had taken a few steps toward her when his heel clicked on a stone.

There was a fluttering of wings and the birds were gone. Tarmo whirled around.

“You frightened them away! They come every day to talk to me. They are my only friends here!”

“I’m sorry.”

She darted past him, but he caught her arm.

“Do you live here? What’s your name?”

Tarmo tried to free herself, but could not. Puzzled, she looked up at him. “You’re stronger than the others.”

“Am I?”

He released her arm but, not moving, she continued to study his face.

“You’re younger, too.” Her eyes slid away from his face, sideways, searching the grass. One small foot took a hesitant step, and paused. A few of the birds returned, to hover over her.

He smiled. “Funny child.”

“First Varden calls me a female, now you call me a child.”

“You’re both, aren’t you? And beautiful. You’ve been told that, haven’t you?”

What was strange about him, about his voice? Everling had never spoken to her like this, nor Varden, nor even the Master. It must mean something, she thought, but it is something I do not understand. And it is something I do not want to run away from.

Korson came close to her. He slipped his hand beneath her chin, lifting her head. She stiffened, instinctively bracing against his wordless challenge. “Now you’re somebody else. I don’t like the somebody else.”

“You will.”

Gently she raised his hand to her lips. Then, deliberately her small teeth clamped hard on his fingers. He jerked his hand away and sucked the fingers.

She went back to the pool, dropped into one of the chairs beside—it, and curled her feet under her. Korson stretched out in the grass and lit a cigarette.”

“Do you live here?” she asked.

“I’m here on business with the Master.”

“You shouldn’t have come. You might have to stay inside these walls, like I do.”

“Who are you? Why are you here?”

“I’m Tarmo. The Lady Ellora is sick. Everling is curing her. And I must be with Everling. He has always taken care of me.”

“He must be a fine man. Your father?”

“No. I don’t remember my father—or my mother…”

“Guardian?”

“No. He doesn’t guard me.”

A mass of purple cloud trapped the last bit of gold from the setting sun and sent a shaft of light into the grove. Tarmo’s hair was blue-black as Korson leaned closer to her, his boldness gone, and his tone gentler. “It’s the light on your hair.” He could not take his eyes from her. “Shining on your hair.”

She raised her head suddenly, as if she were listening. “Yes,” she said, but she was not speaking to Korson. The rustle of a long robe caused Korson to turn as a quiet voice spoke.

“Go to your room, my child. Do not spend so much time dreaming by the pool. Read the lessons I have given you, then dress for dinner.”

Cowl and sparkling ruby. Certainly this was a haunted grove, thought Korson, as he studied the powerfully built man.

When Tarmo had gone, Everling looked at Korson steadily. “I understand that no one is allowed here except on special business.”

“I am on special business.”

“Important enough to permit you the freedom of the Master’s private gardens?”

“Yes.”

Everling’s voice carried no trace of anger. It merely stated a fact. “My ward is very charming—and very young. If you have followed her here—”

Korson’s patience ran out. “I don’t know who the hell you are with your head hidden inside that damn sack, but I will not be called a liar—even in fancy words. I’m here because I am the donor!”

Twilight, silence, a haunted grove. Everling’s hoarse tones seemed loud.

“Please forget what I’ve said. I am Dr. Everling. At present I am treating the Master’s wife.”

“I’m Korson.”

The eyes deep within the shadow of the cowl caught the glint of silver on the young man’s shoulder. “World Scientist?”

Korson nodded.

“Sorrow is part of life, but the giving of a life, before it is fully consummated is more than sorrowful. It is tragedy, and therefore noble.”

The man was harmless, but boring, Korson thought. He was searching for an easy method of breaking off the conversation, when Everling continued:

“This particular tragedy is part of our governmental system. We have accepted it as a lesser evil to others we have known. Curious. Similar to primitive tribes who flung victims over a cliff to propitiate their gods…or burned human sacrifices alive on an altar. I understand that all World Scientists know exactly the role the donor must play?”

“They don’t.”

“Then, all you know is that you are the donor? That your friends and family will never see you again? That no one has any idea what will become of your body, even of your ashes?”

“Do you specialize in psychiatry, Doctor? If you do, let me say, for whatever the data may be worth that my mind is at peace. I admit I was afraid once, but the time for that is past.”

“Yes, it is past. Still, it is natural for me, as a physician, to wonder whether the Master is over troubled by the memory of all the brave young men who have died for him. What, indeed, passes through his mind as he goes about his work in Laboratory 1?”

Impatiently, Korson gathered up his books. “I’m sorry I told you I was the donor. The Master has been kind enough to allow me to live here during my last few days. I don’t know whether he’ll appreciate anyone realizing who I am.”

Musing, seeming to not look at the young man but to be gazing into the future, or the past, Everling answered slowly, “It is strange that you should say that. Viewed in a certain light, your position here is the same as that of Tarmo and myself.”

“All that matters to me, is that no one besides yourself knows the truth—particularly that funny kid who is your ward.”

“Shall we all consider ourselves part of the Master’s family?”

“That’s as good a way of putting it as any.” Korson nodded and walked away through the evening dusk.

CHAPTER TEN

The Master opened the door of a small room in a corner of Laboratory 1. In that tiny area, which seemed lost in the great laboratory, were the apparatus and files he used in what was to him his most important work—the creation of a machine through which he could communicate with the dead.

He was firmly convinced that at death human beings simply entered a new type of existence which was, at first, similar to life on earth. He conceived of this new life as infinitely expanding. It was vaster and more interesting than the one type of life he had known. He also believed that the dead sometimes talked to the living; that they used the living as their method of communication.

Statesmen, rulers, prophets and teachers had used such a means of communication between existences. But for the Master it was impossible. Should he associate himself, even remotely, with anything that might appear unusual or religious, whispers would become more powerful than the long ago wars, and soon there would be no Master.

The only solution for him was to devise a machine through which he could talk with the dead in the lonely isolation of Laboratory 1. He had constructed device after device, and always the result had been the same—failure. Hopelessness had dropped a shroud over the whole project. It had been a long time since he had entered the little room.

Ellora was dying. Even if this strange Everling had actually conquered the sickness, she would die eventually. Then she would be there and he would be here. Trapped… The only link between them would be memory—unless he could devise a machine.

It was vital, now. He must try again.

His last attempt had been an effort to modulate an isolated segment of visual radiation, a beam of lavender light. He concentrated on his notes and diagrams, seeking desperately for some clue.

The visaphone in the laboratory had a one-way visual circuit. There must be no chance of the outside world glimpsing the laboratory’s interior. The Master kept the sound circuit turned off, except when he wished to speak to someone. Nothing and no one from outside could reach him unless he desired it.

It was this isolation and timelessness of Laboratory 1 that caused the Master so often to forget the routines which dominated the world outside. Now, when he glanced up to rest his eyes, he was startled to see that the time indicator showed it was long past the hour of the evening meal.

He rose, switching off the small, intense working, light. Tomorrow he might solve the final problem. Or the day after. Or any day. Eventually he must succeed.

Suddenly, the stark isolation of the room closed in on him. She might die while he was here. Neither weird machines, which did not work, nor philosophy could save him. He must remember to tell her. He must.

He closed the door of the little room and left Laboratory 1.

Finishing the last amber drops in his glass of Vintage 3085—a good year for the white grapes—the Master glanced down the long table. For days he had been dining alone or with Korson. Tonight he wanted to talk to Everling, so he had invited him and Tarmo. But where was Varden? Just as the Master was about to make inquiries, his chief assistant came in, apologizing.

“Those damn lessons ran overtime. And Moon Base—”

“Varden,” the Master said, “if you use that excuse again… What’s this about lessons?” He turned to Everling. “Varden is our social butterfly.”

“Butterfly, hell. This is hard work. Dancing lessons.”

In answer to the Master’s stare of incredulity, Varden continued doggedly. “I don’t intend to get out of touch with everything. It’s good exercise, too.

Varden sat down and turned to Korson. “I understand that you are here to study with the Master.”

Korson nodded.

The Master added, “My first protege. What are the rules for a patron?”

“The first rule is to break rules,” Everling said lightly.

The Master looked at him. “You should know.”

Everling offered a dish of the crisp, paper-thin rolls to Korson. As he was about to take one, Tarmo reached for the plate.

Shoving it under her nose, Korson said, “Try them. They’re better than human fingers.”

“You’re still angry,” Tarmo said as she filled her mouth.

Korson, watching the unlovely gesture, wondered why it seemed so delightful to him. There was magic in this primitive child—at least, for the moment. “Do you like dolls, my dear? Or do you love only wild things like your birds?”

Her green eyes narrowed. “I think you are the one to play with dolls, to fondle and caress them. I think you put them back on a shelf and forget them. Unless you are careless and break one. Then you run away and hide.”

What was this girl in the saffron robe? Was she child or woman? Or perhaps a sort of human chameleon who changed personality with her moods? Baffled, Korson turned his attention to the conversation between the other men.

“Those who feel they must roam the world for experience and understanding are deluded,” Everling was saying. “For, by intensive observation, a man whose boundaries are the four walls of a small area can travel twice as far and learn infinitely more.”

“You in your tower,” Varden said. “And the Master in World Center.”

The Master smiled. “The Doctor’s statement is perhaps an oversimplification. My thought is that if a man could come to know a single person completely, he would have encompassed a good part of the wisdom of the world.”

“Human vivisection—of the heart and brain,” Varden broke in. “A very nasty proposal.”

“A psychic intrusion, I grant you,” the Master laughed.

The great carved ruby glowed on Everling’s hand as he reached for his wine. “And yet a clear view of the human spirit in its entirety would be the most illuminating, exciting experience in the world!”

The Master signaled a servant to refill the wine glasses. Then he glanced at Everling. “One would need to make a chart of the soul,” he said. “Like an unknown sea, full of depths and currents. Swarming with marine life.”

“The two of you,” Varden interrupted, “are inventing a lot of trouble. What if you soul scavengers chose the wrong, person?”

The Master decided it was time to come to the point. “Dr. Everling, let us discuss this another time. I want to know how the Lady Ellora, is progressing?”

“She is improving.”

“I intend to have a talk with her tonight. I hope there is improvement. If not, I shall call in other physicians for consultation tomorrow.”

A sudden sharp sound attracted the Master’s attention. At the opposite end of the table a servant was arranging the coffee service meticulously in front of the one chair that directly faced him. The Master’s voice was curt. “You know the Lady Ellora does not dine with us.”

She stood in the doorway, tall lithe, radiant. Her low-cut robe was almost the shade of lavender that he had struggled with in the little room in the laboratory. Around her throat was a piece of jewelry he had never seen before, a collar of matched sapphires from which hung a single diamond star that nestled between the curves of her breasts. The star patterned after the insignia of the World Scientists.

She bowed, very slightly; a gestured double meaning. It seemed intended for the entire group but was meant only for the man at the head of the table. As she came forward, her steps gliding smoothly over the polished floor, she said, “Good evening.” And, to him alone, “I am sorry Master, that I am late.”

Without sitting down, she took a cup and began to pour the coffee. “Will you have brandy in your coffee?” Raising her eyes she looked directly at him.

Suddenly, the realization of one small fact stopped the fleece of joy that was rising within him. The collar. She had made a gallant gesture, but the collar remained, an obvious concealment of the blue mark. Hopelessness clutched at him.

She did not wait for him to reply. Pouring brandy into the cup, she handed it to a servant. Then she turned to Tarmo.

“I’ve neglected you since you arrived.” The rich, vibrant voice flowed like a limpid stream talking in the sunlight. “Let me make up for it, my dear.” Her hands went swiftly to her throat. The impish smile he knew so well lurked in the corners of her lips. With a quick movement, she unfastened the collar and tossed the jewels, a cascade of gleaming loveliness, to Tarmo.

The throat was bare now, smooth, unmarked. No blue stigma of the sickness showed on the velvet skin.

As the Master rose to his feet, the scene before him was out of focus and blurred—except for one face.

After dinner, Korson suggested a walk to Tarmo. She led the way, across wide lawns, through formal gardens, past the grove of pines, to a glen where a small stream gurgled and splashed.

Sinking to her knees in the moss she looked into the dark, moving water. “Do you like it here?” she asked. “I found this place the day after they put me behind these walls.”

“It’s beautiful.”

“You’re not angry anymore?”

“I never was,” he laughed.

“And you believe now that Everling will cure Lady Ellora?”

“Yes.”

She dipped her hand into the water. Moonlight caught the ripples as, they raced over her fingers. Korson lay down beside her.

“Do you know,” she said, “why I had to find this place?”

“Do you have to find any place?”

“You must search for the place you want. This was most like it. So I found it.”

“Where do you want to be?”

“Back in Cheenwa. In the old tower.”

“Tarmo,” he said, “listen to me. You are no longer a child. You must learn to live with other people and not shut yourself away in a desolate country. Everling knows that. You can’t go back—you can only go forward.”

“I know where I want to be!”

He sat up, took her slender shoulders between his hands, giving her a gentle shake. “Wake up, Tarmo! You must make a place for yourself in the everyday world. Find friends. You can’t live in isolation forever.”

“There is Everling.”

“He won’t be with you always.”

Wide, clear eyes stared up at him, puzzling, musing.

Korson stood up. “Let’s go back. I have a great deal to learn—and very little time.”

How tall he is, she thought. How strong. His skin is smooth in the moonlight and he moves like a big animal, powerfully, silently.

Returning through the magic of early night, Tarmo, stayed close at his side. Sometimes their shoulders brushed. Once she held his hand lightly. The touch of him is good, she thought, and he is my friend. But tonight he will go into the library and I will not see him again until tomorrow.

It was late when the Master entered the Lady Ellora’s bedroom. Sitting on the edge of the lounge, he took her in his arms, his eyes searching her throat for the slightest sign of the blue mark. There was none.

“Scientists—myself particularly—are not allowed to believe in miracles. But if this is a miracle, of what importance is science?

“Don’t thank miracles,” she laughed. “Thank Dr. Everling.”

“Tomorrow he will be duly honored.”

He pulled up a chair near the lounge. “Dearest, please listen carefully. I have long been disturbed by the thought that you might want to reach me in Laboratory 1, and be unable to do so.”

“Don’t be silly. Leave the sound circuit turned on.”

“It has been my custom to turn it off, except when I want two-way communication with someone outside the laboratory. Until I met you, I could conceive of nothing urgent enough…”

The devil of her half smile found its way into her voice. “Now that you’ve learned better, leave the switch turned on.”

“It is an old habit. I might forget.”

“Not you.”

“I’ve forgotten many things.”

“Surely the incredible, Master can write. Put a note on the switch.”

“I might not see it,” he said impatiently. “Besides, the circuit might be broken, the power might fail. Such things happened before. Three times in—”

“A thousand years,” she smiled.

There was no answering lightness in his voice. He was giving an order. “I shall tell you the combination which opens the door of Laboratory 1. Memorize it. If you ever need me, and cannot reach me, give the combination to Varden or even one of the guards.”

She could not believe she had heard him correctly. “You’ve never given the combination to any one else!”

“Nor did I expect to. As you know, I change it every week.” He hesitated. “I have thought the matter over carefully. No harm can come of this act. I will give you the combination now.”

He made her repeat it after him many times over. At last he relaxed, satisfied that she knew it.

She said softly as she kissed him, “Don’t you understand that the tragedies of life are not its happenings, but its fears?”

When the Master left the blue bedroom and descended the curving staircase, his mind was quieter than it had been for a long time.

He opened the door of his study, and tobacco smoke billowed out into the corridor. From the amount of smoke and the half-empty wine bottle on the table beside his chair, it was obvious that Varden had prepared himself for a long wait.

“This grape grease is fairly decent.” Varden held up the bottle. “How is she?”

“She was sleeping when I left,” the Master said, pouring himself a glass of wine. “It has been months since I have seen her doze off so naturally.”

“She was beautiful tonight.” Varden stared at a plume of smoke which spiraled upward from the end of his cigar. “Now what?”

“Tomorrow I will make a world-wide, special telecast from the tower. I shall announce that Dr. Everling has developed a cure for the sickness.”

Varden watched his smoke phantom disintegrate. When the last wisp had vanished, he said, “Master, there is reason now to hope—but isn’t it, perhaps, too soon for such an announcement? I can take chances and make mistakes. You can’t.”

The thin stem of the Master’s wine glass gleamed as he turned it between his fingers and smiled. “You sometimes play the ancient game of poker, which seems immune to time; There is a phrase connected with it, ‘calling a bluff’. If Dr. Everling is anything less than an honest man, we shall soon know it.”

Yes, Varden thought, he would always be the Master.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The Master flicked on the Center intercom-visa phone in his study. “Dr. Everling, please.”

A moment later Everling’s face appeared on the screen. “Yes, Master.”

“Doctor, your brilliant success in curing the Lady Ellora seems proof of your claim to have conquered the disease which baffles orthodox science. Therefore, I have arranged for a special world-wide telecast in which I will announce your discovery. You will receive an award of honor.”

“But, Master—”

“Please, do not interrupt. The Council will issue you a grant of one hundred and fifty thousand villars annually for life. You will be given funds for research and the training of other physicians in your methods. However, I must request that you make a telerecord of your methods, and of the training you underwent. Also, a translation and photorecord of the ancient document you discovered.”

“Master, I—”

“Come to the telecast tower in ten minutes.”

The visaphone screen went blank, but Everling remained motionless, staring into it. His hands reached for the switch, then dropped to his side. Slowly he raised his cowl over his head, the green cloth framing his dark, burning eyes.

Adjusting the folds of his robe, he paced slowly across the exquisitely parqueted floor. When the time indicator on the wall showed that five minutes had passed, he paused before the long mirror to study his image. Straightening his shoulders, his chin high, he left the room.

When he reached the arched entrance to the building, he glanced at the telecast tower, a gleaming needle pointing to the clouds. Between him and the tower was a paved court. He started to run.

The rising wind whipped his robe and leaves scuffled across the stones.

The lives of the inhabitants of the third planet from the sun stopped; the tools, the jests, the scheming, were laid aside. The thoughts of a race were focused on a spire against the sky and the words which came from it:

“This is a special world-wide telecast from the Center. The Master will, announce the discovery of a cure for the sickness… This is a special…”

In markets, in crowded rooms and lonely places, in shops and laboratories beside immense machines and among the splendor of tropical flowers, men and women silently watched telecast screens. The horror of the sickness had come from somewhere to Earth. But between men and women and horror stood the Master. As was to be expected, he had found a way to protect them.

Lady Ellora, Varden and Korson sat before the screen in the blue bedroom. Instinctively they had met there, by one of those unspoken understandings which sometimes govern life. Ellora had not been surprised when Korson arrived. And if Varden had not come to her then, the ties which hold friends together would have been only cobwebs.

Everling was breathing hard as he crossed the marble bridge, and jerked open the door to the telecast room.

“Master!”

The tall figure in the blue cape turned abruptly. “Yes?”

“I must speak to you alone. At once.”

“This telecast is of greatest importance.

“What I have to say is more important.”

This was the thing he had feared, thought the Master. Yet he must face it out to the end. He signaled the telecast engineer to hold the broadcast, and went outside with Everling. As they stood on the bridge, the wind took the Master’s cape, spreading it like a great wing, and snatched the cowl from Everling’s head.

The Master shouted above the vortex of roaring air, “Be quick!”

“Master!” There was desperate urgency in the luminous eyes. “You have solved unbelievable problems. You have saved a world. But you cannot cure the sickness. I can—if I have sufficient time to finish my work here. A bargain, Master! Your secret of rejuvenation for my secret of the cure!”

Clipped, harsh, came the answer.

“You are a fool if you think I would consider such a demand!”

“I am not asking for eternal life. But I must have another thirty years in order to serve the people of the world as you serve them.”

As the Master started back across the bridge, Everling caught the edge of his wind-swept cloak.

“Your duty is to humanity. And I am part of that duty. Neither of us can be spared.” Everling spoke through dry, cracked lips. “Grant me this!”

“No.”

“Then I appeal to you, not as the Master—but as a man. The Lady Ellora is not yet out of danger. I shall be forced to stop the treatments…

High on the bridge, screaming wind swallowed the last words, yet they were known, blazoned between them like a challenge.

“You may think that I have used an ugly weapon,” said Everling. But you have left me no choice. With the method of healing in my hands, I cannot stand idly by and lose my last chance of saving men and women.”

Uncertainty and blind rage obliterated the Master’s reason. He saw below the waist-high balustrade, a drop of seven hundred feet. His eyes traveled from the chasm to Everling and he started forward, powerful hands spread.

“You will not do it.”

The Master knew he could not. He was beaten. Ellora must have a chance. “Part of your duty to humanity.” Was he bound to the figure opposite him, unable to go forward without him? Had they been catapulted together in this particular moment in time for a particular purpose? He was convinced there was nothing to do but think it out, play for time. “I shall cancel the telecast.”

People went back to their daily business. Some wondered a little, shrugged, and added another incident to the mystery of the Master. In hospitals, white faces turned wearily away from now blank telecast screens. Doctors and nurses tried, with hollow, professional inanities, to comfort those with the blue mark.

In the bedroom of the Master’s Lady, Varden looked at Korson. “How could he!”

Korson felt suddenly awkward. Forcing a smile, he shrugged. “Some change of plan.”

“But this was so important I can’t understand—” Varden broke off, “or can I?”

“Don’t worry, either of you,” Ellora said quietly. “I know the Master better than you. He has his reasons. Dr. Everling has given the world hope. He is a wonderful person.”

“Maybe you’re right,” Varden said, “but I can’t get to whatever’s inside that green robe.”

“You don’t like him? Why not?”

“I don’t know. Come on, Korson, let’s get out and give her a chance to rest.”

A few minutes after they had gone, there was a light knock on the door. When Ellora opened it, she found Tarmo.

“Lady Ellora, I—I wanted to talk to someone. Could I—”

“Come in, my dear.” Lady Ellora took the girl by the hand and led her into the room, shutting the door behind them. Sitting on the lounge, she pulled Tarmo down beside her. “I’m afraid it’s rather lonely for you here. We must find some young girls for you to meet.”

Tarmo was startled, murmuring doubtfully, “I wouldn’t know what to say to them.”

“Nonsense. You can go to the park. Have a picnic, play some games together. There are a dozen games to learn.”

Tarmo’s hands, hidden beneath the folds of her robe, twisted nervously. “Is the park far?”

“No.”

“Because he doesn’t like me to go far from him.”

“He?”

“Everling.”

“When he understands that you will be quite safe, he will agree.” A life such as Everling’s would not be easy, she thought. Being father, mother and playmate to a young girl was certainly not simple. No wonder Everling was overly cautious.

The glitter of jewels on the dressing table caught Tarmo’s eye and she went to look at the sparkling ornaments, sniffing the faint scents that rose from flasks of perfume and boxes of powder.

“Do you swim in the pool?” asked Ellora.

“May I?” she asked eagerly.

“Whenever you wish. You will need a swimming costume. I’ll have one sent to you.”

“You are very kind, Lady Ellora.” A filmy handkerchief dangled from Tarmo’s fingers; on it was embroidered the likeness of a flamingo in brilliant colors. “Do you love birds and animals?”

“Yes.”

“The birds here are wonderful. I know them all.”

“I’m glad to hear that. But you must make human friends.”

“My Lady, I think I have.”

“Yes?”

“Korson.”

Lady Ellora’s arm went round Tarmo’s shoulders. “Of course, he’s your friend. But you are dear to all of us, and we don’t want to lose you.”

There was a curious, veiled look about the girl. “Lost. Sometimes I have felt I was lost. But when I began to feel it, I sent my thoughts a different way.”

Does she merely express herself in a fantastic manner, or is there another reason, wondered Lady Ellora. “Surely you have been lonely? Perhaps unhappy?”

“Never. I have been trained so that I do not admit such sensations. It is sickness of the mind which causes these feelings. And I am very healthy.” Moving away from the protecting arm, she studied a mosaic set into the wall with interest. After a moment she said in a low tone, “Did the Master tell you why he stopped the telecast?”

“No. Why don’t you ask Dr. Everling?”

“He—he doesn’t talk to me as he used to. The Master is a wonderful person, but Everling—”

“I understand. A young woman usually believes her father is the most wonderful man—until she falls in love.”

“What is that?”

“I cannot tell you. But you will find out.”

“I love the trees and the wind.”

“That’s one kind. Love is the most abused word in our language. It means a hundred things—everything and nothing. You love an animal or a dear friend. Or one man. But it is still the same word.”

“There ought to be more words.”

“You are right.” Lady Ellora stood up. “You must go now, my dear. I shall see you at dinner.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

Long golden arms of late afternoon sunlight probed Terra City. They slanted across the shoulders of a tall man standing beside a pool. The man noticed how the sunlight painted the still water with brilliant red and orange reflections from the clouds overhead.

A servant came noiselessly into the patio and switched on a small telenews screen recessed into the wall. Dimly, as from very far off, the voice of the announcer reached the Master’s mind.

“Union of North Europe reports more than 1500 deaths resulting from the sickness. Trans-Northland reports…”

He went to the set and turned it off. Returning to the pool, he sat on a weather scarred sandstone bench and covered his eyes with his hands. He did not realize Everling had approached until he heard his voice.

“Good afternoon, Master. Have you reached a decision?” The cowl was thrown back and his eyes were as expressionless as two holes bored straight into eternal darkness.

“The secret of everlasting life is not mine to give. It belongs to the world.”

“Then why not give it to the world?”

“It is the one discovery that men must not know.”

“Why, Master?”

“We are not discussing that point.”

“But it is a point.”

The master nodded.

“You have seen proof,” Everling continued, “that my work is the only known solution to the horror of this disease. Certainly it is reasonable to allow me another thirty years to complete what I have begun?”

“Obviously, Dr. Everling, the decision involved is tremendous. The secret has been guarded as nothing else on this earth. If misused, it could turn whole planets into gigantic slaughterhouses.”

“I do not understand.”

“Of course not.”

“The secret will be safe with me.”

The Master rose to his feet. “Why do you want it?”

For a moment Everling appeared to be plunged in uneasy thoughts and did not answer.

“Perhaps,” the Master continued, “you believe the Council knows the secret. They do not. I alone know it.”

Everling moved a little, restlessly, seeming uncertain. “Master, I have given my life for science and medicine. It is true that I am not a World Scientist. But are two silver stars the measure of a man’s genius? Is the organization of World Scientists designed to rule or to rule out what they do not understand?”

“If to be a World Scientist is all you desire, I can arrange for a special order.”

“That will neither give me back the years I have sacrificed, nor time to finish my work.”

“I have offered you rewards and honors but you refused them.”

There was deep, passion in Everling’s voice. “It is justice I want!”

“I have searched for it longer than you.”

“Your pardon, Master.” He was calm, now. “Ultimate justice is something that I—and probably even you—can never understand. Let us rather say that, although I have not received human justice, I desire to serve humanity—with another thirty years can I accomplish this.”

The Master, his body sagging a little, his hands trembling like those of an old man, forced his answer through stiff lips. “I need time to think. Wait…”

Everling seemed to be observing something of very great importance in the depths of the little pool.

“The Lady Ellora will be waiting, too.”

Without speaking, the Master left him, walking across the patio, past banks of fragrant roses which were beginning to glisten with the evening dew. He entered the low, domed corridor. Here his footsteps took on an eerie likeness to reverberating voices.

Over and over they repeated, “You are the Master. You will have other wives. The secret is not yours to give. Yet, Everling may be right.

Hollowly, the footsteps seemed to linger behind him, wisps of sound that were trapped and doomed to whisper endlessly.

A little way down the corridor he met Varden, who was carrying a chess board and a box of men.

“Did you go to bed last night?” Varden asked.

“No.”

“I thought so. How about some chess?”

The Master shook his head, the pathetic ghost of a smile crossing his face. “You might beat me. If you want to play, Dr. Everling is in the patio. He told me he understood the game.”

Varden lingered, his mind a turmoil of questions, his eyes on the face of the man who was both his friend and the Master. That he carried a heavy burden was obvious, and Varden wished to share it. But, as he started to speak, the Master, anticipating his words, turned from him and, with a wave of his hand that meant dismissal, went on his way.

Tiny eterno-lights, automatically turned on, gleamed here and there among the trees. Everling and Korson were engaged in a conversation which, Varden realized at once, was about to expire.

Placing the box of chessmen on the table, Varden opened it. Korson disclaimed any knowledge of the game, but Everling accepted the challenge with obvious pleasure.

“Most interesting and excellent mental discipline.”

Taking a black and white pawn from the box, Varden shook them in cupped hands behind his back, and extended two closed fists. Everling tapped the left. It was the black pawn.

For an instant Varden considered what opening he should use. There was no use trying any of those weird openings the Master was always springing on him. He didn’t understand them, and doubted if the Master did. Use something simple—why not queen’s gambit?

To his surprise, Everling accepted the gambit. Varden played slowly, blocking every positional advantage gained from the original pawn sacrifice. But somehow Everling developed a remarkably strong position. Everling sat back and smiled.

“You play well.”

“I keep in practice, playing with the Master.” Varden studied the board, wishing he had castled earlier.

Everling increased the pressure: His handling of the diagonals and his bishops—which he had refused to exchange—was deft. Varden struggled out of one trouble into another. Moving his king—knight’s pawn, Everling said, “Check, discovered.”

Korson, who had been wandering around the patio, said, “The Master must be a difficult man to beat.”

“The Master plays the game to win,” said Everling. “That is the only way to play any game.”

Suddenly Varden saw it. The last play had been only a nuisance check. There was nothing behind it. One move to escape check, and he would be free to force a bishop exchange. Next the double check with knight and queen—and it was over.

He moved out of check. Everling looked at the board a long time. The stylized wooden pieces reflected the soft glow of the lights. Finally Everling made an ineffectual rook move. He glanced up at Korson. “One who wants to win above all else will win.”

Varden forced the bishop exchange and they played in silence for several moves. Then Varden completed his plan by a move which made the passing of a pawn inevitable.

Everling studied his position, smiled, picked up his king, and handed it to Varden. The chief assistant was surprised at the traditional gesture of resignation.

“You have proven my point,” Everling said. “My attention wandered—and I lost.”

They were replacing the men in the box when Tarmo ran out on the patio, wearing a bathing suit.

“Come for a swim, Korson.”

“Good idea.” He got up. “Water therapy is the only treatment after being exposed to chess.”

Tarmo was already on her way, calling, “Come, Korson!”

Varden watched Tarmo as she ran. Suddenly he felt Everling’s eyes upon him. “Your ward is a lovely child,” he said.

“She is.”

“Or should I say a beautiful young woman?”

Everling did not answer. Now he was staring after Tarmo.

* * * *

Refreshed by the swim, Korson dressed for dinner and entered the library. He found it empty except for a beautiful and unusual woman. Although he had seen only pictures of them, he was sure she was a Venusian. She had ripe olive skin coloring, three-fingered hands, and slate-gray eyes. Around her neck was the traditional high, rose velvet collar which concealed her vestigial gill-slits.

Seeing him, she stood up. She was tall for a Venusian. “I greet you, sir.”

Her pronunciation was remarkably clear. Only the soft, high-pitched syllables remained of the lisping Venusian speech.

Korson bowed. “You speak our language well.”

“Learn, I must. I am secretary to the envoy of Venus. He talks with the Master.” Her head turned slightly, toward the closed door of the study.

Sinking again into the deep-cushioned chair, she leaned back languidly, her golden robe accentuating the delicate contours of her body. Korson realized why Venusians were characterized as exquisite.

For a moment, he considered the standard archaeological puzzle as to whether the Venusians had once been Earth dwellers who migrated after one of that planet’s periodic cataclysms. It would explain the mythology which inevitably associated Venus with the goddess of love. But the Venusian’s gill slits, indicating recent amphibious existence, did not accord with the Earth-life theory. After all, the surface of Venus was eighty-seven and eight tenths percent water.

She smiled with the gracious courtesy of a lady welcoming a guest into her home.

The strange, exotic quality of her entranced him and he came close, his gaze challenging, direct. “You’re very bold, Earthman.”

“Is boldness unrewarded on your planet?”

“Wisdom rewards.”

“I do not understand.” His eyes continued to travel over her. “How old are you?”

“Forty-nine Venus years.” She smiled at his surprise. “That would be thirty Earth years.”

He realized that she was looking over his shoulder. Tarmo’s footsteps on the deep floor-covering had been unheard by him, but the Venusian’s acute ears had caught them.

She bowed her head in greeting. “I am Venusian. In your words, my name is Zaline.”

“I am Tarmo.” She was edging back toward the door.

“Stay, Earthgirl.” Zaline went to Tarmo, took her arm and, folds of the robe Tarmo wore, she asked, “Why do you not wear finer robe?”

“Everling chose this for me.”

“Oh Earth!” Zaline laughed. Slipping her hand into Tarmo’s, she pressed it gently. “To make yourself adored, choose for yourself jewels, flowers, robes. My purpose in life is to attract. That is why I exist.”

Tarmo flashed a quick glance at Korson. “I will see you at dinner.” She ran out of the room calling, “Goodby, Zaline!”

He watched her go, and looked back at Zaline. “You have taught her something, I think. Perhaps it will make her happy. I’d like to do something for you. Entertain you.”

“Tomorrow show me Terra City.”

“You’ve been here before.”

“Some of city I see. Gay parts. Not real parts. Meet me outside old rocket junk yard. At the sunset.”

The door to the Master’s study swung open and the Venusian envoy entered, his face deeply lined, his eyes dark circled. There was an edging of sweat around the conventional high collar.

Zaline made the introduction. “Ambassador Imptoli, this is Korson.”

“I greet you.” The Venusian nodded and sat down.

“Good evening, your Excellency. I have always wanted to visit your planet. I have often read about it. But I have seen no record of your having anyone similar to the Master.”

“Never is need for Master. To make happy our lives we use machines. They do not use us. We fight not among ourselves.”

“Do you believe the Master is the only one in the universe who does not die?”

“You are a World Scientist. Belief is for children. Facts are for men. I possess no factual evidence that there is one besides the Master who never dies.” The Venusian rested his head against the back of the chair. “I have weakness,” he murmured. He unfastened the high collar.

Korson gasped as he stared at the brown throat. Between the gill-slits was the mark of the sickness.

Imptoli looked up and followed Korson’s eyes. “Yes,” he said, “from Earth comes strange gifts. Yet we blame you not. All planets are daughters of the sun. Their fate the same.”

Unnoticed, the Master had entered the room. “There is hope, Imptoli,” he said. For an instant he thought he should say more. Accept Everling’s bargain, now that the scourge had spread to other planets. Why hesitate? Yet, he did.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Varden maneuvered his way through the crowds in the street. In two hours it would be Carnival night and the pageantry of the world’s history would be relived at the Pavilion. With every citizen in costume, the city would assume the appearance of a gigantic stage, and its population, actors.

At the moment, however, Varden’s mind was not concerned with the Carnival. He was wondering why the Master continued to withdraw from all his normal associations. Grave and silent, he wandered about his museum or isolated himself in Laboratory 1. Confiding neither in Varden nor the Lady Ellora, he made evasive answers when cautiously questioned. Often Varden found him alone in his big chair, with Flim’s great head resting on his knee.

Even on this Carnival day, the Master had spoken only once to Varden, and that had been a brief visaphone message which had sent the chief assistant on his present errand.

Working his way around a man in a sixteenth century French costume who was arguing with a woman dressed as a twenty-seventh century Izonian, Varden opened the door of the Ronding Biological Institute.

Although he well knew that Ronding had never been noted for the orderliness of his laboratory or the length of his temper, Varden was unprepared for the Madhouse which he entered. Beakers, pipettes, carboys, spirals of tubing were scattered about the long tables as if flung by the hand of some fretful giant. His feet crunched on fragments of broken test tubes.

Ronding, his back to Varden, faced a little group of technicians. Between bursts of profanity, he was snarling something about an experiment.

“You goddamned idiots should be unloading cargo on Mars. Biologists—hell! You waste my time with the results of this experiment. Why? Because it happened to be an experiment. What do I care about it if it doesn’t prove anything?”

Ronding paused to suck in a new supply of atmosphere, and one of the technicians said, “That’s the way science progresses. You make an experiment and report your data.”

“Then, science—”

“Science. It’s a word, nothing else!” Ronding hurled another test tube into the far corner of the laboratory where its fragments joined half a dozen others. “We are not concerned with abstract science. We are fighting the sickness.”

Now get back to work and use your heads for a change.

They straggled away and began to clean up the shambles on the tables.

Varden moved closer, grinning broadly. “Trouble?”

Ronding spun around. “Hell’s fires—oh, Varden. Well, I’ve plenty of trouble without you.”

“Won’t you ever learn that it takes time to make a biologist?”

Ronding stared at the ceiling in despair and disgust. “How did you ever get to be chief assistant? You’re worse than those morons over there”—he jerked his head in the directions of the lab technicians—“who claim to be scientists. What the hell are you bothering me for, anyway?”

“The Master asked me to find out whether there is anything you need.”

Leaning against a table, he rubbed his eyes with his hands. “There is. But you can’t give it to me. Nor can the Master.”

“He has instructed the Council to give you what you ask.” Concealing hands dropped from the man’s eyes, and Varden noticed they were red-rimmed and very tired.

“Not what I need.”

“What is that?”

“I need,” said Ronding, “human beings who have just contracted the sickness.”

“Haven’t you called for volunteers?”

“Of course. They came for a while. But after the Master called off the special telecast, they lost hope and quit.”

“You must have already collected sufficient specimens?”

“I need cases of the disease in its early stages. You know how suddenly the mark appears—often on awakening in the morning. Or in the middle of a day’s work. Sometimes there is only half an hour between the appearance of the first faint signs and the mark’s complete development.”

“I would have thought,” Varden said, “that the first indication of the disease would cause people to come to you.”

“When people get the sickness they try to conceal it even from themselves. The handful who have come here were nearly dead.”

“We can’t force anyone to come. The law cannot be broken, even by the Council.”

“I know.” Ronding extricated two crumpled cigars and shoved one at Varden.

Varden took it and lit his and Ronding’s. “Why did the Master call off that telecast?”

“I haven’t the slightest idea.” Varden sucked on the cigar and coughed.

There was something odd about Ronding’s voice as it died slowly and, as it did so, his eyes became alive—first incredulously, then with expanding realization, and finally with a bright and sparkling certainty.

On the floor before him was a broken beaker. The half sphere of glass had become a mirror which reflected the concentrated image of a man. The man in the reflection was squat and deformed, his body fading away into a vague blob, his head distorted upward into a fantastically elongated face.

The strange trickery of the light and the curvature of the glass had brought the man’s throat into exact focus. There, sharp and clear, was the blue mark of the sickness.

Ronding’s steady fingers touched his throat and, as he did so, a hand entered the sharply focused area on the broken beaker and the fingers pointed to the blue mark.

He spoke with infinite serenity, “Now I have a chance.”

Then he was shouting commands at the technicians.

Varden started to say something, but the words wouldn’t go together. An uncontrollable desire to be back in the Carnival throng, to be an unidentified member of the masses, swept over him. The tumult in the laboratory was so furious that no one noticed his leaving.

An ominous clatter met Varden as he entered the Center. He was trying to identify the sound, when a strange figure stalked across the courtyard, arms outstretched. It was dressed in a knight’s full armor. Varden stopped the specter from the past with a firm hand against its breast plate.

“Glub?” came a plaintive query from behind the closed visor.

Varden raised the visor. “Which are you?”

“Koom,” answered the entombed one.

“Sorry, I lost my atomic torch. You’ll need it before the night’s over.”

Koom gazed at him with icy superiority. “Nothing is sacred to you.”

“Why don’t you join the percussion section of an orchestra?”

“I prefer to dress with some dignity for the Carnival. It is a traditional celebration. A person should honor it without frivolity. Your clown suit is laundered and pressed. You will find it on your bed.”

Varden stepped back and saluted.

Slamming down his visor, Koom stalked away with a fateful clank. As Varden continued on his way, he wondered if the Master knew that his museum was minus a piece of priceless antique war costume.

* * * *

It was late afternoon when Korson reached the rocket junkyard. The Venusian was standing by the gate. For an instant the guard hesitated. But the stars of a World Scientist were enough, and he swung open the great doors.

Here, assembled as a vast storehouse of scrap metal, was the history of man’s effort to escape into space. A hundred types of crumbling ships towered into the sky.

Briefly, Korson explained the saga of Earth’s tragic efforts to accomplish what Venus had known so long. Zaline was silent as, walking from ship to ship, he outlined man’s battle for the beyond. At last he said, “Why did you want to see all this?”

“For the sake of one man.”

“The ambassador?”

“Yes.”

“You love him?”

“Truly, I do.”

“What has the rocket junk yard to do with it?”

“Because of these ships there is on his throat the blue mark.”

Suddenly he visioned the junk yard filled with jet men, sphere-spinners, magno-balancers, astrographers. Ghostly figures thronging round the battered ships. What would be the ultimate result of all this? Expanding life-or death from the sickness? Oppressed by the mood of the place, he remained deep in his thoughts until Zaline’s soft voice broke in.

“Take the Earth girl. She is good.”

Korson answered firmly, “I have a reason.”

“Reason and love go not together.”

He knew he could say it. It would be safe with her, but he would not.

The strange eyes probed his face. “I sense a trouble. But you desire to keep it secret. So I do not ask. It was wrong to come here when he is dying of the sickness. Forgive.”

“There is nothing to forgive.”

A tiny vibration of sound, on the edge of audibility, murmured in the falling light. It was the day, the hour, the instant when an ancient rocket fin had decided to let go. There was the crescendo of parting metal, and a broken knife-edge crashed to the ground.

It had fallen only ten feet from them. Her three fingers slipped into his hand. “It happens so,” she whispered.

“Strange is fate.”

Staring up at the dark, twisted mass of space ships above them, she added, “Earthman, in this physical world planets do not mate. Only love and tragedy do. Come, we go now.”

Tarmo watched the eterno-lights flicker on the surface of the water as she poised herself on the diving board, ready for the spring. The sound of running footsteps caused her to pause and look around. Korson, in his bathing trunks, was chasing Flim, who had made off with his sandals. When she was sure that Korson had seen her, Tarmo dived and swam across the pool.

Korson gave up the pursuit of Flim and ran to the pool, his body arching into the water in a racing dive. Clear to the bottom he went, swimming underwater to the end of the pool where Tarmo lay stretched out on the tiles, and cautiously rose to the surface at the edge. Silently, his arm stretched out toward her ankle. He did not see that she had picked up a leafy branch which the wind had torn from one of the Mozette trees.

The branch thrashed down hard on his hand. Jerking back the hand, he laughed up at her. Tarmo leaned far over the edge, trying to slap his face with the branch. Grabbing the end, he pulled sharply.

Caught off balance, she fell, the water splashing high, a crystal screen around the two of them.

It was no longer a game as their bodies slid together, twisting and struggling. Korson twined his legs around hers, so she could not escape. Tarmo’s arms went around his neck, pulling his face closer, her lips lifted for his kiss. Desire and longing swept over him, but before his mouth touched hers, the specter came between them. The fifth day.

Roughly, he gripped her encircling arm, breaking her embrace, and swam away. As he climbed out of the pool, Tarmo called after him.

“Korson!”

He did not look back.

Dressed, Korson sought the library as a sanctuary. Four walls of ancient wisdom and philosophy surrounded him, as did the musty scent which is peculiar to libraries throughout the centuries. He opened a volume and tried to bring his ideas into sharp alignment. This, he thought, is why I came here. It is all I want in the time left to me.

A huge lighted globe of the Earth persistently distracted his attention. Impatiently, he switched it off. His mind at last became absorbed in the book, and he did not hear the door open.

Tarmo was still wearing her bathing suit, over which she had thrown a long cloak. I am sure the sun will rise tomorrow, she thought. As I know that, I know also that he loves me. He must be taught not to fight me any more.

Her hand covered the page he was reading; she pressed close to him, moving her cloak so that it was not a barrier between them.

“I came when you called me,” she whispered, and ran her hand lightly through his hair.

He did not move or look up. I could have you now, he thought. But that would leave something only begun. I am concerned only with endings.

“I did not call.”

“I heard you thinking about me. In the pool, under water, I heard you.”

He stood up, taking her firmly by the shoulders, and moved her back from him. “It’s been a pleasant visit. Now, run along.”

There was a low, savage tone in her voice. “A little while ago you wanted to be near me!”

“That was a little while ago,” he answered coolly.

“You held me close to you.”

“Only because you expected it. Because it amused me.” He must make her dislike him, even hate him, if he could.

He sat down and opened a book. “Go feed your birds. Play with the dog. I’ve got work to do.”

She could not believe it. She dared not. What has he done that makes white seem black? What have I done? I do not know anything at all if what I felt is false. White is black. Black is white.

Slowly she walked down the long room to the door and stopped to say, timidly, “The Carnival is tonight. Will—will you take me?”

Without looking up he muttered, “I’ve no time for carnivals!”

It was almost ten o’clock on Carnival night when the Lady Ellora entered Tarmo’s room. She found only silence and emptiness. A black domino lay crushed on the floor, and a transparent undergarment clung limply to the edge of the bed.

She sought for some clue as to what had happened. The room spoke eloquently of turmoil and confusion. But why? Yet how ridiculous it was to attempt to fathom the motives or moods of others. It had been tried since time began and still no one ever really knew another.

She left the room in search of Korson, whom she found in the library.

“I’m sorry to disturb you, but I’m worried about Tarmo. She isn’t in her room and I haven’t seen her all evening. Her costume is missing. Except for this.” She held out the domino.

“I can’t help you. I haven’t seen her since this afternoon.” He rose, dignified, yet with a certain awkwardness that did not escape her. “Perhaps the guards…”

She was standing near him and he felt her presence as something more real than a physical touch. The essence of her being flowed out to him, surrounding him with its understanding and compassion.

“Why should I call the guards,” she said, “when I have the best of all guards beside me—your love for Tarmo? Go, find her yourself.”

Korson shouldered his way through the crowd in the Pavilion. It was between acts of the pageant, and the dance area was jammed with wildly gyrating celebrants. A tall man in a beggar’s costume marched by, carrying a girl who clutched a glass of wine, tilting it back in an effort to gulp a few mouthfuls.

Someone doused him with iridescent rainbow fluid. Three men were singing, “Space Ain’t so Deep as Other Things.” Two attendants stopped a fight. Fireworks laced across the sky. Another fight started while the announcer’s voice boomed.

“The second half of the pageant will—” Then, he saw her.

Tarmo was sitting at one of the tables on the balcony which surrounded the open-air dance area. She wore the costume of an Arabian dancing girl and was obviously, the cause of a dispute between two men.

Korson climbed the balcony and went to the table.

“Tarmo!”

She looked up. “Hello, Korson. Good-bye.” Moving closer to one of the men she smiled seductively, reaching for his wine glass.

“I’ve come to take you back.”

“I won’t go!”

One of the men stood up, scowling, “Take her where?”

“It’s none of your damn business!”

“Oh, have a drink and forget it—” He broke off suddenly. “Uh—is she your girl?”

Korson nodded.

The man sat down again and, shrugging, nodding at his companion. “Little family quarrel, I guess.”

An Arabian dancing girl was picked up bodily by a man dressed simply as a World Scientist and carried, kicking and screaming, out of the Pavilion.

In the shadows of the trees, he put her down.

“You wanted me,” she said. “You wanted me, Korson!”

He took her radiant face between his hands and lifted it into the moonlight. “Yes, dearest, I wanted you.”

Shadows engulfed them.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Varden was vanquishing a hangover when the Master’s voice summoned him from his shower. He stood, dripping, before the visaphone.

“Yes, Master?”

“Come to my study at once.”

When he entered the room, Varden found it dim, the drapes still drawn over the windows, the Master a hunched figure in his great chair.

“You know that the Venusian ambassador has the sickness?”

Varden nodded.

“Do you connect the occurance of the sickness on Venus with Dr. Everling’s theory?”

Varden was thoughtful for a moment. “In one way, yes. I think you realize that I do not like the man. But I must be honest. His theory that the sickness is partly caused by a lack of struggle would make Venus an almost ideal place for its occurance. Could it have originated there? The life on Venus is certainly the easiest in the solar system.”

“I have been reasoning along the same line. Dr. Everling’s theory is certainly unorthodox. Yet, who knows?”

Varden shrugged.

“Wouldn’t it seem logical,” the Master continued, “for me to discuss the matter with the one person who has experience with both Dr. Everling and the sickness?”

“Lady Ellora?”

The Master nodded.

Entering the blue bedroom without knocking, the Master found a tray of breakfast, almost untouched, beside the bed where Ellora lay. Gently he kissed her. “Dearest, you should, sleep longer in the morning.”

“Always telling people what to do.”

Was there a trace of agitation in her manner, he wondered. “And you must eat all of your breakfast.”

He saw her fingers nervously touch the silk cord of her bedjacket which was fastened closely about her throat. His hand reached out and her eyes watched, wide and helpless jerking the cord, he thrust aside the collar of the jacket. On her throat was the blue mark of the sickness;

A few minutes later, Everling entered the study where the Master sat, apparently engrossed in some papers. Actually he was still trying to control the cold rage that had swept over him in Ellora’s room and to think clearly.

The man from Cheenwa stood near a globe of the Earth, idly spinning it, until the Master spoke.

“Dr. Everling, I accept your proposition. I will reveal to you the secret of eternal life.”

“When, Master?”

“Tomorrow night at nine o’clock, in Laboratory 1. Now go to my wife and save her!”

In the blue bedroom, Everling took a small amber vial from its plastic case and placed it on the table, beside Ellora’s bed. Quickly he filled a hypodermic syringe. He glanced at her expectant face.

“Yes,” he said quietly, “this nightmare through which you have been passing will soon be over. Rest. Dream of green hills, clear waters and far places. I shall give you the injection now. When you awaken, it will be to a new and brighter world.”

His movements were rapid, but sure. They were the motions of a man in high excitement, yet with the self-control to master it. Holding her white arm, he drove the needle home; his thumb began the slow, steady pressure on the plunger. Ellora’s eyes closed, and a half smile tugged at the corners of her mouth.

As Everling withdrew the needle, the buzzer of the visaphone sounded softly. He laid the syringe on the table and went to the set. The face of the Master appeared on the screen.

“Everling?”

“Yes, I am with her. There is marked improvement. She must rest, now.”

“Then there must still be hope.”

“More than hope. I will cure her, Master.”

Everling turned back to the woman on the bed. “You will slip slowly down, down a gentle spiral, into the depths of sleep…the depths of power…the place where you find me a renewal of that vitality which is your right…sleep…peace…sunlight in the woods where your footfalls are muffled… Remember the days of your childhood…long, long ago…

Picking up the vial, he returned it to its case and left the room.

In the grove of great pines, Tarmo lay on her back, arms supporting her head on a cushion of emerald moss, damp and sweet. She was saying, happily, “Well have a small house and a big garden. And dogs.”

Korson said nothing.

“We will have dogs, won’t we?”

He kissed her. “Dear heart, we won’t have any dogs. We won’t have anything… I am the donor.”

It must be a joke, she thought. But his expression frightened her and she appealed tremulously, “Korson?”

“It is true, Tarmo.”

As she realized he meant it, she screamed, pressing a hand hard against her mouth, “No—no!”

He caught her in his arms and she clung to him desperately.

“You must go away. I’ll help you! We’ll go to Cheenwa—deep in the forest. They can’t find us there.”

He shook his head. “No donor has ever run away.”

She could not mistake the acceptance of his fate, the calm refusal to consider any alternative. She ran from him, then, running to find a refuge—as if a refuge would blot out the horror and it would exist no more.

Everling went into his room and crossed to the mirror over the big, carved chest. Gazing at his reflection, he touched the deep crow’s feet beside his eyes and the few touches of gray at his temples.

He heard a low, convulsive sobbing, coming from Tarmo’s room, which adjoined his own, and hurried in to her.

She lay face downward on the bed. Sitting beside her, he put his arm around her shoulders. “It surely can’t be that bad, my dear.”

The calm, rather hoarse tones, familiar all her life, racked her nerves. She looked up for a moment into the curious probing eyes which seemed to bore into her skull. “How do you know?”

Such dominance and vigor were in his smiling face that, if she had not been overcome with grief, it would have dazzled her. “You know nothing!”

“This is a great day,” he said. “When I explain, you will forget to cry.

Korson told me that he is the donor!”

“Yes. I knew it.”

“I begged him to go to Cheenwa. To hide. But he won’t try to save himself!” Springing to her feet, she cried, “He can’t go into Laboratory 1, and never come out again! We love each other!”

“I am sorry.”

She dropped to her knees before him and took his hands in hers, pleading. “You can do anything. You always helped me. Help me to save him!” She bowed her head in his lap.

Above her, Everling’s face was immobile as he stroked her hair. “You’re very young. There will be other young men.

Her head came up; her voice rang with final conviction. “There will be only one love.”

He moved restlessly, as one who tries to hold in check a flood of exultation and triumph. Fire glowed in the great ruby as his fingers closed tightly, then loosened to pluck at the folds of his robe.

Her eyes on the red spark, Tarmo cried. “Because of the Master, Korson must die. I hate the Master!”

Everling put his hand under her chin, tilting back her head; she felt the brilliant, hypnotic eyes Upon her.

“Soon I shall be powerful. Very powerful. The time has come to tell you my plan… For many years I knew that too much power in the hands of one man was dangerous. A hundred things showed this clearly. Things that went wrong all over the earth. Yet no one was strong enough to rise up and act against him. No one clever enough to think of a way to overthrow him. In the past, nations fell into darkness and decadence under the heels of dictators. It has always happened. It will always happen. But now the entire Earth is at stake!”

He stared past her, envisioning the day, now so near, when the peoples of the earth would rise against their hero. “There must be change—always change. I heard in Cheenwa that the Lady Ellora had the sickness. I came here, bringing you, young, strong healthy. I said that I had cured you of this disease.”

She stared at him incredulously. “You mean I never had the sickness?”

“Only a childhood illness, nothing more. But, so desperate was the Master that he clutched at any hope. And I achieved a bargaining position, exactly as I had planned.” He bent over her, closer now, his breathing quicker, heavier.

“But Korson?” She did not fully realize the whole meaning. “If I save him will you do something for me?”

“Yes—yes!”

“Promise!”

Her gaze was frozen upon the glowing eyes opposite hers. “I promise.”

“Before Korson dies, I will know the Master’s secret. I will live forever. I will be the Master! He has been the abomination of this earth for too long. My task is to end tyranny!”

“How will you save Korson?”

“Before he enters Laboratory 1, the secret will be mine, and the Master will either be dead or under my control. Then I can free Korson. The curse of the donor will be over forever. Korson will live—and you will keep the promise you have made.”

“What must I do, Everling?” she whispered.

“When I am Master, you will be The Master’s Lady!”

He pressed his body against hers, his strong fingers loosening her robe. As their flesh touched, she sank into a black pit of oblivion…

Korson paused before the door to the Lady Ellora’s room. Should he disturb her? No matter how it all ended, she was entitled to whatever peace she could find. Yet he knew that Tarmo would need her badly when he was gone.

The door was slightly ajar. As he opened it, he said softly, “Lady Ellora?”

She was in bed, but her eyes were open. They were vacant, expressionless.

“I want your help, Lady Ellora.”

The head resting among the pillows did not move.

“Please, Lady Ellora!”

Still, she did not move nor answer.

“How do you feel?”

“I feel very well, Dr. Everling.”

“I am not Dr. Everling. I am Korson.” Worried, he studied her breathing and the pallor of her skin. “Do you feel better today?”

“Better today, Dr. Everling.” The words came parrot-like from her lips.

Korson glanced at a shaft of sunlight which cut across the bed. “You’d feel better if the sun were shining, wouldn’t you? But this is a gloomy day.”

“A gloomy day.”

He took a cigarette lighter from a pocket of his tunic. Slowly, he passed the intense white light across Ellora’s eyes. She did not blink.

He switched off the lighter and glanced at her bare white arm. The puncture mark was clearly visible. And, as he saw it, the sunlight glinting on the syringe caught his eye. He picked up the glass cylinder and tilted it. The few drops of remaining liquid moved sluggishly.

Dropping the syringe into his pocket, he stood looking down at the Master’s Lady, speaking as if she could understand him. “This must not be.”

Tumult blasted at Korson when he entered Ronding’s laboratory. Ronding was inoculating a guinea pig. Korson, shocked, wondered if it were really Ronding, the great biochemist. This haggard, unshaven man seemed to have no relationship with the inspiring teacher he knew.

Korson noticed that Ronding often paused in his work and wiped perspiration from his face. Yet there was something incredible about the man, as if dust on its return journey to dust had already revealed the living core of energy which it had so long hidden.

Korson approached. “Dr. Ronding?”

He turned. “What the hell do you want?”

Korson held out the syringe. “Whatever is in this must be, analyzed at once.”

“What do you think this is, an elementary chemistry lab? Get out!”.”

“This is vital to—”

“Get out!”

“The Lady Ellora.”

Ronding said something that might have been an apology and lit a cigar. Through the smoke, the bloodshot, weary eyes were as piercing as ever. He took the syringe and carried it across the laboratory.

Only a few minutes were necessary for his analysis. Writing down the formula, he signed his name and handed it to Korson. With his teeth clamped viciously on the cigar, he growled. “If this is connected with the treatment Lady Ellora is getting for the sickness, you’d better move fast, young man!”

Outside the clinic Korson read the formula and notation. The drug Everling had injected was nothing but norcozyne. It produced a state of lethargy, followed by a temporary burst of synthetic energy. It cured nothing.

Once more he saw Lady Ellora, lying helpless in a hypnotic trance, drugged with norcozyne. Precious time had been wasted, hopes raised—all useless.

An instant later his jet car was speeding through Terra City traffic.

Turning the car over to a guard, he strode through the gates of the Center. In the anteroom he grabbed the visaphone from the clerk and called for the Master. The operator informed him that the Master would receive no calls that day.

He cursed the operator, the gods, everything, and ran to the Master’s library.

The room was now as familiar to him as his own laboratory. He looked about, but the Master was not there; only the shelves of books and the glowing eye of the great globe.

A guard stood in front of the door to the Master’s study, “Can I help you, sir?”

“I must see the Master. It is very important.”

“My orders are to admit no one.”

“You must.”

“I am sorry, sir.”

“Surely, if I write a message, you could step inside and hand it to him?”

“The orders are specific. He must not be disturbed by anything.”

“Where’s Varden?”

“In the telecast tower, I believe.”

Back through the corridors Korson went. As he crossed the court, he glanced up at the tower, and saw Varden crossing the marble bridge.

“Varden!” he called.

Varden waved his hand and came down the curving stairway.

At the foot Korson met him with a grim, set face. “I must see the Master at once! It’s vital. But he’s left orders that he will see no one—receive no messages. You could get to him.”

“Not today.”

Grabbing the chief assistant’s arm, Korson persisted, “You don’t understand. This is deadly serious!”

The stocky, ruddy-faced man regarded him with kindly eyes, in which there was a trace of disappointment. It is because of the girl, he thought. He has found he cannot face death; he wants her too much. He wants to live and hope for a reprieve. The best thing is to blast his hopes at once.

Varden’s casual, good-natured air gave way to his official manner as he answered, “There is nothing I can do. And if you could see the Master, you would be disappointed.

He walked on past Korson, cool and implacable.

This, Korson thought bitterly, is the absolute end, the final irony. He had done what he could. His hand crumpled the paper with the formula. And after all, nothing mattered, to him anymore.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The ninth day of Month 13, year 3097, dawned clear and calm. Sunlight caught the peaks behind Terra City and began working its way down into the valleys. Night mist was, sucked away from the cobalt sky.

On the grass behind a one-story, low house that looked like a giant, glistening cube of sugar, two boys were playing a game of their own invention. It involved racing, tumbling and amicable fighting.

Their shouts roused a woman who sat near a window, reading a book of ancient history. She looked out, smiling at her children playing in the sunlight. How tall and strong and handsome they would be when they were grown!

A group of seven girls in their teens were beginning a picnic. They sang as they put up a net for a game of ball, lusty young voices throbbing in the clear air as they attempted to harmonize. When the net was up, they started the game, calling to each other as the big ball flew through the air.

“Tomorrow’s the party!”

“Going with Leveng?”

“I like Jorgex better—”

“What’ll you wear?”

Outside the great gate of the Center, the guard was at his usual post, moving a few feet in one direction or the other. His thoughts wandered… They come, they go, watching their own feet, all-important feet on the slick pavement. No one really knows where his feet are taking him… The guard jerked to attention as one of the passersby nodded to him.

He decided that it was very possible he might become a poet or a great writer of some kind. He would write a book so fine that it would be placed in the library of the Center. Perhaps in the Master’s own collection. Not science, certainly. He was tired of that. Romance, adventure on one of the planets, perhaps. He had always meant to be a wanderer, himself.

The guard would have liked to scratch his neck. However, a large group of people entered the Center, on their way to the museum. He stiffened to formal attention. To a poet they were a flock of sheep, nothing more. To a poet who wished to scratch, they were an even worse nuisance.

After the visitors had passed, the second guard said, “Hi, robot.”

“Robots would do better at the gate,” growled the first guard as he scratched vigorously. “That’s what we’ll become, in time.”

The first guard did not answer.

After a moment the other man added, soberly, “Have you noticed there’s something oppressive about this place today?”

“There is. And I haven’t seen the Master for three days.”

“Neither has anyone else.”

“Something could happen.”

In his study, the Master stirred uneasily in sleep, awoke to a half-doze, and discovered that his cloak had twisted uncomfortably about him. His body stiff, he got up with an effort and removed the cloak, letting it fall to the floor. His mind was clearer but, as he slowly crossed to the window, his steps were uncertain, tottering.

His hand, opening the window, was deeply wrinkled, the veins thick and coarsened, the skin spotted with brown. He looked out, and watched Flim who was stalking a bird among the flowers.

It was noon, when Tarmo left her room and went down to the garden. The Center seemed oddly hushed; no voices, no bustle of activity. No one moves around me but ghosts, she thought. I feel no pain, no sorrow for ghosts.

A flood of sunlight warming her body made her look up and, raising her arms like a pagan goddess, she cried, “Stop! Stop the sun for one day!”

The sun of the ninth day of the Month Thirteen, was touching the horizon. Korson was reading a book which had been given him by the Master. The book was entitled The Bitter One: A Life of Foroni. The Master had circled a passage on the last page:

Just before Foroni’s death in 2907 he said:

“That death does not exist—at least as the term is understood—that this inevitable happening is—merely a not very radical evolutionary transition is, to me, obvious. I have already presented the evidence and reasoning on which my conclusion is based.

“However, as men would suffer any torture rather than to think, I do not expect them to pay the slightest attention to anything that I have ever said.”

It was evening of the last day. The solar system hurtled at approximately nine miles a second towards the star, Vega. Everling stood on the terrace, gazing into the night. He might have been a cosmic pilot, guiding the solar system to, its proper destination. Already he had come a long way, and when the new dawn rose, he would have traveled farther than any other man.

Alone in his study, the Master’s thoughts spun out from a dark core of anguish. Everyone would be in the drawing room for after dinner coffee, he thought, envisioning their faces.

Korson and Tarmo loved each other. How many loves are found too late? How many eager, seeking hearts love, and are not loved in return? How many ever find the flame for which they starve? And how many flames joined only when they went out.

Korson loved Tarmo. In two hours he must extinguish both flames in Laboratory 1. Varden had told him of Korson’s frantic request for a meeting and he, was convinced that the young man desired an extension of the time allotted to the donor. Desired it because of the girl. Somehow, though, he could not understand Korson pleading for a reprieve…

Dressed in a wine-colored robe, her hair caught up in a net spangled with sapphires, Lady Ellora poured coffee from a golden urn and handed the cup to Varden. It would be a difficult evening for all of them and she was determined to keep the conversation in a light vein for as long as she could manage. “What is this story I heard about your doings at the carnival?”

“Obviously, a lie.”

“And last year?”

“Also a lie.” He grinned. “I’m surrounded by spies.”

Everling walked down the long room to where Tarmo sat. In her big chair she looked like a lifeless rag doll which someone had tossed aside. Her face was, as white as the creamy satin robe she wore. He stooped, murmuring to her in a low tone.

Varden turned back to Lady Ellora. “There are times,” he said, “when I feel mildly violent toward that man. Like wanting to cut his throat, for instance.”

Lady Ellora put her hand on his shoulder. “He is strange, I grant you. Rather barbaric, or pagan.”

As Varden lit his cigar, he saw her eyes wander to the door.

“I wonder where Korson is?” she murmured, almost to herself.

Bending his head close to hers, Varden said in a low tone, “I do not want to upset you, but there is something you should know—whether the Master agrees or not.”

“Korson.” She nodded. “You are not violating a confidence. He is the donor. The Master told me.”

“He must tell you everything.”

“No. But I like to think he trusts me as he does you.”

Varden was silent a moment, then said gruffly “Tonight won’t be easy for any of us. I have an appointment in the city. It’s business, but I can put it off and stay…

She shook her head. “What good would it do?”

He shrugged helplessly. “Talk.” She bit her lip to stop the trembling. “Say anything. The space between each of us here is a vacuum.”

Over his face came a mask, a bright sardonic smile. He turned toward Everling. “Are we social outcasts, Dr. Everling?”

From Tarmo’s side, Everling said, “I’m afraid I was meditating on my past. And nothing is duller conversation than reminiscence.”

Varden picked up a plate of sweets and carried it to Tarmo. She took one of the candies. “That doesn’t apply to you, Tarmo. You’re too young to have a past.”

Dully, she answered. “I was wondering why the Master was not with us at dinner.”

“He’s probably wasting time with that Moon Base affair.”

Her nails dug into the palm of her hand. “Why doesn’t the Master come? What has happened? Where is Korson?”

And, like an evoked spirit, he stood in the doorway.

“Sorry I’m late.” He went to Lady Ellora and, somewhat hesitantly, bent over her hand and kissed it.

There was only one person in the room he wanted to see, the slender girl in the satiny white robe, with black hair falling upon her shoulders, who nervously twisted a pearl bracelet between her fingers.

“You are beautiful tonight,” he said to her. “Like a bride.”

Everling gave an angry start of surprise, and broke in quickly. “The reason the Master is not here seems obvious to me. He has undoubtedly shut himself away to work out some difficult scientific problem.”

Is the man blind? thought Lady Ellora. This was Korson’s and Tarmo’s last minutes together. “Dr. Everling, there is something I want to ask you.” Taking his arm, firmly, she led him away toward the cabinet of music recordings. “One of these came today. It is said to be an old folk song of Cheenwa, and I would like your opinion.”

The music was not too loud, but sufficient to create a barrier between them and the young people.

Without looking at Korson, Tarmo rose as if pulled by a magnet. His hand clasped her small fingers and they went across the thick pile of the carpets to a windowed alcove, half concealed by folds of heavy drapery.

If only I could disappear among these folds and take him with me, she thought. But if he knew what I am now, he would not come with me.

In agony, he watched the shadow of the wild, laughing creature she had been. So quickly she has turned from everything in the world, because I am leaving it. He felt the tense, hot hand gripping his own. “Tarmo…”

Her whisper was low, but insistent. “I want you to remember something. Anything I do is for you. Anything I have to give is for you. Will you believe that, always?”

If only, she thought with vacant eyes, I could clean my mouth. There is a taste in my mouth as if I had been drinking blood. A taste of iron, warm and hot, as though I had killed and eaten…

She touched his chest, then his face with her hand. “Whole. Quite whole,” she said in a tone of wonder. “I don’t know what is real, any more. Korson, is the moon blue or silver?”

What caused this melancholy fantasy, he wondered. She is very young. She must not leap from the dreams of childhood to the regrets and uncertainty of old age. “Tarmo, you must not be sorry—not even for yourself. You, too, must remember something. I might have come to this last night without knowing there was a you.”

“And if you were free? If this were not the last night?”

His voice was harsh. “There is no escape, and you know it.” For the last time, he put his arms around her. “Goodbye, beloved.”

The music stopped with his kiss.

Slightly apprehensive, Varden eyed Korson as he approached the table where the brandy decanter and glasses were. But Korson smiled and said, “Do you own that stuff, Varden?”

Lady Ellora’s voice sounded feverishly bright. “I’m a miserable hostess.”

The clear, dark fluid gurgled pleasantly into Korson’s glass.

“Brandy is my favorite drink,” Everling said. “An inspiring liquid.”

“Does your genius need an aid to inspiration?” asked Korson, with unconcealed sarcasm.

“Relaxation might be a better word. That peace which comes from the gentle glow of the kindly drink.”

Korson’s laugh was short and curt. “I grant you that certain men are in need of peace. Do you dream, Dr. Everling? Do you have nightmares?”

“I sleep like a child—”

“Of the devil!”

Sharp and quick, with the tone of authority he so seldom used, Varden broke in, “Come, Doctor. You need a refill.” Everling followed him to the decanter.

Korson, now alone with the Master’s Lady, spoke urgently. “Lady Ellora, I know something of the greatest importance. I must reach the Master. How can I do so?”

“There is no way.”

Once more the unfathomable weakness attacked her; she could no longer stand, and sank into a chair. He must hate me, she, thought. This tall, imperious, tender young man. She was mistress of the Center, of the place which had doomed him.

He bent closer to her. “You would know how to find him if anyone does. Only two minutes to talk to him—now!”

The luster of her eyes was veiled by sadness. “If there were a way, it would do no good. If you were my own son, I could not save you.”

Soundlessly, Everling had come near enough to overhear the last words. “It is surprising that he would wish to be saved.”

An instant after the words left his mouth, the blow struck squarely. Everling staggered back and dropped, sprawling, to the floor.

Darting across the room, Tarmo knelt beside him, terrified that he might not keep his promise to save the life of the man who had struck him down. Her hand touched his hair, his cheek. Korson looked down at them, cold and hard.

“Tarmo, did you ever have the sickness?”

“Yes!”

Everling got to his feet, waving away Varden’s gesture of assistance. “Our young friend is zealous in his search for truth. I trust he is satisfied.”

Varden scowled, knowing something was behind Korson’s action, yet inclined to attribute it to the strain of his last night of life. Both men wanted to spring at each other’s throats, but could not find the reason.

“We were all impetuous once,” the hoarse tones continued. “Enthusiastic, following the rules, our feet never straying from the well-defined paths science laid out for us. It is understandable.” He bowed to Lady Ellora. “Now, if you will excuse me…”

With dignity, Everling walked the length of the drawing room, Tarmo beside him and, in silence, they disappeared from view.

Three pair of eyes avoided each other. Finally, Korson said, “I apologize to both of you.”

“Forget it,” Varden told him. “Look, Korson, I’d like to stay with you here, for—”

“Hell no!” Korson interrupted. “Do you think I want to play chess?” He held out his hand.

Gripping it, Varden tried to say something, realized he could not, and went out.

The Lady Ellora said, quietly, “I want to play chess.” The sound that came from him was the wordless protest of humanity against a destiny it cannot fathom.

Her frail arms closed tightly around him, cradling his head. Forgetting pride, he sought the woman’s kindly strength. It is almost ludicrous, he thought. Both of us doomed. She, tender and sad for my fate, and I for hers.

After a moment he moved out of her embrace, smiling, “We could go out in clouds of glory, with vine leaves in our hair—but we won’t.”

“Let’s do a decent job of it, Lady Ellora. Let’s not break the glasses at ten. Lord, I don’t know how to say things. I’m only a biochemist-but a damn good one!”

“You are, surely.”

“Don’t wreck it. And don’t wait here with me. Go now!”

He felt the light pressure of her lips on his. Then she was going away, her slender figure poised, head high.

He was alone, now. Emptying his drink, he poured another. It was the one time in a man’s life when he was most free. Free of the niggling, inconsequential happenings of today—any day—free of yesterday, free of tomorrow.

He glanced at a time indicator. The dial markers stood at 9:07.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

In Laboratory 1, the great machines squatted like shadowy monsters that had been frozen in their death agonies. The wall illumination had been turned down to a faint glow, and the only brightness was the single beam of light focused on the desk.

It seemed to the Master that the tall figure of Everling in his green robe and pointed cowl was a character from some ancient oil painting; not a man, but a specter that had stalked out of the childhood of humanity.

He looked at the time indicator. It was less than an hour until Korson would arrive. The matter at hand must be finished, and quickly.

From beyond the shaft of light slanting down to the desk, came the deep, compelling voice, “For longer than I can remember I have desired to see the interior of this place.”

“Undoubtedly. However, you are here only because I must keep an agreement. So I shall be brief.” He placed one hand, palm down, upon the top of the desk and rubbed a long finger over the dry, discolored skin. “What causes men to age?”

“It is a cosmic law of the life force.”

“Which I have broken? Men do not break cosmic laws. And I am a man.”

“Nevertheless—”

“Nevertheless you are neither a logical philosopher nor a good pathologist. Men age because of a change in their blood. That is the reason why all men are not deathless. The only reason.

“The individual organs of the body are potentially immortal. But a man is a unit—not a set of organs. What unified him? It is the ever-flowing river of blood that connects and integrates the organs. A man is as old as his blood.”

Everling started to speak, but a motion of the Master’s hand cut him off.

“As the various organs of the body take on nourishment and give off waste products, the composition of the blood slowly changes. Each organ poisons the others. The blood becomes that of an old man; eventually, of a dead man.

“That change is absolute and irrevocable. Science, with all its knowledge, cannot alter it. Even the Master cannot.”

“But,” said Everling, “with massive transfusions of young blood—”

“It would not work.”

“Why not?”

“First, every drop of blood must be removed, and the circulatory system cleaned. Were the smallest amount, of old blood allowed to remain, it would act as an antagonist to the new blood. The old man would die as swiftly and as surely as if he had been given a transfusion of the wrong type of blood.”

“Also, and this is the strange fact which I do not pretend to understand, the young blood must be from a single individual of the same sex. Remember, you are not simply transferring blood—you are transferring that which holds a living creature together. You are receiving not a set of organs, but a unit.

“Finally—and in this case—you were partially right—there is what you called ‘life force.’ Each organ has its own life force. This can only be renewed by a brief period of apparent death. During that period, the organs will take in energy from the eternal well of youth, and return to the period of their maximum vigour.

“Now, if you nourish those regenerated organs with the blood of a single young person of the same sex, and if that nourishment flows through a cleansed circulatory system, the old person will become young. And that is an actual cosmic law.”

Everling was silent a moment. Then he said, reflectively, “It is more complicated than I had anticipated.”

“Truth is never simple. Only half truths are simple.”

Everling was staring at the Master with growing realization and amazement. “But—to do what you have said you would be forced to suspend life!”

“Yes.”

“Suspend life!”

The Master nodded. “That is my secret.”

“By the use of such a discovery all human beings could have their youth renewed.” Everling’s tone was biting. “By what perversion of thought does the Council allow you to keep the secret?”

“They do not know it.”

“Why not?”

The Master’s fingers impatiently tapped the desk. “I did not say that I could make old blood young.”

“But—”

“Think for a moment. If my secret were known, the world would instantly be filled with a race of vampires. Every man and woman would spend half his life struggling, scheming, killing to obtain precious young blood. Every child born would be another potential source. At maturity, he would become a hunted animal. I know which temptations men can stand—and which they cannot resist. Worst of all is the desire for renewed youth.”

The cowled head nodded in agreement. “You are right, Master.”

“From the very beginning, I realized the possible consequences of my discovery—both for good and evil. Therefore, I did not disclose my secret. I had done my experimental work with animals. Dogs cannot talk.

“In those days, when humanity was disintegrating because of war and the inability to control the machine, the great Conference of Scientists was called. I went before that gathering and proved my discovery—without revealing my methods. Then I proposed that one man, and only one, be made immortal. And that he should be the Master.

“They debated for several days, and finally agreed, to my plan. As they had no choice, they selected me as the Master.”

“And you have guarded your secret ever since?”

“Until now. If you will follow me, I will show you the key to potential immortality.”

Walking across the great laboratory, the, Master touched a button and the panels began to drop into the floor. When the first panel was completely down, he pointed to the nude young man in the scintillating mist.

“My first donor.”

Everling threw back his cowl and stared intently at the entombed figure. Then the man from Cheenwa rapped on the plastic cover of the cabinet.

The sound echoed in the laboratory, but the man in the cabinet did not move.

“But,” he whispered, “he seems alive!”

“He is neither living, nor dead. His life is suspended, and has been for ten centuries.”

“The real basis of physical life,” the Master continued, “is not chemical, but electromagnetic. I discovered a way to make that life force inactive until I wish to reactivate it.”

“What is that strange mist around him?”

“That is the fluorescent effect of the force field which I have created in the cabinet. It is that field which suspends the electromagnet potential, or ‘life force’.”

“Why does he stand so straight?”

“His muscles were taut when his life was instantaneously suspended. The muscles will remain so.”

Everling’s thick brows drew together. “Why not kill these men?”

“There are many things which even the Master does not know. One is exactly what happens after death.” His finger pressed the second button and the panels began to rise into place.

“I believe,” he added. “that death is a beginning, not an end. But many of the men in those cabinets did not share my belief. Therefore, I have kept them here, hoping that some day I will find a way to return to them the only life they were sure of. This life.”

“Thirty living dead men!” Everling whispered hoarsely.

The panels were down, except for the last two. These two cabinets remained open and empty.

“You noticed, Dr. Everling, that there was an urn in each cabinet. Those urns contain the old blood from my body which was exchanged for the young blood of the donor. If I can discover a way of making old blood young, my secret can be revealed. Then I can give these men back young blood. And their lives, which I stole.”

“What prevents the force fields escaping from the cabinets?”

“The walls of the cabinets are double. Between those walls I have created a second field which balances the primary field and contains it within the cabinet. It took a long while to work out that problem. At first, the fields had to be constantly renewed.”

The Master went to the two empty cabinets. Behind him he heard the slow, measured footsteps of the doctor. He became conscious of a queer illusion; from somewhere far off a faint voice seemed to be warning him not to take this final step.

“When the donor arrives,” the Master said, “he will strip and enter this cabinet. I will then adjust the force field and the insulating fields. For an instant, the donor’s life will be suspended.”

“Why do you not adjust the fields before the donor arrives?”

“The fields must be adjusted immediately before the donation. An individual’s life force is not static, but constantly changing—even from hour to hour.”

“When the donor’s fields are set, I can release him from suspended animation. He returns to his last moments of life and steps out of the cabinet. I then instruct him how to adjust the fields. Next, I strip and step into the other cabinet. The donor anesthetizes my arm and inserts this needle into a vein.”

The Master indicated a large hypodermic needle which was attached to a length of flexible, transparent tubing. The tubing emerged from the inner side of the cabinet.

“After which,” Everling said eagerly, “he closes the door of your cabinet and adjusts the fields according to your instructions.”

“Exactly. There is only one more step. The donor enters his cabinet, inserts a similar needle into his arm, and closes his door. When he shuts that door the master switch is automatically closed, and the whole affair is turned over to the time clock, mounted between the cabinets.”

“The actual donation,” Everling interrupted, “is automatic?”

“Yes. For an hour, the world’s only Master is the time clock. After that period, my door is automatically opened, the force fields are shut off and I return to life and youth.”

“How are the fields adjusted?”

“I will show you.”

He led the way to a large control panel in the center of the laboratory. The panel was studded with knobs, switches, dials and indicators.

“The adjustments must be unbelievably complicated!” There was something rather like panic in Everling’s unnaturally high-pitched tone.

“No, said the Master, I have simplified them and made everything possible automatic. This was to minimize any chance of error.”

A brief sigh escaped Everling. The Master wondered if he had actually heard the sound or not. He was annoyed, for it seemed that he was missing something of significance.

“These are the controls for the donor’s cabinet. These are for mine. These four knobs are adjusted until the dials read so.”

Swiftly, he instructed Everling. The Master was amazed at the rapidity with which Everling’s mind grasped each point.

When he had finished, Everling said, “Is that all?” He was almost mocking, as if a great deal had been made of something quite ordinary.

“Except that every control on the panel is labeled in code. The key to the code is in my desk. I will destroy it after the donation is completed.”

Exultation throbbed in Everling’s voice. “When will Korson arrive?”

“At ten o’clock.” The Master broke off. “You knew the donor was Korson?”

“He told me accidentally in a moment of anger.” A nervous motion of his tongue moistened his thin lips. “Interesting to know that my new blood will be his, Korson’s.”

“No, it will not!” It was no longer the voice of an old, tired man; it was the voice of the Master.

“That was our bargain!” Everling’s voice was suddenly out of control. “Is your word no better than a cheap liar’s?”

“I have kept my word. I agreed to reveal my secret in exchange for yours. I should never have made such an agreement, but I was weak enough to place my love for a woman above all else. I have despised myself for it.”

“You promised thirty more years of life!”

His method of escape was technical, unworthy, and the Master knew it. “The agreement was to exchange secrets. You falsely presumed that I also agreed to give you renewed youth. Korson offered his life, as a decent scientist should. But you wanted to bargain like a merchant.”

The trap was sprung. The Master saw a shiver pass over the man opposite him, saw him grow calm again.

“You have disclosed your secret. Now you wish me to tell my method of curing the sickness.”

The Master nodded.

“I believe, Master, that I have been treated unjustly. However, I have saved the Lady Ellora, and I ask one favor.”

“What is it?”

“May I experience, for one moment, the sensation of suspended life? To you, of course, it is not a sensation, but for me it has a mystical significance. I would like to enter the donor’s cabinet while you adjust the force fields.”

What possible harm could come of humoring Everling? the Master thought. There was some justice in Everling’s bitterness. “Very well. Strip!”

It required only a few seconds for the Master to adjust the controls. He suspended Everling’s life for perhaps a half minute, then turned off the fields and opened the cabinet.

Smiling, Everling stepped out. “Thank you, Master.” Quickly, he dressed.

“Now, Dr. Everling, what is your method of treating the sickness?”

“I will explain at once. However, I would rather talk in more pleasant surroundings. I am haunted by those living dead men. May we go into your office?”

The Master shrugged. “The man was becoming a nuisance with his trivial requests. However, he must have his answer. He crossed the laboratory, and took the atomic torch from its niche. As its rays fell on the opalescent disk, the great, slab began to swing outward.

Everling’s voice came from directly behind him.

“This is my, secret!” His weapon crashed against the back of the Master’s head.

As the aged body crumpled, the torch fell from its hand. Ponderously, the slab swung back into position, leaving Laboratory 1 once more sealed from the outside world.

When consciousness returned, the Master tried to move, but he could not. He realized that he was bound and gagged, his body propped against one of the machines.

Everling, a heavy wrench in his hand, stood before him. “I will take my thirty years—and more! I shall not kill you, yet. For the present you are no use to me dead. Alive, you may become one of my most valuable possessions.”

Sitting down behind the desk, he lit a cigarette. “In half an hour Korson will be outside the laboratory. I will open the door by the method you so kindly showed me. Korson will suspect nothing and I shall be armed and prepared. Fortunately my knowledge of science allowed me to follow your explanation and to realize that the donor need not be conscious. An unconscious donor will serve my purpose excellently.”

The Master knew that what he said was true.

“You have already set my field, and I know how to set his. Tonight, for the first time in a thousand years, the world will have a new Master!”

Taking the Master’s cape from the back of the chair, he drew it around his shoulders.

The man was insane, thought the Master. It was a fitting ending that the Master, who had been created to save the world from its own madness, should be destroyed by a madman.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

It was nineteen minutes to ten when Korson heard the tapping of sandals on the parquet floor in the entrance of the drawing room.

As Tarmo came running to him, he called, “Get out. Damn it, get out!”

“I can’t go through with it! Not even for you. Korson, the Master must not die. We’d be killing all that’s good on earth—”

Roughly he gripped her arm, “What do you mean!”

“I betrayed him—for you. I never had the blue mark or the sickness.”

“And you lied!”

“To save you. Everling told me his whole plan two nights ago. He means to kill the Master and become Master himself. He met the Master at nine o’clock in Laboratory 1. And he promised to save your life.” Abject before him, she covered her face with her hands.

Korson muttered, “I can’t get into Laboratory 1.”

She raised her head. “The guards?”

“If neither Varden nor I can get in, how can they?” He thought a moment. “There’s one chance—Lady Ellora.”

Grabbing her hand, he jerked her along with him as he ran out of the room.

The Lady Ellora was lying on her lounge, reading, when they burst into the room. As she looked up at them in astonishment, both saw the livid blue mark on her throat.

“There’s little time, Lady Ellora. Everling is in Laboratory 1 with the Master. He intends to kill him and become Master himself.”

Her frightened blue eyes stared incredulously at them. “How do you know?”

“Everling told me,” said Tarmo. “It was part of his plan to get into the Center—to pretend he could cure the sickness. I never had it and he never cured me.” A sob choked her. “Oh, my Lady, I am sorry!”

“There must be a way into Laboratory 1. You know it,” said Korson quietly.

Her head turned to and fro in feverish torment. “I cannot tell you.”

“Tell us or the Master will die!”

“It is a sacred trust.”

“I must get into that laboratory before Everling expects me, and take him by surprise. It’s my only chance.” Korson was uncompromising.

“If I did as my heart pleads, I would let him die…so that he could go with me.”

“Then,” said Tarmo, “you would not be the Master’s Lady.”

The child has become a woman, thought Lady Ellora. She sat erect, a final spark of vitality flaming in her face. “Korson, have you a weapon?”

“A World Scientist isn’t allowed to carry one.”

“Get one from the guards.”

“They must not know about this—they might talk. Too dangerous for the world to know of the Master’s one weakness.”

“Then forcing the words through bloodless lips, each one a struggle against her ebbing strength, she continued, “Come closer…the combination cubicle is to the right of the door. The combination is 4-92X-9-7-418-K.”

He repeated it once, and was gone.

Dropping to her knees beside the lounge, Tarmo’s arms went round Lady Ellora as tears poured down her cheeks.

* * * *

As Korson slammed open the combination cubicle, fear that in the last moments of his life his memory might betray him, made his fingers shaky. But he set the dials which only one other pair of hands had touched before.

Suddenly, the almost imperceptible cracks in the concrete wall began to widen. The massive slab swung inward.

Korson saw the figure of Everling behind the desk, the folds of the Master’s cloak hanging from his shoulders. A hand darted out to grab the heavy wrench on the desk.

Everling came around the desk.

Lunging across the space between them, Korson dodged the blow of the wrench. As he came up, half-crouched, he struck Everling’s arm a paralyzing blow with the edge of his palm, causing the doctor to loosen his grip on the wrench.

With his free hand, Everling gripped the collar of Korson’s tunic, jerking him forward, twisting the collar in an attempt to choke him. He must not kill the donor, just render him helpless.

Suddenly Korson’s powerful leg thrust between Everling’s, tripping him, and he went down on one knee. Flinging himself on top of the doctor, Korson smashed his fist into the man’s face. Blood spurted from a cut over his eye. Everling, half-blinded for a moment, could only cling desperately to the wrench, feeling his arm slowly, painfully pressed back and outward, further and further.

Hampered by the long cloak, his movements were clumsy and he could not throw Korson off. At the moment he lost his grip on the weapon, Everling sprang to his feet, the wrench landing on the floor several yards away.

Two savage blows, low on his body, knocked the wind out of Korson. His eyes blurred as he saw the other man make a dash for the wrench. One blind lunge brought him forward, to wrap his arms around Everling’s legs and drag him down, just out of reach of the wrench.

Everling launched a vicious kick; his boot caught Korson’s jaw, snapping his head back. Consciousness dimmed, but he clung grimly to Everling, and slowly inched himself up along the other man’s body. Finally, he was in reach of his throat and, pinning down Everling’s legs with his own, he thrust his thumbs into the flesh on both sides of Everling’s throat. Fury had erased all thoughts from his mind, except one to kill.

Slowly increasing the pressure of his thumbs, he saw Everling’s eyes begin to glaze. Then Korson remembered that it was for the Master to deal with the doctor; he had no right to be the executioner. Within a second of the kill, he relaxed his grip. Everling was unconscious.

Now, with the eyes closed, the face of the man on the floor was cruel, evil.

Hurrying to the Master, he untied him and helped him to his feet. Shocked at his slow, feeble movements, he felt deep pity for the trembling old man. Pity, and fear that there was too little time to do what must be done.

“Use me, Master. Quickly!”

“It must be quick—” whispered the Master. The grey eyes flicked down at the prone figure in the green robe. “But, you are not the donor. He is.”

“What!”

“Korson, make sure that Doctor Everling is alive.”

Stooping down, Korson felt Everling’s wrist. “He is alive, Master.”

“Find his card which shows his blood type.”

Korson searched Everling’s clothes and brought out the card.

“What is his type?”

“Type A-Rh positive.”

“Good,” the Master said softly. “That is my type.”

“We know nothing about this man’s health. And he’s a few years too old.”

“He is healthy enough and young enough. If necessary, I can ask the Council to send me a new donor ahead of the usual time.”

Still, Korson did not move. “I am the donor.”

“And I, Korson, am the Master.”

* * * *

The Master sat alone behind his desk in Laboratory 1. He had sent Korson to find Tarmo and bring her to him. He wanted them together when he announced the final decision he had made, which would change their lives, and end this strange affair. Dreading the step he was forced to take, he knew there was no other way.

He rubbed a hand across his forehead as if to blot out something. Yet the same few words were repeated endlessly in his mind—the words which, in answer to his first desperate question, had come over the visaphone circuit from the outside world.

“The Lady Ellora is dead.”

Placing his hands on the desk before him, he noticed that already years had gone from them. The flesh was becoming firm and smooth. Soon they would be the hands of a young man. Even now, he felt youth’s energy pounding through him.

Varden’s voice on the visaphone startled him.

“Ronding wishes to speak to you. Says it is urgent!”

“I will talk to him.”

Ronding’s excited face appeared on the screen, and his voice boomed, “The drinks are on you and Dr. Everling, Master. I have isolated the cause of the sickness. It is a damn virus, terrible and unusual, but still a virus. My findings have been checked by the Council. With the cause known, we’ll find the cure. You can tell all the other eggheads that it took Ronding to lick it.”

“The world owes you a great debt, Dr. Ronding.”

“Oh hell!”

The Master was glad that Ronding could not see his face. “Find Varden and stay with him until I come.”

He rose and, with light, vigorous steps, wandered about the great laboratory. He paused a moment to look at Everling, eternally sealed inside the swirling mist; then he pressed the button and the panels rose into place. He went into the little room in the corner of the laboratory, and stared idly at the notes concerning his most recent efforts to solve the problem of communication with the dead. Korson’s voice on the visaphone interrupted his thoughts:

“We are outside the door to the laboratory, Master.”

The beam of the Master’s atomic torch found the disk, and the slab swung inward. Tarmo and Korson entered.

She hurried to him, impulsively pouring out her story. “Forgive me, Master! When I first came here with Everling I truly believed I had had the sickness and that he had cured me. Then he told me his scheme and the part I had played. Tonight I lied to the others, because he said he would save, Korson. Forgive—” Her voice stopped as if unseen hands had closed round her throat, and she stood frozen, suddenly realizing the change in the Master.

He smiled, and his rich, calm tones filled the laboratory. “You have never seen me like this, Tarmo, my dear. The old man you knew and the young one you see are the same person. Korson has told me the whole story. Your actions speak for themselves. The matter is ended, except for something I must do. Something which may seem harsh to you. Come.”

Returning to the desk, he sat down and looked steadily at the young people.

“No one must ever know Everling’s fate. Nor that Korson was not the donor.”

“Yes,” said Korson. “I understand.”

“You will leave Earth tonight, both of you. And you must never return. You may visit any of the other planets and pursue any work you desire. To the day of your deaths, nothing that is in my power to give will be lacking from your lives. But you must change your names and conceal your identities. Every day you live, you must remember that the fate of the Master, and perhaps humanity, is in your hands.”

He paused, looking beyond them at the dim shapes of the great machines. Then, opening a drawer in the desk, he took out a thin sheaf of papers. “I prepared this while I waited for you. You will find here a complete background of fictitious identities for both of you. I have selected names, and sketched the major outlines of your lives previous to tonight. Tomorrow I will have this information filed with the proper official quarters. You will leave on the dawn rocket for Moon Base. Your reservations are made.” He hesitated. “Korson…”

Korson smiled. “I know. It would be impossible for me to conceal my identity if…” As his hands touched his shoulders to remove the two silver stars, Tarmo tore them off, laughing, and kissed him.

* * * *

The Master strode across the courtyard, through the tunnel and up the stairway which led to the blue bedroom.

They were all there, Varden, Ronding—even Flim. Automatically, the group parted before him. He glimpsed the awe and wonder in their faces, but he had seen that before.

Bending over the Lady Ellora his lips touched hers and he shivered, feeling their coldness.

Going out onto the balcony he stood, silhouetted against the star-scattered sky above Terra City. There remained only the ultimate problem that was enclosed by the little room in the corner of Laboratory 1.

“And what, oh Stars, is your answer?”

For I should know. I am the Master.

THE MARTIAN CHILD, by David Gerrold

Originally published in 1994.

Winner of the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and HOMer Awards (Best Novelette Category).

Toward the end of the meeting, the caseworker remarked, “Oh—and one more thing. Dennis thinks he’s a Martian.”

“I beg your pardon?” I wasn’t certain I had heard her correctly. I had papers scattered all over the meeting room table—thick piles of stapled incident reports, manila-foldered psychiatric evaluations, Xeroxed clinical diagnoses, scribbled caseworker histories, typed abuse reports, bound trial transcripts, and my own crabbed notes as well: Hyperactivity. Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. Emotional Abuse. Physical Abuse. Conners Rating Scale. Apgars. I had no idea there was so much to know about children. For a moment, I was actually looking for the folder labeled Martian.

“He thinks he’s a Martian,” Ms. Bright repeated. She was a small woman, very proper and polite. “He told his group home parents that he’s not like the other children—he’s from Mars—so he shouldn’t be expected to act like an Earthling all the time.”

“Well, that’s okay,” I said, a little too quickly. “Some of my best friends are Martians. He’ll fit right in. As long as he doesn’t eat the tribbles or tease the feral Chtorran.”

By the narrow expressions on their faces, I could tell that the caseworkers weren’t amused. For a moment, my heart sank. Maybe I’d said the wrong thing. Maybe I was being too facile with my answers.

—The hardest thing about adoption is that you have to ask someone to trust you with a child.

That means that you have to be willing to let them scrutinize your entire life, everything: your financial standing, your medical history, your home and belongings, your upbringing, your personality, your motivations, your arrest record, your IQ, and even your sex life. It means that every self-esteem issue you have ever had will come bubbling right to the surface like last night’s beans in this morning’s bath tub.

Whatever you’re most insecure about, that’s what the whole adoption process will feel like it’s focused on. For me, it was that terrible familiar feeling of being second best—of not being good enough to play with the big kids, or get the job, or win the award, or whatever was at stake. Even though the point of this interview was simply to see if Dennis and I would be a good match, I felt as if I was being judged again. What if I wasn’t good enough this time?

I tried again. I began slowly. “Y’know, you all keep telling me all the bad news—you don’t even know if this kid is capable of forming a deep attachment—it feels as if you’re trying to talk me out of this match.” I stopped myself before I said too much. I was suddenly angry and I didn’t know why. These people were only doing their job.

And then it hit me. That was it—these people were only doing their job.

At that moment, I realized that there wasn’t anyone in the room who had the kind of commitment to Dennis that I did, and I hadn’t even met him yet. To them, he was only another case to handle. To me, he was…the possibility of a family. It wasn’t fair to unload my frustration on these tired, overworked, underpaid women. They cared. It just wasn’t the same kind of caring. I swallowed my anger.

“Listen,” I said, sitting forward, placing my hands calmly and deliberately on the table. “After everything this poor little guy has been through, if he wants to think he’s a Martian—I’m not going to argue with him. Actually, I think it’s charming. It’s evidence of his resilience. It’s probably the most rational explanation he can come up with for his irrational situation. He probably feels alienated, abandoned, different, alone. At least, this gives him a reason for it. It lets him put a story around his situation so he can cope with it. Maybe it’s the wrong explanation, but it’s the only one he’s got. We’d be stupid to try to take it away from him.”

And after I’d said that, I couldn’t help but add another thought as well. “I know a lot of people who hide out in fantasy because reality is too hard to cope with. Fantasy is my business. The only difference is that I write it down and make the rest of the world pay for the privilege of sharing the delusion. Fantasy isn’t about escape; it’s a survival mechanism. It’s a way to deal with things that are so much bigger than you are. So I think fantasy is special, something to be cherished and protected because it’s a very fragile thing and without it, we’re so defenseless, we’re paralyzed.

“I know what this boy is feeling because I’ve been there. Not the same circumstances, thank God—but I know this much, if he’s surrounded by adults who can’t understand what he really needs, he’ll never have that chance to connect that everyone keeps talking about.” For the first time I looked directly into their eyes as if they had to live up to my standards. “Excuse me for being presumptuous—but he’s got to he with someone who’ll tell him that it’s all right for him to be a Martian. Let him be a Martian for as long as he needs.”

“Yes. Thank you,” the supervisor said abruptly. “I think that’s everything we need to cover. We’ll be getting back to you shortly.”

My heart sank at her words. She hadn’t acknowledged a word of what I’d said. I was certain she’d dismissed it totally. I gathered up all my papers. We exchanged pleasantries and handshakes, and I wore my company smile all the way to the elevator. I didn’t say a word, neither did my sister. We both waited until we were in the car and headed back toward the Hollywood Freeway. She drove, guiding the big car through traffic as effortlessly as only a Los Angeles real estate agent can manage.

“I blew it,” I said. “Didn’t I? I got too…full of myself again.”

“Honey, I think you were fine.” She patted my hand.

“They’re not going to make the match,” I said. “It would be a single parent adoption. They’re not going to do it. First they choose married couples, Ward and June. Then they choose single women, Murphy Brown. Then, only if there’s no one else who’ll take the kid, will they consider a single man. I’m at the bottom of the list. I’ll never get this kid. I’ll never get any kid. My own caseworker told me not to get my hopes up. There are two other families interested. This was just a formality, this interview. I know it. Just so they could prove they’d considered more than one match.” I felt the frustration building up inside my chest like a balloon full of hurt. “But this is the kid for me, Alice, I know it. I don’t know how I know it, but I do.”

I’d first seen Dennis’s picture three weeks earlier; a little square of colors that suggested a smile in flight.

I’d gone to the National Conference of the Adoptive Families of America at the Los Angeles Airport Hilton. There were six panels per hour, six hours a day, two days, Saturday and Sunday. I picked the panels that I thought would be most useful to me in finding and raising a child and ordered tapes—over two dozen—of the sessions I couldn’t attend in person. I’d had no idea there were so many different issues to be dealt with in adoptions. I soaked it up like a sponge, listening eagerly to the advice of adoptive parents, their grown children, clinical psychologists, advocates, social workers, and adoption resource professionals.

But my real reason for attending was to find the child.

I’d already been approved. I’d spent more than a year filling out forms and submitting to interviews. But approval doesn’t mean you get a child. It only means that your name is in the hat. Matching is done to meet the child’s needs first. Fair enough—but terribly frustrating.

Eventually, I ended up in the conference’s equivalent of a dealer’s room. Rows of tables and heart-tugging displays. Books of all kinds for sale. Organizations. Agencies. Children in Eastern Europe. Children in Latin America. Asian children. Children with special needs. Photo-listings, like real-estate albums. Turn the pages, look at the eyes, the smiles, the needs. “Johnny was abandoned by his mother at age three. He is hyperactive, starts fires, and has been cruel to small animals. He will need extensive therapy.… “Janie, age 9, is severely retarded. She was sexually abused by her stepfather, she will need round-the-clock care.… “Michael suffers from severe epilepsy.… “Linda needs… “Danny needs… “Michael needs… So many needs. So much hurt. It was overwhelming.

Why were so many of the children in the books “special needs” children? Retarded. Hyperactive. Abused. Had they been abandoned because they weren’t perfect, or were these the leftovers after all the good children were selected? The part that disturbed me the most was that I could understand the emotions involved. I wanted a child, not a case. And some of the descriptions in the book did seem pretty intimidating. Were these the only kind of children available?

Maybe it was selfish, but I found myself turning the pages looking for a child who represented an easy answer. Did I really want another set of needs in my life—a single man who’s old enough to be considered middle-aged and ought to be thinking seriously about retirement plans?

This was the most important question of all. “Why do you want to adopt a child?” And it was a question I couldn’t answer. I couldn’t find the words. It seemed that there was something I couldn’t write down.

The motivational questionnaire had been a brick wall that sat on my desk for a week. It took me thirty pages of single-spaced printout just to get my thoughts organized. I could tell great stories about what I thought a family should be, but I couldn’t really answer the question why I wanted a son. Not right away.

The three o’clock in the morning truth of it was a very nasty and selfish piece of business.

I didn’t want to die alone. I didn’t want to be left unremembered.

All those books and TV scripts…they were nothing. They used up trees. They were exercises in excess. They made other people rich. They were useless to me. They filled up shelves. They impressed the impressionable. But they didn’t prove me a real person. They didn’t validate my life as one worth living. In fact, they were about as valuable as the vice-presidency of the United States.

What I really wanted was to make a difference. I wanted someone to know that there was a real person behind all those words. A dad.

I would lie awake, staring into the darkness, trying to imagine it, what it would be like, how I would handle the various situations that might come up, how I would deal with the day-to-day business of daddying. I gamed out scenarios and tried to figure out how to handle difficult situations.

In my mind, I was always kind and generous, compassionate and wise. My fantasy child was innocent and joyous, full of love and wide-eyed wonder, and grateful to be in my home. He was an invisible presence, living inside my soul, defying reality to catch up. I wondered where he was now, and how and when I would finally meet him—and if the reality of parenting would be as wonderful as the dream.

—But it was all fantasyland. The books were proof of that. These children had histories, brutal, tragic, and heart-rending.

I wandered on to the next table. One of the social workers from the Los Angeles County Department of Children’s Services had a photo book with her. I introduced myself, told her I’d been approved—but not matched. Could I look through the book? Yes, of course, she said. I turned the pages slowly, studying the innocent faces, looking for one who could be my son. All the pictures were of black children, and the county wasn’t doing trans-racial adoptions anymore. Too controversial. The black social workers had taken a stand against it—I could see their point—but how many of these children would not find homes now?

Tucked away like an afterthought on the very last page was a photo of the only white child in the book. My glance slid across the picture quickly, I was already starting to close the album—and then as the impact of what I’d seen hit me, I froze in mid-action, almost slamming the book flat again.

The boy was riding a bicycle on a sunny tree-lined sidewalk; he was caught in the act of shouting or laughing at whoever was holding the camera. His blond hair was wild in the wind of his passage, his eyes shone like stars behind his glasses, his expression was raucous and exuberant.

I couldn’t take my eyes off the picture. A cold wave of certainty came rolling up my spine like a blast of fire and ice. It was a feeling of recognition. This was him—the child who’d taken up permanent residence in my imagination! I could almost hear him yelling, “Hi, Daddy!”

“Tell me about this child,” I said, a little too quickly. The social worker was already looking at me oddly. I could understand it. My voice sounded odd to me too. I tried to explain. “Tell me. Do you ever get people looking at a picture and telling you that this is the one?”

“All the time,” she replied. Her face softened into an understanding smile.

His name was Dennis. He’d just turned eight. She’d just put his picture in the book this morning. And yes, she’d have the boy’s caseworker get in touch with my caseworker. But…she cautioned…remember that there might be other families interested too. And remember, the department matches from the child’s side.

I didn’t hear any of that. I heard the words, but not the cautions.

I pushed hard and they set up a meeting to see if the match would work. But they cautioned me ahead of time—” Tthis might not be the child you’re looking for. He’s classified as ‘hard-to-place.’ He’s hyperactive and he’s been emotionally abused and he may have fetal alcohol effects and he’s been in eight foster homes, he’s never had a family of his own.…

I didn’t hear a word of it. I simply refused to listen. The boy in the picture had grabbed my heart so completely that I’d suddenly expanded all my definitions of what I was willing to accept.

I posted messages on CompuServe asking for information and advice on adoption, on attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, on emotional abuse recovery, on everything I could think of—what were this child’s chances of becoming an independent adult? I called the Adoption Warm Line and was referred to parents who’d been through it. I hit the bookstores and the libraries. I called my cousin, the doctor, and he faxed me twenty pages of reports. And I came into the meeting so well-papered and full of theories and good intentions that I must have looked the perfect jerk.

And now…it was over.

I leaned my head against the passenger side window of my sister’s car and moaned. “Dammit. I’m so tired of being pregnant. Thirteen months is long enough for any man! I’ve got the baby blues so bad, I can’t even go to the supermarket anymore. I find myself watching other people with their children and the tears start welling up in my eyes. I keep thinking ‘Where’s mine?’”

My sister understood. She had four children of her own, none of whom had ended up in jail; so she had to have done something right. “Listen to me, David. Maybe this little boy isn’t right for you—”

“Of course he’s right for me. He’s a Martian.”

She ignored the interruption. “And if he isn’t right, there’ll be another child who is. I promise you. And you said it yourself that you didn’t know if you could handle all the problems he’d be bringing with him.”

“I know—it’s just that… I feel like—I don’t know what I feel like. This is worse than anything I’ve ever been through. All this wanting and not having. Sometimes I’m afraid it’s not going to happen at all.”

Alice pulled the car over to the curb and turned off the engine. “Okay, it’s my turn,” she said. “Stop beating yourself up. You are the smartest one in the whole family—but sometimes you can be awfully stupid. You are going to be a terrific father to some very lucky little boy. Your caseworker knows that. All of those social workers in that meeting saw your commitment and dedication. All that research you did—when you asked about the Apgar numbers and the Conners scale, when you handed them that report on hyperactivity, which even they didn’t know about—you impressed them.”

I shook my head. “Research is easy. You post a note on CompuServe, wait two days, and then download your e-mail.”

“It’s not the research,” Alice said. “It’s the fact that you did it. That demonstrates your willingness to find out what the child needs so you can provide it.”

“I wish I could believe you,” I said.

She looked deeply at me. “What’s the matter?”

“What if I’m really not good enough?” I said. “That’s what I’m worried about—I can’t shake that feeling.”

“Oh, that—” she said, lightly. “That’s normal. That’s the proof that you’re going to do okay. It’s only those parents who don’t worry who need to.”

“Oh,” I said. And then we both started laughing.

She hugged me then. “You’ll do fine. Now let’s go home and call Mom before she busts a kidney from the suspense.”

Two centuries later, although the calendar insisted otherwise, Ms. Bright called me. “We’ve made a decision. If you’re still interested in Dennis, we’d like to arrange a meeting—” I don’t remember a lot of what she said after that; most of it was details about how we would proceed; but I remember what she said at the end. “I want to tell you the two things that helped us make the decision. First, all that research you did shows that you’re committed to Dennis’s needs. That’s very important in any adoption, but especially in this one. The other thing was what you said at the end of the meeting—about understanding his need to be a Martian. We were really touched by your empathy for his situation. We think that’s a quality that Dennis is going to need very much in any family he’s placed in. That’s why we decided to try you first.”

I thanked her profusely; at least, I think I did; I was suddenly having trouble seeing, and the box of tissues had gone empty.

* * * *

I met Dennis three days later, at the Johnson Group Home in Culver City. He was one of six children living at the facility; four boys, two girls. Because the caseworkers didn’t want him to know that he was being auditioned, I would be introduced as a friend of the group home parents.

The child who came home from school was a sullen little zombie, going through the motions of life. He walked in the door, walked past me with no sign of recognition, and headed straight to his room. I said, “Hi.” He grunted something that could have been “H’lo” and kept on going. For a moment, I felt somehow cheated. I recognized him, why hadn’t he recognized me? And then I had to remind myself that I was the grownup, not him. I waited. After a bit, he came out from his retreat, looked me up and down, and said, “Do you want to play with me?”

We played air hockey. For the first few minutes, he was totally intent on the game. I didn’t exist to him. Then I remembered an exercise from one of my communications courses—about simply being with another person. I stopped trying so hard to do it right, and instead just focused my attention on Dennis, letting it be all right with me for him to be exactly the way he was.

And yet, I couldn’t turn off the analytical part of my mind. After reading all those reports, and hearing all the opinions of the caseworkers, I couldn’t help but watch for evidence. I couldn’t see it. None of it. All I could see was a child. And then that thing happened that always happens to an adult who is willing to play with a child. I rediscovered my own childhood again. I got involved in the game, and very shortly I was smiling and laughing when he did, returning the same delight and approval at every audacious play. And that’s when it happened. He began to realize that there was a real human being on the opposite side of the game board. Something sparked. He started reacting to me instead of to the puck. I could feel the sense of connection almost as a physical presence.

Then, abruptly, it was time for him to do his chores. We loaded up the wagon with the cans from the recycling bin and walked them over to the nearby park. We talked about stuff. He talked, I listened. Sometimes I asked questions, sometimes he did. On the way back, he insisted that I pull the wagon so he could ride in it. By now, he was glowing. He was the boy in the photograph.

When we got back to the group home, however, the other children had arrived home from school and were already playing together in the back yard. As soon as he saw them, Dennis broke away from me and ran to the back of the yard. He flung himself into the corner of a large old couch and curled up in a ball. He was as apart from the other children—indeed the whole world—as it was possible to get.

What had suddenly triggered his unhappiness? Was it the thought that now that there were other children to play with, I would reject him? Did he have to reject me first? Or was there something else going on? From inside the house, I watched him as he sat alone. He was a very unhappy little boy. And he had stopped glowing. At that moment, I knew I couldn’t leave him here. Whatever other problems he might have, my commitment was bigger. Or so I believed.

The group home parents invited me to stay to dinner with the children. I hadn’t planned on it, but all the children insisted that I stay, so I did, specifically making a point of sitting next to Dennis. He didn’t talk at all, he was subdued, as if he was afraid of losing something that he wanted very much—or maybe that was only my perception. He ate quietly and timidly. But then Tony, one of the more excitable children, suddenly piped up, “Do you know what Dennis said?”

Tony was sitting directly across from me. He had that look of malicious mischief common to children who are about to betray a confidence. “What?” I asked, with a queasy foreboding.

“Dennis said he wishes you were his dad.” Even without looking, I could see that beside me, Dennis was cringing, readying himself for the inevitable politely worded rejection.

Instead, I turned to Dennis, focusing all my attention on him, and said, “Wow, what a great wish. Thank you!” There was more I wanted to add, but I couldn’t. Not yet. The “game plan” required me to be Dennis’s “special friend” for at least six weeks before I made any kind of commitment to him. He couldn’t know that I had the same wish he did. I felt cheated at not being able to add, “So do I.” But I understood the rationale, and I would follow it.

“Better watch out,” Tony said. “He might make it a Martian wish, and then you’ll have to.”

At the time, I didn’t understand what Tony had meant. So I forgot about it.

* * * *

The next time I heard about Martians happened thirteen months later.

I was in Arizona, at a party at Jeff Duntemann’s sprawling house. Jeff is a two-time Hugo nominee who gave up science fiction to write books about computer programming. Apparently, it was far more profitable than science fiction; now he was publishing his own magazine, PC-Techniques. I write a regular column for the magazine, an off-the-wall mix of code and mutated zen. It was the standing joke that my contribution to the magazine was the “Martian perspective.”

I was sitting on the patio, watching Dennis splash enthusiastically across the pool. He was doing cannonballs into the deep end. A year ago, I couldn’t pry him loose from the steps in the shallow end; he wouldn’t even let me teach him how to dog-paddle—now he was an apprentice fish. He spent more time swimming across the bottom of the water than the top.

A year ago, he’d been a waif—capable of joy, the picture proved that—but more often sad, uncertain, alienated, and angry. A year ago, he’d told his caseworker, “I don’t think God listens to my prayers. I prayed for a dad and nothing happened.” On the day he moved in, I asked his caseworker to remind him of that conversation and then tell him that sometimes it takes God a little while to make a miracle happen.

A miracle—according to my friend Randy MacNamara—is something that wouldn’t have happened anyway. Now, after the fact, after the first giddy days of panic and joy, after the days of bottomless fears, after the tantrums and the testing, after a thousand and one peanut butter and jellyfish sandwiches, I understood what he meant. And more. A miracle takes real commitment. It never happens by accident. I’d had other miracles happen in my life—one which I’d written about, one which I may never write about—but this one was the best. I had the proof of it framed on my wall.

One afternoon I’d opened Dennis’s lunch kit to see how much he’d eaten and found the note I’d packed that morning. It said, “Please eat your whole lunch today! I love you! Daddy.” On the other side, written in a childish scrawl was Dennis’s reply: “I love you to. you are very specil to me. I realy think your the best. I love you very much dady I never loved eneyone more than you. I never new anyone nicer than you.” At the bottom, he’d drawn three hearts and put the word “dady” in the biggest of them.

So the miracle was complete. Dennis could form a deep attachment. And he could express it. And all I had to do was sit and glow and realize that despite all my doubts and all my mistakes, I was getting the important part of the job done right. I had passed from wannabe to gonnabe to finding-how-to-be to simply be-ing. I was glowing as brightly as the warm Arizona evening. Pink clouds were striped across the darkening twilight sky.

I didn’t know anyone else at the party besides Jeff and Carol—and the world-famous Mr. Byte who was in the kitchen begging scraps he wasn’t supposed to have. But that was all right. I was content just to sit and watch my son enjoying himself. And then I heard the word “Martian” in back of me, and without moving, my attention swiveled 180 degrees.

Four of the wives were sitting together—it was that kind of party; the programmers were talking code, the wives were talking children. I didn’t know enough about either subject, I still felt like a dabbler in both fields, so I made the best kind of listener. One of the women was saying. “No, it’s true. Since she was old enough to talk she’s insisted that she’s a Martian. Her mother has never been able to convince her otherwise. She asked her, ‘How do you explain that I remember going to the hospital and giving birth to you?’ and she said, ‘I was implanted in your tummy.’ She’s twelve now and she still believes it. She has a whole story, an explanation for everything. She says UFOs are implanting Martian babies all the time.”

The other women laughed gently. I found myself smiling to myself and watching Dennis. Remembering for the first time in a long while what he’d once told his caseworker—that he was a Martian too. Interesting coincidence.

Then, one of the others said, “We had a boy in my daughter’s school who wore a T-shirt to school almost every day that said, ‘I am a Martian.’ He took a lot of teasing about it. The principal tried to make him stop wearing it, but he refused. All the kids thought he was crazy.”

“That was probably the only way he could get the attention he needed.”

“Well,” said the fourth voice, “it’s a common childhood fantasy—that the child is really a changeling or an orphan and that you’re not her real mother. Adding Mars to it is just a way to take advantage of the information in the real world to make it more believable.”

I didn’t hear any more of that conversation; we were interrupted by Carol announcing that dessert was served; but a seed of inquiry had been planted. If nothing else, I thought it might make an interesting story. If only I could figure out an ending for it. Let’s see, a man adopts a little boy and then discovers that the child is a Martian.

Hm. But what’s the hook?

Horror story? Too easy. Too obvious—the Martian children are going to murder us in our beds. Besides, Richard Matheson could do it better, if he hadn’t already. John Wyndham already had. A hidden invasion? The Martians will take us over without our ever knowing? Fred Brown had beaten me to it by four decades. His story had even ended up as an episode on Hitchcock. Maybe something tender and gentle instead? Parenting a starlost orphan? That would be the hardest to write—and Zenna Henderson had already written it several times over. Sturgeon was another one who could handle that angle. I wished I could pick up the phone and call him. He would have had the most interesting insight for the ending, but the connect charges would have been horrendous. I could call Harlan, of course, but he’d probably bitch at me for interrupting him during Jeopardy. Besides, I didn’t think he would take this question seriously. “Harlan, listen—I think my son’s a Martian, and I’m trying to write it up as a story.… Yeah, right, David. Have you had your medication checked recently?

I made a mental note to think about it later. Maybe my subconscious would think about it during the drive home. Maybe I’d stumble across an ending by accident. I really couldn’t do anything at all without an ending in mind. It’s easy to start a story, but if you don’t know the ending, you don’t know what you’re writing toward and after a while the story goes adrift, the energy fails, and you’ve got one more thing to be frustrated about. I had a file cabinet full of unfinished stories to prove that this was not the best way to generate pay copy.

* * * *

The next day…we were slicing across the desolate red desert, seemingly suspended between the blazing sky and the shimmering road, not talking about anything, just listening to a tape of Van Dyke Parks and sipping sodas from the cooler. The tape came to an end and the white noise of the wind rushed in to envelop us. Convertibles are fun, but they aren’t quiet.

Abruptly, I remembered last night’s conversation.

“Hey,” I asked. “Are you a Martian?”

“What?”

“Are you a Martian?” I repeated.

“Why do you ask that?”

“Ah, obviously you’re a Jewish Martian. You answer a question with a question.”

“Who told you I was a Martian?”

“Kathy did. Before I met you, we had a meeting. She told me all about you. She said that you told her you were a Martian. Do you remember telling her that?”

“Yes.”

“Are you still a Martian?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Oh,” I said. “Do you want to tell me about it?”

“Okay,” he said. “I was made on Mars. I was a tadpole. Then I was brought to Earth in a UFO and implanted in my Mommy’s tummy. She didn’t know. Then I was borned.”

“Ahh,” I said. “That’s how I thought it happened. Is that all?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Why did the Martians send you here?”

“So I could be a Earth-boy.”

“Oh.”

“Can we go to Round Table Pizza for dinner?” he asked, abruptly changing the subject as if it was the most natural thing to do.

“Do Martians like pizza?”

“Yes!” he said excitedly. Then he pointed his fingers at me like a funny kind of ray gun. Most children would have pointed the top two fingers to make a pretend gun, but Dennis pointed his index and little fingers, his thumb stood straight up for the trigger. “If you don’t take me out for pizza tonight, I’ll have to disneygrade you.”

“Ouch, that sounds painful. I definitely do not want to be disneygraded. Then I’d have to stand in the dark and sing that awful song forever while boatloads of Japanese tourists take pictures of me. But we’re not going tonight. Maybe tomorrow, if you have a good day at school.”

“No, tonight!” He pointed his fingers menacingly—both hands now—and for a moment I wondered what would happen if he pressed his thumbs forward. Would I be turned into a giant three-fingered mouse?

“If you disneygrade me,” I said, “for sure you won’t get any pizza.”

“Okay,” he said. Then he closed up both weapons, first one hand, then the other. First the little finger of his left hand, then the index finger; then the little finger of his right hand, then the index finger. Each time he made a soft clicking sound with his mouth. Finally he folded his thumbs down—and abruptly he had hands again.

Later, I tried to do the same thing myself. A human can do it, but it’s like the Vulcan salute. It takes practice.

* * * *

I have a pinched nerve in my back. If I do my twisting exercises a couple of times a week, and if I take frequent breaks from the keyboard, and if I remember to put myself into the spa every couple days and let the bubbles boil up around me, then I can keep myself functioning pretty much like a normal person. It’s a fair trade. Usually I wait until after dinner to sit in the spa. After the sun sets is a perfect time for a little skinny-dipping.

Several days after the Phoenix trip, Dennis and I were alone in the pool. The pool has a blue filter over the light, the spa has a red one; when the bubbles are on, it looks a little like a hot lava bath. Sometimes we talk about nothing important, sometimes we just sit silently letting the bubbles massage our skins, sometimes we stare up into the sky and watch for meteors; once we’d seen a bright red starpoint streak across the sky like a bullet.

But tonight, as he splashed in the bubbles, I found myself studying the way the light shaped his features. I’m not an expert on the development of children’s skulls, but abruptly I was struck by the odd proportions of his forehead and eyes.

Before I’d adopted him, I’d been given copies of various doctor’s reports. One doctor, who was supposed to be looking for fetal alcohol effects, had described the five-year-old Dennis as “an unusual-looking” child. I couldn’t see what he was talking about. To me, Dennis had always been an unusually good-looking boy.

There are only two shapes of faces—pie and horse. Dennis was a pie-face, I’m a horse. In that, he was lucky because his smile was so wide he needed a round face to hold it all. He was blessed with dark blond hair which was growing steadily toward shoulder-length. His eyes were puppy-brown and hidden behind lashes long enough to trouble the sleep of mascara manufacturers. His complexion was as luminous and gold as an Arizona sunset.

His body was well-proportioned too; he had long legs and a swimmer’s torso. He was thin, but not skinny. He looked like a Disney child. I expected him to be a heartbreaker when he grew up. The girls were going to chase him with lassos. Already I wondered what kind of a teenager he would become—and if I would be able to handle it.

Now…seeing him in the reflected red light of the spa—is this the same color light they have on Mars?—he did look a little alien to me. His forehead had a roundish bulge toward the crown. His cheekbones seemed strangely angled. His eyes seemed narrow and reptilian. Probably it was the effect of the light coming from underneath instead of above, combined with the red filter, but it was momentarily unnerving. For a moment, I wondered what kind of a thing I’d brought into my life.

“What?” he asked, staring back.

“Nothing,” I said.

“You were looking at me.”

“I was admiring you. You’re a beautiful kid, do you know that?”

“Uh-huh.” And suddenly he was Dennis again.

“How do you know that?”

“Everybody says so. They all like my eyelashes.”

I laughed. Of course. Here was a child who’d learned to work the system. He was a skilled manipulator. He’d learned real fast how to turn on his special smile and get what he wanted out of people. Of course he knew how much attention his eyelashes attracted.

But—for a moment there, he hadn’t been Dennis the little boy. He’d been something else. Something cold and watchful. He’d noticed me studying him. He’d sensed the suspicion. Or was it just the power of suggestion at work? Most of the books on parenting advised not to feel guilty for wondering if your child is going to suddenly catch a fly with his tongue. It’s a very common parental fear.

And then…whenever I had doubts about Dennis and my ability to keep up with him, all I had to do was ask myself one simple question. How would I feel if Kathy Bright said she had to remove him from my home? Ripped apart was the simplest answer. The truth was, I didn’t care if he was a Martian or not, I was as bonded to him as he was to me.

But out of curiosity, and possibly just to reassure myself that I was imagining things, I logged onto CompuServe. The ISSUES forum has a parenting section. I left a message under the heading, “Is your child a Martian?”

My little boy says he’s a Martian. I’ve heard of two other children who claim to be Martians as well. Has anyone else heard of children who believe that they’re from Mars?

Over the course of the next few days—before the message scrolled off the board and into the bit-bucket—I received thirty-three replies.

Several of the messages were thoughtful analyses of why a child might say such a thing; it was pretty much what that mother in Phoenix had surmised; it’s common for children to fantasize that they have glamorous origins. In the past, children might have believed they were secretly princes and princesses and one day their real parents would arrive to take them to their golden castles. But because that mythology has now been superseded by starships and mutants, it’s more appropriate for children to fantasize about traveling away on the Millennium Falcon or the Enterprise. But if a child was experienced enough to know that those stories were just fiction, he would also know that Mars was a real planet; therefore… Mars gave credibility to the fantasy. Etcetera. Etcetera. Local mileage may vary, but if the delusion persists, see a good therapist. It may be evidence of some deeper problem. Etcetera some more.

I knew what Dennis’s deeper problems were. He’d been bounced around the foster care system for eight years before landing in my arMs. He didn’t know where he came from or where he belonged.

Several of the replies I received were from other parents sharing pieces of weirdness their own children had demonstrated. Interesting, but not particularly useful to my inquiry.

But…there were over a dozen private messages.

My sister’s little girl used to insist that she’d been brought to Earth in a UFO and implanted in her mommy’s tummy while her mommy was asleep. She kept this up until she was about fourteen, then abruptly stopped. After that, she wouldn’t answer questions about it at all.

My next door neighbors had a boy who said he wasn’t from Earth. He disappeared when he was twelve. Without a trace. The police assumed he was kidnapped.

My ex-wife was a child psychologist. She used to joke about her Martian children. She said she could tell how crazy New York was by the number of Martians she saw in any given year. At first she used to tell the parents that same old same old about children needing to fantasize about a glamorous background, but later on she began to wonder. The stories the kids told were all very similar. They began life as Martian tadpoles brought to Earth and implanted in the uteruses of Earth women. She always wanted to do a study on Martian children, but she could never get a grant.

I dated a girl once who said she was from Mars. She was very insistent on it. When I tried to get serious with her, she turned me down flat. She said she really liked me, but it wouldn’t work out between us. When I asked her why, she said it was because she was from Mars. That’s all. I guess Martians have a rule against marrying outside their species.

I heard about a Martian when I was in high school. He killed himself. I didn’t know him. I only heard about it afterward.

I thought I was from Mars once. I even had memories of being on Mars. It had a pink sky. That’s how I knew it was Mars. When the photos came in from JPL showing that Mars really did have a pink sky, just like in my memories, I thought that proved something. When I told my parents, they took me to see a doctor. I was in therapy for a long time, but I’m fine now. Maybe you should get your son into therapy.

It was the last one that really got to me. I knew the person who sent it meant to be reassuring, but instead, his message had the opposite effect.

Okay, maybe it’s me. Maybe it’s because I’m a writer. I read subtext where none is intended. And maybe the cumulative effect of all these messages, especially the wistful, almost plaintive tone of the last one left me with a very uncomfortable feeling.

I replied to all of these messages.

I know this sounds silly, but please indulge me. What did your Martian friend/relative look like? Did he/she have any special physical characteristics or medical problems? What was his/her personality like? Do you know what happened to him other? Does he/she still believe that he/she is from Mars?

It took a week or two to compile the responses. Of the ten Martians specifically mentioned, two had committed suicide. One was successful in business. Three refused to talk about Mars. Two were “cured.” The whereabouts of the others were unknown. Three were missing. Two of the missing had been repeated runaways during their teen years. I wondered where they thought they were running to.

Of the ten Martians, six were known to have had golden-brown skin, round faces, brown eyes and very long eyelashes. The hair color was generally dark blond or brown. That was an interesting statistical anomaly.

Of the ten Martians, five were hyperactive, two were epileptic. The other three weren’t known.

I asked the fellow whose ex-wife had been a child psychologist if she’d ever noticed any statistical patterns among her Martians. He said he didn’t know and he didn’t even know her whereabouts anymore. She had disappeared two years earlier.

* * * *

I called my friend, Steve Barnes. He’d written one of the character references I’d needed to adopt Dennis, and because of that I regarded him as an unofficial godfather to the boy. We chatted about this and that and the other thing for awhile. And then, finally, I said, “Steve—do you know about the Martian phenomenon?” He didn’t. I told him about it. He asked me if I was smoking dope again.

“I’m serious, Steve.”

“So am I.”

“I haven’t touched that crap since I kicked out she-who-must-not-be-named,” I said it angrily.

“Just checking. You gotta admit that’s a pretty bizarre story, though.”

“I know that. That’s why I’m telling you. You’re one of the few people I know who will actually consider it fairly. Geez—why is it that science fiction writers are the most skeptical animals of all?”

“Because we get to deal with more crazies than anyone else,” Steve replied without missing a beat.

“I don’t know what to do with this,” I said, admitting my frustration. “I know it sounds like one more crazy UFO mystery. Only this one is something that can actually be validated. This is the kind of statistical anomaly that can’t be explained away by coincidence. And I bet there’s a lot more to it too. Like, what was the blood type of all those children? What was the position of the Earth and Mars when they were conceived? What was the phase of the moon? What are their favorite foods? How well did they do in school? What if there’s something really going on here?—maybe not Martians, maybe some kind of social phenomenon or syndrome—I don’t know what it is, I don’t know what else to ask, and I don’t know who to tell. Most of all, I don’t want to end up on the front page of the Inquirer. Can’t you just see it? ‘SCI-FI WRITER HAS MARTIAN CHILD!’”

“It might be good for your career,” Steve said thoughtfully. “I wonder how many new readers you could pick up.”

“Oh, yeah, sure. And I wonder how many old readers I’ll lose. I’d like to be taken seriously in my old age, Steve. Remember what happened to what’s-his-name.”

“I’ll never forget old what’s-his-name,” Steve said. “Yeah, that was a real sad story.”

“Anyway… I said. “You see my point? Where do I go from here?”

“You want my real advice?” Steve asked. He didn’t wait for my reply. “Don’t go anywhere with it. Drop it. Let someone else figure it out. Or no one. You said it yourself, David. ‘It’s almost always dangerous to be right too soon.’ Don’t go borrowing trouble. Turn it into a story if you must and let people think it’s a harmless fantasy. But don’t let it screw up your life. You wanted this kid, didn’t you? Now you have him. Just parent him. That’s the only thing that’s really wanted and needed.”

He was right. I knew it. But I couldn’t accept it. “Sure. That’s easy for you to say. You don’t have a Martian in the house.”

“Yes I do.” He laughed. “Only mine’s a girl.”

“Huh—?”

“Don’t you get it? All children are Martians. We get thirteen years to civilize the little monsters. After that, it’s too late. Then they start eating our hearts out for the rest of our lives.”

“You sound like my mother now.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment.”

“It’s a good thing you don’t know her, or you wouldn’t say that.”

“Listen to me, David,” and his tone of voice was so serious that six different jokes died before they could pass my lips. “You’re right on schedule. Have you ever really looked at the faces of new parents? Most of them are walking around in a state of shock, wondering what happened—what is this loathsome reptilian thing that has suddenly invaded their lives? It’s part of the process of assimilation. The only difference is that you have a more active imagination than most people. You know how to name your fears. Trust me on this, Toni and I went through it too with Nicki. We thought she was a—never mind. Just know that this normal. There are days when you are absolutely certain that you’ve got a cute and stinky little alien in your house.”

“But every day?”

“Trust me. It passes. In a year or two, you won’t even remember what your life was like before.”

“Hmm. Maybe that’s how long it takes a Martian to brainwash his human hosts.…

Steve sighed. “You’ve got it bad.”

“Yes, I do,” I admitted.

* * * *

The Martian thing gnawed at me like an ulcer. I couldn’t get it out of my head. No matter what we did, the thought was there.

If we went out front to swat koosh-balls back and forth, I wondered if the reason he was having trouble with his coordination was the unfamiliar gravity of Earth. If we went in the back yard and jumped in the pool together, I wondered if his attraction to water was because it was so scarce on Mars. I wondered about his ability to hear a piece of music a single time and still remember the melody so clearly that he could sing it again, note for note, a month later. He would walk through the house singing songs that he could not have heard except on the tapes I occasionally played. How many nine-year-olds know how to sing My Clone Sleeps Alone like Pat Benatar? I wondered why he had so little interest in comic books, but loved to watch television dramas about the relationships of human beings. He hated Star Trek, he thought it was “too silly.” He loved the Discovery channel—especially all the shows about animals and insects.

There was no apparent pattern to his behavior, nothing that could be pointed to as evidence of otherworldliness. Indeed, the fact that he was making his father paranoid was a very strong argument that he was a normal Earth kid.

And then, just when I’d forgotten…something would happen. Maybe he’d react to something on television with an off-the-wall comment that would make me look over at him curiously. There was that Bugs Bunny cartoon, for instance, where the rabbit is making life difficult for Marvin the Martian, stealing the eludium-235 detonator so he can’t blow up the Earth. In the middle of it, Dennis quietly declared, “No, that’s wrong. Martians aren’t like that.” Then he got up and turned the television set off.

“Why did you do that?” I asked.

“Because it was wrong,” he said blandly.

“But it’s only a cartoon.” One of my favorite cartoons, I might add.

“It’s still wrong.” And then he turned and went outside as if the whole concept of television would never be interesting to him again.

* * * *

And now, almost two years to the day since I’d filled out the first application, the nickel finally dropped and I sat up in bed in the middle of the night. Why were so many adopted children hyperactive?

The evidence was all around me. I just hadn’t noticed it before. It was there in the photo-listing books. It seemed as if every third child was hyperactive. It was acknowledged in the books, the articles, the seminars, the tapes…that a higher proportion of foster children have Attention Deficit Disorder, also called Hyperactivity. Why was that?

Some theorists suggested that it was the result of substance abuse by the parents, which is why we saw it more in abandoned and unwanted children. Some doctors believed that hyperactivity was the result of the body’s failure to produce certain key enzymes in response to physical stimulation; therefore the child needed to overstimulate himself in order to produce an equivalent amount of calming. Still others postulated that there was an emotional component to the disorder; that it was a response to a lack of nurturing. Most interesting of all to me was the offhand note in one article that some theorists believed that many cases of ADD were actually misdiagnoses. If you were unattached and didn’t know who you were or where you had come from or where you were going, you’d have a lot to worry about; your attention might be distracted too.

Or…what if the behavior that was judged abnormal for Earth children was perfectly normal for Martian children? What if there was no such thing as ADD…in Martians?

At this point, I’d reached the limits of my ability to research the question. Who could I tell? Who would have the resources to pursue this further? And who would take me seriously?

Suppose I picked up the Los Angeles Times tomorrow and saw that Ben Bova had called a press conference to announce that he’d been kidnapped by aliens and taken into space where they’d performed bizarre sexual experiments on him…would I believe him? Ben is one of the most believable men in the world. Once, he almost talked me into voting for Ronald Reagan. But if I saw a report like that in the newspaper, the first thing I’d do would be to call Barbara and ask if Ben were all right.

In other words…there was simply no way for me to research this question without destroying all of my credibility as a writer.

Even worse, there was no way to research it without also destroying my credibility as a parent.

Up until this time, I’d always been candid with the caseworkers and therapists; I’d talked to them about our discipline problems, about my feelings of frustration, about ever little step in the right direction and every major victory. But…suddenly, I realized this was something I couldn’t talk to them about. Suppose I called Kathy Bright. What could I say? “Uh, Kathy, it’s David. I want to talk to you about Dennis. You know how he says he’s a Martian? Well, I think he might really be a Martian and…

Uh-huh.

If the adoptive father was starting to have hallucinations about the child, how long would the Department of Children’s Services leave the child in that placement? About twenty minutes, I figured. About as long as it took to get out there and pick him up. She’d pull him out of my house so fast they’d be hearing sonic booms in Malibu. And I wouldn’t even be able to argue. She’d be right to do so. A child needs a stable and nurturing environment. How stable and nurturing would it be for him to be living with an adult who suspects he’s from another planet and is wondering about his ultimate motives.

If I pursued this, I’d lose my son.

The thought was intolerable. I might never recover. I was sure that he wouldn’t. For the first time in his life, he’d finally formed an attachment. What would it do to him to have it broken so abruptly? It would truly destroy his ability to trust any other human being.

I couldn’t do that to him. I couldn’t do anything that might hurt him.

And what about me? I had my own “attachment issues.” I couldn’t stand the thought of another failure. Another brick in the wall, as they say.

That was where I stayed stuck for the longest time. I walked around the house in physical pain for three weeks. My chest hurt. My head hurt. My legs hurt. My back hurt. My eyes hurt. My throat hurt. The only part of me that didn’t hurt was my brain. That was so numb, I couldn’t think.

I didn’t know if he was a Martian or not. But something weird was going on. Wasn’t it? And if it was just me—if I was going insane—then what right do I have to try to parent this child anyway? Either way I lose. If he’s a Martian, I can’t tell anyone. And if he isn’t a Martian, then I’m going crazy.

* * * *

I started looking for local evidence. I began browsing through my journal. I’d been making daily notes of interesting incidents, in case I ever wanted to write a book about our experiences. At first, I couldn’t find anything. Most of the incidents I’d written about were fairly mundane. Not even good Readers’ Digest material.

For instance, the week after he moved in, I’d taken him to the baseball game at Dodger Stadium. For the first part of the game, he’d been more interested in having a pennant and getting some cotton candy than in what was going on down on the stadium floor. But along about the fifth inning, he’d climbed up onto my lap and I began explaining the game to him. “See that man at home plate, holding the bat. Wish for him to hit the ball right out of the park.”

“Okay,” said Dennis.

Cra-a-ack! The ball went sailing straight out into the right field stands. Someone in the lower deck caught it and the runner sauntered easily around the bases while the organist played, “Glory, glory, Hallelujah.”

“You’re a good wisher, Dennis. That was terrific. Want to try it again?”

“No.”

“Okay.”

Two innings later, the Dodgers were one run behind. I asked Dennis to wish for hits again. Four pitches later, there were runners at first and third.

It didn’t matter to me who came up to bat now; I hadn’t remembered the names of any ballplayers since Roy Campanella was catching for Don Drysdale and Sandy Koufax. As far as I was concerned, Who was on first, What was on second, and I Don’t Know still played third. I liked baseball only so long as I didn’t have to be an expert; but I’d never seen the Dodgers win a game. Every time I came to the stadium they lost; so I’d made it a point to stay away from Dodger Stadium to give them a fair chance at winning. I didn’t expect them to win tonight; but Dennis’s wishes had brought them from three runs behind.

“Okay, Dennis,” I said, giving him a little squeeze. “It’s time for one last wish. See that guy at the home plate, holding the bat. You gotta wish for him to hit a home run. All the way out of the park. Just like before. Okay?”

“Okay.”

And just like before—cra-a-ack—the ball went sailing deep into right field, triggering a sudden cluster of excited fans scrambling down across the seats.

The Dodgers won that night. All the way home, I kept praising Dennis for his excellent wishing.

* * * *

A couple of weeks after that, we were stopped at a light, waiting for it to change. It was one of those intersections that existed slightly sideways to reality. Whenever you stopped there, time slowed down to a crawl. Without even thinking, I said, “Dennis, wish for the light to turn green please.”

“Okay,” he said.

—and abruptly the light turned green. I frowned. It seemed to me the cycle hadn’t quite completed.

Nah. I must have been daydreaming. I eased the car through the intersection. A moment later, we got caught at the next red light. I said a word.

“Why’d you say that?”

“These lights are supposed to be synchronized,” I said. “So you only get green ones. We must be out of synch. Why don’t you wish for this light to change too please.”

“Okay.”

—green.

“Boy! You are really a good wisher.”

“Thank you.”

A minute later, I said, “Can you wish this light to turn green too?”

“No,” he said, abruptly angry. “You’re going to use up all my wishes.”

“Huh?” I looked over at him.

“I only have so many wishes and you’re going to use them all up on stoplights.” There was a hurt quality in his voice.

I pulled the car over to the side of the road and stopped. I turned to him and put my hand gently on his shoulder. “Oh, sweetheart. I don’t know who told you that, but that’s not so. The wish bag is bottomless. You can have as many wishes as you want.”

“No, you can’t,” he insisted. “I have to save my wishes for things that are important.”

“What’s the most important thing you ever wished for?” I asked, already knowing the answer.

He didn’t answer.

“What’s the most important wish?” I repeated.

Very softly, he admitted, “I wished for a dad. Someone who would be nice to me.”

“Uh-huh. And did you get your wish?”

He nodded.

“So, you see, sweetheart. There’s no shortage of miracles.”

I didn’t know if he believed me. It was still too early in the process. We were still learning who each other was. I noted the conversation in my journal and let the matter slide. But it left me with an uncomfortable feeling. What has to happen to a child to make him believe there’s a limit to wishes?

A year later, I looked at the words I’d written glowing on the computer screen, and wondered about Dennis’s ability to wish. It was probably a coincidence. But maybe it wasn’t. That time we’d matched four out of six numbers in the lottery and won eighty-eight dollars—was that the week I’d asked him to wish real hard for us to win?

Maybe Martians have precognitive or telekinetic powers…?

* * * *

Dennis likes cleaning things. Without asking, he’ll go out and wash the car, or the patio. He’ll give the dogs baths. He’ll vacuum the rugs and take the Dustbuster to the couch. He’ll mop the floors. His favorite toys are a sponge and a squirt-bottle of Simple Green. I’ve seen him take a rusty old wrench he found in a vacant field and scrub the rust off of it until it shone like new. One night after dinner, after he finished methodically loading the dishwasher, I sat him down at the kitchen table and told him I had a surprise for him.

“What?”

“It’s a book of puzzles.”

“Oh.” He sounded disappointed.

“No, listen. Here’s the game. You have twenty minutes to do these puzzles, and then when you finish. I add them up and we’ll find out how smart you are. Do you want to do this?”

“It’ll really tell you how smart I am?”

“Uh-huh.”

He grabbed for the book and a pencil.

“Wait a minute—let me set the timer. Okay? Now once you start, you can’t stop. You have to go all the way through to the end. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Ready?”

“Ready.”

“One, two, three…go.”

He attacked the first three puzzles with a vengeance. They were simple. Pick the next shape in a series: triangle, square, pentagon…? Which object doesn’t belong: horse, cow, sheep, scissors? Feather is to Bird as Fur is to: dog, automobile, ice cream…?

Then the puzzles started getting harder and he started to frown. He brushed his hair out of his eyes and once he stopped to clean his glasses; but he stayed interested and involved and when the timer went off, he didn’t want to stop. He insisted that he be allowed to finish the puzzle he was working on. What the hell. I let him.

“What does it say?” Dennis asked as I computed the percentile. He wanted to grab the test book out of my hand.

“Well…let me finish here.” I held it out of his reach as I checked the table of percentiles.

The test showed that he had above-average intelligence—not unexpected; hyperactive kids tend to be brighter than average—but well within the normal range for a nine-year-old. “It says that you are fifty-two inches high, that you weigh sixty-six pounds, and that your daddy loves you very much. It also says that you are very smart.”

“How smart?”

“Well, if this test were given to one hundred children, you would be smarter than ninety-two of them.”

“How good is that?”

“That’s very good. You can’t get much better. And it means we should go out for ice cream after dinner. What do you think?”

“Yeah!”

Oh, that was another thing. He didn’t like chocolate. He preferred rainbow sherbet. I’d never seen that in a kid before.

* * * *

A couple of weeks later, we played another game. I made sure to pick a quiet evening, one with no distractions. “This game is even harder,” I explained. “It’s a kind of card game,” I explained. “See these cards? There are six different shapes here. A circle, a square, a star, three squiggly lines, a cross, and a figure-eight. All you have to do is guess which one I’m looking at. See if you can read my mind, okay?”

He frowned at me, and I had to explain it two or three more times. This was not a game he wanted to play. I said okay and started to put the deck away. If he didn’t want to cooperate, the results would be inconclusive. “Can we go for ice cream after we do this?” he asked abruptly.

“Sure,” I said.

“Okay, let’s do it then.”

“All night. We have to do it five times. Do you think you can do it that many times?”

He shrugged. I laid out a paper in front of him, showing him the shapes so he would be able remember them all. I told him he could close his eyes if it would help him concentrate. The test conditions were less than perfect, but if there were any precognitive or telepathic powers present, five trials should be enough to demonstrate them.

Half an hour later, I knew.

Martians aren’t telepathic.

But they do like rainbow sherbet. A lot.

* * * *

There were other tests. Not many. Not anything too weird. Just little ones that might indicate if there was something worth further investigation. There wasn’t. As near as I could determine, there was nothing so unusual about Dennis that it would register as a statistical anomaly in a repeatable testable circumstance. He couldn’t levitate. He couldn’t move objects. He couldn’t make things disappear. He didn’t know how to grok. He could only hold his breath for thirty-three seconds. He couldn’t think muscles. He couldn’t see around corners.

But—

He could predict elevators. Take him into any building, anywhere. Take him to the elevator bank. Let him push the up button. Don’t say a word. Without fail, the door he stands in front of will be the one where the first elevator arrives. Was he wishing them or predicting them? I don’t know. It’s useful only at science fiction conventions, which are legendary for recalcitrant elevators. It has little value anywhere else in the world.

He could make stop lights turn green—sometimes. Mostly, he waited until he saw the lights for the cross street turn yellow before he announced his wish. Maybe he could still make the Dodgers score four runs in two innings—but it wasn’t consistent. We went back to Dodger Stadium in May, and either Dennis wasn’t wishing or he really had used up all his wishes.

He could sing with perfect pitch, especially if the lyrics were about Popeye’s gastrointestinal distress. He could play a video game for four hours straight without food or water. He could invent an amazing number of excuses for not staying in bed. He could also hug my neck so hard that once I felt a warning crack in my trachea. My throat hurt for a week afterward.

I began to think that maybe I had imagined the whole thing.

* * * *

On school nights, I tucked him in at 9:30. We had a whole ritual. If there was time, we read a storybook together; whatever was appropriate. Afterward, prayers—

“I’m sorry God for… I didn’t do anything to be sorry for.”

“How about sassing your dad? Remember you had to take a timeout?”

“Oh, yeah. I’m sorry God for sassing my dad. Thank you God for…um, I can’t think of anything.”

“Going swimming?”

“No. Thank you God for Calvin, my cat.”

“Good. Anything else you want to say to God?”

“Does God hear the prayers of Martians?”

“Uh…of course he does. God hears everybody’s prayers.”

“Not Martians.”

“Yes, even Martians.”

“Uh-uh.”

“Why do you say no?”

“Because God didn’t make any Martians.”

“If God didn’t make the Martians, then who did?”

“The devil.”

“Did the devil make you?”

“Uh-huh.”

“How do you know?”

“Because… I’m a Martian.”

“Mm,” I said, remembering a little speech I’d made just about a year ago. Let it be all right for him to be a Martian for as long as he needs to be. “All right,” I said. “But let me tell you a secret,” I whispered. “The devil didn’t make any Martians. That’s just a lie the devil wants you to believe. God made the Martians.”

“Really?”

“Cross my heart and hope to die. Stick a noodle in my eye.”

“How do you know?” He was very insistent.

“Because I talk to God every night,” I said. “Just like you, I say my prayers. And God made everything in the world.”

“But Martians aren’t from this world—”

“That’s night. But God made Mars too. And everything on it. Just like she made this world, she made a whole bunch of others, and Mars was one of them. Honest.”

“How come you say ‘she’ when you talk about God?”

“Because sometimes God is female and sometimes God is male. God is everything. And now it’s time for you to stop asking questions and go to sleep. Hugs and kisses—?”

“Hugs and kisses.”

“G’night. No more talking.”

“I love you.”

“I love you too. Now no more talking.”

“Dad?”

“What?”

“I have to tell you something.”

“What?”

“I love you.”

“I love you too. Now, shhh. No more talking, Dennis.”

“G’night.”

“Sleep tight—”

Finally, I got smart. I stopped answering. Control freaks. We each wanted to have the last word.

* * * *

I padded barefoot down the hall. I stopped in the living room long enough to turn off the television set, the VCR, and the surround-sound system. I continued on through the dining room and finally to my office. Two computers sat on my desk, both showing me that it was 9:47. The monster-child had manipulated an extra seventeen minutes tonight.

I sat down in my chair, leaned back, put my feet up on my desk, and stared out at the dark waters of the swimming pool in the back yard. The pool glowed with soft blue light. The night was…silent. Somewhere, a dog, barked.

Somewhere—that was his name, yes. He was a writer’s dog—lived under my desk. Whenever I said,” Let’s go to work,” wherever he was in the house, Somewhere would pick himself up and laboriously pad-pad-pad into my office where he’d squelch himself flat and scrooch his way under the desk, with a great impassioned Jewish sigh of, “I hope you appreciate what I do for you.”

He’d stay there all day—as long as the computer was on. Somewhere would only come out for two things: cookies and the doorbell…and the doorbell was broken. It had been broken for as long as I’d lived in this house. I’d never had the need to get it fixed. If someone came to the door, the dog barked.

Somewhere, the dog, barked.

That was why I loved him so much. He was a living cliché. He was the only possible justification for one of the most infamous sentences in bad writing. It was just a matter of placing the commas correctly.

Somewhere had just enough intelligence to keep out of the way and more than enough intelligence to find his dinner dish—as long as no one moved it. He spent his mornings resting under my desk, his afternoons snoozing behind the couch, his evenings snoring next to Dennis; he spent the hours before dawn in the dark space underneath the headboard of my bed, dreaming about the refrigerator.

Almost every night, just as Dennis began saying his prayers, Somewhere would come sighing down the hall, a shaggy, absent-minded canine-American. He’d step over everything that was in his way, uncaring if he knocked over a day’s worth of Lego construction. He’d climb onto the bed, over my lap, over Dennis, grumbling softly as he found his position next to Dennis. With his prehensile tongue, he could slurp the inside of Dennis’s right ear from the left side of his head, taking either the internal or external route.

Tonight, though, he knew I wasn’t finished working. I had some serious thinking to do. He remained under the desk, sighing about the overtime. “You’re in super-golden hours,” I said to him; he shut up.

Whenever I’m in doubt about something, I sit down and start writing. I write down everything I’m feeling or thinking or worrying about. I say everything there is to say until there’s nothing left to say. The first time I did this was the day after my dad died. I sat and wrote for two days. When I was finished, I had a Nebula nominated story, In the Deadlands. To this day I still don’t fully understand what the story was about, but the emotional impact of it is undeniable. It still gives me the shudders.

But the lesson I learned from that experience was the most important thing I’ve ever learned about storytelling. Effective writing isn’t in the mechanics. Anyone can master the mechanical act of stringing together words and sentences and paragraphs to make a character move from A to B. The bookstores are full of evidence. But that’s not writing. Writing isn’t about the words, it’s about the experience. It’s about the feeling that the story creates inside of you. If there’s no feeling, there’s no story.

But sometimes, there’s only the feeling without any meaning or understanding. And that’s not a story either. What I was feeling about Dennis was so confusing and troubling and uncertain that I couldn’t even begin to sort it out. I needed to write down all the separate pieces—as if in the act of telling, it would sort itself out. Sometimes the process worked.

When I looked up again, three hours had passed. My back and shoulders ached. The dog had gone to bed, and I felt I had accomplished nothing at all except to delineate the scale of my frustration.

Why would an alien species come to this planet? The last time I spent that much time on this question, I came up with giant pink man-eating slugs in search of new flavors. Why would Martians send their children to Earth?

The most logical idea that I came up with was that they were here as observers. Spies.

Haven’t you ever been pulling on your underwear and realized that your dog or your cat is watching you? Haven’t you ever considered the possibility that the creature is sharing your secrets with some secret network of dogs and cats? “Oh, you think that’s weird? My human wears underwear with pictures of Rocky and Bullwinkle on them.”

But dogs and cats are limited in what they can observe. If you really want to know a culture, you have to be a member of it. But an alien couldn’t step in and pretend to be a member of this culture, could he? He’d have to learn. He’d have to be taught.…

Where could a Martian go to get lessons in being a human? Who gives lessons in human beingness?

Mommies and Daddies. That’s right.

* * * *

“You’re too paranoid,” my sane friend said. He asked me to leave his name out of this narrative, so I’ll just call him my sane friend.

“What do you mean?”

“You think that aliens are all motivated by evil intentions. You’ve written four novels about evil aliens eating our children, and you’re working on a fifth. Isn’t it possible that you’re wrong?”

“Moi? Wrong?”

“Do you ever think about the cuckoo?” my sane friend asked.

“No,” I said.

“Well, think about the cuckoo for a moment.”

“Okay.”

“How do you feel about the cuckoo?” he asked.

“It’s an evil bird,” I said. “It lays its egg in the sparrow’s nest. The cuckoo chick pushes the other babies out of the nest. The sparrow ends up raising it—even at the expense of her own young. It’s a parasite.”

“See, that’s your judgment talking—”

“That’s the truth—” I started to object.

“Is it? Is that what you tell Dennis about his birth-mother?”

“Uh—I tell him that his birth-mom couldn’t take care of him. And that she loves him and misses him. And that’s the truth. Sort of…whitewashed.”

My sane friend grinned at me.

“Okay,” I admitted. “I’m protective of my son. So what?”

My sane friend shrugged. “How do you think the cuckoo feels?”

“Birds don’t feel.”

“If it could feel, how do you think it would feel?”

I thought about it. The first image that came to mind was the silly little bird from the Dr. Seuss story; the one who flew off, leaving Horton the elephant to hatch her egg. I shook my head. “I’m not getting anything useful—”

“How do you think Dennis’s mother feels?”

I shook my head again. “Everything I’ve heard about her… I can’t empathize.”

“All right, try it this way. Under what circumstances would you give Dennis up?”

“I’d die before I’d give him up,” I said. “He makes me happier than anybody I’ve ever known before. Just looking at him, I get an endorphin rush. If anybody started proceedings to take him out of my home, I’d have him on a plane to New Zealand so fast—” I stopped. “Oh, I see what you mean.” I thought about it. “If I wasn’t able to take care of him, or if I thought I was hurting him, or if I thought I wasn’t doing a good enough job—” There was that old familiar twinge again. “If I thought he’d really be better off with someone else, I’d want him to have the best chance possible. But I just can’t see that happening.”

“Uh-huh.… My sane friend grinned. “Now, how do you think the Martians feel?”

“Huh?”

He repeated the question.

I thought about it for a while. “I’d have to assume that if they have the capability to implant their children in human wombs that they would have a highly developed science and technology and that implies—to me anyway—a highly developed emotional structure and probably a correspondingly well-developed moral structure as well. At least, that’s what I’d like to believe.”

“And if what you believe is true… he started to say.

I finished the thought for him. “…then the Martians are trusting us with their children.”

“Aren’t they?” he asked.

I didn’t answer. I didn’t like where that train of thought might lead. But I followed it anyway.

“Would you trust your child to apes or wolves?” my sane friend asked. “No,” I said. “You know what happens to feral children.”

He nodded. “I’ve read the same books you have.”

“So, if the Martians are trusting us with their children…then that implies that either they don’t care about their children very much—or they do.”

“You want my best guess?”

“This is where you resolve everything for me, isn’t it?”

“No. This is where I tell you what I think. I think they’re engaged in a long-term breeding experiment…to upgrade the level of intelligence and compassion in the human race.”

“Yeah?” I gave him my best raised-eyebrow look. “Remember what happened to Spock? He was a half-breed too. His parents wanted to breed a logical human. Instead, they got an emotional Vulcan.”

“Have you got a better guess?”

“No,” I admitted. “But what kind of Martians are we raising?”

“What kind of Martian are you raising?” he corrected.

And that really did it for me. That was the question. “I don’t know,” I finally admitted. “But—he is mine to raise, isn’t he?”

“Yep,” my sane friend agreed.

That thought echoed for a long long moment. Finally, I acknowledged the truth of it with a grin. “Yeah,” I said. “I can live with that.…

* * * *

As a literary puzzle, this is incomplete. As a story, it doesn’t work. There’s no ending.

There isn’t enough evidence for me to even suggest a conclusion. What do we know about the Martians? For that matter, what do we really know about ourselves? There’s nothing to extrapolate. And if the Martians are really engaged in some kind of large-scale genetic engineering we won’t really know what their intentions are until the Martian children start reaching adulthood. Dennis will be old enough to vote in 2005. And that raises another question. How long have the Martians been planting their babies in human homes? Maybe we already live in a Martian-influenced world?

Maybe the Martian children will be super geniuses, inventing cold fusion and silicon sentience and nanotechnological miracles—Stephen Hawking and Buckminster Fuller. Maybe they’ll be spiritual saviors, bringing such superior technology of consciousness that those of us brave enough to follow will achieve the enlightenment of saints. Maybe they’ll be demagogues and dictators. Or maybe they’ll be madmen and all end up in institutions. And maybe they’ll be monsters, giving us a new generation of serial killers and cult-leaders—Jack the Ripper and Charles Manson.

All we can do is wait and see how it works out.

* * * *

There’s one more thing.

In reviewing the material for this story, I came across a curious coincidence. Kathy Bright had given me several huge stacks of reports on Dennis, written by various therapists and counselors. I hadn’t had time to read them all, and after the first few, I stopped—I didn’t want their experience of Dennis; I wanted to make up my own mind. But as I paged through the files, looking for Martian stuff, one of them caught my eye. On Saturday, June 27th, 1992, Carolyn Green (the counselor on his case at the time) had noted, “Dennis thinks God doesn’t hear his prayers, because he wished for a dad and nothing happened.”

I first saw Dennis’s picture on Saturday, June 27th, 1992, at about two in the afternoon. According to Carolyn Green’s report, that was the exact time of his weekly session. I cannot help but believe that he was wishing for a dad at the exact moment I first saw his picture. A Martian wish. Was that what I felt so strongly?

Does it mean anything? Maybe. Maybe not. In any case, I know better than to argue with Martian wishes. Tonight, at bed time, he wished for me to be happy.

I had to smile. “Was that a Martian wish?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said, in a voice that left no room for disagreement.

“Then, I’m happy,” I said. And in fact, I was.

I hadn’t realized it before, because I hadn’t acknowledged it, not even to myself; but as I walked back down the hall to my office, I had to admit that I was glowing. I’d gotten everything I’d wanted, a wonderful son, a profound sense of family, a whole new reason for waking up in the morning. So what if he’s a Martian, it really doesn’t matter, does it? He’s my son, and I love him. I’m not giving him up. He’s special.

When Dennis puts his mind to it, he can predict elevators and make stoplights turn green and help the Dodgers win baseball games. He can make lottery tickets pay off (a little bit, four numbers at a time) and he can wish a father into his life. That’s pretty powerful stuff.

I think we might experiment with that a little bit more. We haven’t bought any lottery tickets in a while. Maybe we should buy a couple tonight. And if that works, who knows what else he could wish for. I was thinking of asking him to wish for a Hugo award for his dad—just a test, you understand—but this morning, he announced he was going to wish for a mom instead. I’ll be very interested to see how that one works out.

AUTHOR’S AFTERWORD

This story is, to the best of my knowledge, a work of fiction.

Yes, I have an adopted son. Yes, his name is Dennis. No, he is not a Martian.

I asked him if he was. He said he wasn’t. Then he came over and whispered in my ear, “I said no because we’re not supposed to tell.”

Special Feature: FIREBIRD, by Tony Rothman [Part 1 of 3]

ALSO BY TONY ROTHMAN

Fiction

The Course of Fortune

Censored Tales

The World is Round

Nonfiction

Sacred Mathematics: Japanese Temple Geometry (with Fukagawa Hidetoshi)

Everything’s Relative and Other Fables from Science and Technology

Doubt and Certainty (with George Sudarshan)

Instant Physics

A Physicist on Madison Avenue

Science à la Mode

Frontiers of Modern Physics

DEDICATION

To the memory of my father, Milton Rothman,

with gratitude for the scientific life.

ZERO

“You know this is mad.” That’s how it began. That is how Nathaniel Machuzak remembered it began. With the wind blowing into the Texas hill country and the convoy snaking after it toward folly. With his half-incredulous, half-angry challenge to the bearded Russian sitting beside him in the jeep.

“Yes, it’s mad.” The parched gulches the procession crossed each moment were hardly drier than the Russian’s reply; his distant gaze, trained on a Brahman steer munching grass behind a barbed-wire fence, shrouded his desiccated response with fatality.

“Borisovich, there’s not a snowball’s chance in hell of it working. And if something fucks up…Jesus…”

“Machine is conditioned. Should be okay.”

Nathaniel scowled ferociously at Yaroslav Borisovich Archangelsky, but that one only continued to stare out the window, bearded chin resting on knuckles. Worthy of Rasputin, the great beard provided its pint-sized wearer with effective camouflage and his bedraggled hair lent Archangelsky more than a passing resemblance to the crazy monk, but Machuzak had known this Russian too long to be fooled. Slava was crazy, foxlike, and the barely perceptible purse of his lips assured Machuzak that he was far from blind.

“Y–you’ve misunderstood something, Slava,” Nathaniel persisted to the march-past of scrub and rock. “This was supposed to be the dedication. The plan was to give them the c–cook’s tour, show them a routine pulse. That’s all.”

“Plans change, moi drug.”

“I—wasn’t told.”

For an instant the conversation lapsed; then Archangelsky chuckled with an unearthly rumble an octave lower than could possibly emerge from such a shrimp. “Nat Edward’ich, you think we’ve been killing ourselves day and night for cook’s tour? Who was Cook anyway?”

Managing a faint smile at the Archangelsky-ism, Machuzak did not at once reply. He recognized that he was slow in speech, to the point of hesitation, and he flattered himself that this was because he thought before he opened his mouth. But at this moment the welling anger soon overcame hesitation. “What the hell does Rasmussen think he’s doing?” he hit the steering wheel with the flat of his hand, even as he knew exactly what Slava would say:

“Giving fire to the world.”

* * * *

Machuzak’s jeep insisted on its own judgment. The video was off, permanently, but no one could mistake the voice: Leonard Rasmussen himself, CFRC’s director, online from the lab. Urgency shaded the famously boisterous tenor, one that had of late grown gravelly, but even in poor health Rasmussen did all to sound confident, sanguine. “Mac,” he said, “I smell trouble brewing at the gate. Be prepared, like a good scout. What’s your ETA?”

“N–no problem, Len. Give us twenty minutes.”

“Thumbs up,” Rasmussen said, and signed off.

A long sigh escaped Machuzak’s lips. His slowness, he conceded, was not limited to speech alone.

“Be glad we don’t have implants,” Slava remarked.

Machuzak nodded grimly. With forty the next milestone, both men were too old to want to have anything to do with the Apple Brainwave, which wired you to the Internet once and for all. Auto fatalities for 24/7 chatterers already exceeded deaths by GPS distraction. Smart cars could take over the thinking, but drive-thru Texans hadn’t exactly gone into paroxysms of ecstasy at the thought of handing over the sacred wheel to a superior intellect.

The world had changed, Machuzak shook his head with the now-permanent wonder, the geography no less. As the procession trailed the buzzards west and south out of Austin, Machuzak numbered the ranches covered with solar panels, some the older silicon and copper, more with photovoltaic nanopaint. He convinced himself that the lazy whoosh of blades turning in the wind made itself heard above the road noise.

Some things are frozen in time. A beet-red farmer perched atop his tractor stared down Machuzak and Archangelsky as the motorcade passed, leveled at them imaginary shotgun sights. The locals blamed the lab for the worsening of the water, for the annual freak snowstorms and any time their TV signal got lost. St. Cecilia and her talk-show cronies insisted that CFRC scientists were space aliens.

“We’re all aliens in this place,” Slava spat out the window.

It was true. They all spoke with accents, hardly any of them Texas twangs.

The caravan snaked up and down more kilometers, past oak trees dripping with moss, clumps of prickly pears, more ranches, down, up and—suddenly it lay before them. Machuzak pulled off the road to give the dignitaries an opportunity to gaze upon it for the first time. But whether you came over this rise once in a lifetime or every morning for a decade, you remained unprepared. There below, sprawled over three or four square kilometers, the great complex—the water towers, cooling towers, the giant structures you’d mistake for aircraft hangars, the satellite dishes, the swans gliding over the artificial lake—each time it seemed less planned than dropped. From an alien planet.

The congress members and tycoons shielding their eyes in the Texas light made astonished noises. Aye they should, Machuzak nodded. The vista confronting you from this rise is so unexpected, so irreconcilable with the eyescape, that you cannot but be drawn toward it, downward, into the valley. And they descended.

* * * *

The scene at the gate was worse than Rasmussen had foreseen. “What the—?” Machuzak exclaimed, seeing the way blocked by a mass of cameramen and bots pointing headsets in every direction and, worst of all—“Slava,” he said, as he jammed on the brakes and the motorcade ground to a halt, “who the hell’s been talking to the press?”

Archangelsky didn’t need to say, “I told you so” as the journalists stampeded toward them.

Nathaniel’s perplexity was rising by the instant. On a normal day nothing much distinguished CFRC’s main gate from the entrance to the Ruby or L-Bar Ranch, nothing except the nearly invisible eyes that surmounted the modest brick fence and the buffalo roaming in the vast fields beyond. On a normal—Before him, several dozen protestors had braved the afternoon heat to prevent…what? Nathaniel shook his head; there hadn’t been a protest since the lab opened. The college students—well, that anyone could understand… The Buddhists surprised him and the hermits and dropouts of all sorts interspersed among the rest, people who had simply removed themselves from the pace of the current century. More than the numbers it was the agitation, the genuine fear written on their faces, that seized Nathaniel’s attention. As he stepped out of the jeep they pushed toward him angrily waving their placards. “No radiation!”

“No bombs!” a bearded twenty-year-old shouted silently in his face by flashing his phone screen at Machuzak. “This place is hit and we all go up!”

“Whoa,” said Machuzak, raising his hands. “No one’s building bombs here.”

“What about the tritium?” the kid insisted belligerently, punching his keys.

“I’ve got to shoot you,” Machuzak answered with a smile, which to the surprise of both of them disarmed his opponent.

At that moment, a portly businessman on the far side of fifty, shaded by a full-sized Stetson, stepped out of his long-horn-graced limo and waded into the fray. Nathaniel knew him by sight, of course, but their handshake at Bergstrom airport had been his first and only introduction to Richard Garrett, the billionaire chair of CFRC’s board of governors.

“Excuse me, sir, just what is going on here?”

Despite the confrontation unfolding about them, and that he towered over Garrett by a head, Machuzak deferred to the tone of voice of a man who not only expected to be, but was, listened to. “M–Mr. Garrett, I suspect you know better than I. Rumor has it—” he glanced at Archangelsky in the jeep—“that Leonard has decided to use Prometheus to fire up the lab’s power grid.”

“First I’ve heard about it, er…Dr.—”

“—Machuzak, Nathaniel Machuzak.”

“And what’s wrong with that?”

“Nothing…everything.”

Garrett looked up quizzically at the lanky, perturbed, perplexed scientist. “These people seem to think it’s dangerous. Is it?”

Nathaniel hesitated, glanced at the fevered crowd surrounding this surreal exchange. “Hmm, probably not to us, if that’s what you mean. But Mr. Garrett, believe me, that machine was not ready, is not ready—”

“Ah,” Garrett shrugged jovially, considering. “Dr. Machuzak, where’s your sense of adventure? I say we give it a go. If it fizzles, well…”

In spite of himself Machuzak was fast working up a sweat. They’d always known that the second-worst thing that could happen to the program was a fizzled demonstration and the worst thing was an accident. Today they were risking both. For what? He only dimly perceived the implications. On the verge of losing his temper altogether, Machuzak half spit out, “It’s insane!” but confronted by his own lack of imagination, he swallowed his tongue and faced the crowd. “Why don’t you come watch?” he announced to the protestors, badging open the gate.

For only an instant, shocked silence and baffled glances met the unexpected invitation, then one by one the young people nodded and moved toward the retreating fence.

“Good move,” remarked Garrett.

“Welcome to the Controlled Fusion Research Center,” Machuzak said, and the crowd streamed in.

* * * *

The motley guignol of grizzled recluses munching on home-baked pies, saffron-robed monks banging drums and Energy Star moms pushing their phone-charging strollers quickly engulfed the motorcade, and the limo-bound dignitaries might have walked the final kilometer to the guardhouse. Metalized balloons bobbed above everything.

“That boy at the gate is like my daughter,” observed Slava. “She won’t speak to me except by texting.”

Aye, the world was new. Machuzak vividly recollected that day nearly two decades ago when Americans awoke to pictures of cuddly polar bears drowning in the former Arctic ice cap. By now green had turned black. His “jeep” usually ran on algae, and long ago those fourteen-mpg Urban Assault Vehicles, which Texans believed were guaranteed them by the Second Amendment, had met the same fate as the dinosaurs, except in Crawford.

The one word you never heard amidst solar, wind and bio was fusion. The energy source of stars. If fusioneers, physicists like him and Slava, could do it, they would hand the world a new, virtually limitless supply of energy. The first problem, Machuzak conceded heavily, was that after eighty years of effort, the ultimate goal still lay just beyond their fingertips. The second problem was that to people like the kid at the gate, fusion meant bombs of the worst sort. Then there was the third problem: the future never had much of a constituency.

Leonard Rasmussen, CFRC’s director, was determined that their endeavor should succeed. Ten years after he’d rebuilt the old Austin National Fusion Research Laboratory into the Controlled Fusion Research Center, his troops had yet to produce a self-sustaining reaction, which would alter the history of the world, but if Slava was right, they were going to try today.

* * * *

Machuzak waved the crowd past the perplexed duty guard, who raised the boom in spite of himself, and everyone passed through the crumbling concrete barriers that had been ordained after 9/11. Nathaniel figured the odds of a terrorist attack on CFRC were about the same as a hit against the nearest Taco Bell, but when even university students thought they were building bombs…

The crowd passed along the wide arc of the lake until at last everyone stood before the main building, gawking, giggling at the majestic fountain that rose from the water and enveloped them all in a fine spray. Their childlike wonder prompted Machuzak to see the sculpture for the first time in years. Once, those irregular, artfully corroded bronze sheets soaring heavenward through rainbow mists had reminded him of angel wings, and now he remembered that. Afresh he contemplated the small sphere surmounting the whole, bronze, brass, intricately carved away such that inner labyrinths were suggested.

“What do you suppose that sphere means?” a guest asked.

“The sun,” Nathaniel answered and ducked inside, the crowd after him.

Each and every person was instantly transported outside again by the lobby, which had been designed with light. Once more transfixed, hermits and dignitaries stood together, smiling at the vaulting arches that touched skylights open to the heavens. For a second moment, the throng’s admiration of a visionary creation briefly rekindled in Nathaniel a cinder of boyhood wonder. In those two moments, he discovered again what his profession was about, what it should be about, and resolved to act.

Setting off, he ignored the exhibits and memorabilia and mountains of food, determined to confront Rasmussen. The director was nowhere to be found, but his eyes lit on Leonard’s wife, Theresa, surrounded by admirers. Machuzak took two steps toward that charmed circle and suddenly halted, lassoed by his damned indecision, and he foolishly stood frozen in the middle of the great lobby as Slava looked on with amusement.

Luckily, Theresa herself caught sight of him and motioned him over. “What’s wrong, Mac?” she said. “You look troubled.”

He’d bypass the obligatory pleasantries: “Theresa, is Len up to anything?”

“Shh,” she smiled. “It’s supposed to be a secret.”

Christ, Slava was exactly right. For a moment Nathaniel stared blankly at Theresa. They’d known each other a decade, since he’d first set foot in this miraculous space. A handsome woman, a strong one, Theresa sometimes remarked that she read history to “be reminded of the beauty of ephemeral things,” and with her husband’s health in decline, she had well crossed the threshold where life’s transitoriness ceases to be a surprise. “Believe me, Mac,” she said, casting on Nathaniel the indulgent gaze a mother reserves for the runt of the litter, “everything will be fine. Leonard knows what he’s doing.”

Nathaniel scowled. As splendid as Theresa was, she wasn’t a scientist.

“Theresa, this isn’t the sort of thing you try in public. It’s arrogant—” He suddenly halted, seeing. “This has something to do with ITER, doesn’t it?”

Theresa’s silence instantly told Nathaniel he’d hit the mark. ITER, the colossal twenty-billion-euro device that the EU and a half dozen other countries had built in southern France, had finally completed its shakedown last week.

Leonard would never allow the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor to beat CFRC in the race for fusion. When ITER’s construction was announced, years before climate change went mainstream, the United States’ first move was to pull out of the endeavor. In, out… America’s endless vacillations handed Leonard Rasmussen his opening. With legendary charm, boundless vigor, infinite patience, he sweet-talked and cajoled. “I want ten billion dollars and fifteen years,” he leveled his gaze on high-tech magnates and secretaries of energy. Eventually he got what he wanted, the Manhattan Project for energy.

From the ashes of the decaying Austin lab rose a glittering new entity, the Controlled Fusion Research Center. Construction began immediately on the consortium’s centerpiece, christened ASSET for Advanced Steady State Experimental Tokamak. Few words, Machuzak knew, could be more meaningless to outsiders. To insiders, it meant one thing: the future, and lab hands soon christened the device Prometheus, bringer of fire. Not fully ITER’s size, ASSET’s design was—they hoped—smarter, and with luck it would trump its rival. Today the competition had stepped out of the shadows.

Nathaniel walked away from Theresa and found Archangelsky hovering over the hors d’oeuvres. “A tsar’s table,” Slava mused, only obliquely glancing at Machuzak. Then he raised his beard, grinning. “You look tortured, my friend,” he said, thrusting a sparkling glass into the other’s hand.

“You were right, friend,” Machuzak answered, glancing at the improbable, expectant crowd now milling everywhere about them. “They’re going to turn on the lights today—they’re going to try.”

“Of course I was right. I said it before. You think we’ve been busting our balls for a month now on cook’s tour?”

Nathaniel nodded, belatedly as usual, he thought. When fully operational ASSET was meant to supply electricity for the entire laboratory. When. If. It had never been connected to the turbine. They’d been slowly putting the machine through its paces when suddenly the board decreed a commissioning, apparently more, and they threw Prometheus together with sealing wax and string. Oh, it was sputtering along all right—not with a torch but a match—and they’d have to dismantle the beast and spend weeks righting what they’d made wrong. Even with ITER suddenly breathing down their necks, something here did not add up. The idiots couldn’t believe that they’d turn on the lights in front of an audience.

“Let them make fools of us all. Game isn’t worth candle. The higher-ups will get blame.”

“We all will. Tell me, Slava, weren’t scientists at one time supposed to be honest, dedicated to the truth? Wasn’t that the oath we took when we became physicists?”

Archangelsky threw a bewildered expression at Machuzak. “Nat Edward’ich, tell me on what strange and wonderful planet you grew up.”

* * * *

With a resignation to futility, Nathaniel Machuzak again resolved to stop this lunacy. He took a step toward the lobby’s center and the lab’s deputy director, Cyrus Krieg-Zuber. “Into whose hard hat were the alleged feces defecated?” Zuber snarled as if offended by his phone itself. “Yes, we shall investigate at once.”

“Cy, what are you on about?” Machuzak said the moment Krieg-Zuber had signed off. “I saw it myself this morning in the rf heating area. A tech was so stressed that he took a crap into his hard hat, that’s all. You would too if you had any idea of what was going on around here. Put an end to it.”

The blond Krieg-Zuber, accent purposely falling on the final syllable, trained his laser stare momentarily on Nathaniel, stroked his chin. Then he turned without a word, straightened the trimmed lapels of his jacket and edged toward the cameras. For a moment Machuzak stared after him, openmouthed.

Nathaniel ducked into the men’s room only to be brought up short by Leonard Rasmussen turning toward him. The director hadn’t been much visible around the lab for a year, not since the day when that terrible thing happened. Until that day, he’d been a compact, vigorous fifty-five, with silvering hair, ruddy skin and a sly grin, and then he stumbled. Machuzak hadn’t set eyes on him at all for three months and the change was almost too much to endure. Leonard Rasmussen in a wheelchair.

The moment Rasmussen caught sight of him, he struggled to his feet.

“L–Leonard,” Nathaniel stuttered simultaneously, moving to help.

Rasmussen waved him off. “It’s fine,” he said with the effort of one whose muscles refuse to obey. “I can make it. We have a demo to perform, don’t we, Mac?”

“Len,” Nathaniel pressed, “you can’t do this. How far is ITER from ignition? They can’t be close—”

“One day ahead is too close, Mac.”

“To hell with them. You know as well as I do what you’re risking. Overloads, disruptions, equipment damage—”

“ASSET was behaving during the pre-ops—”

“—reputation. What you’re planning isn’t a pre-op. Don’t do it.”

For an instant Rasmussen glanced at Nathaniel with pleading eyes and steadied himself. In that space the last piece of the day’s puzzle fell into place. ITER may be breathing down our necks, but Leonard Rasmussen is determined to see Prometheus’torch set ablaze before he dies.

Machuzak fell silent and helped Leonard into the lobby.

* * * *

Cyrus Krieg-Zuber had reappeared and already begun herding the crowd across the three hundred meters of asphalt and grass that separated the main building from the great tokamak complex at CFRC. Cyrus the Great, striving with his corporate physique for every air of an acting director, if not presidential candidate, had invited the entire planet to watch. What a spectacle it would be, he assured the press, his sartorial splendor no less than his unplaceable accent convincing them that history itself was today in the making. For an instant Machuzak caught his eye, but the adder’s glare Zuber shot at him before he turned again to the cameras said one thing: don’t.

There was nothing for it. He passed Leonard on to Theresa and filed out with Slava and a hundred others toward what they called the pentagon. Not quite “twice five miles of fertile ground,” but six stories high, the immense complex consisted of five connected subunits arrayed around a central hub. Within that hub sat Prometheus. All told, the pentagon covered the area of two or three football fields. The size of the place alone filled visitors with a certain awe, and as they approached, Nathaniel could not doubt it, each one of them was wondering what on Earth could be inside.

What is inside is not quite on Earth.

Krieg-Zuber had stationed a few smiling bots at the nearest entrance to distribute hard hats, say, “Have a wonderful day” and break-dance. Flashing his badge and teeth to the crowd, he waved it over the electronic lock, a gesture that told everyone they were about to enter forbidden domains. With nearly comical bows, he ushered in the dignitaries, then the rest, and when Machuzak and Archangelsky passed him, his expression soured.

Inside, Nathaniel and Slava found themselves shoved up against Garrett again. Soon Machuzak became conscious of a hush descending on the crowd, the same hush that descended every time visitors entered the motor-generator room and understood they are dwarfed.

“Size does matter,” Archangelsky remarked.

Garrett looked askance at the Russian, not knowing what to make of him, but Slava was right. Above the persistent whir of the flywheels, Nathaniel explained that beneath their feet spun the four huge motor-generators that power CFRC’s experiments. Without them, every time they started up Prometheus they’d be in danger of draining greater Austin of electricity. He led Garrett to a chain surrounding one of the wells and the chairman caught his breath when he gazed onto the 700-ton giant resting in a pit the size of a small house. Two generators remained idle—spares—but for short periods the primaries alone could supply 700 megawatts of power: seven million lightbulbs, 700,000 microwave ovens, enough electricity for a small city. On the other hand, the purpose of these beasts was merely to put a match to Prometheus.

“That’s hard to believe,” remarked Garrett.

Machuzak lowered his gaze at the chairman and recounted how during their installation, a great crane was lowering one of the flywheels’ outer casing into the pit. Suddenly cables began straining, snapping. Within seconds the entire crane collapsed and the stator fell into place. Four hundred tons of steel crashed down around the workmen standing atop the flywheel. A cable whipped up, smashed through the crane-cabin window and broke the operator’s arm. Seismometers in Dallas and Houston registered the tremor, but no one died of a heart attack. One of the workmen did take the week off.

“Dr. Machuzak!” exclaimed Garrett, now in outright disbelief, “surely you are making this all up.”

“In the realm of the gods, Mr. Garrett,” Machuzak replied pointedly, “even the extraordinary is ordinary.” Nathaniel regretted the words even as they escaped his lips. He was attempting to make a perhaps-too-subtle hint and was certain that Garrett would hold the remark against him as a sign of the arrogance of physicists, but the businessman appeared oblivious, shrouded by the sense of personal insignificance the motor-generators produce.

Hurrying on, Zuber led the crowd directly to the tokamak test cell. He received voice and visual authorization from the guard to enter and ordered the massive door open. Soon the onlookers were rimming the central bay, streaming videos to friends worldwide. A hush fell, more palpable than the one that had come before.

Prometheus was the ultimate plumber’s nightmare and no matter how often Machuzak tried to describe it, he failed. His failure was not a matter of words, he reassured himself; the eye is simply incapable of taking in everything that confronts it. The device, all fifty thousand tons, stands nearly four stories high, but is buried by the hundreds of cables and microwave guides feeding it from all directions, by the diagnostic equipment that sprout from every crevice, by the massive particle accelerators that heat the fuel. You glimpse a ladder here, a girder there, two flags flying from the impossibly massive crane above, but Prometheus is too complex to allow you to make it into a sensible whole.

Peel away the cables and plumbing and girders and you discover a great cylindrical vessel, the full height of the machine, which contains a vacuum nearly as perfect as you’d find in deep space. Dismantle this cryostat and you reveal sixteen superconducting magnet coils cooled to 268 degrees below zero by the liquid helium flowing through their veins. Each coil reminds you of a pearish D, except this D is eight or nine meters tall, and all sixteen are arrayed around in the form of a giant doughnut. When pulsed, the magnets attempt to lurch toward each other with a force, well, several hundred thousand times what a hefty horseshoe magnet produces—but they don’t lurch; their superalloy casings and the machine’s massive titanium superstructure hold them fast. Finally, strip away the magnets and you peer into the heart of the tokamak itself: a D-shaped superalloy chamber, three times the height of a person, wrapped around in the shape of a doughnut.

Tokamak, Slava once explained, is a Russian acronym meaning “toroidal chamber with magnetic coils.” That says pretty much what a tokamak is: a giant doughnut wrapped with magnetic coils. What it doesn’t say is that inside this doughnut, fusioneers intended to create the center of the sun.

The naked eye is incapable of assembling Prometheus into a sensible whole because Prometheus was, barring perhaps ITER, the most complex device ever constructed. The product of fifteen thousand man-years of work, it was altogether too complicated. And now, Machuzak thought, as much as I am protesting, we are going to turn it on.

* * * *

By the time Krieg-Zuber steered everyone to the control room, located in a kind of underground bunker attached to the main building, 4:00 p.m. had come and gone. He directed the overflow crowd to spread out around the glass-walled visitors’ gallery while inviting a select few to take their places on the “captain’s deck” overlooking the command center floor.

Leonard merely waved to everyone and Zuber made his announcement. “Mesdames et messieurs,” he said with his most sparkling affectation while running his finger along the scar of unknown provenance he wore with pride on his right cheek, “Prometheus is the prototype of machines that will someday provide humankind with clean and virtually inexhaustible energy from ordinary water. This no person can doubt. The more modest goal of Prometheus itself is to bring fusion power to our lab. Although over the past months we have been testing the machine, we have yet to connect it CFRC’s grid. On the occasion of Prometheus’ commissioning, it seems fitting to make the experiment.”

Machuzak fumed. The great goal of ignition—a self-sustaining reaction—yes, that was the dream, but no one knew whether ASSET—or ITER—would ever achieve it. One thing was certain: with the machine in its thrown-together condition they weren’t going to get it today.

“Let us now dim the lights and wait for Prometheus to turn them back on.” The room went dark, leaving the onlookers bathed only in the star-glow of panel lights and monitors. With a nod Krieg-Zuber signals the COE to commence. Chief Operating Engineer Larissa Davidson sits before the controls; she has trained two years for this moment. All safety interlocks are engaged; around the room the scientists take their stations at a few of the hundreds of terminals, one poised to measure temperature, another pressure…x-rays, optical radiation…dirt.

“Two minutes, forty seconds,” announces the electronic voice and the countdown has begun. Instinctively, everyone turns toward the steady tick of the clock, but then they catch sight of the flashing digits on the big screen. The collective breathing slows.

“Magnet temperature, four-point-two degrees absolute,” Larissa says over the intercom. “Poloidal field magnetization commencing.”

Even at that point the whine is audible, not the protest of the flywheels spinning down as the tokamak saps their energy, but a screeching from the machine itself caused by rapidly changing magnetic fields.

“Ninety seconds…eighty-nine…eighty-eight…”

Today, Cyrus announces, they are counting down toward full power; launch will be at t-minus-sixty. It makes sense. No roar of engines will greet them, no majestic liftoff of a giant spacecraft. Only a blaze of light, a miniature sun created in their midst, then…

“Prepare for DT injection and current ramp-up.”

“Sixty-three…sixty-two…sixty-one…”

Liftoff. A crack resounds throughout the room as the screen monitoring the interior of the tokamak flashes red. The guests are transfixed by that flickering, incandescent glow, displayed for all in the gallery to see. At the same time the loudspeakers pipe in a great metallic wrenching as Prometheus groans under the immense magnetic forces attempting to tear it apart. From the audience there is oohing and aahing, but the scientists remain silent. Liftoff is not what counts in this game. How hot. How long. How much power…

“Beginning current ramp-up.”

Nothing has fucked up. Ten seconds into the pulse and they’re still sailing. Slava turns to Nathaniel with astonishment written across his face. “Bozhe moi,” he crosses himself, “the thing may work.”

My God, Nathaniel thinks, he may be right. As images fly to the corners of the world, he finds caution slipping away.

“Tap thirteen. One hundred fifty thousand volts. Rf heating, lower-hybrid drives engaged.” Larissa has begun walking the taps of the high-voltage transformers, engaging some of the auxiliary heating systems. “Thirty seconds to full-power injection.”

“Tap fourteen. Three hundred thousand volts.”

“Twenty-five seconds…twenty-four…”

Machuzak and Archangelsky both glance over to the display wall. Five million amps of electric current are circulating in that doughnut, some fusion reactions have begun. The main beams are on the ready, prepared to bring the process to fruition. God, let us not disrupt. The two men find themselves clenching their fists and urging Prometheus on. Theresa on the captain’s deck holds her hands to her face as she watches the digits mutate. “Preparing for full-power injection at tap fifteen.”

“Ten, nine, eight…”

“Go! Go!” Krieg-Zuber shouts while Leonard beams.

The audience is counting: “Six, five, four…”

“Go!” Nathaniel and Slava shout with the others. “Go!” the cry fills the air.

“…zero.”

Zuber jumps and punches the air in triumph. “Yes!” he cries, slapping Leonard on the back. The room explodes in wild, hysterical applause. But what’s this? Ten, twenty seconds go by and Nathaniel sees no lights, fails to hear the speakers broadcasting the roar of the turbine. From the corner of his eye he glances at the display wall and sees zero helium pressure in the heat exchanger. An operator’s finger points at a terminal and a flashing red bar. Indeed, anticipation has overtaken reality and everyone is cheering the emperor’s new clothes. Nathaniel and Slava finally nod to each other; something has indeed fucked up. As a minute passes without a spark or flicker, the applause turns to tweeting and the world is alerted that all is not right.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Cy at last announces, “there appears to be a difficulty. We will track it down presently.” He turns and snarls something to Andy Lipman, one of the technicians, who runs out of the room. Machuzak sighs.

* * * *

Despite Leonard’s halting attempts to distract the crowd by explaining tokamak operations, before long everyone was back to video games. A half hour crept by. Finally Lipman reappeared and whispered something to the deputy director. As Rasmussen made another apology for the delay, assuring everyone “the problem will be solved within minutes,” Krieg-Zuber angrily stormed out of the room.

“They forget first pancake is always flat,” quipped Slava. “Now Cy will prove he can do more than talk on phone.” Nathaniel nodded. Cyrus the Great intended to show everyone that he could fix tokamaks.

“What do you think’s wrong, Mac?” asked Theresa, stepping down from the captain’s deck. “You must be gloating, ‘I told you so.’”

Hardly. “Theresa, probably close to a million things needed to go right for this to work. I’m sorry, it must be embarrassing for you.”

She shook her head and touched Nathaniel’s arm. “We’ll survive.”

Lipman seemed to be hesitating and Machuzak managed to catch him before he left the control room. “What’s up, Lip?”

The tech answered with a shrug of resignation. “Dunno, Mac. Got a level-three fault in the neutral-beam system. Something down in the surge rooms. Maybe an old switch… You know how it is.” With another shrug he ran out after Krieg-Zuber.

“I wish we had a computer from 2020, even,” one of the diagnostic team was growling as he pounded on a terminal.

Another fifteen minutes crawled by as the caterers began distributing refreshments and the visitors complained that ASSET operations lacked a music track. Suddenly an agitated Lipman reappeared and whispered to Leonard, who went wide-eyed and attempted to rise, only to collapse back onto his chair. Only after a few minutes did he manage to grope for the microphone, drop it, then, when his wife handed it to him, find enough composure to speak.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said slowly, “there a…appears to have been—” he stopped—“an accident. The…ceremony is canceled.”

As everyone rushed to the captain’s deck, Lipman waved Slava and Machuzak after him. Followed by others, they sprinted three hundred meters through the big tunnel to the neutral-beam power system. The safety door to one of the surge rooms was open. There on the floor amidst the maze of electrical equipment lay Cyrus Krieg-Zuber. Nathaniel guessed that he had accidentally hit one of the capacitor terminals, which sent his heart into fibrillation.

A technician straddled Zuber and was pumping his chest while another administered mouth-to-mouth through a pocket mask. Machuzak snapped on a mask as he and Slava relieved the other pair. The belated wail of the lab emergency medical team siren grew higher, louder.

“I’ve never seen The Terminator so angry,” Lipman was saying. “When he opened the door the safety interlock should’ve discharged the capacitors. He must have slipped or something. Jesus…”

“Do you mean this stuff is still hot?” Machuzak asked in disbelief, rows of high-voltage capacitor terminals not a foot from his head. “What the hell!”

“Interlock failed?” asked Slava, staring at Nathaniel for a moment before resuming mouth-to-mouth.

“Screaming like a madman but he didn’t jump it,” answered one of the techs. “We even racked out the breakers.”

“You did?” This was impossible.

In that breath the EMT arrived and took over with its defibrillator. Nathaniel got up, feeling dizzy and nauseated, and stumbled out of the surge room. To the incessant ring of phones, he made his way to his office and fell back into his chair. Mail was coming through.

CHAPTER ONE

Forty-five minutes after they’d left an inert deputy director in the surge room, Slava Archangelsky, hair bedraggled, eyes bloodshot, staggered through the labyrinthine corridors of CFRC toward Nathaniel’s office to see that half the lab’s thousand employees had beaten him there. No thought confusing his mind, he shoved his way to the door to find his colleague inside under journalistic siege.

“Do you know what happened, Dr. Machuzak?”

“N…no I don’t.”

“Are you sure?”

“Cyrus Krieg-Zuber seems to have been electrocuted in an accident.”

“Do you know what caused it?”

“Current.”

“Would you care to—”

“—speculate? No!”

Resembling the mad Rasputin more than ever, Archangelsky grabbed the nearest reporter by the shoulders and herded him toward the door, just as that one huffed, “Jesus, what a fool.”

“Go to hell,” Slava said and booted him out. God, he needed a cigarette. What kind of country is this where it’s illegal to kill yourself? Riffling his pockets, he shoved a tattered stick into his mouth, took it out when he saw Machuzak painfully staring into the reporter’s wake. Slava cast at him a sympathetic glance. Like most Americans, Nat lacked a ready wit, but no scientist deserves to be called a fool because he says he doesn’t know. “I don’t know” is honest, more honorable by far than saying you know when you don’t. In an instantaneous world, Nat’s problem was that he was an old-fashioned romantic. He remembered that PhD meant doctor of philosophy. “Forget it,” Slava tried to beat it into his brain often enough. “We are not natural philosophers pondering workings of the universe. We are here to build the tokamak. Save world from itself.”

Now, having been sucked dry by parasites, Mac to most, Nat to Archangelsky, sat before the Russian with hazel eyes staring blankly ahead. “You look like hell,” Archangelsky offered, puffing on the unlit cigarette. Machuzak usually came across as young for his years. Wrinkles hadn’t intruded much yet, but tonight his face was all creases. “You need a drink?”

“How could this have happened?” was the physicist’s only reply.

“Stupidity. Idiot plays with high-voltage system he doesn’t know shit about. What do you expect? He saves Enterprise? Look, you predicted it yourself. Nobody listened.”

“Did the local emergency people show up?” Nathaniel asked dumbly, still frozen.

“Da, everybody. The devil would break a leg over there.”

Finally Nat exhaled and he scratched his gray-streaked temples as he did when stumped. “So, friend, we’ve just had the most public accident in fusion history. Christ, half the world was watching. It’s already all over…everything.” With one motion he brushed aside a mop of his lazy brown hair and waved across the images leaping from the monitor. “Protestors, board members, reporters… We couldn’t have set it up better if we tried.”

Seated on the edge of the desk, Archangelsky nodded heavily and they fell silent. He liked Nat because, unlike most CFRC grunts, he thought beyond physics. He didn’t need to say that today’s events had put the entire program in jeopardy; that was written all over his face. Pravda, Nat was a little slow. Slava briefly recollected their first meeting, six years ago when he’d come to CFRC after a previous existence at Dubna and the Kurchatov Institute. Maybe he was testing his new colleague—after all, the tokamak was invented by Andrei Sakharov himself. These Americans? Within a minute, the two had gotten into a heated argument, which required some calculations. Machuzak’s math was clumsy—he’d obviously never been through enough Olympiads—and after an hour Archangelsky spat, “You can teach me nothing.”

The American went white like a ghost and walked slowly away. A week later, though, Nathaniel caught him in a stupid mistake and Archangelsky laughed, “So you can teach me something after all.” They hooked their arms and drank to brotherhood with a bottle of French cognac Slava had stuffed into his pocket and they’d been putting up with each other ever since. No, Nat wasn’t much of a mathematician, but he had an experimental nose like a razor. Somehow his career had been derailed. He’d gotten his PhD at the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab, once America’s leading fusion research center, now little more than some half-empty buildings standing in a New Jersey meadow. Leonard recruited him just as he transformed the Austin National Fusion Research Laboratory into CFRC. Recently he’d been made a division head, but everyone knew the reason for that.

The momentary silence was cut short by Andy Lipman, who appeared at the door with three emergency people. “Uh, Mac,” the tech said, “they wanted to ask you a couple questions for their report.” Slava got to his feet and ushered them in with a silent frown. The last thing either physicist was interested in was answering more of the same.

Neither did the emergency people appear in a hurry to ask. “Can we get this over with?” Archangelsky said, but something about Machuzak’s office amused them; they clucked in mock admiration at the shelves of texts, the stacks of printouts heaped up everywhere, the blackboard, the wall charts. All the while a fire-truck beacon flashed through the window, painting everyone with pallid Christmas colors as the low rumble of the engine sent concussions through the air. In that weird twilight zone Archangelsky fidgeted with his cigarette, waiting. The fireman made a bad joke about smoking regulations, to which Slava replied with a ferocious stare. The intruder swallowed; they got down to it.

Machuzak repeated what he’d said to the reporters: At the surge room, they found Krieg-Zuber receiving CPR on the floor. He’d evidently backed into a charged capacitor and, as they’d learned, a couple hundred milliamps is just right for the heart of an acting director.

The paramedic checked his notes. “Isn’t there supposed to be a safety interlock or something that discharges those capacitators when you open the door?”

Machuzak nodded wearily, glancing at Slava.

“But it failed?”

“Yes,” Machuzak said, “it failed. We don’t know why. There’s a lot of old equipment down there. We use parts from previous machines.”

“Got it. Anything else you can add, Dr. Machuzak?”

“No,” he sighed again, “I really can’t.”

“I can,” interrupted Slava, throwing down his cigarette. “Terminator shouldn’t have been there in the first place. The man didn’t know what he was doing. That’s all there is to it.”

“Slava, take it easy,” Machuzak interrupted.

Archangelsky immediately caught himself, gazed forlornly at the cigarette on the floor, raised his hand in a peace salute. His nerves were more on edge than he’d realized. “Sorry.”

The apology didn’t seem to appease the police sergeant, who was showing more interest in the “Miss Fusion” calendar pinned above Nat’s desk than in an EMT report. She turned to the Russian and said, “I’m sorry, sir, I didn’t catch your name.”

“Yaroslav Archangelsky,” Slava replied without expression.

“Yaaroslaave Archangelsky?” she repeated with a serious Texas twang, obliterating his name.

“Yahroslav Arkhahngelsky,” Slava said as if correcting a schoolchild.

The fair-haired policewoman didn’t perceive the menace in Slava’s voice. “You descend from high places,” she said cheerfully enough, intending to alter the mood or at least show that she understood his name even if she couldn’t pronounce it.

Now Archangelsky answered at absolute zero. “Just old name from old country. You need history lesson?”

“Sorry,” she said, seeing that things were going from bad to worse, “just curious. You know, it’s quite a place y’all have. I’ve always wanted to visit. Never been too clear about what you do here—”

“Build bombs,” cracked the fireman, having remained in a private bubble throughout.

Archangelsky wouldn’t let the remark pass. “Energy,” he said severely, punching out the words. “No bombs, no secrets. We want to give the world energy. Understand?”

“Oil’s pricey for sure, but we got plenty o’ sun and wind in Texas. Don’t need no radiation.”

“Why you ignorant sonofabitch!” Slava leapt toward the fireman.

“Slava!” Machuzak shouted, at once on his feet, fully interposing himself between the two men.

“Sorry,” the policewoman said in the same instant, pinning the fireman to the wall with an evil eye. “Sorry,” she repeated. “You know how gung-ho we Texans can be. Anyway, I hope you can give me the cook’s tour once this is sorted out. What d’ya do now?”

Machuzak accepted the peace offering and eased Slava into his chair. “Serious accidents almost never happen, but there’ll be an internal investigation.”

Despite the last minute’s drama, the cop continued to prowl around the room in a slightly distracted manner, as if the business at hand only half captured her attention. “Seems straightforward,” she said after a pause so long that both Archangelsky and Machuzak were caught off guard. “Who’ll be in charge for the interim?”

The two physicists exchanged glances. “I…it’s difficult to say. Our director Leonard Rasmussen is seriously ill—”

“Well, maybe this Krieg-Zoober will pull through.”

“Huh?” Both Nathaniel and the Russian started. “Zuber isn’t dead?”

The officer shrugged. “He was, but the EMT crew finally jump-started his ticker. They said he’s pretty fried inside and it’ll be touch ’n’ go for a day or two. Anyway, we’d best be on our way. Sorry about what happened.” The sergeant ushered the others out and had half disappeared herself when she took a step closer to the large wall chart outlining the principles of fusion. “Plasma physics… Yeah, people use that word a lot when they talk about this lab. Everybody who doesn’t think you’re building bombs thinks y’all are doing blood research and—that ain’t what’s goin on here.”

“No…” Machuzak smiled faintly, “… it ain’t.”

The young woman continued to ponder the chart, eerily discolored by the flashing fire-truck beacon, and scratched her head. “This really isn’t too clear. D’ya think you could tell me what a plasma is?” At a glance at the scientists’ ashen faces, she retreated. “Well, maybe another time.” Again she prepared to depart but instead moved closer to a cluster of photographs on the wall. “Hmm, Durham Cathedral,” she said, peering closely at the first. Then she touched two fingers to her forehead in a salute, said, “Good evening, sirs,” and vanished.

* * * *

Slava lifted his phone to make a call only to find that not only could he not get a signal, but his address book had been erased. Machuzak tried an outside landline but it was dead. “Eb tvoiu mat’,” Slava muttered. Leaving Nat with a perplexed look on his face, he stepped into the corridor and ran downstairs to the lobby. John Henderson, CFRC’s security chief, motioned for him to wait as he frantically tried to deal with the internal calls lighting up his board.

“What the hell’s going on, John?” Slava finally interrupted.

Henderson looked up at Slava in a desperate bafflement. “W…wireless is jammed and outgoing Internet seems to have been cut.”

“How?” asked Archangelsky.

Removing his cap Henderson scratched his head. “Cyrus installed some equipment in the back room last year. H…he didn’t tell me what it does.”

“This isn’t goddamned NSA!” cursed Archangelsky. Maybe it was. This is exactly how things were going at CFRC. Four years ago Krieg-Zuber had silently put in place a routing system: all scientific papers bound for publication were siphoned to his office and secretly vetted. Nat Edward’ich himself uncovered the scheme and protested to Leonard until it was shut down.

“Why cut signals now?” Slava continued. “World knew what happened hours ago. Fucking amateurs…”

“Must be automatic. Don’t ask me how.”

“That miserable sack of shit… He got this from his CIA trainers at Cryotech…” Waving his arm in disgust, Archangelsky returned to Machuzak’s office to explain what had happened. He switched on the light and found Nat looking more exhausted than he’d left him, brooding over the unfiltered incoming broadcasts.

“It’s worse than we imagined,” Machuzak said before Slava could open his mouth. Every news organization in the state was broadcasting from the environs of CFRC, and blogs—divided equally among those claiming Krieg-Zuber was alive and those claiming he was toast—already saturated the Web. Cut to Washington. Whatever coffee-infused staffers journalists can uncover at this ungodly hour are eager to assure viewers that an investigation is called for.

“Government no longer funds science,” Slava talked back to the screen. “Those off-course whores can’t call for anything.”

“They can and they will,” Nathaniel corrected him wearily. “We still get enough federal bucks that Congress can sink this ship.” One or two maybe.

Slava snorted as he squashed a big roach with his foot. “The bastard isn’t even dead yet.”

“The bastard isn’t the point, Slava; the accident is. Mark my words: the politicians will be on us within a week.”

“Another prediction, Cassandra? Look at them,” Archangelsky pointed to a smirking senatorial aide. “It’s as if they were waiting for this to happen, ignorant sons of bitches.”

“Slava,” Machuzak said, suddenly turning, “what got into you before, calling that fireman an ignorant son of a bitch? Were you out of your mind? Why do you think ignorant sons of bitches want to shut us down?” Aye, you didn’t need to be a Cassandra to see that in more ways than today fusioneers had themselves to blame for what was taking place before their eyes. For too many decades the bigwigs had insisted that a commercial reactor was “just over the next machine,” a claim that would ring ever more hollow as Nature slowly revealed the awesome difficulty of the endeavor. Tonight that arrogance was coming to roost.

“Sorry,” answered Slava with as much contrition as he was capable of. “Nerves… Anyway, public will get investigation. Too bad they won’t investigate the way that svoloch’ has been running lab.” He went on to explain what had just taken place.

“Well, at least we can forget about The Terminator for a while.”

“Not before the crayfish whistles on the hill.”

Nathaniel chuckled morosely, swiveling away to answer incoming mail.

“Don’t.” Slava stayed his hand.

For a moment Machuzak stared blankly at the Russian until Slava launched a new window and pointed to the message that for years had appeared on their screens:… Individuals using this system expressly consent to having all their activities monitored and recorded by system personnel…

Why the implications of the advisory had never sunk in before this moment entirely eluded Machuzak and he mumbled only, “You’ve got to be kidding.” Then he remembered Krieg-Zuber’s paper-vetting scheme.

There was nothing for it. Nathaniel silently got to his feet and switched off the lights. Outside, the parking lot was deserted; phones functioned but memories were gone. The two men breathed heavily. At this hour here was only one thing to do—head to town and the Yellow Rose, where Slava would bargain with the dancers for their G-strings, and hope that tomorrow would not prove worse.

CHAPTER TWO

Early next morning Nathaniel Machuzak, looking no better than the fits and starts of sleep he’d had, abandoned attempts to dream and headed south. The radio did nothing to untie the knot that twisted his stomach. Over night, every media host had flocked unswervingly to the call for an investigation. The single thought running through his mind was a mordant “What next?” Dread quickly crystallized when a sunrise eco-pundit warned that CFRC’s tritium supply was a sure target for terrorists. The words hit Machuzak with such force that he nearly swerved into a ditch. At once yesterday’s student came back to him and he vowed that someday he’d collar the kid and explain tritium. Machuzak switched stations: yet another suicide bomber had attacked Verizon in a last-ditch effort to communicate with a human being. He flipped to the surviving Austin classical music station. Tchaikovsky, as usual.

The sight of media vans lying in wait beyond the guard booth triggered evasive action. Veering off the main drive, Machuzak skirted the pentagon and drove directly to Site Alpha on the lab’s periphery. To the aging structures of Alpha Site, the original complex of the Austin National Fusion Research Laboratory, were relegated some of CFRC’s secondary experiments, including the Materials Test Facility, of which he, Nathaniel Machuzak, was head.

At the parking lot Nathaniel granted himself a breath in the deep morning shadows to gaze eastward. The thought was unavoidable: No wonder the public finds us so inscrutable. What could one make of this Lego-set city? Apart from the showcase main building, the rest of the sprawl was entirely utilitarian, great shells meant only to keep the rain off the tumult below. Strangers invariably found the lab ugly and unnavigable. Machuzak had always found a certain beauty in the haphazardness of CFRC. The unrestrained growth of offices, machine shops, temporary structures that took root to become labyrinths of the mindscape. The high-tension towers, hum of the transformers, silicon panels tracking the sun, satellite dishes linking them to supercomputers worldwide. CFRC was an improvisation, an improvisation crackling with energy.

Not, he understood, today. Machuzak badged himself into the water-stained test facility and threw the light switch. The archaeological fluorescents that functioned sputtered on and produced an irritating sixty-cycle hum. He’d call maintenance, but they’d probably RIFfed the electrician.

His laboratory greeted him and for the first time in twenty-four hours he felt a space of peace. People like him could hardly escape it, really. They were born tinkerers. Nothing gave them so much pleasure as making something work, unless it was the pleasure of making something work that nobody thought possible. When he described his workplace, Slava chided him for sounding like the futurists of old, with their songs of electricity and locomotion. No, it is not progress, it is sensation. I relish the cement floors, smooth with age, the smell of oils, ozone when the capacitors spark, the glint of steel and brass atop the workbenches. The polished vacuum chambers, the test cells sprouting wires and hoses. The clacking of the forepumps, the microwave plumbing running from floor to ceiling. This is my world. Here I am in charge.

Dream on. Though he hadn’t set foot here in nearly a month, to work proved impossible and he managed only to fidget and wander aimlessly through the rooms. He paused briefly at his desk and lifted his cold-fusion apparatus. The great cold-fusion scare of 1989 and the extraordinary hoopla surrounding it was beyond his memory, but he later tested the claims himself. There was nothing to the apparatus: a beaker of heavy water and two electrodes. It was madness to think that such a thing could work, but it was understandable madness. Inexhaustible energy on a benchtop. No great tokamaks, no billions of dollars, no decades lost, no high voltage, no…accidents. The Fountain of Youth. Understandable, misguided madness.

Unable to concentrate, Machuzak was about to head over to his office in the main building when the lab phone rang. Andy Lipman. Machuzak didn’t like the sound of the tech’s voice and Lipman wouldn’t talk online. Nathaniel told him to meet at his office in ten minutes.

Archangelsky was waiting. “Have you heard about the tritium?” Nathaniel asked before Slava could speak.

“Ahh, tritium…” the Russian scoffed. “It is as harmless as radioactive materials come. They should be more concerned with radium in coal smoke.”

“Tell that to CNN—”

Lipman appeared then with an uncertain rap on the doorframe and glanced uneasily at Archangelsky.

“It’s all right,” Machuzak assured him. “No secrets among friends.”

The tech hesitated, waved the pair after him down the back stairwell, past junked computers, improbable numbers of crickets and the stagnant smell of concrete; they left the main building and made their way across to the pentagon. Years ago, in homage to Peter Max, someone ordered the pentagon units painted tan, yellow and blue. The result was considerably less than psychedelic. During the walk, a grackle cawed from Toshi Matsushima’s geometry tree, where ceremonial plaques rattled like bamboo chimes, but Lipman said not a word. By the time the tech badged them in, they’d already guessed their destination: the surge room where Krieg-Zuber had glimpsed immortality.

The accident site was as they’d left it the previous day, except for the yellow DANGER DO NOT ENTER tape the police, probably, had put around the area. The truth is always too late.

“So what is it, Lip?” Machuzak said at last.

The tech yet hesitated. “Well, I figured I’d be appointed to the investigation, so I thought I’d get a head start.” Motioning the physicists forward, Lipman ducked under the tape and stopped at the door to the surge room. “Look here.”

Nathaniel followed Lipman’s finger to the interlock at the top of the orange door. It was a simple magnetic switch like the ones you find on alarmed doors. Open the door, a relay trips, alarm sounds. Here, open the door, a relay trips the capacitors are mechanically grounded, discharging them. To Machuzak it seemed okay.

“Yep, Cy didn’t touch it and I don’t believe anybody else did either.”

But if the interlock was intact—how? And the safety was just the first line of defense. After the fault light, the techs had also racked out the breakers—literally rolled out the circuit breakers from their cradles, disconnecting them from the circuit. There the monsters sat. In the open. What could have failed?

Now Lipman opened the door to the brightly colored room. The great power supplies at CFRC were divided into dozens of these smaller units to isolate the subsystems and make it more difficult to electrocute yourself everywhere at once. Machuzak listened for the discharging mechanism to connect. It did.

“Come on…nothin’s charged now. I checked.” Lipman pointed to the lightning rod in the corner—the time-honored, mandatory way of grounding a capacitor. That rule Zuber had evidently ignored.

Machuzak cast his eye over the tower of metal rings looming above them. Straight out of Frankenstein, these unearthly “ignitrons,” two or three times as tall as he was, protected equipment down the line. A fault is detected, the ignitrons fire, the circuit is “crowbarred.” A dead short in two microseconds. Toss a crowbar across the terminals of the nearest high-tension tower and watch.

Near one end of the alcove, amidst all the plumbing, Lipman pointed to a short section of busbar. “I noticed this when I came in,” he said, indicating the heavy piece of copper used to conduct large currents.

“What’s wrong?” Nathaniel asked, unable to see clearly in his own shadow.

Lipman waved them closer and Nathaniel saw immediately what he was getting at. The busbar, perhaps once thirty centimeters long, was now two. It seemed to have melted in the middle, leaving a gap of a few centimeters. A gap.

“This takes out the circuit protection,” Nathaniel guessed, “and the capacitor discharge switch?”

Lipman nodded.

Slava also instantly understood. “Open circuit—capacitors didn’t discharge when they should have.”

It was not too difficult to infer what had taken place: Circuit protection goes, some component in machine fries, fault light appears in control room, Krieg-Zuber fries.

The three stood for a moment in silence. “When was the last inspection?”

“Five days ago,” Lip answered. “I walked through myself. Here.” He handed Machuzak a touch pad. “I suppose I could’ve missed something.”

Nathaniel stared at the screen. The implications of Lipman’s words weren’t hard to divine, but his every instinct resisted them. Finally, he forced himself to look at the tech. “Are you saying,” he asked, holding his breath, “that someone deliberately cut the busbar?”

“Ain’t hard. Two minutes with a hacksaw—done. On the other hand, this looks it was cut by a torch. Maybe it melted under the load. I dunno. We were pressing the machine pretty hard. Some of this stuff’s museum quality and I’ve known one or two of these to go in my time. You guys got the PhDs. Tell me.”

Nathaniel paused long, glanced at Yaroslav Borisovich, stared at the electrical equipment surrounding them, listened to the distant hum of a generator. At last, exhausting every possible diversion, he whispered the word in the world he wanted least to hear: “Sabotage?”

Lipman only shrugged again. “You guys got the PhDs.”

“Hmm.” Nathaniel stood there, head completely empty. “Who would sabotage the machine?”

The tech didn’t reply, realizing that the physicist was merely drafting thoughts, but Slava whistled softly as if to say, “How many possibilities would you like?” Then he too fell silent.

“Lip,” Nathaniel asked, staring at Slava, “why did you come to me about this?”

The tech shrugged with a glance of Archangelsky. “Gotta go to somebody. Who’s in charge of this place anyway?”

“Well, maybe The Terminator when he’s recovered.”

“That’s the point, Mac,” Lipman said with another glance at Slava. “Last year we found a penny in a motor-generator and Zuber’s roaring sabotage. Cooling pumps break down—sabotage. Yesterday it’s shit in hard hats—all my addresses have been wiped. That guy thinks he’s J. Edgar but his screws are a little loose, you know. Time’s ripe.”

Before Machuzak could respond, Archangelsky cut in. “If the press has gone loco with the accident, can you imagine what they will do with sabotage? They’ll go ballistic. Orbital.”

No denying it.

“Not to mention lab itself,” Slava added, almost as an afterthought. “We should keep this quiet.”

“Are you loco?” Machuzak exclaimed in amazement. “How are we going to keep this quiet?”

“We merely don’t tell anyone. Nat Edward’ich, I am of course not suggesting we ignore what has happened: we must in fact quickly determine what is down here.”

“Up,” Nathaniel muttered. Machuzak felt his hesitation surging forth. Again. God, where are my principles? The sound of passing footsteps argued for a quick decision. “How many people knew about this?” Machuzak asked Lipman.

He had yet to tell anyone.

“Don’t.”

“The bar?” pressed Slava.

Machuzak felt himself shaking internally. “No,” he put his foot down, “we can’t do it.” Machuzak left the surge room and the other two staring at each other. After a moment, Slava ran out after him, and the two walked back to the office together. The open space between the giant forms of the pentagon and the administration building seemed larger than ever and every two paces, or three, Nathaniel found himself glancing over his shoulder. Archangelsky was fuming.

“Brat, are you a holy fool or just plain idiot? They’ll discover that bar within hours. The instant they do…” Slava muttered something in Russian that Machuzak couldn’t understand.

“Maybe we’re making too much of this,” Machuzak responded, more to himself than to Archangelsky. “If you were going to sabotage the machine, why not blow it up and be done with it?”

Slava did not calm down for some time. When he did, he turned to Machuzak and said, “My naive friend, remember Andreyev’s play, The Black Maskers.” The Archangelsky-ism, referring with familiarity to a play no one had ever heard of before, might under other circumstance have been amusing, but Slava’s voice was fully laced with warning. “A rich duke, Lorenzo, holds ball. More and more guests arrive, wearing fantastic, grotesque masks. He asks each, ‘Who are you?’ but his question goes unanswered. Finally, they set fire to palace and Lorenzo goes up in smoke.”

Although with the rest of humanity Machuzak hadn’t read it, he vividly recollected the music Roger Sessions had written for the play. Disturbing, to say the least.

“Remember Lorenzo’s question, my friend.”

Archangelsky’s words chilled Machuzak to the bone. “Slava, enough,” he finally said, paranoia quickly rising. They entered the back courtyard of the main building and once more passed the geometry tree. At sunup and sundown when the temperature shifted and the wind picked up, the grackles there lost their minds, as if the end of the world was upon them. Now it was silent but for an occasional caw and the rattle of the plaques.

“What will you do now?” Archangelsky asked.

“We’re going to have to call the police.”

“What will you tell them?”

“I have no idea.”

Slava walked off shaking his head and Machuzak barricaded himself in his office. It was just eight in the morning.

CHAPTER THREE

Not sixty seconds later, while Machuzak dredged his memory for the name of the police officer from last night, the phone rang. Nathaniel stared long without moving. When he at last answered, the voice on the other end didn’t wait for a greeting.

“Hello, Machuzak?”

“Yes, who is this?”

“Not Jesse James. Richard Garrett here.”

“Mr. Garrett, w…why—?”

“I’ll tell you why. With Leonard and Krieg-Zuber in the state they’re in, I’m gonna have to get more involved with the day-to-day here, and I’m callin the division heads for a meeting.”

“W…what’s happened?” What else could have happened?

“Well, Mac—or should I call you Cassandra—?” The nickname was going to stick, Nathaniel realized as the knot in his stomach twisted again. “You weren’t spittin in the wind yesterday. That accident’s got a lot of people spooked, real spooked. The board’s gone loco overnight—Hold on a second… Mac, can you get up here? On the double.”

After staring at the dead phone in his hand for one second, Nathaniel bounded up to the third floor where he collided with Garrett as he waddled into the conference room. “Moravec, the thief who runs GlobeTex, wants an explanation—now. He’s threatening to pull out.”

Texas Global, one of the world’s largest renewable energy concerns and CFRC’s largest investor. Machuzak suddenly felt hit from every side. This was no coincidence. Sabotage the program, pull out. Eliminate the competition. What should he tell Garrett? “They’re not spooked. They’re trying to shut us down.” He stopped there.

“What’s the point, Mac?” the chairman rejoined. “Why join the consortium to begin with?”

It had been a question since the day Rasmussen and Garrett, this plump maverick who’d made billions in oil and poured millions back into pet energy projects, had founded CFRC. GlobeTex was a leader in wind, solar, bio. Fusion made sense for them at the same level solar had once made sense for BP. Evidently not. Stop, Zuber talks like this. About to blurt out to Garrett the discovery of the busbar, Slava’s warning came to him: “Who are you?”

“This way’s a more permanent death,” Nathaniel said to the chairman. “The people who hold the purse strings are waiting for the right moment to kill off the competition.” The moment could always be engineered.

Garrett didn’t answer, only switched on the big screen. A second later a tall, suited, androgynous figure jumped out at them in poor 3-D.

“Who is this person?” asked Moravec, who appeared more female than male, with so little intonation that he, she or it might have been an advanced bot.

“This is Dr. Machuzak, one of our physicists. I was on the phone with him when you called. He can explain what happened better than I.”

“Explain?” Machuzak erupted, suddenly crossing into overload. “Damn it, Richard, who can explain any of this? Prometheus’ predecessor worked. Prometheus itself was behaving okay during the pre-ops.” He ran his hand through his hair, taken aback at his own outburst but unable to control it. “Christ, I told you it was fucking nuts to connect it to the grid. That’s five years away—if we can get the damned thing to ignite.”

The faintest glimmer of a smile spread across the remote Moravec’s lips. “I’ll give you six months.”

“Huh?” Machuzak swiveled. What could he possibly—

“Our contract is up in six months, from today, as it happens. In six months we pull out—unless you ignite your machine.”

Machuzak found himself staring openmouthed at the screen. Ignition. A self-sustaining fusion reaction. The stuff that powers stars.

“It…it can’t be done,” he managed to stammer.

“I’m sorry, the matter is out of my hands.”

“It’s…it’s impossible, I tell you.”

“In that case, good-bye.”

The image vanished but Machuzak continued to stare. “It’s impossible,” he stammered again. Even as he uttered his disbelief, he saw that more than the fate of a single lab was at stake. In its gargantuan magnificence, Prometheus was the last vestige of the American fusion program. If the lab went, ITER remained. Alone.

Suddenly, Nathaniel felt himself peering downward into a vast abyss. From a great distance, Garrett’s voice penetrated. “We’d better call a general meeting, Mac.”

* * * *

Rumors had gone viral by 9:00 a.m., and the weary lab personnel gathering in the main auditorium sensed that something unprecedented was about to take place. That much is true, Machuzak thought. In the crush he found himself seated next to Toshifume Matsushima, the lab’s great thinker, who remarked in that Eastern way of his, “The accident has spurred the regime to new heights of watchfulness and vigor.” Watchfulness and vigor, Nathaniel agreed, skeptical that the “accident” designation would survive ’til the end of the day. At the same moment, a pair of workmen slid closed the big doors at the back of the stage, doors that were normally open to reveal the friendly hills beyond. Soon the room overflowed with five hundred shell-shocked people bracing themselves for the worst. In the commotion Leonard Rasmussen hobbled down to the stage on crutches and seated himself with Richard Garrett.

When the ringtones finally died away and the pall settled, Leonard took the microphone. No, he does not look well, worse than yesterday. Nathaniel felt a great pity for the director. “Friends,” Rasmussen said, voice unusually hoarse, “all of you know that for ten years I have pushed this laboratory toward the goal of infinite energy. Hotter, denser, longer, I always said…” A few in the audience chuckled nervously as Leonard coughed. “We have survived indifferent and hostile governments, economic crises; we have surmounted every obstacle thrown in our path except Nature’s own. Today we have suddenly been called to face our greatest challenge. We will rise to the occasion, but I shall let Richard Garrett, chairman of our board, explain what has taken place.”

Garrett, all two hundred thirty pounds now on display, took the microphone. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said to the restless sea, “we indeed face a crisis. You folks know I’ve supported this lab’s work since Leonard and I set up the consortium. And I mean through hell and high water. A lot a people think fusion is a pie-in-the-sky pipedream. If any of you still have doubts, take a look at this mornin’s sites. You gotta understand that yesterday’s accident…” Virtually without prologue he then dropped the last hour’s bombshell: GlobeTex, CFRC’s principal investor, would pull out unless within six months from today the lab achieved, “as you folks call it, ignition.”

Machuzak was certain a riot would break out. Shouts of “Impossible!” rose from all sides, echoing his own first outburst. What Moravec was demanding was that they achieve the most difficult technological feat ever attempted by the human race, a task so intractable that it had eluded fusioneers worldwide for eighty years—and that they do it in six months with a machine that might not be capable of it. With a loose saboteur thrown in for good measure.

The shouts abated, only to be replaced by angry accusations that Moravec had planned this from the moment he, she or it joined the consortium. “We’ve been set up!” one voice cried louder than the rest. Truer than you imagine, Machuzak nodded, truer than you imagine. Toshi glanced at his neighbor in a forlorn way. “It is truly impossible, Nathaniel,” his expression said before he cast his gaze to the floor.

Garrett remained on stage as Leonard struggled to his feet. “Friends,” he said with difficulty, above the noise. “We have no choice. Can we do it?”

“No!” was the unanimous reply.

“Can we do it?”

Leonard’s valiant exhortations were drowned out and a general strike appeared to be in the making as the sick director looked on despairingly. To Nathaniel’s amazement, Krieg-Zuber himself suddenly appeared on the big screen, larger than life. Nat’s first thought was that he’d been resurrected; only belatedly did he realize that Cyrus the Great must have taped the bit twenty-four hours ago at the ceremony. “Monsieurs et mesdames,” Zuber was saying with his practiced smile to a circle of journalists. “Our success will be a significant moment in the history of mankind. Failure is not an option.”

The ploy backfired, and as Garrett announced a meeting of the division heads for 11:00 a.m. at the ASSET conference room, the rumble of disbelief welled up again and the crowd stormed out without waiting. In the lobby Toshi turned again to Nathaniel. You always listened when Toshi spoke, but this time he said something other than what Machuzak had read in his face. “So, Nathaniel, it seems that our kairos is suddenly at hand, the moment of grace and opportunity. May we use it well.”

“Kairos—we should all remember that,” an administrator said, exiting the auditorium.

More like a perfect storm, Machuzak was thinking as Slava passed by. “Maybe we should all take our heads out of our asses,” the Russian quipped loudly enough for everyone to hear and continued on his way. Machuzak slowly made his way upstairs to the ASSET conference room.

CHAPTER FOUR

Machuzak stood in the doorway of the ASSET conference room, the same space where less than three hours ago he and Garrett had received Moravec’s ultimatum. Now, thoughts a-tumult, barely cognizant of his surroundings, he is grasping at solutions, resisting the most likely, rejecting them all as unsatisfactory or unpalatable. Nothing made sense. Nathaniel lifted his eyes, they fell on the clock and remained riveted. A morning so quickly lost toward ignition. A morning stolen? Stop. He sat down, staring blankly while the others drifted in. At the stroke of eleven, Leonard and Garrett appeared and for an instant Machuzak again considered revealing Lipman’s discovery, but as his gaze swept the room Lorenzo’s infernal question, “Who are you?” once more muted him.

The dozen division heads took their places around the big table, surrounded by smartboards, blackboards, antique bulletin boards posted with data, ancient overhead projectors. In this room all eyes were invariably drawn first and last to the huge chrome letters ASSET, which protruded cyberlike from the front wall, reminding each and every onlooker of the corporate dollars mingling with scientific blood. But now, this moment, no one could avoid the startling image of Cyrus Krieg-Zuber, who unlike an hour ago now appeared live, swathed, wired and beeping as he hovered weirdly above the proceedings from his hospital bed and surreptitiously broadcast himself to the undoubted ignorance of his nurses.

Nathaniel abruptly realized he was becoming hyperaware of everything around him. One rubbing his nose, another puckering his lips, a third fingering her hair, each wearing a downcast expression. Garrett has taken up his position at the table’s head, beatified by the gleaming ASSET letters, which form a sort of halo behind him. Leonard sits to his left in the wheelchair… Who are these people?

At that moment Rasmussen opened his mouth, preparing to speak, but to his own surprise Machuzak interrupted. “Leonard, I want to know what that electronic craziness was about last night. Whoever heard of such a thing at a scientific laboratory?”

A murmur of approval at Nathaniel’s words circled the table at which Fred Abbuhl, ASSET’s chief engineer, added in his lazy Georgian drawl, “Yeah, Len, what was that about?”

The question caught Rasmussen off guard but the general reaction required a response. “Uh, after numerous bomb threats and worse, Cyrus authorized the plan last year,” he said with a glance toward Krieg-Zuber.

The patient nodded decisively, if wearily, as his monitors bleeped. Cyrus the Great’s heart was stronger than he’d supposed, Machuzak sighed as everyone glanced toward the safety posters: SAFETY HAS NO QUITTING TIME. “Yes,” Zuber said with surprising force, “unsubstantiated rumors can never be allowed to damage the Mission. Wiping phones is standard procedure. In anticipation of an emergency, yesterday the system was set to trigger automatically if I did not check in. Henceforth, proceed with the utmost caution in dealing with outsiders…”

Machuzak seethed as others texted. Yes, we’ve had bomb threats, several a year. Why today such measures? Machuzak perceived the flaccid grumble of impotence about him now.

“In this regard,” Zuber unexpectedly went on, “in order to repair the public damage, we must urgently convene an investigation of yesterday’s accident—if accident it was.”

The last words elicited a sharp glance from Garrett, while Machuzak ceased breathing, waited.

“We shall spare no effort in this matter,” Cyrus continued. “However, in light of today’s dramatic turn of events, my attention shall be occupied with overseeing the ignition campaign—”

At that Garrett interrupted, perturbation overcoming civility to the wounded. “Excuse me, Dr. Krieg-Zuber,” he said, managing to correctly put the accent on the last syllable, “you’re in no shape to oversee anything. Take a rest and enjoy it. We’ll have to appoint an interim director today, right, Len?”

Although Leonard appeared distracted, elsewhere, he nodded with a sudden, incomprehensible irritability. “That’s correct—we’ll have to make a decision.”

Krieg-Zuber fell silent, only the hospital noises and his heavy breathing constituting a reply, but after a prolonged and awkward suspension of all debate, just at the moment Garrett was moving to switch off the broadcast, he surprised Machuzak again by attempting a comeback. “Leonard, we cannot let the great challenge handed us go unanswered.”

“You’ve got to do it, Len,” Tom Kettering called out. “If anyone can…”

Nathaniel glanced over at Tom, who sat as usual with cowboy boots propped up on the table. Is Kettering supporting this madness or Krieg-Zuber or…? Kettering, the beefy head of the tritium division, is just an ex-marine who once worked at the government’s Savannah River tritium extraction site and acts as if he were a member of the SWAT team there. Can do, shoot the fuckers. His truck sports a rifle rack and he once detailed for all within earshot how a terrorist would go about stealing CFRC’s tritium supply. This is a typical Kettering pose.

Is it?

Machuzak snapped-to to see Leonard cast a pained and painful look around the table. Finally, “Thank you. I d–don’t know…”

It was the first time Nathaniel had heard Leonard Rasmussen express doubt about anything, but with Kettering’s interjection the course of the meeting began to veer toward the main business, the greater trial.

Fred Abbuhl leaned over to Garrett with a theatrical, conspiratorial wink intended to lighten the atmosphere and said, “Why don’t you tell them the truth, Mr. Garrett? You’re just continuing Len’s April Fool’s tradition, a few months late.”

Garrett chuckled, forced himself to. “I wish that were the case, Mr.—”

“Abbuhl—”

“Yes, were that the case, but Moravec is dead serious. Dr. Machuzak heard him. Six months. From today.” Garrett struck the table with his knuckle and this time all eyes turned to the clock.

“My, my,” replied Fred, shaking his head in less-than-mock disbelief as he leaned back. “Mr. Garrett, sir, let me tell you, before that ill-considered demo we were getting pretty good temperatures and confinement times. A plasma is the world’s most ornery beast, but I’d say in six months we might be able to show them a four-minute pulse at low power—”

We might, Nathaniel nodded. If we can show them anything at all.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Abbuhl,” Garrett interrupted, “I don’t understand all this tech-speak. I’m a simple man…”

The chief engineer smiled, shaking his head softly. “Sir, the bottom line is that this picayune request of Moravec’s is, well, to find the right word, I don’t know, I think you may have heard it downstairs… How’s impossible sound?”

At this moment more than ever Machuzak yearned to rev Fred up—his speech, his innate tempo—but even news of sabotage would have failed to do it. The blond Abbuhl, graying as retirement loomed, was, thank God, the archetypal Southern gentleman, incapable of yielding to pressure or deadlines. All of which is required if you are going to head ASSET operations. With its hundreds of subsystems, each composed of ten thousand parts, each prone to failure, if you tend to hysteria don’t apply.

And yet, what do I truly know of this man? Nathaniel felt his guts twist again.

“Mesdames et messieurs,” Krieg-Zuber interjected with unexpected persistence, raising his hand slowly from his bed, “what Moravec is demanding is only what we should have done long ago. Nothing will capture the imagination of the world like ignition, the creation of a star on Earth, which will lead to an inexhaustible supply of energy for mankind. We can do this. We must do this. Our day of judgment is at hand. Our kairos, as I believe our Toshi Matsushima put it just an hour ago.”

Despite Krieg-Zuber’s condition, Machuzak shook his head sourly.

“What is it, Dr. Machuzak?” Garrett asked, seeing his expression.

Aye, what? How could he allow an ignition campaign to proceed…? Nathaniel chose his words carefully. “I… If I recall the remark Dr. Matsushima made after the general meeting,” he said, throwing a disgusted look at Zuber, “kairos is not only the moment of opportunity but the moment of grace… Mr. Garrett, I’ve told you that that demonstration was not merely premature but…insane. The machine was not ready, is not ready. Before we even begin an ignition campaign, we’ll have to dismantle it to recheck everything. That alone will take weeks.”

“Mac is correct, Mr. Chairman,” Thaddeus Hasschler put in from the far end of the table. “Our tokamak is a machine, much like the engine of a car, except with perhaps one thousand times as many parts. And we are conceivably subjecting it to the most extreme environment in the solar system outside the sun’s core. First we must create a vacuum such as the one in deep space in order to get rid of everything that might interfere with the reactions.”

Nathaniel watched Hasschler speak and caught himself: Thad, Tadeusz, and I are not close friends. Head of Prometheus’experimental group, his love is the machine. He occasionally attempts to be pleasant, but can’t help exuding a certain European aristocracy, an effect amplified by his thoroughly bald head. Thad is a tough commander. I sometimes get mail from him sent at 3:00 a.m. Had he lived in the eighteenth century, Thaddeus could only have been a Prussian drill master with a sabre scar slicing his cheek, a distinction Krieg-Zuber somehow wears in real life. No, inconceivable…

“And once we create that vacuum,” added Fred, “we gotta be sure it stays that way. Just leak checking is no job for amateurs. Mr. Chairman, sir, all that equipment to heat the fuel, those massive generators—”

“Hell,” Diana Cochran, head of the cryoplant division, interrupted, joining in for the first time, “it’ll take a couple weeks just to get down to operating temperatures,” 4.2 degrees above absolute zero, helium’s boiling point.

And now Nathaniel squinted at her. What did he know of Diana other than she was his own age, blond hair streaked with the first strands of middle years, an engineer with kids who’d somehow gotten into refrigerators? Nothing…

“Mr. Garrett,” Machuzak raised his head, resolving to put an end to this folly here and now. “To create fusion you first have to heat the hydrogen fuel—this plasma—to twenty times the temperature of the center of the sun, high enough so that nuclear reactions begin—”

“This is the easy part,” put in Hasschler.

“True,” Nathaniel nodded in Thad’s direction. “The hard part is holding it long enough to get a decent amount of energy out of it. That’s the purpose of those enormous magnets. In principle they can do it, but I tell you, trapping a plasma in a magnetic cage long enough to produce a sustained reaction is probably the hardest thing ever tried. Period. No qualifiers. You think building an atomic bomb was difficult? A hydrogen bomb? If controlled fusion were that easy, it would have been done a lifetime ago.”

At hearing those words Garrett’s face darkened, and Nathaniel at last felt some satisfaction for producing an effect. The difficulty in confining the plasma was the main reason fusioneers had failed to build a working reactor despite the better part of a century of trying.

“So what are you saying, Machuzak?”

What he was saying is that we could heat the damn fuel to 400 million degrees. Before that fatal ceremony, Prometheus was even holding it for a few minutes before it crapped out. Old AUSTOR, Prometheus’ predecessor, could produce twice as much energy as they used to heat it—two times “breakeven.” Forty years ago skeptics said breakeven was impossible.

Yet.

For all that, the reaction was not self-sustaining. Prometheus was still a fireplace full of damp logs; turn off all the external heating sources and the reaction stops. That’s why yesterday was such a fraud. “But,” he continued to Garrett, “even if the fire catches, it could flame out in two seconds, which won’t do anybody a helluva lot of good. For commercial power you need both ignition and a reaction that goes on for hours—days. Mr. Garrett, ASSET’s initials stand for Advanced Steady State Experimental Tokamak. It was designed primarily to see if we can hold a plasma for days. We’re not even sure it will reach ignition…”

The chairman puckered his lips, as if about to whistle, and ran a finger around the rim of his famous Stetson. For a moment it seemed as if the mists had finally dispersed and he perceived with clarity the unscalable cliff towering above them. “Leonard, ASSET is your baby. Is what Dr. Machuzak says true?”

“Richard,” said Leonard with his earlier sharpness, his head now twisted into a strange position, “what Mac says is true, but I have devoted my entire life to making it untrue. I designed ASSET to achieve ignition. It can be done. It will be done. No one will ask the victor what is true.”

“Ignition is within the design parameters,” Hasschler affirmed. “After all, we have incorporated a simple heat exchanger and turbine—”

“Right,” put in Kettering.

“—although we may have been infected by optimism.”

“Dr. Machuzak’s conservatism in these matters is well known,” Krieg-Zuber suddenly interrupted from his bed, gathering all his strength. “That is why he is not a regular member of the ASSET team and confines himself to less significant research.”

A guillotine of silence fell. For a moment Nathaniel chewed his lip. In that unaided space he felt more alone than he had in his entire life. He passed his eyes slowly over his colleagues, imagining them guests at a doomed ball, all wearing fabulous, grotesque masks. For an instant the image became so vivid that he thought he must be hallucinating. With a few breaths he forced it to pass and gained control over himself. What Krieg-Zuber had said was painfully true: until his conscription for the ceremony’s preparation, he’d been living in exile as division head at the neglected Materials Test Facility. The only recourse is to quit; Machuzak pushed his chair back to arm’s length, staring at the floor.

At that moment one of the group who had been elsewhere surfing looked up and said, “ITER’s director just announced that they will push forward their experimental timetable.”

Krieg-Zuber raised his arm heavily. “Initiate triple shifts,” he breathed the command. “Immediately.” The inevitable round-the-clock operations. “Monsieur Abbuhl, begin organizing the shifts at once. This is destiny, kairos.”

“Triple shifts?” returned Fred with as much umbrage as he was capable of, making a last stand, “after the run-up to that ceremony? The guys’ll mutiny… And you know what? It won’t make any difference. We can’t do it.”

Forgotten, Nathaniel stood on the verge of walking out but he could not abandon the old engineer. “Fred’s right, Mr. Garrett,” he said, putting Krieg-Zuber aside. “We’ve been pulling triple shifts for over a month. Everyone’s exhausted. An ignition push would be worse, a dozen times worse.”

“You know, I kinda like this kairos concept,” Kettering jumped in again, scratching his chin. “Maybe if we’d gotten a swift kick in the ass years ago we’d have the problem licked.”

“Precisely!” wheezed Krieg-Zuber in his sepulchral baritone.

Machuzak shook his head, sighing in disbelief, and moved toward the door. No surprise that Tom embraced the ass-kicking solution. Only surprise is that he hasn’t suggested bringing in the military.

“I don’t know that the helium factory can keep up,” Diana was mumbling to no one in particular.

“Thaddeus,” Leonard told the ASSET head wearily, “assemble your team immediately and start planning ignition experiments. Not a minute to lose, remember?”

At that Machuzak closed his eyes. Yeah, blow up the machine and be done with it. The next time he blinked, the meeting had adjourned. Once more he surveyed the room. The boards, the photos of the Austin tokamaks. We had pride in them once. Chen, the large armadillo mascot standing in the corner, CFRC emblazoned on the saddle thrown over his armored back. There was something welcome in Chen’s deflationary humor and even at this moment the sight of him elicited a faint chuckle from Machuzak.

Fred was standing at his side. “You all right, Mac?”

“I suppose,” he lied. Yet how could he abandon his companions at their kairos? He would not. “Well, let’s make the best of this. No more slacker days.”

Outside, the two stood on the balcony above the building’s great central atrium, filled with its palms and banana trees below and the tentlike glass ceiling above, which might have come from the hand of Le Corbusier. As majestic as it was, the lab’s scale was dwarfed by the magnitude of the endeavor they were suddenly, unexpectedly preparing to undertake. Nathaniel perceived only a castle going up in flames. Garrett sidled up to them then, breaking the silent commiseration, and remarked that he didn’t have the impression their task was impossible, just “difficult.”

“Let’s put it this way, Richard,” Machuzak answered pointedly. “The EU, Japan, China, India…have poured twenty billion euros into ITER, which is designed to reach ignition. Would you bet on it, Fred?”

The senior engineer shook his head.

“The thing is, Richard, the world has seen a few tokamaks. A few have worked better than they were designed, most have worked worse; none—ever—has worked the way it was supposed to. We can kill ourselves day and night, we can be ingenious and even brilliant, but as that deadline nears, what’s going to be most important is sheer, dumb luck. If you were asking me to bet, I’d bet that Moravec has signed our death warrant.”

Garrett frowned and nodded silently. Then he said, “Hmm,” and ambled off.

“Well, Herr Doktor Professor,” said Fred, watching Garrett, now truly The Chairman, depart, “I don’t know who or what’s behind this, and God knows we can’t beat the deadline, but at least now we have a chance to beat ITER.”

Machuzak perceived that what he took for “this” was not what Fred meant by “this,” but he only looked at Abbuhl and said, “Do we deserve to?”

CHAPTER FIVE

Before an hour ticked by, every phone on Nathaniel or within his reach went off simultaneously and Lise, Leonard’s secretary, asked him to come up to the octagon immediately. She wouldn’t say more. He took the stairs, flinched so visibly as he passed Diana Cochran that she recoiled with a snarl, and arrived moments later. The meeting’s tension remained fully with him, so too the knowledge that in a few hours, an accident would become sabotage. Without delay Lise ushered him into the famous, erudite space that had once been so familiar.

Sunlight streaming through two sides of the octagon immediately drew his eyes to the luxurious semicircular desk occupying the room’s center and illuminated the wrinkles on Leonard Rasmussen’s face as he peered up from behind a 360-degree monitor. The same light fell onto the thousand books and Oriental art that covered another three walls; a single ray brightened a Japanese Daruma doll, which blessed the lab with good fortune and whose second eye would be painted in when the great task was accomplished. The big blue bottle atop the water cooler standing at the entrance to the private bath sparkled as always.

Even after ten years Nathaniel felt a certain reverence when stepping into this office, and as he had since he’d set eyes on Leonard yesterday, he fought back tears, but before he could wallow in the lost past, Richard Garrett’s voice interrupted.

“Machuzak,” Garrett said, rising from the conference table off to the side, “we’ve got some good news for you.”

Nathaniel had hardly noticed him sitting at the table, drumming his fingers impatiently. At the big man’s words, Nathaniel caught his breath. Good news no longer existed, by definition.

“The board of governors,” Garrett put his arms around his shoulder, “of which I am chair, has authorized the executive committee to appoint you acting director.”

For a moment Nathaniel blinked at the chairman, then nearly spit up his lunch as he attempted to prevent himself from bursting out in caustic laughter. He glanced distractedly at the medals and citations decorating the octagon’s remaining walls, the photographs of Leonard with presidents of the United States, the leaders of the European Union, Korea. None of those luminaries offered advice.

“What’s the matter, son, cat got your tongue?”

Nathaniel now merely stared at the chairman in full disbelief. “I…I don’t understand,” he said at last, just to make certain he’d heard correctly.

“Mac,” Garrett replied after recovering from a sharp cough, “at the meeting you weren’t exactly grinnin like a skunk eatin cabbage at midnight. Admit it, you wouldn’t prefer the alternatives.”

Machuzak left it to The Chairman to read his expression.

Seeing the resistance that faced him, Garrett pressed forward in a more conciliatory tone, attempting to win the reluctant physicist over to his preposterous plan. Cassandra, he rolled out the epithet again, Machuzak was the only one who showed good sense about the demonstration; everybody else was wrong. “What can I say?” the Texan concluded. “We’re gonna need a level head around here in the comin months.”

Nathaniel couldn’t discern exactly what had been taking place behind the scenes, but his reaction was simple and firm: “I decline.”

“Come on, Mac, duty calls.”

“You’re asking me to oversee the ignition campaign, aren’t you?”

Cocking his head The Chairman said, “I’d say that about sums it up.”

“Why don’t you offer me the Astor suite on the Titanic? Look, the whole thing is crazy.” Crazier, much, than Garrett knew. “You heard me before. It can’t be done.”

“It’s gotta be done. We gotta try.”

Machuzak suddenly felt trapped, set up, and every instinct told him to escape. “What about Krieg-Zuber? He won’t take this lying down.”

“He will, exactly, lyin down. Doctors say there’s been internal injuries. Two months, at least.”

Funny, Cyrus the Great didn’t seem to know that.

“With respect,” Nathaniel said with an increasing desperation, “I’m a scientist, not an administrator. I don’t have the interest, I don’t have the force of personality. Anyone at the lab can tell you that.”

“You don’t see yourself, son.”

“Really it’s absurd,” Machuzak answered, voice acidic, diplomacy ended. At that, he and Garrett simultaneously turned toward Rasmussen, who had remained silent. “Leonard,” said Nathaniel, knowing his words were self-serving, but betraying none of the uncertainty he felt, “you can do this. You above anyone.”

With a visible reluctance, the director shook his head. “I’ll stand behind you, Nathaniel, but the time…” He didn’t finish his sentence. “You must take this on. I ask you.”

Not that. Nathaniel could refuse anything but that. “How long? Six months, no—”

“Two months, max,” said Garrett, “or until Krieg-Zuber’s recovered. I give you my word.”

With a sigh of resignation, of the damned, Nathaniel agreed to think it over.

“I’ll expect a positive reply tomorrow,” The Chairman answered. “It’s time to cowboy up. Realm of the gods, remember?”

Too well. “Would you mind if I spoke to Leonard alone?” Nathaniel asked.

The rich Texan nodded, picked up his hat from the table and with a marked, bowlegged lope waddled out of the office.

* * * *

Machuzak remained standing, looking at Rasmussen in his wheelchair, deciding whether to reveal the sabotage, but it was Leonard who spoke. “I’m sorry to put this on you, Mac,” he said, expression noticeably contorted, “but we have so little choice. We cannot afford to fail in our great endeavor. I have devoted my life to this project…”

“Yes, you have,” Nathaniel replied with difficulty. How far this shrunken man from the dazzling father who, legend told, went to bed at midnight and awoke for calisthenics at 5:00 a.m. Yet, half immobilized as he was, Leonard insisted on wearing a jacket, today with open collar. There’d always been that slight formality, a precision in his entire manner that put one on one’s mettle and was all the more unsettling because he was unfailingly polite.

As he was at this moment. “You’ll have to come by for dinner with Theresa and me,” he said. “You’ll need real fuel during the coming trial, not bachelor noodles.”

“I’m honored.” That was genuine. The Rasmussens regularly invited lab hands to their spectacular home for afternoon cookouts; to be invited for dinner…

“Don’t be honored. Be prepared to eat—and to think.”

“Is that your idea of a bribe?” Nathaniel smiled, shaking his head.

“Of course it’s a bribe. The definition of a scientist is an unscrupulous opportunist, you know that. If the Indian ambassador is in town, I’ll ask you to wear a tie.”

This time Nathaniel laughed. How as a freshly minted PhD he’d longed for one of those coveted invitations! How Leonard’s dazzling aura of elegance and achievement had put him at a far distance. He might have been Christ on the Mount. Several years passed before Leonard became more human than god, and then Nathaniel began to see his formality as an accoutrement of office. Leonard spent his days on the phone with congressmen or at august gatherings where the planet’s future was decided. He was quoted and therefore needed to be precise; he was photographed and therefore needed to appear precise.

“Tell me your plans for ignition,” Rasmussen said.

Nathaniel shook himself into the present. “L–Leonard, you’ve asked me this minute to take charge of an impossible project that I’m not usually attached to—”

“Do not use the word impossible in my presence! Nathaniel, I think a walk would do you good. What do you say?”

That was more like the Rasmussen of old, Machuzak smiled. “Are you sure…?” he asked.

“Of course! Get those crutches!”

As Nathaniel grabbed the crutches propped up against the wall, Leonard struggled to his feet, helping himself to a drink from the cooler. They slowly made their way out of the building to the lake, where Leonard sat down again.

“Now,” he said as the fountain spray refreshed them, “give me your ideas.”

My idea is the single idea I have had for five hours—someone has sabotaged the machine. Someone may do it again.

“Mac, attention! This is the most important task the world has seen!”

Nathaniel chuckled ruefully and recollected those weekends when the formal director would appear at the lab in shirtsleeves and a straw hat, clutching a can of beer. He’d prowl far and wide, corner you at your bench and grill you. If you reported an insight, he’d punch the air with his fist and make you feel like the most important person in the world. Today he may have meant it. Needing to talk over an idea, he’d say, “Let’s go for a walk” and off you went. Leonard was not exceptionally tall, but every stride was taken with purpose and you’d soon find yourself breathing hard beside him.

This afternoon, Machuzak was hardly breathing at all. “I think,” he said, “we must heed the old Roman motto, festina lente—”

“—make haste slowly—”

“—or we risk making a terrible situation worse. If I take this on, I’ll ask Abbuhl to dismantle the machine as far as possible.”

“Is that necessary?”

Yes, Leonard, it is necessary. “I need to think about the triple shifts.”

“Don’t think. Do it,” said Leonard. Rasmussen, as far as anyone could tell, had never wasted a moment of his life.

“Len,” Nathaniel answered, glancing at the sun-sphere surmounting the fountain, “the important thing is to convince the gang that we are not acting desperately and that this task is achievable, even when both aren’t true. I don’t know how to do that.”

“If ITER can do it, we can do it.”

“Leonard, forget ITER. They cannot be close.”

“ITER will not forget us, Nathaniel. You heard the announcement; they’re already redoubling their efforts. I know those people well. I trained half of them. Maybe we need a slogan. ‘Prometheus—Lighting the Way…’”

Machuzak couldn’t help but sigh. “Leonard, somehow we’ve already gotten ourselves into a race with ITER, but we can’t win. Of that I am certain.”

“Why are you certain, Mac?”

“Because Prometheus has been sabotaged.”

Both men stopped short. Finally Rasmussen stuttered, “W–what do you mean?”

Nathaniel told him everything. When he finished, he thought he had killed Rasmussen and was waiting for the older man to die. After a long silence, Leonard spoke again, “This can’t be.”

“I am afraid it is. How serious it is, I don’t yet know. Maybe it was a prank.”

“You mustn’t say a word. Morale would be crushed.”

“It would. How can we go forward?”

“We…you will find the saboteur. Yes, it is probably no more than a bad joke or a grudge. Mac, we are on the cusp of history. This is the moment at which we steer mankind away from three hundred years of folly. You would not let that moment slip through our grasp, would you?”

Kairos again? Machuzak saw in Leonard’s remark the dying of dreams.

After another silence Leonard gazed up at Nathaniel with the same plea in his eye that he had cast at him in his office. “ASSET is my epitaph, Nathaniel, remember that.”

Nathaniel helped Leonard Rasmussen to his feet and they walked back to the main building. He sprinted over to the pentagon, found Lipman and asked if it was too late. When the tech shook his head, he ordered him to replace the busbar at once.

* * * *

When Nathaniel found Slava in his office and told him that the chiefs wanted to appoint him acting director, but that he hadn’t yet agreed, Archangelsky’s reaction was swift and merciless: “Has a fly bit your balls? This is best thing that could have happened. Now we can control the situation.”

Machuzak didn’t reply directly, but thinking the news would pacify Archangelsky, he added that Rasmussen knew about the sabotage and authorized him to replace the busbar. To the contrary, the Russian’s eyes grew wide, he grabbed Machuzak by the arm and marched him outside to the lake again.

“W–why are we here?” was Machuzak’s confused reaction.

“Put on your brain, Edward’ich! Who knows who’s listening? This is the opt-out century, remember.”

Machuzak didn’t get it; The Terminator was out of commission. But yes, here was the boy who had spent his childhood in Russia, Machuzak realized. Archangelsky, though, seeing his friend staring at him in horror, with equal exasperation threw up his hands. “Akh, spilling beans to Leonard may have been right thing or worst mistake of your life, but I tell you reason for this. After Time of Troubles in Russia, this stretch in seventeenth century when country was in chaos, one tsar after other until pfft!—nobody. Finally nobles get together and who do they crown? Little Mikhail Romanov, a teenager, a total wimp.” Slava cast about for a cigarette, found one, and thrust it into his mouth. “That’s why Rasmussen chose you.”

“Don’t you dare call me a wimp,” Machuzak said angrily, turning back to the main building. With a glance at the real sun in the sky and at his watch he growled, “Excuse me, it’s time to call the police.”

CHAPTER SIX

When late in the day T. J. D’Abro at the Austin Sheriff’s Department got a call from one of the physicists she’d met at CFRC not twenty-four hours earlier, she was already half out the door—for good. In her half-belligerent mood she verged on telling the guy to fuck off. Nah, she’d put him on hold. You know, why not celebrate? She puckered her lips and told him to meet her at Scholz’s Beer Garten.

She would have missed him stumbling in if she hadn’t glanced up from one of the picnic tables out back at the exact moment, scowling at the “game over” that blinked obnoxiously from her wrist. From a distance, he seemed tense, fatigued, distracted—she couldn’t tell what—surely no more festive than the voice over the phone. She could tell he didn’t come here often. That was dead obvious from the way he scrutinized the banners strung up all around proclaiming “Hook ’Em Horns” and Coors. Maybe he was worried about droppings from the trees. But hell, that was Scholz’s trademark—bird shit in the beer. “Dr. Machuzak!” she called out and waved. He turned. Yup, as far as he was concerned she might have been Sally Skull or Calamity Jane walkin the streets of the Old West.

It was something like that, Machuzak conceded. The chaos of the day was tumbling through his head and before him stood cowgirl crystallized—half a cowgirl. As she unplugged an ear bud and they shook hands, she reacted with a faint, ironic smile, as if she got the joke. With what attention he could muster, he stood openmouthed in shock and admiration, victim to that streak of self-parody among Texans that makes it difficult to tell whether they are serious and dangerous to guess. D’Abro’s designer jeans were smartly tucked into boots that were embroidered more tastefully than most in these parts, with scarlet stitching. He would have found her black hat—one of those flat, Mexican-style hats rimmed by silver bangles—attractive if he could have struck sabotage from his mind and if it hadn’t been for the green-blond ponytail peeking out the back, but the white silk shirt and brown bandana matched it well anyway. Her earpiece, stylishly disguised as a silver-and-lapis earring, provided a nice touch. What penetrated most through the haze, though, was her distant, ironic smile, entirely uncharacteristic of the locals, which set a course for places unknown.

“Sir, you sure look like you could use a drink,” she said as they sat down, amused more than she expected by the scientist’s disorientation. She laid her hat on the table and poured him a beer, peering at his drawn face, observing him wince at all the “likes,” “I means,” “you knows,” and “absolutelys” assaulting his ears. “Hey, it’s not as bad as it used to be.”

True enough, Machuzak concurred absently. The noise level in the Old World had significantly receded as virtual life’s population swelled, in particular around the waistline. “I’m sorry, Officer D’Abro, I didn’t recognize you without your uniform. It’s been a…”

“… tough day?”

The physicist replied with a morbid chuckle, raised his glass as if were made of lead, and drank. Despite her Gallic-flavored surname, over the rim of his glass D’Abro appeared to be of German descent, unusual these days as Mexico reconquered the Southwest: tall enough to be within striking distance, about eight years more idealistic than he, fair, blond when not green, features soft. If it hadn’t been for the smile and the hair, he might have labeled her wholesome. Back East she would have turned heads, but this was Texas.

“Remember what all those Miss Americas from Denton used to say,” she pronounced as if reading his mind. “The only thing worse than being ugly in Denton is being dead.”

“Are you sure that wasn’t vice versa?” Machuzak managed with effort.

D’Abro granted a smile to the fellow’s faltering attempts to enter the here and now and then asked with abrupt seriousness, “Anyway, Doc, your call sounded urgent. What is it?” Before he could reply, she interrupted herself with a glance at her wrist and turned away. “I…I probably can’t help,” she apologized.

“Why’s that?” Machuzak asked.

“I’ve been promoted to detective today.”

“Congratulations,” Nathaniel answered, thinking to clink her glass, which stood ignored on the table. “That could be useful.”

But D’Abro barely responded. “I resigned. Well, I took a leave,” she eventually replied.

Nathaniel glanced toward the German-style bar inside, where more laws—no doubt—had been enacted than any place outside the Capitol, then peered at D’Abro again with a perplexed shake of his head.

“Don’t ask. I don’t know why. I’m just not good at stickin around too long. You know that.”

Did he? By now entirely bewildered, Machuzak straightened. “Sorry, are you on the phone?” This time she didn’t respond at all. “Look, I’ll find someone else,” he said and got to his feet.

At that D’Abro swiveled back and waved him down. “My fault, Doc, sorry. Why don’t you tell me what’s up.”

“What’s the point?” Machuzak said, exhausted of more than energy. “You’ve resigned…taken leave?”

“Yeah, I do have trouble stickin around. Attention deficit disorder or somethin.” She regarded the weary physicist with some sympathy, if not understanding. “Look, tell me what’s up, Doc, and I’ll refer you. The news says your director friend will probably survive his heart attack.”

“The question is whether the lab’s heart will survive his recovery,” he said humorlessly. “And don’t call me Doc, please.”

“Will do.” D’Abro turned to salting her beer, murmuring that she liked to watch the bubbles.

Machuzak exhaled deeply, already convinced that to reveal anything to this strange woman was an exercise in futility. “I didn’t call about Krieg-Zuber,” he offered finally, reluctantly. “This morning one of the techs found something. I think…” She prodded him with a glance, he considered and went on. “… I think the machine’s been sabotaged.”

D’Abro didn’t react at once. Nathaniel was certain another call had come through until she said with a wrinkled nose and intensity, “So, the professor getting zapped wasn’t an accident?”

Who this T. J. D’Abro was, Machuzak hadn’t decided, but he had decided that to talk was more important than to sleep. “Depends on what you mean by accident,” he said, seeing himself in the surge room not twelve hours ago. “No one could’ve known that The Terminator would run into the power area like a madman. I doubt he’d been down there in years. When he’s not bugging phones he’s on a plane. Zuber was an accident, but that the demo failed wasn’t—not in the way it failed.” Having begun, it was easier to continue and Nathaniel went on to describe everything: the safety systems, the inspections, the surge rooms, Lipman’s morning discovery. “It looks…it looks like someone cut the damned busbar in half.”

When he’d finished, D’Abro only wrinkled her nose again. “Wouldn’t a brick of C-4 do a better job?”

Exactly. “If you want to destroy the machine, not if you want to destroy the program. A pebble is all you need. A pebble may be what we have.”

“Doc—uh, sorry—” She suddenly halted, blushing, just as she jerked upright and put a finger to her earpiece. “Nobody calls you that?”

Machuzak comprehended then that he was as far from T. J. D’Abro’s world as she was from his. Two space aliens meeting in no-man’s land. “That’s movie talk,” he replied, dismissively or wearily she couldn’t say. “If you’re a physicist you have a PhD, period. It’s just a hunting license. The only thing that counts in our game is brains. Anyway, we’re all on a first-name basis at the lab. Call me Nat or Mac, as you prefer.”

“Will do.” D’Abro glanced again at her screen. He’d witnessed the same continuous distraction yesterday in his office, but a minute part of her brain, evidently, was engaged. “So, Doc,” she looked up abruptly, “you don’t sound one hundred percent convinced this is sabotage.”

“Don’t call me Doc. No, I’m not, one hundred percent. Machine parts often fail in strange ways.”

“Then to state the obvious,” D’Abro said, cocking her head with an eyebrow raised, “you’re not one hundred percent sure a crime has been committed.”

Machuzak couldn’t read her expression, which sat somewhere to the left of scorn but to the right of neutrality. “The only thing I’m certain of,” he said, “is that we’ve suddenly gotten ourselves in a race with ITER to achieve ignition, a race we can’t win in six months, and that a saboteur may be determined to stop us.”

D’Abro’s sharp shake of her head revealed complete bafflement. “What’s ITER?” she asked and the question caught Nathaniel off guard. ITER was front-page news all over Europe, evidently not in Texas. Still, he would have taken the detective’s tone as one of genuine curiosity if in the next instant she hadn’t jumped again. “Sorry, Doc, d’ya think you could genetically engineer a spam filter…?”

He doubted it. “ITER,” he explained, calling for a real beer from a waitress passing by the cheerful alpine scene painted on a small stage, “is the huge reactor several dozen countries have built in southern France. The initials originally stood for International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, but the greens didn’t go for the ‘nuclear’ part—.” D’Abro craned her neck in mock surprise, even as she fact-checked Nathaniel’s assertion. “There were a lot of protests from Greenpeace and so on. Then some alert scholar informed the administrators that ITER is also Latin for ‘the way,’ and they greened the name without even changing the acronym. There are still protests. ITER was originally budgeted at about five billion euros, now it’s twenty and years behind schedule. It’s the largest technological project ever attempted and its director, Jules César Balard, is not about to let CFRC win a race for fusion.”

“Or the reverse.”

“Or the reverse.” Machuzak suddenly realized that Leonard’s slogan of the afternoon, “Prometheus—Lighting the Way,” might be misconstrued.

“And ignition, what’s that?”

Again Machuzak was surprised, as much by the abrupt sincerity in the woman’s voice as by the question itself. “Ignition is the dream of all fusioneers. Our bid to save civilization. Ignition is a self-sustaining fusion reaction, a fire that catches and gives you a lot more energy out than you put in to get it started. Until now no reactor has achieved ignition, but if you can’t do it, commercial power is just…” He trailed off, shaking his head.

Examining the scientist’s weary face over her own glass, D’Abro began to sense a man who believed in what he did, or at least tried. “You know, Doc, there’s lots here I don’t understand. All the people we talked to last night were grumbling that the demo was way premature, but nobody had the guts to say so except you. Why the hell would a lab full of pure geniuses try such a thing?”

Machuzak chuckled, weakly. “Officer—Detective?—in the 1970s, Princeton beat out Oak Ridge for a contract worth several hundred million dollars. Oak Ridge had proposed a giant ignition machine, almost as big as Prometheus—fifty years ahead of its time. There’s no chance, none, it ever could have worked. Ignition.” Now he managed an outright laugh. “You find a premature demo surprising? I don’t.”

“The Oak Ridge tomahawk was a fraud?” D’Abro exclaimed with astonishment but was answered only by the face of the sphinx. “You know, I was actually researching this ignition on the drive over. Six hundred videos today say you guys are swindlers and what you just told me proves it.”

“No, it doesn’t.”

Her voice shifted instantly from antagonism to wonder. “But can you really do this—provide Earth with a star?”

For an instant the physicist hesitated and D’Abro was poised to pounce again, but then he said simply, “We know we can do it someday, not in six months. Minus a day.” Absently he traced a large 1 on the table amid the bird droppings.

“That’s the second time you said six months. Why?”

“Because this morning Moravec called.” Before she could ask, he filled her in on the consortium, the morning’s unexpected call from GlobeTex’s strange CEO, the ultimatum. “Six months. From today.”

D’Abro listened with widening mouth. “And Moravec made this ultimatum before sunrise after the accident!” she exclaimed when Nathaniel was finished, loudly enough for the people at the next table to turn.

He nodded.

“And it didn’t occur to you that the two are connected?”

“Don’t tell me you’re a conspiracy theorist,” Machuzak said with a gaze no less severe than hers was incredulous, but she didn’t react. “What’s the point of sabotaging the machine if you can pull out the moment your contract’s expired?”

“Certain amount of logic in that,” D’Abro conceded unhappily.

“Look, the accident’s scared everybody. GlobeTex may be simply spooked, as The Chairman says, but I had the strangest feeling that Moravec was being forced to do it… I can’t explain why. And don’t ask.” Actually, he couldn’t blame D’Abro for weaving conspiracies; against his instincts he’d been weaving all day.

D’Abro didn’t ask. She took a gulp and then said as if the last exchange hadn’t occurred, “I don’t understand what GlobeTex’s doing in your consortium to begin with. Aren’t they into wind, solar, biofuels?”

“They are an energy company,” Machuzak replied, accepting a Brau-Weisse from the waitress.

“I really don’t get it,” D’Abro objected. “I mean, the point. Wind and solar are here. I don’t know anything about nukular fusion, but if you can’t even make it work, how’s it going to compete?”

As the faint smell of urine wafted over him from the toilets, or the Capitol, Machuzak conceded she had a point. The case for fusion was hardly straightforward. “Maybe you’ve noticed that CO_2 hasn’t always decreased in the past twenty years. Solar’s not cheap, we’re using as much fossil fuel as ever, legislation goes nowhere in Congress, Texas ignores every regulation and every time someone grows a biofuel in one place, the price of food goes up somewhere else. Not every country is bathed in sunlight, the wind doesn’t blow all the time. An intelligent grid design helps but you still need a backbone power supply. It takes energy to charge plug-ins. Where does that come from? Where do the emissions go? You think the price of beef and silicon chips is an accident? We’ve got to start using less energy.”

Suddenly the physicist was more animated than he’d been since he arrived, gesticulating like an Italian. D’Abro couldn’t stop herself from bursting out in laughter. “I’m sorry,” she apologized. “You came in here like a cat walkin in mud, and suddenly you seem alive. It’s kinda cute, actually.”

Machuzak laughed—at both of them. He was finding it difficult to understand this woman. Discounting earpiece and thought processes—hell, she remained perpetually mobile. She’d lean forward on her elbow, fiddling with her bracelet or wrist screen, then suddenly sit knee up along the bench, long, manicured fingers wrapped around her chin. Whether it was swagger or sass, God knows he couldn’t say.

“I’m flattered,” he eventually replied, “but I often think the greatest evil in the world is the idea that you can get something for nothing. You gotta refine silicon and copper for solar collectors, making fertilizer takes energy—lots. There’s no free lunch.”

“Yes,” she said with the rising Texas diphthong that makes it sound like yee-ass, “seems I heard that once upon a time. Conservation of energy you physicists call it, if I’m not mistaken.”

“Good girl,” said Machuzak.

She let the borderline condescension pass. Maybe this physicist was a bit crabby after his strange, trying day, but he did seem sort of human, as if he’d always been wrestling with…questions. He looked to be finding his way, groping. “All I can say is that you folks sure don’t have a lot of friends. Energy companies don’t like you, greens don’t like you and you don’t like each other. The question is, who hates you enough to sabotage your program?”

Machuzak could manage only a perplexed shake of the head and the two at last fell silent. Finally, after a pause long enough to give birth to a militiaman, he said, “So where does that leave us, with you having resigned?”

“Let’s say I’ve taken indefinite leave. Look, the feds won’t be interested in this—no sex, no money, no drugs, no publicity. Even the sheriff’s department won’t give a dang unless you convince them a crime has been committed. So…why don’t we go have a look at the scene of the incident and see if there’s anything you missed.”

“Now?”

“The sooner the better. Then you can use your rocket-scientist’s imagination and figure out why somebody would spike your machine.”

“I am not a rocket scientist,” Nathaniel mouthed silently as a fistfight broke out behind them. They walked into the bar, where a cantankerous health inspector was threatening to shut the place down, settled up and for the second time this day Machuzak headed south.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Seeing the physicist’s exhaustion, D’Abro offered to take the wheel of his jeep and met no resistance. She grabbed an aluminum box from the trunk of her own car nearby, but now, sitting before the unfamiliar controls, she asked what sort of jeep this was. “It runs on algae,” Machuzak told her.

“Where do you tank up on that?”

“One of our guys built a pond at the lab. Algae produces biofuels ten, a hundred times more efficiently than grasses, so we’re trying to grow it in the car’s tank itself—but yeah, still no pump at the local station. Infrastructure takes time. No instant fixes.”

“No Mr. Fusion?” D’Abro smirked as she decoded the dashboard and they took off.

Machuzak was not only exhausted but famished. South of town, on the infinite field of fast-food and biodiesel signs that rise pikelike high above the plain to impale civilization, D’Abro stopped long enough for him to grab a burger from the car window. Before he finished a bite she was fiddling impatiently with the radio and caught a talk-show pundit in midflight:

“—After all, the laboratory’s tritium supply makes it too likely a target for terrorists.”

Machuzak nearly choked on his fries, but D’Abro merely snatched a sip from his soda, put her foot to the accelerator and pressed him. “What about that tritium, Doc? Everyone’s talkin about it.”

“Talkin,” Nathaniel nodded, “not understandin.” Usually he told people tokamak fuel is hydrogen, which was true, but it isn’t ordinary hydrogen. “We use two isotopes: deuterium—heavy hydrogen—and tritium, extra-heavy hydrogen. Tritium is mildly radioactive.”

“Why would terrorists want it?” D’Abro asked with sudden interest.

The scientist, feeling but partly revived as the caffeine began its work, sighed heavily. “The military uses it in hydrogen bombs. If a terrorist got enough, he could add it to a fission bomb as a sort of booster, making a crude hydrogen bomb.” That’s why the tritium safeguards at CFRC border on the supernatural. That’s why at Savannah River, SWAT teams guard the country’s tritium stockpile.

“How much you need?” D’Abro pressed as they turned off Route 290.

“You get shot if you ask,” Machuzak replied. “It’s not a lot—grams—but we don’t have a lot at CFRC. You’d have to steal virtually the entire supply.”

“This must be connected—”

“No.” He put his foot down. “Ockham’s Razor, detective, prime directive in science: find the simplest solution. Terrorists… Sheesh…”

“You shave with Ockham’s Razor every day, Doc?” D’Abro retorted and, not waiting for his response, pushed another preset.

Machuzak nodded after one second, two. “Tchaikovsky. Third Orchestral Suite, fourth movement, sixth variation.”

“Wow,” said D’Abro, “you oughtta be on a quiz show. Is your memory that good for everything?”

“Not quite,” he equivocated, biting into his sandwich, “but musically I’ve always been able to identify nearly anything. The world’s most useless talent.”

“Glad to hear you don’t spend all your time thinkin about tomahawks.” She helped herself to his remaining fries.

Machuzak didn’t react and they continued southward. Twilight was descending. As they crested the final rise and the lab came into view below, D’Abro said, “There’s a whole lot here I still don’t understand. Like where that Miss Fusion calendar in your office came from. Seems about as likely as an armadillo with brains.”

“No more unlikely than anything else connected with fusion,” Nathaniel chuckled. “Christ, the whole US program started because the New York Times screamed that Argentina had fusion in 1950. Ever heard of Bob Guccione?”

“Penthouse? He was before my time. Playboy asked me to pose for them once. ‘Girls of South by Southwest’ or somethin. Mighta been a hoot. I was a wild undergrad-thang then, but I said nope. I did dance at Sugar’s once or twice to pay the rent.”

D’Abro spoke offhandedly, but having put up with her now for two hours, Nathaniel was somehow already certain that Sugar’s would have been merely another of life’s distractions for the strange woman. Why not? This is the Republic of Texas, where bumper stickers proclaiming Secede mean it. “Guccione thought fusion would save the world. He poured sixteen million out of his own pocket to build an economical miniature tokamak—”

“Sixteen million?” D’Abro whistled. “No shit?”

“No shit. He even created a subsidiary of the magazine to oversee the project: Penthouse Energy and Technology Systems.” Nathaniel paused, sure D’Abro would get the joke, but her face remained a perfect blank. “PETS.”

Now she smiles. “T, A and fusion—now there’s an angle I hadn’t considered. My, my, the world is full of interesting connections.”

They soon reached the main gate and Machuzak passed the detective his badge for scanning. As the fence swung open, she quipped, “You short on biometrics around here?”

“You’ve been watching too many movies,” he said, before admitting to D’Abro that Guccione had lost every cent. Down the drive the guard booth was already empty for the night. After D’Abro grudgingly accepted Machuzak’s badge again and the gate lifted, they drove on to the main building. She grabbed her box and they walked inside.

* * * *

At once T. J. D’Abro’s expression changed as she was transfixed by the expansiveness of the lobby and she began prowling about. Moments hadn’t gone by before she homed in on a glass case that housed a bird, as large as a peacock and certainly no less colorful, but one wholly unnatural. Whatever mad artisan created it had fashioned the eyes from emeralds, or what might pass for them, the beak from gold. Rising above the head, a crest of diamonds and sapphires. A train of ruby and gold feathers trails away to curl around the bird’s silver feet. The wings, spread above the head like a ballerina, have been fashioned from the same fabric of ruby and gold. This crystalline bird, glittering, dazzling, would be more at home in a museum than a laboratory. At the same time, its very luminescence, as overdone as the Dallas skyline, telegraphed its kinship to a rhinestone cowboy.

“Why, that’s as pretty a sight as I’ve ever seen,” D’Abro exclaimed of the gaudy creature, shooting a video. “What could it be?”

“The firebird,” Nathaniel replied. “Do you know the ballet?”

D’Abro had never heard of it.

The jeweled bird had been presented to the laboratory by a Russian visitor long ago, he told her. The firebird is a symbol of dreams and hope; according to legend, anyone who catches one of its feathers is assured of realizing his heart’s desire.

“Whoever gave you this gift was an optimist,” said a voice from behind them. “If you read the original fairy tales, she is not so nice.”

For an instant, Machuzak caught his breath, until he recognized the accent as Archangelsky’s. “Working late?” he asked, and as Slava sullenly turned up his lips, said, “I believe you two have met. Dr. Yahroslav Arkhahngelsky, T. J. D’Abro, occasional detective.” Puzzled, Slava gingerly took her hand and D’Abro forewent the pronunciation of his name. “Slava is, uh…informed. You might as well come with us, Slava. Do you think the nb supply area is clear?”

“Should be okay. No acting director has authorized triple shifts.” He stared at Machuzak significantly. “Tired bots have gone home.” Seeing that D’Abro’s attention was still fixed on the bird, Archangelsky shook his great beard like an ancient bard. “This firebird causes a lot of trouble,” he sighed mournfully, “a lot of trouble.”

The three of them cut through the atrium to the back door and walked out toward the pentagon.

CHAPTER EIGHT

A few minutes later Machuzak badged them into the central hub. No one was in evidence at this hour. Nathaniel removed a safety key from the interlock, pocketed it, and at the push of a button the heavy door to the tokamak bay swung open.

From their brief acquaintanceship, Nathaniel would have guessed that nothing could silence T. J. D’Abro. But standing on the test-cell floor, gazing up at the colossus covered with its cables and plumbing, at the monstrous crane hanging above it, all on a scale more appropriate to Vulcan’s forge than to a human workshop, she frames no questions, no witty remarks escape her lips. For himself there is: six months, saboteur.

After a few moments of stillness, the young woman shook her head and gulped. “Why don’t we have a look at that whatever-you-called-it—surge room—and see what we got?”

They descended to the bowels of the power-supply area, completely deserted but for the overpowering gloom of a medieval dungeon, ducked under the DO NOT ENTER tape and opened the door to the surge room, which appeared undisturbed.

“I’m gonna check for latents, fibers, you know…” D’Abro said, craning her neck at the science-fiction setting around her. “Normally the crime-scene techies would take care of it, but since this is an unofficial visit…”

This time Archangelsky could not restrain his own bafflement at the woman. “What do you mean, ‘unofficial’? You are detective or aren’t you?”

Reluctantly, D’Abro fessed up to Slava that on this day of her promotion she’d taken indefinite leave. The Russian rolled his eyes in Machuzak’s direction and the latter answered with already proficient exasperation. D’Abro snapped. “You docs think you’re bein saddled with a greenhorn amateur who doesn’t know shit about tomahawks, don’t you?”

“Look, Bedbug,” Machuzak replied, by now more than fed up with the woman’s continued judgments and imputations. “Every scientist I know is a professional amateur. We’re amateurs because everything we try, we’re trying for the first time. We’re professionals because we have the sense to know that whatever it is, we’re going to have a helluva time with it. Every one of us is a greenhorn.” Now more than ever. “Got it?”

“Got it,” D’Abro swallowed, red faced.

As she opened her aluminum case, Slava flipped on the light and pointed out the fateful busbar, half hidden in the maze of electrical plumbing. D’Abro took one look before she snapped a picture: “I thought there was a gap.” No embarrassment in her voice now.

Slava and Nathaniel glanced at each other. “There was,” Nathaniel said. “I told you, didn’t I? Our director is worried about panic—he authorized me to have it replaced.”

As she slipped on a pair of gloves, D’Abro shook her head with an expression no less sour than Slava’s had been. “Cover-up’s worse than the crime, boys.”

Machuzak understood that no good deed goes unpunished, but his irritation only mounted. “Bedbug, if you think the last thirty hours around here have been normal…! I’ve told you everything I know, damnit, and remember, we can’t absolutely rule out that the thing just melted.”

D’Abro scowled but wasn’t as concerned as her reproach had made her sound. “Calm down, Doc. I know you’ve had a rough day.” Her physicist was holding up better than most people she met on duty, actually. She flipped off the light, playing over the equipment with her own special light source, dusted.

“You’ll probably find our prints all over here,” Slava said.

“I expect to,” she replied dryly. At that D’Abro noticed something, crawled past the ignitrons and capacitors toward a far corner. The other two saw only the camera flash before she backed out of the maze again and stood up with palm held open. “What d’ y’all make of this?”

“May I?” Machuzak asked with his eyes, and D’Abro handed him a pair of gloves. She’d found two thin pieces of copper—what was left of them. Each piece was five or six centimeters long and largely melted, but Nathaniel imagined that they had originally formed two halves of a rectangular sleeve, which might have easily slid over a busbar. He and Slava exchanged glances and Machuzak told him to see if he could find the original busbar.

D’Abro’s fiery gaze was now unambiguous. “You mean you may have thrown it away?”

“No. It’s on my desk in the main building.” Slava was gone.

Machuzak and D’Abro stood facing each other. He understood in that moment that D’Abro must be asking, “Who is this reticent fellow who sought out the law but has not exactly acted this day with the strength of a comic-book hero?”

The detective didn’t put to him Lorenzo’s question. She took a hand vac, ducked down behind a capacitor bank and just before she turned it on said, “Now, as I understand it, that there plasma is some sort of hot gas.”

Nathaniel perceived no escape. “A plasma is nothing mysterious,” he answered reluctantly. Most of the visible universe is plasma: stars, the northern lights…the neon signs that trim Austin skyscrapers. “It’s just a gas that’s been heated to at least about ten thousand degrees, enough so that the electrons have boiled off from the nuclei. We say you’ve ionized it. Plasma is a synonym for ionized gas. That’s all.”

“Why do you need to heat it?” She switched off the vac just long enough to pose her question.

Machuzak’s fatigue was fast returning, but the surreal quality of this conversation with a lithe woman, who in the semidarkness resembled nothing more or less than a Halloween cat, inexplicably increased his willingness to go along. “You get energy when you slam those deuterium and tritium nuclei together so that they fuse, but since they’re both positively charged, you’ve got to get them moving fast enough to overcome their electrical repulsion—that requires heating them to, oh, four hundred million degrees.”

D’Abro nodded but was missing something. “What are the magnets for?”

“Nature is generous. The secret of the tokamak is that magnetic fields deflect charged particles. You’ve heard of the Van Allen belts?” D’Abro played her light up and down over Nathaniel’s face. “Cosmic rays fly in from deep space and end up spiraling around the Earth’s magnetic field. The Earth wears a magnetic shield. The thing is, you can’t confine a plasma by any material. It’s so hot that enough of it would vaporize the tokamak. As it stands, inside Prometheus there is so little—it’s almost a deep-space vacuum—that the walls act like a freezer and cool the plasma way below the temperature needed for nuclear reactions.”

D’Abro had been on the verge of accusing the physicist of being in love with facts, but she began to perceive that he wasn’t in love with facts; he was in love with facts in motion, facts that led somewhere. “Seems simple enough,” she said anyway, feeling contrarian. “Hardly string theory.”

“The devil’s in the details,” Machuzak scoffed. “The other important thing about plasmas is that they conduct electricity, like wire. Probably in grade school you connected a battery to a wire and watched it deflect a compass needle.” D’Abro nodded her light again. “The current’s generating its own magnetic field. Sakharov’s idea for the tokamak was that you zap a few million amps of current through the plasma and it generates a magnetic field; the field squeezes the plasma and heats it. Squeeze hard enough and fusion begins.”

“So what’s the problem?” she wants to know.

“Squeeze a water balloon in one place—”

“—it goes gaflooey somewhere else.”

“Precisely. Now try holding a beer with a glass made of rubber bands.”

“Come on, Doc, it’s impossible.”

“Yup, that’s about how hard it is to cage a plasma. At least it’s the hardest technological feat ever tried, period.”

D’Abro extinguished her light source and for a moment became silent. Suddenly her disembodied voice rose archly, “Tell me, Doc, are y’all doin this because it’s worth it or because it’s hard?”

Machuzak wished he were less weary and could anger, but he conceded that her implied accusation was not completely off target. The challenge was part of fusion’s allure, the temptation of the “technically sweet.” Glory would shower a few, but he had nothing to be ashamed of. “Bedbug, most people don’t think it’s worth it. Technically, it boils down to one thing: fusion is about a million times more efficient than burning fossil fuels. There’s more energy in the top two inches of Lake Erie than in all the world’s known oil reserves.”

“Really?” Even the distraction of silencing her phone could not mask D’Abro’s surprise. “Y’all just slurp up that water in Lake Erie and burn it?”

“Nature may be generous but she’s not straightforward. We need deuterium, which we get from heavy water, D_2O. Ordinary hydrogen, from H_2O, doesn’t react well enough. Only about one out of every five thousand water molecules is heavy, but even that tiny fraction in the top two inches of Lake Erie would be enough. For millions of years.”

At that D’Abro finally got to her feet with her tapes and bags of dust. “Now, Mac, let’s whoa a bit. Where’s the catch?”

The main one was that they hadn’t achieved a sustained fusion reaction, let alone a commercially viable reactor.

D’Abro’s stance, arms akimbo, showed she wasn’t buying. “Now wait a minute. What about the tritium? You said it’s radioactive. Aren’t you risking another Chernobyl or Three Mile Island?”

The inevitable had arrived. Like everyone, D’Abro was confusing fusion with fission, when about the only thing they had in common was “nuclear.” “Look, Bedbug,” Machuzak replied after a sigh, “I’ll say it again—there are no free lunches. We would have done better if we’d just explained fusion’s problems to the public. A deuterium-tritium reaction produces four times more energy than a deuterium-deuterium reaction and is much easier to get going. That’s why weaponeers use tritium in hydrogen bombs, and that’s why fusioneers use it in tokamaks. Yes, tritium is mildly radioactive.”

“Ah,” said D’Abro, firing a finger pistol at his eyes.

“But its half-life is only twelve years, as opposed to twenty-five thousand for plutonium, and a meltdown is physically impossible in a tokamak.”

“Why is that?” D’Abro asked, now fully facing him again.

Luckily, at that moment Archangelsky returned and Machuzak was able to say, “Bedbug, if we’re still speaking to each other in forty-eight hours and you haven’t figured it out, ask again.” His voice had almost left him.

“Have you found anything?” Slava asked as he handed over a plastic bag containing the remains of the original busbar.

“I’m actually surprised how clean the place is,” D’Abro said. The physicists weren’t; you didn’t want junk floating around a surge room. “No one’s been whacking off here, for sure. Nothin obvious except some grease and prints.” While D’Abro opened the bag, the two men pressed nearer. She held up the two halves of the original busbar and Nathaniel tried to slide the pieces she’d found over the melted end. Yes, they appeared to fit. Little imagination was necessary to see that the two new pieces formed a sleeve that bridged the gap cut in the busbar, except that the thin sleeve had melted—more likely exploded—under the high currents. The sleeve’s only purpose could have been to camouflage the gap. At that moment any uncertainty that they’d been dealing with sabotage evaporated without trace.

“My money’s down that someone is determined that your tomahawk won’t ignite—ever.” D’Abro’s tone was flat as she reached into her pocket and offered Machuzak a hundred.

Only the night sounds of a giant laboratory broke the silence as the full implications set in. Finally Machuzak said, ignoring the bill, “Will you turn over what you’ve found to the Sheriff’s Department?”

“I suppose I could,” D’Abro nodded, “but I’m not sure there’s anything on the DNA side, and even if I got usable prints, I somehow doubt they’d show up in the FBI database.”

“They might show up in ours.” D’Abro flicked on her light again and trained it directly into Slava’s eyes. “The Terminator recently installed fingerprint identification system. Will go online soon.”

“So you do have biometrics,” D’Abro interjected with the same dryness as before.

Machuzak wasn’t amused. “Bedbug, if you still haven’t gotten it, this is a civilian lab, not Los Alamos. Security has never been a priority.”

“I’ve noticed.” This time her voice was fully desiccated. “Well, boys, let’s have a look at your fingerprint database.”

“I’m not authorized.”

“You could be,” interjected Slava. At D’Abro’s raised eyebrow he explained: “This afternoon powers-that-be requested Nat to become acting director.”

D’Abro squinted at Machuzak. “You didn’t tell me, Doc.”

“I haven’t decided.”

The detective looked to the floor, sighed, then shook her head decisively. “I think you have. Bein that I find myself on leave, Doc, you’re going to take the job, hire me as a security guard and”—she flicked Nathaniel’s badge slung on a lanyard around his neck—“we’re gonna have a look at everyone who’s been in this surge room recently. Damn, and I was looking forward to a little quiet meditation.”

They ascended to the tokamak bay in silence and out to the parking lot. Past midnight, stars were bright. Regarding the physicist’s upward gaze, D’Abro said, “You know, Doc, I’ll bet when you were a boy scientist blowin up rockets, you never thought you’d end up here.”

“That is for sure, Bedbug. That is for sure.” This was indeed not the future that a youngster thirty years past had beheld in the wintry stars.

“And tomorrow when you become director and have to decide between going for ignition and riskin your machine, whatta y’all do?”

Machuzak continued to stare heavenward. “‘For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go… ’”

“Huh?” D’Abro wrinkled her nose.

“‘And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all. O daring joy but safe! are they not all the seas of God?’”

“You’ll go for it then?”

The physicist brought his gaze down to her eyes, sucked in his breath and exhaled long. “Let’s say I’ll pray that we find the saboteur before he gets nervous.”

CHAPTER NINE

The next morning Nathaniel Machuzak, expunging the weariness from his bones, awoke before dawn, swilled a standing cup of coffee, and drove south. The temperature swings, severe this time of year in the semi-desert, sent him shuddering in the jeep, whose top he’d left open. By the time he reached the outer gate, the landscape had turned purple and he began to shake off the cold. The chill mounted.

Down the road he badged himself in at the guard booth and noticed the sign hung to the left of the boom:

Remember:

Turn in Your Radiation Badges Today

Only the tritium handlers and the techs who spent their days on the machine would remember. For everybody else, radiation doses were no greater than the Austin background and they would do only one thing with the monthly reminder: ignore it.

The guard was the tall, angular and silent one. As he asked himself who the fellow staring across the space was, Machuzak thought he sensed a fugitive veil of compassion soften the hard features. About to drive off, he noticed for the first time in years the sign on the booth listing the materials forbidden to bring on-site: explosives, benzene, hydrofluoric acid, radioactive substances… “Do you check every vehicle daily for those materials?” he asked. The granite face scowled and asked whether he was carrying any firearms. “Would you expect anyone to say ‘yes’ to that question?” Nathaniel retorted. Realizing that empathy had been imagined, he flashed his badge across the reader and the gate opened.

At the main building Nathaniel yanked open the lobby doors to see that someone had posted a big Hollywood calendar on one of the columns, the kind whose leaves fall off one by one to ever-so-gracefully mark the passage of time. It showed the number of days to ignition, six months’ worth. A photo of Bill Balustradi’s bearded, smiling face was taped up beneath it, but no smile crossed Machuzak’s lips as he tore off the day they had left behind.

He took two steps at a time up to the third floor to find he’d beaten both director and secretary. For a few minutes he paced, the elevator doors opened and Lise stepped into the foyer, irradiating the space. Lise might have been one of the German beer maids painted on the walls at Scholz’s: tall, buxom, boisterous and fabulously blond. Her Teutonic efficiency was no less authentic and before she sat down the coffee was brewing. “They’re expecting you, Mac,” she said with her radiantly lipsticked smile. “Leonard and Mr. Garrett will any moment be here.”

They showed half an hour later. When The Chairman stepped out of the elevator and saw Nathaniel pacing before him, he beamed like he’d eaten the canary, but when he perceived the physicist’s expression, something closer to fright seized him. “This way, Mac,” he said, ushering him after Leonard into the octagon. For an instant Nathaniel felt in free fall as he gazed through the floor-to-ceiling glass wall overlooking the atrium. Garrett closed the blinds and sat down at the conference table. “What’ll it be, Mac?” he said gravely.

“I’ll do it—,” said Nathaniel.

Garrett slapped his hand on the table. “I knew we could count on you.”

“I have conditions.”

“Name them,” said Leonard from his wheelchair as Garrett sobered again.

Nathaniel turned first to The Chairman. “Two months, as promised.”

Garrett crossed himself.

“Cell-phone wiping and email blocking shall cease.”

“I didn’t authorize that,” Garrett and Rasmussen responded simultaneously.

Now Machuzak faced Leonard and leveled his gaze to the great man’s eyes. “That I don’t answer to you, Leonard, to Richard or to Krieg-Zuber. That I’m director and you are not my shadow.”

The older man nodded softly, with difficulty. “As you wish, Nathaniel. I trust you will not be above taking advice.”

“A wise man once told me that an adult is someone willing to take advice—even when it’s the right thing to do.”

Both Leonard and The Chairman smiled. “Your first directive, sir?”

“My first question: Have you spoken to Moravec since yesterday?”

The Chairman nodded, shook his head. “I didn’t see any slippage. Whatever he is gives me icicles. That guy could eat the devil with his horns on.”

“Then let’s get the division heads together, right away. And get me an appointment with Moravec, now.”

* * * *

The meeting began well. With Leonard and The Chairman flanking him, Machuzak stood at the head of the table before the ASSET letters and told the dozen people gathered there that an hour ago he’d taken the job of acting director. To his surprise, applause greeted him all around. For an instant he stared blankly as the words “You people don’t know it, but the machine’s been sabotaged” verged on escaping his lips. He blinked and said, “Thank you. Now let’s get to work.”

He announced triple shifts, seven days a week with overtime. “Fred, organize them today, and take the beast apart.”

“Will do, sir,” Fred saluted.

The division heads took the announcement of twenty-four/seven operations without grumbling more than a roomful of freshmen. When Machuzak declared that they’d meet daily at 8:00 a.m., beginning tomorrow, they grumbled more. Abbuhl mentioned that rain had leaked into pentagon unit 4, shorting out some components. At that, Tom Kettering, boots propped up, put in that even with the recycling plant going full blast, an ignition campaign meant they’d have to import extra tritium from Savannah River. “Do it now,” Machuzak replied and caught Kettering off guard. Diana Cochran reported that a nitrogen shipment scheduled for the morning would be delayed because the tractor-trailer had jackknifed on the way to CFRC. Her factual remark sent Thaddeus Hasschler into orbit, roaring that he couldn’t work surrounded by such incompetents and that they might as well give up now.

A shouting match erupted before his eyes and Nathaniel remembered the Austin lab’s push to build ASSET’s predecessor, AUSTOR. After a cutthroat competition, ANFRL had killed General Atomics and Oak Ridge for a $700 million government contract on the basis of a deadline. The staff worked like madmen to beat it. More dead than alive they got their “first plasma” at one minute to. “Pink glow,” it’s sometimes called—the tokamak lights up like a neon sign. For $700 million they’d built a fucking neon sign. Then they stripped it down and started over.

Now we will do it again, for ten billion dollars.

As Hasschler and Cochran railed at each other, the sensation that had gripped him since yesterday tightened: These people are shards of personality, I know nothing of them—nothing. Jesus, stop. Looking up from his wrist he raised his hand and read aloud the morning release from ITER: director Pierre Jules César Balard had ordered a review of their DD timetable. ITER had planned to use the low-yield deuterium-deuterium reaction for several years before switching to the high-octane deuterium-tritium mix. The news release could mean only: That was going to change.

As the room fell silent, Machuzak walked over to Hasschler, put his arm around his shoulder and asked if since yesterday he’d gotten a team together to begin planning the experiments. Glancing at the list Hasschler handed him, Nathaniel told him to add Toshi Matsushima and Slava Archangelsky. Thad balked; neither would agree. Machuzak met his sullen stare and assured him they would.

He adjourned the meeting then, asking Fred Abbuhl to stay behind. When the two of them were finally alone he whispered, “Check everything, Fred, and I mean everything in the biblical sense.”

“Sir,” Abbuhl saluted.

“And Fred, how is the mood today?”

“Everyone’s still in shock, of course. It’s only been twenty-four hours since Moravec’s ultimatum. We’ll live without The Terminator at the helm, if that’s what you mean.”

“I suppose we will.”

Fred said he’d get the machine up to atmosphere at once and disappeared. As Machuzak opened the door, Theresa Rasmussen, walking from her husband’s office, caught sight of him and stepped into the conference room. “The whole thing is terrible, isn’t it, Mac?” she offered, touching his arm. “This ignition deadline. It seems so impossible… And Cyrus…” She lapsed into a momentary silence, then said as if somewhere else, “Il n’y a pas de morts. That was Maeterlinck, wasn’t it.” And that was Theresa’s signature habit. She’d sometimes leave off a conversation but continue the dialogue internally with herself. When she surfaced, leagues away, those stranded ashore were more than a little bewildered about how she’d gotten there. “Leonard says he invited you to dinner, Director sir. Why not tomorrow, if you can spare a few hours?”

How infinitely far tomorrow seemed from the now. “That would be nice. I’ll do my best.”

Theresa squeezed his hand and continued on her way.

Once again Nathaniel made ready to depart, but just then the big screen blinked on. He half expected to see Moravec, laughing, but no, it was the white-swathed Cyrus Krieg-Zuber, broadcasting again from his hospital bed. Machuzak involuntarily stiffened.

“So, Mac, old boy,” the sick man said, “you have your revenge. Very clever becoming director, as temporary as that will prove to be.”

“You were listening?”

Krieg-Zuber didn’t reply.

“Big Brother had nothing on the average twenty-first-century consumer. What do you want?”

“Merely to advise you, I intend to step in when the doctors permit and you’d be wise not to attempt anything I would not authorize.”

“What would that be? More jamming? More firings because someone has sent mail you disapprove of? More exiles to remove people whose ideas you’ve filched?”

Krieg-Zuber smiled wearily and benevolently. “Put aside ancient quarrels, Mac, old boy. The fate of the Mission is at stake. We require iron discipline from the troops. Have a punch clock installed—”

Machuzak cut him off. “Shut up, Cy. I’m not listening. The stress on the crew during the insanity that got us into this fix was unbelievable and is going to get worse. Morale is what needs to be in fighting form. As of today your measures are going to cease. Why do you want a punch clock anyway? You already monitor entrances and exits to time lunch breaks. Why all that skullduggery the other night surprised me, I don’t know. Maybe you think everyone around here is so desperate to hang on to their jobs that they’ll put up with anything, or that they’ve forgotten ol’ Ben—those who give up essential liberty for security deserve neither liberty nor security. I haven’t forgotten, Cyrus.”

“This is your problem, Machuzak,” Krieg-Zuber answered, weakly raising a finger. “We are engaged in a great struggle for survival, the Manhattan Project for energy, and you think we are at a decadent university. The Manhattan Project—the most successful scientific endeavor in history. Secret, secure and aimed at one goal alone. No loafers permitted, old boy, no hobbyists.”

Machuzak pondered the slightly older man hovering larger than life above him. One of them was fighting the wrong war, in the wrong century. “The odds are that in six months this lab will cease to exist,” he eventually said, “but we’ll go down as a scientific laboratory, that I swear on my grave—and yours.”

“You have never understood what we are about, old boy. Admit it, you are a second-rate hack who confines himself to problems of no significance.”

“True, I have never understood what your lab was about,” Nathaniel returned, suddenly losing his anger, “but if you, Cy, ever knew what science is about, you forgot long ago. And take it from me, being second-rate is a notch above being third-rate. There’s only one thing I want to know from you: did you feel dizzy in the surge room?”

Caught off guard, Krieg-Zuber merely replied, “Uh, yes. How did you know?”

“I didn’t. Now, either recognize the fact that I’m in charge or die. I don’t care which. Good-bye.”

Once more about to leave, Machuzak turned when he heard a lone pair of hands applauding behind him. Slava, having snuck in, sat in the corner. “‘I perceive you now, beginning of high and turbulent days.’ It’s about time you put that motherfucker in his place.”

“What are you doing here?”

Slava put his finger to his lips, motioned Mac into the corridor. “Heard you accepted inevitable. Instructions, Boss?”

“Get on Hasschler’s team and start planning experiments.”

“That’s not what I meant. I felt dizzy in surge room too. What were you talking about?”

“Meet me at my lab, late.”

He left Slava standing in the corridor alone and stopped in Lise’s office, two steps away. Moravec in Copenhagen was, but agreed to meet him in three days. Set it up. He declined her offer of a spare office up here, near Leonard’s, and disappeared down the stairwell. At the security office he informed Henderson that they were moving to triple shifts and needed to bring on a new security guard. The chief readily agreed. Machuzak said he had a qualified candidate in mind and he’d send her around ASAP.

Another thing: Did Henderson know where The Terminator had installed the phone jammer? John took him into a back room and pointed to the equipment. Machuzak yanked the plug. What about wiping software and email blocking? Henderson shrugged. Well, we’ll know if it doesn’t stay turned off. At that moment Machuzak noticed in the corner a fiber-optics junction box that serviced the lab. Somebody had installed a simple splitter on the cable, a splitter that bled off every byte of Internet traffic into or out of CFRC.

“Where does this go?” Machuzak asked severely, vividly seeing the advisory on his computer screen.

“To my computer.” Henderson shrugged. “Don’t know where else.”

Machuzak knelt to disconnect the splitter, halted and stood up. “Let’s leave it.”

One more thing. He was assigning Lipman and a few others to write up the accident report. They’d need the access records for the past days. Without further prompting, Henderson sat himself at a terminal and brought up the week’s records.

Nathaniel nodded. He’d foreseen the dozens if not hundreds of entrances to the nb supply area. Lipman, Faberman…half the technicians at the lab. Himself. What’s more, the system was an electronic sieve. If anyone tailgates, like Slava and D’Abro last night, that one is invisible. When Nathaniel arrived ten years ago, Henderson himself asked what areas he needed access to and programmed him in then and there.

Ten minutes after Henderson handed him hard copies, Nathaniel authorized Lipman to enlist two others to write the report and ten minutes after that he was on the phone with D’Abro, telling her to get her ass down to CFRC.

CHAPTER TEN

T. J. D’Abro arrived two hours later and smiled slyly at Machuzak’s unintentional snap of his head. Jettisoned were yesterday’s stylish accoutrements and beauty-queen persona. Overnight she’d transformed herself into an Austin slacker, an authentic biker chick arrayed from top to bottom in leather and studs. Only the swath of green hair identified her as the same woman he’d met at Scholz’s. No, after barely taking his extended hand, distraction seized her and she swooped in on the infernal bird, then followed her curious nose toward the other lobby exhibits.

Machuzak watched, wishing to touch her naïveté. Nevermore. She lacks his sense of premature obsolescence. She does not know that what the exhibitors have forgotten to reveal is that many of the projects on display were long ago canceled, never built or never will be. With the rise and fall of our endeavor, the vagaries of our fortunes, the precariousness of our survival, no one thinks to remove what has been lost, to erase the future, which is already past.

“Director, sir,” she said, saluting, “T. J. D’Abro reporting for duty.”

With a glance at two nearby technicians shouldering an electrical ladder and cable, Nathaniel said, “Come,” and introduced her to Henderson, who welcomed her aboard. “At the lab, security means equipment more than intruders,” he informed her. “You’ll be checkin that the cooling systems are on. Has water flooded a laboratory? That sort of thing.” Right, D’Abro glanced at Machuzak. “You’ll need to take a basic safety test to get badged, and a short radiation course to be cleared for the machine area.”

“Will do,” D’Abro said and Machuzak left her to her studies, reminding her that the word when fighting a fire is PASS: Pull the plug, Aim the nozzle, Squeeze the trigger, Swing the extinguisher.

“Wouldn’t PISS be more like it?” she replied and he told her to come to his lab when the day was done.

* * * *

After twilight, D’Abro appeared at the Materials Test Facility in Alpha Site, bitching that one required GPS to navigate CFRC.

“A test,” Machuzak replied dryly, looking up from his desk, which sat to one side of a cluttered laboratory dominated by a big metal cylinder two meters long. D’Abro wrinkled her nose at an oily smell permeating the space and cocked her head at a persistent clacking that reminded her of an antique gasoline lawn mower. The physicist paid no attention any of it and instead asked, “How did yours go—the tests, I mean?”

“PASSed with flying colors,” she smiled. “I memorized the emergency phone numbers, so I aced the safety test, and the radiation course is all ALARA—As Low As Reasonably Attainable—or is that Achievable? Damn, what were those phone numbers?” She lifted a copy of the Bhagavad Gita amidst the piles of technical papers on the scientist’s desk, put it down. “Where are we, Doc?”

Nathaniel got to his feet, peered into the corridor and locked the door. “I don’t know,” he said. “We do know ITER will be pulling something soon… I’ve ordered triple shifts…” He shook his head to himself, baffled, disgusted and walked over to a workbench where he’d spread out some hard copies. “I also got the access records, everyone who was down in the nb supply area for the past two weeks. I don’t see anything funny. Every name’s authorized, no one vanished into thin air.”

“I meant, where are we—this place?” D’Abro said, craning her head as she joined him at the bench.

“The covert op was your idea, Bedbug,” he said, for the first time noting her blue CFRC uniform. “This is the Materials Test Facility. There’s no traffic here except for my two colleagues who like half the lab have disappeared since the accident.”

Standing beside him, D’Abro ran her finger down the records. “Slava and I tailgated on your badge last night, didn’t we?” she remarked. “I know, this ain’t Los Alamos.” She pointed out Machuzak and Slava’s names several times, most recently three days ago. “We were down there a lot second shift, checking out equipment. Deadlines, you know… Everyone on this list had good reasons to be in the dungeons.”

“Doc, just because the badges were there doesn’t mean the names attached to the badges were there. Tell your techs to interview these people for the accident report and find out what bodies were there.” There’d be nearly a hundred, Nathaniel thought. The detective sighed. “Okay, let’s check the surveillance videos. Where are the cameras positioned?”

With a puzzlement that lay between real and feigned, Machuzak glanced around the space. “You see any? There are a couple in the main lobby, a few at the pentagon entrances and every centimeter in the tritium vault. I doubt there are any at all in the power areas. Who’d walk off with an ignitron?”

“Somebody sabotaged Prometheus, Doc. All right, Henderson’ll show me. Motion detectors?”

Now Machuzak choked. “You really are kidding. The only thing that’s ever been stolen from this lab were some radiation badges by a group of Korean tourists who wanted souvenirs.”

“Okay,” D’Abro sighed in an exasperation that equaled Machuzak’s own. “That leaves the fingerprints.” Henderson had already walked her through the new system and all she needed was time alone. “I’ll wait on the DNA. Bein that I’m no longer official, it may take some strings… The problem is, Doc, your system is so leaky, there’s hardly any evidence to believe that anyone was down there.”

Even as Machuzak wondered whether he’d torpedoed this investigation from the start by recruiting a neophyte detective on indefinite sabbatical, D’Abro got to her feet and began to wander around the lab, peering at the tarnished gas cylinders shoved to the room’s perimeter, turning from one thing to another with abrupt, sharp movements. She reminded Nathaniel of a bird, perhaps the firebird herself.

D’Abro stopped before a map taped to one of the gray storage cabinets. It appeared to be the United States—sort of. The coasts had federated with Canada, the Southwest had allied with Mexico, the Midwest was a religious autocracy, Texas a born-again republic. The legend read, “Post-Civil War 2.0.” D’Abro about laughed, but the laugh stuck in her throat. Texas had been negotiating with the feds for autonomy.

“One reason Rasmussen created the consortium here,” Machuzak said, this time as if reading her mind, “is that it’s the most powerful state. Fusion won’t stop the country from splitting up, but with the climate changing, people worldwide are migrating, fighting over resources. If they were more equitably distributed, conflict would go way down.”

“Hmm,” was D’Abro’s only reply, then she swiveled around to the big test chamber in the room’s center, which stood on a stainless-steel stand reaching to her shoulders.

Nathaniel didn’t wait. “Basically, all this stuff is to test materials under bombardment of a plasma,” he said, running his hand over the two-meter-long cylinder. “In a tokamak you’ve got particles at four hundred million degrees slamming into the walls. In a commercial reactor the plasma is producing so much heat that it’s approaching the power radiated by every square meter of the sun. That’s the environment we’re creating. You better damn well know how the walls react, what materials can survive and how to cool them. Believe it or not, the problem has been constantly avoided and remains unsolved. No one is sure how long ITER—or ASSET—will last under real conditions. What we do here is important.”

D’Abro nodded pensively, thinking that her physicist was trying hard to convince himself. “Wouldn’t you have more fun goin to a football game?” she asked, maybe half joking. D’Abro didn’t wait for a reply, glanced at her wrist screen and said, “What this?” pointing to a little hooded flame that had been rigged up on the side of the big cylinder.

“That?” he snorted. “That, Bedbug, is my concession to the environmentalists. My still. People are afraid of what goes on here”—D’Abro flinched uncomfortably at the gaze he leveled at her—“so instead of venting all the deuterium gas after I run it through the chamber, I burn it in this here distillation tube like the flames you see at oil refineries. It makes heavy water. Sometimes we give batches to local labs. Some oddballs still use it for cold fusion experiments. Mostly,” he said, pointing to the tube running through a little hole he’d made in the wall, “I just let it drain outside.”

D’Abro opened the small spigot and gave it a taste. “A little flat,” she said, flashing her smile. A pause and then, “You know, you’re a strange fellow.”

“How so?” replied Machuzak, puzzled. She was staring at him almost angrily now, and he hadn’t the faintest idea why.

“I just can’t figure you out,” she said with visible, audible frustration. “You dress casual, on the surface no one would call you pretentious. But there’s somethin real internal about you—”

“I suppose so,” Nathaniel conceded. “The life of the mind is internal.”

“You got the Bhagavad Gita on your desk like some damned philosopher,” she went on heedless, voice sharply rising, “and when you start explainin this stuff you can’t help soundin superior, like your shit’s a different color up—”

D’Abro’s sudden hostility left Machuzak stunned, but today, this moment, he felt no urge to respond in kind. “Bedbug, I’m not going to defend myself to you. God knows we’re not track stars around here and we’re sure not as glamorous as movie stars, but damnit, we are scientists. We’re athletes of the mind. What we’re good at, on a fair day, is thinking. If you ask me a scientific question, you’re going to get the best answer this scientist can give you. I don’t know who you think builds tokamaks or solar cells, but it sure as hell ain’t Madame Sosostris down at the local tarot parlor.”

“Sorry,” D’Abro apologized suddenly and looked away, bit her nail.

“Remember,” said Machuzak, cocking his head, “we’re all greenhorns here.”

A brief silence ensued, but D’Abro’s flash of bitterness had spent itself as quickly as it had flared. “Sorry,” she repeated, lowering her head contritely, “I guess I’ve always been pissed off that I never became a scientist—or anything else. I can’t do math and I can’t stick.”

“You aren’t alone,” Machuzak answered sympathetically. The disease was endemic by now. Online life had decimated concentration to the extent that almost no one had the skills to do research.

“As it stands,” D’Abro went on with the barest hint of a smile, “I’m sort of a physics groupie.”

At that Nathaniel stared with openmouthed disbelief. Movie stars had groupies, rock stars… Physicists? Dream on.

“It’s true,” she said, now visibly blushing. T. J. D’Abro then revealed herself to be a born-and-bred Austinite, daddy a bona fide oilman. She’d naturally gone to UT, The University, which Nathaniel had guessed at Scholz’s from the ring girdling her finger. “I tried reading a few books about string theory and a couple about physics and synchronicity, but never got too clear on the connection, ya know. I just didn’t know what I was good for. Detective work sort of interested me for a while. It’s not too different from science, don’t you think? We’re both trying to find the answer.”

“Yes,” reflected Machuzak, “but in science you aren’t always presented with the question.” By now he was truly convinced of a broad provincialism blanketing D’Abro’s entire outlook. “Tell me, Bedbug,” he asked her, “have you ever left the republic?” Many Texans hadn’t.

She nodded shyly. “I spent a year in England.”

“Ah,” said Nathaniel. “Durham Cathedral. Why England? Seems unlikely for a gal like you.”

“Unlikely for sure, but the Rhodes people thought to give me a scholarship, so I went to Oxford… I know what you’re thinking.”

“No, you don’t,” he said even as he shut his gaping mouth. “And I’ve already gotten tired of your mind-reading.”

“Sorry, it’s a bad habit… Hell, I wasn’t even sure where Oxford was. I applied for that Rhodes on a lark and was damn sure there’d been a big mix-up when I got it. But, Doc, I never really got into the dang City of Spires. Swilled beer on Tuesdays at the King’s Arms, didn’t do much else, never finished my scholarship, came back to Austin after a year. England’s sort of a luke country, ya know, luke weather, luke food, luke people…”

As far as Machuzak could make out from her circumspect, even embarrassed account, D’Abro knocked about for several years, sneezing in an archaeological lab or living high on Daddy’s credit card, then somewhere in her jumbled odyssey she met a UT professor who taught forensic anthropology and ended up auditing the course. That’s when she decided to try detective work. “But I still don’t know what I’m good for.”

“Is that why you quit yesterday?”

She nodded, almost sheepishly. “It’s more than that, Doc. I look around this lab—it’s so…unreal. I mean, it’s not on a screen, ya know? You guys actually build things, tighten bolts. How does having five thousand friends help you learn to do that?”

“It doesn’t,” Machuzak replied honestly. “It doesn’t.” The young woman seemed genuinely afraid, afraid of the world she was living in, afraid of the world she’d today entered. For a moment he almost felt sorry for her.

“Well,” she said, checking her networking site, “it’s already late. I’d like to see the tomahawk area again. Maybe we can figure out how someone can get down there undetected, if that’s what happened.”

Machuzak nodded. Fred Abbuhl was still organizing the triple shifts and the machine area should be clear. They set off. As they walked across the fields toward the pentagon, D’Abro unexpectedly asked, “What’s between you and Krieg-Zuber?”

“What do you mean?”

“To be honest, Doc, you and Slava don’t exactly show a lot of commiseration when his name comes up. ‘Cyrus the Great.’ ‘Terminator.’ What happened?”

“Let’s just say I came to this lab to do science.”

They gained the pentagon and he was about to badge them in when D’Abro stayed his hand and flashed her own badge across the reader. Entering, she said, “You’ll tell me some other time.”

“Yeah.” At the door to the tokamak bay, Machuzak took out the safety key from the interlock, as he had last night, and pocketed it.

This time D’Abro asked.

“Another puzzle. To gain entry to the test cell you need to remove one of these keys from the interlock. It’s not that they allow you in. Once you remove the key, the machine can’t operate. Not to mention all the backup switches that shut down Prometheus should a door so much as jiggle. ASSET couldn’t have even begun to function if anyone was in the vicinity at the time.”

“Hate to tell you, Doc, but nothin we know at the moment, which ain’t much, indicates that anyone was down there.”

The heavy door swung open and once more they faced Prometheus. Already Abbuhl has begun the disassembly and a few giant parts lie scattered around the floor. Once more the sight of the colossus silences D’Abro, but Nathaniel knows what the place will look like in the coming weeks and he turns to the stairwell leading down to the neutral beam power area.

Halfway to the underbelly he realized she was not with him. “D’Abro!” he called. No answer. He climbed up the stairs but didn’t see her. “D’Abro!” he called again.

He walked toward the tokamak, noticing now that one of the access ports had been opened during the day. Then he jogged, fearing the worst. He ducked through the port, making his way through the great cryostat toward the torus itself. Between two giant magnet coils a pair of legs stretched out toward him. “D’Abro!” His cry echoed in the tank, but—no answer. Moving forward he saw that the detective’s head lay at an inner port and that she was unconscious.

“T. J!” he shouted, nearly passing out himself. He fell against the cryostat floor, shook his head, forcing himself not to breathe. With a desperate pull, he got her loose and dragged her out to the main floor. After a few slaps on her back, she sputtered to life.

“Whew,” she said. “What hit me?”

“Are you out of your fucking mind!” Machuzak shouted, glancing at a poster, A BEATING HEART IS A SAFE HEART. “This is no goddamned amusement park! That machine was filled with nitrogen gas. Jesus, you’re lucky to be alive.”

“Nitrogen?” was all she said. “Why?”

“Why?” Machuzak could hardly believe it and pointed to a “Confined Space” warning. “To kill idiots like you… To keep the machine clean, for Chrissake… They’ve opened it up today…”

A few minutes passed before they recovered legs and sanity. Brushing herself off, D’Abro said meekly, “I’m sorry, sir; it won’t happen again.”

“If it does, you’ll be dead.”

D’Abro’s expression showed that she wanted to make amends, but Machuzak’s cold fury left her at a loss. Finally she said softly, “Thanks, Mac. You saved my life.”

“You’re welcome, T. J.,” he replied, nothing else coming to mind.

They walked back toward the Materials Test Facility in silence. “You know, it’s the first time you’ve called me T. J.,” she said.

“No, I called you T. J. when you were knocked out in the machine, but probably you didn’t hear me.”

“I guess I didn’t.” She smiled and held out her hand.

Before he could take it, Slava emerged from the MTF, wanting to know where they’d been. Machuzak didn’t reply, waved the two toward the building, but Slava shook his head and suggested they meet on Sixth Street instead. Agreed. As Machuzak drove into town, he remained unsettled by D’Abro’s harebrained misadventure, but it might have proved useful. They still had no better idea of who had spiked the machine or why, but at the end of this day, again fighting off the urge to sleep, he become convinced he knew why Krieg-Zuber had nearly met his maker.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

By the time they converged on Sixth Street, it was well into the a.m. The music, focused by hard walls and deep enclosures, shot laserlike onto the streets. When they opened the door to Maggie Mae’s and dissolved in sound, they searched farther for a safe haven. The trio walked a block or two past the massage parlors, bearded cowboys, studs and leather, tongue rattles and nose rings. “If it protrudes, I’ll pierce it,” the sign flashed. T. J., again in her biker duds, urged Slava to yield to an earring; he declined, pushing on through the throngs of fourth-generation hippies and automutilators. He stumbled against the eight-hundred-pound gorilla, accoutered in red hat and tie, looked up to see the birdman proffering his echnicolor assortment of parrots, macaws and cockatoos. Behind him the dwarfish paraplegic draped in a KKK shroud sat high in her hydraulic wheelchair, embroidering.

Austin’s archaeology normally cheered him, but Nathaniel frowned when a Bible thumper, dressed nattily in a gray suit and tie, thrust a tract into his hand. “As it is written, there is none righteous, no, not one.” The three pushed on harder but could not avoid the reconquistas, demanding the formal receding of the Southwest to Mexico. Nor could they shun the hordes of the destitute lining up outside the Medecins sans Frontiers emergency clinic or the echo of a well-known dance club, where young customers sat in silent rows, plugged in and staring blankly. At last they holed up at the Driskill, the once grand, then dilapidated, then re-grand hotel marking the end of the amusement district.

Nathaniel began without prologue under the stare of a giant steer head above the fireplace. “Slava, when we went down to find Zuber, did you notice anything unusual?”

“You’re talking about dizziness, not Terminator lying unconscious on the floor? Yes, I said so this afternoon. I thought it was nausea.”

“So did I. But I had the same sensation an hour ago when I went into the tokamak after D’Abro.”

“Are you sure it wasn’t nausea again?” T. J. asked, smiling faintly. Even on Sixth Street, she’d been unusually reticent, chastened.

Chastened or not, it was exactly the wrong thing to say. “If that had been a pure nitrogen atmosphere, you would have been dead within one breath.” The physicist snapped his fingers. “One. You were lucky it was just residual gas that hadn’t been purged. A visiting Japanese scientist pulled the same stunt once and bought it.”

“I’m sorry,” she said with the same reserve, “I’ve already apologized.”

Machuzak sighed. “No, I’m sorry. One shouldn’t tally these things. One should just do what is right and forget the rest…” The two glanced at each other with determined smiles and he turned again to Slava. “Is it possible that the surge room was filled with gas? For all his excitement, the bastard doesn’t seem to have tried anything. Suppose there was nitrogen down there, he got dizzy, backed into a capacitor.”

“It’s conceivable,” Archangelsky agreed. After deuterium, nitrogen was probably the most common substance at the lab. They used it everywhere: liquid nitrogen surrounded liquid helium coolant as an insulator. If the machine went down for maintenance, they usually filled it with nitrogen until technicians or ex-detectives needed to enter. “Perhaps sulfur hexafluoride,” Slava speculated. SF_6, an inert insulating gas, prevented electrical arcing between high-voltage components. The ancient switches in the surge rooms were filled with it. SF_6, six times heavier than air, would have sunk to the floor where they were administering CPR, but neither of them recollected sounding like Darth Vader.

A glass of cognac, two of wine arrived. T. J. lifted hers and said quietly, “Seems to me y’all tryin to make this more complicated. Ya know, cops have an expression: ‘If it looks like a horse and has hooves like a horse, then it’s probably not a zebra.’ Police version of Ockham’s razor.”

“Bedbug, who sees vast conspiracies everywhere, talks about complications,” Machuzak said. “I did not imagine my dizziness, neither did Slava… You know, Bedbug, in science you may proceed by logic but you begin with a hunch. The access sheets don’t seem promising. Is there any way we could detect nitrogen or SF_6 in the surge room?”

“Two, three days after the event?” Slava wrinkled his nose, downing his cognac. “This is unlikely.”

In an enclosed area it might be barely possible, Nathaniel suggested. If not, could there be any reaction between nitrogen or SF_6 and the components down there that might have left a trace?

Archangelsky shook his head and ordered another cognac. Nitrogen was not highly reactive; SF_6 not at all.

“Too bad Cy didn’t die—then we could exhume the body.”

In spite of herself, T. J. spit out her wine and put a hand to her mouth while the guests at the next sofa threw a merry glance their way. At that moment Nathaniel was acutely aware of her physical presence, her sparkling eyes, which might have been filled with stage glitter. She looked at him over her hand, lowered it the slightest amount and bit the knuckle of her forefinger.

Changing course, Nathaniel recounted his conversation with Krieg-Zuber that afternoon. “I don’t know how long he’s going to be out of commission, but…” He trailed off, shaking his head. “You don’t need to be Cassandra to see that when he gets back on his feet…”

“I thought you didn’t want to be director,” responded T. J.

“Only a madman would, but Krieg-Zuber has always run the lab day to day, more so since Rasmussen fell ill. He led the push to cancel everything but ASSET. You’d think a lab was a place for investigation, but no. ‘Our Mission, old boy, is to drop ten bombs into the same hole, as the general said.’”

“This is true,” added Slava, downing a second glass as the waitress handed it to him. He was beginning to show effects. “Pompous ass has done everything to change lab from scientific organization to military-industrial complex. Remember day when he puffs up chest and announces that everything but Prometheus is canceled? I tell him: this is science, you do not explore alternatives? Someday your tokamak will look like elephant. Other machines will prove better. Other countries will build them. Worst thing you can do is lock yourself into this design, I told him. That is risk we are prepared to take, it is best bet. Fuck you, I said.”

“My, my,” T. J. smiled wanly, “have I fallen into a scientific laboratory or a pit of vipers?”

“You see, T. J.,” said Nathaniel, “movie stars may fight over publicity; we fight over immortality. Slava is right, Zuber’s gotten rid of everybody who’s ever had an idea he couldn’t steal—”

“Four years ago he started going pazzo,” Archangelsky interrupted, drilling a finger into his temple. ‘Into whose hard hat were the alleged feces defecated?’ There is no way we could let him be director again. Time was perfect—”

“So that’s it!” exclaimed Machuzak, rising fully to his feet. Suddenly he understood the chain of events. “Y–you had me appointed.”

Slava lifted his hands in feigned surprise. “Brother, I am not so powerful to do anything.”

Amazement at how fast Archangelsky acted is one hundred percent. “You must have talked to Garrett within hours after we discovered the busbar.”

Slava raised his glass in a salute, which only prompted Machuzak to raise his fist to strike him. T. J. looked on in genuine alarm until Machuzak sighed and lowered his hand, chuckling. “Well, somebody needed to take this on.”

“Thank you,” was all that Slava said and Nathaniel sat.

D’Abro puckered her lips, considering all she’d heard. Her discomfort, which Machuzak had taken for penitence, had become more evident with each word of the conversation. “I need to ask…” she said, deciding. “What were you two doing down in the power supplies? You guys are PhDs and all, but surge rooms are engineers’ territory.”

After a glance between them, Slava talked. “You think you are at a fabulous installation, rich and gleaming, but after we became ‘dedicated lab’ everyone became multifunctional. Last days were nuts getting ready for so-called commissioning. And physicists do talk to engineers, you know. It is good to know experiments can run.”

D’Abro cast an unsatisfied look at Machuzak, but when he frowned, her expression immediately dissolved into one more contrite. She did not comprehend much about this strange place and its inhabitants, but the man sitting opposite her had this morning, largely at her behest, taken on an impossible task. And two hours ago he’d risked his life to save hers. “Where do we go from here?” she said.

Machuzak’s wrist prodded him. “Huh? The Real World is calling.”

D’Abro sat upright, puzzled. “You guys have avatars?”

“We sometimes hold meetings there.” Machuzak told Slava to log on.

A moment later the pair was standing on the rim of an erupting volcano facing a genuine fire-breathing dragon, complete with scaly wings and flaring nostrils. When the monster spied the two avatars facing him, he took flight and headed out over an expansive sea, whose surface shifted from a dark opalescence riven with flashing tongues of red, to a gleaming diamond lattice, to a golden fretwork studded with varicolored gems. Machuzak and Archangelsky were after him. It was a strange duo, a winged horse and a furry black hat with chicken legs and beady eyes.

Nathaniel and Slava followed the dragon until it suddenly dove toward an island and alighted on the plaza of a grand conference center; then before the physicists’ eyes it morphed into a huge armadillo, which scurried under the eaves of the wood and stone complex built in Japanese-Karelian style. Machuzak and Archangelsky likewise set down and rushed into the center. The avatars glanced at each other even as their owners did in the Driskill lounge; both had been to ITER’s Real World conference center before.

At a meeting under way, colleagues, mostly in human form with nametags, milled about the lobby. The sudden appearance of Machuzak’s horse and Archangelsky’s hat, racing through the hall, interrogating everyone with whom they collided about whether they’d just seen a dragon or a giant armadillo, drew raised eyebrows but no answers. The two sped through lecture halls, lounges, bars purveying virtual alcohol; their quarry eluded them.

At last one of Slava’s Russian colleagues said that he’d seen an armadillo scamper into the video parlor. The winged horse and chicken-footed hat ran in to see find a number of avatars heatedly arguing—what to do about CFRC?—but no armadillo was in sight. As Pegasus and Hat nervously circled the room, their alter egos at the Driskill carefully recited aloud the names of everyone present. D’Abro had thought to log on to ITER’s website and was simultaneously checking the online personnel list; all were genuine ITER physicists.

The pair searched further. A minute later, on a broad terrace overlooking the sea, they glimpsed the armadillo rounding a corner. Machuzak went directly after it, while Archangelsky cut through the nearest room and emerged on the other side. They’d trapped the beast. Pegasus and Hat pounced on the animal, which stood as tall as they did, but it promptly blinked out of existence. The avatars got to their feet, puzzled. On the ground lay a large chess piece. Hat picked it up: a queen with a shot glass for a crown.

“What’s that?” asked Nathaniel.

“A trophy from a visit I made to ITER,” said Slava. “We had little chess tournament—you take the shot of vodka before each move. I won.” D’Abro wrinkled her nose at the strange form of Russian roulette while Slava paused, continued. “Not many people were there. Armadillo was.”

“Sure sounds like an invitation to me,” T. J. whistled and peered closely at Machuzak. “You don’t think ITER’s in on your problem?”

Nathaniel ran his tongue over his lips. “I think you two deserve a vacation in Provence. Be on a plane in the morning—if you can, tonight.”

“Not bad idea,” said Slava, considering.

“I’ve never been there,” said T. J., getting up. “I’ll need to check whether my passport’s expired…”

Machuzak shook his head sadly. “A person should always carry two things in this world: a valid passport and a sweater.”

“You’re not comin, Doc?” she blushed.

Again he shook his head. “I need to sit down with Moravec.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

By eight the next morning, Slava and T. J. were at Bergstrom scrambling for a flight to Houston, and an hour later they were searching at Houston for a flight toward Marseilles. Archangelsky’s skeletal plan was no more than to surprise the dragon and learn the meaning of its prophecy.

“Let’s hope it doesn’t turn out to be a wild-armadillo chase,” remarked D’Abro, who sometime after having stowed her sweater and jacket, accepted a beer from the flight attendant. Slava only tugged at his beard, bought a new supply of cognac and the two settled back for the long leg to Europe.

“I don’t think I’ve ever known a Russian, Dr. Archangelsky,” T. J. offered, mutilating his name as always. “I’ll get that right sooner or later. What part are you from?”

“Why don’t you just call me Slava; it’s easier. I grew up in Moscow, the Big Onion, but that was a long time ago.”

“You wouldn’t go back?” she asked, sensing a certain sadness in his reply.

Yaroslav Borisovich Archangelsky shook his disheveled head. “There is nothing to go back to. For the decade after the Soviet Union collapsed, there was spasm of democracy, but the place has reverted to time-honored Russia. It is country that can’t shake off its past. But this is like all countries. In America you are so bloody individualistic, you can’t take one step in any direction—to sign climate-change treaty, initiate carbon tax. You have a right to live as you please and destroy everything else. Second Amendment.”

D’Abro let that go. Slava didn’t wear a ring but she asked anyway whether he was married or had children.

“Sometimes married,” he said after a pause, rubbing the crease on his finger. “Dostoevsky, you know, did not write out of vacuum. In Russia everything is drama. Everything. My daughter is American—well, virtual. Can’t talk face-to-face, has five billion friends she’s never met.”

Slava downed what was left of the too-small bottle, and as the United States fell away, D’Abro could see that he was staring across vast seas and into times long gone by. “You know,” he said at last without prompting, “they built tokamak at my institute, the Kurchatov, one of world’s first superconducting machines. It was before my time. They ran it precisely once.” He held up a solitary finger to D’Abro’s skeptical eyes. “Oh, tokamak worked okay, but at that moment Soviet Union slipped out of existence and liquid helium supply went with it. They sold machine to Chinese for one ruble. What was that worth then? A penny? A hundredth of cent? The Chinese ran it for long time. If Prometheus fails and ITER, they will do it. Chinese have two billion people thirsting for energy. I doubt it will be with tokamak, though.”

T. J. didn’t follow his meaning. The Russian opened another bottle.

“Tokamaks are big, complicated, expensive, prone to failure and inherently not meant for steady-state operation. You need all kinds of fixes to make them run long enough for fusion. It is inconceivable that anyone would want to use a tokamak for commercial reactor. Its cousins, stellarators, mirror machines will prove better, but at CFRC we are glued to doughnuts. This is what happens when wagon bands get rolling. Like I said to Krieg-Zuber, worst thing to do is lock yourself into one design. But whole world put twenty billions of eggs into ITER. Texas put ten billions into ASSET. Science can always progress if you have infinite amounts of money. If you don’t, you become like hammer hitting one nail.”

At this moment T. J. felt like Slava’s daughter, suppressing an urge to text the man beside her. “I didn’t really get what you were saying about Krieg-Zuber last night, that he’s been in charge. Doesn’t Rasmussen approve everything?”

Slava snorted and took another drink. “Being director of big lab does not mean you are in charge. You know Golden Rule: ‘He who has gold makes rules.’ Until he got sick, Leonard was always running around, begging for gold. When he wasn’t begging he was on plane to Korea, Japan, China. Asians treat him like master, god even. He will be remembered as father of fusion. Day to day Terminator ran lab. But he likes power more than science. A few people who love science, Nat, me, fought back.”

“Hmm,” D’Abro said, lapsing into silence again. After some time she went on. “By the way, Slava, Nat said you couldn’t have a meltdown in a tomahawk and that if I couldn’t figure out why, I should ask.” Her time limit hadn’t expired but her patience had.

“He is correct,” replied Slava, chuckling. “In fission reactor, cooling system fails, uranium becomes so hot that it destroys reactor. Meltdown. In the tokamak we need big magnetic fields to keep reaction running. Magnets fail or machine ruptures, plasma escapes, gas cools down in blink of an eye and reactions stop. Pffft. That’s all.”

“You leak out tritium into the atmosphere, though, right?”

“Nu da, but a tiny amount of tritium is no big deal. And it ain’t meltdown… You know, there is something I miss about Russia.”

“What’s that?”

“The word for clever is not an insult. I wish public would once in a while credit scientists for having some idea of what they are doing… How are you finding your first case, or whatever you call this?”

T. J. shook her head in a baffled way. She already doubted her days tracking down stolen credit cards were going to help with five million amps, tritium and tokamak sabotage. “If I ever write up a report when this is over,” T. J. said, gazing into her beer, “I can’t imagine what it will be.”

“Do what scientists do when they write budget proposals,” Slava shrugged. “Invent.”

* * * *

At Marseilles the next morning, Slava refused to wait “three hours for a bus into the mountains”; they rented a car and followed the GPS toward Cadarache, sixty kilometers northeast, home of the French Atomic Energy Commission.

“You think we’re just going to walk into a nukular establishment?”

“That is exactly what we are going to do. Surprise is best weapon.” He pronounced the last with gravity and handed her a forged ITER badge.

“Where did you get these?” she started, but Slava merely frowned.

Well before the gate, T. J. perceived that the Cadarache facility matched or exceeded CFRC in size, housing not only ITER in a huge tomblike complex, gypsum white, but an older tokamak in a smaller building, as well as a dozen fission research reactors. The facility lacked the artistic merits of CFRC’s showcase main building, but she grudgingly conceded that the Provençal hills, nearby castle and river held advantages over the scrubland of southwest Austin.

The ITER complex sat outside the security fence and D’Abro abruptly understood why Slava foresaw no serious difficulty getting past the elderly guard who turned away from a soccer match, pulled a cigarette from his lips and asked with no apparent interest the reason for their visit. They were here for the tour, Slava said, and were told where to park. At the lot, Slava handed T. J. her badge and headed toward the front entrance of the low-lying administration building. The mistral was blowing and T. J. slipped on her jacket.

The whole place had the feel and smell of a giant construction site, which was the truth of the matter, for ITER had been completed only a year or two earlier, and loose gravel still got underfoot. But granting no time for T. J. to gawk at the monumental and characterless shed that faced them, Slava headed straight for the front door and sought out Dima Sazhin.

Sazhin started at the unexpected rap on his spartan office’s door, and at catching sight of Slava, he leapt to his feet and embraced his old friend, kissing him soundly on the lips. At once the blond Dima began gesturing wildly and the two launched into an animated conversation. Sazhin appeared to be a few years younger than Slava and, disconcertedly, wearing a thick walrus moustache he reminded T. J. of Captain Kangaroo. She couldn’t follow a thing, except “Slava!” “Hell!” “business” and “vodka,” the last just as Sazhin slid open his desk drawer and poured three glasses. Without a blink Slava downed the shot; T. J. tried, failed. Then, in English: “It’s urgent.” Dima’s round face dropped into a puzzled frown.

“We’ve got trouble at CFRC,” said Slava, glancing about the office, shutting the door behind him.

“We know,” deadpanned Sazhin. “Too bad about Krieg-Zuber. What a crazy accident.”

“Dima,” Slava said, taking his arm, “it wasn’t an accident.”

Sazhin didn’t catch Slava’s meaning and continued waving. “Well, it was damned stupid going straight for ignition on opening day—but we know how these things snowball. Ceremonies, deadlines, money, deadlines, pride, deadlines…” He paused long enough to smile toothily at the beautiful stranger in his presence. “You think you have bureaucracy over there… Now we’ll pull the same stunt here just because you guys tried it—and we’ll have our own accidents.”

“Dima,” Archangelsky finally cut him off. “That’s not what I mean. I mean it wasn’t an accident.”

Sazhin peered at his compatriot, twirling his moustache. “What was it then?”

“I can’t tell, Dima, and if you breathe word to anyone, I swear to Almighty God that I’ll string you up by your eggs on Nikolsky Gate.” Dima crossed himself in the Orthodox manner. “Do you remember that little chess tournament we had when I visited about five years ago?”

Sazhin wrinkled his nose. “You flew across Atlantic to ask me about a vodka-laced chess tournament?”

“Dima, who was there? There weren’t many—five…ten…?”

“Hmm, so small event, such a long time ago. You, me, Misha Klebanov, Alessandro Marietti… Will Marlow… I can’t remember.”

“Dima, remember! Somebody who was at tournament contacted us—probably warning us not to go for ignition.”

Slava’s chum jerked his head up and smiled crookedly. “I am to be surprised at this? Half of ITER staff is ready to blow you to hell. Who do you robbers think you are, trying to steal ignition from us?”

“This is science,” Archangelsky shrugged “Open thievery. What do you expect?”

“Expect?” Dima stared with wide, then narrow eyes. “Do you have any idea of what your foolish prank has started? We were planning to spend years on low-power experiments before going for real burn, but since Monday, everyone here is determined to squash you. You don’t believe me when I tell you ITERniks must now try the same stunt. You think EU has sunk twenty billions of euros into The Way to let a bunch of cowboys show us The Way Out? You can’t understand how dangerous this situation has become.”

Dima’s anger-laden outburst forced Slava to understand that CFRC truly had a race on its hands, a race with the most formidable opponent conceivable, the most formidable even had the playing field been level. “Dima, are you trying to stop us?”

“Me?” He put his arm around his friend’s shoulder. “I want CFRC and you to survive so that when ITER fails, I have waiting job.”

“Dr. Sazhin,” T. J. interrupted firmly, “were you in the Real World two days ago?”

After a startled pause, Dima made a motion of his head to Slava in the direction of the woman. “Go ahead,” Slava said.

“Yes, I was at the ITER conference center early. I told Slava’s hat I saw armadillo.”

T. J. glanced at the list she’d made in the Driskill lounge, though she couldn’t imagine anyone inventing such a story. “Yeah, Dima Sazhin, that’s you all right. The others aren’t on the list.” She faced Sazhin. “Sir, can we talk to Marietti, Klebanov and Marlow?”

“Well, they still work here,” the baffled Dima shrugged.

“Let’s find them,” said Slava.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

They hadn’t gone five steps down the corridor when the last person in the world Slava wanted to see saw them: Pierre Jules César Balard, the director general of ITER himself. Slava turned away too late.

“Dr. Archangelsky,” the nearly two-meter-tall Balard greeted him with a heavy French accent. “No one told me you were visiting.”

Slava accepted the extended hand, which fully engulfed his own. “Was in area. Just thought I’d drop in to see Dima.”

The bald Balard’s reputation was of a brusque, intransigent tyrant who’d been inspired by his own name. It might be necessary if you are coordinating a project involving thirty countries, Slava conceded. Inevitably, Balard brought up events at CFRC.

“Give my best to Krieg-Zuber.” From the way Balard frowned and rebuttoned his jacket, Slava could see the director was about to say more. He did. “Zis was, of course, not unexpected when you attempt something so foolish. What did Leonard think he was doing, Dr. Archangelsky? Trying to beat us? By what moral authority does Leonard think he has ze right to attain fusion, to challenge moi—moi?” He thumped his vast chest. “The civilized world has invested in ITER—in CFRC? Pfff. Listen carefully, Dr. Archangelsky. I will never—never—allow zat son of a bitch Rasmussen to win zis race against me. I will show you what we can do here and by the time I am finished, there will be nothing left of him but a pip, a laughingstock on every continent. No, that is too good. He will be forgotten, completely forgotten. That is what ze bastard deserves…”

Dima took Slava’s arm, intending to spirit him out of harm’s way, but Archangelsky shook himself loose. There he stood, in an unbuttoned sports jacket, resembling today if not exactly Rasputin then a rock musician, drawing himself up to his full height, which put the top of his head somewhere short of Balard’s shoulders. He raised his chin to the starched figure towering over him and pointed his finger straight at the director’s nose. “You, sir, think you have moral authority to achieve fusion. You with your lowballing of costs and billions of euros of overruns, not to mention years lost with magnet problems and overstuffed claims for baby ITER. You know as well as I do the thing will never do what you advertise. You call this moral authority? Maybe others can make it happen quicker, cheaper. Maybe we Texans will do it. You stand here telling me you will crush us and call yourself moral authority. Hah. I spit on it.” Slava paused, almost surprised at himself, and literally spat at Balard’s feet. But he wasn’t quite done. “Tell me when in science does anyone have moral right to breakthrough? In some long-lost fairyland, gentlemen scientists grant moral authority to rivals, but you are neither moral nor have authority anywhere but in ITER-land. Come on, pussyfoot”—Slava suddenly put up his fists, began to dance like a boxer—“show us what you’ve got. We’re ready for anything.”

Fully enraged, Balard raised two clenched hands over his head, as if about to squash the pint-sized Russian with a sledgehammer, but Dima again grabbed Slava and this time dragged him away. Balard screamed after them, “I will crush you like insect! You have no chance, none!”

“Bring it on!” Slava shouted back with raised fists as Sazhin hustled him into the nearest elevator. The doors closed.

T. J. let out a long whistle. “Whoa.”

“Eb tvoiu mat’,” both Dima and Slava breathed simultaneously, undoubtedly for different reasons.

“You weren’t kidding,” T. J. said after she’d finally caught her breath. “He really hates Rasmussen.” Dima nodded. “And Slava, what a performance.” She held him by the shoulders at arm’s length, then kissed him smack on the lips.

“You may regret that,” Slava said.

On the third floor the doors opened and T. J. asked, “Does he hate Rasmussen enough to do anything?”

Dima shrugged as they exited. “Two months from now I show you the scars on my back from director’s cracking whip. That much he will do. The rest?” He shrugged again. “I told you, half of ITER staff is ready to blow you to hell. After what just happened, Balard would light match.”

* * * *

T. J. was soon convinced he was right. “You remember Slava Archangelsky?” Dima said to Alessandro Marietti as they cornered him in his office.

“Of course,” the Italian replied, shaking hands. “The best drunken chess player on two continents.”

“This is why we need to talk, Alessandro,” Slava said to the handsome young Latin, whose black hair and chiseled face could have belonged to a movie star who’d intentionally forgotten to shave that day. “Do you remember who was at that chess match?”

Marietti produced the names Dima had, plus Sabine Warzel, a German. He thought there were some others, but it had been four years ago, maybe five. Slava pressed him to ignite his memory.

“Sir,” T. J. interrupted, glancing at the picture of stray cats on the Campo dei Fiori that Marietti had taped above his desk. “Were you in the Real World this Saturday?”

“No,” Marietti replied, suspicions rising. “What is this about?”

“A matter of urgency,” Slava said.

Before Marietti could respond, T. J. asked if he had a Real World account. The young man nodded and reluctantly logged on, offering his account information and IP address only because he knew Slava. T. J. hadn’t learned much from her computer security courses, but enough to know that an IP address meant little.

“Eh, what is this about, really?” Marietti said finally, getting to his feet. “This has something to do with that happened at CFRC? You know what we think about that, don’t you, Slava? You deserved it—”

“Some of us think so too—”

“You are like a putanna who gives the clap to the whole village, no? You endanger everybody—”

“I’ve already told him,” put in Dima.

“In three days the whole world program has gone pazzo. Everybody is infected. You should read Machiavelli, why do states go to war with each other when they don’t want to—”

By now Marietta was making wild gesticulations and Dima was already on his phone to Marlow. “He’s in the test cell,” he said to Slava and T. J. “Come.”

* * * *

A few minutes later they reached the tokamak bay. The machine was down for maintenance. Dima got authorization to enter and the door opened.

“Behold,” said the Russian.

Suddenly, without warning, ITER stood before them. T. J. gulped as her hand went to her neck and her knees nearly gave out. The device confronting them was unlike anything she’d ever seen. Half again as large as Prometheus, the machine stood, she guessed, fifteen times as tall as she did. The tokamak bay was far cleaner than at CFRC, all the scientists wearing ties tucked into their shirts. The innards of the machine were entirely obscured by the great cylindrical cryostat that housed it, of the same sort that surrounded Prometheus, whose purpose was to provide a vacuum barrier between the superconducting magnets and room temperature. Immense blocklike devices protruding from the cryostat were covered with heavy cables that ran on metal trays through the walls and out of the test cell altogether. Slava was commenting to Dima on neutral beams, a term T. J. had already heard several times without comprehension at CFRC.

The feeling of insignificance she’d experienced while standing before Prometheus was magnified here over and again. Mere humans no longer had any say in the course of events, and their fate was in the hands of giant, alien devices with a life of their own—impersonal, inscrutable, implacable.

“This is the machine that the civilized world is counting on to prove that limitless energy is possible,” said Dima.

“Some of the civilized world,” Slava corrected.

Will Marlow was a big American who spoke with a flat Californian accent. Like Marietti, he volunteered his Real World account and avatar. Nothing. “Who was at that chess match?” Slava put to him the question.

Marlow scratched his head, racking his memory. “You, me, Alessandro, Misha, Sabine, some post-docs and grad students, I think…”

“Pravil’no,” recollected Slava through half a decade and vodka, “there were some younglings. Who? You’ve got to remember.”

“Oh, those transients never stick around for long—you know that, Slava. Jesus, they’re anonymous.”

“There must be records,” T. J. interrupted with annoyance. “If they were students, somebody knew they were here—like their professors, maybe.”

They made for the exit and agreed to split up, Slava and T. J. going after Sabine Warzel and Misha Klebanov, Dima saying that he’d try to find some records, but it was like searching for bank account numbers without knowing the customers. T. J. asked Marlow why he was here instead of in Texas.

“Originally it was because I like Europe and thought the job would be more stable. But with the economy for the past decades… ITER was a giant gamble from the beginning and almost never got finished. Now that stunt you idiots pulled has put the entire world program in jeopardy. The race is on. We’ll rush years ahead, do something stupid and ITER will fail. Governments won’t forgive us and that will be the end of fusion for the next century, mark my words. Damn you all.” Marlow walked away.

“Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” Dima said and was off.

* * * *

Misha Klebanov was abroad for a week. Sabine Warzel, a dark-haired, pretty German from Munich, had been at the Real World conference and was on T. J.’s list. Her avatar matched the one they’d seen. Sabine also dimly remembered some post-docs and grad students hanging around the chess tournament, but couldn’t produce names. “I believe there were a couple French, a Spaniard, a Japanese or a Korean, I’m not sure…maybe a Chinese or two.”

“Japanese or Koreans would’ve been shooting videos,” T. J. said. “And posting them.”

“Good point,” agreed Slava and Sabine simultaneously and they logged on. Sabine’s office was hardly distinguishable from the others—computer, a white board, papers. T. J. began to think that though she’d fallen in with the most international bunch of characters imaginable, the laws of nature required all physicists to be identical, regardless of sex. “Bosons,” quipped Slava to her mystification. Sabine remembered that one of the Chinese was a woman. There never were many in physics, she smiled.

“For sure,” D’Abro said, thinking she’d seen two female physicists at CFRC. “You don’t get lonely?”

“That would depend on what you’re hunting for,” Sabine smiled again.

Soon, their search coughed up a short video of a pink-eyed, red-nosed Archangelsky, surrounded by, indeed, some Europeans and Asians, one a woman, but neither he nor Sabine could identify anybody in the picture. “Do you have facial recognition software?” T. J. asked.

“Bedbug, as you said, somebody around here should have records,” answered Slava, wrinkling his nose. “Why don’t we check personnel office first.” As T. J. protested that online would probably be faster, they forwarded the video to Dima. Thanking Warzel, and hoping to evade a diatribe about CFRC, they were half out the door when T. J. thought to ask whether she’d ever been in at CFRC.

“Sure. Several times.”

“Do a lot of ITER physicists spend time in the States?” T. J. continued, curiosity aroused. Ah, something distinguished Sabine’s office after all: a large beer stein standing on the windowsill, open, with a plastic flower stuck in it.

“Nowadays, it’s mostly the reverse,” the German laughed broadly. “The American labs are almost nothing now, and ITER is such a gigantic project. You know, contracts are spread over sixty countries. They tested magnets in Japan, Germany, Korea, Switzerland… Chinese peasants wound coils for a dollar a day. We ended up with more administrators than physicists. This is modern science.”

“Thank you, that’s very interesting.” T. J. remarked and she and Slava were into the corridor.

“By the way,” Sabine called out, “may a tornado wipe CFRC off the face of the Earth.”

* * * *

T. J. and Slava were momentarily alone. It was late in the day, nearing five o’clock, and although Klebanov was missing, T. J. didn’t feel the trip had been wasted. They had a better idea of who had been at the chess tournament, and she was now absolutely convinced that the ITER folks had it in for CFRC.

“Find Dima and hunt down those records,” she ordered. “In the meantime, I’m gonna visit with M. Pierre Jules César Balard.”

She mangled his name almost as badly as she did “Archangelsky,” but Slava started anyway. “You think he will speak to you now? And why would you possibly want to talk to that svoloch’?”

“I don’t know exactly what you just said, Slava, but leave it to me. One thing, though—stay out of sight.” She smiled radiantly.

He led her to the director’s office; she smoothed out her hair in the big window’s reflection, brushed off her suede jacket and abandoned the Russian. Shrugging, Slava tracked down Dima, who’d been trying to explain to the staff who they were looking for. The video on Dima’s handset helped them identify three of the Europeans, while several others remained anonymous. But now the day had trickled away and everyone abruptly vanished. It would have to wait until tomorrow. Slava made his friend swear that he’d continue working on it.

Archangelsky paced for an hour when T. J. phoned and they met out front. “We need to find a place to stay for the night,” he said, glancing at the sun, which nearly touched the hills. The only facilities in the immediate area were a gas station. “I doubt we will be welcome in dormitory.”

“Don’t worry about it,” T. J. replied. “We’re staying in the castle, courtesy of the director.” Archangelsky shook his head with disbelief, but she shook her head right back. “You’ve been married too long, Slava. As someone once said: boobs, Doc, boobs.”

“But did you get anything out of him?” Archangelsky answered, once he’d recovered.

“Yeah. I’ll tell you after I’ve gotten back from dinner.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

At eight o’clock the morning after Sixth Street, while Slava and T. J. made their way to Europe, Nathaniel entered the lobby of the main building and tore off the top page of the deadline calendar. He crumpled up the paper and tossed it into the nearest basket, watching another day slip uselessly from their grasp.

Ripping off the sheet had not been his first act this day. Two hours earlier, he’d badged himself into the test cell, where one of those stand-up balloons of Edvard Munch’s Scream with Bill Balustradi’s face pasted over it now guarded the entrance. Although it was hardly dawn, skies yet gray, the lab was alive. An undermanned first shift had just gotten under way, and clean-suited technicians were disappearing into the tokamak to begin the task of washing the inside of Prometheus’great toroid by hand. Under Abbuhl’s eye, techs were all over the area, checking everything…but what needed to be checked for. One of their first tasks would be to make certain all safety interlock systems functioned properly, short-circuiting the possibility that Lipman’s accident investigation would uncover anything.

The chief engineer walked up to him and tossed Machuzak a bolt the size of a rolling pin. “We’ve been finding some of these, Director, sir,” he said. “Counterfeit bolts.”

“Counterfeit?” Machuzak sucked in his breath, catching the monstrous object. His was thinking: explosive.

“I mean substandard. Chinese. We should be able to identify them.”

“Neutron spectroscopy?”

“Labels.”

“Do it.” With a small relief, Mac slapped Fred on the back; the engineer was gone.

* * * *

Machuzak had not come to the test cell to watch. The suspicion that The Terminator had succumbed to gas would not free him, and he desperately needed to disprove it. If his hunch was right, it might snag this saboteur before a second strike, but Nathaniel couldn’t deny that what captured his imagination was the intrigue of an idea. D’Abro had missed the mark when she suggested that detectives and scientists were twins. Detectives are paid to find; scientists are paid to seek. There is no other profession paid to be confused. It is a great privilege—had been.

Machuzak knew his plan was harebrained, but he clambered down to the neutral-beam supply area and, waiting until the coast was clear, sucked a sample of surge-room air into a little evacuated cylinder. Thieflike, he stole back to the Material Test Facility where he kept an old quadrupole mass spectrometer, not much different he supposed from the ones they were always mentioning on crime shows that identify the atomic constituents of samples of unknown substances. His obsolete machine was capable only of detecting parts per million, which would more than do.

Nathaniel cranked up the voltage and ran tests on the surge-room air and controls from lab corridors. When he finished, the cracking charts lay before him on the bench. There the telltale spikes at mass number 14 for nitrogen, but on both test sample and corridor control—the same height. There oxygen 16, argon, neon, carbon dioxide… He could see no significant difference between them. No, here: The surge-room air shows minute traces of SF_6, which slowly leaks out of the high-voltage switches and must be periodically replenished. Seek and ye shall seek.

Nathaniel felt certain he was blind. The idea must be true. I felt the gas, damnit. Nevertheless, Machuzak was now forced to concede that the idea was no more than one of those clever conjectures relinquished by their creators only under extreme duress, and ultimately lead nowhere.

He was about to depart for the main building when his assistant, Jerry Wilson, unexpectedly appeared, glancing shyly about the clutter, and asked if they might speak. Nathaniel hadn’t set eyes on him since the accident; only a short message had informed him that Jerry was taking a few days off.

Wilson was endearingly bashful, rarely able to bear the weight of another’s gaze. “Umm,” he said, looking toward the floor, “last time I talked to Cy, he was threatening to shut down the MTF and scrub Toshi’s experiment. I was kinda wondering…”

Machuzak puckered his lips, nodded. Krieg-Zuber had only weeks ago threatened to close down the MTF, and Wilson’s concern for self-preservation was understandable. Formerly, Jerry had been a diagnostician who measured the properties of a tokamak plasma. For a few years, he’d worked happily on ASSET’s predecessor, AUSTOR, even before Nathaniel had joined the lab, then he tired of midnight shifts and requested something less demanding. The pickings were slim, but Jerry wasn’t ambitious, entertaining no thoughts of a PhD. He floated around a long time, ended up overseeing one of Toshi’s ideas and assisting Nathaniel part time. Machuzak had first found it strange that Wilson was older than he, but they both got over it. One thing was certain: if the MTF went, Jerry went with it.

“The MTF is safe for the moment,” Nathaniel assured him. “You have my word, but I’ll talk to Toshi.”

Wilson thanked him and disappeared into the next room. Today’s ignition meeting was due to begin in ten minutes. Nathaniel would collar Toshi there. He drove to the main building, tore off the top sheet of the deadline calendar and took two steps at a time up to the ASSET conference room.

* * * *

Toshi was not present. The others were, though it made no difference. Four days had passed since Moravec’s ultimatum, but no one could see how to ignite Prometheus short of putting a torch to it. Everyone had the same thought: to hell with long pulses, just get the power up, way up, if only for seconds. Push the magnets to the limits. Ignite, disrupt, claim victory. Seeing the state of affairs, Nathaniel asked if anyone knew what had happened to Matsushima, and he was unable to ascertain from Thaddeus Hasschler whether Toshi had even been informed.

“He’s too busy levitating,” cracked Kettering, pressing his palms together and making a mock bow in all directions. “What’s he doing at CRFC anyway?”

Nathaniel was not amused. “Tom,” he said, “let me put it hypothetically. If I had an ignition deadline to beat and you asked me to put my money on the entire lab or Toshi by himself, I wouldn’t hesitate…”

Thad instantly rose. “I find that insulting, Nat. I demand an apology.” Had Hasschler been wearing a glove, he would have hurled it to the ground. Aye, Hasschler’s difficult temper was already leaking out at the knowledge that his would be the responsibility for coaxing the impossible fire out of that great, sullen machine. Who is this man? The question came unbidden, but Nathaniel asked evenly whether he had any ideas. Caught empty-handed, Thad sat down again and said gruffly, “In any case, there is nothing to be done until Prometheus is ready.” He shot a smoldering glance toward Abbuhl.

“My apologies, Thad,” Fred replied with his signature calm, “I only got three shifts on the boards a couple hours ago”—he glanced at his watch—“and we won’t be up to strength ’til tomorrow. You’re going to have to give us a few weeks, maybe a month.”

“Then let’s cancel these damned meetings until then!” Hasschler erupted.

Diana Cochran quipped that one of the concrete platforms supporting the helium factory had cracked and needed repair. Nathaniel leveled his gaze at Diana. They’d always irritated each other. As their eyes met, the same spike of suspicion caught in his throat. No, here is nothing more than the usual conflict of personalities. I regard her as knee-jerk gung-ho and she finds my skepticism of the Mission treacherous.

At that moment Hasschler swiveled to Machuzak with a pointed finger. “It is your responsibility to get Moravec to relent. This is our only hope.”

“Take him to a surge room and electrocute him,” Kettering cut in.

“Moravec’s in Copenhagen,” Nathaniel replied, peering at the tritium head with incredulity. “I’m meeting him in Dallas day after tomorrow.” That silenced the insurgents, but as they adjourned Machuzak took Tom aside, about to interrogate him on the remark. Catching himself, he cursed audibly and backed off.

“What’s your problem, Machuzak?” the ex-marine asked sternly.

“Sorry, nothing,” Nathaniel answered, turning away awkwardly, putting a vague mental question mark by Kettering’s name and certain only that it was essential to enlist Matsushima at once.

* * * *

Toshi Matsushima had also been exiled to Alpha Site by Krieg-Zuber and Nathaniel was forced to drive over again. To his surprise, he found the Japanese physicist in place, trim and agile at fifty, sitting on a tatami mat drinking tea.

“Why weren’t you at the meeting?” he demanded.

“I wasn’t informed,” replied Toshi without apparent interest. As Nathaniel had suspected. “In any case, why should I join such a group of bots?”

“If you don’t,” said Machuzak, “we are certain to fail.”

“What is that to me?”

“‘You have the right to your labor, not to the fruits of your labor.’”

The exhortation obliged Toshi to smile. “Hoisted on my own petard,” he said, knowing he had recommended the Bhagavad Gita with its famous advice to Nathaniel. “So how are you holding up, Prince Arjuna, on the eve of battle?”

Nathaniel chuckled morosely. “I am just trying to do my duty, dharma, isn’t it?”

“Correct,” Toshi responded, offering Nathaniel some tea. “But remember, the message of the Gita is that one does his duty whether one likes it or not. And now you will tell me that this applies to the both of us.”

“Yes.” Nathaniel declined the tea but sat down without invitation and bored unrelentingly into Matsushima.

Toshi understood. “The others are of course paralyzed, without ideas. You expect me to work the required miracles to spare the impossible Mission immolation. Will I be canonized, Nathaniel?”

“‘You have the right to your labor, not to the fruits of your labor.’”

Toshi agreed only to consider it. Nathaniel well knew that Matsushima’s exile to Site Alpha was spiritual as well as physical, that he would resist impressment; he tactically changed course to Jerry Wilson’s request: What had Krieg-Zuber been up to?

“It is very much like the situation when one company buys another with its own money, isn’t it?” Machuzak didn’t quite follow. “You well know that the funds for my experiment come directly from the pocket of our exalted benefactor Richard Garrett. So if Krieg-Zuber was planning to scrub it, he would be canceling an experiment he did not fund. This is typical of The Terminator’s ego.”

When Matsushima spoke of “his” experiment, he meant one of his ideas, which others like Wilson were carrying out. Toshi could probably tie his own shoelaces, but tightening a bolt would have been beyond his range. That Garrett had been personally financing Toshi’s experiment was public knowledge; it was too far out for anyone else to take seriously. “So, if I continue to pay Jerry at the MTF, you can ante up your half?”

Toshi smiled like the Buddha. “Is Krieg-Zuber able to hear our laughter?”

Despite his surname, Toshifumi Matsushima was half Korean and much of what he said had the flavor of a Zen koan, something that demanded completion yet could not be completed. This was typical of Matsushima, if anything could be called typical. An encounter with him left you inspired or perplexed, sometimes annoyed, rarely unaltered.

Toshifume Matsushima was in every respect the most singular character Nathaniel had known. He came from the six hundred thousand or so Zainichi families, ethnic Koreans, remaining in Japan, and Nathaniel often wondered whether his internal exile had shaped his destiny. He thinks qualitatively differently than you or I. “It is like a goat going up a hill and coming down a camel,” he will describe a nuclear transmutation. Toshi’s quicksilver mind allowed him the luxury to work on what amused him and he’d made contributions to several branches of physics. His great speed was equally his downfall. Toshi bores easily and has never carried through anything to the bitter end. He once confessed he could win his freedom only by receiving the Nobel Prize. Nathaniel laughed, reminding him that no one gets Nobel Prizes for plasma physics, and pitied him.

As Nathaniel glanced at his watch, the older man said, “Don’t forget your deep-breathing exercises, Arjuna. Breath is the first thing that goes.” Nathaniel nodded good-bye as Matsushima offered to show him his latest geometry problem, which he felt worthy to hang on the tree, but Machuzak had already disappeared, wondering, as always, who Toshi was.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Leaving Slava behind, T. J. had walked forthrightly into Balard’s outer office to see the ITER director giving instructions to his secretary. She extended her hand and said, “Professor Balard, I’m T. J. D’Abro with CFRC, and I want to apologize for Dr. Archangelsky’s behavior earlier. You can imagine things are a little tense over there.” A true Frenchman, Balard counted it a good day when an attractive woman glanced at him, and to resist the enigmatic smile being cast in his direction was altogether beyond his capabilities. Allowing him no chance to recover, T. J. asked whether they might speak and he unhesitatingly offered a gracious bow, ushering her into his inner sanctum.

With a glance at the classical artifacts adorning the office, T. J. continued to improvise. “Hopefully things at CFRC will calm down once we determine the cause of the accident,” she said, taking the seat offered, “and then you’ll see that this is all a gentleman’s misunderstanding. As a matter of fact—”

By this time Balard was smiling. “Gentleman’s misunderstanding?” he interrupted with his heavy accent. “Mademoiselle, permit me, ITER is one of ze largest scientific projects ever undertaken, and doubtlessly ze most important for ze future of mankind. You see—” he gestured to a wall chart behind him that showed the dozens of countries and agencies involved. “What you cannot detect from zis chart is how small a role the United States is playing, approaching zero. Your country could have been the leader, but no, thirty years ago America turned its back on ze future. Your fundamentalist politicians, who live in a medieval world, have much on their shoulders, rejecting science for superstition, habitually pulling out of signed international protocols. What’s more, when Rasmussen had the chance to correct these mistakes, what does he do? He swindles billionaires to invest in his ridiculous consortium, for no other reason than to serve his own vanity, which I assure you is unsurpassed. From ze beginning he has attempted to sabotage ITER. He steals from me scientists, engineers, he has diverted dollars to CFRC that were rightfully ours… If you think I will allow t…that voleur to beat ITER to ignition by one second—No. I will stop him, so help me God…”

As the director clenched his fist, T. J. saw that she was witnessing an outburst that verged on approaching the earlier one in the corridor. Balard simply could not disguise his hatred of Rasmussen. “How will y’all stop him, sir?” D’Abro asked simply, silencing her phone.

“W…what, what do you mean?” Balard abruptly halted. “I will stop him with every means. I will play his game. I will entice his best scientists with higher salaries, better cuisine, lovelier scenery. I will be sure that every cent of American fusion dollars comes to ITER instead of CFRC. I will push my people to the limits of their endurance and we will show Rasmussen what it means to challenge Pierre Jules César Balard.” As before, the immense man thumped his chest angrily. “Leonard has asked for a race and now he has one. Give him regards from his former student, mademoiselle.”

“Y–you were his student?” T. J. stammered in full amazement.

“His first doctoral student, oui, half a lifetime ago.”

Boy, was this personal, T. J. began to suspect. “I’ll be sure to tell him,” she swallowed. “I’m curious, Dr. Balard, a lot of people here seem to have connections to the States.”

“Of course, physicists are some of the world’s best jet-setters, unfortunately not always of their own choosing. When funding for one lab is cut, the lab farms out its physicists to another site, sometimes for three, five years. Lives are changed, disrupted, divorces… Often one’s home lab becomes a mere pied-à-terre… For many years the brain drain has been running in reverse, since so little goes on in America… But of course you know all this…”

“Of course. Do you still keep in touch with anyone there?” T. J. asked as nonchalantly as she might, peering at one of the Roman vases that adorned the desk.

Balard leveled his big shining head at her. “Why do you ask?” he said, less with suspicion than with perplexity.

“You said you were Leonard’s student, that’s all. Are any of your own students in Austin?”

“Perhaps, but for the past years I have had virtually no contact with anyone at CFRC, except for those who want to come here… Why have you come here, mademoiselle?”

She’d feared the question. “Just vacation, sir.” T. J. told him, winging it. “I’ve been pretty stressed out recently. I’d never been to Provence and Dr. Archangelsky thought I might like to visit ITER.”

“Better, mademoiselle, I should show you Avignon,” Balard said. “Tomorrow, if my schedule permits.”

“That might be very pleasant,” answered T. J., if we haven’t been deported.

“In any case, why don’t you be my guest for dinner zis evening, Mademoiselle… D’Abro, is it? and we can have a more leisurely conversation—”

At that moment Balard’s phone rang and he excused himself to the next room, saying the call would take a few minutes.

T. J. didn’t know what she was looking for, but she lost no time, walking around his uncluttered desk. A blotter occupied the desk’s center. She pushed aside a few papers. The blotter was a mess of notes, doodles, memos. It took a few seconds for the tangle to resolve. Emerging from the rest, the words Rasmussen Rasmussen Rasmussen Rasmussen, penned no fewer than four times. A cartoonish portrait next to the names with a sword stuck through its head. “I would slice him without a knife, good.” That was all.

T. J. started when she heard Balard sign off in the next room and quickly returned to the chair. The director general entered. “Please excuse the interruption,” he said. “That was ze Chinese director. India and China joined the program very late and have been a constant headache with their demands. Where were we? Dinner? Shall we say in two hours? My secretary will arrange rooms for you and Dr. Archangelsky at ze castle tonight.”

* * * *

After dinner, T. J. said to Slava, “There ain’t room in Fusion Town for Rasmussen and Balard both. Julius Cesar is gunnin for him, no question. Apart from detailing the ways he’d destroy Rasmussen, you know what he said over dinner?”

Of course Slava had no idea; he’d spent the past hours on the castle tower attempting to contact the people in the video they’d identified so far.

The Frenchman had leaned over to T. J. with wineglass in hand and tightened his lips. “Mademoiselle, you will forgive if my remarks earlier seemed, umm…heavy-handed. I am of course upset by zis week’s events. Were I to do in Rasmussen, the method I would choose would be much simpler, requiring neither money nor theft. I require merely ideas.”

“What do you mean?” T. J. asked, wrinkling her nose, checking for text messages.

“Mademoiselle, everyone hates Rasmussen. All that is required to make certain ASSET fails completely is for one of his team to feed him an idea.” Balard examined his wineglass. “It should be a bad idea, but one that appears…good. There are many of those in science, you know. In fusion, a cleverly bad idea, disguised as a good one, would be enough to detour your program for years—forever.”

When Slava heard this, it chilled him to the core. The scientific mills grind finely but ever so slowly. Balard was correct: in present circumstances little would be required to turn the impossible task before them into a catastrophe.

Archangelsky got to his feet atop the castle and stared at the light-flecked river below. T. J. was saying, “Slava, you gotta believe Balard’s planted a mole among you folks. I don’t know who, but Monsieur Director General sure wasn’t leveling with me about not havin contacts at CFRC.”

Slava suddenly wanted very much to get back to Texas.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Early Friday morning, en route to the lab, Nathaniel received a message from T. J. with a smiley; they’d reached their destination. Glad for that, he tore off the top sheet of the calendar as he arrived for the daily ignition meeting. Matsushima failed to appear and the meeting went precisely as far as yesterday’s. As the division heads logged off their Facebook pages, he announced he was shutting down access to social networking sites. He knew he’d just deprived them of mother’s milk.

The sensation that remained as they adjourned was one of futility absolute. While they stood paralyzed, the deadline had notched forward twenty-four hours. The single bright spot was that Abbuhl believed his team had identified all the Chinese bolts and that they could be removed. Kettering would contact Savannah River within the hour to make arrangements for new tritium shipments.

At Site Alpha, Nathaniel searched for Toshi, futilely. He returned to the MTF next door, thinking to send him a note, saw the on-screen warning again, halted. Instead, he tried to learn something about Moravec, whom he’d meet tomorrow. Machuzak uncovered much about GlobeTex, but its CEO left few electronic footprints, an extraordinary feat in the post-Google world. With little to show for his efforts, Machuzak found himself staring into the empty beaker of his cold-fusion apparatus, wishing, as always, that the thing would work.

* * * *

It was only at seven that evening, a day postponed, that Nathaniel turned onto Red Bud Trail in West Lake Hills, where natural twilight alone shrouded the streets. Probably another power outage. Electricity had been vanishing at state borders from the nascent smart grid, but in fact he’d probably never discover what exactly had happened. Since the local papers had folded, no one really knew what went on in this town… Ah, by the time Machuzak pulled into the Rasmussens’ driveway, the lights were back.

Theresa Rasmussen welcomed him at the door with a wineglass in her hand. Entering, Nathaniel kissed her on the cheek and complimented her on the elegant evening dress, which fairly slinked around her tall, almost bony figure. Theresa would have sooner fled town than be caught in a pair of blue jeans, Austin’s official uniform. Like Leonard she couldn’t escape an air of formality, breeding, Nathaniel had to call it, but she never allowed the likes of mongrel CFRC scientists to feel uncomfortable in her presence.

“What is it, Mac?” Theresa asked. “You look troubled.”

Machuzak chuckled grimly, accepted the proffered wine with gratitude and saluted Leonard, who already sat at the dinner table. Leonard slowly raised a hand in return. “I think I’ve faced more trouble in the past week than in the rest of my life all together.” After this day and its manifold problems he felt yet unfocused.

“Well, relax for a few minutes.”

Together they strolled through the house. Here a Japanese wall unit full of mementoes: honorary degrees from a dozen universities in the United States, Japan, China, Korea, France; a citation from the president of Korea, a bullwhip from graduating students, government medals. Here the rare books: French novels, Enlightenment philosophy, a first edition of the Arabian Nights with illustrations by Dulac. Leonard’s presence overwhelmed and, as at his office four long days ago, Nathaniel felt he was treading on hallowed ground.

“I’m surprised Leonard collects fairy tales,” he said, leafing through the Arabian Nights, but the illustrations, soft and suffused with kindness, failed to stir him. “He always assured me that reality is far more interesting than any literature.”

“That’s why he’s a scientist. Those are mine,” Theresa replied, though her answer hardly surprised him any less and he asked what she found in them. “Truth,” she said. “It’s not just in tokamaks, you know.”

They walked into the rec room. There, one of those walking machines for the hyper-energetic, complete with drink holders, fiber-optic connection. Behind it an African mask, bold, modern in its lines, frightening. Opposite, a clay sculpture, a nude, half finished. “Is that yours?” Nathaniel asked with curiosity.

She nodded. Nathaniel hadn’t known Theresa was a sculptress, but she protested that she wasn’t very good. He said she was wrong. “With Leonard’s health I… I haven’t been able to work much recently. Sometimes I get upset and smash everything, Just…” With that she bit her lip and turned away. Slashes disfigured the piece’s legs, arms.

Nathaniel found no reply. Leonard was dying; that was the long and short of it. For the first time Nathaniel noticed gray on Theresa’s ordinarily brown hair, and it seemed to him that she’d cut it short, the thing women do in a crisis.

She led him by the arm back into the living room. The wooden beams arching across the space, separating skylights, gave the fabulous house a rustic and Oriental feel. They stopped before the big windows overlooking Austin. Behind the house, the setting sun threw a soft purple veil over the city. Downtown, the mirrored buildings cast back the light, although little trim was left on after dark these days; farther north the university’s tower glowed a faint orange.

“Did UT win a game today?” Theresa asked with the tone of someone who has been sidelined from world events.

Nathaniel shrugged no less than she. The window glass, separating them from the town, represented exactly how he felt. Austin, The University, belonged to another planet.

“Well,” said Theresa with sudden cheer, “you’ve had three minutes. What is it?”

Nathaniel focused on the music that had been playing all the while. “Dies Irae from Zelenka’s D minor requiem, I believe.”

Theresa smiled. “You’re very hard to fool.” She dropped into silence for a moment, then, “Do you think you can do it, Mac?”

“No. It’s impossible,” he answered flatly, “but we’ll go down trying.”

“Don’t say that to Leonard.” She led him toward the dining room. “And Leonard’s told me what happened,” she said, disappearing into the kitchen.

* * * *

Machuzak sat down across from Leonard, confused. “You’ve told her about the sabotage?” he whispered.

Leonard nodded with difficulty. “She is my wife, you know.”

Nathaniel found himself concerned and relieved. Too many people were learning about the true state of affairs, but he was thankful that he wouldn’t have to lie to Theresa.

When she reappeared with salads for the two of them and soup for Leonard, Theresa paused to light candles and asked how Nathaniel was holding up. “The worst thing is that since this thing happened, I have to force myself to look people in the eye. I walk down hallways, crossing them off some mental checklist of personalities, motives, opportunities, catching words in my throat, glancing over my shoulder, wondering if in the next hour, minute, the machine is going to be hit again—or blown to bits. It’s the strangest sensation I’ve ever known—distrusting one’s friends. I… I know so little about them. I guess I’ll have to live with it.” Throughout Theresa and Leonard remained silent, expressions downcast. “Otherwise, I’ve enlisted a, umm, private detective and we’ve started an investigation. We have almost no clues, but she and Slava got to ITER today.”

Leonard started, such as he was able. “ITER, why?” he said slowly.

Nathaniel disclosed that they’d received communications from somebody there who apparently knows something. “That’s all I can tell you.” He omitted the information that the someone was a virtual dragon who’d morphed into an armadillo.

“Jules Balard will do everything to prevent us from attaining ignition,” Leonard continued with genuine alarm. “I’ve known him thirty years. He’s the worst son of a bitch on the face of the planet.”

“I can’t believe he would go so far as to sabotage Prometheus!” Nathaniel exclaimed. “That’s preposterous!”

With difficulty Leonard wiped away a line of soup dribbling down his chin. He reminded Nathaniel that Prometheus had been sabotaged once. The only question was, Who would do it twice? “I wouldn’t put it past him,” he spat. “The man steals everything he can get his hands on. He has stolen so many ideas of mine that he blocked me from winning the Nobel Prize.”

The candlelight could not disguise the anger contorting Rasmussen’s face. Nathaniel had never seen the older man display such vehemence. “Tell me,” he changed the subject but put it directly, “did you authorize Krieg-Zuber to install a cell-phone wiping and jamming system? To block, monitor Internet traffic?”

Leonard’s expression now dissolved into one of pain. “Cy felt the lab was being run too loosely, that the Mission was being compromised. Four years ago he decided that something needed to be done. I had other responsibilities and did not pay much attention, Mac. You understand, don’t you…?”

“Len,” Nathaniel replied, staring at him in disbelief, “while you weren’t paying attention, The Terminator transformed the lab from a scientific establishment into a—You know why I am at Alpha Site—” Without thinking he slammed his fist on the table, nearly overturning his glass. “He’s already threatened to take over again as soon as he’s able…”

Nathaniel recounted their conversation from two days ago, but Rasmussen simple refused to believe it. “You must be exaggerating,” he said.

“Mark my words.”

“Maybe you could appoint him your deputy,” Theresa suggested.

Nathaniel merely stared, as if she’d made a bad joke. Leonard thought the doctors had sidelined Krieg-Zuber for several months, but agreed to speak to him. Then as Theresa served salmon, he pressed Nathaniel for his ignition strategy. Nathaniel described the fruitless meetings, his determination to include Matsushima, the opposition to that on all sides, including Matsushima’s. “The worst thing is the lack of ideas.”

To Nathaniel’s disappointment, Leonard offered no proposals that he hadn’t already heard, adding only, “It might help to pray.” At his own remark, a dark twinkle appeared in Rasmussen’s eyes and he said, “Austin is the buckle of the Bible Belt more than ever before. We’ll hire an televangelist to uncover biblical passages prophesying fusion and set up an eight-hundred number to raise funds.” It was a relief to see the unexpected flash of good humor, despite…and Nathaniel smiled for the first time this evening.

“Could we start a Mideast war to drive up oil prices?” Machuzak asked, not entirely facetiously.

“I tried it once,” Leonard answered with perfect gravity. “Unfortunately, there is always a war in the Mideast. I also promised the Saudis for a sum not to develop fusion—naturally I intended to funnel the money into ASSET—but they refused the bribe. Neither has Congress accepted my repeated observation that we could develop fusion for what they spend each month defending oil fields.”

Leonard’s voice bore no trace of its famous April Fool’s Day impishness and it gave Nathaniel pause; he seemed to be telling the truth. Failing as always to imagine the exalted circles the director traveled in, Nathaniel changed the subject to Moravec. Here too Leonard was of little help. As it turned out, they’d met only virtually. “There is something strange about him,” Leonard conceded, but added that GlobeTex’s chief was no fool and a hero to environmentalists. Before Nathaniel could press him for weaknesses, Leonard asked to be excused. Theresa helped him to the bedroom and returned shortly, suggesting that she and Nathaniel adjourn to the living room.

* * * *

They stood again by the front windows with Austin in the distance. Nathaniel said he was sorry, Leonard’s illness must be very difficult for her.

Theresa nodded, took a drink. “It’s given me time to prepare. ‘You plan a tower that will pierce the clouds? Lay first the foundation of humility.’ That was Augustine, wasn’t it?”

She’d done it. Theresa’s internal dialogue had taken her across continents and momentarily short-circuited Machuzak’s ability to follow.

“Oh, I was just thinking of the tower,” she said, sitting, “that’s all.”

Nathaniel frowned, at himself. He perceived that at this moment Theresa Rasmussen herself was not excepted from his past days’ revolving unease that he was surrounded by strangers. For all their years of acquaintanceship what did he know of Theresa? At a party, here, when Krieg-Zuber was pontificating that Einstein was the most important person of the last century, she casually asked him, What about the researchers who had vanquished tuberculosis? The inventors of birth control? Stalin? And what after all was one century? The Byzantine Empire had lasted fourteen. The Terminator was soon noticed to be missing from the party.

Theresa was no professional historian. Coming from a well-to-do family, Nathaniel doubted she was a professional anything. She’d been groomed to be the gracious wife of an important man, but ornamentation didn’t suit her. Sprung from college, she hoisted a pack onto her shoulder and set off. Europe, Africa, Asia; Machuzak wasn’t sure why or where. To touch Earth. Her wanderjahr lasted until the years left her rootless, and she returned. Once married, she headed committees and arts organizations. No less than Leonard, Theresa disdained idleness, and when she was not leading worthy charges, she delved into all sorts of strange byways. Her tastes ran in every respect to the obscure. She rejected the Great Men theory of history and was convinced that most of what is important in the world has gone unrecognized and unrecorded.

Nathaniel knew that much. He once asked why her aversion to jeans and she replied, “It smacks of indiscipline.” In an age when 120 characters counted as epic, he’d rarely seen her without a book, often printed.

Theresa patted the spot on the couch by her side. “Sit,” she said.

He obeyed. “I think I must disappoint Leonard,” he said.

“Why no,” her eyebrows lifted. “He’s always said you had some of the best physical intuition of anyone he’d ever met. You just saw how an experiment would turn out. That’s why he made you a division head. I’m sorry you haven’t gotten farther at the lab. I think it’s because you’re too honest. You’re the most honest person I know, Mac. It’s a bit quaint in this age, wouldn’t you agree?”

Machuzak stood again. “I’d rather be quaint and forgotten than take after some others and be shrouded in glory. Theresa, you can be sure that during this past week I’ve found it difficult to be as honest as I’d like. Slava’s right. Google changed the definition of honesty. It’s optional now. In science too. These days, I don’t always remember why I got into this business, but you can be sure that by the time all this is over, I will have found out.”

“Bravo, Nathaniel, bravo!” Theresa exclaimed, clapping, but Machuzak felt embarrassed, as if he had revealed too much.

“Maybe it’s time for me to leave,” he said.

She stood, took his arms, searched his eyes. He and Theresa were both in that plateau of years where it is impossible to guess another person’s age, and he had always assumed, merely, that she was slightly older than he. Theresa ran her hands down his arms and lay her head against his chest, crying softly. Flustered, he allowed her to remain for several moments with his arms around her, then gently released himself. She kissed him lightly on the lips, lingered a beat too long, and he disappeared into the night.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Well before dawn on Saturday, a ringing next to his ears shattered Machuzak’s dreams. Bedbug. “Doc, we’re going to be a little late. I’ll call ya later,” she said and abruptly hung up. He’d intended to rendezvous with T. J. and Slava on his return from Dallas, where he was to meet Moravec. Puzzled, unable to return to sleep, he roused himself, headed to the lab, watched Hasschler and Kettering nearly come to blows at the ignition meeting, cursed, received the first resignations on his desk, cursed again and departed for the airport.

Garrett had put his private jet at his disposal and two hours after he’d left CFRC, Nathaniel entered the domain of Moravec, GlobeTex’s CEO. After the call five days ago he did not know what to expect—male, female or otherwise. Stepping into the huge corner office Machuzak was equally unable to decide whether it had been modeled after a Hollywood set or vice versa. The plush carpet, the heavy purplish drapes. The rosewood conference table. The 3-D displays, remote conferencing studio, scale models of solar plants, a wallful of awards and citations from environmental organizations.

The opening pleasantries. A tall suited figure, in no way resembling the one he’d seen once before, stepped out from behind the desk and extended her hand; today Machuzak was willing to guess at the gender, but he remained unsure whether facing him was a living human being or a bot. “I know what you’re thinking,” she said in a voice no more devoid of intonation than a Californian’s. “Who am I? It’s difficult to keep a low profile in this day and age, so I hide in broad daylight. I rarely make public appearances, employ doubles—no two of whom look alike—project various virtual images to confuse the enemy, if you will. Call it electronic chaff. I find it keeps the intruders at bay, not knowing exactly who they’re dealing with.”

Multiple personas, Machuzak thought, not unlike any Web citizen. Perhaps Moravec has forgotten who she is. “I should think it would spur curiosity, not decrease it,” he said.

Moravec smiled faintly but didn’t answer. “I know you are here to talk about the ignition deadline. Let’s get down to it, shall we? Scotch?”

Nathaniel thanked his host for meeting him, and on a Saturday, accepted the proffered chair but declined the scotch. Moravec sat down stiffly opposite him, across a small lounge table. The being facing Nathaniel was taller than he, elegantly if sexlessly dressed, with silvering hair and a pale complexion that spoke of rare hours beneath the sun. He couldn’t read her expression, which seemed of one accustomed to intimidate crossed with a discomfort at live conversation. It was not altogether unkind, but Machuzak chose his words carefully nevertheless.

“Many people at the lab have long felt that your membership in our consortium was a ploy, that GlobeTex intended to shut us down at the right moment. That does appear to be what you are doing—”

“—to eliminate the competition from fusion, just as GM destroyed public transportation, the Lear engine and early electric cars. Yes, I’ve heard that theory myself.” To Nathaniel’s surprise, Moravec revealed a slight bemusement. “In fact, apparently I staged last week’s accident to give GlobeTex an excuse to pull out.”

You took the words out of my mouth.

“Mac, you’ll agree—I understand everyone calls you Mac; is that okay?” she said that with a typical female intonation, confusing Nathaniel further. “You’ll agree that there would be little point in such a move given that our contract expires in six months…minus a few days.”

Again anticipated. Machuzak leveled his gaze. “You know that deadline can’t be met.”

Moravec reacted only by standing and turning away. “I’m sorry. There’s no choice in the matter. We’ve been putting far more money into your lab than the Republic or federal government. For a time Leonard Rasmussen convinced me that success was inevitable. He was, it appears, exaggerating. You may have heard that a controlling interest in our company has been bought by the Germans, who are much more enthusiastic about solar than fusion, especially with ITER causing so much controversy. GlobeTex’s current plans are to establish the world’s largest wind farm and solar facility in the panhandle, and push harder on cellulosic ethanol along the Brazilian model. I’m sure you’ll agree that America’s detour to corn-based ethanol was a total failure.”

A diversionary tactic, Machuzak thought, but he did agree. Ethanol was, in a word, stupid. It wasn’t energy efficient and its development only caused people to starve elsewhere. “I didn’t come to talk about ethanol,” he said. “I came to ask you for more time.”

“How much?”

“A commercial fusion plant is still decades away. To demonstrate feasibility, ignition, a few years…four, five…”

Moravec chuckled while pausing before the award wall. “Mac, you’re talking like your predecessors have for seventy years. We took a big risk investing in CFRC. People who support me are opposed to fusion—these days they’re leaning toward ordinary fission now that Japan is forgotten—and GlobeTex is not prepared to wait any longer.”

“Two years—give us two years.” Nathaniel suddenly felt as if he were bargaining with the devil in a three-button jacket.

The CEO turned from the wall, raised her glass toward the physicist. “Tell me, Mac, what are the odds of success in two years?”

“Ten percent,” Nathaniel replied, flinching internally, as he well knew the meaninglessness of placing odds on a single event.

“Not a risk any businessman would accept. Leonard would have answered one hundred percent.”

“He would have lied. I am not Leonard.”

“To your disadvantage, Mac.”

That cut. Machuzak knew that he had no experience in these matters and must be coming across as a neophyte. “A year,” he said.

Moravec laughed, this time Nathaniel might have said sardonically, and absently spun the blades of a miniature wind turbine standing on the desk. “If the odds are ten percent in two years, surely they are less in one.”

“Tell me,” said Nathaniel, now rising, “imagine we do the impossible and achieve ignition in six months.” He stepped toward the reclusive CEO. “Then…?”

For the first time since the audience began, Moravec paused. “A fair question. We are obliged to extend your contract, I suppose.”

“You suppose. For how long?”

At this, the executive’s silence was slightly, perceptibly longer. Machuzak realized that she, it, hadn’t considered the contingency.

“That would depend.”

“On…?”

“On how promising the results look, I imagine.” Moravec glanced away, the discomfort Nathaniel had noticed upon entering flashing briefly.

“You wouldn’t accept ignition as promising?”

“I didn’t say that. But as I understand it, the definition of ignition is not so clear-cut. Is ignition for one second ignition?”

One second is an eternity in physics. “You’re shifting the goalposts.”

Moravec set down her glass, no smile now. “Mac, do not class me with those reactionary politicians who have ruined Texas by fighting restrictions on carbon, fuel standards or research into alternate energy.” For an instant the CEO’s voice was infused with a sad anger. “I too am of the future. But I no longer see fusion as part of that future.”

She said the last in an earnest, nearly importunate tone. Nathaniel nevertheless perceived that Moravec’s answer was a shameless evasion. She, it, had no intention of rescinding the deadline. “You’ve never visited the lab, have you?”

“Only by remote.”

At that instant, her cell phone rang. The ringtone was a jaunty one, unusual, and a few seconds passed before Nathaniel placed it as an electronic version of the Nisi Dominus from Monteverdi’s Vespers. Moravec cut her caller short, saying she was occupied, and returned to her guest.

“Why don’t you visit, see what you are destroying?” Nathaniel said before Moravec could resume speaking.

“I don’t relish the thought of being blown to bits,” she replied.

Nathaniel tilted his head. “What makes you think that would happen?” he asked curiously.

“No reason,” Moravec shrugged, “undue suspicion. I suppose I owe you that much, but I’ll be traveling for the next six weeks. Make an appointment with my secretary.”

They stood. As Nathaniel prepared to leave, he noticed on Moravec’s shelf Sun Tzu’s Art of War, beloved of movie executives. “Doesn’t Sun Tzu write that it is better to take a state intact than ruin it?” remarked the scientist.

“If possible,” reacted Moravec with surprise.

“He also writes that moral superiority is the first weapon in waging war.” Nathaniel shook Moravec’s hand and said he’d make the appointment.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Early Saturday morning, as they left Cadarache Castle, Slava had found a message waiting in the foyer. He opened the envelope and handed its contents to T. J., who read, “Your presence in Cadarache is not required.” Lost in thought, Archangelsky lagged behind while she walked in the brisk air down the steps through the garden and toward the parking area. Suddenly, she froze, and in that instant the two were buffeted by a deafening roar as their car went up in flames. Even now her instincts told her to take cover; she pulled the physicist after her three steps and together they dove behind a five-hundred-year-old stone wall. When their ears had stopped ringing, the two got to their feet, dusted themselves off. T. J. pulled a leaf from Archangelsky’s beard but did not pause to ask for an explanation. As the castle staff came running, she gripped him by the arm, marched him to the other end of the lot and shoved him into an idle taxi.

* * * *

Only late that evening did Machuzak link up with Slava and T. J. at the Salt Lick in Driftwood. Even as Nathaniel entered the rough-hewn lodge, choking on the smoke that poured from the barbeque pit, D’Abro and Archangelsky signaled him from a bench in a far corner. Despite the dimness of the place, he perceived that the expressions worn by the pair went beyond jet lag.

They ordered brisket and ribs, which arrived on paper plates, beer in cups. Only a couple of Republic of Texas Defense Force militiamen immersed in computer games a few tables away and emitting alien shrieks disturbed the unusual quiet.

With an expression that appeared no less grim to Slava and T. J. than theirs to him, Nathaniel shook his head, ran his fingers over the wooden table scarred with knife wounds and began. “Nobody has any ideas. Toshi has vanished. People have begun to quit.” This morning: one tech, two engineers, a physicist. He reported his negative results detecting nitrogen and SF6 in the surge room, to which T. J. smiled faintly, and he then relayed his meeting with Moravec. “He, she is a new species, homo virtualis. I’m not even sure I met the Moravec, but I’m convinced whoever or whatever I met can’t rescind the deadline even if she, it wants to. Someone is forcing her to do this. I invited her to the lab, but…”

The deadline remained, immovable. The wheels of their great task were slowly beginning to turn. At this very moment, cooling-water checks, leak checks of the neutral beams would be proceeding. In the next day or two, techs would seal up the torus, further leak checks… The bakeout could take weeks. The cooldown would overlap but a month might yet pass before the desperate games could begin. Even Moravec could not fast-forward Nature. “Did you find the dragon?” Nathaniel asked, suddenly impatient.

Archangelsky and T. J. glanced at each other. “We got video of some people at chess tournament and have identified them,” replied Slava somberly. Dima, true to his word, had found the names in the administrative offices and Slava received them over the Atlantic. “This is not main thing—”

“Did you find—”

“Doc,” said T. J., “those ITER people don’t like us.” To Nathaniel’s cocked head, Slava reluctantly described the corridor scene between him and Balard. When he finished, D’Abro added, “What you called a race with ITER before is gonna look like a pissant go-kart in a bowl of Cheerios compared to what’s shapin up now. Believe me.”

Machuzak glared ferociously at the Russian. “Yaroslav Borisovich, I send you to ITER on a reconnaissance mission and you start a war! I can’t believe…!”

“Sorry,” said Slava.

“Are you sure Balard would…?” Machuzak managed once he’d calmed.

T. J. described her encounter with the director, the note on his desk, the dinner conversation. “Doc, my theory is he’s planted a mole here at CFRC who’s determined that ASSET will fail—permanently.”

Nathaniel disdained nonscientists’ use of the word theory for any idle proposition. Archangelsky scorned it no less but said, “She’s right, boss.”

To prove her case, D’Abro shoved a phone toward Machuzak. “The whole conversation is there, and the voice stress analysis. Wanna hear it?”

Nathaniel was still absorbing the fact of the phone lying before him when Slava revealed what had happened that morning at Cadarache Castle. As the Russian finished, Nathaniel stared at him as if nothing had penetrated. Nothing had, so impossible was it to believe what he’d just heard. “You with us, brat?” said Slava, waving his hand before the other’s eyes.

After an infinite space, Machuzak blinked. “I’m glad you are, brat… Who knew you were there?”

“By this morning? Every plasma physicist in the world, probably.”

“Balard sure wouldn’t have forgotten,” put in T. J. “It was just a warning. We weren’t anywhere near the car and if they’d intended to kill us, they would have.”

It seemed preordained when at that moment Nathaniel’s phone signaled. Holding his breath, he logged on to the Real World and, sure enough, found the dragon perched on a crag above the same volcano. “There will be another,” the dragon roared with flared nostrils, and took wing.

Its wake left the three of them staring. After eons T. J. breathed. “Believe me now, Doc? We’ve got to locate those folks in the video.

“I’m working on it,” Slava said.

Even as they were en route to Europe, T. J. had contacted the Real World administrators to get the dragon’s user information, but they naturally demanded a warrant. “That’ll be tricky with me on leave. The other choice is to hack in.” She abruptly lit up. “Can you boy scientists do it?”

Machuzak glanced at T. J., to the phone on the table, back to her. At length he said, “Maybe with enough—. I don’t like the idea—”

“When it’s this urgent—?” T. J. was staring at him with the ravenous eyes of a teenage download pirate.

“Damnit, Bedbug, it’s illegal!” Nathaniel shouted loudly enough so that the militiamen glanced up from their computer games. “I shouldn’t be telling you this.” All of them stared at the Real World volcano bubbling on the screen, as if to decide who was going to capitulate first. “No,” Machuzak finally shook his head, “I’ve had it up to here with people telling me to do the wrong thing all week. What’s happened to this world?”

“To freedom of information,” Slava raised his glass.

“Look,” Nathaniel went on, “if we hack into the Real World we’ll only end up with a whole daisy chain of proxy server addresses that’ll lead nowhere. What we need is the Real World’s cooperation to snag Mr. Dragon next time he logs on. If we can trace him in real time, we might at least get a geographical fix.”

“We should have thought of this before flying to Europe,” muttered Archangelsky.

“We’ve got to smoke out the mole,” T. J. insisted. “I tell you, when Balard told me he had no contacts here anymore, I believed him about as much as I’d believe that Pam Anderson’s tits were real.”

“Because of a cheap piece of software?” Nathaniel mumbled to himself, pushing her phone away in disgust. It did remind him, though… “Krieg-Zuber has evidently been monitoring email traffic for some time.” He told them about the back-room splitter. “You might check if there’s been any communication with Balard.”

Now T. J. cocked her head. “Much obliged, Doc. Are you sure it’s legal?”

“I’m not, The Terminator apparently was.” An awkward silence descended but then Nathaniel’s eyes suddenly twinkled. “You know, why wait for the dragon’s next appearance? Why not lure him online?”

“How?” T. J. asked, puzzled.

He wasn’t sure. “Announce a meeting: ‘radical ideas for ignition.’ God knows we need some. Maybe he’ll show up, in one avatar or another. If we’re lucky, the Real World can trace him while we’re on.”

“This is not-bad idea,” said Slava, “disinformation.”

T. J. agreed. “Good to know you’re thinkin, Doc; it’s worth a try.”

Nathaniel nodded and fell to contemplation. Slava called a halt then, saying he needed some sleep. The lines on his face were evident and D’Abro wasn’t looking any better. With a wave Archangelsky abandoned the other two in the parking lot, and since T. J. had left her car at home, Nathaniel offered her a lift.

* * * *

She lived in Hyde Park north of the university, which after all these years retained its reputation as a hippie enclave. Machuzak pulled into the gravel driveway in need of weeding and suggested that she also hit the sack. T. J. nodded wearily, getting out of the car, but after a few steps halted and with a backward glance asked if he wanted to come in for a drink. He agreed. She unlocked the door to the smallish house, frowzy and single storied, switched on a light and apologized for the disarray. Ironing board in the dining room, clothes scattered hither and yon, books piled studentlike in corners, on unvarnished pinewood shelves. T. J. dropped her sweater onto the sofa and disappeared into the kitchen, leaving Nathaniel to glance over her collection. The young woman had not lied about being a physics groupie. Prominent in the stacks, Entropy: The Key to America’s Decline; Cash In on Climate Change; 1001 Theories of Everything; Reenchanting Everyday Life Through Quantum Mechanics. He smiled, pondering the chasm between such treatises and the nitty-gritty of science, noticed the genuine biology, physics and chemistry texts interspersed among them.

T. J. returned then, holding out a glass of bourbon, saying she was too keyed up now to sleep.

“I can imagine,” Nathaniel answered, as she cleared a place on the sofa for them to sit. “First week on the job, you pass a radiation course, almost kill yourself in a tokamak, nearly become a murder victim… Not bad.”

“Yeah,” she smiled faintly. “You know, Doc, when I resigned I was feelin real burnt out, too much from all sides—work, cyberspace, chores… I’d been thinkin of spending some time in one of those Buddhist retreats up in the hills. The online ones didn’t help. My plan doesn’t seem to be workin out, does it?” She smiled dimly again. “And we still don’t have any idea of what’s goin on.”

“It’s been less than a week, T. J. Scientific problems often take years…”

“Investigations go cold in a day.” She plunked down on the sofa and motioned for him to sit. “You know what was goin through my mind at ITER, Doc?” she said, facing him unabashedly. Nathaniel shook his head. “That I missed you.”

Reddening, Machuzak swallowed and managed to say, “I missed you too.” He realized he meant it.

“What do you want to do?”

Nathaniel was taken aback, here, not earlier than midnight, watching D’Abro lean closer with her elbow resting on the back of the couch. Her hair flopped over her face, almost into her glass; she flicked it back, chuckling in a way that was as embarrassed as he felt. “What do I want to do?” he said. “We have a job, T. J.”

“Upstanding Nathaniel doesn’t believe in mixing business with pleasure?”

Machuzak answered that intense situations bring every kind of…emotion…illusion. “We’re very different, you and me.”

“About as different as they come.” She made a nod that might have been taken for pensive and silenced her earpiece. “Opposites attract but don’t stick, huh?”

“Do they? Anyway, it’s dangerous, getting involved with coworkers, in science especially. Look at a woman the wrong way and—there’s hell to pay.”

Again D’Abro chuckled, rolled back against the sofa with her eyes toward the ceiling. “Doc, I’m not a scientist, in case you’re still confused on that point. I know. No office romances, too unpleasant when they go sour. No next-door neighbors, same reason. Forget subordinates, superiors, students, you name it. In fact, the only place when romance is legal is when it’s…virtual.” T. J. sat up, clasping her glass with two hands and took a drink. “You know,” she said abruptly, “according to your radiation manual, the greatest health risk to a male is staying single. Ten years off your life.”

“Are you suggesting I take up smoking?” Nathaniel asked dryly.

“You’d gain seven years.”

Nathaniel couldn’t help but laugh, not perceiving where these two people were heading. Neither were the sculpted curves of T. J.’s figure lost on him as she lay against the couch with her eyes half closed and her blouse loosely buttoned. He was tempted to reach out his hand, and she might have welcomed it, but he hesitated. “Surely,” he said, finally, “someone as attractive as you must have…commitments.”

He sees that T. J. finds the words funny. “Umm, occasional commitments,” she replies. “You already know I have trouble stickin around.”

“Then why, I mean why me?”

“I told you I’m a physics groupie.”

“Anyone at the lab can explain what a plasma is.”

Again she rolls her head toward him. “Maybe, but not everyone has the Bhagavad Gita lyin on his desk.”

Without thinking, Machuzak stretches his hand across the small space and runs his finger down her cheek. She does not oppose him, indeed attempts to nuzzle his hand. “The Gita won’t help with tokamaks, but I keep hoping it will help with life. It reminds me to do my duty, that’s all.” Somehow he has not expressed himself well, he feels, an especially common state with women. “T. J.,” he says, reluctantly withdrawing his hand against all desire, “we have a long row to hoe and… I’m not sure you entirely trust me.”

She looks up at him in her fatigue. The moment may be slipping. “You keep a lot to yourself, Doc, you really do. Or else you’re so damn naïve that you have nothing whatever to hide. I’m not sure which is scarier. It’s the wrong century for someone like that.” Her blue eyes are locked on to his, as wide as he’d seen them, limpid and imploring. “What haven’t you told me?”

He shakes his head, puzzled.

“I hope you’re right, partner.”

She loops her arms around his neck and nestles her head against his shoulder. A moment later she is asleep. Machuzak sits there until late becomes early, gently disentangles himself and goes home.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Machuzak again arrived early at the MTF, a foam mattress and sleeping bag in tow. After yesterday’s warning from the dragon he found himself edgy, convinced against his better judgment that another attack on Prometheus was inevitable, imminent. The insane events at Cadarache left no doubt of the prognosis and what he’d feared most was taking place: he could not empty his mind of suspicion.

A mole? Who could Balard have turned? Who at CFRF reviled the program so fiercely to throw the race to ITER? Machuzak began scanning a mental list of CFRC scientists who’d worked on ITER or visited Cadarache itself. He lost count. Hasschler, Krieg-Zuber, Slava… No, not even Archangelsky was jaundiced, crafty enough. Nathaniel clasped his head between his hands.

The hiss of a valve caused him to jerk upright. He breathed, thought to check ITER’s daily report and instantly regretted it: Balard had moments ago announced that he would bypass deuterium-deuterium experiments altogether and go straight to the high-powered deuterium-tritium mix within a week. Machuzak struck the desk hard with his fist. “Damn you, Archangelsky!” he shouted. The empty lab echoed with his vain curse but as T. J. had predicted, the race between ITER and ASSET was no longer one between pissant go-karts in a bowl of Cheerios.

He cast about for a way to turn the situation to their advantage and ordered the nearest webcam on. Moments later he’d recorded an announcement that CFRC scientists, under the leadership of Toshifume Matsushima, had conceived a radical new magnetic field configuration that would allow ASSET to achieve ignition in record time. Experiments would begin within weeks. It was a complete lie, but Machuzak added an upbeat soundtrack and after sucking in his breath readied his finger to release it to the world.

Was he out of his fucking mind? They yet had no warrant to tap the Real World. What if the ruse succeeded and the dragon logged on today? They’d have gained nothing, absolutely nothing. Nathaniel lowered his finger.

* * * *

As he sat in the gloom-shrouded lab, chin resting on knuckles, the MTF’s third worker walked in. Nathaniel looked up, smiled faintly at Mercedes Ramirez. He hadn’t seen her in a full week. Seven days past the event, she appeared in a state of shock, eyes large, red, a sleepwalker’s. Perhaps it was the hour. Perhaps it was her.

“Hello, Mercedes,” he said.

She didn’t reply, exactly, instead pulled off her earbuds and shook out her hair, staring at him for a moment with a pinched, sullen expression. Without a word she walked into her lab, which adjoined his own. He followed and asked how she was doing.

“The whole thing freaked me out,” Mercedes at last answered. She stood facing him in a brown vest and set her portfolio on the bench. The space wasn’t much different from Machuzak’s own next door. “I’m sorry, I just didn’t want to come in.”

A few years younger than Nathaniel, Mercedes was more of their generation. Permanently plugged in and insensible to her surroundings, she could give T. J. a run for her money as poster child for the smartphone stare, the gaze into cyberspace that was the indelible brand of the age. Nathaniel often wondered why Mercedes had become a physicist. Like many of their contemporaries, she wielded video-game reflexes but was less than adroit with true experiments, having been schooled since birth to view a nuts-and-bolts laboratory as an artificial thing. A refusal to confront a world in which systems fucked up and could not be reset at the blink of an eye had become the most intractable dilemma facing modern science. For all his mathematical shortcomings, Machuzak at least respected the mathematical process. Mercedes regarded calculus, even algebra, as software. Like most CFRC hands, when presented with the simplest problem her first move was invariably to the computer. It never entered her mind that a mathematical problem might have an exact solution and that humans were capable of finding it, occasionally. The very concept of an exact answer had disappeared from the face of the Earth, as extinct as the dodo and the polar bear.

They’d briefly danced around an affair and Nathaniel couldn’t deny that she was an attractive woman. But despite her Latin name, Nathaniel found Mercedes to be brittle, uptight, taken to offense and imagined slights. She also suffered from that androgynous, sexless quality that seemed to be the hallmark of the few women who entered physics to this day. Machuzak readily conceded that she may well have felt the same about the men, but as he regarded her, he wished D’Abro were standing before him.

Had Mercedes taken up with Krieg-Zuber last year? Those were the whispers, but if anything was going on, they’d kept it under the radar and Nathaniel didn’t consider it his business. Had she’d ever worked at ITER? Yes—he scanned her face her uncomfortably—he thought she had. “I’ve invited Moravec to visit next month,” he said. “We’ll show her—”

“—Her?”

“Them, maybe. We’ll show her the MTF, the accelerator. It may be our last chance to convince her to rescind this hopeless deadline. Will you do the honors?”

At that moment a tool clattered loudly to the floor in the next room. “What was that!?” Mercedes Ramirez exclaimed, going stiff from head to toe.

Machuzak also flinched, against his will. “Something fell, that’s all… Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” she said, sniffling.

“Good, I’ll talk to you later. I’m late for today’s meeting.”

Nathaniel made a quick exit, leaving Ramirez standing sullenly in the MTF, wondering very much who she was.

* * * *

As the meeting, the paralysis he’d described to T. J. and Slava last night continued. The realization that one false step could send them down a blind, fatal alley had completely incapacitated the division heads. Hasschler was arguing that they couldn’t dare anything exotic. But if they refused to essay the radical, they’d fail. And Toshi? After leaving Mercedes Ramirez, Nathaniel scoured the MTF for him in vain. Archangelsky hadn’t showed either, and with jet lag from Europe he shouldn’t be sleeping late.

“Pierre Balard announced today that ITER will go to DT within the week,” Machuzak told them in the midst of it.

Instantly, the division heads sucked in their collective breaths as if they’d been punched in the stomach. They stared, but no brilliant suggestions came to their lips. In the vacuum, Fred Abbuhl distributed a list of immediate repairs: turbine on cryoplant pump #4 ; five high-voltage capacitors for pulse-cleaning; two klystrons for rf heating… Nothing major. Nor the stuff with which to serenade your true love. When all was said and done, Nathaniel understood, that was our problem—lack of romance. We are too much engineers.

* * * *

As he left the conference room a call came through. Krieg-Zuber, now at home from the hospital, on the line. “Fuck DD, old boy,” he commanded. “Go straight to DT.” Machuzak clicked off and blocked the number.

In the next moment he collided with D’Abro, who’d been looking for him. “Doc,” she said, with no trace of awkwardness from the previous night, indeed with some unspoken, melancholy intimacy, “I’ve been thinkin, maybe you do need someone on active duty. This is getting beyond my pay—”

Without a word, Machuzak silenced her, grabbed her arm and rounded up Slava. Outside in the fountain’s spray, T. J. revealed herself to be as on edge as Nathaniel himself. “Doc, another attack is a sure thing and I’m not in the position… Geez, I’m already calling in a couple favors to get a Real World subpoena and DNA tests.” She shook her head at a loss, then stared at Machuzak sadly. “Look, why don’t you put me on the accident investigation, if it’s not too late.”

“It’s not too late,” Machuzak said sympathetically, laying his hand on her shoulder.

She smiled faintly. “Then I can at least interview everyone who was in the power area. But I won’t even be able to take DNA elimination samples unless we break cover.”

“She’s right, boss,” Slava interrupted. “This covert ops business has strung us by the ham. Maybe best to get unstrung.”

Machuzak was surprised to hear this from Archangelsky the subversive, but evidently they’d all been thinking the same thing.

“Until we’re not,” D’Abro sighed before he could answer, “I’m gonna raid all those emails your former superiors have hoarded and flag Cadarache traffic. I’m also gonna bury myself in your personnel files and do a lotta cross-checking with what passes for your surveillance records. Believe me, I won’t surface before sundown, CSI reruns notwithstanding.”

They had no better plan. Slava remarked that he’d contacted most of the Europeans in the photo, and that they all seemed to be in the clear. “No reply yet from Asians and I doubt asking whether they are posing as dragon in Real World will help. Best bet is to snag Dragonmaster next time he logs on. We need their help, with or without warrant.”

Nathaniel then revealed the video he’d made and come to within seconds of launching two hours ago. “I almost torpedoed the show.”

“Don’t beat yourself up, Doc, you’ll be a rock star soon enough. The minute we get the Real World’s cooperation, you’re online.”

“A microsecond after I’m online, everyone at CFRC will know I’m lying and about ten milliseconds after that so will ITER. We have no ideas, none, to achieve ignition in record time.”

Archangelsky stroked his beard, shrugged. “We merely adjust truth to lie. Governments do this all the time.”

“True,” nodded Machuzak with something that might pass for a smile. “Standard operating procedure.” He then got up and walked back toward the main building, preparing to wait, for exactly what he didn’t know.

CHAPTER TWENTY

T. J. was pissed off and scared. Pissed off because she was painfully aware that her training, life, had not prepared her for what she’d stumbled into. Why’d she let Mac talk her into such a mess? What was this “we’re all amateurs” bullshit? Pissed off enough, for sure, to request the sheriff’s department’s cooperation in an official-like investigation, reminding them that CFRC was fronting the bill. Outsourcing sounded good to Austin; with the sheriff’s permission she filed for the Real World subpoena herself, fast-tracking it online. And now she fidgeted, waited. Damn, she had so looked forward to that Buddhist retreat.

Scared because she couldn’t comprehend her surroundings. For several days she’d been poring over surveillance files. Mac’d been right. There was no coverage, none, in the bowels of Prometheus. Whatever world this laboratory belonged to, she’d never seen its like at IMAX. Nor could she understand a tenth of the jargon she found in Krieg-Zuber’s email cache. Stubbornly she persisted, staring at her monitor until bleary eyed, cross-checking against personnel files images of anyone the cameras had caught at the pentagon entrances within twenty-four hours of the event, cross-checking her fingerprint matches against the same, checking all personnel files for scientists who’d worked at Cadarache, which were many. None had an obvious connection to Balard.

Damnit. T. J. abruptly got to her feet, walked out of the security office into the darkened lobby. Not a word she’d read during the past hour had penetrated. She walked over to the opalescent firebird, whose wings glistened even at midnight, and pressed her forehead to the display glass. For a moment she wondered again at the mad artisan who had spent months fashioning the thing. No multitasker.

Thoughts obstinately refusing to organize themselves, she checked her messages. Nothing new in the past ten seconds. T. J. glanced at the shadowy exhibits surrounding her and glumly conceded that, maybe, truly, she wasn’t cut out for science, at least at a place where the experiments took not seconds, not years, but lifetimes.

She returned to the office and, with a bad taste in her mouth but a curiosity she couldn’t deny, went through Mac’s file. He hadn’t spent time in Cadarache, but Slava had and neither much liked Krieg-Zuber. They’d already admitted bein in the power area before the accident. Krieg-Zuber’s database coughed up a dozen pairs of prints that matched those she’d found in the surge room; a few were too smeared to identify. How old they were she couldn’t know, but every name attached to the matches appeared on the access records. The only prints on the damned busbar were Mac’s, Slava’s and Lipman’s. Professional amateurs, sheesh. Oh, that strange reticence of his… She’d rarely ever met anyone so diffidently smart; she’d even asked him about it. “The Greeks tell us true valor has no need to call attention to itself,” he’d replied, smiling. She couldn’t understand. Not to advertise was practically un-American.

To hell with this. Now an official member of Lipman’s accident investigation, she sent the tech a list of people she wanted to interview tomorrow, but not until she spoke to Krieg-Zuber. She turned off the lights and slept on the floor.

* * * *

Only after Krieg-Zuber confirmed with Henderson that D’Abro was a new hire at CFRC did he agree to take her call. She spoke to him from the big field, amid the buffalos, figuring that put her out of range of cupped ears.

“How are you feeling, sir?” she asked the clean-shaven, imposing blond man of about Mac’s age who stared at her from a living room chair.

“Not badly, mademoiselle, thank you. The burns are healing, my left arm is still partially paralyzed and may take some months to return to normal, but have no fear, I intent to resume the directorship as soon as possible. Only the plebian doctors have prevented me from returning already.”

“As you know, we’re conducting an accident investigation,” T. J. said, observing even over the phone that the deputy director rarely blinked. “I need to know why you ran into the surge room against all safety regulations.”

“Mademoiselle,” Krieg-Zuber replied with visible, unblinking annoyance, “that has already been explained to Lipman. In my younger years I fixed tokamaks every day. By the time I arrived on the scene, technicians had already racked out the circuit breakers and the system should have been entirely discharged. Obviously it wasn’t. I may be a foolish statistic now, but this far from the first electrical accident at a laboratory. You shall determine the cause.”

“This is our intent, sir,” T. J. answered with complete honesty as a buffalo nuzzled her. “Apparently you told Dr. Machuzak that you felt dizzy in the surge room?”

At that Krieg-Zuber cast at her a wide-eyed startled glance. “I don’t remember much if anything about what happened, but yes, I told him that. Why did he ask?”

“Just a theory. He thought you might have fainted in the excitement.”

The convalescent snorted disdainfully. “Hardly likely, and irrelevant. Young lady, people like Machuzak have deluded themselves into thinking that their minuscule problems, observing the dent an ion makes in a piece of titanium, grants them mastery of the universe. These humdrum physicists, engineers—they are interchangeable, their ideas, their personalities. They can be bought and sold in bulk for discount rates. You certainly don’t realize it, but this war with ITER is the best thing that could have happened. Machuzak has no vision. A strange quirk of fate has catapulted him to the directorship, but be assured, he will not maintain that high position long.”

“May I ask, sir, what is your vision for the laboratory, the ignition campaign?”

“ITER is a historic boondoggle. It was never subjected to true scientific scrutiny; it was an entirely political decision and is billions of euros over budget. No one believes that it can achieve ignition—”

“Then why, sir,” interrupted T. J., petting the buffalo, “are you in a race?”

“We did not ask for this, but now we must win.” Krieg-Zuber clenched his fist. “The world must know that fusion can be a reality and for a smaller cost than ITER—”

“ASSET is a ten-billion-dollar machine, sir, and it’s a tokamak.”

“Not all tokamaks are identical, mademoiselle, and as CFRC is overwhelmingly privately funded, no one can accuse it of siphoning money from other research.”

“Could you tell me, sir,” it suddenly occurred to T. J. to ask, “what ideas you have contributed to ASSET to make it different from ITER?”

“Ideas? Miss D’Abro, that has been explained to you one minute ago,” he said with his unnerving stare. “Ideas in science are a dime a dozen. If one person doesn’t have an idea, another will. No one cares who has the ideas. The man who understands people, mademoiselle, he is the man who changes history. I have led this project. There can be no greater contribution.”

Krieg-Zuber’s scoff or sneer or condescension would have been impossible to surpass. “I see…” said T. J. pensively. “May I ask one other question? Have you worked at Cadarache?”

“I visited for a few months four or five years ago. What, young lady, can that possibly have to do with the accident?”

“Nothin really, but y’all seem like a big, incestuous family, you physicists. You’re friends with your rivals and rivals with your friends and have no allegiances except to the place you’ve parked your overnight bag. Well, thank you, Dr. Krieg-Zoober. I’ll send you a copy of the report.”

T. J. signed off, uncertain of Krieg-Zuber’s vision for Prometheus, certain that every one of these high-minded folks wanted fusion on their own terms and no one was about to retreat. She walked back across the field toward the pentagon. It was time to interview the techs.

* * * *

They all had plausible stories. Red Ehlers had been down there just twenty-four hours before the dedication, doing some last minute high-potting. What that meant, T. J. hadn’t the faintest, but in the gloomy dungeon he demonstrated, as did the other techs. She began to understand why judges hated expert witnesses.

Their resentment at recent events leaked through everything they said. “The Terminator saw two guys having a mock knife-fight with screwdrivers”—Frosty Patton spat on the floor—“and fired them on the spot. If they were still around, they’d have thrown the big ass into the surge room themselves.”

By evening, T. J. had a numbing headache and no more reason to believe one tech wanted to sabotage the machine more than the next—or had refrained. It seemed unlikely to her that the techs were involved. How would a tech have known she and Slava were in Cadarache? Well, Slava had said it: by the second day probably every plasma physicist in the world knew their location with GPS precision. That wasn’t the point. How many knew why they were there? A tech? No way. Had Balard guessed?

T. J. returned to the security office and stayed late again. The DNA tests came in that evening. Progress. There’d been a few samples on the busbar. She’d retrieved one of Slava’s hairs from her sweater after the Cadarache incident and one of Mac’s from her couch. With a knot in her stomach, she’d sent both in for testing. The results left no room for interpretation.

She’d also found a few hairs in the surge-room vicinity and those tests had come back too, but unless she broke cover she couldn’t get elimination samples. Fuck… She wandered again out into the lobby and peered into the firebird’s display case. “Why don’t you help, bird?” The unblinking jeweled eyes merely stared at her.

Abruptly T. J. glanced over her shoulder, but the only other occupants of the lobby were shadows and her own echo. She felt very stuck and she needed a drink. T. J. closed the security office door and this time went home.

* * * *

By morning the Real World under subpoena had turned over their logged IP addresses for Dragonmaster. Meeting Nathaniel and Slava early in the MTF, T. J. gave them the bad news. The addresses led to a server near Cadarache. The two physicists glanced at each other. “You were right, Mac,” she bowed. “It’s a proxy that disguises the original address.”

“I’d have been surprised had it been otherwise,” remarked Slava.

Machuzak pondered their situation. “I suppose that means we need another subpoena,” he eventually replied.

“Doc, you don’t get it. I can’t subpoena a French service provider. I’d need cooperation from the French law enforcement agencies, and to get that…”

She stared at him significantly, but Nathaniel had no intention of resurrecting his adolescent hacking skills; the idea daunted and disgusted him equally.

Archangelsky felt the same. “Looks like it’s time to launch your infomercial, Boss,” he said.

They huddled around the computer and Nathaniel posted his video, with enhanced graphics, on CFRC’s website and then on the big video sites. Forty-eight seconds later the first burst of rage and disbelief came back from ITER. Machuzak nodded. Good. By the time this morning’s ignition meeting was over, the announcement should have gone viral.

* * * *

The division heads were watching the video as Nathaniel entered the conference room and met him with fierce outcries from all sides. “What the hell have you done, Machuzak?” Diana Cochran shouted. “It’s a bald-faced lie.”

Absolutely. He feigned a smile and lied again: “It’s only to keep ITER off balance.”

At which Thad Hasschler exploded. “Off balance! You have made what was impossible inconceivable! Not only Balard, but the whole world will be breathing down our necks and know us for frauds!”

“If you don’t want the world to know us for frauds,” Nathaniel now answered icily, “I suggest you come up with some ideas. You’re way behind schedule.” With that he canceled further ignition meetings and left.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

An hour later, blogs being posted on the four corners of the Earth but no sign of Dragonmaster, Machuzak headed to the pentagon, hoping that if the damned physicists couldn’t keep a level head, his chief engineer could.

Nathaniel found Abbuhl in the test cell, where now two balloons of Edvard Munch’s Scream face guarded the entrance. Technicians had sealed up the torus a few days ago and had been pumping hard on it since. Leak checks were proceeding. Machuzak stood at Fred’s side watching the techs climb in and out of the cryostat as they sprayed helium gas over every surface of the inner vessel. Meters below, diagnosticians checked whether the helium showed up in the vacuum-pump exhaust.

“Looks good,” Andy Lipman reported. “Seals are tight.”

Machuzak audibly expelled a quantum of tension. They’d run into no major catastrophes, like the plastic pails or latex gloves that techs had sometimes inadvertently left in machines after the hand washing, household items which easily contained enough gas to destroy the vacuum they were attempting to achieve. More than once the discovery of such objects had cost them months while the tokamak was brought up to room pressure and reopened. The thought sobered: a rubber glove in the wrong place today would be the perfect sabotage. Our nemesis should have thought of it. But he hadn’t: after days of pumping the gauges would have already hit a latex iceberg.

“When can you begin the bake?” Machuzak asked.

“Mac,” said Abbuhl, “you know as well as I do that it takes a week to get down to operating pressure.” Meaning no pressure at all, one hundred billionth of an atmosphere.

Once there, Abbuhl would begin the vessel bake, heating the torus to nearly 400 degrees Celsius to drive out recalcitrant impurities and water. That would take…

“Mac, sir, even Balard can’t rush this. The bakeout before the dedication took two weeks.”

“Push it,” said Machuzak and winced even as he uttered the words.

Abbuhl glanced sideward at him. “Herr Doktor Professor, let ITER fuck itself.”

Nathaniel barely heard him; he was already considering helium. While the torus baked, the big cryostat surrounding it would be pumped out too. After ITER’s, it was the world’s largest vacuum vessel. More leak checks. The magnets themselves would then be flooded with liquid helium, slowly bringing them down to operating temperatures, 4.2 degrees absolute. Should they get there, the hottest place in the solar system would reside next to one of the coldest, only a vacuum jacket separating them. Machuzak was grateful that vacuums are the best insulator.

Three weeks for the cooldown. At the same time Abbuhl’s team would be checking out the heating systems. “How long to condition the neutral beams and the rf drives?” Nathaniel asked.

“Mac, it takes a month—you know that as well as I do.”

“Push it,” said Machuzak and left the test cell without waiting for the chief’s protest.

* * * *

He found Diana Cochran conferring with two of her engineers in the cryoplant, which occupied pentagon No. 3. The trio stood below the nitrogen factory with its boxlike plant towering above and its maze of multicolored pipe-works and holding tanks that resembled supersized hot dogs. To the best of Machuzak’s knowledge, it was the second-largest liquid nitrogen factory in the world and the helium factory near it was larger. They both churned 24/7, 365 days a year.

Nathaniel approached and perceived that Cochran’s expression was not welcoming. “What’s wrong?” he asked. The others could hardly hear him over the high-pitched whine of the compressors.

First she scowled. “We’ve been getting nonstop response videos about your commercial, Machuzak. You really raised the stakes with that one. We needed this like a hornet up our ass.”

“What else?” Nathaniel said; he always felt itchy around Cochran.

“One of the nitrogen refrigerators failed,” she answered above the noise. “We’re going to have to replace the motor.”

“What about helium? Abbuhl’s ready to start cooling.” That was a stretch.

“The tap is on.”

“Make sure it stays on. I want that machine superconducting in two weeks.” A larger stretch.

Cochran turned away from him and muttered something, which the noise rendered indistinct. He thought he heard, “If I were you, Machuzak, I’d pray.”

It suddenly felt like he’d been doing that his whole life.

* * * *

The afternoon had half run its course when Machuzak’s wrist, handset and office phone went off simultaneously. “This is it,” he whispered to Slava, who’d just stopped by. Too late he realized that it was not the Real World pinging him but an obscure, unfamiliar website. Even as they ran outside to the fountain they got a rough fix on its URL: Cadarache.

Within a moment Machuzak found himself walking along a desolate plain at twilight. To one side, on a beach under a black-red sun, he spied a group of small creatures, which for some reason he took to be the Eloi, huddled around a campfire while they filled the air with a final song. As he traveled along the plain, to either side stood ruins of past civilizations. Here the stark pillars of the Roman forum, there the colossal wreckage of the Bibi-Khanym mosque in Samarkand and the remains of Ulug-beg’s observatory. Farther on, the Parthenon, a pile of rubble that was once the great Buddha at Bamiyan, a half-excavated Pompeii with its ash-encrusted mummies, casts of citizens in the final moments of their lives as they futilely struggled to escape the inescapable. Nearby, the Qin Emperor’s tomb, with its row upon row of terra-cotta warriors, here headless, armless, lifeless.

As he passed the mummies, one rose and approached. “You have ignored my warnings,” it said in a thick Scottish brogue.

Not in the mood for games, Nathaniel grabbed the mummy by the throat. “Are you the saboteur or are you trying to help?” he demanded, his pent-up anger and frustration surging forth.

“If you persist, Prometheus will be destroyed,” the mummy said flatly with blank eyes that revealed nothing.

An instant passed before the words sank in. When they did, Machuzak reeled. Dragonmaster’s two previous messages might have been ambiguous. Not this one. “Who is going to destroy it, damnit?”

“Not to act is to act,” the mummy replied.

“Tell us what you know!” Nathaniel shouted but the avatar had already dissolved in his hands.

Under the fountain Archangelsky sighed. “At least there were no flying samurai.”

For his part, Nathaniel remained silent long. “Looks like Dragonmaster knew we’d staked out the Real World,” he finally said.

Slava glanced around, pausing at a wild turkey that had wandered onto the drive. “Not clear. Maybe he was just smart enough not to show up on same website too many times. He must realize we are after him.”

“Not to act is to act,” Nathaniel muttered, stomach knotted again as in the past days. “I destroy the machine by continuing on course…?”

“You could abandon the effort,” Slava proposed heavily. “We have no chance anyway.”

“Damnit!” Machuzak exploded again. “How can we do that now?”

Slava stared hard at him with a beard glistening from the spray. “Nat Edward’ich, avoid becoming Krieg-Zuber. You give the word, project ends. Lab ends. ITER wins. Machine survives, no one is hurt.”

“I give the word, Krieg-Zuber steps in.”

The two men stood facing each other until the Russian bit his lip. “Well, Dragonmaster has outfoxed us. He won’t appear in Real World again. We need way through that proxy server, or around it.” As Machuzak cursed aloud, Archangelsky offered the latest on the Cadarache video: “I contacted Asians. No surprise Japanese fellow is at what’s left of Naka Fusion Institute, the Korean was at KBSI—” that was the Korean Basic Science Institute, site of Korea’s fusion program. “The Chinese are at Hefei, of course.”

“They all check out?”

Slava nodded. “That leaves only one person unaccounted for.”

“Who’s that?”

“Whoever shot video.”

Nathaniel peered at the Russian. He had half a mind to throw Archangelsky on a plane, but said only, “Find him,” and, “You’re also going to start showing up to ignition meetings.”

“They’ve been canceled,” the Russian replied.

* * * *

The complexes at CFRC were already sparkling with the glow of evening when T. J. appeared at the MTF. She wasn’t happy to learn about the meeting at the End of the World, not one bit. What they needed was help from the FBI Cyber Division, which wasn’t gonna happen. “You say this server was Cadarache again?”

“Doesn’t mean a damn thing,” Machuzak growled, still seething, “and you know it.” He cut off further discussion by showing her some of the messages that had been pouring in throughout the day: nearly two hundred from France alone. She didn’t need to be a physicist to see that the ITER team had gone ballistic over Mac’s infomercial and was already planning tests for later in the week, just to stick it to CFRC. His attempt to bait the Dragonmaster, Nathaniel acknowledged, had unquestionably failed in every purpose except to put them in a more precarious position than they’d already been in. Hasschler was very right about that…

“It was a good idea,” T. J. offered, “even if it hasn’t worked.”

“Slava’s ready to throw in the towel—”

“Don’t.”

The ever-present clacking of the vacuum pumps receded under the plea in her voice, but Machuzak’s only reaction was to strike the desk hard with his fist. At that moment a call from Abbuhl came in. His team had located a cracked flange on one of the neutral-beam boxes. “I’ll be right there.” He took D’Abro by the hand and fifteen silent minutes later they stood in the test cell with Abbuhl. Luckily, it was no emergency. The chief told them that they’d need to replace the flange and pump the box down again, but there was no further damage and the vacuum in the cryostat was holding. Then he vanished to take care of other business.

D’Abro glanced up at the massive steel monoliths covered with cable, and perhaps wanting to change the tone of their previous conversation whispered, “It’s way past time you explained to me what these damned things are. Maybe if I knew, it might help with this here investigation. As far as I’ve made out, neutral beams have something to do with heating that plasma to twenty times the temperature of the sun, but your household Radar Range doesn’t come close, does it?”

“Well,” Machuzak began slowly, if nothing else also wanting to change the previous conversation, “after holding the plasma, heating it is our biggest headache. A tokamak being the world’s largest contraption, we use several methods.” Apart from merely squeezing the plasma with the magnets, which wasn’t popular because of the water balloon problem he’d explained last week, there was the toaster method, there was in fact the Radar Range method and there was the billiard-ball method.

“The toaster method is pretty simple minded. A plasma is like toaster wire; zap it with a few million amps and it heats up. But it’s sort of a reverse toaster wire—the hotter it gets, the less it wants to heat up further, until it stops, period. The toaster method gets you only to twenty or thirty million degrees.”

“Only,” T. J. grunted, wondering what the incomprehensible amount of plumbing above her was for, wondering whether nanobots could change her hair color.

“Yeah. You can do better with the Radar Range method. We call it rf—radio frequency heating.” Machuzak pointed to the racks of microwave guides running into the test cell above their heads and disappearing into Prometheus. “Essentially we nuke the fuel with microwaves and on a good day it heats it up beyond what the toaster method can achieve. But to get the temperature way up we use the neutral beams—”

T. J. stopped crunching the peanuts in her mouth and said, “Go on—the suspense is killing me.”

Machuzak nodded. “These huge boxes are actually particle accelerators, which accelerate deuterium and tritium to high energy and inject them directly into the plasma. The nuclei collide with the particles already inside the torus and—”

“A break shot,” T. J. interrupted, now with him. “Cue ball slows down, other balls speed up. Doesn’t sound so complicated, Doc. You might have told me before.”

Nathaniel laughed soberly. “Bedbug, the devil is much in the details. The electric field in the beam boxes can only accelerate charged particles like deuterium and tritium nuclei. Fine. But the Earth’s magnetic field deflects cosmic rays. How do you get charged nuclei past the tokamak’s own magnetic field into the machine?”

The cocky expression on D’Abro’s face dissolved. “Let’s just say we do a fast two-step—we change the neutral tritium and deuterium atoms into charged ions by adding electrons, accelerate them, then strip away the extra electrons to neutralize them again. Then the deuterium and tritium can pass through the tokamak’s magnetic field and clobber the particles inside. Sort of a bait-and-switch operation. The neutral beams not only supply the fuel, but bring it up to operating regimes, four hundred million degrees.”

“Humph,” T. J. snorted pensively, then abruptly asked whether there was reason to sabotage the neutral beams as opposed to anything else.

Not that Machuzak could think of. “It’s one of the biggest systems and dozens of people work on it. As you see.” Techs were already swarming around the cracked flange.

“Well,” she said, “I think I’m gonna visit with Krieg-Zoober.” Nathaniel cocked his head at her. “He’s back on-site today. By the way, Doc, I’ve been meanin to say, about that night at my place…”

“I know, don’t worry about it.”

“I’m not worrying,” she smiled bravely, and they parted company.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Moments later, T. J. rapped on the third-floor door of Cyrus Krieg-Zuber’s office, glancing at the posters of the Arc de Triomphe, Napoleon’s tomb, the pyramids and Westminster Abbey hanging in the interstices of the teak cabinets that lined his spacious office walls. This was the first time she’d actually seen him in the flesh. She’d read his personnel file with the others and knew that Rasmussen had originally recruited Krieg-Zuber about ten years ago from Advanced Cryotech, which had manufactured ASSET’s magnets, and where he’d received some highfalutin CIA security training. He’d spent time at various ITER sites but as deputy director at CFRC had become Rasmussen’s right-hand man and four years ago decided to tighten up security. That’s when things, as Mac told it, began to go seriously amiss.

The man who sat at his monitor today wore a blue silk shirt and necktie and grumbled even as he stood up, his left arm hanging somewhat stiffly at his side. “He has shut out the director, he believes…” he spat, annoyed at having to adjust his tie with a bad hand.

“Dr. Krieg-Zoober,” T. J. said, already unsettled by the man’s wide, unblinking ice-blue eyes, “I’m surprised you’re in. What brings you here?”

“Zubér. Mademoiselle D’Abro, isn’t it? What do idiot doctors know? No one can prevent the director from performing his duties. To what do I owe the pleasure of this visit?” T. J. was equally unsettled by his demeanor, bow-string taught. Before she could answer, he interrupted himself. “You have obviously seen the video that was launched this morning, if you did not assist in producing it. What could have possessed Machuzak to make such untrue and hazardous statements?” He trained an incendiary stare on her and she involuntarily backed up a step.

“I believe Dr. Machuzak wanted to light a fire under the division heads,” she swallowed, suddenly doubting that this man and the one she’d spoken to by phone were entirely the same. “Get their asses in gear.”

But the two were the same, externally. The deputy director paused, running a finger along the scar on his face. “Mademoiselle, if one wanted to ‘light a fire’ under the division heads—quaintly put—far more effective tactics may be brought to bear. Threaten them with replacement, announce that we have offers of help from the best Japanese, Korean and Chinese teams. Shame is a most compelling weapon against cowards who shirk from laying down their lives for their cause.”

T. J. regarded with curiosity a small sculpture of San Sebastian hung on the wall, complete with dripping wounds and piercing arrows. “Dr. Krieg-Zubér,” she said sweetly, turning her glance slowly from the statue, “why not just line them up against a wall and shoot them?”

A thin smile spread across Zuber’s lips and he blinked once, slowly. “A sufficient threat should suffice…” He walked to his desk, put his nose to a flower, then raised his head so that he appeared be staring up at her almost through his eyelids. “You have come about the accident investigation.”

“Exactly, sir.”

At that Krieg-Zuber gazed at her in amazement for an instant, then nearly spat out a laugh impossible for him to contain. “You cannot expect anyone to take such a charade seriously!” he snarled. “With the ignition campaign under way, crucial evidence has already been erased. You will find nothing—if you ever intended to.”

T. J. now shut the door behind her, leaned against it. “I came to find out what you remember.”

“Mademoiselle,” Krieg-Zuber answered with dripping fatigue, “stop playing games. You have been told what I remember. If you are truly attempting to get to the bottom of this, then you have been examining access records and our pitiful supply of surveillance files. You surely cannot be so naïve to believe this was an accident, can you?”

“What makes you think that?” T. J. said, suddenly feeling more nervous than she hoped she appeared.

“There are no accidents in this world, Miss D’Abro, but there are myriad enemies who would like to see this program end, apart from Moravec. Look at my arm!” he exploded without warning. “What they have done to me!”

“Sir, someone in your condition should take it easy,” T. J. said, nearly jumping backward as Zuber stooped to examine his own desk for bugs. “Can you be more specific?” she ventured, hoping that she continued to prop up her innocence. “I mean, about who would like to see the program end?”

“No,” Krieg-Zuber answered, abruptly breaking off his search and sitting down at his desk, where he began to play absently with the toy trains there. “But there is more here than meets the eye.”

T. J. frowned at the cliché, at the same time dying to know what this man knew. “Well, sir, if there is, I hope to discover it, but the surveillance records haven’t been as helpful as I’d hoped.”

“How surprising.” He no longer attempted to disguise the sneer in his voice. “The people who designed the CFRC security system were amateurs, but there are other records.”

“I am aware that you monitor email, Dr. Krieg-Zuber—”

“Routine!” The wave was angry as he got to his feet again. “CFRC has completely lagged behind the times. You have, young lady, undoubtedly noticed that the damned fingerprint-reader system has not yet even gone online.”

In one sense it had. “I also know that you were monitoring all Internet traffic to this laboratory.” T. J. thought that Krieg-Zuber paused and cocked his head at her, but then decided no. She was finding him difficult to read, since his penetrating stare met her eyes and did not.

“Accepted practice and legal,” he said, with slightly less anger. “Surely you do not need to be reminded that CFRC is a private lab.” T. J. couldn’t argue. The practice was accepted and legal, and it hadn’t disturbed her nearly as much as it had Mac. “Stupidly,” Zuber went on, “Machuzak has pulled the plug; this you obviously know.”

“Are you offering something, sir?” she asked.

For a moment Krieg-Zuber glanced at his arm sorrowfully, whimpered, said, “The director’s archives are yours, mademoiselle.”

At that he fairly bowed toward her, but in a way that his blank eyes made T. J. uncertain that she was present. “Tell me, Dr. Krieg-Zuber,” she said, swallowing, “a random question: have you ever met Pierre Balard?”

Zuber stroked his chin thrice, nodded. “Certainly.”

“Is it true that he was Dr. Rasmussen’s first doctoral student?” T. J.’s question was genuine and Krieg-Zuber’s smile knowing.

“Quite true,” he replied. “Balard despised Rasmussen for stealing his ideas, which were significant. They haven’t spoken to each other for twenty years.”

“As I suspected,” T. J. answered. “I’ll let you know if I require your assistance, Dr. Krieg-Zuber.” With that she opened the door, noticed the damp she left on the knob, and stepped into the hall, feeling no less stuck than she had for the past days, and a notch more ill at ease.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Machuzak, Fred Abbuhl and Diana Cochran stood in the ASSET control room, watching the downward tremble of the temperature gauges. The cryostat had been pumped down to a billionth of an atmosphere, a vacuum that would serve to insulate the magnets, and liquid helium was flowing from the helium factory into Prometheus’great coils. The cooldown had begun. Fred had been right: they could hardly hope for better than a degree an hour and that would mean—weeks. Someone had hung a big deadline calendar under the captain’s deck, with more than two weeks crossed out. They’d heard nothing from Dragonmaster since the encounter in the ruins and Nathaniel could only wonder which of the remaining dates was marked.

“Is extra tritium coming in from Savannah River?” he asked.

“Kettering ordered it over a week ago,” Abbuhl replied. “We should have a shipment in a couple days.”

Cochran was not happy. “There’s another helium shortage in Amarillo,” she told them and Machuzak understood. The Federal Helium Reserve in the panhandle produced a third of the world’s helium supply, but over the past decade industrial demand had risen ten times faster than predicted and they’d intermittently been running dry. The spiking prices meant that helium cost fifty times what it had a few decades back. “If we have to bring Prometheus up again…”

“I know, pray.” Nathaniel bit his lip, trusted that Diana was merely engaged in her habitual grousing. Prometheus and the helium factory form a closed loop and there should be no losses. Under normal circumstances. He took his leave.

* * * *

T. J. intercepted Machuzak at lunchtime on his way to the cafeteria, a pseudo Spanish-style mezzanine of pink marble that opened to the back courtyard. The same constrained agitation gripped him now as the other evening, and unfortunately, she was not about to make his life easier. She pointed her handset at him, he glanced at it, frowned in her direction, walked over to a microphone that stood before a big mural of cowboys riding into the sunset. Bill Balustradi had taped his smiling face over one of the cacti.

“Today ITER has begun DT experiments,” Machuzak announced. Exactly as threatened, Balard had skipped the low-yield DD, going directly to deuterium-tritium. These were just low-power test pulses but it meant that ITER had suddenly jumped ahead of CFRC by a month. At Nathaniel’s words, a veil descended over the cafeteria and silenced it. Good, we deserve this. Together he and T. J. descended with sandwiches from the mezzanine to a picnic table below.

D’Abro gazed across the grassy place, which yielded to asphalt and the pentagon in one direction, to vast fields and Site Alpha in the other, and turned to Nathaniel. She had intended to report her meeting with Krieg-Zuber. Instead, observing his dark expression, she said, “What is it, Doc?” even as she knew the answer. Suddenly she wanted to take his hand.

“Damnit, T. J.,” he erupted, “what good is having a machine when you have no idea of what to do with it?”

Before she could respond, her attention was distracted by a slim figure who entered the courtyard, walked up to the big oak and looped a small wooden tablet over one of the branches, where it began to rattle hollowly in the breeze with all the others. For a brief moment he stood with his head bowed, then walked toward the cafeteria.

“Who’s that?” T. J. asked.

“That”—Nathaniel clenched his teeth as he rose—“is Toshi.” He strode over to the older physicist, grabbed his arm and dragged him back to the table. “Where the hell have you been?” he demanded angrily. “I’ve been looking high and low for you—office, home… You dropped off the face of the Earth. Who do you think you are, a killer bee?”

The older physicist only shrugged and sat down cross-legged on the grass before the fishpond, where he opened a container of rice. Finally he said, “I have been doing geometry problems.”

“Geometry problems! Damnit, Matsushima, in case you haven’t heard, I canceled the ignition meetings because no one has come up with a single decent idea—”

“This is not surprising,” Toshi replied, gazing straight ahead. “What do you expect from a group of people who exist only as appendages to computer terminals? They have never learned how to think, only to calculate. They have never learned that where heaven and Earth meet, this is where you have attained proficiency in the art of swordsmanship. This is where knowledge lost is knowledge gained, where to win is no more than to lose.” Briefly he halted. “And why, Nathaniel, do you think these bots will accept my ideas any more than they have in the past?”

Listening, T. J. was instantly captivated by Matsushima, but at last a shadow of perspicacity fell. “Dr. Matsushima, sir, doesn’t this lab mean anything to you?” The question surprised her as much as the others and Matsushima’s silence was uncomfortably, disturbingly long. “Doesn’t the future mean anything to you?” she continued with an even more importunate tone when he didn’t answer.

“There are many futures, Miss D’Abro,” the physicist finally replied, “but the gods have not given us the vision to choose the one we want.”

“If we don’t choose, who then?” she said, verging on despair. “Didn’t all those gurus used to say, ‘Not to decide is to decide’? Haven’t we not decided on this planet too long? Dr. Matsushima, if you people don’t decide, who? I’d really like to know.” She squinted at him fiercely until she embarrassed herself. “Excuse me, Professor. I’m out of line.” She turned away, blushing as the physicist stared with a puzzled expression.

Not to act is to act, Nathaniel couldn’t help thinking, but seeing the state of these two, he attempted to rescue both. “Toshi, I know how you feel about Krieg-Zuber and being out in Alpha Site—”

“Do you, Nathaniel? What do you, a mere foot soldier, know? These rumors that I believe in levitation and ESP? Being reduced to foraging for funds when I should have been creating. Here I am, banished to Alpha, where I am invisible and shorn of respect. I might have changed the entire fusion program had anyone listened to me.”

“I am sorry about what Krieg-Zuber has done to you—”

“Krieg-Zuber!” Toshi snorted.

T. J. was following the exchange with widening discomfort, uneasily deciding to check Matsushima’s file. She saw equally Mac’s displeasure at being stripped of rank and expected him to anger again, but he did not. Instead he answered, “‘They are forever free who renounce all selfish desires and break away from the cage of I, me and mine to be united with the Lord. This is the supreme state.’ Toshi, if you could only listen to yourself.”

The older man stared at Mac momentarily with an annoyed expression, which then saddened. “Do not be clever, Nathaniel.”

“I am not being clever, Toshi,” he said, shaking his head with a sadness that exceeded Matsushima’s own. “I am asking you to put aside your feelings and turn your talents to the task that called us when we were young and idealistic, when we willingly, bravely became scientists to understand the intricacies of Nature and with our understanding turn her to the benefit of the future. Maybe Nature will not bend, outwit us as she always does, but let us make our struggle with her, with our understanding, not with the past or with personalities we dislike. Let us act without regard to rewards or consequences, and we will succeed even in failure.”

“Again you try to outwit me, Nathaniel. When the Master governs, the people barely know he exists. I see you are becoming a master. My compliments.”

“Please, Dr. Matsushima,” T. J. entreated, again surprising herself.

Once more, Toshi agreed only to consider the request, but his reply was amiable enough that T. J. allowed herself to rise. The two physicists watched her walk over to the oak, where Toshi hung worthy geometry problems, and she began turning the tablets over one by one, pressing the flat of her hands against them, even sniffing them, as if by these actions she could absorb the mathematics she so claimed to dread.

“Sacred geometry,” she said almost to herself as she returned to the pair, staring in befuddled wonder at Matsushima.

Toshi overheard. “Ah,” he said, “who knows what is sacred in the world of Samsung and Toyota? But many are the gods to be propitiated and hopefully a few digest mathematics.”

“Professor,” T. J. asked, at this moment with more genuine curiosity than professional acumen, “I’ve heard a lot about you, but I don’t think I know what you do here.”

Matsushima, calmer now, leaned back on the grass and smiled. “Miss D’Abro—that is your name I believe—it is quite clear none of us know what we are doing here. As for me, I am robbing the rich.” T. J. asked for his meaning. “Since my present ideas are considered—how do we say it in polite company?—not to lie along the Eight-Fold Path, I am forced to beg alms on the street.”

Nathaniel put in that Garrett paid Toshi out of his own pocket.

“What sort of ideas are you talking about, professor?” T. J. pressed, her conversation with Balard suddenly loud in her ears.

But Toshi only snorted. “Miss D’Abro, it is not the ideas; it is the implementation of the ideas. Ideas are cheap. Machines are expensive. When the US government trashed all approaches to fusion beyond the tokamak, it was rolling billion-dollar dice, not to mention our future. Of course, partisans claimed the other devices never would have worked, but some of them were simpler than tokamaks, being mere cylinders rather than doughnuts, and with a few modifications they might have outperformed America’s favorite. Geometry, Miss D’Abro, is destiny and it is far easier to remove the waste products of fusion from the ends of a tube than from a doughnut, and to service the machine. You wrinkle your nose. Indeed, these are practical concerns—hardly poetic, but they are important for a real, not imaginary reactor. A tokamak, in my view, is an imaginary reactor.”

“Why is that, Dr. Matsushima?” In Toshi’s remarks, T. J. heard an echo of Archangelsky’s on the airplane. After three weeks at CFRC she had begun to perceive the deeper faults in this hermetic community, and now she wondered whether she had too jokingly called it a pit of vipers.

“Oh, everyone knows how tokamaks are prone to failure. I imagine a field the size of several football stadiums filled with giant tokamaks, such that when one nosedives and requires servicing, another is brought online. Each of these machines should be five times the size of ITER, volumewise—”

“Five times the size of ITER!” T. J. choked. Her first sight of that unbelievable construct, and her reaction to it, returned in full force.

“Oh yes. This is when Nature bestows her favor on tokamaks. But to attempt fusion with something so insignificant as ITER or ASSET is a waste of time. Of course, none of these ideas helps us in our current predicament, but there are more subtle possibilities that might allow us to cheat a deadline. They involve technical matters that I am sure do not interest you. Now, if you’ll excuse me, Miss D’Abro. It has been a pleasure.”

* * * *

Toshi got to his feet and moved off, leaving the other two alone. “What a character!” T. J. blurted out, then abruptly, soberly peered at Machuzak and whispered, “Doc, is he angry enough to have done it?”

Nathaniel replied with a strange disgust etched across his face. “I trust him more than anyone, except Slava perhaps. He’s a difficult, vain man who sees everything with crystal clarity—except himself. I suppose in that he is human.” For another moment Machuzak continued to gaze intently at T. J., then he nodded with comprehension and switched off.

D’Abro saw that Machuzak had just become one step more of a stranger. “You really don’t think I trust you, Doc, do you?” she said after one heartbeat, then another. “Even now?” The anguish in her voice was audible.

“It’s your duty not to trust me,” he replied. “I don’t hold it against you.”

The genuine equanimity of his response coerced from her an incredulous shake of the head. “Sometimes you don’t make it easy, partner,” she began, but he’d already changed course.

“Maybe Abbuhl is right—you can’t hurry the process.”

“Huh?” T. J. asked, not following.

“They say it’s important to be stuck,” Machuzak replied, as if somewhere else. “You know, Siddhartha wandered for six years before he sat himself under a fig tree, where for forty-nine days he was assailed by every force and temptation. When he finally arose, he was the Buddha. It is necessary to be stuck.”

“I’ll order a fig tree planted in the courtyard,” T. J. said quietly.

Machuzak’s only response was to stand and clench his fist. “It cannot be as difficult to achieve ignition as enlightenment.”

“I hope you’re right about that, Doc,” she said with continued wonder, “because we are truly, truly stuck.”

That state lasted another minute.

Table of Contents

COPYRIGHT INFO

A NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHER

The MEGAPACK™ Ebook Series

TORQUING VACUUM, by Jay Lake

COLLECTORS, by Pamela Sargent

VICTORY, by Lester del Rey

THE TREE OF LIFE, by C. L. Moore

YE OLDE RESIGNATION, by Rhys Hughes

FACE TO FACE, by Adrian Cole

BEYOND THE THUNDER, by H. B. Hickey

CAPTIVES OF THE THIEVE-STAR, by James H. Schmitz

THE DEEPS, by Keith Roberts

I’VE NEVER SEEN, by Hannes Bok (poem)

MADMEN MUSTERED, by Connor Freff Cochran

EXILE FROM SPACE, by Judith Merril

THROUGH TIME AND SPACE WITH FERDINAND FEGHOOT: THE CHAIRMAN DANCES, by David Gerrold

THE FROZEN PLANET, by Keith Laumer

THE TAIL-TIED KINGS, by Avram Davidson

THE GRAIN KINGS, by Keith Roberts

HIS MASTER’S VOICE, by Randall Garrett

BACK TO JULIE, by Richard Wilson

BRIGHTSIDE CROSSING, by Alan E. Nourse

THOUGHT AND SPACE, by Ray Bradbury

THE SECRET OF THE SCARAB, by Ron Goulart

REINVENTING CARL HOBBS, by James Glass

THE OLD SHILL GAME, by H.B. Fyfe

NOTES TOWARD A NEW TRAIT AS REVEALED BY CORRELATION AMONG ITEMS OF THE MMMPI, by M. Purrzillo, U. R. A. Ferball, and C. Kitirun

THE SLEEPER IS A REBEL, by Bryce Walton

THE TEACHER FROM MARS, by Eando Binder

NIF’S WORLD, by Lawrence Watt-Evans

A MAN OBSESSED, by Alan E. Nourse

FIRST LENSMAN, by E.E. “Doc” Smith [Part 1]

FIRST LENSMAN, by E.E. “Doc” Smith [Part 2]

FIRST LENSMAN, by E.E. “Doc” Smith [Part 3]

REINCARNATE, by Lester del Rey

THE MAN WHO LIVED FOREVER, by R. DeWitt Miller and Anna Hunger

THE MARTIAN CHILD, by David Gerrold

Special Feature: FIREBIRD, by Tony Rothman [Part 1 of 3]

Table of Contents

COPYRIGHT INFO

A NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHER

The MEGAPACK™ Ebook Series

TORQUING VACUUM, by Jay Lake

COLLECTORS, by Pamela Sargent

VICTORY, by Lester del Rey

THE TREE OF LIFE, by C. L. Moore

YE OLDE RESIGNATION, by Rhys Hughes

FACE TO FACE, by Adrian Cole

BEYOND THE THUNDER, by H. B. Hickey

CAPTIVES OF THE THIEVE-STAR, by James H. Schmitz

THE DEEPS, by Keith Roberts

I’VE NEVER SEEN, by Hannes Bok (poem)

MADMEN MUSTERED, by Connor Freff Cochran

EXILE FROM SPACE, by Judith Merril

THROUGH TIME AND SPACE WITH FERDINAND FEGHOOT: THE CHAIRMAN DANCES, by David Gerrold

THE FROZEN PLANET, by Keith Laumer

THE TAIL-TIED KINGS, by Avram Davidson

THE GRAIN KINGS, by Keith Roberts

HIS MASTER’S VOICE, by Randall Garrett

BACK TO JULIE, by Richard Wilson

BRIGHTSIDE CROSSING, by Alan E. Nourse

THOUGHT AND SPACE, by Ray Bradbury

THE SECRET OF THE SCARAB, by Ron Goulart

REINVENTING CARL HOBBS, by James Glass

THE OLD SHILL GAME, by H.B. Fyfe

NOTES TOWARD A NEW TRAIT AS REVEALED BY CORRELATION AMONG ITEMS OF THE MMMPI, by M. Purrzillo, U. R. A. Ferball, and C. Kitirun

THE SLEEPER IS A REBEL, by Bryce Walton

THE TEACHER FROM MARS, by Eando Binder

NIF’S WORLD, by Lawrence Watt-Evans

A MAN OBSESSED, by Alan E. Nourse

FIRST LENSMAN, by E.E. “Doc” Smith [Part 1]

FIRST LENSMAN, by E.E. “Doc” Smith [Part 2]

FIRST LENSMAN, by E.E. “Doc” Smith [Part 3]

REINCARNATE, by Lester del Rey

THE MAN WHO LIVED FOREVER, by R. DeWitt Miller and Anna Hunger

THE MARTIAN CHILD, by David Gerrold

Special Feature: FIREBIRD, by Tony Rothman [Part 1 of 3]