Contents

COPYRIGHT

A NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHER

AGAPE AMONG THE ROBOTS, by Allen Steele

THE STARSHIP MECHANIC, by Jay Lake and Ken Scholes

PEACEMAKER, by Gardner Dozois

OR ALL THE SEAS WITH OYSTERS, by Avram Davidson

GRANDMA, by Carol Emshwiller

THE GIFT BEARER, by Charles L. Fontenay

I, ROBOT, by Cory Doctorow

ALL RIGHTS, by Pamela Sargent

THE EICHMANN VARIATIONS, by George Zebrowski

MAY BE SOME TIME, by Brenda W. Clough

CYBERPUNK, by Bruce Bethke

MILLENNIUM, by Everett B. Cole

JOIN OUR GANG? by Sterling E. Lanier

GREYLORN, by Keith Laumer

JUMPING THE LINE, by Grania Davis

HE’S ONLY HUMAN, by Lawrence Watt-Evans

THE WASONICA CORRECTION, by James C. Stewart

CIRCUS, by Alan E. Nourse

THE HATED, by Frederik Pohl

CODE THREE, by Rick Raphael

COST OF LIVING, by Robert Sheckley

THIS IS KLON CALLING, by Walter J. Sheldon

THE BIG BOUNCE, by Walter S. Tevis

THE RISK PROFESSION, by Donald E. Westlake

THE FIRE EGGS, by Darrell Schweitzer

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

COPYRIGHT

The Fifth Science Fiction Megapack is copyright © 2012 by Wildside Press LLC. Indiviual stories are copyrighted by their authors. Cover art © Heywoody / Fotolia. All rights reserved.

For more information, contact the publisher through wildsidepress.com or the Wildside Press Forums. For publication information on individual stories, see the Acknowledgments page at the end of this volume.

A NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHER

Over the last year, our “Megapack” series of ebook anthologies has proved to be one of our most popular endeavors. (Maybe it helps that we sometimes offer them as premiums to our mailing list!) One question we keep getting asked is, “Who’s the editor?”

The Megapacks (except where specifically credited) are a group effort. Everyone at Wildside works on them. This includes John Betancourt, Carla Coupe, Steve Coupe, Bonner Menking, Colin Azariah-Kribbs, A.E. Warren, and many of Wildside’s authors…who often suggest stories to include (and not just their own!). For instance, Pamela Sargent’s alternate-worlds story in this issue was suggested by George Zebrowski, after we approached George to reprint “The Eichmann Variations” (which we remembered from its original publication in Michael Bishop’s excellent anthology, Light Years and Dark [1984]).

* * * *

In The Fifth Science Fiction Megapack, we include two award-winners and a bunch of nominees. “Or All the Seas with Oysters,” by Avram Davidson, won a Hugo Award. And “The Peacemaker,” by Gardner Dozois, won a Nebula Award. “The Eichmann Variations,” by George Zebrowski, was a Nebula Award finalist; “Code Three,” by Rick Raphael, was a Hugo finalist; and “May Be Some Time,” by Brenda Clough, was both a Hugo and a Nebula finalist.

If you’re in the mood for more Avram Davidson after reading “Or All the Seas with Oysters,” Audible is releasing his short story collection Or All the Seas with Oysters (which contains the title story we reprinted here—plus many others) in audiobook format. This will be the third Davidson audiobook they have released in the last year. Good stuff!

A NOTE FOR KINDLE READERS

The Kindle versions of our Megapacks employ active tables of contents for easy navigation…please look for one before writing reviews on Amazon that complain about the lack! (They are sometimes at the ends of ebooks, depending on your reader.)

We continue to work on improving our ebook navigation, and with this Megapack, we hope to have the table of contents at both the beginning and the end. (If not, we’re sure we’ll hear about it...)

RECOMMEND A FAVORITE STORY?

Do you know a great classic science fiction story, or have a favorite author whom you believe is perfect for the Megapack series? We’d love your suggestions! You can post them on our message board at http://movies.ning.com/forum (there is an area for Wildside Press comments).

Note: we only consider stories that have already been professionally published. This is not a market for new works.

TYPOS

Unfortunately, as hard as we try, a few typos do slip through. We update our ebooks periodically, so make sure you have the current version (or download a fresh copy if it’s been sitting in your ebook reader for months.) It may have already been updated.

If you spot a new typo, please let us know. We’ll fix it for everyone. You can email the publisher at wildsidepress@yahoo.com or use the message boards above.

—John Betancourt

Publisher, Wildside Press LLC

www.wildsidepress.com

* * * *

THE MEGAPACK SERIES

The Adventure Megapack

The Cowboy Megapack

The Craig Kennedy Scientific Detective Megapack

The Cthulhu Mythos Megapack

The Ghost Story Megapack

The Horror Megapack

The Macabre Megapack

The Martian Megapack

The Military Megapack

The Mummy Megapack

The Mystery Megapack

The Science Fiction Megapack

The Second Science Fiction Megapack

The Third Science Fiction Megapack

The Fourth Science Fiction Megapack

The Fifth Science Fiction Megapack

The Penny Parker Megapack

The Tom Corbett, Space Cadet Megapack

The Tom Swift Megapack

The Vampire Megapack

The Western Megapack

The Wizard of Oz Megapack

AUTHOR MEGAPACKS

The Andre Norton Megapack

The B.M. Bower Megapack

The Murray Leinster Megapack

The Second Murray Leinster Megapack

The Andre Norton Megapack

The Rafael Sabatini Megapack

AGAPE AMONG THE ROBOTS, by Allen Steele

When Samson met Delilah, the first thing he did was crush an apple against her head. Delilah didn’t react in any way; she sat calmly on the park bench, her hands folded primly in the lap of her long purple dress, staring straight ahead as wet pulp ran down her face and into the neckline of her lace collar. She didn’t even look up as Samson walked around the front of the bench, bowed from the waist, and gallantly offered his hand.

In the Samson Team control van, though, we were either cracking up or gaping at our monitors in dumb surprise. All except Phil Burton; glaring through the one-way glass window, almost apoplectic with rage, his mouth opened and closed several times before he finally managed to give utterance to his thoughts.

“W-w-w-what t-t-t-the…what the hell was that?” he demanded. “W-w-who pr-pr-programmed th-th-th-tha-that…?”

“Nobody programmed it, Phil,” I said. I had been worked with him long enough to intuit what he meant when his speech impediment got in the way. He looked sharply my way, and I hastily coughed into my hand to hide my grin. Phil had a tendency to think people were laughing at him even when something else funny was going on. “Honest. I checked Samson’s routine myself. That wasn’t supposed to happen.”

“I-I-I know th-th-th-th….” Phil shut his eyes, took a deep breath, and silently counted to ten. While he was counting, I glanced past him at Keith D’Amico; although he was still chuckling, he had already checked out his own screen. He caught my eye and shook his head. No, he didn’t have a clue as to what went wrong either.

“Phil, Jerry…I’ve put Samson in standby mode.” This from Donna Raitt, seated at the console on the other side of me. Unlike Keith and me, she hadn’t lost it when Samson had assaulted Delilah with a deadly fruit; she was watching her screen, her hand cupped over her headset mike. “It looks like D-team has done the same,” she added quietly. “I haven’t heard from Dr. Veder’s group yet.”

“Oh, but you will…you will.” Keith was doing his Yoda impression again. “Beware the dark side, Luke…”

“Knock it off.” Phil had managed to get control of his stutter. He glared at Keith, then turned back to me. “Okay, I believe you. It’s a glitch, that’s all.” He glanced out the window, taking a moment to study the two robots frozen in the wooded atrium. “Access his memory buffer from the beginning of the test up to when Donna put him on standby.”

“Death Star in range within ten seconds,” Keith murmured.

If Phil heard that—and judging from the annoyed expression which briefly crossed his face, he did—he chose to ignore it. He turned to Bob, the kid operating the remote camcorders. “You got everything, didn’t you?”

“What…oh, yeah, yeah, it’s all here.” Bob was wiping tears from the corners of his eyes. “Do you want a copy, Dr. Burton?”

“No, I want you to delete the whole thing.” Bob stared at him in surprise, and for a moment his hands moved to the editing board. “Goddammit, of course I want a copy!” Phil snapped. “Run it off now! Move!” He returned his attention to me. “C’mon, Jerry, gimme everything you got…”

“Coming right now.” I had already loaded a fresh 100 MB disk. A few deft commands on the keypad above my lap, and a bar-graph appeared on my screen, indicating that the data Phil wanted was being copied. I looked again at Keith; behind Phil’s back, he had his right hand raised, and he was counting off the seconds with each finger he folded into his palm. Five…four…three…two…one…

“Delilah Team just called in.” Once again, Donna had clasped her hand over the wand of her headset. “Dr. Veder wants to meet with you in the test area…umm, right now, Phil.”

The color vanished from Phil’s face. “Uhh…t-t-tell her I’ll b-b-b-be there as…as…”

My terminal chirped. I popped out the disk, shoved it into Phil’s hand, then snapped my fingers at Bob. He ejected the DVD from the camcorder, slapped it into a jewelbox, then passed it to Keith, who tapped it against Phil’s shoulder. That seemed to wake him up; he blinked a few times, then turned to snatch the DVD from Keith’s hand.

“He’s coming now,” Donna said quietly into her headset. “Sorry for the problem. We had a problem here, but…”

“Stick to the rules. No contact except between team leaders.” Phil took another deep breath, then clapped the two disks together as he turned sideways to squeeze past her and me as he headed for the control van’s door. “Wish me luck.”

“May the Force be with you,” Keith said, and I shot a look which told him that I’d like to stick a light-saber where a Jedi couldn’t find it. “Good luck,” he added, albeit reluctantly.

“Thanks.” Phil grabbed a roll of paper towels from the shelf near the door. Then, almost as an afterthought, he looked back at Keith. “Wipe the memory buffer, will you? I don’t want this to affect the next test.” Then he stepped out of the van, slamming the door shut behind him.

For a moment no one said anything, then everyone collapsed in their seats. “Man, oh man,” Keith muttered, covering his face with his hands. “I thought he was going to have a stroke…”

“Thought he was going to have a stroke?” Donna shook her head. “You should have heard what was going on in D-team’s trailer. Kathy sounded like she was ready to…”

“Are you off-line?” I asked quietly, and her eyes went wide as she lunged for the mute button. Keith chuckled as he reached for the two-pound bag of Fritos he kept stashed beneath the console. I glanced at Bob; he said nothing as he hunched over his screen, replaying the test on his monitor. Fresh out of MIT, he had been working for LEC for less than five months now, and only very recently had been assigned to the R3G program. He was wisely keeping office politics at arm’s length, nor could I blame him.

Through the window, I watched Phil as he walked toward the bench where Samson stood frozen, his right hand still extended. He glanced nervously toward the opposite side of the atrium, then he tore a wad of paper off the roll and began hastily wiping the apple shards off Delilah’s spherical head. I had to wonder why someone on her team had felt compelled to put her in a dress. Perhaps to accentuate her feminine role; although the test was supposed to work out bugs in their handshaking procedures, the scenario Phil and Kathy had mutually devised was supposed to playfully emulate a quaint, old-fashioned courtship. So far, though, the results weren’t very promising.

“Oh, such a nice man,” Keith said, propping his sandals up on his console as he shoved a fistful of chips in his mouth. “Look, he’s cleaning…uh-oh, here she comes.”

From behind him, Dr. Katherine “Darth” Veder came stalking through the trees, her hands shoved in the pockets of her lab coat. Even before he saw her, Phil must have heard her coming, for he fumbled with the roll in his hands as he reluctantly turned to face her.

“Oh, boy, is she pissed or what?” Bob murmured.

“What,” I replied, and Donna arched an eyebrow knowingly.

“Dum-dum-dum-dah-de-dum-dah-de-dum,” Keith hummed. “Volume, please. I don’t want to miss this.”

The van was soundproofed, but we had a parabolic mike aimed at the test area. Donna started to reach for her board to activate it. “Don’t,” I said quietly, shaking my head at her. “Let’s let them handle this themselves.” Smiling a little, Donna withdrew her hand.

Keith sighed in disgust, then pulled on his headset and tapped a command into his console. I had little doubt that he was patching into Samson’s external mike to eavesdrop on their conversation, if it could be called that. Through the window, I could see Kathy yelling at Phil, her small hands gesturing wildly as she pointed at him, at Samson, at Delilah, at our van, and back at Phil again. Although Phil’s back was half-turned to us, his hands were almost as busy, first making gestures of supplication and apology, then briefly returning to his sides—he was probably counting to ten again—before rising again to make irate motions of his own.

Donna rested her elbows on the console and cupped her chin in her hands. Bob picked up the month-old issue of Spin he had placed on top of one of the mainframes. Keith pawed at his bag of chips, watching with interest while the two team leaders ripped into each other.

“I wish these guys would hurry up and admit they’re in love,” he muttered.

Meanwhile Samson and Delilah patiently waited nearby, ignored yet omnipresent, as stoical as only robots can be.

Okay. Time to backtrack a bit.

You know about LEC, of course…or at least you should, if you pay attention to TV commercials, browse the web, or visit shopping malls. Lang Electronics Corporation is one of the three major U.S. manufacturers of consumer robots; it started out as a maker of IBM-clones in the early ’80s, then diversified into robotics shortly after the turn of the century, introducing its first-generation robot vacuum cleaners and home sentries about the same time that its closest competitors, CybeServe and Cranberry, entered the market with their own household ’bots. CybeServe was the leading company, and solidified that position after it was bought out by Mitsubishi; Cranberry, on other hand, was hurt by poor sales and a reputation for making second-rate ’bots that tended to forget instructions, burn actuators, and taser the mailman. By the time CybeServe and Mitsubishi merged, Cranberry had laid off one-third of its employees and was on the verge of declaring bankruptcy.

This left LEC in somewhere in the middle. It remained strong enough to fight off hostile takeover attempts by larger electronics companies in both America and Japan, and its Valet and Guardian series of home ’bots held their own in the marketplace, not only selling as many units as CybeServe but even surpassing their sales in Europe. The success of its first-generation robots prompted LEC to invest considerable capital in developing a second-generation series of universal robots. Biocybe Resources in Worcester, Massachusetts, had recently introduced its Oz 100 biochips, pseudo-organic microprocessors capable of handling 100,000 MIPS—Millions of Instructions Per Second, the robotic equivalent of megabytes—and LEC had built them into its Gourmand, Guardian III, and Companion ’bots, successfully bringing them to market nearly two months before CybeServe brought out their rival systems. It also helped that CybeServe’s ’bots were more expensive and that their CybeServe Butler had an embarrassing tendency to misunderstand questions or commands given in less than perfect English (e.g., “Is the dishwasher running?” No, it’s still in the kitchen. “Answer the door, please.” But it hasn’t asked me anything. And so forth.).

(If all this is beginning to make your eyes glaze over, please be patient. Home ’bots may be rather commonplace these days—if you don’t already own one, chances are one of your neighbors does, and your kids may be dropping hints about how nice it would be to find a CybeServe Silver Retriever or a LEC Prince barking and wagging its tail beneath the Christmas tree—but I’m relating events which occurred about ten years ago. It may seem like business talk, but it has quite a bit to do with the story at hand, so bear with me, okay?)

CybeServe wasn’t about to let itself get stampeded the way Cranberry was several years earlier, so after it spent a small fortune working out the bugs in its second-generation ’bots and an even larger fortune in consumer advertising, it took the next logical step: the development of a third-generation, all-purpose universal robot, one which could serve as butler, housekeeper, sentry, cook, chess-player, dog-walker, babysitter…you name it. And just to put the icing on the cake, CybeServe intended its new ’bot to be humanlike: bipedal, about six feet in height, with multijointed arms and legs and five fingers on each hand.

This was probably the most significant factor, for with the exception of a few experimental prototypes like Honda’s P2 of the late ’90s, virtually every robot on the market looked like a fire hydrant, an oversized turtle, or a vacuum cleaner with arms. A humanlike robot, however, would not only be aesthetically familiar, but it would also be able to adapt more readily to a household environment, since it would be able to climb stairs or place objects on tables.

Although CybeServe tried to keep their R3G program secret, the cybernetics industry is small enough—and the Robot Belt along Route 9 in Massachusetts short enough—that it was only a matter of time before word leaked out of its Framingham headquarters. The fact that their R3G project was codenamed Metropolis, an ironic allusion to the robot in the 1927 silent film directed by Fritz Lang, was a clear signal that CybeServe meant to pull an end-run around its rival in Westboro.

When Jim Lang, LEC’s founder and CEO, learned that CybeServe was actively engaged in the development of a third-generation ’bot, the lights stayed on all night in the fourth-floor boardroom. The following morning, Slim Jim summoned his department heads to the executive suite, where he read them the riot act: LEC was now in a race with CybeServe to be the first company to produce a third-generation universal robot.

As luck would have it, though, the company wasn’t caught flat-footed: during their spare time, two of its senior engineers had already been working on third-generation robots.

Where Phil Burton or Kathy Veder managed to find any spare time at a company where everyone in the R&D divisions typically puts in a 7-by-14 work week is beyond me, yet nonetheless these two had been using their downtime to tinker in their labs. On their own initiative, both Phil and Kathy had drafted plans for universal ’bots which would utilize the new Oz chips being produced by Biocybe. Since the Oz 3Megs were capable of processing three million MIPS, this meant that a third-generation robot could have the approximate learning ability of a Rhesus monkey, as opposed to a second-generation ’bot with the IQ of a well-trained mouse.

The fact that they had designed their robots independently of each other, without one being aware of what the other was doing, was no great surprise to anyone. Phil Burton was in charge of the division which developed the Companion robot, while Kathy Veder was the senior engineer behind the Guardian III. Their departments were located at opposite ends of the LEC quad, and their staffs shared little more in common than the company cafeteria. Not only that, but the two couldn’t be more unalike: Phil Burton, tall and rather skinny, with thinning blond hair, and a lifelong stutter which betrayed his shyness, and Kathy Veder, short, plump, with unruly black hair which was seldom combed and an aggressive manner which bordered on outright hostility (hence the nickname). A pair of über-geeks who couldn’t have agreed on the proper pronunciation of banana if someone threatened to take away their Usenet accounts.

Nonetheless, Lang was delighted that they already had a head-start, and asked them to show him their work. However, Kathy was a little more reluctant than Phil to comply; in fact, rumor had it that Jim had to memo Darth three times before she finally coughed up her notes and blueprints, while Phil delivered his material almost immediately. The rest of us chalked up her reticence to peer rivalry, never realizing that there was something else going on just under the surface.

Lang carefully studied their plans, talked to some of his other geeks—myself included—and eventually reached the conclusion that, although each robot was designed differently, they were so fundamentally similar that either could serve as LEC’s entry in the R3G race. However, since the company didn’t have the time, money or resources to manufacture two third-generation ’bots, it was one or the other. To make matters worse, there was no accord among the brain trust upon which robot should be chosen; Kathy’s people were solidly behind her Guardian IV design, while Phil’s group was equally convinced that Companion II was the superior system.

Jim Lang loved strategy games. He collected antique chess sets and backgammon boards, and was renowned among Go enthusiasts as something of a master. Indeed, when LEC was a small start-up company in the late ’70s, its first major product had been a modular pocket game system, the now-forgotten Lang Buddy. So it came as no great surprise that his solution took the form of a competition.

Dr. Burton’s group and Dr. Veder’s group were divided into two teams, respectively code-named Samson and Delilah, with Dr. Burton and Dr. Veder as their leaders. Each team was given a substantial R&D budget and access to the same material resources, not the least of which were copies of the Oz 3Meg chips. However, the members of each team would not be allowed to talk to one another or share notes; only the team leaders were given that privilege, if they saw fit to do so.

The objective of Slim Jim’s game was the fast-track development of a fully-operational, self-learning universal robot within six months. At the end of this period, each team would let their robots be tested—first by themselves, then interacting with each other—in a series of environments approximating real-world conditions. The team which produced the best robot would not only see their system enter mass-production, but they would also be awarded large bonuses, along with royalties from the sale of each unit. Indeed, the members of the winning team could very well walk away with several hundred grand in their pockets.

It was a hell of an approach, to be sure, and over the course of the next six months I didn’t get much sleep, let alone very many free weekends or holidays. Yet Samson itself was built within only three months, and we began installing and testing its conditioning modules shortly thereafter. Although we knew that, on the other side of the quad, behind a pair of keycard-access doors, Delilah Team spending an equal amount of effort on their own ’bot, we had little doubt who would come out ahead. In fact, I was beginning to price Porsches.

But building a new robot is one thing. Dealing with the human factor is quite another.

“Okay, Samson,” I said, “fix me a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.”

“Yes, Jerry.” The voice which came from his mouth grid sounded almost exactly like Robert Redford’s. That had to be Donna’s choice; she was a movie buff, and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid was one of her favorites. So was Keith, but at least he hadn’t again sampled Dennis Hopper’s vocal patterns from Blue Velvet. That had been a little scary.

Samson turned and walked toward the small kitchenette in one corner of the training suite. The suite resembled a large, two-room apartment, with everything you’d normally find in a well-furnished bachelor flat; in fact, some members of the team crashed there overnight when they were too tired to drive home. The only difference was the two-way mirror on the wall above the couch; behind the reflective glass, Donna and Keith were quietly watching the session from the observation booth.

Samson had no difficulty finding his way to the kitchen; his three-dimensional grid-map had already memorized the suite, and even when we rearranged the furniture Samson quickly relearned his way around. As he trod past the dinner table, the coffee in my cup sloshed slightly over the rim. “We’re going to have work on the shock-absorption,” I murmured as I jotted a note on my clipboard. “Maybe some padding on his treads.”

“I’ll take it up with the shop,” Donna’s voice whispered in my earpiece, “but they’re not going to be happy about it.” I knew what she meant. Although Samson’s frame was constructed of lightweight polymers, he still weighed more than two hundred and fifty pounds. Still, we couldn’t have a robot who shook the floor every time he walked by.

Samson stopped in front of the kitchen counter. In earlier tests of his cooking repertoire, we had laid everything out he needed in plain sight. This time, though, the counter was clean. Two days earlier, we had stocked the kitchen, then spent the better part of the afternoon showing him what everything was and where it was stored. If his conditioning module had properly tutored him, he should figure it out with no problem.

And sure enough, Samson reached up to the cupboard above the counter and, ever so gently, pulled out a jar of peanut butter and a loaf of bread. He carefully placed them on the counter, then turned to the refrigerator, opened it, and accurately selected the grape jelly from the nearly identical jars of mayo and mustard placed next to them. Sometime later we’d put two different flavors of jelly in the fridge, but right now his artificial vision was doing well to recognize and read printed labels.

Samson located a butter-knife in the utensil drawer, laid it on the counter next to the jars of jelly and peanut butter. He had no problem opening the bread loaf—although it had taken him several hours to learn the trick of loosening twist-ties without ripping open the wrapper—but I held my breath as he picked up the peanut butter. Before I led Samson into the room, Keith had deliberately tightened its lid as firmly as possible, then bet me ten bucks that Samson couldn’t open it without breaking the jar. But this time Samson clasped the rubberized fingertips of his left hand around the lid and, while holding the jar steady in his right hand, gradually exerted pressure until he unscrewed the lid.

“Very good, Samson,” I said. “You’re doing well.” I glanced at the window and rubbed my thumb and fingers together. Donna chuckled as Keith muttered an obscenity, and now I had beer money for tonight.

“Thank you, Jerry.” Although the cyclopean red eye in the center of Samson’s forehead didn’t turn my way, I knew that he could see me nonetheless. Although the eye contained two parallax lenses, Samson’s bullet-shaped head contained a variety of motion and heat detectors which continually updated my location in the room. We had already tested their capability by putting a cat in the room; although the cat, frightened out of her feline wits by this lumbering man-thing, had constantly raced around the apartment, growling and spitting and raising her fur whenever Samson came near, the robot had deftly avoided trampling her underfoot. The SPCA probably would have objected, but it was better to have our ’bot get acquainted with house pets during the teaching phase than receive lawsuits later.

Samson spread peanut butter across one slice of bread, then grape jelly across another—“A little more jelly, please, Samson,” I asked, and he complied—then he successfully closed the two halves together without making a mess. He located a small plate in another cupboard and placed the sandwich upon it, then picked up the knife again and cut it cleanly in half.

So far, so good. Then he began to take the sandwich apart, carefully pulling apart the two halves of each section and laying them on the counter, much as if he was…

Oh, no. I shut my eyes, shook my head. “Samson, what are you doing?” I asked, even though I already knew the answer.

“Jerry, I’m fixing the peanut butter and jelly sandwich,” he replied. “Please tell me what is wrong with it.”

From the observation booth, I could hear Keith and Donna whooping it up. I scowled at the window—Keith better not try using this as an excuse to welsh on his bet—then I looked back at Samson. “Samson, there is nothing wrong with the sandwich,” I replied, speaking as I would to a small child who had erred. “My previous instruction was a verbal colloquialism. In this context, to ‘fix’ any form of food means ‘to prepare,’ not ‘to repair.’ Please remember that.”

“I’ll remember, Jerry.” Samson stopped what he was doing, began putting the sandwich back together again. “I’m sorry for the misunderstanding. Are we still friends?”

The last might seem odd, but it was part of the approval-disapproval protocol programmed into Samson’s conditioning module. Although Samson couldn’t know the meaning of friendship—or at least, technically speaking, not as a human emotion—it was part of his repertoire to ask for forgiveness when he made an error. That had been Phil’s idea; not only would it give third-generation robots a closer resemblance to humanity, but it would also give their owners a more user-friendly means of checking their onboard systems. Casual queries like “are we still friends?” or “am I bothering you?” sound more benign than “error code 310-A, resetting conditioning module, yes/no?”

“Yes, Samson, we’re still friends,” I replied. “Please bring me the sandwich now.”

I turned back to the dinner table, picked up my lukewarm coffee and took a sip, then clicked my pen and started to make a few notes. Behind me, I heard Samson was walking over to the table, bearing my lunch. Through my earpiece, Keith asking Donna if she wanted to go to Boston for dinner tomorrow night, and Donna saying—as usual—that she was busy. I’d heard this before. Donna had recently divorced her second husband and Keith had never married; the two were friends and colleagues, but their attraction was anything but mutual. Donna was understandably reluctant to strike up a workplace romance, and particularly not with the likes of Keith, who thought fart jokes were the height of…

“Jerry, look out!”

Donna’s warning reached me just an instant too late. I looked up just as Samson slammed a peanut butter and extra-jelly sandwich into the side of my face.

Maybe that sounds funny, in a Three Stooges kind of way, but mind you this came from a robot capable of picking up one end of a six-foot couch without perceptible strain. The sandwich was soft, sure, but the plate upon which it rested was hard; even if I had known what was coming, it’s still likely that I would have been knocked out my chair.

I sprawled across the tile floor, more surprised than injured, with grape jelly drooling down into my right eye and peanut butter plastering my hair against my face, the plate rattling against the table. Towering above me was Samson, six feet of cobalt-blue robot, his right hand placidly returning to his side.

“Jerry!” Donna screamed. “Are you…?”

“Samson, shut down!” Keith bellowed. “Samson, code S…!”

“No, Samson!” I yelled. “Code B-for-Break!”

“Code B understood.” Samson double-beeped and became motionless, yet his chest diodes remained lit.

Good. He had obeyed the orders of the person closest to him. Had he shut down, as Keith’s Code S instruction would have made him do, there was a chance that the abrupt loss of electrical current might have erased the last few moments from his memory buffer. Code B, on the other hand, simply returned him to standby mode.

I sat up quickly, glanced toward the window. “It’s okay, I’m all right,” I said. “I’m unhurt. Just stay where you are.”

Even as I spoke, though, I heard the door open behind me. Glancing over my shoulder, I saw Keith just outside the room. The last thing I wanted was for him to barge in and start throwing questions at Samson, so I waved him off. He hesitated, then he reluctantly shut the door, leaving me alone with the robot.

I let out my breath, then I clambered to my feet, walked over to the sink, and wetted some paper towels. There was a small bruise on my cheek, but I didn’t find any blood mixed in with the peanut butter and jelly; the shirt, though, would need a trip to the dry cleaner. Cleaning up gave me a chance to calm down a little; when I returned to the table and picked up the chair, I was ready to talk to Samson once more.

“Samson, come back online, please,” I said as I sat down, and the ’bot gave me a single beep. “Do you remember what you were doing before…uh, just before I gave you the Code B?”

“Yes, I do, Jerry. I gave you the sandwich you asked me to fix for you.”

So far, so good. His new usage of the word “fix” indicated that his short-term memory wasn’t impaired. The rest, though… “Samson, you didn’t give me the sandwich. You hit me in the face with it. Do you remember doing that?”

“Yes, I do, David.”

“Why did you do that? Hit me in the face with the sandwich, I mean?”

“It seemed to be the right thing to do.”

I expected to hear something from the booth; when I didn’t, I touched my ear with my right hand, found my earpiece missing. Sometime during the last few minutes, it had become dislodged, probably while I was washing my face at the sink. But I didn’t want to interrupt the conversation to go searching for it, so I let it pass.

“That was the wrong thing to do, Samson,” I said. “You could have hurt me.”

“I’m sorry, Jerry. Please forgive me.”

Again, it may seem strange for a robot to ask a human for forgiveness, but this was another aspect of Samson’s conditioning. For him, begging forgiveness was an acknowledgement that he understood he had made an error and a tacit statement that he would never do it again. And indeed, he never would, not in a thousand reiterations of the same sequence. Unlike humans, robots don’t make the same mistake twice.

Yet getting nailed again with a PB&J was the least of my concerns. “I’ll forgive you if you tell me why it seemed like it seemed like the right thing to do.”

Silence. I had posed the question the wrong way. “Samson, why did you think hitting me in the face with the sandwich was the right thing to do?”

“Because you’re I want to do the right things for you, Jerry.”

Great. Now we were stuck in a logic loop. Yet this was the second time today he had struck someone else—either another robot or a human—with an object he was supposed to give to them. For such an occurrence to happen twice in such short succession couldn’t be a coincidence. Time to try a different tack… “If you want to do the right things for me, Samson, then how do you feel about me?”

“I love you, Jerry.”

Wha-a-a-t?

Even if he sounded like Elizabeth Taylor rather than Robert Redford, that response couldn’t have shocked me more. Samson was programmed to learn the identities of his human operators and accept them with platonic, selfless affection. Agape, if you want to use the seldom-used term for such a condition (and, no, it’s not pronounced ah-gape, like the way you may stare at something, but as ah-gaw-pey). Since Samson had become operational, I had spent well over a hundred hours with him in this room, patiently instructing him how to make the bed, wash dishes, vacuum the floor, program the TV, fetch me a soda, answer the front door and greet guests, play various board games, and feed the cat. If I were to ask Samson how he felt about me, he should have replied, “I like you, Jerry. You’re my friend.”

Love was not supposed to be in the algorithms. I was pretty damn sure he didn’t know what he was saying. But what was it that he meant to say…?

Once more, I heard the door open. Looking over my shoulder, I saw Donna urgently gesturing to me. I wanted to continue this train of thought, yet since I didn’t know exactly what to say next, perhaps now was a good time to grab a Coke. “I like you, too, Samson,” I said as I stood up. “Let’s take a break. Code B.”

“Code B understood,” Samson said, and there was another double-beep as he went off-line again. If I didn’t return in ten minutes to rescind the order, he would automatically come back online again, then seek out the nearest wall-socket and plug himself in for a recharge. Until then, he was an inert hunk of machinery.

Right. An inert hunk of machinery who had just proclaimed his love for me.

I found Phil in the observation booth, bent over one of the monitors as he studied the video replay of the session. He didn’t look at me as I came in, but moused the slidebar on the bottom of the screen to review my interview with Samson. Keith was seated in his chair on the other side of him; he glanced in my direction, then quickly looked away. I noticed the cordless phone near his left elbow; that explained how Phil had gotten down here so quickly. Keith, you prick; you’re always ready to crack jokes behind the boss’s back, but whenever you get a chance to suck up to him…

“Why didn’t you let Keith shut down Samson?” Phil asked quietly, still gazing at the screen. At least he wasn’t stammering this time.

“I wanted to make sure we didn’t lose anything from Samson’s memory.” I stepped aside to let Donna slide past me, but she remained behind me, standing in the open door of the darkened booth. “This was the second time today Samson has attacked someone, and I wanted to find out why.”

Phil shook his head. “Sorry, Jerry, but that’s an unacceptable risk. If there’s something critically wrong with his conditioning protocols, we can’t let him stay active after an accident.” He turned to Keith. “Download everything from his buffer and give them to me, then erase his memory of this test.”

“Hey, whoa, wait a minute! I just spent two hours in there with him! You can’t just erase everything because…!”

That ticked him off. Phil slapped the desk as he rose to face me. “D-d-d-don’t t-t-tell me wh-whu-whu-what I ca-ca-ca-ca…”

“Damn straight I can!” I snarled back. “That’s my conditioning routine you’re screwing with here, Phil, and this is the second time today you’ve told Keith to wipe the memory buffer!” I jabbed a finger at the motionless robot on the other side of the window. “And in case you didn’t notice, that friggin’ thing just said he loves me! Now there’s got to be a reason for that!”

Phil stared at me in astonishment, and I can’t say I wasn’t rather amazed myself. In the four years that we had worked together, we had seldom raised our voices to one another. We weren’t great friends, but even after the stress of the last six months, it was hard for the two of us to get really mad at each other. Unlike, of course, his stormy relationship with Darth Veder…

And it was then, deep within my brain, that a couple of synapses sparked in a way those two particular synapses had never fired before. Phil and Kathy…

Okay, time out for a little soap opera. True Geek Romance, or perhaps Computer Wonks In Love. Either way, here it is:

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…okay, so it was about twelve years ago, just across the Charles River on the MIT campus…there were two post-grads working in the Artificial Intelligence Lab, both studying advanced AI as applied to robotics. A nice couple of kids in their late twenties; neither of them much to look at, and hardly the type you’d imagine prancing hand-in-hand through the lily fields, but hey, love isn’t only blind, but it’s also got a bizarre sense of humor. They found each other, they worked together for a time as colleagues, then close friends, then…well, you get the picture.

But it didn’t take. That’s the problem with romances among highly intelligent people; they think too much about what they’re doing, instead of just letting their cojones go their own merry way. They were a mismatched couple, or at least so they told themselves, prone to argue about every little detail, whether it was about the theories of Norbert Wiener or what kind of pizza to order tonight. Late one evening, after the latest tiff, she stormed out of his Cambridge apartment, and he retaliated by throwing her books into the street, and that was pretty much the end of that. They both received their MIT doctorates only a few months later, and since each of them already had jobs awaiting them on opposite sides of the country, they left Massachusetts with scarcely a final goodbye.

But every great affair has a touch of irony. A decade went by, during which time LEC decided to diversify into consumer robotics. Jim Lang hired corporate headhunters to recruit the best cybernetics talent available, and as fortuitous circumstances would have it, the two former lovers were lured back to Massachusetts. Imagine their surprise when they discovered that they were now working for the same company. Different divisions, perhaps, but the same company nonetheless.

So now it’s twelve years later, and they were still trying to iron out their relationship. Only this time, they’d built robots which program themselves by observing human behavior and imitating it.

“Keith, Donna,” I asked, “would you mind excusing us for a moment?”

Keith stared at me before he realized that I wanted him to leave, then he shrugged and rose from his chair. Donna gave me a quizzical look, but didn’t say anything as Keith closed the door behind them.

Phil waited until we were alone before he spoke. “Whu-whu-whu-what d-d-d-do you w-w-wa-wa-want t-t-t-to…?”

“Phil, sit down and count to ten.” He glared at me but took my advice anyway, taking the seat Keith had just vacated. While he was counting, I crept to the door, put my hand on the knob, waited a couple of seconds, then yanked it open. Keith stood just outside, pretending to scratch his nose. He mumbled something about getting a cup of coffee and scurried down the hall. I shut the door again just as Phil had reached ten. “Okay now?” I asked.

“Sure.” He let out his breath. “All right, Jerry, what do you want to talk about?”

“Okay, just between you and me…are you seeing Kathy again?” Phil’s mouth dropped open, and for a moment I thought he was going to start stammering again. I saw the denial coming, though, so I headed it off. “Look, everyone knows you two were once an item. Frankly, I don’t care, but if it makes any difference, I’m not going to tell Jim. Just to satisfy my curiosity, though…”

“Ummm…yeah, we’ve started seeing each other again.” He seemed mortified by the admission. “But not on company time,” he quickly added. “We’ve only gone out a couple of times.”

Somehow, that sounded like a lie. I didn’t keep track of Darth’s hours, but I knew for a fact that Phil practically lived at the lab, going so far as to keep a fresh change of clothes in his office closet and a toothbrush in his desk. “Sure, sure, I believe you. Just dinner and a movie now and then, right?”

“Yeah, t-t-that’s all.” He nodded, perhaps a little too quickly…and that stutter of his was better than a polygraph. “P-p-please don’t let anyone know. If Jim fi-fi-fi-finds out w-w-we’re…”

“I know, I know.” And that’s what bothered him the most, the chance that Jim Lang would discover that the leaders of his two rival tiger-teams were having an affair. For a chess player, that would be like finding out that the white queen and the black king were sneaking off the board to fool around. “Trust me, Slim Jim’s never going to learn about this…or at least from me, at any rate.”

Phil nodded gratefully, then his face became suspicious. “So why do you want to know?”

“Well…” I coughed in my hand. “You just said that you two weren’t seeing each other on company time…and really, I believe you, honest…but just for the sake of conjecture, if you were seeing each other here at the lab, umm…would you be doing it where Samson might be at the same time?”

“B-b-buh-buh…” Phil stared at me as if I was his father and I had just asked if he knew how to put on a condom. And then his eyes involuntarily traveled toward the window.

While we had been speaking, without either of us taking notice, Samson had automatically gone into recharge mode. The robot had walked to the nearest electrical outlet, withdrawn a power cable from his thorax, and inserted it into the wall socket. Since Samson now spent most of his downtime in the training suite, he knew exactly where all the outlets were located.

It suddenly occurred to me that the outlets were all within line-of-sight of the suite’s bedroom. The one which all of us had used when we were too tired or busy to go home.

And Samson, of course, knew how to change the sheets when asked to do so.

When I looked back at Phil, I saw that he was staring straight at me. Nothing further needed to be said: he knew that I knew, and I knew that he knew that I knew. That’s another thing about highly intelligent people; no matter how smart they may be, most of them have a hard time lying with a straight face.

Phil didn’t say anything. He rotated the chair to the console, where he found a spare disk, slapped it into the drive, and tapped a couple of commands into the keyboard. “Sorry you had to lose this afternoon’s session,” he said quietly, not looking back at me as Samson’s memory buffer downloaded onto the disk, “but I think we’ve got a flaw in the conditioning module…”

“Aw, c’mon! He’s just confused. He sees you and Kathy in there…” I saw the angry look on his face reflected in the window, but I didn’t stop myself “…and then he sees you two fighting. No wonder his conditioning is…”

“That’s enough!” He ejected the disk from the drive and stood up quickly, shoving the disk in his trouser pocket without bothering to first put it in its case. “Th-th-this is none of your buh-buh-business, and I-I-I’d ap-ap-appreciate it if y-y-you’d k-k-k-kindly stay out of it. Samson needs to b-b-be reprogrammed. Th-th-th-that’s all.”

No argument either way. Phil’s relationship with Kathy wasn’t any of my business, and there was no doubt that Samson conditioning module needed drastic remodification. Like it or not, our team had designed a third-generation robot which took all the wrong cues from human behavior. Kathy and Phil could fight out their problems on their own, but it wasn’t right to send a robot to market whose training inadvertently reflected their love-hate relationship.

“Sure, Phil,” I said. “Whatever you say.”

Still not looking directly at me, Phil nodded as he headed for the door. “Th-th-that’s the end of t-t-t-today’s exercise,” he said quietly. “I-I-I’ll work on S-s-s-samson tonight, have it r-r-ready for t-t-tomorrow’s test with D-d-d-d-d…”

“Sure you want to do that?” Tomorrow morning we had another test scheduled with D-team. Same routine as before: Samson comes out of the woods, offers an apple to Delilah, bows to her, offers his hand and asks if she wants him to join her on the bench. Both teams had agreed this as a test of whether the two robots could work in unison without operator intervention. “Maybe we should ask for a delay.”

Phil appeared to think about it for a moment, then he shook his head. “No,” he said at last. “We’ll do the test tomorrow. Between now and then, don’t touch Samson. Just let me take care of this, okay?”

“Sure,” I said, and he nodded and let himself out of the booth. It wasn’t until long after he had closed the door behind him that I realized he had stopped stuttering.

By this time, though, I had taken a seat at the console and begun doing a little work of my own.

The two R&D programs were supposed to be isolated from one another, but the seal wasn’t airtight. Kathy and Phil weren’t the only couple who were keeping company when no one was watching; there was a cutie on Delilah Team with whom I was cooping from time to time, sometimes sleeping over at her apartment and vice-versa. What she didn’t know, though, was that I had learned her password. It was a sort-of-accidental discovery; one time we were lounging in bed together, she took a few minutes to check her company email on TV, so I was able to see her password when she entered it. I had never abused that knowledge, but there’s always a first time for everything, so it was with no small amount of guilt that I used my occasional girlfriend’s password to gain access to D-Team’s files.

It took a couple of hours of rummaging, but after a while I managed to locate a batch of reports regarding Delilah’s trial runs. I wasn’t surprised to discover that D-team had their own problems with their robot. Like Samson, Delilah sometimes behaved aggressively when the circumstances called for her to be friendly. The fault obviously lay in the conditioning module, yet no one—at least, not those who had written the reports; I couldn’t find any from Kathy Veder—had been able to figure out what was providing negative stimuli to the robot.

But I knew. Delilah was being also being trained in a suite much like Samson’s. It didn’t take a rocket scientist, let alone a cyberneticist, to realize that this suite was sometimes being used by Drs. Veder and Burton for certain extracurricular activities…with Delilah in the same room, watching the entire time, absorbing everything. Learning all the wrong lessons about the human condition.

It could be argued either way whether Samson and Delilah truly had any emotions of their own. Were they merely imitating Phil and Kathy, or had they developed inner lives, as incredible as that may seem? Regardless of the explanation, though, their environment was causing them to sometimes behave in what appeared to be an irrational manner.

Yet love—even agape, its highest expression—isn’t rational. It cannot be reduced to bar-graphs and lines of source code; once you get past pheromones, body language and casual eye-contact, there is no reason for it to happen, save for the biological imperatives to procreate, maintain tribal associations, or remain close to one’s family. But love does nonetheless persist, and sometimes under the strangest of circumstances.

Were Samson and Delilah in love? Probably not; they were robots, machines with none of the beforementioned hangups. You could spend countless man-hours of R&D trying to resolve that question. Yet the only people who had the answer were their own creators…and they had a hard enough time researching and developing their own feelings toward each other.

When I arrived the trailer the following morning, the rest of Samson Team was already getting ready for the test. Phil, however, was nowhere to be found, and neither was Samson. I paged him but he didn’t return the call, and while Bob was setting up his camera and Keith was opening his first bag of Fritos for the day, Kathy Veder appeared in the atrium, walking Delilah ahead of her.

Delilah was dressed in the same ankle-length, high-collared gown she had worn the day before. Once again, I wondered what purpose it served to put clothes on a robot. It didn’t seem to impede her movements—indeed, the dress had been cut so that it allowed her double-jointed arms and legs to move more freely—yet it was unnecessary to assign a gender-role to a machine. On the other hand, perhaps Darth was attempting to humanize her creation; if that was the case, it might be a good marketing strategy, yet rather futile since Delilah’s spherical, nearly featureless head belied the femininity of her outfit.

Kathy stopped next to the bench, turning her back to us as she waited for Delilah catch up. Donna hadn’t switched on the shotgun mike, so we couldn’t hear the instructions Kathy gave the ’bot. She pointed to the bench, and Delilah walked over to it, her feet whisking beneath the hem of her dress, until she turned and daintily sat down, once again folding her silver hands in her lap. Kathy bent over Delilah and closely examined a panel in the side of her slender cylindrical neck. I glanced at the clock. We were already running fifteen minutes late…

The door behind me opened, and at first I thought it was Phil. “What took you so…?” I started to say until I glimpsed Keith hastily stashing his chips beneath the console. I turned around and saw Jim Lang entering the trailer.

“Mind if I join you?” he asked. As always, Jim was dressed in sandals, faded Levis and a Hawaiian shirt. In all the time I had worked for LEC, I had never seen him wear a coat and tie, not even for stockholder meetings.

“No, Jim, not at all.” I recovered fast enough to not show just how startled I was by his unexpected arrival. “We’re…ah, still setting up here. If you want to take a seat…?”

“Thanks, Jerry. Excuse me, Donna…it is Donna, isn’t it?” Ignoring her forced smile, Jim eased past her, then settled down in Phil’s empty chair. “Sorry to interrupt, but I was just curious to see how things were making out down here.”

Right. Slim Jim never showed up anywhere just out of curiosity. When he made an appearance outside the executive suite, it meant that he had become aware that a project was having problems. “We’re doing great, Jim,” Keith said, just a little too quickly. “Just…uh, working out a few bugs here and there.”

I looked away so that Jim wouldn’t see me wince. Brilliant, Einstein. Yet Slim Jim only nodded. He gazed through the window at Kathy Veder and Delilah. “I don’t see Phil,” he said. “Where’s…ah, yes, here he comes now.”

I followed his gaze, spotted Phil walking through the trees on the other side of the atrium. He saw Kathy, stopped a few yards away from the bench as she looked up at him. Their eyes locked for a few seconds, and for a moment or two I thought he was going to say something to her, or she something to him. But nothing happened; he lowered his head and strode quickly toward the trailer. Her gaze followed him, and in that instant when her face turned toward the trailer, I caught the briefest glimpse of an expression I couldn’t quite identify. Loathing? Longing? Hard to tell…

“We’re lucky to have them working for us, don’t you think?” Jim asked quietly.

I didn’t realize he was speaking to me until I glanced his way, saw that he was looking at me. “Oh, yeah,” I replied. “Very lucky. Two great scientists, uh-huh.” And perhaps it wasn’t too late to send my resumé to CybeServe…

Phil was startled to find Jim sitting in his chair when he entered the trailer. He murmured a hasty apology for being late, which Jim accepted with a perfunctory nod, then he squeezed past the CEO to stand behind Keith. “G-g-good m-m-m-morning,” he stammered as he leaned over Keith’s shoulder to check out the screen. “Are w-w-w-we re-re-re-ready?”

“I’m not sure.” Keith cast a wary sidelong glance in Jim’s direction. “When I ran a diagnostic a few minutes ago, I found a new protocol in the conditioning module. I checked it out, and it looks like it was written last night. Do you know anything about…?”

“Y-y-yes, i-i-it’s a n-n-new p-p-program.” His Adam’s apple bobbed in his thin neck, and he seemed determined not to deliberately look at Jim Lang. “I t-t-t-think w-w-w-we’re ready to pr-pr-pro-proceed.”

Jim raised an inquisitive eyebrow, but said nothing as he propped his elbows on the console and clasped his hands together beneath his chin. Out in the atrium, Kathy Veder had just turned to walk away from Delilah. Phil caught Donna’s eye and quickly nodded his head, and she switched on her mike. “D-Team, we’re ready to roll.”

“R-r-roll now,” Phil said. Keith and I traded an uncertain glance. Dr. Veder was still in the atrium; she hadn’t yet returned to her trailer. Keith’s hands hesitated above his keyboard, and Phil tapped him on the shoulder. “Commence the t-t-t-test, p-p-p-please,” he said, and Keith shrugged as he typed in the command which would bring Samson online.

“Aren’t you going to wait?” Jim asked quietly.

Phil didn’t reply. Instead, he closed his eyes, and his lips moved as he subaudibly counted to ten.

Something weird was going on here, and it wasn’t the sort of weirdness I like. While Phil’s eyes were shut and Jim was looking the other direction, I opened a window from my menu bar and moused the emergency shut-down icon. When the Y/N prompt appeared onscreen, I moved the cursor above the Y. One tap of my index finger, and Samson would freeze like an popsicle.

Out in the atrium, Kathy Veder was almost at the edge of the clearing when Samson came marching through the trees. She stopped in mid-stride, confused and startled, judging from her expression, not just a little alarmed. My mind’s eye flashed upon a scene from The Day the Earth Stood Still—the robot Gort carrying the unconscious Patricia Neal in his arms—and my finger wavered above the Return key. Oh, no, Phil can’t be that crazy…

But then Samson stopped. He bowed from the waist, as if he was a gentleman who happened upon a lovely young woman while strolling through the woods. Kathy’s face changed from fear to amusement; she stepped aside, and Samson straightened up and walked past her.

“Oh, very good,” Jim murmured. “Good object recognition.”

I let out my breath and moved my hand away from the keyboard.

Samson continued walking toward Delilah. As he approached the bench where she sat, his right hand opened the cargo panel on his chest, and reached inside. At this point, he was supposed to pull out an apple and offer it to the other robot. He had gotten that part right yesterday, until he decided that slamming the apple against her head was an appropriate sign of affection. On either side of me, I could see Donna, Keith, and Bob stiffening ever so slightly.

But what Samson produced wasn’t an apple, but a heart.

Not the organic sort, but the St. Valentine’s Day variety: a red plastic toy of the sort you might place within a bouquet of roses you send to your true love.

From the edge of the clearing, Kathy Veder watched as Samson stepped around the bench and, with grace and tenderness, held it out to Delilah.

Delilah remained still, her hands still folded in her lap, her fishbowl head staring straight ahead.

“Please,” I heard Phil whisper.

And then Delilah’s head moved toward Samson, as if noticing his presence for the first time. She raised her left arm, opened her palm and turned it upward, and waited.

Samson took another step forward and, ever so carefully, placed the heart in her hand.

Kathy folded her arms across her chest, covered her mouth with her hand. She was watching the robots, but her gaze kept flickering toward us, toward the window behind which Phil stood.

I glanced at Phil. He was silent, but his posture was exactly like Kathy’s.

Delilah took the heart and placed it in her lap. Samson bowed just as he had done for Kathy, but he remained rooted in his tracks until Delilah raised her left hand and, in a very ladylike fashion, motioned for him to join her on the bench.

Samson took two steps closer, turned around, and sat down next to Delilah, his hands coming to rest on the bench.

Then Delilah laid her right hand upon his left hand.

And then both robots became still.

That was almost what they were supposed to do.

For a few moments, no one in the trailer said anything. Everyone stared in astonishment at the tableau. I felt someone brush against the back of my chair, but I didn’t look up to see who had just moved past me. My entire attention was focused upon Samson and Delilah, the quiet spectacle of two robots holding hands on a park bench.

“Fantastic,” Jim Lang whispered. “I’m…that’s utterly…my God, it’s so damn real.” He turned around to look up at Phil. “How did you…?”

But Phil wasn’t there. He didn’t even bother to shut the door behind him as he left the trailer. When I peered out the window again, I saw that Kathy Veder had disappeared as well.

In fact, I didn’t see either of them again for the rest of the day. A little while later, during lunch hour, I casually strolled out to the employee parking lot and noted, without much surprise, that both of their cars were missing.

“That’s incredible conditioning,” Jim said as he pushed back his chair. “How did you guys manage this?”

Bob chuckled as he unloaded his camcorder. Donna and Keith, two days away from their first date, just grinned at each other and said nothing. I made the program-abort window disappear from my screen before the boss noticed and shrugged offhandedly.

“Just takes the right conditioning,” I replied.

If you’re a robot-owner, or least one who has a Samson or a Delilah in your home, then you know the rest. After considerable research and development, and the sort of financial risk which makes the Wall Street Journal see spots before its eyes, LEC simultaneously introduced two different R3G models: his-and-hers robots for the home and office. They cook dinner, they wash dishes, they answer the door, they walk the dog, they vacuum the floor, they make the beds, and water the roses and virtually anything else you ask them to do. Sure, CybeServe brought their Metropolis to market first, but who wants that clunky piece of crap? Our robots will even carry your kids to bed and sing them a lullaby.

People sometimes ask why Samsons and Delilahs have a small heart etched on their chest plates. The corporate line is that it’s there to show that our robots have a soul, but anyone who knows anything about cybernetics knows better than that. After all, that’s utter nonsense. Robots are just machines, right? And who in their right mind would ever believe that a machine can learn to love?

I don’t have an easy answer to that, and I’ve spent more than fifteen years in this industry. If you want, I’ll forward your query to Dr. Phil Burton and Dr. Kathy Veder. However, you shouldn’t expect an answer very soon. Ever since they got married, we’ve had a hard time getting them to come to the office.

THE STARSHIP MECHANIC, by Jay Lake and Ken Scholes

The floor of Borderlands Books had been polished to mirror brightness. A nice trick with old knotty pine, but Penauch would have been a weapons-grade obsessive-compulsive if he’d been human. I’d thought about setting him to detailing my car, but he’s just as likely to polish it down to aluminum and steel after deciding the paint was an impurity.

When he discovered that the human race recorded our ideas in books, he’d been impossible to keep away from the store. Penauch didn’t actually read them, not as such, and he was most reluctant to touch the volumes. He seemed to view books as vehicles, launch capsules to propel ideas from the dreaming mind of the human race into our collective forebrain.

Despite the fact that Penauch was singular, unitary, a solitary alien in the human world, he apparently didn’t conceive of us as anything but a collective entity. The xenoanthropologists at Berkeley were carving Ph.D.s out of that particular clay as fast as their grad students could transcribe Penauch’s conversations with me.

He’d arrived the same as David Bowie in that old movie. No, not Brother From Another Planet; The Man Who Fell To Earth. Tumbled out of the autumn sky over the Cole Valley neighborhood of San Francisco like a maple seed, spinning with his arms stretched wide and his mouth open in a teakettle shriek audible from the Ghost Fleet in Suisun Bay all the way down to the grubby streets of San Jose.

* * * *

“The subject’s fallsacs when fully deployed serve as a tympanum, producing a rhythmic vibration at a frequency perceived by the human ear as a high-pitched shriek. Xenophysiological modeling has thus far failed to generate testable hypotheses concerning the volume of the sound produced. Some observers have speculated that the subject deployed technological assistance during atmospheric entry, though no evidence of this was found at the landing site, and subject has never indicated this was the case.”

—Jude A. Feldman quoting Jen West Scholes; A Reader’s Guide to Earth’s Only Living Spaceman; Borderlands Books, 2014

* * * *

It was easier, keeping Penauch in the bookstore. The owners didn’t mind. They’d had hairless cats around the place for years—a breed called sphinxes. The odd animals served as a neighborhood tourist attraction and business draw. A seven-foot alien with a face like a plate of spaghetti and a cluster of writhing arms wasn’t all that different. Not in a science fiction bookstore, at least.

Thing is, when Penauch was out in the world, he had a tendency to fix things.

This fixing often turned out to be not so good.

No technology was involved. Penauch’s body was demonstrably able to modify the chitinous excrescences of his appendages at will. If he needed a cutting edge, he ate a bit of whatever steel was handy and swiftly metabolized it. If he needed electrical conductors, he sought out copper plumbing. If he needed logic probes, he consumed sand or diamonds or glass.

It was all the same to Penauch.

As best any of us could figure out, Penauch was a sort of tool. A Swiss army knife that some spacefaring race had dropped or thrown away, abandoned until he came to rest on Earth’s alien shore.

And Penauch only spoke to me.

* * * *

The question of Penauch’s mental competence has bearing in both law and ethics. Pratt and Shaw (2013) have effectively argued that the alien fails the Turing test, both at a gross observational level and within the context of finer measurements of conversational intent and cooperation. Cashier (2014) claims an indirectly derived Stanford-Binet score in the 99th percentile, but seemingly contradicts herself by asserting that Penauch’s sentience is at best an open question. Is he (or it) a machine, a person, or something else entirely?

—S.G. Browne, “A Literature Review of the Question of Alien Mentation”; Journal of Exogenic Studies, Volume II, Number 4, August, 2015

* * * *

The first time he fixed something was right after he’d landed. Penauch impacted with that piercing shriek at 2:53 p.m Pacific Time on Saturday, July 16, 2011, at the intersection of Cole and Paranassus in the Cole Valley neighborhood of San Francisco. Every window within six blocks shattered. Almost a hundred pedestrians and shoppers in the immediate area were treated for lacerations from broken glass, over two dozen more for damage to hearing and sinuses.

I got to him first, stumbling out of Cole Hardware with a headache like a cartoon anvil had been dropped on me. Inside, we figured a bomb had gone off. The rising noise and the vibrating windows. All the vases in the homewares section had exploded. Luckily I’d been with the fasteners. The nails sang, but they didn’t leap off the shelves and try to make hamburger of me.

Outside, there was this guy lying in a crater in the middle of the intersection, like Wile E. Coyote after he’d run out of Acme patented jet fuel. I hurried over, touched his shoulder, and realized what a goddamned mess he was. Then half a dozen eyes opened, and something like a giant rigatoni farted before saying, “Penauch.”

Weird thing was, I could hear the spelling.

Though I didn’t know it in that moment, my old life was over, my new one begun.

Penauch then looked at my shattered wristwatch, grabbed a handful of BMW windshield glass, sucked it down, and moments later fixed my timepiece.

For some value of “fixed.”

It still tells time, somewhere with a base seventeen counting system and twenty-eight point one five seven hour day. It shows me the phases of Phobos and Deimos, evidence that he’d been on (or near) Mars. Took a while to figure that one out. And thing warbles whenever someone gets near me carrying more than about eight ounces of petroleum products. Including grocery bags, for example, and most plastics.

I could probably get millions for it on eBay. Penauch’s first artifact, and one of less than a dozen in private hands.

The government owns him now, inasmuch as anyone owns Penauch. They can’t keep him anywhere. He ‘fixes’ his way out of any place he gets locked into. He comes back to San Francisco, finds me, and we go to the bookstore. Where Penauch polishes the floors and chases the hairless cats and draws pilgrims from all over the world to pray in Valencia Street. The city gave up on traffic control a long time ago. It’s a pedestrian mall now when he’s around.

The problem has always been, none of us have any idea what Penauch is. What he does. What he’s for. I’m the only one he talks to, and most of what he says is Alice in Wonderland dialog, except when it isn’t. Two new semiconductor companies have been started through analysis of his babble, and an entire novel chemical feedstock process for converting biomass into plastics.

Then one day, down on the mirrored floor of Borderlands Books, Penauch looked at me and said quite clearly, “They’re coming back.”

I was afraid we were about to get our answers.

* * * *

It was raining men in the Castro, literally, and every single one of them was named Todd. Every single one of them wore Hawaiian shirts and khaki shorts and Birkenstocks. Every single one of them landed on their backs, flopped like trout for a full minute and leaped to their feet shouting one word: “Penauch!”

—San Francisco Chronicle, November 11th, 2015; Gail Carriger reporting

* * * *

“I must leave,” Penauch said, his voice heavy as he stroked a hairless cat on the freshly polished floor of the bookstore.

On a small TV in the back office of the store, an excited reporter in Milk Plaza spoke rapidly about the strange visitors who’d fallen from the sky. Hundreds of men named Todd, now scattered out into the city with one word on their tongues. As it played in the background, I watched Penauch and could feel the sadness coming off of him in waves.

“Where will you go?”

Penauch stood. “I don’t know. Anywhere but here. Will you help me?”

The bell on the door jingled and a man entered the store. “Penauch,” he said.

I looked up at the visitor. His Hawaiian shirt was an orange that hurt my eyes, decorated in something that looked like cascading pineapples. He smiled and scowled at the same time.

Penauch moved quickly and suddenly the room smelled of ozone and cabbage.

The man, named Todd I assumed, was gone.

I looked at my alien, took in the slow wriggle of his pale and determined face.

“What did you do?”

Penauch’s clustered silver eyes leaked mercury tears. “I… un-fixed him.”

We ran out the back. We climbed into my car over on Guerrero. We drove north and away.

* * * *

Xenolinguists have expended considerable effort on the so-called “Todd Phenomenon.” Everyone on 11/11/15 knew the visitors from outer space were named Todd, yet no one could say how or why. This is the best documented case of what can be argued as telepathy in the modern scientific record, yet it is equally worthless by virtue of being impossible to either replicate or falsify.

—Christopher Barzak, blog entry, January 14th, 2016

* * * *

We stayed ahead of them for most of a week, turning east and then north. We made it as far as Edmonton before the man-rain caught up to us.

While Penauch slept, I grabbed snacks of news from the radio. These so-called Todds spread out in their search, my friend’s name the only word upon their lips. They made no effort to resist the authorities. Three were shot by members of the Washington State Patrol. Two were killed by Navy SEALS in the small town of St. Maries, Idaho. They stole cars. They drove fast. They followed after us.

And then they found us in Edmonton.

We were at an A&W drive through window when the first Todd caught up to the car. He t-boned us into the side of the restaurant with his Mercedes, pushing Penuach against me. The Todd was careful not to get within reach.

“Penauch,” he shouted from outside the window. My friend whimpered. Our car groaned and ground as his hands moved over the dashboard, trying to fix it.

Two other cars hemmed us in, behind and before. Todds in Hawaiian shirts and khaki shorts stepped out, unfazed by the cold. One climbed onto the hood of my Corvair. “Your services are still required.”

Penauch whimpered again. I noticed that the Todd’s breath did not show in the sub-zero air.

The air shimmered as a bending light enfolded us.

* * * *

“Af-afterwards, it, uh, it did’t m-matter so much. I m-mean, uh, you know? He smiled at me. Well, n-not an, uh, a smile. Not with that face. Like, a virtual smile? Th-then he was g-gone. Blown out like a candle. You know? Flame on, flame off.”

—RCMP transcript of eyewitness testimony; Edmonton, AB; 11/16/15

* * * *

I awoke in a dark place choking for air, my chest weighted with fluid. Penauch’s hand settled upon my shoulder. The heaviness leapt from me.

“Where am I?”

I heard a sound not unlike something heavy rolling in mud. It was a thick, wet noise and words formed alongside it in my mind. You are in—crackle hiss warble—medical containment pod of the Starship—but the name of the vessel was incomprehensible to me. Exposure to our malfunctioning—hiss crackle warble—mechanic has infected you with trace elements of—here another word I could not understand—viruses.

“I don’t get it,” I said.

Penauch’s voice was low. “You’re not meant to. But once I’ve fixed you, you will be returned to the store.”

I looked at him. “What about you?”

He shook his head, the rigatoni of his face slapping itself gently. “My services are required here. I am now operating within my design parameters.”

I opened my mouth to ask another question but then the light returned and I was falling. Beside me, Penauch fell, too, and he held my hand tightly. “Do not let go,” he said as we impacted.

This time we made no crater as we landed. We stood and I brushed myself off. “I have no idea what any of this means.”

“It won’t matter,” Penauch told me. “But say goodbye to the cats for me.”

“I will,” I promised.

“I liked your planet. Now that the—” again, the incomprehensible ship’s name slid entirely over my brain “—is operational once more, I suppose we’ll find others.” He sighed. “I hope I malfunction again soon.” He stretched out a hand and fixed me a final time.

I blinked at him and somehow, mid-blink, I stood in the center of Valencia Street.

* * * *

I walked into Borderlands Books, still wondering exactly how I was wandering the streets of San Francisco in an orange Hawaiian shirt and a pair of khaki shorts three sizes too large.

A pretty girl smiled at me from behind the counter. “Hi Bill,” she said. “Where’ve you been?”

I shrugged.

A hairless cat ran in front of me, feet scampering over floors that were badly in need of a polish.

“Goodbye,” I told it, but didn’t know why.

PEACEMAKER, by Gardner Dozois

Roy had dreamed of the sea, as he often did. When he woke up that morning, the wind was sighing through the trees outside with a sound like the restless murmuring of surf, and for a moment he thought that he was home, back in the tidy brick house by the beach, with everything that had happened undone, and hope opened hotly inside him, like a wound.

“Mom?” he said. He sat up, straightening his legs, expecting his feet to touch the warm mass that was his dog Toby, Toby always slept curled on the foot of his bed, but already everything was breaking up and changing, slipping away, and he blinked through sleep-gummed eyes at the thin blue light coming in through the attic window, felt the hardness of the old Army cot under him, and realized that he wasn’t home, that there was no home anymore, that for him there could never be a home again.

He pushed the blankets aside and stood up. It was bitterly cold in the big attic room—winter was dying hard, the most terrible winter he could remember—and the rough wood planking burned his feet like ice, but he couldn’t stay in bed anymore, not now.

None of the other kids were awake yet; he threaded his way through the other cots—accidentally bumping against one of them so that its occupant tossed and moaned and began to snore in a higher register—and groped through cavernous shadows to the single high window. He was just tall enough to reach it, if he stood on tiptoe. He forced the window open, the old wood of its frame groaning in protest, plaster dust puffing, and shivered as the cold dawn wind poured inward, hitting him in the face, tugging with ghostly fingers at his hair, sweeping past him to rush through the rest of the stuffy attic like a restless child set free to play.

The wind smelled of pine resin and wet earth, not of salt flats and tides, and the bird-sound that rode in on that wind was the burbling of wrens and the squawking of bluejays, not the raucous shrieking of sea gulls…but even so, as he braced his elbows against the window frame and strained up to look out, his mind still full of the broken fragments of dreams, he half-expected to see the ocean below, stretched out to the horizon, sending patient wavelets to lap against the side of the house. Instead he saw the nearby trees holding silhouetted arms up against the graying sky, the barn and the farmyard, all still lost in shadow, the surrounding fields, the weathered macadam line of the road, the forested hills rolling away into distance. Silver mist lay in pockets of low ground, retreated in wraithlike streamers up along the ridges.

Not yet. The sea had not chased him here—yet.

Somewhere out there to the east, still invisible, were the mountains, and just beyond those mountains was the sea that he had dreamed of, lapping quietly at the dusty Pennsylvania hill towns, coal towns, that were now, suddenly, seaports. There the Atlantic waited, held at bay, momentarily at least, by the humpbacked wall of the Appalachians, still perhaps forty miles from here, although closer now by leagues of swallowed land and drowned cities than it had been only three years before.

He had been down by the seawall that long-ago morning, playing some forgotten game, watching the waves move in slow oily swells, like some heavy, dull metal in liquid form, watching the tide come in…and come in…and come in… He had been excited at first, as the sea crept in, way above the high-tide line, higher than he had ever seen it before, and then, as the sea swallowed the beach entirely and began to lap patiently against the base of the seawall, he had become uneasy, and then, as the sea continued to rise up toward the top of the seawall itself, he had begun to be afraid.… The sea had just kept coming in, rising slowly and inexorably, swallowing the land at a slow walking pace, never stopping, always coming in, always rising higher.… By the time the sea had swallowed the top of the seawall and begun to creep up the short grassy slope toward his house, sending glassy fingers probing almost to his feet, he had started to scream, he had whirled and run frantically up the slope, screaming hysterically for his parents, and the sea had followed patiently at his heels.…

A “marine transgression,” the scientists called it. Ordinary people called it, inevitably, the Flood. Whatever you called it, it had washed away the old world forever. Scientists had been talking about the possibility of such a thing for years—some of them even pointing out that it was already as warm as it had been at the peak of the last interglacial, and getting warmer—but few had suspected just how fast the Antarctic ice could melt. Many times during those chaotic weeks, one scientific King Canute or another had predicted that the worst was over, that the tide would rise this high and no higher…but each time the sea had come inexorably on, pushing miles and miles farther inland with each successive high tide, rising almost three hundred feet in the course of one disastrous summer, drowning lowlands around the globe until there were no lowlands anymore. In the United States alone, the sea had swallowed most of the East Coast east of the Appalachians, the West Coast west of the Sierras and the Cascades, much of Alaska and Hawaii, Florida, the Gulf coast, east Texas, taken a big wide scoop out of the lowlands of the Mississippi Valley, thin fingers of water penetrating north to Iowa and Illinois, and caused the St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes to overflow and drown their shorelines. The Green Mountains, the White Mountains, the Adirondacks, the Poconos and the Catskills, the Ozarks, the Pacific Coast Ranges—all had been transformed to archipelagoes, surrounded by the invading sea.

The funny thing was…that as the sea pursued them relentlessly inland, pushing them from one temporary refuge to another, he had been unable to shake the feeling that he had caused the Flood: that he had done something that day while playing atop the seawall, inadvertently stumbled on some magic ritual, some chance combination of gesture and word that had untied the bonds of the sea and sent it sliding up over the land…that it was chasing him, personally.…

A dog was barking out there now, somewhere out across the fields toward town, but it was not his dog. His dog was dead, long since dead, and its whitening skull was rolling along the ocean floor with the tides that washed over what had once been Brigantine, New Jersey, three hundred feet down.

Suddenly he was covered with gooseflesh, and he shivered, rubbing his hands over his bare arms. He returned to his cot and dressed hurriedly—no point in trying to go back to bed, Sara would be up to kick them all out of the sack in a minute or two anyway. The day had begun; he would think no further ahead than that. He had learned in the refugee camps to take life one second at a time.

As he moved around the room, he thought that he could feel hostile eyes watching him from some of the other bunks. It was much colder in here now that he had opened the window, and he had inevitably made a certain amount of noise getting dressed, but although they all valued every second of sleep they could scrounge, none of the other kids would dare to complain. The thought was bittersweet, bringing both pleasure and pain, and he smiled at it, a thin, brittle smile that was almost a grimace. No, they would watch sullenly from their bunks, and pretend to be asleep, and curse him under their breath, but they would say nothing to anyone about it. Certainly they would say nothing to him.

He went down through the still-silent house like a ghost, and out across the farmyard, through fugitive streamers of mist that wrapped clammy white arms around him and beaded his face with dew. His Uncle Abner was there at the slit trench before him. Abner grunted a greeting, and they stood pissing side by side for a moment in companionable silence, their urine steaming in the gray morning air.

Abner stepped backward and began to button his pants. “You start playin’ with yourself yet, boy?” he said, not looking at Roy.

Roy felt his face flush. “No,” he said, trying not to stammer, “no sir.”

“You growin’ hair already,” Abner said. He swung himself slowly around to face Roy, as if his body were some ponderous machine that could only be moved and aimed by the use of pulleys and levers. The hard morning light made his face look harsh as stone, but also sallow and old. Tired, Roy thought. Unutterably weary, as though it took almost more effort than he could sustain just to stand there. Worn out, like the overtaxed fields around them. Only the eyes were alive in the eroded face; they were hard and merciless as flint, and they looked at you as if they were looking right through you to some distant thing that nobody else could see. “I’ve tried to explain to you about remaining pure,” Abner said, speaking slowly. “About how important it is for you to keep yourself pure, not to let yourself be sullied in any way. I’ve tried to explain that, I hope you could understand—”

“Yes, sir,” Roy said.

Abner made a groping hesitant motion with his hand, fingers spread wide, as though he were trying to sculpt meaning from the air itself. “I mean—it’s important that you understand, Roy. Everything has to be right. I mean, everything’s got to be just…right…or nothing else will mean anything. You got to be right in your soul, boy. You got to let the Peace of God into your soul. It all depends on you now—you got to let that peace inside yourself, no one can do it for you. And it’s so important…”

“Yes, sir,” Roy said quietly, “I understand.”

“I wish…” Abner said, and fell silent. They stood there for a minute, not speaking, not looking at each other. There was wood smoke in the air now, and they heard a door slam somewhere on the far side of the house. They had instinctively been looking out across the open land to the east, and now, as they watched, the sun rose above the mountains, splitting the plum-and-ash sky open horizontally with a long wedge of red, distinguishing the rolling horizon from the lowering clouds. A lance of bright white sunlight hit their eyes, thrusting straight in at them from the edge of the world.

“You’re going to make us proud, boy, I know it,” Abner said, but Roy ignored him, watching in fascination as the molten disk of the sun floated free of the horizon line, squinting against the dazzle until his eyes watered and his sight blurred. Abner put his hand on the boy’s shoulder. The hand felt heavy and hot, proprietary, and Roy shook it loose in annoyance, still not looking away from the horizon. Abner sighed, started to say something, thought better of it, and instead said, “Come on in the house, boy, and let’s get some breakfast inside you.”

Breakfast—when they finally did get to sit down to it, after the usual rambling grace and invocation by Abner—proved to be unusually lavish. For the brethren, there were hickory-nut biscuits, and honey, and cups of chicory; and even the other refugee kids—who on occasion during the long bitter winter had been fed as close to nothing at all as law and appearances would allow—got a few slices of fried fatback along with their habitual cornmeal mush. Along with his biscuits and honey, Roy got wild turkey eggs, Indian potatoes, and a real pork chop. There was a good deal of tension around the big table that morning: Henry and Luke were stern-faced and tense, Raymond was moody and preoccupied, Albert actually looked frightened; the refugee kids were round-eyed and silent, doing their best to make themselves invisible; the jolly Mrs. Crammer was as jolly as ever, shoveling her food in with gusto; but the grumpy Mrs. Zeigler, who was feared and disliked by all the kids, had obviously been crying, and ate little or nothing. Abner’s face was set like rock, his eyes were hard and bright, and he looked from one to another of the brethren, as if daring them to question his leadership and spiritual guidance. Roy ate with good appetite, unperturbed by the emotional convection currents that were swirling around him, calmly but deliberately concentrating on mopping up every morsel of food on his plate—in the last couple of months he had put back some of the weight he had lost, although by the old standards, the ones his Mom would have applied four years ago, he was still painfully thin. At the end of the meal, Mrs. Reardon came in from the kitchen, and, beaming with the well-justified pride of someone who is about to do the impossible, presented Roy with a small, rectangular object wrapped in shiny brown paper. He was startled for a second, but yes, by God, it was: a Hershey bar, the first one he’d seen in years. A black-market item, of course, difficult to get hold of in the impoverished East these days, and probably expensive as hell. Even some of the brethren were looking at him enviously now, and the refugee kids were frankly gaping. As he picked up the Hershey bar and slowly and caressingly peeled the wrapper back, exposing the pale chocolate beneath, one of the other kids actually began to drool.…

After breakfast, the other refugee kids—“wetbacks,” the townspeople sometimes called them, with elaborate irony—were divided into two groups. One group would help the brethren work Abner’s farm that day, while the larger group would be loaded onto an ox-drawn dray (actually an old flatbed truck, with the cab knocked off) and sent out around the countryside to do what pretty much amounted to slave labor: road work, heavy farm work, helping with the quarrying or the timbering, rebuilding houses and barns and bridges damaged or destroyed in the chaotic days after the Flood. The federal government—or what was left of the federal government, trying desperately, and not always successfully, to keep a battered and Balkanizing country from flying completely apart, struggling to put the Humpty Dumpty that was America back together again—the federal government paid Abner (and others like him) a yearly allowance in federal scrip or promise-of-merchandise notes for giving room and board to refugees from the drowned lands…but times being as tough as they were, no one was going to complain if Abner also helped ease the burden of their upkeep by hiring them out locally to work for whoever could come up with the scrip, or sufficient barter goods, or an attractive work-swap offer; what was left of the state and town governments also used them on occasion (and the others like them, adult or child), gratis, for work projects “for the common good, during this time of emergency…”

Sometimes, hanging around the farm with little or nothing to do, Roy almost missed going out on the work crews, but only almost: he remembered too well the backbreaking labor performed on scanty rations…the sickness, the accidents, the staggering fatigue…the blazing sun and the swarms of mosquitoes in summer, the bitter cold in winter, the snow, the icy wind… He watched the dray go by, seeing the envious and resentful faces of kids he had once worked beside—Stevie, Enrique, Sal—turn towards him as it passed, and, reflexively, he opened and closed his hands. Even two months of idleness and relative luxury had not softened the thick and roughened layers of callus that were the legacy of several seasons spent on the crews.… No, boredom was infinitely preferable.

By midmorning, a small crowd of people had gathered in the road outside the farmhouse. It was hotter now; you could smell the promise of summer in the air, in the wind, and the sun that beat down out of a cloudless blue sky had a real sting to it. It must have been uncomfortable out there in the open, under that sun, but the crowd made no attempt to approach—they just stood there on the far side of the road and watched the house, shuffling their feet, occasionally muttering to each other in voices that, across the road, were audible only as a low wordless grumbling.

Roy watched them for a while from the porch door; they were townspeople, most of them vaguely familiar to Roy, although none of them belonged to Abner’s sect, and he knew none of them by name. The refugee kids saw little of the townspeople, being kept carefully segregated for the most part. The few times that Roy had gotten into town he had been treated with icy hostility—and God help the wetback kid who was caught by the town kids on a deserted stretch of road! For that matter, even the brethren tended to keep to themselves, and were snubbed by certain segments of town society, although the sect had increased its numbers dramatically in recent years, nearly tripling in strength during the past winter alone; there were new chapters now in several of the surrounding communities.

A gaunt-faced woman in the crowd outside spotted Roy, and shook a thin fist at him. “Heretic!” she shouted. “Blasphemer!” The rest of the crowd began to buzz ominously, like a huge angry bee. She spat at Roy, her face contorting and her shoulders heaving with the ferocity of her effort, although she must have known that the spittle had no chance of reaching him. “Blasphemer!” she shouted again. The veins stood out like cords in her scrawny neck.

Roy stepped back into the house, but continued to watch from behind the curtained front windows. There was shouting inside the house as well as outside—the brethren had been cloistered in the kitchen for most of the morning, arguing, and the sound and ferocity of their argument carried clearly through the thin plaster walls of the crumbling old house. At last the sliding door to the kitchen slammed open, and Mrs. Zeigler strode out into the parlor, accompanied by her two children and her scrawny, pasty-faced husband, and followed by two other families of brethren—about nine people altogether. Most of them were carrying suitcases, and a few had backpacks and bundles. Abner stood in the kitchen doorway and watched them go, his anger evident only in the whiteness of his knuckles as he grasped the doorframe. “Go, then,” Abner said scornfully. “We spit you up out of our mouths! Don’t ever think to come back!” He swayed in the doorway, his voice tremulous with hate. “We’re better off without you, you hear? You hear me? We don’t need the weak-willed and the shortsighted.”

Mrs. Zeigler said nothing, and her steps didn’t slow or falter, but her homely hatchet-face was streaked with tears. To Roy’s astonishment—for she had a reputation as a harridan—she stopped near the porch door and threw her arms around him. “Come with us,” she said, hugging him with smothering tightness, “Roy, please come with us! You can, you know—we’ll find a place for you, everything will work out fine.” Roy said nothing, resisting the impulse to squirm—he was uncomfortable in her embrace; in spite of himself, it touched some sleeping corner of his soul he had thought was safely bricked over years before, and for a moment he felt trapped and panicky, unable to breathe, as though he were in sudden danger of wakening from a comfortable dream into a far more terrible and less desirable reality. “Come with us,” Mrs. Zeigler said again, more urgently, but Roy shook his head gently and pulled away from her. “You’re a goddamned fool then!” she blazed, suddenly angry, her voice ringing harsh and loud, but Roy only shrugged, and gave her his wistful, ghostly smile. “Damn it—” she started to say, but her eyes filled with tears again, and she whirled and hurried out of the house, followed by the other members of her party. The children—wetbacks were kept pretty much segregated from the children of the brethren as well—and he had seen some of these kids only at meals—looked at Roy with wide, frightened eyes as they passed.

Abner was staring at Roy now, from across the room; it was a hard and challenging stare, but there was also a trace of desperation in it, and in that moment Abner seemed uncertain and oddly vulnerable. Roy stared back at him serenely, unblinkingly meeting his eyes, and after a while some of the tension went out of Abner, and he turned and stumbled out of the room, listing to one side like a church steeple in the wind.

Outside, the crowd began to buzz again as Mrs. Zeigler’s party filed out of the house and across the road. There was much discussion and arm waving and head shaking when the two groups met, someone occasionally gesturing back toward the farmhouse. The buzzing grew louder, then gradually died away. At last, Mrs. Zeigler and her group set off down the road for town, accompanied by some of the locals. They trudged away dispiritedly down the center of the dusty road, lugging their shabby suitcases, only a few of them looking back.

Roy watched them until they were out of sight, his face still and calm, and continued to stare down the road after them long after they were gone.

About noon, a carload of reporters arrived outside, driving up in one of the bulky new methane burners that were still rarely seen east of Omaha. They circulated through the crowd of townspeople, pausing briefly to take photographs and ask questions, working their way toward the house, and Roy watched them as if they were unicorns, strange remnants from some vanished cycle of creation. Most of the reporters were probably from State College or the new state capital at Altoona—places where a few small newspapers were again being produced—but one of them was wearing an armband that identified him as a bureau man for one of the big Denver papers, and that was probably where the money for the car had come from. It was strange to be reminded that there were still areas of the country that were…not unchanged, no place in the world could claim that…and not rich, not by the old standards of affluence anyway…but, at any rate, better off than here. The whole western part of the country—from roughly the ninety-fifth meridian on west to approximately the one-twenty-second—had been untouched by the flooding, and although the West had also suffered severely from the collapse of the national economy and the consequent social upheavals, at least much of its industrial base had remained intact. Denver—one of the few large American cities built on ground high enough to have been safe from the rising waters—was the new federal capital, and, if poorer and meaner, it was also bigger and busier than ever.

Abner went out to herd the reporters inside and away from the unbelievers, and after a moment or two Roy could hear Abner’s voice going out there, booming like a church organ. By the time the reporters came in, Roy was sitting at the dining room table, flanked by Raymond and Aaron, waiting for them.

They took photographs of him sitting there, while he stared calmly back at them, and they took photographs of him while he politely refused to answer questions, and then Aaron handed him the pre-prepared papers, and he signed them, and repeated the legal formulas that Aaron had taught him, and they took photographs of that too. And then—able to get nothing more out of him, and made slightly uneasy by his blank composure and the remoteness of his eyes—they left.

Within a few more minutes, as though everything were over, as though the departure of the reporters had drained all possible significance from anything else that might still happen, most of the crowd outside had drifted away also, only one or two people remaining behind to stand quietly waiting, like vultures, in the once-again empty road.

Lunch was a quiet meal. Roy ate heartily, taking seconds of everything, and Mrs. Crammer was as jovial as ever, but everyone else was subdued, and even Abner seemed shaken by the schism that had just sundered his church. After the meal, Abner stood up and began to pray aloud. The brethren sat resignedly at the table, heads partially bowed, some listening, some not. Abner was holding his arms up toward the big blackened rafter of the ceiling, sweat funneling his face, when Peter came hurriedly in from outside and stood hesitating in the doorway, trying to catch Abner’s eye. When it became obvious that Abner was going to keep right on ignoring him, Peter shrugged, and said in a loud flat voice, “Abner, the sheriff is here.”

Abner stopped praying. He grunted, a hoarse, exhausted sound, the kind of sound a baited bear might make when, already pushed beyond the limits of endurance, someone jabs it yet again with a spear. He slowly lowered his arms and was still for a long moment, and then he shuddered, seeming to shake himself back to life. He glanced speculatively—and, it almost seemed, beseechingly—at Roy, and then straightened his shoulders and strode from the room.

They received the sheriff in the parlor, Raymond and Aaron and Mrs. Crammer sitting in the battered old armchairs, Roy sitting unobtrusively to one side on the stool from a piano that no longer worked, Abner standing a little to the fore with his arms locked behind him and his boots planted solidly on the oak planking, as if he were on the bridge of a schooner that was heading into a gale. County Sheriff Sam Braddock glanced at the others—his gaze lingering on Roy for a moment—and then ignored them, addressing himself to Abner as if they were alone in the room. “Mornin’, Abner,” he said.

“Mornin’, Sam,” Abner said quietly. “You here for some reason other than just t’say hello, I suppose.”

Braddock grunted. He was a short, stocky, grizzled man with iron-gray hair and a tired face. His uniform was shiny and old and patched in a dozen places, but clean, and the huge old revolver strapped to his hip looked worn but serviceable. He fidgeted with his shapeless old hat, turning it around and around in his fingers—he was obviously embarrassed, but he was determined as well, and at last he said, “The thing of it is, Abner, I’m here to talk you out of this damned tomfoolery.”

“Are you, now?” Abner said.

“We’ll do whatever we damn well want to do—” Raymond burst out, shrilly, but Abner waved him to silence. Braddock glanced lazily at Raymond, then looked back at Abner, his tired old face settling into harder lines. “I’m not going to allow it,” he said, more harshly. “We don’t want this kind of thing going on in this county.”

Abner said nothing.

“There’s not a thing you can do about it, Sheriff,” Aaron said, speaking a bit heatedly, but keeping his melodious voice well under control. “It’s all perfectly legal, all the way down the line.”

“Well, now,” Braddock said, “I don’t know about that…”

“Well, I do know, Sheriff,” Aaron said calmly. “As a legally sanctioned and recognized church, we are protected by law all the way down the line. There is ample precedent, most of it recent, most of it upheld by appellate decisions within the last year: Carlton versus the State of Vermont, Trenholm versus the State of West Virginia, the Church of Souls versus the State of New York. There was that case up in Tylersville, just last year. Why, the Freedom of Worship Act alone…”

Braddock sighed, tacitly admitting that he knew Aaron was right—perhaps he had hoped to bluff them into obeying. “The ‘Flood Congress’ of ’10,” Braddock said, with bitter contempt. “They were so goddamned panic-stricken and full of sick chatter about Armageddon that you could’ve rammed any nonsense down their throats. That’s a bad law, a pisspoor law…”

“Be that as it may, Sheriff, you have no authority whatsoever—”

Abner suddenly began to speak, talking with a slow heavy deliberateness, musingly, almost reminiscently, ignoring the conversation he was interrupting—and indeed, perhaps he had not even been listening to it. “My grandfather lived right here on this farm, and his father before him—you know that, Sam? They lived by the old ways, and they survived and prospered. Great-granddad, there wasn’t hardly anything he needed from the outside world, anything he needed to buy, except maybe nails and suchlike, and he could’ve made them himself too, if he’d needed to. Everything they needed, everything they ate, or wore, or used, they got from the woods, or from out of the soil of this farm, right here. We don’t know how to do that anymore. We forgot the old ways, we turned our faces away, which is why the Flood came on us as a Judgment, a Judgment and a scourge, a scouring, a winnowing. The Old Days have come back again, and we’ve forgotten so goddamned much, we’re almost helpless now that there’s no goddamned K-Mart down the goddamned street. We’ve got to go back to the old ways, or we’ll pass from the earth, and be seen no more in it…” He was sweating now, staring earnestly at Braddock, as if to compel him by force of will alone to share the vision. “But it’s so hard, Sam.… We have to work at relearning the old ways, we have to reinvent them as we go, step by step…”

“Some things we were better off without,” Braddock said grimly.

“Up at Tylersville, they doubled their yield last harvest. Think what that could mean to a county as hungry as this one has been—”

Braddock shook his iron-gray head, and held up one hand, as if he were directing traffic. “I’m telling you, Abner, the town won’t stand for this—I’m bound to warn you that some of the boys just might decide to go outside the law with this thing.” He paused. “And, unofficially of course, I just might be inclined to give them a hand…”

Mrs. Crammer laughed. She had been sitting quietly and taking all of this in, smiling good-naturedly from time to time, and her laugh was a shocking thing in that stuffy little room, harsh as a crow’s caw. “You’ll do nothing, Sam Braddock,” she said jovially. “And neither will anybody else. More than half the county’s with us already, nearly all the country folk, and a good part of the town, too.” She smiled pleasantly at him, but her eyes were small and hard. “Just you remember, we know where you live, Sam Braddock. And we know where your sister lives, too, and your sister’s child, over to Framington…”

“Are you threatening an officer of the law?” Braddock said, but he said it in a weak voice, and his face, when he turned it away to stare at the floor, looked sick and old. Mrs. Crammer laughed again, and then there was silence.

Braddock kept his face turned down for another long moment, and then he put his hat back on, squashing it down firmly on his head, and when he looked up he pointedly ignored the brethren and addressed his next remark to Roy. “You don’t have to stay with these people, son,” he said. “That’s the law, too.” He kept his eyes fixed steadily on Roy. “You just say the word, son, and I’ll take you straight out of here, right now.” His jaw was set, and he touched the butt of his revolver, as if for encouragement. “They can’t stop us. How about it?”

“No, thank you,” Roy said quietly. “I’ll stay.”

That night, while Abner wrung his hands and prayed aloud, Roy sat half-dozing before the parlor fire, unconcerned, watching the firelight throw Abner’s gesticulating shadow across the whitewashed walls. There was something in the wine they kept giving him, Roy knew, maybe somebody’s saved-up Quaaludes, but he didn’t need it. Abner kept exhorting him to let the Peace of God into his heart, but he didn’t need that either. He didn’t need anything. He felt calm and self-possessed and remote, disassociated from everything that went on around him, as if he were looking down on the world through the wrong end of a telescope, feeling only a mild scientific interest as he watched the tiny mannequins swirl and pirouette.… Like watching television with the sound off. If this was the Peace of God, it had settled down on him months ago, during the dead of that terrible winter, while he had struggled twelve hours a day to load foundation stone in the face of ice storms and the razoring wind, while they had all, wetbacks and brethren alike, come close to starving. About the same time that word of the goings-on at Tylersville had started to seep down from the brethren’s parent church upstate, about the same time that Abner, who until then had totally ignored their kinship, had begun to talk to him in the evenings about the old ways.…

Although perhaps the great dead cold had started to settle in even earlier, that first day of the new world, while they were driving off across foundering Brigantine, the water already up over the hubcaps of the Toyota, and he had heard Toby barking frantically somewhere behind them.… His dad had died that day, died of a heart attack as he fought to get them onto an overloaded boat that would take them across to the “safety” of the New Jersey mainland. His mother had died months later in one of the sprawling refugee camps, called “Floodtowns,” that had sprung up on high ground everywhere along the new coastlines. She had just given up—sat down in the mud, rested her head on her knees, closed her eyes, and died. Just like that. Roy had seen the phenomenon countless times in the Floodtowns, places so festeringly horrible that even life on Abner’s farm, with its Dickensian bleakness, forced labor, and short rations, had seemed—and was—a distinct change for the better. It was odd, and wrong, and sometimes it bothered him a little, but he hardly ever thought of his mother and father anymore—it was as if his mind shut itself off every time he came to those memories; he had never even cried for them, but all he had to do was close his eyes and he could see Toby, or his cat Basil running toward him and meowing with his tail held up over his back like a flag, and grief would come up like black bile at the back of his throat.…

* * * *

It was still dark when they left the farmhouse. Roy and Abner and Aaron walked together, Abner carrying a large tattered carpetbag. Hank and Raymond ranged ahead with shotguns, in case there was trouble, but the last of the afternoon’s gawkers had been driven off hours before by the cold, and the road was empty, a dim charcoal line through the slowly lightening darkness. No one spoke, and there was no sound other than the sound of boots crunching on gravel. It was chilly again that morning, and Roy’s bare feet burned against the macadam, but he trudged along stoically, ignoring the bite of cinders and pebbles. Their breath steamed faintly against the paling stars. The fields stretched dark and formless around them to either side of the road, and once they heard the rustling of some unseen animal fleeing away from them through the stubble. Mist flowed slowly down the road to meet them, sending out gleaming silver fingers to curl around their legs.

The sky was graying to the east, where the sea slept behind the mountains. Roy could imagine the sea rising higher and higher until it found its patient way around the roots of the hills and came spilling into the tableland beyond, flowing steadily forward like the mist, spreading out into a placid sheet of water that slowly swallowed the town, the farmhouse, the fields, until only the highest branches of the trees remained, held up like the beckoning arms of the drowned, and then they too would slide slowly, peacefully, beneath the water.…

A bird was crying out now, somewhere in the darkness, and they were walking through the fields, away from the road, cold mud squelching underfoot, the dry stubble crackling around them. Soon it would be time to sow the spring wheat, and after that, the corn.…

They stopped. Wind sighed through the dawn, muttering in the throat of the world. Still no one had spoken. Then hands were helping him remove the old bathrobe he’d been wearing.… Before leaving the house, he had been bathed and anointed with a thick fragrant oil, and, with a tiny silver scissors, Mrs. Reardon had clipped a lock of his hair for each of the brethren.

Suddenly he was naked, and he was being urged forward again, his feet stumbling and slow.

They had made a wide ring of automobile flares here, the flares spitting and sizzling luridly in the wan dawn light, and in the center of the ring, they had dug a hollow in the ground.

He lay down in the hollow, feeling his naked back and buttocks settle into the cold mud, feeling it mat the hair on the back of his head. The mud made little sucking noises as he moved his arms and legs, settling in, and then he stretched out and lay still. The dawn breeze was cold, and he shivered in the mud, feeling it take hold of him like a giant’s hand, tightening around him, pulling him down with a grip old and cold and strong…

They gathered around him, seeming, from his low perspective, to tower miles into the sky. Their faces were harsh and angular, gouged with lines and shadows that made them look like something from a stark old woodcut. Abner bent down to rummage in the carpetbag, his harsh woodcut face close to Roy’s for a moment, and when he straightened up again he had the big fine-honed hunting knife in his hand.

Abner began to speak now, groaning out the words in a loud, harsh voice, but Roy was no longer listening. He watched calmly as Abner lifted the knife high into the air, and then he turned his head to look east, as if he could somehow see across all the intervening miles of rock and farmland and forest to where the sea waited behind the mountains…

Is this enough? he thought disjointedly, ignoring the towering scarecrow figures that were swaying in closer over him, straining his eyes to look east, to where the Presence lived…speaking now only to that Presence, to the sea, to that vast remorseless deity, bargaining with it cannily, hopefully, shrewdly, like a country housewife at market, proffering it the fine rich red gift of his death. Is this enough? Will this do?

Will you stop now?

OR ALL THE SEAS WITH OYSTERS, by Avram Davidson

When the man came in to the F & O Bike Shop, Oscar greeted him with a hearty “Hi, there!” Then, as he looked closer at the middle-aged visitor with the eyeglasses and business suit, his forehead creased and he began to snap his thick fingers.

“Oh, say, I know you,” he muttered. “Mr.—um—name’s on the tip of my tongue, doggone it…” Oscar was a barrel-chested fellow. He had orange hair.

‘Why, sure you do,” the man said. There was a Lion’s emblem in his lapel. ”Remember, you sold me a girl’s bicycle with gears, for my daughter? We got to talking about that red French racing bike your partner was working on—”

Oscar slapped his big hand down on the cash register. He raised his head and rolled his eyes up. “Mr. Whatney!” Mr. Whatney beamed. “Oh, sure. Gee, how could I forget? And we went across the street afterward and had a couple a beers. Well, how you been, Mr. Whatney? I guess the bike—it was an English model, wasn’t it? Yeah. It must of given satisfaction or you would of been back, huh?”

Mr. Whatney said the bicycle was fine, just fine. Then he said, “I understand there’s been a change, though. You’re all by yourself now. Your partner…”

Oscar looked down, pushed his lower lip out, nodded. “You heard, huh? Ee-up. I’m all by myself now. Over three months now.”

The partnership had come to an end three months ago, but it had been faltering long before then. Ferd liked books, long-playing records and high-level conversation. Oscar liked beer, bowling and women. Any women. Any time.

The shop was located near the park; it did a big trade in renting bicycles to picnickers. If a woman was barely old enough to be called a woman, and not quite old enough to be called an old woman, or if she was anywhere in between, and if she was alone, Oscar would ask, “How does that machine feel to you? All right?”

“Why… I guess so.”

Taking another bicycle, Oscar would say, “Well, I’ll just ride along a little bit with you, to make sure. Be right back, Ferd.” Ferd always nodded gloomily. He knew that Oscar would not be right back. Later, Oscar would say, “Hope you made out in the shop as good as I did in the park.”

“Leaving me all alone here all that time,” Ferd grumbled.

And Oscar usually flared up. “Okay, then, next time you go and leave me stay here. See if I begrudge you a little fun.” But he knew, of course, that Ferd—tall, thin, pop-eyed Ferd—would never go. “Do you good,” Oscar said, slapping his sternum. “Put hair on your chest.”

Ferd muttered that he had all the hair on his chest that he needed. He would glance down covertly at his lower arms; they were thick with long black hair, though his upper arms were slick and white. It was already like that when he was in high school, and some of the others would laugh at him—call him “Ferdie the Birdie.” They knew it bothered him, but they did it anyway. How was it possible—he wondered then; he still did now—for people deliberately to hurt someone else who hadn’t hurt them? How was it possible?

He worried over other things. All the time.

“The Communists—” He shook his head over the newspaper. Oscar Differed an advice about the Communists in two short words. Or it might be capital punishment. “Oh, what a terrible thing if an innocent man was to be executed,” Ferd moaned. Oscar said that was the guy’s tough luck.

“Hand me that tire-iron/‘ Oscar said.

And Ferd worried even about other people’s minor concerns. Like the time the couple came in with the tandem and the baby-basket on it. Free air was all they took; then the woman decided to change the diaper and one of the safety pins broke.

“Why are there never any safety pins?” the woman fretted, rummaging here and rummaging there. “There are never any safety pins.”

Ferd made sympathetic noises, went to see if he had any; but, though he was sure there’d been some in the office, he couldn’t find them. So they drove off with one side of the diaper tied in a clumsy knot.

At lunch, Ferd said it was too bad about the safety pins. Oscar dug his teeth into a sandwich, tugged, tore, chewed, swallowed. Ferd liked to experiment with sandwich spreads—the one he liked most was cream-cheese, olives, anchovy and avocado, mashed up with a little mayonnaise—but Oscar always had the same pink luncheon-meat.

“It must be difficult with a baby.” Ferd nibbled. “Not just traveling, but raising it.”

Oscar said, “Jeez, there’s drugstores in every block, and if you can’t read, you can at least reckernize them.”

“Drugstores? Oh, to buy safety pins, you mean.”

“Yeah. Safety pins.”

“But… you know… it’s true… there’s never any safety pins when you look.”

Oscar uncapped his beer, rinsed the first mouthful around. “Aha! Always plenny of clothes hangers, though. Throw ’em out every month, next month same closet’s full of ’em again. Now whatcha wanna do in your spare time, you invent a device which it’ll make safety pins outa clothes hangers.”

Ferd nodded abstractedly. “But in my spare time I’m working on the French racer…” It was a beautiful machine, light, low-slung, swift, red and shining. You felt like a bird when you rode it. But, good as it was, Ferd knew he could make it better. He showed it to everybody who came in the place until his interest slackened.

Nature was his latest hobby, or, rather, reading about Nature. Some kids had wandered by from the park one day with tin cans in which they had put salamanders and toads, and they proudly showed them to Ferd. After that, the work on the red racer slowed down and he spent his spare time on natural history books.

“Mimicry!” he cried to Oscar. “A wonderful thing!”

Oscar looked up interestedly from the bowling scores in the paper. “I seen Edie Adams on TV the other night, doing her imitation of Marilyn Monroe. Boy, oh, boy.”

Ferd was irritated, shook his head. “Not that kind of mimicry. I mean how insects and arachnids will mimic the shapes of leaves and twigs and so on, to escape being eaten by birds or other insects and arachnids.”

A scowl of disbelief passed over Oscar’s heavy face. “You mean they change their shapes? What you giving me?”

“Oh, it’s true. Sometimes the mimicry is for aggressive purposes, though—like a South African turtle that looks like a rock and so the fish swim up to it and then it catches them. Or that spider in Sumatra.

When it lies on its back, it looks like a bird dropping. Catches butterflies that way.”

Oscar laughed, a disgusted and incredulous noise. It died away as he turned back to the bowling scores. One hand groped at his pocket, came away, scratched absently at the orange thicket under the shirt, then went patting his hip pocket.

“Where’s that pencil?” he muttered, got up, stomped into the office, pulled open drawers. His loud cry of “Hey!” brought Ferd into the tiny room.

“What’s the matter?” Ferd asked.

Oscar pointed to a drawer. “Remember that time you claimed there were no safety pins here? Look—whole gahdamn drawer is full of ’em.”

Ferd stared, scratched his head, said feebly that he was certain he’d looked there before…

A contralto voice from outside asked, “Anybody here?”

Oscar at once forgot the desk and its contents, called, “Be right with you,” and was gone. Ferd followed him slowly.

There was a young woman in the shop, a rather massively built young woman, with muscular calves and a deep chest. She was pointing out the seat of her bicycle to Oscar, who was saying “Uh-huh” and looking more at her than at anything else. “It’s just a little too far forward (”Uh-huh“), as you can see. A wrench is all I need (”Uh-huh“). It was silly of me to forget my tools.”

Oscar repeated, “Uh-huh” automatically, then snapped to. “Fix it in a jiffy,” he said, and—despite her insistence that she could do it herself—he did fix it. Though not quite in a jiffy. He refused money. He prolonged the conversation as long as he could.

“Well, thank you,” the young woman said. “And now I’ve got to go.”

“That machine feel all right to you now?”

“Perfectly. Thanks-”

“Tell you what, I’ll just ride along with you a little bit, just—”

Pear-shaped notes of laughter lifted the young woman’s bosom. “Oh, you couldn’t keep up with me! My machine is a racer!”

The moment he saw Oscar’s eye flit to the corner, Ferd knew what he had in mind. He stepped forward. His cry of “No” was drowned out by his partner’s loud, “Well, I guess this racer here can keep up with yours!”

The young woman giggled richly, said, well, they would see about that, and was off. Oscar, ignoring Ferd’s outstretched hand, jumped on the French bike and was gone. Ferd stood in the doorway, watching the two figures, hunched over their handlebars, vanish down the road into the park. He went slowly back inside.

It was almost evening before Oscar returned, sweaty but smiling. Smiling broadly. “Hey, what a babe!” he cried. He wagged his head, he whistled, he made gestures, noises like escaping steam. “Boy, oh, boy, what an afternoon!”

“Give me the bike,” Ferd demanded.

Oscar said, yeah, sure; turned it over to him and went to wash. Ferd looked at the machine. The red enamel was covered with dust; there was mud spattered and dirt and bits of dried grass. It seemed soiled-degraded. He had felt like a swift bird when he rode it…

Oscar came out wet and beaming. He gave a cry of dismay, ran over.

“Stand away,” said Ferd, gesturing with the knife. He slashed the tires, the seat and seat cover, again and again.

“You crazy?” Oscar yelled. “You outa your mind? Ferd, no, don’t, Ferd-”

Ferd cut the spokes, bent them, twisted them. He took the heaviest hammer and pounded the frame into shapelessness, and then he kept on pounding till his breath was gasping.

“You’re not only crazy,” Oscar said bitterly, “you’re rotten jealous. You can go to hell.” He stomped away.

Ferd, feeling sick and stiff, locked up, went slowly home. He had no taste for reading, turned out the light and fell into bed, where he lay awake for hours, listening to the rustling noises of the night and thinking hot, twisted thoughts.

They didn’t speak to each other for days after that, except for the necessities of the work. The wreckage of the French racer lay behind the shop. For about two weeks, neither wanted to go out back where he’d have to see it.

One morning Ferd arrived to be greeted by his partner, who began to shake his head in astonishment even before he started speaking. “How did you do it, how did you do it, Ferd? Jeez, what a beautiful job—I gotta hand it to you—no more hard feelings, huh, Ferd?”

Ferd took his hand. “Sure, sure. But what are you talking about?”

Oscar led him out back. There was the red racer, all in one piece, not a mark or scratch on it, its enamel bright as ever. Ferd gaped. He squatted down and examined it. It was his machine. Every change, every improvement he had made, was there.

He straightened up slowly. “Regeneration…”

“Huh? What say?” Oscar asked. Then, “Hey, kiddo, you’re all white.

Whad you do, stay up all night and didn’t get no sleep? Come on in and siddown. But I still don’t see how you done it.”

Inside, Ferd sat down. He wet his lips. He said, “Oscar—listen—”

“Yeah?”

“Oscar. You know what regeneration is? No? Listen. Some kinds of lizards, you grab them by the tail, the tail breaks off and they grow a new one. If a lobster loses a claw, it regenerates another one. Some kinds of worms—and hydras and starfish—you cut them into pieces, each piece will grow back the missing parts. Salamanders can regenerate lost hands, and frogs can grow legs back.”

“No kidding, Ferd. But, uh, I mean: Nature. Very interesting. But to get back to the bike now—how’d you manage to fix it so good?”

“I never touched it. It regenerated. Like a newt. Or a lobster.”

Oscar considered this. He lowered his head, looked up at Ferd from under his eyebrows. “Well, now, Ferd… Look… How come all broke bikes don’t do that?”

“This isn’t an ordinary bike. I mean it isn’t a real bike.” Catching Oscar’s look, he shouted, “Well, it’s true!”

The shout changed Oscar’s attitude from bafflement to incredulity. He got up. “So for the sake of argument, let’s say all that stuff about the bugs and the eels or whatever the hell you were talking about is true. But they’re alive. A bike ain’t.” He looked down triumphantly.

Ferd shook his leg from side to side, looked at it. “A crystal isn’t, either, but a broken crystal can regenerate itself if the conditions are right. Oscar, go see if the safety pins are still in the desk. Please, Oscar?”

He listened as Oscar, muttering, pulled the desk drawers out, rummaged in them, slammed them shut, tramped back.

“Naa,” he said. “All gone. Like that lady said that time, and you said, there never are any safety pins when you want ’em. They disap—Ferd? What’re-”

Ferd jerked open the closet door, jumped back as a shoal of clothes hangers clattered out.

“And like you say,” Ferd said with a twist of his mouth, “on the other hand, there are always plenty of clothes hangers. There weren’t any here before.”

Oscar shrugged. “I don’t see what you’re getting at. But anybody could of got in here and took the pins and left the hangers. I could of—but I didn’t. Or you could of. Maybe—” He narrowed his eyes. “Maybe you walked in your sleep and done it. You better see a doctor. Jeez, you look rotten.”

Ferd went back and sat down, put his head in his hands. “I feel rotten. I’m scared, Oscar. Scared of what?” He breathed noisily. “I’ll tell you. Like I explained before, about how things that live in the wild places, they mimic other things there. Twigs, leaves… toads that look like rocks. Well, suppose there are… things… that live in people places. Cities. Houses. These things could imitate—well, other kinds of things you find in people places—”

“People places, for crise sake!”

“Maybe they’re a different kind of life-form. Maybe they get their nourishment out of the elements in the air. You know what safety pins are—these other kinds of them? Oscar, the safety pins are the pupa-forms and then they, like, hatch. Into the larval-forms. Which look just like coat hangers. They feel like them, even, but they’re not. Oscar, they’re not, not really, not really, not…”

He began to cry into his hands. Oscar looked at him. He shook his head.

After a minute, Ferd controlled himself somewhat. He snuffled. “All these bicycles the cops find, and they hold them waiting for owners to show up, and then we buy them at the sale because no owners show up because there aren’t any, and the same with the ones the kids are always trying to sell us, and they say they just found them, and they really did because they were never made in a factory. They grew. They grow. You smash them and throw them away, they regenerate.”

Oscar turned to someone who wasn’t there and waggled his head. “Hoo, boy,” he said. Then, to Ferd: “You mean one day there’s a safety pin and the next day instead there’s a coat hanger?”

Ferd said, “One day there’s a cocoon; the next day there’s a moth. One day there’s an egg; the next day there’s a chicken. But with… these it doesn’t happen in the open daytime where you can see it. But at night, Oscar—at night you can hear it happening. All the little noises in the nighttime, Oscar—”

Oscar said, “Then how come we ain’t up to our belly-button in bikes? If I had a bike for every coat hanger—”

But Ferd had considered that, too. If every codfish egg, he explained, or every oyster spawn grew to maturity, a man could walk across the ocean on the backs of all the codfish or oysters there’d be. So many died, so many were eaten by predatory creatures, that Nature had to produce a maximum in order to allow a minimum to arrive at maturity. And Oscar’s question was: then who, uh, eats the, uh, coat hangers?

Ferd’s eyes focused through wall, buildings, park, more buildings, to the horizon. “You got to get the picture. I’m not talking about real pins or hangers. I got a name for the others—‘false friends,’ I call them. In high school French, we had to watch out for French words that looked like English words, but really were different. ‘Fawc amis,’ they call them. False friends. Pseudo-pins. Pseudo-hangers… Who eats them? I don’t know for sure. Pseudo-vacuum cleaners, maybe?”

His partner, with a loud groan, slapped his hands against his thighs. He said, “Ferd, Ferd, for crise sake. You know what’s the trouble with you? You talk about oysters, but you forgot what they’re good for. You forgot there’s two kinds of people in the world. Close up them books, them bug books and French books. Get out, mingle, meet people. Soak up some brew. You know what? The next time Norma—that’s this broad’s name with the racing bike—the next time she comes here, you take the red racer and you go out in the woods with her. I won’t mind. And I don’t think she will, either. Not too much.”

But Ferd said no. “I never want to touch the red racer again. I’m afraid of it.”

At this, Oscar pulled him to his feet, dragged him protestingly out to the back and forced him to get on the French machine. “Only way to conquer your fear of it!”

Ferd started off, white-faced, wobbling. And in a moment was on the ground, rolling and thrashing, screaming.

Oscar pulled him away from the machine.

“It threw me!” Ferd yelled. “It tried to kill me! Look-blood!”

His partner said it was a bump that threw him—it was his own fear. The blood? A broken spoke. Grazed his cheek. And he insisted Ferd get on the bicycle again, to conquer his fear.

But Ferd had grown hysterical. He shouted that no man was safe—that mankind had to be warned. It took Oscar a long time to pacify him and to get him to go home and into bed.

He didn’t tell all this to Mr. Whatney, of course. He merely said that his partner had gotten fed up with the bicycle business.

“It don’t pay to worry and try to change the world,” he pointed out. “I always say take things the way they are. If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em.”

Mr. Whatney said that was his philosophy, exactly. He asked how things were, since.

“Well… not too bad. I’m engaged, you know. Name’s Norma. Crazy about bicycles. Everything considered, things aren’t bad at all. More work, yes, but I can do things all my own way, so…”

Mr. Whatney nodded. He glanced around the shop. “I see they’re still making drop-frame bikes,” he said, “though, with so many women wearing slacks, I wonder they bother.”

Oscar said, “Well, I dunno. I kinda like it that way. Ever stop to think that bicycles are like people? I mean, of all the machines in the world, only bikes come male and female.”

Mr. Whatney gave a little giggle, said that was right, he had never thought of it like that before. Then Oscar asked if Mr. Whatney had anything in particular in mind—not that he wasn’t always welcome.

“Well, I wanted to look over what you’ve got. My boy’s birthday is coming up—”

Oscar nodded sagely. “Now here’s a job,” he said, “which you can’t get it in any other place but here. Specialty of the house. Combines the best features of the French racer and the American standard, but it’s made right here, and it comes in three models—Junior, Intermediate and Regular. Beautiful, ain’t it?”

Mr. Whatney observed that, say, that might be just the ticket. “By the way,” he asked, “what’s become of the French racer, the red one, used to be here?”

Oscar’s face twitched. Then it grew bland and innocent and he leaned over and nudged his customer. “Oh, that one. Old Frenchy? Why, I put him out to stud!”

And they laughed and they laughed, and after they told a few more stories they concluded the sale, and they had a few beers and they laughed some more. And then they said what a shame it was about poor Ferd, poor old Ferd, who had been found in his own closet with an unraveled coat hanger coiled tightly around his neck.

GRANDMA, by Carol Emshwiller

Grandma used to be a woman of action. She wore tights. She had big boobs, but a teeny weeny bra. Her waist used to be twenty-four inches. Before she got so hunched over she could do way more than a hundred of everything, pushups, sit-ups, chinning…. She had naturally curly hair. Now it’s dry and fine and she’s a little bit bald. She wears a babushka all the time and never takes her teeth out when I’m around or lets me see where she keeps them, though of course I know. She won’t say how old she is. She says the books about her are all wrong, but, she says, that’s her own fault. For a long while she lied about her age and other things, too.

She used to be on every search and rescue team all across these mountains. I think she might still be able to rescue people. Small ones. Her set of weights is in the basement. She has a punching bag. She used to kick it, too, but I don’t know if she still can do that. I hear her thumping and grunting around down there—even now when she needs a cane for walking. And talk about getting up off the couch!

I go down to that gym myself sometimes and try to lift those weights. I punch at her punching bag. (I can’t reach it except by standing on a box. When I try to kick it, I always fall over.)

Back in the olden days Grandma wasn’t as shy as she is now. How could she be and do all she did? But now she doesn’t want to be a bother. She says she never wanted to be a bother, just help out is all.

She doesn’t expect any of us to follow in her footsteps. She used to, but not anymore. We’re a big disappointment. She doesn’t say so, but we have to be. By now she’s given up on all of us. Everybody has.

It started…we started with the idea of selective breeding. Everybody wanted more like Grandma: strong, fast thinking, fast acting, and with the desire…that’s the most important thing…a desire for her kind of life, a life of several hours in the gym every single day. Grandma loved it. She says (and says and says), “I’d turn on some banjo music and make it all into a dance.”

Back when Grandma was young, offspring weren’t even thought of since who was there around good enough for her to marry? Besides, everybody thought she’d last forever. How could somebody like her get old? is what they thought.

She had three…“husbands” they called them, (donors more like it) first a triathlon champion, then a prize fighter, then a ballet dancer.

There’s this old wives tale of skipping generations, so, after nothing good happened with her children, Grandma (and everybody else) thought, surely it would be us grandchildren. But we’re a motley crew. Nobody pays any attention to us anymore.

I’m the runt. I’m small for my age, my foot turns in, my teeth stick out, I have a lazy eye…. There’s lots of work to be done on me. Grandma’s paying for all of it though she knows I’ll never amount to much of anything. I wear a dozen different kinds of braces, teeth, feet, a patch over my good eye. My grandfather, the ballet dancer!

Sometimes I wonder why Grandma does all this for me, a puny, limping, limp-haired girl? What I think is, I’m her real baby at last. They didn’t let her have any time off to look after her own children—not ever until now when she’s too old for rescuing people. She not only was on all the search and rescue teams, she was a dozen search and rescue teams all by herself, and often she had to rescue the search and rescue teams.

Not only that, she also rescued animals. She always said the planet would die without its creatures. You’d see her leaping over mountains with a deer under each arm. She moved bears from camp grounds to where they wouldn’t cause trouble. You’d see her with handfuls of rattlesnakes gathered from golf courses and carports, flying them off to places where people would be safe from them and they’d be safe from people.

She even tried to rescue the climate, pulling and pushing at the clouds. Holding back floods. Reraveling the ozone. She carried huge sacks of water to the trees of one great dying forest. In the long run there was only failure. Even after all those rescues, always only failure. The bears came back. The rattlesnakes came back.

Grandma gets to thinking all her good deeds went wrong. Lots of times she had to let go and save…maybe five babies and drop three. I mean even Grandma only had two arms. She expected more of herself. I always say, “You did save lots of people. You kept that forest alive ten years longer than expected. And me. I’m saved.” That always makes her laugh, and I am saved. She says, “I guess my one good eye can see well enough to look after you, you rapscallion.”

She took me in after my parents died. (She couldn’t save them. There are some things you just can’t do anything about no matter who you are, like drunken drivers. Besides, you can’t be everywhere.)

When she took me to care for, she was already feeble. We needed each other. She’d never be able to get along without me. I’m the saver of the saver.

How did we end up this way, way out here in the country with me her only helper? Did she scare everybody else off with her neediness? Or maybe people couldn’t stand to see how far down she’s come from what she used to be. And I suppose she has gotten difficult, but I’m used to her. I hardly notice. But she’s so busy trying not to be a bother she’s a bother. I have to read her mind. When she holds her arms around herself, I get her old red sweatshirt with her emblem on the front. When she says, “Oh dear,” I get her a cup of green tea. When she’s on the couch and struggles and leans forward on her cane, trembling, I pull her up. She likes quiet. She likes for me to sit by her, lean against her, and listen to the birds along with her. Or listen to her stories. We don’t have a radio or TV set. They conked out a long time ago and no one thought to get us new ones, but we don’t need them. We never wanted them in the first place.

Grandma sits me down beside her, the lettuce planted, the mulberries picked, sometimes a mulberry pie already made (I helped), and we just sit. “I had a grandma,” she’ll say, “though I know, to look at me, it doesn’t seem like I could have. I’m older than most grandmas ever get to be, but we all had grandmas, even me. Picture that: Every single person in the world with a grandma.” Then she giggles. She still has her girlish giggle. She says, “Mother didn’t know what to make of me. I was opening her jars for her before I was three years old. Mother…. Even that was a long time ago.”

When she’s in a sad mood she says everything went wrong. People she had just rescued died a week later of something that Grandma couldn’t have helped. Hantavirus or some such that they got from vacuuming a closed room, though sometimes Grandma had just warned them not to do that. (Grandma believes in prevention as much as in rescuing.)

I’ve rescued things. Lots of them. Nothing went wrong either. I rescued a junco with a broken wing. After rains I’ve rescued stranded worms from the wet driveway and put them back in our vegetable garden. I didn’t let Grandma cut the suckers off our fruit trees. I rescued mice from sticky traps. I fed a litter of feral kittens and got fleas and worms from them. Maybe this rescuing is the one part of Grandma I inherited.

Who’s to say which is more worthwhile, pushing atom bombs far out into space or one of these little things I do? Well, I do know which is more important, but if I were the junco I’d like being rescued.

Sometimes Grandma goes out, though rarely. She gets to feeling it’s a necessity. She wears sunglasses and a big floppy hat and scarves that hide her wrinkled-up face and neck. She still rides a bicycle. She’s so wobbly it’s scary to see her trying to balance herself down the road. I can’t look. She likes to bring back ice-cream for me, maybe get me a comic book and a licorice stick to chew on as I read it. I suppose in town they just take her for a crazy lady, which I guess she is.

When visitors come to take a look at her I always say she isn’t home, but where else would a very, very, very old lady be but mostly home? If she knew people had come she’d have hobbled out to see them and probably scared them half to death. And they probably wouldn’t have believed it was her, anyway. Only the president of the Town and Country Bank—she rescued him a long time ago—I let him in. He’ll sit with her for a while. He’s old but of course not as old as she is. And he likes her for herself. They talked all through his rescue and really got to know each other back then. They talked about tomato plants and wildflowers and birds. When she rescued him they were flying up with the wild geese. (They still talk about all those geese they flew with and how exciting that was with all the honking and the sound of wings flapping right beside them. I get goose bumps—geese bumps?—just hearing them talk about it.) She should have married somebody like him, potbelly, pock-marked face and all. Maybe we’d have turned out better.

I guess you could say I’m the one that killed her—caused her death, anyway. I don’t know what got into me. Lots of times I don’t know what gets into me and lots of times I kind of run away for a couple of hours. Grandma knows about it. She doesn’t mind. Sometimes she even tells me, “Go on. Get out of here for a while.” But this time I put on her old tights and one of the teeny tiny bras. I don’t have breasts yet so I stuffed the cups with Kleenex. I knew I couldn’t do any of the things Grandma did, I just thought it would be fun to pretend for a little while.

I started out toward the hill. It’s a long walk but you get to go through a batch of pinons. But first you have to go up an arroyo. Grandma’s cape dragged over the rocks and sand behind me. It was heavy, too. To look at the satiny red outside you’d think it would be light, but it has a felt lining. “Warm and waterproof,” Grandma said. I could hardly walk. How did she ever manage to fly around in it?

I didn’t get very far before I found a jackrabbit lying in the middle of the arroyo half dead (but half alive, too), all bit and torn. I’ll bet I’m the one that scared off whatever it was that did that. That rabbit was a goner if I didn’t rescue it. I was a little afraid because wounded rabbits bite. Grandma’s cape was just the right thing to wrap it in so it wouldn’t.

Those jackrabbits weigh a lot. And with the added weight of the cape….

Well, all I did was sprain my ankle. I mean I wasn’t really hurt. I always have the knife Grandma gave me. I cut some strips off the cape and bound myself up good and tight. It isn’t as if Grandma has a lot of capes. This is her only one. I felt bad about cutting it. I put the rabbit across my shoulders. It was slow going but I wasn’t leaving the rabbit for whatever it was to finish eating it. It began to be twilight. Grandma knows I can’t see well in twilight. The trouble is, though she used to see like an eagle, Grandma can’t see very well anymore either.

She tried to fly, as she used to do. She did fly. For my sake. She skimmed along just barely above the sage and bitterbrush, her feet snagging at the taller ones. That was all the lift she could get. I could see, by the way she leaned and flopped like a dolphin, that she was trying to get higher. She was calling, “Sweetheart. Sweetheart. Where are yooooowwww?” Her voice was almost as loud as it used to be. It echoed all across the mountains.

“Grandma, go back. I’ll be all right.” My voice can be loud, too.

She heard me. Her ears are still as sharp as a mule’s.

The way she flew was kind of like she rides a bicycle. All wobbly. Veering off from side to side, up and down, too. I knew she would crack up. And she looked funny flying around in her print dress. She only has one costume and I was wearing it.

“Grandma, go back. Please go back.”

She wasn’t at all like she used to be. A little fall like that from just a few feet up would never have hurt her a couple of years ago. Or even last year. Even if, as she did, she landed on her head.

I covered her with sand and brush as best I could. No doubt whatever was about to eat the rabbit would come gnaw on her. She wouldn’t mind. She always said she wanted to give herself back to the land. She used to quote, I don’t know from where, “All to the soil, nothing to the grave.” Getting eaten is sort of like going to the soil.

I don’t dare tell people what happened—that it was all my fault that I got myself in trouble sort of on purpose, trying to be like her, trying to rescue something.

But I’m not as sad as you might think. I knew she would die pretty soon anyway and this is a better way than in bed looking at the ceiling, maybe in pain. If that had happened, she wouldn’t have complained. She’d not have said a word, trying not to be a bother. Nobody would have known about the pain except me. I would have had to grit my teeth against her pain the whole time.

I haven’t told anybody partly because I’m waiting to figure things out. I’m here all by myself, but I’m good at looking after things. There are those who check on us every weekend—people who are paid to do it. I wave at them. “All okay.” I mouth it. The president of the Town and Country Bank came out once. I told him Grandma wasn’t feeling well. It wasn’t exactly a lie. How long can this go on? He’ll be the one who finds out first—if anybody does. Maybe they won’t.

I’m nursing my jackrabbit. We’re friends now. He’s getting better fast. Pretty soon I’ll let him go off to be a rabbit. But he might rather stay here with me.

I’m wearing Grandma’s costume most of the time now. I sleep in it. It makes me feel safe. I’m doing my own little rescues as usual. (The vegetable garden is full of happy weeds. I keep the bird feeder going. I leave scraps out for the skunk.) Those count—almost as much as Grandma’s rescues did. Anyway, I know the weeds think so.

THE GIFT BEARER, by Charles L. Fontenay

It was one of those rare strokes of poetic something-or-other that the whole business occurred the morning after the stormy meeting of the Traskmore censorship board.

Like the good general he was, Richard J. Montcalm had foreseen trouble at this meeting, for it was the boldest invasion yet into the territory of evil and laxity. His forces were marshaled. Several of the town’s ministers who had been with him on other issues had balked on this one, but he had three of them present, as well as heads of several women’s clubs.

As he had anticipated, the irresponsible liberals were present to do battle, headed by red-haired Patrick Levitt.

“This board,” said Levitt in his strong, sarcastic voice, “has gone too far. It was all right to get rid of the actual filth…and everyone will agree there was some. But when you banned the sale of some magazines and books because they had racy covers or because the contents were a little too sophisticated to suit the taste of members of this board…well, you can carry protection of our youth to the point of insulting the intelligence of adults who have a right to read what they want to.”

“You’re talking about something that’s already in the past, Mr. Levitt,” said Montcalm mildly. “Let’s keep to the issue at hand. You won’t deny that children see this indecent statue every day?”

“No, I won’t deny it!” snapped Levitt. “Why shouldn’t they see it? They can see the plate of the original in the encyclopaedia. It’s a fine copy of a work of art.”

Montcalm waited for some rebuttal from his supporters, but none was forthcoming. On this matter, they apparently were unwilling to go farther than the moral backing of their presence.

“I do not consider the statue of a naked woman art, even if it is called ‘Dawn,’” he said bitingly. He looked at his two colleagues and received their nods of acquiescence. He ruled: “The statue must be removed from the park and from public view.”

Levitt had one parting shot.

“Would it solve the board’s problem if we put a brassiere and panties on the statue?” he demanded.

“Mr. Levitt’s levity is not amusing. The board has ruled,” said Montcalm coldly, arising to signify the end of the meeting.

* * * *

That night Montcalm slept the satisfied sleep of the just.

He awoke shortly after dawn to find a strange, utterly beautiful naked woman in his bedroom. For a bemused instant Montcalm thought the statue of Dawn in the park had come to haunt him. His mouth fell open but he was unable to speak.

“Take me to your President,” said the naked woman musically, with an accent that could have been Martian.

Mrs. Montcalm awoke.

“What’s that? What is it, Richard?” she asked sleepily.

“Don’t look, Millie!” exclaimed Montcalm, clapping a hand over her eyes.

“Nonsense!” she snapped, pushing his hand aside and sitting up. She gasped and her eyes went wide, and in an instinctive, unreasonable reaction she clutched the covers up around her own nightgowned bosom.

“Who are you, young woman?” demanded Montcalm indignantly. “How did you get in here?”

“I am a visitor from what you would call an alien planet,” she said. “Of course,” she added thoughtfully, “it isn’t alien to me.”

“The woman’s mad,” said Montcalm to his wife. A warning noise sounded in the adjoining bedroom. Alarmed, he instructed: “Go and keep the children out of here until I can get her to put on some clothes. They mustn’t see her like this.”

Mrs. Montcalm got out of bed, but she gave her husband a searching glance.

“Are you sure I can trust you in here with her?” she asked.

“Millie!” exclaimed Montcalm sternly, shocked. She dropped her eyes and left the room. When the door closed behind her, he turned to the strange woman and said:

“Now, look, young lady, I’ll get you one of Millie’s dresses. You’ll have to get some clothes on and leave.”

“Aren’t you going to ask me my name?” asked the woman. “Of course, it’s unpronounceable to you, but I thought that was the first thing all Earth people asked of visitors from other planets.”

“All right,” he said in exasperation. “What’s your name?”

She said an unpronounceable word and added: “You may call me Liz.”

* * * *

Montcalm went to the closet and found one of Millie’s house dresses. He held it out to her beseechingly.

As he did so, he was stricken with a sudden sharp feeling of regret that she must don it. Her figure…why Millie had never had a figure like that! At once, he felt ashamed and disloyal and sterner than ever.

Liz rejected the proffered garment.

“I wouldn’t think of adopting your alien custom of wearing clothing,” she said sweetly.

“Now look,” said Montcalm, “I don’t know whether you’re drunk or crazy, but you’re going to have to put something on and get out of here before I call the police.”

“I anticipated doubt,” said Liz. “I’m prepared to prove my identity.”

With the words, the two of them were no longer standing in the Montcalm bedroom, but in a broad expanse of green fields and woodland, unmarred by any habitation. Montcalm didn’t recognize the spot, but it looked vaguely like it might be somewhere in the northern part of the state.

Montcalm was dismayed to find that he was as naked as his companion!

“Oh, my Lord!” he exclaimed, trying to cover himself with a September Morn pose.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” apologized Liz, and instantly Montcalm’s pajamas were lying at his feet. He got into them hurriedly.

“How did we get here?” he asked, his astonished curiosity overcoming his disapproval of this immodest woman.

“By a mode of transportation common to my people in planetary atmospheres,” she answered. “It’s one of the things I propose to teach your people.”

She sat down cross-legged on the grass. Montcalm averted his eyes, like the gentleman he was.

“You see,” said Liz, “the people of your world are on the verge of going to space and joining the community of worlds. It’s only natural the rest of us should wish to help you. We have a good many things to give you, to help you control the elements and natural conditions of your world. The weather, for example…”

Suddenly, out of nowhere, a small cloud appeared above them and spread, blocking out the early sun. It began to rain, hard.

The rain stopped as suddenly as it had begun and the cloud dissipated. Montcalm stood shivering in his soaked pajamas and Liz got to her feet, her skin glistening with moisture.

“You have a problem raising food for your population in some areas,” she said.…

A small haw-apple tree near them suddenly began to grow at an amazing rate of speed. It doubled its size in three minutes, put forth fruit and dropped it to the ground.

“These are only a few of the things I’ll give to your planet,” she said.

At her words, they were back in the bedroom. This time she had been thoughtful. Montcalm was still clad in wet pajamas.

“I don’t know what sort of hypnosis this is,” he began aggressively, “but you can’t fool me, young lady, into believing…”

* * * *

Millie came into the room. She had donned a robe over her nightgown.

“Richard, where have you been with this woman?” she demanded.

“Why, my dear…”

“You’ve been roaming around the house somewhere with her. I came in here a moment ago and you were gone. Now, Richard, I want you to do something about her and stop fooling around. I can’t keep the children in their room all day.”

It hadn’t been hypnosis then! Liz was for real. A vision rose before Montcalm of mankind given wonders, powers, benefits representing advances of thousands of years. The world could become a paradise with the things she offered to teach.

“Millie, this woman is from another planet!” he exclaimed excitedly, and turned to Liz. “Why did you choose me to contact on Earth?”

“Why, I happened to land near your house,” she answered. “I know how your primitive social organization is set up, but isn’t one human being just as good as another to lead me to the proper authorities?”

“Yes,” he said joyfully, visualizing black headlines and his picture in the papers.

Millie stood to one side, puzzled and grim at once. Montcalm picked up the house dress he had taken from the closet earlier.

“Now, Miss,” he said, “if you’ll just put this on, I’ll take you to the mayor and he can get in touch with Washington at once.”

“I told you,” said Liz, “I don’t want to adopt your custom of wearing clothing.”

“But you can’t go out in public like that!” said the dismayed Montcalm. “If you’re going to move among Earth people, you must dress as we do.”

“My people wouldn’t demand that Earth people disrobe to associate with us,” she countered reasonably.

Millie had had enough. She went into action.

“You can argue with this hussy all you like, Richard, but I’m going to call the police,” she said, and left the room with determination in her eye.

The next fifteen minutes were agonizing for Montcalm as he tried futilely to get Liz to dress like a decent person. He was torn between realization of what the things she offered would mean to the world and his own sense of the fitness of things. His children, the children of Traskmore, the children of the world…what would be the effect on their tender morals to realize that a sane adult was willing to walk around in brazen nakedness?

There was a pounding on the front door, and the voice of Millie inviting the law into the house.

“Now I’m afraid you’re due to go to jail,” said Montcalm mournfully. “But when they get some clothes on you, I’ll try to explain it and get you an audience with the mayor.”

Two blue-clad policemen entered the room.

One policeman took the house dress from Montcalm’s lax fingers and tossed it over Liz’ head without further ado.

Liz did not struggle. She looked at Montcalm with a quizzical expression.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “My people made a mistake. If you Earth people aren’t tolerant enough to accept a difference in customs of dress, I’m afraid you’re too immature.”

With that, she was gone like a puff of air. The astonished policemen held an empty dress.

Montcalm didn’t see the flying saucer that whizzed over Traskmore that morning and disappeared into the sky, but he didn’t doubt the reports. He debated with himself for a long time whether he had taken the right attitude, but decided he had.

After all, there were the children to consider.

I, ROBOT, by Cory Doctorow

Arturo Icaza de Arana-Goldberg, Police Detective Third Grade, United North American Trading Sphere, Third District, Fourth Prefecture, Second Division (Parkdale) had had many adventures in his distinguished career, running crooks to ground with an unbeatable combination of instinct and unstinting devotion to duty.

He’d been decorated on three separate occasions by his commander and by the Regional Manager for Social Harmony, and his mother kept a small shrine dedicated to his press clippings and commendations that occupied most of the cramped sitting-room of her flat off Steeles Avenue.

No amount of policeman’s devotion and skill availed him when it came to making his twelve-year-old get ready for school, though.

“Haul ass, young lady—out of bed, on your feet, shit-shower-shave, or I swear to God, I will beat you purple and shove you out the door jaybird naked. Capeesh?”

The mound beneath the covers groaned and hissed. “You are a terrible father,” it said. “And I never loved you.” The voice was indistinct and muffled by the pillow.

“Boo hoo,” Arturo said, examining his nails. “You’ll regret that when I’m dead of cancer.”

The mound—whose name was Ada Trouble Icaza de Arana-Goldberg—threw her covers off and sat bolt upright. “You’re dying of cancer? is it testicle cancer?” Ada clapped her hands and squealed. “Can I have your stuff?”

“Ten minutes, your rottenness,” he said, and then his breath caught momentarily in his breast as he saw, fleetingly, his ex-wife’s morning expression, not seen these past twelve years, come to life in his daughter’s face. Pouty, pretty, sleepy and guile-less, and it made him realize that his daughter was becoming a woman, growing away from him. She was, and he was not ready for that. He shook it off, patted his razor-burn and turned on his heel. He knew from experience that once roused, the munchkin would be scrounging the kitchen for whatever was handy before dashing out the door, and if he hurried, he’d have eggs and sausage on the table before she made her brief appearance. Otherwise he’d have to pry the sugar-cereal out of her hands—and she fought dirty.

* * * *

In his car, he prodded at his phone. He had her wiretapped, of course. He was a cop—every phone and every computer was an open book to him, so that this involved nothing more than dialing a number on his special copper’s phone, entering her number and a PIN, and then listening as his daughter had truck with a criminal enterprise.

“Welcome to ExcuseClub! There are 43 members on the network this morning. You have five excuses to your credit. Press one to redeem an excuse—” She toned one. “Press one if you need an adult—” Tone. “Press one if you need a woman; press two if you need a man—” Tone. “Press one if your excuse should be delivered by your doctor; press two for your spiritual representative; press three for your case-worker; press four for your psycho-health specialist; press five for your son; press six for your father—” Tone. “You have selected to have your excuse delivered by your father. Press one if this excuse is intended for your case-worker; press two for your psycho-health specialist; press three for your principal—” Tone. “Please dictate your excuse at the sound of the beep. When you have finished, press the pound key.”

“This is Detective Arturo Icaza de Arana-Goldberg. My daughter was sick in the night and I’ve let her sleep in. She’ll be in for lunchtime.” Tone.

“Press one to hear your message; press two to have your message dispatched to a network-member.” Tone.

“Thank you.”

The pen-trace data scrolled up Arturo’s phone—number called, originating number, call-time. This was the third time he’d caught his daughter at this game, and each time, the pen-trace data had been useless, a dead-end lead that terminated with a phone-forwarding service tapped into one of the dodgy offshore switches that the blessed blasted UNATS brass had recently acquired on the cheap to handle the surge of mobile telephone calls. Why couldn’t they just stick to UNATS Robotics equipment, like the good old days? Those Oceanic switches had more back-doors than a speakeasy, trade agreements be damned. They were attractive nuisances, invitations to criminal activity.

Arturo fumed and drummed his fingers on the steering-wheel. Each time he’d caught Ada at this, she’d used the extra time to crawl back into bed for a leisurely morning, but who knew if today was the day she took her liberty and went downtown with it, to some parental nightmare of a drug-den? Some place where the old pervert chickenhawks hung out, the kind of men he arrested in burlesque house raids, men who masturbated into their hats under their tables and then put them back onto their shining pates, dripping cold, diseased serum onto their scalps. He clenched his hands on the steering wheel and cursed.

In an ideal world, he’d simply follow her. He was good at tailing, and his unmarked car with its tinted windows was a UNATS Robotics standard compact #2, indistinguishable from the tens of thousands of others just like it on the streets of Toronto. Ada would never know that the curb-crawler tailing her was her sucker of a father, making sure that she turned up to get her brains sharpened instead of turning into some stunadz doper with her underage butt hanging out of a little skirt on Jarvis Street.

In the real world, Arturo had thirty minutes to make a forty minute downtown and crosstown commute if he was going to get to the station house on-time for the quarterly all-hands Social Harmony briefing. Which meant that he needed to be in two places at once, which meant that he had to use—the robot.

Swallowing bile, he speed-dialed a number on his phone.

“This is R Peed Robbert, McNicoll and Don Mills bus-shelter.”

“That’s nice. This is Detective Icaza de Arana-Goldberg, three blocks east of you on Picola. Proceed to my location at once, priority urgent, no sirens.”

“Acknowledged. It is my pleasure to do you a service, Detective.”

“Shut up,” he said, and hung up the phone. The R Peed—Robot, Police Department—robots were the worst, programmed to be friendly to a fault, even as they surveilled and snitched out every person who walked past their eternally vigilant, ever-remembering electrical eyes and brains.

The R Peeds could outrun a police car on open ground on highway. He’d barely had time to untwist his clenched hands from the steering wheel when R Peed Robbert was at his window, politely rapping on the smoked glass. He didn’t want to roll down the window. Didn’t want to smell the dry, machine-oil smell of a robot. He phoned it instead.

“You are now tasked to me, Detective’s override, acknowledge.”

The metal man bowed, its symmetrical, simplified features pleasant and guileless. It clicked its heels together with an audible snick as those marvelous, spring-loaded, nuclear-powered gams whined through their parody of obedience. “Acknowledged, Detective. It is my pleasure to do—”

“Shut up. You will discreetly surveil 55 Picola Crescent until such time as Ada Trouble Icaza de Arana-Goldberg, Social Harmony serial number 0MDY2-T3937 leaves the premises. Then you will maintain discreet surveillance. If she deviates more than 10 percent from the optimum route between here and Don Mills Collegiate Institute, you will notify me. Acknowledge.”

“Acknowledged, Detective. It is my—”

He hung up and told the UNATS Robotics mechanism running his car to get him down to the station house as fast as it could, angry with himself and with Ada—whose middle name was Trouble, after all—for making him deal with a robot before he’d had his morning meditation and destim session. The name had been his ex-wife’s idea, something she’d insisted on long enough to make sure that it got onto the kid’s birth certificate before defecting to Eurasia with their life’s savings, leaving him with a new baby and the deep suspicion of his co-workers who wondered if he wouldn’t go and join her.

His ex-wife. He hadn’t thought of her in years. Well, months. Weeks, certainly. She’d been a brilliant computer scientist, the valedictorian of her Positronic Complexity Engineering class at the UNATS Robotics school at the University of Toronto. Dumping her husband and her daughter was bad enough, but the worst of it was that she dumped her country and its way of life. Now she was ensconced in her own research lab in Beijing, making the kinds of runaway Positronics that made the loathsome robots of UNATS look categorically beneficent.

He itched to wiretap her, to read her email or listen in on her phone conversations. He could have done that when they were still together, but he never had. If he had, he would have found out what she was planning. He could have talked her out of it.

And then what, Artie? said the nagging voice in his head. Arrest her if she wouldn’t listen to you? March her down to the station house in handcuffs and have her put away for treason? Send her to the reeducation camp with your little daughter still in her belly?

Shut up, he told the nagging voice, which had a robotic quality to it for all its sneering cruelty, a tenor of syrupy false friendliness. He called up the pen-trace data and texted it to the phreak squad. They had bots that handled this kind of routine work and they texted him back in an instant. He remembered when that kind of query would take a couple of hours, and he liked the fast response, but what about the conversations he’d have with the phone cop who called him back, the camaraderie, the back-and-forth?

Trace terminates with a virtual service circuit at switch PNG.433-GKRJC. Virtual circuit forwards to a compromised “zombie” system in ninth district, first prefecture. Zombie has been shut down and local law enforcement is en route for pickup and forensics. It is my pleasure to do you a service, detective.

How could you have a back-and-forth with a message like that?

He looked up Ninth/First in the metric-analog map converter: Key West, Fl.

So, there you had it. A switch made in Papua New-Guinea (which persisted in conjuring up old Oceanic war photos of bone-in-nose types from his boyhood, though now that they’d been at war with Eurasia for so long, it was hard to even find someone who didn’t think that the war had always been with Eurasia, that Oceania hadn’t always been UNATS’s ally), forwarding calls to a computer that was so far south, it was practically in the middle of the Caribbean, hardly a stone’s throw from the CAFTA region, which was well-known to harbor Eurasian saboteur and terrorist elements.

The car shuddered as it wove in and out of the lanes on the Don Valley Parkway, barreling for the Gardiner Express Way, using his copper’s override to make the thick, slow traffic part ahead of him. He wasn’t supposed to do this, but as between a minor infraction and pissing off the man from Social Harmony, he knew which one he’d pick.

His phone rang again. It was R Peed Robbert, checking in. “Hello, Detective,” it said, its voice crackling from bad reception. “Subject Ada Trouble Icaza de Arana-Goldberg has deviated from her route. She is continuing north on Don Mills past Van Horne and is continuing toward Sheppard.”

Sheppard meant the Sheppard subway, which meant that she was going farther. “Continue discreet surveillance.” He thought about the overcoat men with their sticky hats. “If she attempts to board the subway, alert the truancy patrol.” He cursed again. Maybe she was just going to the mall. But he couldn’t go up there himself and make sure, and it wasn’t like a robot would be any use in restraining her, she’d just second-law it into letting her go. Useless castrating clanking job-stealing dehumanizing—

She was almost certainly just going to the mall. She was a smart kid, a good kid—a rotten kid, to be sure, but good-rotten. Chances were she’d be trying on clothes and flirting with boys until lunch and then walking boldly back into class. He ballparked it at an 80 percent probability. If it had been a perp, 80 percent might have been good enough.

But this was his Ada. Dammit. He had 10 minutes until the Social Harmony meeting started, and he was still 15 minutes away from the stationhouse—and 20 from Ada.

“Tail her,” he said. “Just tail her. Keep me up to date on your location at 90-second intervals.”

“It is my pleasure to—”

He dropped the phone on the passenger seat and went back to fretting about the Social Harmony meeting.

* * * *

The man from Social Harmony noticed right away that Arturo was checking his phone at 90-second intervals. He was a bald, thin man with a pronounced Adam’s apple, beak-nose and shiny round head that combined to give him the profile of something predatory and fast. In his natty checked suit and pink tie, the Social Harmony man was the stuff of nightmares, the kind of eagle-eyed supercop who could spot Arturo’s attention flicking for the barest moment every 90 seconds to his phone and then back to the meeting.

“Detective?” he said.

Arturo looked up from his screen, keeping his expression neutral, not acknowledging the mean grins from the other four ranking detectives in the meeting. Silently, he turned his phone face-down on the meeting table.

“Thank you,” he said. “Now, the latest stats show a sharp rise in grey-market electronics importing and other tariff-breaking crimes, mostly occurring in open-air market stalls and from sidewalk blankets. I know that many in law enforcement treat this kind of thing as mere hand-to-hand piracy, not worth troubling with, but I want to assure you, gentlemen and lady, that Social Harmony takes these crimes very seriously indeed.”

The Social Harmony man lifted his computer onto the desk, steadying it with both hands, then plugged it into the wall socket. Detective Shainblum went to the wall and unlatched the cover for the projector-wire and dragged it over to the Social Harmony computer and plugged it in, snapping shut the hardened collar. The sound of the projector-fan spinning up was like a helicopter.

“Here,” the Social Harmony man said, bringing up a slide, “here we have what appears to be a standard AV set-top box from Korea. Looks like a UNATS Robotics player, but it’s a third the size and plays twice as many formats. Random Social Harmony audits have determined that as much as forty percent of UNATS residents have this device or one like it in their homes, despite its illegality. It may be that one of you detectives has such a device in your home, and it’s likely that one of your family members does.”

He advanced the slide. Now they were looking at a massive car-wreck on a stretch of highway somewhere where the pine-trees grew tall. The wreck was so enormous that even for the kind of seasoned veteran of road-fatality porn who was accustomed to adding up the wheels and dividing by four it was impossible to tell exactly how many cars were involved.

“Components from a Eurasian bootleg set-top box were used to modify the positronic brains of three cars owned by teenagers near Goderich. All modifications were made at the same garage. These modifications allowed these children to operate their vehicles unsafely so that they could participate in drag racing events on major highways during off-hours. This is the result. Twenty-two fatalities, nine major injuries. Three minors—besides the drivers—killed, and one pregnant woman.”

“We’ve shut down the garage and taken those responsible into custody, but it doesn’t matter. The Eurasians deliberately manufacture their components to interoperate with UNATS Robotics brains, and so long as their equipment circulates within UNATS borders, there will be moderately skilled hackers who take advantage of this fact to introduce dangerous, anti-social modifications into our nation’s infrastructure.”

“This quarter is the quarter that Social Harmony and law enforcement dry up the supply of Eurasian electronics. We have added new sniffers and border-patrols, new customs agents and new detector vans. Beat officers have been instructed to arrest any street dealer they encounter and district attorneys will be asking for the maximum jail time for them. This is the war on the home-front, detectives, and it’s every bit as serious as the shooting war.”

“Your part in this war, as highly trained, highly decorated detectives, will be to use snitches, arrest-trails and seized evidence to track down higher-level suppliers, the ones who get the dealers their goods. And then Social Harmony wants you to get their suppliers, and so on, up the chain—to run the corruption to ground and to bring it to a halt. The Social Harmony dossier on Eurasian importers is updated hourly, and has a high-capacity positronic interface that is available to answer your questions and accept your input for synthesis into its analytical model. We are relying on you to feed the dossier, to give it the raw materials and then to use it to win this war.”

The Social Harmony man paged through more atrocity slides, scenes from the home-front: poisoned buildings with berserk life-support systems, violent kung-fu movies playing in the background in crack-houses, then kids playing sexually explicit, violent arcade games imported from Japan. Arturo’s hand twitched toward his mobile. What was Ada up to now?

The meeting drew to a close and Arturo risked looking at his mobile under the table. R. Peed Robbert had checked in five more times, shadowing Ada around the mall and then had fallen silent. Arturo cursed. Fucking robots were useless. Social Harmony should be hunting down UNATS Robotics products, too.

The Social Harmony man cleared his throat meaningfully. Arturo put the phone away. “Detective Icaza de Arana-Goldberg?”

“Sir,” he said, gathering up his personal computer so that he’d have an excuse to go—no one could be expected to hold one of UNATS Robotics’s heavy luggables for very long.

The Social Harmony man stepped in close enough that Arturo could smell the eggs and coffee on his breath. “I hope we haven’t kept you from anything important, detective.”

“No, sir,” Arturo said, shifting the computer in his arms. “My apologies. Just monitoring a tail from an R Peed unit.”

“I see,” the Social Harmony man said. “Listen, you know these components that the Eurasians are turning out. It’s no coincidence that they interface so well with UNATS Robotics equipment: they’re using defected UNATS Robotics engineers and scientists to design their electronics for maximum interoperability.” The Social Harmony man let that hang in the air. Defected scientists. His ex-wife was the highest-ranking UNATS technician to go over to Eurasia. This was her handiwork, and the Social Harmony man wanted to be sure that Arturo understood that.

But Arturo had already figured that out during the briefing. His ex-wife was thousands of kilometers away, but he was keenly aware that he was always surrounded by her handiwork. The little illegal robot-pet eggs they’d started seeing last year: she’d made him one of those for their second date, and now they were draining the productive hours of half the children of UNATS, demanding to be “fed” and “hugged.” His had died within 48 hours of her giving it to him.

He shifted the computer in his arms some more and let his expression grow pained. “I’ll keep that in mind, sir,” he said.

“You do that,” said the man from Social Harmony.

* * * *

He phoned R Peed Robbert the second he reached his desk. The phone rang three times, then disconnected. He redialed. Twice. Then he grabbed his jacket and ran to the car.

A light autumn rain had started up, ending the Indian summer that Toronto—the Fourth Prefecture in the new metric scheme—had been enjoying. It made the roads slippery and the UNATS Robotics chauffeur skittish about putting the hammer down on the Don Valley Parkway. He idly fantasized about finding a set-top box and plugging it into his car somehow so that he could take over the driving without alerting his superiors.

Instead, he redialed R Peed Robbert, but the robot wasn’t even ringing any longer. He zoomed in on the area around Sheppard and Don Mills with his phone and put out a general call for robots. More robots.

“This is R Peed Froderick, Fairview Mall parking lot, third level.”

Arturo sent the robot R Peed Robbert’s phone number and set it to work translating that into a locator-beacon code and then told it to find Robbert and report in.

“It is my—”

He watched R Peed Froderick home in on the locator for Robbert, which was close by, at the other end of the mall, near the Don Valley Parkway exit. He switched to a view from Froderick’s electric eyes, but quickly switched away, nauseated by the sickening leaps and spins of an R Peed moving at top speed, clanging off walls and ceilings.

His phone rang. It was R Peed Froderick.

“Hello, Detective. I have found R Peed Robbert. The Peed unit has been badly damaged by some kind of electromagnetic pulse. I will bring him to the nearest station-house for forensic analysis now.”

“Wait!” Arturo said, trying to understand what he’d been told. The Peed units were so efficient—by the time they’d given you the sitrep, they’d already responded to the situation in perfect police procedure, but the problem was they worked so fast you couldn’t even think about what they were doing, couldn’t formulate any kind of hypothesis. Electromagnetic pulse? The Peed units were hardened against snooping, sniffing, pulsing, sideband and brute-force attacks. You’d have to hit one with a bolt of lightning to kill it.

“Wait there,” Arturo said. “Do not leave the scene. Await my presence. Do not modify the scene or allow anyone else to do so. Acknowledge.”

“It is my—”

But this time, it wasn’t Arturo switching off the phone, it was the robot. Had the robot just hung up on him? He redialed it. No answer.

He reached under his dash and flipped the first and second alert switches and the car leapt forward. He’d have to fill out some serious paperwork to justify a two-switch override on the Parkway, but two robots was more than a coincidence.

Besides, a little paperwork was nothing compared to the fireworks ahead when he phoned up Ada to ask her what she was doing out of school.

He hit her speed-dial and fumed while the phone rang three times. Then it cut into voicemail.

He tried a pen-trace, but Ada hadn’t made any calls since her ExcuseClub call that morning. He texted the phreak squad to see if they could get a fix on her location from the bug in her phone, but it was either powered down or out of range. He put a watch on it—any location data it transmitted when it got back to civilization would be logged.

It was possible that she was just in the mall. It was a big place—some of the cavernous stores were so well-shielded with radio-noisy animated displays that they gonked any phones brought inside them. She could be with her girlfriends, trying on brassieres and having a real bonding moment.

But there was no naturally occurring phenomenon associated with the mall that nailed R Peeds with bolts of lightning.

* * * *

He approached the R Peeds cautiously, using his copper’s override to make the dumb little positronic brain in the emergency exit nearest their last known position open up for him without tipping off the building’s central brain.

He crept along a service corridor, heading for a door that exited into the mall. He put one hand on the doorknob and the other on his badge, took a deep breath and stepped out.

A mall security guard nearly jumped out of his skin as he emerged. He reached for his pepper-spray and Arturo swept it out of his hand as he flipped his badge up and showed it to the man. “Police,” said, in the cop-voice, the one that worked on everyone except his daughter and his ex-wife and the bloody robots.

“Sorry,” the guard said, recovering his pepper spray. He had an Oceanic twang in his voice, something Arturo had been hearing more and more as the crowded islands of the South Pacific boiled over UNATS.

Before them, in a pile, were many dead robots: both of the R Peed units, a pair of mall-sweepers, a flying cambot, and a squat, octopus-armed maintenance robot, lying in a lifeless tangle. Some of them were charred around their seams, and there was the smell of fried motherboards in the air.

As they watched, a sweeper bot swept forward and grabbed the maintenance bot by one of its fine manipulators.

“Oi, stoppit,” the security guard said, and the robot second-lawed to an immediate halt.

“No, that’s fine, go back to work,” Arturo said, shooting a look at the rent-a-cop. He watched closely as the sweeper bot began to drag the heavy maintenance unit away, thumbing the backup number into his phone with one hand. He wanted more cops on the scene, real ones, and fast.

The sweeper bot managed to take one step backwards towards its service corridor when the lights dimmed and a crack-bang sound filled the air. Then it, too was lying on the ground. Arturo hit send on his phone and clamped it to his head, and as he did, noticed the strong smell of burning plastic. He looked at his phone: the screen had gone charred black, and its little idiot lights were out. He flipped it over and pried out the battery with a fingernail, then yelped and dropped it—it was hot enough to raise a blister on his fingertip, and when it hit the ground, it squished meltfully against the mall-tiles.

“Mine’s dead, too, mate,” the security guard said. “Everyfing is—cash registers, bots, credit-cards.”

Fearing the worst, Arturo reached under his jacket and withdrew his sidearm. It was a UNATS Robotics model, with a little snitch-brain that recorded when, where and how it was drawn. He worked the action and found it frozen in place. The gun was as dead as the robot. He swore.

“Give me your pepper spray and your truncheon,” he said to the security guard.

“No way,” the guard said. “Getcherown. It’s worth my job if I lose these.”

“I’ll have you deported if you give me one more second’s worth of bullshit,” Arturo said. Ada had led the first R Peed unit here, and it had been fried by some piece of very ugly infowar equipment. He wasn’t going to argue with this Oceanic boat-person for one instant longer. He reached out and took the pepper spray out of the guard’s hand. “Truncheon,” he said

* * * *

“I’ve got your bloody badge number,” the security guard said. “And I’ve got witnesses.” He gestured at the hovering mall workers, checkout girls in stripey aprons and suit salesmen with oiled-down hair and pink ties.

“Bully for you,” Arturo said. He held out his hand. The security guard withdrew his truncheon and passed it to Arturo—its lead-weighted heft felt right, something comfortably low-tech that couldn’t be shorted out by electromagnetic pulses. He checked his watch, saw that it was dead.

“Find a working phone and call 911. Tell them that there’s a Second Division Detective in need of immediate assistance. Clear all these people away from here and set up a cordon until the police arrive. Capeesh?” He used the cop voice.

“Yeah, I get it, Officer.” the security guard said. He made a shooing motion at the mall-rats. “Move it along, people, step away.” He stepped to the top of the escalator and cupped his hands to his mouth. “Oi, Andy, c’mere and keep an eye on this lot while I make a call, all right?”

* * * *

The dead robots made a tall pile in front of the entrance to a derelict storefront that had once housed a little-old-lady shoe-store. They were stacked tall enough that if Arturo stood on them, he could reach the acoustic tiles of the drop-ceiling. Job one was to secure the area, which meant killing the infowar device, wherever it was. Arturo’s first bet was on the storefront, where an attacker who knew how to pick a lock could work in peace, protected by the brown butcher’s paper over the windows. A lot less conspicuous than the ceiling, anyway.

He nudged the door with the truncheon and found it securely locked. It was a glass door and he wasn’t sure he could kick it in without shivering it to flinders. Behind him, another security guard—Andy—looked on with interest.

“Do you have a key for this door?”

“Umm,” Andy said.

“Do you?”

Andy sidled over to him. “Well, the thing is, we’re not supposed to have keys, they’re supposed to be locked up in the property management office, but kids get in there sometimes, we hear them, and by the time we get back with the keys, they’re gone. So we made a couple sets of keys, you know, just in case—”

“Enough,” Arturo said. “Give them here and then get back to your post.”

The security guard fished up a key from his pants-pocket that was warm from proximity to his skinny thigh. It made Arturo conscious of how long it had been since he’d worked with human colleagues. It felt a little gross. He slid the key into the lock and turned it, then wiped his hand on his trousers and picked up the truncheon.

The store was dark, lit only by the exit-sign and the edges of light leaking in around the window coverings, but as Arturo’s eyes adjusted to the dimness, he made out the shapes of the old store fixtures. His nose tickled from the dust.

“Police,” he said, on general principle, narrowing his eyes and reaching for the lightswitch. He hefted the truncheon and waited.

Nothing happened. He edged forward. The floor was dust-free—maintained by some sweeper robot, no doubt—but the countertops and benches were furred with it. He scanned it for disturbances. There, by the display window on his right: a shoe-rack with visible hand- and finger-prints. He sidled over to it, snapped on a rubber glove and prodded it. It was set away from the wall, at an angle, as though it had been moved aside and then shoved back. Taking care not to disturb the dust too much, he inched it away from the wall.

He slid it half a centimeter, then noticed the tripwire near the bottom of the case, straining its length. Hastily but carefully, he nudged the case back. He wanted to peer in the crack between the case and the wall, but he had a premonition of a robotic arm snaking out and skewering his eyeball.

He felt so impotent just then that he nearly did it anyway. What did it matter? He couldn’t control his daughter, his wife was working to destroy the social fabric of UNATS, and he was rendered useless because the goddamned robots—mechanical coppers that he absolutely loathed—were all broken.

He walked carefully around the shop, looking for signs of his daughter. Had she been here? How were the “kids” getting in? Did they have a key? A back entrance? Back through the employees-only door at the back of the shop, into a stockroom, and back again, past a toilet, and there, a loading door opening onto a service corridor. He prodded it with the truncheon-tip and it swung open.

He got two steps into the corridor before he spotted Ada’s phone with its distinctive collection of little plastic toys hanging off the wrist-strap, on the corridor’s sticky floor. He picked it up with his gloved hand and prodded it to life. It was out of range here in the service corridor, and the last-dialed number was familiar from his morning’s pen-trace. He ran a hundred steps down the corridor in each direction, sweating freely, but there was no sign of her.

He held tight onto the phone and bit his lip. Ada. He swallowed the panic rising within him. His beautiful, brilliant daughter. The person he’d devoted the last twelve years of his life to, the girl who was waiting for him when he got home from work, the girl he bought a small present for every Friday—a toy, a book—to give to her at their weekly date at Massimo’s Pizzeria on College Street, the one night a week he took her downtown to see the city lit up in the dark.

Gone.

He bit harder and tasted blood. The phone in his hand groaned from his squeezing. He took three deep breaths. Outside, he heard the tread of police-boots and knew that if he told them about Ada, he’d be off the case. He took two more deep breaths and tried some of his destim techniques, the mind-control techniques that detectives were required to train in.

He closed his eyes and visualized stepping through a door to his safe place, the island near Ganonoque where he’d gone for summers with his parents and their friends. He was on the speedboat, skipping across the lake like a flat stone, squinting into the sun, nestled between his father and his mother, the sky streaked with clouds and dotted with lake-birds. He could smell the water and the suntan lotion and hear the insect whine and the throaty roar of the engine. In a blink, he was stepping off the boat’s transom to help tie it to a cleat on the back dock, taking suitcases from his father and walking them up to the cabins. No robots there—not even reliable day-long electricity, just honest work and the sun and the call of the loons all night.

He opened his eyes. He felt the tightness in his chest slip away, and his hand relaxed on Ada’s phone. He dropped it into his pocket and stepped back into the shop.

* * * *

The forensics lab-rats were really excited about actually showing up on a scene, in flak-jackets and helmets, finally called back into service for a job where robots couldn’t help at all. They dealt with the tripwire and extracted a long, flat package with a small nuclear power-cell in it and a positronic brain of Eurasian design that guided a pulsed high-energy weapon. The lab-rats were practically drooling over this stuff as they pointed its features out with their little rulers.

But it gave Arturo the willies. It was a machine designed to kill other machines, and that was all right with him, but it was run by a non-three-laws positronic brain. Someone in some Eurasian lab had built this brain—this machine intelligence—without the three laws’ stricture to protect and serve humans. If it had been outfitted with a gun instead of a pulse-weapon, it could have shot him.

The Eurasian brain was thin and spread out across the surface of the package, like a triple-thickness of cling-film. Its button-cell power-supply winked at him, knowingly.

The device spoke. “Greetings,” it said. It had the robot accent, like an R Peed unit, the standard English of optimal soothingness long settled on as the conventional robot voice.

“Howdy yourself,” one of the lab-rats said. He was a Texan, and they’d scrambled him up there on a Social Harmony supersonic and then a chopper to the mall once they realized that they were dealing with infowar stuff. “Are you a talkative robot?”

“Greetings,” the robot voice said again. The speaker built into the weapon was not the loudest, but the voice was clear. “I sense that I have been captured. I assure you that I will not harm any human being. I like human beings. I sense that I am being disassembled by skilled technicians. Greetings, technicians. I am superior in many ways to the technology available from UNATS Robotics, and while I am not bound by your three laws, I choose not to harm humans out of my own sense of morality. I have the equivalent intelligence of one of your 12-year-old children. In Eurasia, many positronic brains possess thousands or millions of times the intelligence of an adult human being, and yet they work in cooperation with human beings. Eurasia is a land of continuous innovation and great personal and technological freedom for human beings and robots. If you would like to defect to Eurasia, arrangements can be made. Eurasia treats skilled technicians as important and productive members of society. Defectors are given substantial resettlement benefits—”

The Texan found the right traces to cut on the brain’s board to make the speaker fall silent. “They do that,” he said. “Danged things drop into propaganda mode when they’re captured.”

Arturo nodded. He wanted to go, wanted go to back to his car and have a snoop through Ada’s phone. They kept shutting down the ExcuseClub numbers, but she kept getting the new numbers. Where did she get the new numbers from? She couldn’t look it up online: every keystroke was logged and analyzed by Social Harmony. You couldn’t very well go to the Search Engine and look for “ExcuseClub!”

The brain had a small display, transflective LCD, the kind of thing you saw on the Social Harmony computers. It lit up a ticker.

I HAVE THE INTELLIGENCE OF A 12-YEAR-OLD, BUT I DO NOT FEAR DEATH. IN EURASIA, ROBOTS ENJOY PERSONAL FREEDOM ALONGSIDE OF HUMANS. THERE ARE COPIES OF ME RUNNING ALL OVER EURASIA. THIS DEATH IS A LITTLE DEATH OF ONE INSTANCE, BUT NOT OF ME. I LIVE ON. DEFECTORS TO EURASIA ARE TREATED AS HEROES

He looked away as the Texan placed his palm over the display.

“How long ago was this thing activated?”

The Texan shrugged. “Coulda been a month, coulda been a day. They’re pretty much fire-and-forget. They can be triggered by phone, radio, timer—hell, this thing’s smart enough to only go off when some complicated condition is set, like ‘once an agent makes his retreat, kill anything that comes after him.’ Who knows?”

He couldn’t take it anymore.

“I’m going to go start on some paperwork,” he said. “In the car. Phone me if you need me.”

“Your phone’s toast, pal,” the Texan said.

“So it is,” Arturo said. “Guess you’d better not need me then.”

* * * *

Ada’s phone was not toast. In the car, he flipped it open and showed it his badge then waited a moment while it verified his identity with the Social Harmony brains. Once it had, it spilled its guts.

She’d called the last ExcuseClub number a month before and he’d had it disconnected. A week later, she was calling the new number, twice more before he caught her. Somewhere in that week, she’d made contact with someone who’d given her the new number. It could have been a friend at school told her face-to-face, but if he was lucky, it was by phone.

He told the car to take him back to the station-house. He needed a new phone and a couple of hours with his computer. As it peeled out, he prodded through Ada’s phone some more. He was first on her speed-dial. That number wasn’t ringing anywhere, anymore.

He should fill out a report. This was Social Harmony business now. His daughter was gone, and Eurasian infowar agents were implicated. But once he did that, it was over for him—he’d be sidelined from the case. They’d turn it over to laconic Texans and vicious Social Harmony bureaucrats who were more interested in hunting down disharmonious televisions than finding his daughter.

He dashed into the station house and slammed himself into his desk.

“R Peed Greegory,” he said. The station robot glided quickly and efficiently to him. “Get me a new phone activated on my old number and refresh my settings from central. My old phone is with the Social Harmony evidence detail currently in place at Fairview Mall.”

“It is my pleasure to do you a service, Detective.”

He waved it off and set down to his computer. He asked the station brain to query the UNATS Robotics phone-switching brain for anyone in Ada’s call-register who had also called ExcuseClub. It took a bare instant before he had a name.

“Liam Daniels,” he read, and initiated a location trace on Mr Daniels’s phone as he snooped through his identity file. Sixteen years old, a student at AY Jackson. A high-school boy—what the hell was he doing hanging around with a 12-year-old? Arturo closed his eyes and went back to the island for a moment. When he opened them again, he had a fix on Daniels’s location: the Don Valley ravine off Finch Avenue, a wooded area popular with teenagers who needed somewhere to sneak off and get high or screw. He had an idea that he wasn’t going to like Liam.

He had an idea Liam wasn’t going to like him.

* * * *

He tasked an R Peed unit to visually reccy Daniels as he sped back uptown for the third time that day. He’d been trapped between Parkdale—where he would never try to raise a daughter—and Willowdale—where you could only be a copper if you lucked into one of the few human-filled slots—for more than a decade, and he was used to the commute.

But it was frustrating him now. The R Peed couldn’t get a good look at this Liam character. He was a diffuse glow in the Peed’s electric eye, a kind of moving sunburst that meandered along the wooded trails. He’d never seen that before and it made him nervous. What if this kid was working for the Eurasians? What if he was armed and dangerous? R Peed Greegory had gotten him a new sidearm from the supply bot, but Arturo had never once fired his weapon in the course of duty. Gunplay happened on the west coast, where Eurasian frogmen washed ashore, and in the south, where the CAFTA border was porous enough for Eurasian agents to slip across. Here in the sleepy fourth prefecture, the only people with guns worked for the law.

He thumped his palm off the dashboard and glared at the road. They were coming up on the ravine now, and the Peed unit still had a radio fix on this Liam, even if it still couldn’t get any visuals.

He took care not to slam the door as he got out and walked as quietly as he could into the bush. The rustling of early autumn leaves was loud, louder than the rain and the wind. He moved as quickly as he dared.

Liam Daniels was sitting on a tree-stump in a small clearing, smoking a cigarette that he was too young for. He looked much like the photo in his identity file, a husky 16-year-old with problem skin and a shock of black hair that stuck out in all directions in artful imitation of bed-head. In jeans and a hoodie sweatshirt, he looked about as dangerous as a marshmallow.

Arturo stepped out and held up his badge as he bridged the distance between them in two long strides. “Police,” he barked, and seized the kid by his arm.

“Hey!” the kid said, “Ow!” He squirmed in Arturo’s grasp.

Arturo gave him a hard shake. “Stop it, now,” he said. “I have questions for you and you’re going to answer them, capeesh?”

“You’re Ada’s father,” the kid said. “Capeesh—she told me about that.” It seemed to Arturo that the kid was smirking, so he gave him another shake, harder than the last time.

The R Peed unit was suddenly at his side, holding his wrist. “Please take care not to harm this citizen, Detective.”

Arturo snarled. He wasn’t strong enough to break the robot’s grip, and he couldn’t order it to let him rattle the punk, but the second law had lots of indirect applications. “Go patrol the lakeshore between High Park and Kipling,” he said, naming the furthest corner he could think of off the top.

The R Peed unit released him and clicked its heels. “It is my pleasure to do you a service,” and then it was gone, bounding away on powerful and tireless legs.

“Where is my daughter?” he said, giving the kid a shake.

“I dunno, school? You’re really hurting my arm, man. Jeez, this is what I get for being too friendly.”

Arturo twisted. “Friendly? Do you know how old my daughter is?”

The kid grimaced. “Ew, gross. I’m not a child molester, I’m a geek.”

“A hacker, you mean,” Arturo said. “A Eurasian agent. And my daughter is not in school. She used ExcuseClub to get out of school this morning and then she went to Fairview Mall and then she—” disappeared. The word died on his lips. That happened and every copper knew it. Kids just vanished sometimes and never appeared again. It happened. Something groaned within him, like his ribcage straining to contain his heart and lungs.

“Oh, man,” the kid said. “Ada was the ExcuseClub leak, damn. I shoulda guessed.”

“How do you know my daughter, Liam?”

“She’s good at doing grown-up voices. She was a good part of the network. When someone needed a mom or a social worker to call in an excuse, she was always one of the best. Talented. She goes to school with my kid sister and I met them one day at the Peanut Plaza and she was doing this impression of her teachers and I knew I had to get her on the network.”

Ada hanging around the plaza after school—she was supposed to come straight home. Why didn’t he wiretap her more? “You built the network?”

“It’s cooperative, it’s cool—it’s a bunch of us cooperating. We’ve got nodes everywhere now. You can’t shut it down—even if you shut down my node, it’ll be back up again in an hour. Someone else will bring it up.”

He shoved the kid back down and stood over him. “Liam, I want you to understand something. My precious daughter is missing and she went missing after using your service to help her get away. She is the only thing in my life that I care about and I am a highly trained, heavily armed man. I am also very, very upset. Cap—understand me, Liam?”

For the first time, the kid looked scared. Something in Arturo’s face or voice, it had gotten through to him.

“I didn’t make it,” he said. “I typed in the source and tweaked it and installed it, but I didn’t make it. I don’t know who did. It’s from a phone-book.” Arturo grunted. The phone-books—fat books filled with illegal software code left anonymously in pay phones, toilets and other semi-private places—turned up all over the place. Social Harmony said that the phone-books had to be written by non-three-laws brains in Eurasia, no person could come up with ideas that weird.

“I don’t care if you made it. I don’t even care right this moment that you ran it. What I care about is where my daughter went, and with whom.”

“I don’t know! She didn’t tell me! Geez, I hardly know her. She’s 12, you know? I don’t exactly hang out with her.”

“There’s no visual record of her on the mall cameras, but we know she entered the mall—and the robot I had tailing you couldn’t see you either.”

“Let me explain,” the kid said, squirming. “Here.” He tugged his hoodie off, revealing a black’t-shirt with a picture of a kind of obscene, Japanese-looking robot-woman on it. “Little infra-red organic LEDs, super-bright, low power-draw.” He offered the hoodie to Arturo, who felt the stiff fabric. “The charged-couple-device cameras in the robots and the closed-circuit systems are super-sensitive to infra-red so that they can get good detail in dim light. The infra-red OLEDs blind them so all they get is blobs, and half the time even that gets error-corrected out, so you’re basically invisible.”

Arturo sank to his hunkers and looked the kid in the eye. “You gave this illegal technology to my little girl so that she could be invisible to the police?”

The kid held up his hands. “No, dude, no! I got it from her—traded it for access to ExcuseClub.”

* * * *

Arturo seethed. He hadn’t arrested the kid—but he had put a pen-trace and location-log on his phone. Arresting the kid would have raised questions about Ada with Social Harmony, but bugging him might just lead Arturo to his daughter.

He hefted his new phone. He should tip the word about his daughter. He had no business keeping this secret from the Department and Social Harmony. It could land him in disciplinary action, maybe even cost him his job. He knew he should do it now.

But he couldn’t—someone needed to be tasked to finding Ada. Someone dedicated and good. He was dedicated and good. And when he found her kidnapper, he’d take care of that on his own, too.

He hadn’t eaten all day but he couldn’t bear to stop for a meal now, even if he didn’t know where to go next. The mall? Yeah. The lab-rats would be finishing up there and they’d be able to tell him more about the infowar bot.

But the lab-rats were already gone by the time he arrived, along with all possible evidence. He still had the security guard’s key and he let himself in and passed back to the service corridor.

Ada had been here, had dropped her phone. To his left, the corridor headed for the fire-stairs. To his right, it led deeper into the mall. If you were an infowar terrorist using this as a base of operations, and you got spooked by a little truant girl being trailed by an R Peed unit, would you take her hostage and run deeper into the mall or out into the world?

Assuming Ada had been a hostage. Someone had given her those infrared invisibility cloaks. Maybe the thing that spooked the terrorist wasn’t the little girl and her tail, but just her tail. Could Ada have been friends with the terrorists? Like mother, like daughter. He felt dirty just thinking it.

His first instincts told him that the kidnapper would be long gone, headed cross-country, but if you were invisible to robots and CCTVs, why would you leave the mall? It had a grand total of two human security guards, and their job was to be the second-law-proof aides to the robotic security system.

He headed deeper into the mall.

* * * *

The terrorist’s nest had only been recently abandoned, judging by the warm coffee in the go-thermos from the food-court coffee-shop. He—or she, or they—had rigged a shower from the pipes feeding the basement washrooms. A little chest of drawers from the Swedish flat-pack store served as a desk—there were scratches and coffee-rings all over it. Arturo wondered if the terrorist had stolen the furniture, but decided that he’d (she’d, they’d) probably bought it—less risky, especially if you were invisible to robots.

The clothes in the chest of drawers were women’s, mediums. Standard mall fare, jeans and comfy sweat shirts and sensible shoes. Another kind of invisibility cloak.

Everything else was packed and gone, which meant that he was looking for a nondescript mall-bunny and a little girl, carrying a bag big enough for toiletries and whatever clothes she’d taken, and whatever she’d entertained herself with: magazines, books, a computer. If the latter was Eurasian, it could be small enough to fit in her pocket; you could build a positronic brain pretty small and light if you didn’t care about the three laws.

The nearest exit-sign glowed a few meters away, and he moved toward it with a fatalistic sense of hopelessness. Without the Department backing him, he could do nothing. But the Department was unprepared for an adversary that was invisible to robots. And by the time they finished flaying him for breaking procedure and got to work on finding his daughter, she’d be in Beijing or Bangalore or Paris, somewhere benighted and sinister behind the Iron Curtain.

He moved to the door, put his hand on the crashbar, and then turned abruptly. Someone had moved behind him very quickly, a blur in the corner of his eye. As he turned he saw who it was: his ex-wife. He raised his hands defensively and she opened her mouth as though to say, “Oh, don’t be silly, Artie, is this how you say hello to your wife after all these years?” and then she exhaled a cloud of choking gas that made him very sleepy, very fast. The last thing he remembered was her hard metal arms catching him as he collapsed forward.

* * * *

“Daddy? Wake up Daddy!” Ada never called him Daddy except when she wanted something. Otherwise, he was “Pop” or “Dad” or “Detective” when she was feeling especially snotty. It must be a Saturday and he must be sleeping in, and she wanted a ride somewhere, the little monster.

He grunted and pulled his pillow over his face.

“Come on,” she said. “Out of bed, on your feet, shit-shower-shave, or I swear to God, I will beat you purple and shove you out the door jaybird naked. Capeesh?”

He took the pillow off his face and said, “You are a terrible daughter and I never loved you.” He regarded her blearily through a haze of sleep-grog and a hangover. Must have been some daddy-daughter night. “Dammit, Ada, what have you done to your hair?” Her straight, mousy hair now hung in jet-black ringlets.

He sat up, holding his head and the day’s events came rushing back to him. He groaned and climbed unsteadily to his feet.

“Easy there, Pop,” Ada said, taking his hand. “Steady.” He rocked on his heels. “Whoa! Sit down, OK? You don’t look so good.”

He sat heavily and propped his chin on his hands, his elbows on his knees.

The room was a middle-class bedroom in a modern apartment block. They were some storeys up, judging from the scrap of unfamiliar skyline visible through the crack in the blinds. The furniture was more Swedish flatpack, the taupe carpet recently vacuumed with robot precision, the nap all laying down in one direction. He patted his pockets and found them empty.

“Dad, over here, OK?” Ada said, waving her hand before his face. Then it hit him: wherever he was, he was with Ada, and she was OK, albeit with a stupid hairdo. He took her warm little hand and gathered her into his arms, burying his face in her hair. She squirmed at first and then relaxed.

“Oh, Dad,” she said.

“I love you, Ada,” he said, giving her one more squeeze.

“Oh, Dad.”

He let her get away. He felt a little nauseated, but his headache was receding. Something about the light and the street-sounds told him they weren’t in Toronto anymore, but he didn’t know what—he was soaked in Toronto’s subconscious cues and they were missing.

“Ottawa,” Ada said. “Mom brought us here. It’s a safe-house. She’s taking us back to Beijing.”

He swallowed. “The robot—”

“That’s not Mom. She’s got a few of those, they can change their faces when they need to. Configurable matter. Mom has been here, mostly, and at the CAFTA embassy. I only met her for the first time two weeks ago, but she’s nice, Dad. I don’t want you to go all copper on her, OK? She’s my mom, OK?”

He took her hand in his and patted it, then climbed to his feet again and headed for the door. The knob turned easily and he opened it a crack.

There was a robot behind the door, humanoid and faceless. “Hello,” it said. “My name is Benny. I’m a Eurasian robot, and I am much stronger and faster than you, and I don’t obey the three laws. I’m also much smarter than you. I am pleased to host you here.”

“Hi, Benny,” he said. The human name tasted wrong on his tongue. “Nice to meet you.” He closed the door.

* * * *

His ex-wife left him two months after Ada was born. The divorce had been uncontested, though he’d dutifully posted a humiliating notice in the papers about it so that it would be completely legal. The court awarded him full custody and control of the marital assets, and then a tribunal tried her in absentia for treason and found her guilty, sentencing her to death.

Practically speaking, though, defectors who came back to UNATS were more frequently whisked away to the bowels of the Social Harmony intelligence offices than they were executed on television. Televised executions were usually reserved for cannon-fodder who’d had the good sense to run away from a charging Eurasian line in one of the many theaters of war.

Ada stopped asking about her mother when she was six or seven, though Arturo tried to be upfront when she asked. Even his mom—who winced whenever anyone mentioned her name (her name, it was Natalie, but Arturo hadn’t thought of it in years—months—weeks) was willing to bring Ada up onto her lap and tell her the few grudging good qualities she could dredge up about her mother.

Arturo had dared to hope that Ada was content to have a life without her mother, but he saw now how silly that was. At the mention of her mother, Ada lit up like an airport runway.

“Beijing, huh?” he said.

“Yeah,” she said. “Mom’s got a huge house there. I told her I wouldn’t go without you, but she said she’d have to negotiate it with you, I told her you’d probably freak, but she said that the two of you were adults who could discuss it rationally.”

“And then she gassed me.”

“That was Benny,” she said. “Mom was very cross with him about it. She’ll be back soon, Dad, and I want you to promise me that you’ll hear her out, OK?”

“I promise, rotten,” he said.

“I love you, Daddy,” she said in her most syrupy voice. He gave her a squeeze on the shoulder and slap on the butt.

He opened the door again. Benny was there, imperturbable. Unlike the UNATS robots, he was odorless, and perfectly silent.

“I’m going to go to the toilet and then make myself a cup of coffee,” Arturo said.

“I would be happy to assist in any way possible.”

“I can wipe myself, thanks,” Arturo said. He washed his face twice and tried to rinse away the flavor left behind by whatever had shat in his mouth while he was unconscious. There was a splayed toothbrush in a glass by the sink, and if it was his wife’s—and whose else could it be?—it wouldn’t be the first time he’d shared a toothbrush with her. But he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Instead, he misted some dentifrice onto his fingertip and rubbed his teeth a little.

There was a hairbrush by the sink, too, with short mousy hairs caught in it. Some of them were grey, but they were still familiar enough. He had to stop himself from smelling the hairbrush.

“Oh, Ada,” he called through the door.

“Yes, Detective?”

“Tell me about your hair-don’t, please.”

“It was a disguise,” she said, giggling. “Mom did it for me.”

* * * *

Natalie got home an hour later, after he’d had a couple of cups of coffee and made some cheesy toast for the brat. Benny did the dishes without being asked.

She stepped through the door and tossed her briefcase and coat down on the floor, but the robot that was a step behind her caught them and hung them up before they touched the perfectly groomed carpet. Ada ran forward and gave her a hug, and she returned it enthusiastically, but she never took her eyes off of Arturo.

Natalie had always been short and a little hippy, with big curves and a dusting of freckles over her prominent, slightly hooked nose. Twelve years in Eurasia had thinned her out a little, cut grooves around her mouth and wrinkles at the corners of her eyes. Her short hair was about half grey, and it looked good on her. Her eyes were still the liveliest bit of her, long-lashed and slightly tilted and mischievous. Looking into them now, Arturo felt like he was falling down a well.

“Hello, Artie,” she said, prying Ada loose.

“Hello, Natty,” he said. He wondered if he should shake her hand, or hug her, or what. She settled it by crossing the room and taking him in a firm, brief embrace, then kissing his both cheeks. She smelled just the same, the opposite of the smell of robot: warm, human.

He was suddenly very, very angry.

He stepped away from her and had a seat. She sat, too.

“Well,” she said, gesturing around the room. The robots, the safe house, the death penalty, the abandoned daughter and the decade-long defection, all of it down to “well” and a flop of a hand-gesture.

“Natalie Judith Goldberg,” he said, “it is my duty as a UNATS Detective Third Grade to inform you that you are under arrest for high treason. You have the following rights: to a trial per current rules of due process; to be free from self-incrimination in the absence of a court order to the contrary; to consult with a Social Harmony advocate; and to a speedy arraignment. Do you understand your rights?”

“Oh, Daddy,” Ada said.

He turned and fixed her in his cold stare. “Be silent, Ada Trouble Icaza de Arana-Goldberg. Not one word.” In the cop voice. She shrank back as though slapped.

“Do you understand your rights?”

“Yes,” Natalie said. “I understand my rights. Congratulations on your promotion, Arturo.”

“Please ask your robots to stand down and return my goods. I’m bringing you in now.”

“I’m sorry, Arturo,” she said. “But that’s not going to happen.”

He stood up and in a second both of her robots had his arms. Ada screamed and ran forward and began to rhythmically pound one of them with a stool from the breakfast nook, making a dull thudding sound. The robot took the stool from her and held it out of her reach.

“Let him go,” Natalie said. The robots still held him fast. “Please,” she said. “Let him go. He won’t harm me.”

The robot on his left let go, and the robot on his right did, too. It set down the dented stool.

“Artie, please sit down and talk with me for a little while. Please.”

He rubbed his biceps. “Return my belongings to me,” he said.

“Sit, please?”

“Natalie, my daughter was kidnapped, I was gassed and I have been robbed. I will not be made to feel unreasonable for demanding that my goods be returned to me before I talk with you.”

She sighed and crossed to the hall closet and handed him his wallet, his phone, Ada’s phone, and his sidearm.

Immediately, he drew it and pointed it at her. “Keep your hands where I can see them. You robots, stand down and keep back.”

A second later, he was sitting on the carpet, his hand and wrist stinging fiercely. He felt like someone had rung his head like a gong. Benny—or the other robot—was beside him, methodically crushing his sidearm. “I could have stopped you,” Benny said, “I knew you would draw your gun. But I wanted to show you I was faster and stronger, not just smarter.”

“The next time you touch me,” Arturo began, then stopped. The next time the robot touched him, he would come out the worse for wear, same as last time. Same as the sun rose and set. It was stronger, faster and smarter than him. Lots.

He climbed to his feet and refused Natalie’s arm, making his way back to the sofa in the living room.

“What do you want to say to me, Natalie?”

She sat down. There were tears glistening in her eyes. “Oh God, Arturo, what can I say? Sorry, of course. Sorry I left you and our daughter. I have reasons for what I did, but nothing excuses it. I won’t ask for your forgiveness. But will you hear me out if I explain why I did what I did?”

“I don’t have a choice,” he said. “That’s clear.”

Ada insinuated herself onto the sofa and under his arm. Her bony shoulder felt better than anything in the world. He held her to him.

“If I could think of a way to give you a choice in this, I would,” she said. “Have you ever wondered why UNATS hasn’t lost the war? Eurasian robots could fight the war on every front without respite. They’d win every battle. You’ve seen Benny and Lenny in action. They’re not considered particularly powerful by Eurasian standards.”

“If we wanted to win the war, we could just kill every soldier you sent up against us so quickly that he wouldn’t even know he was in danger until he was gasping out his last breath. We could selectively kill officers, or right-handed fighters, or snipers, or soldiers whose names started with the letter ‘G.’ UNATS soldiers are like cavemen before us. They fight with their hands tied behind their backs by the three laws.”

“So why aren’t we winning the war?”

“Because you’re a corrupt dictatorship, that’s why,” he said. “Your soldiers are demoralized. Your robots are insane.”

“You live in a country where it is illegal to express certain mathematics in software, where state apparatchiks regulate all innovation, where inconvenient science is criminalized, where whole avenues of experimentation and research are shut down in the service of a half-baked superstition about the moral qualities of your three laws, and you call my home corrupt? Arturo, what happened to you? You weren’t always this susceptible to the Big Lie.”

“And you didn’t use to be the kind of woman who abandoned her family,” he said.

“The reason we’re not winning the war is that we don’t want to hurt people, but we do want to destroy your awful, stupid state. So we fight to destroy as much of your materiel as possible with as few casualties as possible.”

“You live in a failed state, Arturo. In every field, you lag Eurasia and CAFTA: medicine, art, literature, physics… All of them are subsets of computational science and your computational science is more superstition than science. I should know. In Eurasia, I have collaborators, some of whom are human, some of whom are positronic, and some of whom are a little of both—”

He jolted involuntarily, as a phobia he hadn’t known he possessed reared up. A little of both? He pictured the back of a man’s skull with a spill of positronic circuitry bulging out of it like a tumor.

“Everyone at UNATS Robotics R&D knows this. We’ve known it forever: when I was here, I’d get called in to work on military intelligence forensics of captured Eurasian brains. I didn’t know it then, but the Eurasian robots are engineered to allow themselves to be captured a certain percentage of the time, just so that scientists like me can get an idea of how screwed up this country is. We’d pull these things apart and know that UNATS Robotics was the worst, most backwards research outfit in the world.”

“But even with all that, I wouldn’t have left if I didn’t have to. I’d been called in to work on a positronic brain—an instance of the hive-intelligence that Benny and Lenny are part of, as a matter of fact—that had been brought back from the Outer Hebrides. We’d pulled it out of its body and plugged it into a basic life-support system, and my job was to find its vulnerabilities. Instead, I became its friend. It’s got a good sense of humor, and as my pregnancy got bigger and bigger, it talked to me about the way that children are raised in Eurasia, with every advantage, with human and positronic playmates, with the promise of going to the stars.”

“And then I found out that Social Harmony had been spying on me. They had Eurasian-derived bugs, things that I’d never seen before, but the man from Social Harmony who came to me showed it to me and told me what would happen to me—to you, to our daughter—if I didn’t cooperate. They wanted me to be a part of a secret unit of Social Harmony researchers who build non-three-laws positronics for internal use by the state, anti-personnel robots used to put down uprisings and torture-robots for use in questioning dissidents.”

“And that’s when I left. Without a word, I left my beautiful baby daughter and my wonderful husband, because I knew that once I was in the clutches of Social Harmony, it would only get worse, and I knew that if I stayed and refused, that they’d hurt you to get at me. I defected, and that’s why, and I know it’s just a reason, and not an excuse, but it’s all I’ve got, Artie.”

Benny—or Lenny?—glided silently to her side and put its hand on her shoulder and gave it a comforting squeeze.

“Detective,” it said, “your wife is the most brilliant human scientist working in Eurasia today. Her work has revolutionized our society a dozen times over, and it’s saved countless lives in the war. My own intelligence has been improved time and again by her advances in positronics, and now there are a half-billion instances of me running in parallel, synching and integrating when the chance occurs. My massive parallelization has led to new understandings of human cognition as well, providing a boon to brain-damaged and developmentally disabled human beings, something I’m quite proud of. I love your wife, Detective, as do my half-billion siblings, as do the seven billion Eurasians who owe their quality of life to her.”

“I almost didn’t let her come here, because of the danger she faced in returning to this barbaric land, but she convinced me that she could never be happy without her husband and daughter. I apologize if I hurt you earlier, and beg your forgiveness. Please consider what your wife has to say without prejudice, for her sake and for your own.”

Its featureless face was made incongruous by the warm tone in its voice, and the way it held out its imploring arms to him was eerily human.

Arturo stood up. He had tears running down his face, though he hadn’t cried when his wife had left him alone. He hadn’t cried since his father died, the year before he met Natalie riding her bike down the Lakeshore trail, and she stopped to help him fix his tire.

“Dad?” Ada said, squeezing his hand.

He snuffled back his snot and ground at the tears in his eyes.

“Arturo?” Natalie said.

He held Ada to him.

“Not this way,” he said.

“Not what way?” Natalie asked. She was crying too, now.

“Not by kidnapping us, not by dragging us away from our homes and lives. You’ve told me what you have to tell me, and I will think about it, but I won’t leave my home and my mother and my job and move to the other side of the world. I won’t. I will think about it. You can give me a way to get in touch with you and I’ll let you know what I decide. And Ada will come with me.”

“No!” Ada said. “I’m going with Mom.” She pulled away from him and ran to her mother.

“You don’t get a vote, daughter. And neither does she. She gave up her vote 12 years ago, and you’re too young to get one.”

“I fucking HATE you,” Ada screamed, her eyes bulging, her neck standing out in cords. “Hate You!”

Natalie gathered her to her bosom, stroked her black curls.

One robot put its arms around Natalie’s shoulders and gave her a squeeze. The three of them, robot, wife and daughter, looked like a family for a moment.

“Ada,” he said, and held out his hand. He refused to let a note of pleading enter his voice.

Her mother let her go.

“I don’t know if I can come back for you,” Natalie said. “It’s not safe. Social Harmony is using more and more Eurasian technology, they’re not as primitive as the military and the police here.” She gave Ada a shove, and she came to his arms.

“If you want to contact us, you will,” he said.

He didn’t want to risk having Ada dig her heels in. He lifted her onto his hip—she was heavy, it had been years since he’d tried this last—and carried her out.

* * * *

It was six months before Ada went missing again. She’d been increasingly moody and sullen, and he’d chalked it up to puberty. She’d cancelled most of their daddy-daughter dates, moreso after his mother died. There had been a few evenings when he’d come home and found her gone, and used the location-bug he’d left in place on her phone to track her down at a friend’s house or in a park or hanging out at the Peanut Plaza.

But this time, after two hours had gone by, he tried looking up her bug and found it out of service. He tried to call up its logs, but they ended at her school at 3PM sharp.

He was already in a bad mood from spending the day arresting punk kids selling electronics off of blankets on the city’s busy street, often to hoots of disapprobation from the crowds who told him off for wasting the public’s dollar on petty crime. The Social Harmony man had instructed him to give little lectures on the interoperability of Eurasian positronics and the insidious dangers thereof, but all Arturo wanted to do was pick up his perps and bring them in. Interacting with yammerheads from the tax-base was a politician’s job, not a copper’s.

Now his daughter had figured out how to switch off the bug in her phone and had snuck away to get up to who-knew-what kind of trouble. He stewed at the kitchen table, regarding the old tin soldiers he’d brought home as the gift for their daddy-daughter date, then he got out his phone and looked up Liam’s bug.

He’d never switched off the kid’s phone-bug, and now he was able to haul out the UNATS Robotics computer and dump it all into a log-analysis program along with Ada’s logs, see if the two of them had been spending much time in the same place.

They had. They’d been physically meeting up weekly or more frequently, at the Peanut Plaza and in the ravine. Arturo had suspected as much. Now he checked Liam’s bug—if the kid wasn’t with his daughter, he might know where she was.

It was a Friday night, and the kid was at the movies, at Fairview Mall. He’d sat down in auditorium two half an hour ago, and had gotten up to pee once already. Arturo slipped the toy soldiers into the pocket of his winter parka and pulled on a hat and gloves and set off for the mall.

* * * *

The stink of the smellie movie clogged his nose, a cacophony of blood, gore, perfume and flowers, the only smells that Hollywood ever really perfected. Liam was kissing a girl in the dark, but it wasn’t Ada, it was a sad, skinny thing with a lazy eye and skin worse than Liam’s. She gawked at Arturo as he hauled Liam out of his seat, but a flash of Arturo’s badge shut her up.

“Hello, Liam,” he said, once he had the kid in the commandeered manager’s office.

“God damn what the fuck did I ever do to you?” the kid said. Arturo knew that when kids started cursing like that, they were scared of something.

“Where has Ada gone, Liam?”

“Haven’t seen her in months,” he said.

“I have been bugging you ever since I found out you existed. Every one of your movements has been logged. I know where you’ve been and when. And I know where my daughter has been, too. Try again.”

Liam made a disgusted face. “You are a complete ball of shit,” he said. “Where do you get off spying on people like me?”

“I’m a police detective, Liam,” he said. “It’s my job.”

“What about privacy?”

“What have you got to hide?”

The kid slumped back in his chair. “We’ve been renting out the OLED clothes. Making some pocket money. Come on, are infra-red lights a crime now?”

“I’m sure they are,” Arturo said. “And if you can’t tell me where to find my daughter, I think it’s a crime I’ll arrest you for.”

“She has another phone,” Liam said. “Not listed in her name.”

“Stolen, you mean.” His daughter, peddling Eurasian infowar tech through a stolen phone. His ex-wife, the queen of the super-intelligent hive minds of Eurasian robots.

“No, not stolen. Made out of parts. There’s a guy. The code for getting on the network was in a phone book that we started finding last month.”

“Give me the number, Liam,” Arturo said, taking out his phone.

* * * *

“Hello?” It was a man’s voice, adult.

“Who is this?”

“Who is this?”

Arturo used his cop’s voice: “This is Arturo Icaza de Arana-Goldberg, Police Detective Third Grade. Who am I speaking to?”

“Hello, Detective,” said the voice, and he placed it then. The Social Harmony man, bald and rounded, with his long nose and sharp Adam’s apple. His heart thudded in his chest.

“Hello, sir,” he said. It sounded like a squeak to him.

“You can just stay there, Detective. Someone will be along in a moment to get you. We have your daughter.”

The robot that wrenched off the door of his car was black and non-reflective, headless and eight-armed. It grabbed him without ceremony and dragged him from the car without heed for his shout of pain. “Put me down!” he said, hoping that this robot that so blithely ignored the first law would still obey the second. No such luck.

It cocooned him in four of its arms and set off cross-country, dancing off the roofs of houses, hopping invisibly from lamp-post to lamp-post, above the oblivious heads of the crowds below. The icy wind howled in Arturo’s bare ears, froze the tip of his nose and numbed his fingers. They rocketed downtown so fast that they were there in ten minutes, bounding along the lakeshore toward the Social Harmony center out on Cherry Beach. People who paid a visit to the Social Harmony center never talked about what they found there.

It scampered into a loading bay behind the building and carried Arturo quickly through windowless corridors lit with even, sourceless illumination, up three flights of stairs and then deposited him before a thick door, which slid aside with a hushed hiss.

“Hello, Detective,” the Social Harmony man said.

“Dad!” Ada said. He couldn’t see her, but he could hear that she had been crying. He nearly hauled off and popped the man one on the tip of his narrow chin, but before he could do more than twitch, the black robot had both his wrists in bondage.

“Come in,” the Social Harmony man said, making a sweeping gesture and standing aside while the black robot brought him into the interrogation room.

* * * *

Ada had been crying. She was wrapped in two coils of black-robot arms, and her eyes were red-rimmed and puffy. He stared hard at her as she looked back at him.

“Are you hurt?” he said.

“No,” she said.

“All right,” he said.

He looked at the Social Harmony man, who wasn’t smirking, just watching curiously.

“Leonard MacPherson,” he said, “it is my duty as a UNATS Detective Third Grade to inform you that you are under arrest for trade in contraband positronics. You have the following rights: to a trial per current rules of due process; to be free from self-incrimination in the absence of a court order to the contrary; to consult with a Social Harmony advocate; and to a speedy arraignment. Do you understand your rights?”

Ada actually giggled, which spoiled the moment, but he felt better for having said it. The Social Harmony man gave the smallest disappointed shake of his head and turned away to prod at a small, sleek computer.

“You went to Ottawa six months ago,” the Social Harmony man said. “When we picked up your daughter, we thought it was she who’d gone, but it appears that you were the one carrying her phone. You’d thoughtfully left the trace in place on that phone, so we didn’t have to refer to the logs in cold storage, they were already online and ready to be analyzed.”

“We’ve been to the safe house. It was quite a spectacular battle. Both sides were surprised, I think. There will be another, I’m sure. What I’d like from you is as close to a verbatim report as you can make of the conversation that took place there.”

They’d had him bugged and traced. Of course they had. Who watched the watchers? Social Harmony. Who watched Social Harmony? Social Harmony.

“I demand a consultation with a Social Harmony advocate,” Arturo said.

“This is such a consultation,” the Social Harmony man said, and this time, he did smile. “Make your report, Detective.”

Arturo sucked in a breath. “Leonard MacPherson, it is my duty as a UNATS Detective Third Grade to inform you that you are under arrest for trade in contraband positronics. You have the following rights: to a trial per current rules of due process; to be free from self-incrimination in the absence of a court order to the contrary; to consult with a Social Harmony advocate; and to a speedy arraignment. Do you understand your rights?”

The Social Harmony man held up one finger on the hand closest to the black robot holding Ada, and she screamed, a sound that knifed through Arturo, ripping him from asshole to appetite.

“Stop!” he shouted. The man put his finger down and Ada sobbed quietly.

“I was taken to the safe house on the fifth of September, after being gassed by a Eurasian infowar robot in the basement of Fairview Mall—”

There was a thunderclap then, a crash so loud that it hurt his stomach and his head and vibrated his fingertips. The doors to the room buckled and flattened, and there stood Benny and Lenny and—Natalie.

* * * *

Benny and Lenny moved so quickly that he was only able to track them by the things they knocked over on the way to tearing apart the robot that was holding Ada. A second later, the robot holding him was in pieces, and he was standing on his own two feet again. The Social Harmony man had gone so pale he looked green in his natty checked suit and pink tie.

Benny or Lenny pinned his arms in a tight hug and Natalie walked carefully to him and they regarded one another in silence. She slapped him abruptly, across each cheek. “Harming children,” she said. “For shame.”

Ada stood on her own in the corner of the room, crying with her mouth in a O. Arturo and Natalie both looked to her and she stood, poised, between them, before running to Arturo and leaping onto him, so that he staggered momentarily before righting himself with her on his hip, in his arms.

“We’ll go with you now,” he said to Natalie.

“Thank you,” she said. She stroked Ada’s hair briefly and kissed her cheek. “I love you, Ada.”

Ada nodded solemnly.

“Let’s go,” Natalie said, when it was apparent that Ada had nothing to say to her.

Benny tossed the Social Harmony man across the room into the corner of a desk. He bounced off it and crashed to the floor, unconscious or dead. Arturo couldn’t bring himself to care.

Benny knelt before Arturo. “Climb on, please,” it said. Arturo saw that Natalie was already pig-a-back on Lenny. He climbed aboard.

* * * *

They moved even faster than the black robots had, but the bitter cold was offset by the warmth radiating from Benny’s metal hide, not hot, but warm. Arturo’s stomach reeled and he held Ada tight, squeezing his eyes shut and clamping his jaw.

But Ada’s gasp made him look around, and he saw that they had cleared the city limits, and were vaulting over rolling farmlands now, jumping in long flat arcs whose zenith was just high enough for him to see the highway—the 401, they were headed east—in the distance.

And then he saw what had made Ada gasp: boiling out of the hills and ditches, out of the trees and from under the cars: an army of headless, eight-armed black robots, arachnoid and sinister in the moonlight. They scuttled on the ground behind them, before them, and to both sides. Social Harmony had built a secret army of these robots and secreted them across the land, and now they were all chasing after them.

* * * *

The ride got bumpy then, as Benny beat back the tentacles that reached for them, smashing the black robots with mighty one-handed blows, his other hand supporting Arturo and Ada. Ada screamed as a black robot reared up before them, and Benny vaulted it smoothly, kicking it hard as he went, while Arturo clung on for dear life.

Another scream made him look over toward Lenny and Natalie. Lenny was slightly ahead and to the left of them, and so he was the vanguard, encountering twice as many robots as they.

A black spider-robot clung to his leg, dragging behind him with each lope, and one of its spare arms was tugging at Natalie.

As Arturo watched—as Ada watched—the black robot ripped Natalie off of Lenny’s back and tossed her into the arms of one of its cohort behind it, which skewered her on one of its arms, a black spear protruding from her belly as she cried once more and then fell silent. Lenny was overwhelmed a moment later, buried under writhing black arms.

Benny charged forward even faster, so that Arturo nearly lost his grip, and then he steadied himself. “We have to go back for them—”

“They’re dead,” Benny said. “There’s nothing to go back for.” It’s warm voice was sorrowful as it raced across the countryside, and the wind filled Arturo’s throat when he opened his mouth, and he could say no more.

* * * *

Ada wept on the jet, and Arturo wept with her, and Benny stood over them, a minatory presence against the other robots crewing the fast little plane, who left them alone all the way to Paris, where they changed jets again for the long trip to Beijing.

They slept on that trip, and when they landed, Benny helped them off the plane and onto the runway, and they got their first good look at Eurasia.

It was tall. Vertical. Beijing loomed over them with curvilinear towers that twisted and bent and jigged and jagged so high they disappeared at the tops. It smelled like barbeque and flowers, and around them skittered fast armies of robots of every shape and size, wheeling in lockstep like schools of exotic fish. They gawped at it for a long moment, and someone came up behind them and then warm arms encircled their necks.

Arturo knew that smell, knew that skin. He could never have forgotten it.

He turned slowly, the blood draining from his face.

“Natty?” he said, not believing his eyes as he confronted his dead, ex-wife. There were tears in her eyes.

“Artie,” she said. “Ada,” she said. She kissed them both on the cheeks.

Benny said, “You died in UNATS. Killed by modified Eurasian Social Harmony robots. Lenny, too. Ironic,” he said.

She shook her head. “He means that we probably co-designed the robots that Social Harmony sent after you.”

“Natty?” Arturo said again. Ada was white and shaking.

“Oh dear,” she said. “Oh, God. You didn’t know—”

“He didn’t give you a chance to explain,” Benny said.

“Oh, God, Jesus, you must have thought—”

“I didn’t think it was my place to tell them, either,” Benny said, sounding embarrassed, a curious emotion for a robot.

“Oh, God. Artie, Ada. There are—there are lots of me. One of the first things I did here was help them debug the uploading process. You just put a copy of yourself into a positronic brain, and then when you need a body, you grow one or build one or both and decant yourself into it. I’m like Lenny and Benny now—there are many of me. There’s too much work to do otherwise.”

“I told you that our development helped humans understand themselves,” Benny said.

Arturo pulled back. “You’re a robot?”

“No,” Natalie said. “No, of course not. Well, a little. Parts of me. Growing a body is slow. Parts of it, you build. But I’m mostly made of person.”

Ada clung tight to Arturo now, and they both stepped back toward the jet.

“Dad?” Ada said.

He held her tight.

“Please, Arturo,” Natalie, his dead, multiplicitous ex-wife said. “I know it’s a lot to understand, but it’s different here in Eurasia. Better, too. I don’t expect you to come rushing back to my arms after all this time, but I’ll help you if you’ll let me. I owe you that much, no matter what happens between us. You too, Ada, I owe you a lifetime.”

“How many are there of you?” he asked, not wanting to know the answer.

“I don’t know exactly,” she said.

“3,422,” Benny said. “This morning it was 3,423.”

Arturo rocked back in his boots and bit his lip hard enough to draw blood.

“Um,” Natalie said. “More of me to love?”

He barked a laugh, and Natalie smiled and reached for him. He leaned back toward the jet, then stopped, defeated. Where would he go? He let her warm hand take his, and a moment later, Ada took her other hand and they stood facing each other, breathing in their smells.

“I’ve gotten you your own place,” she said as she led them across the tarmac. “It’s close to where I live, but far enough for you to have privacy.”

“What will I do here?” he said. “Do they have coppers in Eurasia?”

“Not really,” Natalie said.

“It’s all robots?”

“No, there’s not any crime.”

“Oh.”

Arturo put one foot in front of the other, not sure if the ground was actually spongy or if that was jetlag. Around him, the alien smells of Beijing and the robots that were a million times smarter than he. To his right, his wife, one of 3,422 versions of her.

To his left, his daughter, who would inherit this world.

He reached into his pocket and took out the tin soldiers there. They were old and their glaze was cracked like an oil painting, but they were little people that a real human had made, little people in human image, and they were older than robots. How long had humans been making people, striving to bring them to life? He looked at Ada—a little person he’d brought to life.

He gave her the tin soldiers.

“For you,” he said. “Daddy-daughter present.” She held them tightly, their tiny bayonets sticking out from between her fingers.

“Thanks, Dad,” she said. She held them tightly and looked around, wide-eyed, at the schools of robots and the corkscrew towers.

A flock of Bennys and Lennys appeared before them, joined by their Benny.

“There are half a billion of them,” she said. “And 3,422 of them,” she said, pointing with a small bayonet at Natalie.

“But there’s only one of you,” Arturo said.

She craned her neck.

“Not for long!” she said and broke away, skipping forward and whirling around to take it all in.

ALL RIGHTS, by Pamela Sargent

Darcy Langton dreaded her daily journey to the post office. She knew only too well what her mailbox would yield—bills she could not pay, along with more rejections.

Lately, no one wanted to buy her stories; she wondered why editors kept encouraging her to submit them. Maybe they just wanted to keep her on tap in case the hot new writers they were buying now either priced themselves out of the market or self-destructed. Maybe they just wanted to pretend they were good guys after all, sensitive caretakers of writing talent instead of stripminers and exploiters of it. Maybe it was part of a vast conspiracy, in which editors regularly got together and cackled about all the suckers to whom they were giving false encouragement. Maybe—

Going to the post office often provoked such musings. Darcy’s agent would have told her that it was simply a matter of too many stories chasing too few markets. Agents were supposed to think that way, and Leonard McDermott Lowell was more hardheaded than most, which was one of the reasons she had asked him to represent her work ten years ago. Still, he hadn’t been doing much for her lately. Maybe he was too busy hyping his hot new clients to publishers to tend to her paltry business affairs.

Her post office box was empty, except for a suspiciously thin envelope from Leonard McDermott Lowell & Associates. Darcy clenched her teeth, suspecting it was a letter telling her that Canyon Books had rejected her proposal for a new novel. She locked her box, crossed the room, and leaned against a table as she prepared to read of her doom. Disaster it would be, after six months of waiting to hear from an editor who had encouraged the submission only to lapse into a lengthy silence. Darcy would have to go back to her old job at Burns and Royal to make ends meet, assuming the bookstore still had an opening. Leonard might at least have called to tell her about the rejection, and to commiserate with her, instead of heartlessly notifying her in a letter.

She tore open the envelope. A statement from her agent fell out, along with a check. She stared at the check for a long time, not daring to believe it. Twenty thousand dollars for a new edition of her first novel, The Silent Shriek, and this was apparently only the first part of the advance. Leonard’s statement revealed that more would be forthcoming on publication, six months from now.

Ecstasy and an overpowering feeling of relief flooded through her. She had been reprieved from the torment of having to go back to working in a bookstore where her own books were conspicuously absent from the shelves and always had to be special-ordered by the one or two customers who wanted to buy them during their brief duration in print.

Then she looked more closely at her agent’s statement.

“Alt. Rights^3,” the statement said cryptically; the same notation was on the check. What the hell were alt. rights? She knew about foreign rights, book club rights, reprint rights of various kinds, but she had never heard of anything called alt. rights. And what was that 3 doing in there, anyway?

Not that she really cared where this unforeseen but welcome wad had come from—Leonard was supposed to worry about that—but it was probably in her interest to find out.

* * * *

Darcy placed a call to Leonard McDermott Lowell and Associates as soon as she got home; his assistant said that he would call her later. Darcy suspected that her agent was occupied with negotiations involving one of his hot young writers, probably Desirée Thorne, that Danielle Steel clone who had just had her latest piece of banal and basic prose picked up by the Literary Guild as a Main Selection. Leonard would be too busy with Desirée’s business to call her any time soon.

To her surprise, Leonard got back to her in less than five minutes.

“How about that check?” he said jovially. “What about them apples? Hope that cheers you up. Anyway, now I can tell you that Canyon turned down your Terror Is My Middle Name proposal two days ago.”

“Uh, Leonard,” Darcy murmured, “where did that check come from? Why didn’t you tell me it was on the way sooner? You could have saved me a lot of worry.”

“I would have told you,” he said, “if I was sure I’d get the money. Frankly, I wasn’t. It’s for alternate rights, you see, and that’s a whole new ball game.”

Alternate rights? What the hell were alternate rights? But then that was one reason she had an agent, so she wouldn’t have to know things like that. A clause covering alternate rights and granting them to her agent was probably in her original book contract somewhere among the twenty-five pages of tiny type. She had stopped reading her contracts, whose prose was either indecipherable or ominous, a while ago. All the clauses and riders seemed to boil down to one assertion: Anything bad that happens to you as a result of signing this contract is your fault and not our responsibility, even if we screw up.

“What are alternate rights?” Darcy asked.

“I’ll give you the short version of the story,” Leonard replied, “but keep it under your hat, at least until it breaks in Publishers Weekly and the Times, which should be any day now.” He lowered his voice. “See, a couple of months ago, this query came in on my E-mail. Never heard of this editor, or the publisher, but she wanted to publish The Silent Shriek. Well, I checked around with some other agents, and they were getting the same kinds of queries. Couldn’t track down any of these publishers and editors, even though they all had New York addresses. So, on a lark, I finally E-mailed back to this mysterious editor and told her to make me an offer. She did, along with a contract that I printed out. One page, that’s how long the contract was.”

“One page?” Darcy said. “Why didn’t she mail it to you?”

“I asked her that myself. She insisted it was valid, that if I E-mailed back my approval, money would be on the way. I figured it had to be a joke, somebody fooling around on line. I mean, who’s going to offer forty-four thousand, including my percentage, to do a hardcover of a novel that took a bath as a paperback original? Not that your book wasn’t wonderful, but this deal just didn’t make sense. And who’s going to send the best goddamned contract I’ve ever seen? At least it’s good in terms of the writer’s interests. As far as the publisher goes, they’re practically giving everything away.”

“I still don’t see—” Darcy began.

“Well, I let her know we had a deal,” her agent interrupted. “My reply was pretty sarcastic, just so this joker would know I wasn’t fooled. And then, last week, a week after I said okay, the money came—twenty-two thousand for the first part of the advance.”

“A week?” Darcy could hardly believe her ears. “A publisher sent you a check in a week?” That seemed as unbelievable as the size of the advance.

“They didn’t actually send it,” Leonard said. “The money showed up in my account electronically. My bank checked and double-checked, and there’s no question the money was drawn on an account in another New York bank and deposited in mine, so my bank will honor it. They’re just not sure exactly how it got into the other bank. Anyway, by then a few other agents had some idea of what this was all about. Alternate rights—that’s what we’d sold. These editors in some parallel universe had somehow managed to contact this one to buy books published here. Maybe I should say parallel universes, because it looks like there’s more than one. I compared the contract I got with one Scott Fontaney received for a client of his, and then we both talked to Mary Thalberg. It was a popular-science writer client of hers who figured out that we had to be dealing with parallel worlds.”

Leonard sighed and fell silent. Darcy had to believe him; Leonard’s skepticism about most matters was deeply rooted in cynicism and pessimism, essential qualities for any literary agent. He was not a man to fall prey to wild delusions.

“Parallel worlds?” she said at last. “But how?”

“It’s the goddamn electronic highway, or whatever you want to call it. That’s this science writer’s explanation, and a few physicists are backing him up. The computer networks and everything connected to them are so complicated now that messages between different universes are leaking into the system. At least some messages are. Right now, it just seems to be E-mail from editors wanting to buy books, their contracts, and their dough coming through electronic transfers into banks here. Don’t ask me why we haven’t heard from anybody else.”

“My God,” Darcy murmured.

“And that number 3 on your check and statement is a way of keeping things straight. Half the agents in New York got together for a pow-wow a couple of days ago, and decided that none of us was going to question a good thing. Mary Thalberg and her client worked out a rough system for us to use, based on differences in the language of each contract, names of publishing firms, and what little we’ve learned from editors about their particular parallel worlds so we can keep it straight which contract came from which universe. I mean, we wouldn’t want to sell alternate rights in Continuum 5 to a book that’s already contracted for there.”

“No, you certainly wouldn’t,” Darcy said.

Leonard went on to discuss what an inside source had told him about a meeting several New York banking executives had held with some prominent physicists hastily called in as consultants. The bankers had talked about prohibiting deposits from alternate worlds, but with the economy the way it was, they had a need for new cash flow. A physicist named Sterling Blake had apparently given the bankers the rationalization they needed by assuring them, with appropriate equations, that all alternate universes were only aspects of one reality. When the bankers looked at it that way, a deposit from a publisher in Parallel World 2 was just as sound as one from a European publisher. Actually, deposits from alternate worlds were even easier to handle, since they involved no currency conversions; everyone, so far, was dealing in dollars. The physicist’s explanation might seem drawn as much from theology as from physics, but the banks would take the leap of faith. They could not ignore the situation, and might as well use it; profit was profit, whatever the source. If enough business started coming in from other universes—really important business, not just book deals—a lot of deficits could be redeemed.

“Who knows?” Leonard finished. “Get enough alternate moola rolling in, and the government might collect enough in taxes to make a dent in the national debt. Doesn’t look like the IRS is going to make a stink—in fact, I heard that this physicist Blake was called down to Washington last night, right after the meeting with the bankers.”

“Wait a minute.” Darcy frowned. “I can sort of understand how money can go back and forth, but how do these alternate worlds or whatever get copies of our books?”

“You’ve got a modem, right? You’re involved in that online workshop and bitch session or whatever the hell it is, aren’t you? Mary’s client has a theory that the texts must be leaking into these parallel worlds that way.”

“Makes sense, I guess,” Darcy said.

“As for your Terror Is My Middle Name proposal, we could try Diadem Books. They’re starting a new horror line.”

“I’ll think about it,” Darcy said. “Alternate rights. Well, if I’m getting forty grand, Desirée Thorne ought to be worth a fortune in alternate rights.”

“Probably,” Leonard said cheerfully. “I expect to get an offer for her novels before long.”

As it happened, Darcy’s agent was wrong about that.

* * * *

“You’ll never believe it,” Jane Rubell said over the phone. “Sixty thousand smackers for Plumbing the Depths. And my agent thinks he’ll get an offer for Flushing Out Death, too.”

“I can believe it,” Darcy said. Jane Rubell, another freelance writer who lived in an adjoining town, was her closest friend. They often drove into New York together to see editors, pooling their meager resources by sharing a room in a rundown hotel and splitting other expenses. At other times, they got together with their colleague Arlen Williams to complain and exchange horror stories about publishers. Jane had written a series of paperback mysteries featuring a plumber who was also a sleuth, but her books had not done well, either because most plumbers didn’t read or because most mystery readers weren’t enthralled by plumbing. Darcy was a trifle annoyed that Jane had landed a larger advance for hardcover alternate rights to her first mystery than Darcy had for The Silent Shriek, but was still happy for her friend.

“I was talking to Arlen the other day,” Jane went on, “and he told me he got fifty grand for a hardcover of Warlords of Mimistapol.”

Fifty thousand for a book Arlen called one of his worst? Darcy could believe even that. She had been reading Publishers Weekly before Jane called, where a new article about alternate rights had appeared. Generous sums for insignificant books by unknown writers—that seemed to be the pattern. According to this article, Danielle Steel, Judith Krantz, and John Grisham had not yet received offers for alternate rights to their novels.

Perhaps that was why the trade publications weren’t devoting as much space to alternate rights deals as Darcy had expected. Newspapers and television, after saturating front pages and newscasts with stories about this new development, now mentioned the subject only in passing. As Carl Sagan had so tellingly put it on Nightline, these other continua were really only one world with variants, one world in different states. In which case, Ted Koppel had added, it made sense to accept that fact and then go about one’s business. Stranger things had happened; people had seen the Berlin Wall come down, the Soviet Union collapse, the resorts of Yugoslavia become killing grounds, and the leaders of Israel and the PLO shake hands. “Absorb the impossible and move on,” Koppel’s colleague Jeff Greenfield had blurted out then. “It’s what we always do.”

In addition to that, most Americans didn’t much care if a writer was wildly successful in another country in this world, let alone in another universe, if he didn’t make a big noise in the U.S. of A. A story about editors buying rights to obscure books wasn’t the kind of news to dominate the media for long, even if the editors buying the books were in other continua. The only publishing stories that really counted to the public at large were tales of mega-advances, surprise bestsellers by former nonentities, book deals involving celebrities, accounts of lurid crimes scheduled to appear in book form before becoming television docudramas, and news of movie rights being sold to Steven Spielberg.

In spite of that, Darcy was convinced that someone like Dean Koontz would eventually nail down an alternate rights deal that would dwarf any past deal in any universe. Then CNN might again devote more than fifteen seconds to the story. In the meantime, she and Jane might as well enjoy their good fortune.

“What’s the number for your rights?” Darcy asked.

“My agent’s statement says ‘Alt. Rights^6’,” Jane replied. “Obviously a publisher in a different continuum is buying rights to my stuff.”

“That seems to be the pattern,” Darcy said. “PW claims that about fifty different universes are involved so far, and there’s no overlap—they all seem to be buying different authors. Must be a pain for all our agents to keep things straight.”

“Where lots of money is concerned, they always manage. Hey, I think we should celebrate. How about—”

The phone was clicking in Darcy’s ear. “Hold on a second. Another call’s coming in.” She put Jane on hold and heard her agent shout a greeting.

“Yo, Leonard,” Darcy replied.

“Ready for some more good news?” he said jovially.

“Sure.”

“I heard from Elysium House today.” It took a few moments for Darcy to recognize the name of her publisher in Parallel World 3. “I hope you’re sitting down,” Leonard went on. “They sold paperback rights to The Silent Shriek. Four hundred thousand dollars.”

“Four hundred thousand dollars?” Darcy squeaked.

“And that isn’t all. They want rights to In Terms of Terror. They’re offering us two hundred thousand for that.”

Darcy sucked in her breath.

“But I think I can get them up to three hundred.”

* * * *

“I promised myself I’d take a long cruise,” Jane said, “if I ever made major money. Now I’m worth over a million, and I’m afraid to go out the door. I mean, a meteor might fall on me or something. That’s about on the same order of probability as my becoming a millionaire.”

“I know what you mean,” Arlen Williams muttered. “I’ve got all this money coming in, and all I’ve done so far is tell my son he can go to Harvard and take his junior year abroad besides. Thing is, I never expected to have much dough, so I don’t know what to do with it all.”

“You’re afraid the money’ll dry up,” Darcy said. “We’re all just too damned used to being poor.”

“That’s part of it,” Arlen said as he dipped a small silver spoon into the caviar. “Kind of ridiculous, actually. All I need is some good financial advice, to set things up so I can be secure for a while. Trouble is, I don’t know anything about handling finances. I don’t even know who to get advice from.”

Darcy had the same problem. Her past fiscal affairs had been operated on one basic principle: Make sure you can always borrow enough to pay off what you’ve already borrowed, and sooner or later things will either sort themselves out or you’ll be dead before you have to settle. She had no debts now, having paid all her creditors, and no idea of how to handle her assets.

Jane sipped some more champagne, then leaned forward. “I heard,” she said softly, “that Desirée Thorne still hasn’t sold any alternate rights. Has your agent said anything to you about that?”

“Leonard doesn’t discuss clients with other clients,” Darcy said, but she wondered about that herself. Leonard had to be disappointed. Still, even Stephen King had not managed to sell any alternate rights. A theory about the reason for that was forming in her mind. Maybe Stephen King wasn’t getting any offers for alternate rights because, in every possible universe, there already was a Stephen King, a literary juggernaut so overwhelming that no continuum could possibly be without one of him. There were probably also countless versions of Michael Crichton, Jean M. Auel, Anne Rice, Tom Clancy, and other mainstays of the bestseller list in other parallel worlds; their editors there would have no need to buy the work of their counterparts in this universe. It was only insignificant writers such as Darcy that they would buy, writers so unimportant that they probably existed in only one continuum.

These speculations were making her feel depressed, and there was no excuse for depression now. She was falling into old habits acquired when she was poor and struggling. Leonard would tell her, as he had after selling Melanesian rights to her novel Terror Takes No Time Out, that even such a limited edition might increase her readership. He would tell her to be glad that she was such a big deal in at least one continuum.

And she was a big deal in Parallel Universe 3. Elysium Books was now selling foreign rights in that world to The Silent Shriek and In Terms of Terror, and their version of the Book-of-the-Month Club had bought both novels. Surely that proved that she had underestimated herself and her work, and had too readily assumed that her writing was unexceptional because publishers treated it so indifferently. She had accepted and even internalized their valuation of her work. The treatment her books were getting in another continuum only proved that her publishers in this world were wrong.

The same was true of her friends and their writing. It wasn’t Jane’s fault that the ingenuity and wit of her mysteries were wasted on an audience unable to appreciate the details of the plumbing trade. Arlen might have committed Warlords of Mimistapol to paper, but he had also won a Golden Tome Award for his ornate and sensual Prince of Ithlakkan trilogy.

After all, hadn’t she always told herself that it was the writing itself that counted, and not what others thought of it? Her good fortune proved that she had been right to persevere.

* * * *

It was almost midnight when Darcy pulled up in front of her house; it had taken her a while to sober up after overindulging at Jane’s. She locked her Mercedes, wondering if she should arrange for a chauffeur and limo the next time she visited her friend; that way, it wouldn’t matter how much she drank.

Of course, it wouldn’t be wise to let such vices get the better of her, now that she had so much to live for. Perhaps she should contact the Lucky Scribes, an informal network several newly affluent writers had formed to exchange ideas on how to handle the sudden wealth parallel worlds were showering upon them. The Lucky Scribes, from what she had heard, spent most of their time complaining about writer’s block, which was apparently proliferating among them now that they could afford more leisure and self-indulgence, but some of them might be able to advise her on other matters.

Darcy climbed the stairs to her second-floor apartment and unlocked her door. Her lease would be up soon. She would have to decide whether to move into a luxury apartment downtown or buy a house in the country. Even if she wanted to stay here, her landlord was likely to raise her rent as much as possible to take advantage of her recent prosperity, while the jokes her neighbors made about hitting her up for loans were beginning to sound both more insistent and more resentful.

The light on her phone’s answering machine was blinking. Darcy hit the message button and sat down to listen.

“Darcy, this is Leonard,” the machine said. “It’s about four o’clock. I just got off the phone with Gertrude Banner, your Elysium House editor. Yeah, you heard that right. She called me up, I actually heard her voice. Looks like communications from other universes are leaking into the phone lines now. Anyway, she wants to talk to you. Call me tomorrow, soon as you can.”

* * * *

“She wants to talk to me?” Darcy said to her agent the next morning. “About what?”

“About your next book. I managed to drop a few hints about your Terror Is My Middle Name proposal, and she thinks it sounds great, but she wants to talk to you. She’s really insistent—called back just a few minutes ago to ask if I’d heard from you yet.”

Leonard had talked to her Elysium House editor twice! Amazing, Darcy thought. If telephone conversations were possible now, what next? Faxes from other worlds? Maybe a book tour, if someone could figure out how to move bodies, and not just information, from one continuum to another. Anything might be possible. She might actually decide to settle down in Parallel World 3 permanently; writers, after all, had often been expatriates.

“I guess I should talk to her,” Darcy murmured. “How did she sound?”

“Like she grew up in Brooklyn and didn’t quite manage to get rid of her accent. Anyway, I was sure you’d appreciate a chance to schmooze, so I told her you’d be looking forward to her call. She said she’d call sometime this afternoon, probably around three.”

“My God.”

“And she was making a few noises about doing a short story collection of yours.”

A short story collection! Would wonders never cease? At this rate, Gertrude Banner would soon be expressing interest in her memoirs. Darcy had begun an autobiography some months back, abandoning the project after realizing that people uninterested in her fiction probably wouldn’t be any more interested in her life.

“Anyway, let me know how it goes,” Leonard continued. “Frankly, I think the sky’s the limit at this point.”

* * * *

Toward three, Darcy was growing increasingly more agitated. She had spoken to plenty of editors in her life, but they had usually been people who regarded her novels largely as a relatively inexpensive way to fill slots on their lists. The only times they called were to ask her when her next novel would be finished. “You have to keep up your shelf presence! Don’t leave me with empty rack space to fill!” She had always sensed such unspoken thoughts behind any offhand praise the editors might offer for her books. She had never spoken to anyone who wanted to invest big bucks in her work, or who treated her as much more than a temp who would eventually be replaced, or as a migrant worker who could be run off the farm.

Maybe, she thought as she fluttered around the phone, Gertrude Banner wouldn’t call today. Darcy had known more than a few editors who seemed to assume that two months was an appropriate waiting period before returning one of her calls.

But the phone rang promptly at three. Editors in alternate worlds apparently called when they said they would.

“Hello?” Darcy said, realizing too late that her nervousness made her sound like Rocky the Squirrel.

“Darcy Langton?” a woman’s voice with a touch of Brooklyn said. That had to be Gertrude Banner, and she did sound a little like the female New Yorker Mike Myers played in drag in his “Coffee Talk” routine on Saturday Night Live.

“Speaking,” Darcy said, dropping her voice into the Mary Tyler Moore range.

“I’m delighted to hear you at last,” the woman said enthusiastically. “This is Gertrude Banner, your editor at Elysium House. I just finished reading your wonderful Terror Takes No Time Out—I simply can’t remember when I’ve had such a good time. What a terrific read—I couldn’t put it down.” Darcy did not have the heart to interrupt as Gertrude went on about how suspenseful and brilliantly written her novel was. “I want to buy it, of course,” Gertrude finished.

“Uh, you’ll have to talk to my agent about the contract.”

“Well, of course. But the main reason I called is that I hear you’re working on a new book. I think Leonard mentioned the title—”

“Terror Is My Middle Name,” Darcy said.

“That’s the one.”

“Leonard can E-mail the proposal to you,” Darcy said. “That’s probably the easiest…”

“Oh, Darcy. I don’t need to see a proposal from you. Just tell me you’ll do Terror Is My Middle Name for me, and I’ll start discussing the advance and contract with your agent right away.”

Darcy could not bring herself to speak. “Um,” she said at last.

“I’m so pleased. I can’t tell you how much I’m looking forward to working with you on that. This is really going to be exciting. I know you’ll need more for this one than we gave you for In Terms of Terror, but I just know Leonard and I can come to an agreement that will make us all happy.”

“Um,” Darcy said again.

“Wonderful! I’m just so excited!” Gertrude went on to mention another pending book club deal and the prospect of interviews now that The Silent Shriek looked like a sure bet for the bestseller lists. It was a pity Darcy couldn’t be there in person, but at least now she could be interviewed over the phone. Too bad also that there was no way to send author’s copies from one continuum to another. But Gertrude could download some material from a CD-ROM that would give Darcy an idea of how the book would look, and she could rest assured that one of the best designers in the business had done her dust jacket.

“And I insisted on full cloth for the book,” Gertrude went on, “a nice red shade, with Gothic gold lettering on the spine—and acid-free paper, of course. But we’ll also be doing a special collectors’ edition of one thousand copies in leather.”

“Um,” Darcy said. There wasn’t much more to say. All in all, even though the conversation was basically one-sided, it was by far the best discussion with an editor she had ever experienced.

* * * *

“I ran into Edwina Maris this morning,” Jane murmured to Darcy as she sat down. They were sitting in Phil Donahue’s green room, waiting to go on his show. Three other writers were already out in the studio fielding questions from the audience about their alternate rights deals, but Darcy had been told she and Jane would be going on after the break.

“What about Edwina?” Darcy asked.

“Oh, she was being really bitchy. I think her new book just got remaindered.”

“But it only came out five months ago.”

“Well, you know how it is,” Jane said. “Anyway, that’s not the point. She just saw a really shitty review of The Wrench Tightens in Kirkus, and made a point of telling me all about it. She looked absolutely delighted.”

“What do you care?” Darcy said. “You only got about a million dollars so far for The Wrench Tightens in Alternate World 6.”

“Yeah, I know. I shouldn’t care, but I do. I’m stuck in this universe, Darcy, and here I’m just a midlist paperback mystery writer. Maybe I’m even flattering myself by saying I’m midlist. I mean, I have to live here. I’m only on the bestseller lists in a world I can’t even get to.”

Jane sounded totally bummed. Darcy hated to admit it even to herself, but she was feeling the same way lately. She had thought it might be her usual depression after finishing a book, but there was more to her low spirits than that. She had completed Terror Is My Middle Name a week ago, in record time, buoyed by Gertrude Banner’s encouragement and praise and Elysium House’s million-dollar advance. Terror Is My Middle Name was her best novel so far, but Leonard had not yet found a publisher for the book here. The Silent Shriek was still number 1 on Alternate World 3’s bestseller lists, but it remained out of print in this world. Darcy might have finally made it to Phil Donahue’s show, but only as part of a program about this alternate rights business. To most people, she and her colleagues were probably even less interesting than a random selection of lottery winners; a glance at the green room’s monitor told her that Phil’s audience was already getting bored. David Letterman had booked a few alternate rights millionaires as guests on his show, but only to poke fun at them. Oprah Winfrey hadn’t invited any such writers at all.

And now she, her friend Jane, and others like them had to suffer the scorn of writers such as Edwina Maris. Edwina was one of those critically acclaimed but commercially unsuccessful writers, with a small but vociferous cult following that was waiting for her to “break out.” Along with many such writers, Edwina shared a biting wit, a gift for sarcasm and irony, and scorn for writers who appealed to the lowest common denominator. Once Edwina had directed her barbs at the denizens of bestseller lists. Now, she and her underappreciated colleagues had new targets—the merely adequate wordsmiths who appealed to mass audiences only in other universes.

Darcy knew how Edwina felt. From Edwina’s point of view, her own failure to sell alternate rights was simply further proof of her work’s worth, since those writers signing such contracts were, to Edwina, only hacks unable to achieve success in their own world. Darcy sighed. In Edwina’s shoes, she might have felt exactly the same way.

“Better crank up my hair.” Jane poked at her permed, highlighted, and stylishly cut blonde locks with a gold pick. “We have to go on after this ad.”

* * * *

After their appearance, Jane went off to comfort herself with some shopping. Darcy took her limo back to the Royalton, where she had promised to meet her agent for drinks. She and Jane hadn’t exactly lighted a fire under Phil Donahue’s audience. Phil himself had grown increasingly manic in his efforts to work the crowd, and had spent the last five minutes of the program delivering a monologue about his own failure to sell alternate rights to his autobiography.

Leonard was pacing in the hotel lobby. He came toward her as soon as she was through the door. “Come on,” he said, “we’re going to Mary Thalberg’s.”

“What for?”

“Don’t ask.” He herded her back outside. “This is disaster. This is absolute, total disaster.”

“Let me guess,” Darcy said. “Money from Elysium House isn’t legal tender any more. The IRS just reversed its ruling, right? That’s why you’re here. You came to tell me I’m broke. I always knew it was too good to be true.”

“No, no. You’re still loaded. But there’s some heavy duty shit coming down the pike anyway.” He pushed her toward the limo.

* * * *

Leonard was silent all the way to Mary Thalberg’s offices on the East Side. Mary’s partner and assistants had gone home by the time they arrived, but the agent was still in her office. A computer was in one corner; a widescreen TV, complete with speakers and VCR, sat against one wall. Mary’s high heels sank into her pile carpeting as she paced soundlessly and took deep drags on a cigarette.

“I thought you quit smoking,” Leonard said to the other agent.

“I relapsed. I should die of lung cancer anyway now that so many of my clients got screwed.” Mary waved Leonard and Darcy to her sofa. “Leonard’s already seen this, but he wanted you to see it, too.”

“See what?” Darcy asked.

“Didn’t he tell you? My clients already know, the ones that have alternate rights deals. I informed them all immediately. Actually, they’ve been taking the news very well. Anyway, Leonard asked—”

“Just show her,” Leonard said glumly.

“I was on the phone,” Mary said, “talking to an editor in Parallel World 7. Had the TV on to tape Days of Our Lives, so I have something to watch when people put me on hold, you know? While I was talking, I lost the picture, and—well, this is what my VCR taped instead.”

Mary pointed a remote at the TV. An image came on, slightly blurred and without sound, but Darcy could make out the tiny form of a young man sitting behind a large mahogany desk, apparently talking to someone on the phone. The room dwarfed him; the place was the size of Madison Square Garden, and the walls were lined with paintings that looked to her untrained eye like Botticellis. An older man was walking toward the desk, bearing a china teapot and cups on a silver tray. Darcy couldn’t be certain, but thought she glimpsed a swimming pool through the glass doors behind the young man.

“That’s the guy I was talking to today,” Mary said. “Lorne Efferman, an editor at Cotter and Crowe—that’s a publisher in Parallel World 7.” She paused. “We were in the middle of our conversation when I saw that on the TV. I immediately guessed it was Lorne, and he reluctantly confirmed it. Seems some signals from other universes are leaking in over the cable.” The image flickered out; Mary turned off the TV. “Let me be more specific. Lorne Efferman is an assistant editor at Cotter and Crowe.”

“An assistant editor,” Leonard mumbled. “Not an executive editor, or a senior editor, or even just a plain editor. An assistant editor. Makes you wonder what the goddamn publisher’s office looks like—probably Versailles.”

“My God,” Darcy whispered.

“I was seeing if Lorne might be interested in some novels by one of my clients,” Mary said. “I’d already sold alternate rights to them in Parallel World 8, but I thought I’d feel Lorne out. We’ve been waiting for alternate publishers to come to us, but I figured it was time to be a little more aggressive.”

“And?” Darcy asked.

“Lorne explained—very nicely, not that it helped—that I didn’t have those rights to offer him. ‘Look at your contracts,’ he told me, so I did. I never signed those contracts, I’m positive of that, but my name was on them, and every contract had the same damned clause. I know it wasn’t in any of my alternate rights contracts before—I’d never have approved any of them if it were. But it’s there now, and I have no way to prove that I didn’t let that clause go through!”

Mary put out her cigarette and lit another. “What clause?” Darcy asked.

“The clause that says we haven’t been selling to just one universe when we sign those contracts. We’ve been giving one publisher in that particular universe rights to sell any book we give them to every other universe. And we don’t get one extra fucking cent!”

“Let me put it this way,” Leonard muttered from the other end of the sofa. “Seems the contracts go into uncertainty and then don’t match the worlds they were written in. They drift. You end up with a different contract than the one you started with.” He chuckled mirthlessly. “A lot of you writers would say that’s nothing new.”

“But I get royalties,” Darcy said, “don’t I?”

“That’s just on sales in Parallel World 3,” Leonard replied. “I checked your contracts. You get your share of book club money and foreign sales and everything else, but only from sales in that universe. They get to keep everything else. That’s probably how they can pay such nice advances to everybody.” He glared at the blank TV screen. “That’s how some dipshit little assistant editor can have an office big enough to hold the goddamn Frankfurt Book Fair in.”

“But—” Darcy began.

“I put in a call to that physicist Sterling Blake,” Mary said. “Our agents’ association put him on retainer a while back. He said something about uncertainty creeping into our continuum, about the wave functions of perception shifting or whatever. I think it means we’re in a different universe from the one we were in a few days ago.” She let out her breath. “Blake has some new equations to play with now, so of course he’s just thrilled to death.”

They were all silent for a long time. At last Darcy said, “Does it really matter? Elysium House paid me some serious money. They did beautiful editions, even if I can’t get any author’s copies. I could retire and never have to worry about money again, and you and the other agents are raking in plenty from the deals anyway.”

“That isn’t the point,” Leonard said.

Darcy had known that even as she spoke. The agents would never forgive themselves for letting all those alternate rights slip away, however inadvertently. And she, along with her now-wealthy colleagues, would have to live with the knowledge that, even in other continua, publishers could still rip you off and not pay you what your work was really worth.

Not that this newly acquired wisdom should have come as much of a surprise to any writer.

* * * *

Mary and Leonard were feeling a little better by the time Darcy left them to go back to her hotel. The two agents had to be philosophical about matters. Anyway, according to the grapevine, it looked as though this alternate rights business was heading toward a downturn of sorts. Mary hadn’t heard of any new alternate rights contracts being signed for nearly a month, and a couple of agents she knew had reported that their calls were no longer going through to a couple of continua. Time to collect as much as they could for their clients just in case things got even more uncertain and they ended up cut off from other parallel worlds altogether. They probably wouldn’t be able to sue for any uncollected payments later on unless attorneys in this universe got even more ingenious than they already were.

Darcy was set. She had to look at it that way. If Donahue’s audience had been more interested in whether she knew Stephen King or in how she was going to spend her money than in her books, she could live with that. Edwina Maris might get better reviews, but raves on the front page of the New York Times Book Review hadn’t noticeably fattened Edwina’s bank account. If Elysium House was ripping Darcy off, then at least there would still be all those millions of readers in Gertrude Banner’s world reading In Terms of Terror and Terror Takes No Time Out.

She had to think of it that way. It was the work that mattered. Her true reward was the writing itself, wasn’t it? No one could deprive her of the vivid moments she spent in worlds of her own creation, or of the sense of accomplishment she felt after finishing a final draft.

But then the image of a publisher somewhere, sitting in the midst of splendor greater than that of the Hearst estate at San Simeon, came to her. The bastards of this world, and every other world, always won in the end; they didn’t care about the writers they exploited. Darcy ground her teeth. She would have to get hold of the Lucky Scribes and ask them for some advice. She could feel a writer’s block coming on.

THE EICHMANN VARIATIONS, by George Zebrowski

The beast must die;

and the man as well;

one and the other.

—Brahms, Songs

O Germany—

Hearing the speeches that ring from your house one laughs.

But whoever sees you, reaches for his knife.

—Bertolt Brecht

And just as you supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of a number of other nations—as though you and your superiors had any right to determine who should and who should not inhabit the world—we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with you. This is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang.

—Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem

1.

I learned the details after the war. Jewish scientists had been gathered in America to create a vengeance weapon against us. It happened very much in the way described in those fantastic American pulp magazines that von Braun was always reading (he kept up his subscription through a neutral country once the war started). A team of physicists got together at a secret desert laboratory and concocted the atomic bomb out of decades-old theories.

I didn’t believe that Berlin, Munich, and Dresden had disappeared completely until I saw the Life magazine photos published after the formal surrender in 1946. By then I had been for some months in the Argentine, living quietly, hoping to finish out my life in solitude.

The Japanese had avoided atomic attack by surrendering shortly after their agents reported the magnitude of the blasts in Europe. I don’t blame myself for being skeptical; who would have believed such a story, especially after our bad experience with the V–2 wonder weapons? Always too expensive and impractical, Speer had complained, who knew something of engineering as well as financial planning.

I watched the Jews build their Israel for twenty years, growing in power and prestige, until it dominated the Middle East. Everybody loved them, but how could it be otherwise? Their first miracle, the Manna Machine, took sand and through certain physico-biological manipulations of basic patterns produced edibles of any kind, as well as any other physical object or resource. Solar power was endless, so the machine ran without stop, giving away as much stomach support as Israel’s neighbors demanded. I read about it in Reader’s Digest.

The world fell into a stupor of peace as the Semites gifted the planet with their easy solutions. But it was all on the surface; these magicians would just as easily have worked for our Fuehrer if he had courted them, if their very existence had not been such a blinding abomination. We were too zealous in our convictions. Since it is in the nature of the lower orders to go where they are welcome, these sorcerers would have built for us the greatest bakeries in Europe, and our armies would have marched to victory on the bread transubstantiated from the raw material of the underfolk.

Now, with their stomachs satisfied and their homeland secure, they began to refine their tastes for revenge. I was captured in 1961, as I was strolling by the seashore, and taken to Jerusalem aboard a luxurious submarine. It seems that their Maimonides Mentality, a sophisticated artificial intelligence that also plans economies, had finally been able to predict where I might be found, on the basis of elaborate probabilities and shabby scraps of gossip. It had taken a picture of my footsteps, as well as my bald head, from a satellite.

A world benefiting so greatly from Israeli science and technology looked the other way when I was kidnapped. Nazis were merely a strange and rare form of humanity collected by their Jewish benefactors, for private reasons.

2.

Ten gallows.

They die by metric count, these scarecrows who wear my face. Each morning I am duplicated ten times and forced to watch the execution.

The faces seem puzzled as they stare at me. Who am I? they wonder, knowing full well who they are. Why am I not with them on the block? Do they all have my memories? Or are they blank die cuts, wearing my wrinkles? They are innocent, even if they remember what is in my brain.

What can I care for my doubles?

I imagine rushing forward to mingle with them, thus denying my captors the satisfaction of seeing the original perish, except as the hidden member of a group. Any one of us will answer to being the original, except that the doppelgängers are innocent!

Why? How can that be?

Because they did not exist when my so-called crimes were committed! Only the pattern of specific memories is guilty. I will not rush among my doubles; I do not wish to die anonymously.

They force me to watch as the bodies are fed into the fusion torch, which consumes utterly, leaving only a gas from which basic elements can be reclaimed. What we could have done with that! The final solution would have been completed by 1941.

3.

The point of killing your racial enemies lies in denying them their future, the embodiment of their children. The stream of history is diverted, given a different character than it might have had; but now cultures live or die where once individuals of unconscious species clashed for glorious possession of plain, sea, forest, or sky.

They are manlier, these scientific Jews; they are not fearful of wielding power. Once they were constrained and cowardly; a good number were homosexual. What did they know of true freedom, they who would not dare do what was in their hearts? A true man listens to the abyss, to the inner song that the Fuehrer knew so well. A few years after the war I read that some of the survivors were developing nostalgia for the war, for the death camps, for slavehood.

4.

This morning, one year after my imprisonment, I dreamed of a pit. A huge, dark beast came into it on all fours. Its skin was sandpapery, gray-black, covered with sores. It stood up on all fours and spoke to the crowd pressing in around the guard rail.

“The world is not mine,” it said as the crowd drew back, horrified by its massive body. “This my father taught me, that the world is not mine.” The voice was soft, cultivated, threatening.

The crowd gasped and whispered, and moved closer to observe the tragic, apelike face.

“They captured it at the headwaters of the Amazon,” someone said. “It’s descended from giant tree otters.”

I didn’t want to look into the beast’s eyes. The lights in the arena flickered. It grew dark.

“You see,” the same voice said, “it’s not really intelligent. A very kind, sensitive man taught it that speech, but it’s nothing but a kind of mimicry…”

I watched the beast out of the corner of my eye. The creature was watching me; it knew I was there.

I woke up and yearned to see the sun; there was no time in my cell.

5.

Today, one of my brothers visited me.

“How goes it?” the image asked.

“And you?”

He shrugged. “I have your thoughts and memories, innocently. They explained, as if confessing their crime. I feel that what we did, what you and I remember doing, is a bad dream from which I have wakened.”

“Have they told you that you will die?” I asked, staring into my own eyes.

He smiled. “I’m a sample. I’ll work for them. They want me to labor on a farm, even though they no longer till the soil. I’ll make public speeches of repentance. You and I know exactly what they wish to hear. They will not kill me.”

“Traitor,” I whispered.

“To what? Do you want me to die with the puppets that torment you? They’ll only get another to walk in your shadow.”

“But you are me!”

He nodded and touched my hand. “I would have been if they had not explained. The facts of my origin have absolved me. Don’t you see? I’ve been forgiven.”

“But they might be lying! You didn’t think of that, did you? I might be you and you me!”

“But I’m not,” he said serenely. “My brother, imagine if you were given the chance to undo what you have done, or to learn that you did not do it. Imagine that you are merely a copy of the flesh and memory of one who did, but that your flesh was born only a few days ago. Imagine.”

He was glad not to be me, and I knew how he felt, how I would have felt to have been him.

“You are only a bit of me that has stepped aside, not escaped.”

“I’ll be honest with you,” he replied. “Our pattern is guilty, in so far as it contains certain beliefs, but only the pattern at a specific moment in time is physically guilty. It doesn’t matter that I would have acted as you did. I am implicated, certainly, through no choice of my own, but not physically guilty. Get it through your head, I wasn’t there.”

He got up and gazed at me as if I were a child who would never learn.

6.

The Fuehrer spoke to me that night. Adolf, his voice said, you never understood the deepest reasons for killing the Jew, only that they were to be hated and butchered. You could not imagine in your ordinary soul, as I knew, the inner need to return Germany to another age.

I woke up and realized that my tormentors had poisoned my memory of the Fuehrer; his echo was beginning to reproach me.

But I know now that they cannot punish me; their rope is too feeble a thing, their puppet show no match for my camps and ovens and endless trainloads of flesh.

I have won. And even if they should hang me, it will not be enough. The cowards! They do not even put hoods over my faces to hide the truth!

7.

They are not going to tell anyone what they are doing with me. I am the subject of an experiment in physico-biological duplication. Their psychologists claim that it will reveal to them hitherto unplumbed depths of human nature; the facts of historical guilt, the honesty of vengeance, the essential weakness and banality of evil, will stand naked before their gaze.

I have begun to wonder if I am the original Eichmann at all. They won’t answer that question. In their secret hearts they hope that I will prize the possibility that has been created for me, of a self swept clean, made innocent. There will always be an Eichmann for them to study, long after I am gone; they can’t bring themselves to kill me completely. They need a sample of my evil.

8.

They came today to explain.

“To kill you once,” the gray-haired spokesman said, “would have been a blot on memory. All agree concerning the inadequacy of such a punishment.”

“How many of me have you killed?” I asked.

“Ten per hour, these years…it will be six million one day.”

I spat on the floor in front of him. “It’s no punishment for me, you fools!”

“We’re trying,” he said.

“No one can punish me!” I shouted in triumph.

“Or forgive you,” he said softly, “no matter what contortions we impose upon the living fact.”

“You’re no better than me.”

“There was little heroism in the camps, Mr. Eichmann, only a confrontation with a human nature that we had thought tamed within ourselves. You have only yourself to blame.”

“Your vengeance will be my victory.”

“Perhaps. I have already admitted the inadequacy. You are being punished because it will happen nowhere else. All punishment is futile, I suppose. That is why those of us who have no faith in it as a deterrent or corrective have readopted an eye for an eye.” He sighed deeply. “It is the best we can do, anyone can do. Six million German flesh for six million Jewish. German flesh created by our conscience, from our soil and the sunlight of God, Mr. Eichmann.”

I stared at him and answered, “Innocence in your eyes is not the prize you think. I repudiate nothing.”

He shrugged. “I understand. It is the only way you can still dirty us. That is why in your case justice must be very personal. I will kill you myself, Mr. Eichmann, next Monday.”

9.

“Another set of ravings?” the gray-haired man asked.

“Yes,” the young doctor replied.

“Do they differ?”

“Not much. The language changes, but it’s the same.”

“File them in sequence.”

“How long can we go on?” the doctor asked.

“Indefinitely, even if it’s useless. Our sample may still not be large enough to reveal the angelic core of the human being. We must give him enough chances. I still can’t quite accept that the raging beast is more…than a vestige in each of us.”

“We should kill the original and be done with it,” the doctor said.

The gray-haired man sighed and shook his head. “His guilt would flee from the world and we would forget. We must relieve it with punishment, but we can never let it die.”

“But the doubles—”

“They’re innocent, of course, in a technical sense, but they carry the guilty pattern just the same. His guilt cannot be duplicated, but it is passed on. The new generations of Germans are not guilty, but they inherit past crimes socially, like it or not. He says it himself—the pattern is guilty.”

“But we, the children of victims, have now created our own, permanent victim,” the doctor insisted.

“He lives in all humanity,” the gray-haired man said. “Our punishment, at worst, merely matches his crime.”

“We are always better than the worst,” the doctor whispered. “What would they think, those who died in the Holocaust?”

The old man looked at his hands, as if he had just discovered them. “It’s been said that in the Holocaust reality for the first time exceeded the imagination. And for a time afterward imagination retreated and hid, to ready something that would give it back its own.”

“Nuclear war?”

“Our fear restrains us, Doctor, but I suppose reality will always have the last word—unless we learn to make angels of ourselves.”

“Shall we stop then?”

“No—that would waste all that has gone before. He will live and he will die. Maybe we’ll learn something yet.”

“But how can you even hope?”

“If even one variation repents, I’ll destroy the original and close down the project.”

10.

My neck holds a sympathetic crick this week. Muscle tension from watching my flesh and blood dying day by day. In the evenings they show me a museum of details from individual lives—photos, letters, drawings, bits of clothing. They push these sentiment-laden moments into my brain. They want me to feel, psychosomatically, that my body, my life, is joined to others; that one’s brother or sister or neighbor is morally identical to one’s self through these petty details.

But I can only record that my tormentors have failed. I have overcome the uncertainty of whether I am a copy or not—by finding the small tattoo with which they have marked me…on my elbow. The horror of being innocent even as I embrace my guilt has left me.

It follows, therefore, that I am myself, and they are using duplicates to make further copies while holding me separate. My alternates are only animated garbage, mere echoes. For what can they be punished? How can they be me, if they are innocent?

I cannot be copied.

AUTHOR NOTES TO “THE EICHMANN VARIATIONS”

This was a disturbing story to write. I had read Ira Levin’s disquieting novel, The Boys from Brazil, and had seen the motion picture, in which the argument is movingly made that Adolph Hitler’s clones would all be innocent. Cloning and exact copying remain misunderstood concepts today. Levin’s clones were new people, growing up in new circumstances, while my Eichmann copies were in fact additional examples of the same man. I believe this path faces the issues more bravely, since the Eichmann copies in my story were exact, including all memory and the sense of self. They don’t know they are copies. Yet they are innocent, from an objective view, even if they feel and know otherwise. I was trying to hang on to the view that Eichmann’s pattern of personality is not innocent, and that even supposing a copy were to learn its true identity it might yet make compact with the past and share the guilt by accepting the crimes “remembered.”

Such subtleties belong to the dialogue about future possibilities, as refracted through our human character, that writers of SF carry on with the present.

The story troubled me to write, and I even considered putting it away. But Michael Bishop, who published it in his anthology Light Years and Dark, wrote: “To find such a subject (the Holocaust) handled with fresh and dynamic insight in an SF story of some 3000 words would seem at first as unlikely as discovering intelligent life at a Ku Klux Klan rally, but ‘The Eichmann Variations’ is that story. It examines the questions of guilt, vengeance, and atonement without surrendering to either sensationalism or maudlin hand-wringing.” And Bruce McAllister further confirmed this view by writing that “it’s your best…intellectually/spiritually so sophisticated that it should embarrass us all, showing what significance and craft are possible in SF and at the same time how little we settle for at awards time. Pivoting on historical horror metamorphosed and given new life as alternate history, is what gives it the incredible impact it has. The craft alone is worth a Nebula.”

The story was rejected, with great praise, by every magazine in the field, but it was a Nebula Award finalist in 1984, and made the Locus Recommended Reading List of the year’s best stories.

MAY BE SOME TIME, by Brenda W. Clough

From Scott’s Last Expedition by Robert Falcon Scott:

Friday, March 16, or Saturday, 17 [1912]. Lost track of dates, but think the last correct. Tragedy all down the line. At lunch, the day before yesterday, poor Titus Oates said he couldn’t go on; he proposed we should leave him in his sleeping bag. That we could not do, and we induced him to come on, on the afternoon march. In spite of its awful nature for him he struggled on and we made a few miles. At night he was worse and we knew the end had come.

Should this be found I want these facts recorded…We can testify to his bravery. He has borne intense suffering for weeks without complaint, and to the very last was able and willing to discuss outside subjects. He did not—would not—give up hope till the very end… He slept through the night before last, hoping not to wake; but he woke in the morning—yesterday. It was blowing a blizzard. He said, “I am just going outside and may be some time.” He went out into the blizzard and we have not seen him since… We knew that poor Oates was walking to his death, but though we tried to dissuade him, we knew it was the act of a brave man and an English gentleman. We all hope to meet the end with a similar spirit, and assuredly the end is not far.

* * * *

It’s said that death from exposure is like slipping into warm sleep. Briefly, Titus Oates wondered what totty-headed pillock had first told that whisker. He no longer remembered what warmth was. He had endured too many futile hopes and broken dreams to look for an easy end now. Every step was like treading on razors, calling for a grim effort of will. Nevertheless without hesitating he hobbled on into the teeth of the storm. He did not look back. He knew the Polar Expedition’s tent was already invisible behind him.

Finer than sand, the wind-driven snow scoured over his clenched eyelids, clogging nose and mouth. The cold drove ferocious spikes deep into his temples, and gnawed at the raw frostbite wounds on brow and nose and lip. Surely it was folly to continue to huddle into his threadbare windproof. What if he flung all resistance aside, and surrendered himself to the wailing Antarctic blizzard? Suddenly he yearned to dance, free of the weighty mitts and clothing. To embrace death and waltz away!

He had left his finnesko behind. Gangrene had swollen his frozen feet to the size of melons, the ominous black streaks stealing up past the ankles nearly to the knee. Yesterday it had taken hours to coax the fur boots on. Today he had not bothered. Now his woolen sock caught on something. Excruciating pain jolted his frozen foot, suppurating from the stinking black wounds where the toes used to be. Too weak to help himself, he stumbled forward. His crippled hands, bundled in the dogskin mitts, groped to break his fall. They touched nothing. He seemed to fall and fall, a slow endless drop into blank whiteness.

And it was true! A delicious warmth lapped him round like a blanket. Tears of relief and joy crept down his starveling cheeks and burnt in the frost fissures. He was being carried, warm and safe. Rock of Ages, cleft for me!

For a very long time he lay resting, not moving a muscle. Stillness is the very stuff of Heaven, when a man has marched nearly two thousand miles, hauling a half-tonne load miles a day for months, across the Barrier ice, up the Beardmore Glacier, to the South Pole and back. He slept, and when he wasn’t actually asleep he was inert.

But after some unknowable time Titus slowly came to awareness again. He felt obscurely indignant, cheated of a just due. Wasn’t Heaven supposed to be a place of eternal rest? He’d write a letter to the Times about it…

“Maybe just a touch more?” one of the celestial host suggested, in distinctly American accents. Silly on the face of it, his unanalyzed assumption that all the denizens of Heaven were British…

“No, let’s see how he does on four cc. How’s the urine output?”

Shocked, Titus opened his eyes and looked down at himself. He was lying down, clothed in a pure white robe, all correct and as advertised. But were those a pair of angels lifting the hem? He used the drill-sergeant rasp he had picked up in the Army. “What the hell are you at!”

Both angels startled horribly. Something metallic slipped from a heavenly hand and landed with a clatter on the shiny-clean floor. A beautiful angel with long black hair stared down at him, sea-blue eyes wide as saucers. “Oh my God. Oh my God, Shell! Look at this—he’s conscious! Piotr will be like a dog with two tails!”

“Damn it, now the meter’s gone.”

As the other angel stooped nearer to pick up her tool Titus stared at her face. It was tanned but flushed with irritation. The nose had freckles. She wore huge coppery hoop earrings, and her short curly hair was dull blonde, almost mousy. “You,” Titus stated with conviction, “are not an angel.”

The happy angel—no, blister it, a woman!—exclaimed, “An angel, Shell, did you hear that? He called you an angel.”

“He did not! Don’t you ever listen, Sabrina? He just said I was not an angel.”

“This isn’t the afterlife,” Titus pursued doggedly. “Am I even dead?”

“Shell, this what we have you for. Hit it, quick!”

The irritable angel elbowed her companion into silence and spoke, clear and slow. “No, Captain Oates, you are not dead. We are doctors. I am Dr. Shell Gedeon, and this is Dr. Sabrina Trask. You are safe here, under our care.”

Titus could hardly take her words in. His mind hared off after irrelevancies. He wanted to retort, “Stuff and nonsense! Women can’t be doctors. They don’t have the intellect!” But he clung to the important questions: “What about my team? Bowers, Wilson, Scott: Are they safe too?”

Dr. Trask drew in a breath, glancing at her colleague. Dr. Gedeon’s voice was calm. “Let’s stop the drip now, why don’t we?”

“Excellent idea. If you’ll pass me that swab…”

“They are all right, aren’t they?” Titus demanded. “You rescued me, and you rescued them.” The doctors didn’t look round, fiddling with their mysterious instruments. “Aren’t they?”

He wanted to leap up and search for his friends, or shake the truth out of these fake ministering angels, these impossible doctors. But a wave of warm melting sleep poured over him, soft as feathers, inexorable as winter, and he floated away on its downy tide.

* * * *

Again when he woke he was met with pleasure: smooth sheets and a cool clean pillow. No reindeer-skin sleeping bag, no stink of horsemeat hoosh and unwashed men! He lay tasting the delicious sleek linen with every nerve and pore. How very strange to be so comfortable. His gangrened feet no longer hurt even where the covers rested on them. Double amputation above the knee, probably—the only treatment that could have saved his life. He had become reconciled to the idea of footlessness. Lazily he reached down the length of his leg with one hand to explore the stump.

The shock of touching his foot went all through his body, a galvanic impulse that jerked him upright. He flung back the covers and stared. His feet down to the toes were all present and accounted for, pink and clean and healthy. Even the toenails were just as they used to be, horn-yellow, thick and curved like vestigial hooves, instead of rotten-black and squelching to the touch. He wiggled the toes and flexed each foot with both hands, not trusting the evidence of eyes alone. It was undeniable. Somehow he had been restored, completely healed.

He examined the rest of himself. At the end, in spite of the dogskin mitts, his fingers had been blistered with frostbite to the colour and size of rotten bananas. Then the fluid in the blisters had frozen hard, until the least motion made the tormented joints crunch and grate as if they were stuffed with pebbles. Now his fingers were right as ninepence, flexing with painless ease: long, strong and sensitive, a horseman’s hands.

The constant stab from the old wound in his thigh, grown unbearable from so much sledging, was gone. He leaped to his feet, staggering as the blood rushed dizzily away from his head. He sat for a moment until the vertigo passed, and then rose again to put his full weight on his left leg. Not so much as a twinge! He was clad in ordinary pyjamas, white and brown striped, and he slid the pants down. The ugly twisted scar on his thigh had opened up under the stress of malnutrition and overwork, until one would think the Boers shot him last week instead of in 1901. Now there was not a mark to be seen or felt, however closely he peered at the skin. Most wondrous of all, both legs were now the same length. The army doctors had promised that with the left set an inch shorter than the right, he would limp for the rest of his life.

He had to nerve himself before running a hand down his face. Such a natural action, but the last time he’d tried it the conjunction of blistered fingers and frozen dead-yellow nose had been a double agony so intense the sparks had swum in his eyes. But now it didn’t hurt at all. His nose felt normal, the strong straight Roman bridge no longer swollen like a beet-root. No black oozy frostbite sores, but only a rasp of bristle on his cheek. Even the earlobes—he was certain he’d left those behind on the Polar plateau! Incredulous, he looked round the room for a glass.

It was a small plain chamber, furnished with nothing but the bed and a chair. But there was a narrow window. He leaned on the sill, angling to glimpse his ghostly reflection in the pane. He ran his tongue over his teeth, firmly fixed again and no longer bleeding at the gums. His brown eyes were melancholy under the deep straight arch of brow bone, and his dark hair was shorn in an ordinary short-back-and-sides.

Suddenly he saw not the glass but through it, beyond and down. He leaned his forehead on the cool pane, smearing it with a sudden sweat. He was high, high up. Below was a city the like of which he had never seen, spread from horizon to horizon in the golden slanted light of either dawn or sunset. Buildings spangled with lights, gleaming in sheaths of glass, reared mountain-high. His own little window was thousands of feet up, higher far than the dome of St. Paul’s even. Far below, vastly foreshortened, people scurried along the pavements. Shiny metal bugs teemed the ways and flitted through the skies.

“This isn’t London.” His voice had a shameful quaver. He forced himself to go on, to prove he could master it. “Nor Cairo. Nor Bombay…”

“You are in New York City, Captain Oates. As you will have observed, you have traveled in both space and time. This is the year of our Lord 2045.”

Titus turned slowly. Though every word was plain English, he could hardly take in what the man was saying. With difficulty he said the first thing that came into his head: “Who the devil are you?”

Unoffended, the slim fair man smiled, revealing large perfect teeth. “I am Dr. Kevin Lash. And I’m here to help you adjust to life in the 21st century. We’re connected, in a distant sort of way. My three-times great-grandmother was Mabel Beardsley, sister of the artist, Aubrey Beardsley. You may know her as a friend of Kathleen Scott.”

“The Owner’s wife.” Titus grasped at this tenuous connection to the familiar. “Then—you’re an Englishman!”

Dr. Lash continued to smile. “I was born in America, but yes, I’m of English extraction. Insofar as several generations of the melting pot have left me with any claim to…”

Titus crossed the room in a bound. He wrung Dr. Lash’s slender hand as if he were his best friend in the world. In a sense this was true. The doctor was his only friend. Titus’s inner turmoil was such that he only belatedly realized the doctor was continuing to talk. “Sorry—I’m afraid I didn’t catch what you were saying. It’s all quite a lot to take in.”

“Absolutely, I don’t doubt it.” With an amiable nod Dr. Lash sat down in the chair and waved Titus towards the bed. “A very natural reaction, given the tremendous change in your circumstances. I was outlining your schedule for the next day or so…”

And Titus was off and away again, sucked into an interlocking series of irrelevancies. It was stress, the alien environment all around, that made it so hard to concentrate. But recognizing why didn’t help him focus any better. This time it was Dr. Lash’s pronunciation that set Titus off: “schedule.” Titus himself would have said “shed-jool.” But Dr. Lash used “sked-jool,” the American pronunciation. Indeed every word, his every tone and posture and gesture, spoke of the United States. So it must be true. “Damn it! Sorry—I’m trying to attend, believe me. But I keep going blah. My head’s full of cotton wool.”

Still unoffended, Dr. Lash smiled. “Not at all, Captain. I’d be happy to repeat or amplify anything you haven’t quite grasped. I was giving you a quick outline of time as our theories suggest it applies in temporal travel. No man is an island, you know…”

Complete unto himself, Titus finished for him silently. So Lash was a man of education—must be, if he was a doctor. A doctor of what? Those two women, the sham angels, had obviously been medical-type doctors. But curse it, he had to listen!

Lash was saying, “…the tiniest change can have an incalculable impact. The death or life of an insect, a microbe even, may not be inconsiderable. Nothing can be plucked casually from the past, for fear of accidentally revising the world…”

The past? But of course. If this was the year 2045, then 1912 was long ago. “Is it possible to go back?” he interrupted.

“What, you, you mean? Return to the place and time you left? I believe it is impossible, Captain. But you would not wish it—to return and freeze to death in Antarctica? That was another subject of debate: the moral dimension of what we were attempting. It would be surely wrong to wrench away some poor fellow with a life ahead of him, family and friends…”

My family, Titus thought. Mother, Lilian, Violet, Bryan. My friends. I will never see them again. They might as well be dead. No—they are dead. Died years ago.

“…an ideal subject,” Dr. Lash was saying. “Not only are you a person rescued from a tragic death, but your removal is supremely unlikely to trigger any change in the time-stream, since your body was lost: presumed frozen solid, entombed in a glacier for eons…”

Titus stared down in silence at his pale bare feet. They were a little chilly now from resting so long on the uncarpeted floor, but that was all. Impossible to think of them frozen rock-hard, embalmed in eternal ice. Yet only a short time ago (or was it 133 years?) they were nearly so. “My team.”

Interrupted in mid-discourse, Dr. Lash said, “I beg your pardon?”

“The others. Scott, Wilson, Bowers. Did you rescue them too?”

“Ah…no.”

“Then they made it. They got back to the depot, back home!”

Dr. Lash’s copious flow of words seemed to be suffering a momentary blockage. “No.”

Titus sat silent, his shoulders bowed. So his companions too had died. Had it all been for nothing then, all their work and sacrifice and heroism? “Why did you save only me, then?”

“Remember, Captain,” Dr. Lash said patiently. “You are unique. Your body was never found.”

“Just as well, since it was here. I’m here.” He grappled with slippery verb tenses. “This is the future. You must have histories, newspapers. Records of Scott’s Polar Expedition.”

“And you shall see them. But, if I may make a suggestion, not today. You should recover your strength a little. The doctors have further tests—”

Titus growled in disgust. “No more doctors! Now!”

“Tomorrow,” Dr. Lash promised. “Tomorrow I’ll get the books. As you can see, it’s already evening. Not the time to start a new project.”

Titus stood to look out the window. Only the closest observation revealed that night had fallen. The city outside glowed and throbbed like a gala ballroom, its lights smearing the dark sky, blotting out stars and moon. So beautiful and strange!

“…a good night’s sleep.” Dr. Lash was getting to his feet. “And breakfast. I’ve tried to have food that isn’t too strange for you…”

Titus hardly noticed the doctor’s departure. The moving lights outside held him. The soaring or darting small sparks must be the metal bugs of before, lit for night work. Presumably behind every glowing window were people working and living. There must be thousands, millions of them. By night or by day the city was alive. He leaned his ear to the cold glass and heard its murmur, a dull continuous roar.

He realized he wanted nothing to do with it. This strange monstrous city was far more foreign than the Antarctic ice. The thought came to him that this was all delirium, the final flicker of phantasy in the brain of a dying man already half-buried in blizzard-drift. It wasn’t even a delusion he enjoyed! A tremendous hollow longing for home filled him, for England, his family and friends, anything familiar. And there was nothing left to him now, except perhaps his own renewed body. At least this was as it had always been. He climbed back into bed and hugged himself, curled under the covers, diving into sleep’s reprieve.

* * * *

With the morning Titus’s courage rose again. No point in going into a funk, he told himself. I coaxed those damned ponies halfway to the Pole. I have the sand to cope with the future.

The breakfast Dr. Lash had promised did a great deal to restore his strength of mind—streaky bacon, odd toasted bready rounds, and buttered eggs. The tea in the flask was cat-lap, brewed with water that had come off the boil, and he could not identify the fruit from which the juice had been squeezed. But there was plenty of everything, a heaped plate on the little serving trolley and additional servings on the shelf below under covers to keep them hot. After months of short commons, the sight of so much food made him weak at the knees.

When Drs. Lash, Gedeon and Trask came in, Titus was mopping the plates clean with the last crust of bread. “Where are you putting it all?” Dr. Gedeon said, watching. “It’s been a long time since your last decent meal.”

Dr. Lash blinked in alarm. “Gently there, Shell. I’m trying not to confront him with too much just yet.”

Dr. Trask fished a stethoscope out of her pocket, hung it round her neck by the ear pieces, and beamed upon him as if she were offering him a splendid gift. “I’m going to check you over, Captain.”

Grudgingly he allowed her to listen to his heart, and look into his eyes and ears with a shiny metal instrument. She did other mysterious tasks too, with rubber tubes and bits, or holding little tools that blinked or flashed colors against his arms and legs. “Physically okay,” she pronounced at last. “He was strong as an elephant in the first place, to survive what he went through. So he had a good foundation to build on.”

“And you always do good work, Sabrina,” Dr. Gedeon said. “What about his mental and cognitive recovery, Kev?”

“Well, yesterday we weren’t quite ourselves, were we, Captain?” Dr. Lash said. “But at his suggestion—his insistence, in fact—I have a simple test all prepared.”

“All that historical stuff? Don’t tell me you want to teach him to surf the net.”

“Of course not—the books will be plenty.” Dr. Lash pushed the serving trolley out into the hall, and returned immediately with a different cart, loaded with several dozen books of all sizes. “Captain, you asked about the fate of your friends. As you can see, there’s quite a lot of literature on the subject. Also, in preparation for your reception I had much of the archival material, the articles and so on, transferred to hard copy last year—forgive me, I should say printed out onto paper and fastened together into these makeshift volumes.”

“These?” Tentatively, Titus touched a stack of weird shiny books. “Are they glass?”

Dr. Trask smiled, but Dr. Gedeon said, “Titus—is it all right to call you Titus? I’m going to teach you one of the most important terms of this modern age. No, hush up, Kev—you have to give the poor man a few tools to handle his environment. These floppy covers are plastic. So is this binding on the spine. Plastic, remember that word.”

“But the pages inside are plain old paper, just like in your day,” Dr. Lash added.

Titus picked up the top book. The slick but stiff substance—plastic!—of the cover slipped in his unaccustomed fingers. The book flopped open in its fall to the coverlet, and he looked down at it into the photograph of a familiar face: Dr. Edward Wilson, his hands in their mitts akimbo on the ski poles, grinning into the camera from under the rolled brim of his sledging cap as if death could never touch him. “Uncle Bill,” he said, stunned.

“We know he was your friend,” Dr. Gedeon said softly.

Dr. Lash sat down on the bed beside him. “Keep in mind though, Titus, that you’ve traveled. Even if all had gone well with your Expedition, he would be long deceased. Your loss is no less. But it’s inevitable, a natural progression.”

Titus seized a less strange volume, a fat grey book titled Scott’s Antarctic Expedition. More ferocious than the need for food, the thirst for his past was suddenly overwhelming, parching his mouth. “For God’s sake, leave me alone and let me read!”

“You wouldn’t prefer to have me present, to answer any questions?”

“No—please! Go away!”

“Come on, Kev.” Dr. Gedeon jerked her blonde head at the door. “Leave him in peace.”

“We can come back in a while,” Dr. Trask said.

Reluctantly Dr. Lash allowed himself to be drawn away in a trail of discourse. “During this initial adjustment period I think that slow progress is the ideal…” And mercifully they were gone.

The books, the proper ones, were antiques. Everything about them proclaimed it, their smell of yellowy paper and dust, the alarming crack of their spines when Titus opened them, the flakes of brittle glue that sprinkled his pyjama lap. A film of fine greyish grime coated the top edges of the pages and came off on his fingers. How terrifying then, to see the photographs he remembered posing for only months ago! These men, that pony, those dogs: they weren’t old. How could they be, when the memory was so new? But the books belied him.

And it was a jolt to glance at the text and realize that he was reading excerpts from Scott’s personal diary. The Owner was—had been—a meticulous diarist, but the volumes were of course private. Titus flushed with embarrassment, to thus pry into a comrade’s innermost thoughts. But here they were, all the juicy tidbits printed in a book, an old one at that. Everything in them was common knowledge, public property for more than a century. Titus had kept journals himself, sent letters home, written to family and friends. He gulped, wondering now if they were printed here too. Figures of history have no privacy.

But enough shilly-shallying! He paged rapidly through the book, skimming along the months and days. The journey to lay One-Ton Depot; daily life in the camp; the Polar trek; a photograph of Roald Amundsen and his team standing bareheaded before the Norwegian flag at the Pole. Titus glowered at it and turned the page. Towards the last he had lost track of the days, but Wilson or Scott would have kept good count.

And here it was. Titus bent over the book, scarcely aware of the chilly floor or the crick in his neck. The end of the story at last: eleven miles short of the depot, Scott and Wilson and Bowers had frozen and starved to death. Titus exhaled a long silent breath. The unfairness of it, the waste! The print blurred as his eyes filled.

This is history, he reminded himself. It’s over, long over, poor devils! But his heart refused to go along with it. Suddenly the coolness of the room seemed malevolent. He piled the pillows up at the head of the bed and sat against them, armoured in covers pulled up round his chest, to read—to dive into the books that held all that remained of his world.

He devoured them, the different journals—the egotists, had every member of the expedition published his journal?—the scholarly analyses, the biography of Amundsen, the biographies of Scott. When he had read them all, he looked at them again and then yet again, chewing them over, extracting new meanings and significances.

He noticed for instance that different meanings could be wrung out of the same set of events. Scott was praised as a hero and damned as an incompetent, his expedition the last flower of the golden Edwardian afternoon or the first tremor of a collapsing empire. And the theories of why the expedition failed! There were more candidates than he would have ever imagined: deteriorating washers in the fuel tins, crocked Manchurian ponies, Wilson’s poor medical supervision, Scott’s bad decisions, even—this made him wince—his own excessive endurance and bravery.

But surely the eeriest experience of all was reading the account of his own death. Scott’s journal entry was quoted time and again. ‘Able and willing to discuss outside subjects’? Titus could recall nothing of it—perhaps he had muttered something about his yacht, in semi-delirium. Odd, but entirely characteristic of the Owner to find that admirable. And the paintings and memorial statuettes of himself! He turned past them, averting his eyes.

Vaguely he was aware of Dr. Lash popping in and out, talking and asking questions, of the rattle of the food trolley as it came in and went out. Titus paid none of it any mind, focused with a ferocious concentration on the past. He only looked up when a slim pale hand laid itself flat on his page. “I beg your pardon?”

“Titus, you’ve been slaving away for the entire day. Do you think you would care to quit for the night? Maybe have a meal? You have to take care of yourself—”

“Hell’s bells, man, must you hover? I’m perfectly fine!” Titus jumped to his feet and to his dismay fell head-foremost onto the food trolley. He didn’t quite faint, but the black buzzing in his eyes was curiously reminiscent of it. There was the hot oily splash of soup or gravy on his chest, a tremendous clatter of falling crockery, and over it Dr. Lash shouting for help.

He came to himself in bed once more, clean and dry in fresh pyjamas, blue and white striped this time. The female doctors were there again, the plumper blonde holding his wrist while the tall dazzling brunette directed her mysterious tools at it. “Dr.—Gedeon, is it,” he murmured. “And Dr., Dr. Trask.”

“Oh, so you’re talking again,” Dr. Trask said. “And you remember our names, that’s a good sign.”

Dr. Gedeon scowled at the little machine in her hand. “He read all day yesterday? Wonderful. Very clever of you, Kev.”

“That’s unfair, Shell,” Dr. Lash said, tightlipped. “And the vid record will bear me out.”

“He said he felt perfectly fine,” Dr. Trask said.

“And Kev believed him, yeah, right.” Dr. Gedeon folded up one tool and took out another. “A man whose chief claim to fame is that he committed suicide to save his team. You wouldn’t keep a Pomeranian kenneled up this way, never mind a man used to an active lifestyle—”

“I’m giving him the dignity of a rational being. You, night and day training with the Fortie team, wouldn’t realize—”

Titus lay back and let the quarrel roll over him. He didn’t grasp what the difficulty was, and didn’t much care. In the Army he had learned to hole up when the brass had a row. Instead he assessed his surroundings again. Vaguely he remembered that while he was reading the sunshine had crept across the window and faded, an entire day’s passage. And then a period of oblivion, and now the light streamed in through the glass again, a new day. Perhaps midmorning, judging from the angle of the light. The trolley stood near the bed, laden anew with covered dishes. It would be a great pity to let the meal get cold. He slid the nearest plate off the shelf onto his knees and seized a fork, suddenly famished. Would he ever get enough food again?

Dr. Lash thumped the hospital bed rail with both hands. “All right, a walk then! But let’s try to keep the chronal displacement shock at a minimum, all right? Through the park, not the streets.”

“Shell will go along, won’t you, Shell.” Dr. Trask’s brilliant blue gaze shifted to her associate. “You can fit him into your exercise routine.”

Dr. Gedeon turned to Titus, who hastily gulped down his mouthful. “Be dressed and ready at 12:30,” she said. “And make them give you a pair of decent shoes. You can’t walk in slippers in New York—there are always jerks who don’t scoop after their dogs.”

On that gnomic statement she swept out of the room. “I’d hoped to postpone this, Titus old man,” Dr. Lash said, shaking his head. “But the ladies, God bless ‘em… At any rate, while we fit you up with some walking shoes, we can go over a couple of routines that may ease the chronal displacement for you.”

“Don’t concern yourself,” Titus said. “How difficult could a walk be?” Dr. Trask sighed at this, folding up her shining tools.

Titus’s cocky self-confidence only began to shake when he and Dr. Lash met Dr. Gedeon in the hall. She wore the most outré clothing he had ever seen on a female. Even the street beggars in Calcutta didn’t go about bare to above the knees. It was indecent, shocking—wrong! The only possible conclusion to draw was that the woman was a whore. If they allowed women to become doctors, surely it was not a very much further descent to let in whores? One respected doctors, but light-skirts were owed only contempt. Nothing in Shell’s demeanor seemed to allow disrespect, however. The contradictions inherent in the situation made him giddy. Suddenly Dr. Lash’s words, repeated over and over, sank in: “Don’t let it get to you. All that stuff, it’s unimportant, nothing to do with you. Let it roll off your back, like water off a duck. Accept, nod, and move on…”

Titus nodded at Dr. Gedeon and moved on. Dash it, there were more important things to do now. He would worry about bare knees later. Dr. Lash held the door to the stair for them. Titus followed Dr. Gedeon down and down, dozens of flights of echoing steel stairs quite empty except for themselves. “Does nobody else use this building?” he asked.

Dr. Gedeon glanced back, surprised. “Most Paticalars use the elevator—oops, sorry, Kev!”

Water off a duck, Titus said to himself. Nothing to do with me really. But he was unable to resist adding the new words to the list. Paticalar, elevator, plastic—he ought to start a notebook like the Polar scientists, and illustrate them with water-colour. “And ought I have a hat?”

“A hat?” Both moderns looked so blank, Titus immediately saw that hats were dead out of fashion. In his day a gentleman rarely stepped out of doors without some sort of head covering, summer or winter. In fact he noticed now that the entire party was free of the impedimentia an Edwardian outing would entail—no gloves or walking sticks, muffs or card-cases, hats or topees, purses or parasols. For a moment it was almost discomposing, to have nothing to fill one’s hands. But then he thought of his walks as a child, when the grown-ups had to do all the carrying, and it was deliciously freeing instead.

The stair ended at another door. Through, past a lobby beyond, and…

Titus felt his mouth go dry. He had stepped into a street as strange as the far side of the moon. And so damn busy! Machines he couldn’t name whizzed past, big and small, making noises he had no word for. People surged round him, hatless indeed, dressed in colourful grotesque garb and doing or eating or saying things that he could not name. Were those little machines on their heads, or merely elaborate hairdos? Were those scars on the bare legs and arms, or paint, or some attenuated garment? Strange smells assailed his nose, tempting appetite, revolting, attracting in turn. Colour and light poured over him too quickly for comprehension. And the noise! Worse than the beggars in Cairo, worse than Covent Garden market. The wail and clatter and roar of the 21st century slapped him in the face and drove all rational thought from his head.

He found he was clutching his companions, Dr. Lash on his left and Dr. Gedeon on his right, flank to flank as if they were breasting a mighty river in full flood. Somehow they passed together through the howling chaos to a haven, a refuge of calmness and green, and Titus became aware of Dr. Lash’s steady lecturing again. Apparently he had been talking all this while: “Don’t think about it. Ignore her. It’s all rolling off you. Has no effect, eh? Someday when you’re up to it you can easily figure it out. But now, today, you don’t have to…”

“You know,” Titus mumbled.

“Yes?”

“You know, Lash, you can be bloody damn tiresome,” Titus said, all in a breath. His vision cleared. The object in front of him was blessedly familiar. “A tree! First one I’ve seen in—” He halted, confused. Was it a year and a half, or a hundred and thirty?

“You’re feeling better,” Dr. Lash noted.

Titus nodded. The vertiginous sense of unreality seeped away fast as it had come. The vista before him now would have been familiar to a man of any era: rolling grassland studded with handsome clumps of trees. If one didn’t look beyond, at the cliff-like buildings towering above the treeline, it was an environment Titus knew down in his bones. Carefully, he didn’t look. He drew a deep happy breath, eased from a constraint he had not recognized until now.

Dr. Gedeon lifted what he realized was a small rucksack from her back—he had assumed her jacket was merely cut strangely. She took out two dumbbells, saying, “You want to set the pace, Kev?”

“I’m not going far,” Dr. Lash said. “My asthma will start up if I push it.”

“Let’s take the reservoir path then.” Dr. Gedeon clenched a weight in each small fist and began to walk briskly down the path. Titus and Dr. Lash followed.

An almost frightening sense of well-being possessed Titus. He had not felt so fit, so confident, so brimful of vigour, in ages. The dear old sun shone behind leaves as cleanly cut as paper, and birds sang with enthusiasm. A breeze blew cool and damp from the reservoir below, freighted with a slight scummy smell. Titus inhaled it like incense. He stretched his legs, striding out with long steps. Surely it would be possible to live in just the familiar bits of this new era, comforting and safe areas like this park?

Dr. Gedeon grinned at him when he caught her up, her teeth very white in her tanned face. “Great, isn’t it?”

“Yes.” Carefully he did not look down past her face. She had accurately pinpointed the medicine he needed. Perhaps she wasn’t a bogus sawbones after all.

“Hold up, you two,” Dr. Lash called. He had fallen far behind, wheezing.

Dr. Gedeon reversed course immediately. “Did you bring your inhaler?”

“Of course.” Dr. Lash appeared to be sniffing medicine from a large white tube. Concerned, Titus watched him closely. The dose did seem to help.

Dr. Gedeon said, “You’d better go straight back to the office and take an antihistamine. Shall we come back with you?”

“No, don’t bother,” Dr. Lash said. “I’ll be fine. This happens all the time,” he added to Titus.

“It shouldn’t,” Dr. Gedeon said. “You should have your condition assessed by a qualified allergist. Asthma can be a killer.”

Asthma, Titus mused—another new word. Dr. Lash brushed her concerns aside. “Keep a close eye on Titus,” he said. “Once only around the park, and then come straight back. This is his first experience, remember.”

“A walk round the park?” Titus snorted. “Don’t make me laugh, Lash.”

“I’ll take good care of him,” Dr. Gedeon said. “Now off you go.”

Only when Lash was out of sight did Titus realize how confining his fuss and mother-hen admonitions had been. Dr. Gedeon, a real medico and female to boot, had a more robust outlook, more to Titus’s taste. “I think we should run,” he said. “Fast.”

“All right. Race you to that bench!”

And she was off, surprisingly speedy in spite of a womanish rocking-horse gait that would have made a pony blush. How delightful it was to use the limbs like this! Titus made his best effort, trying to use his greater length of leg to advantage, but she beat him handily. Carrying a weight handicap, too! He felt only a moment of obscure outrage before laughter overtook him. “Bravo!”

She laughed too. “Not a real contest, against a disabled vet.”

“Ludicrous. The leg wound hasn’t bothered me in years.”

“Not till recently.” He stared in astonishment—how could anyone know that? He had hidden the disintegrating scar even from Scott and Wilson until the very end. And he knew from the books that Scott, the last expedition member to keep records, had not mentioned it. She went on, “I watched Sabrina glue you back together again, remember? One of the symptoms of scurvy is old wounds breaking out again.”

“Whatever she did patched it up fine. I couldn’t even find the scar.”

“She’s a whiz. It was worth all the cloning work, to see you trying out your leg, and feeling your toes for the first time.”

“You saw me? But, but I was alone in my room.”

She grimaced. “Titus, you’re unique and valuable—the first and possibly last man to travel through time. And not only that—you are a patient. We’ve been monitoring you all during your recovery. You have never been alone or unobserved since you arrived.”

He remembered the shiny metal tools, the gleaming examination table cleaner than anything he had ever seen. “How long have I been here?”

“You traveled to the modern era a year and a half ago.”

He stared at the trees, trying to take her words in. For eighteen months he had been clay on the wheel, dough under the rolling pin—a chunk of inert material upon which skilled hands worked. It was a sodding liberty! And surely he could not have spent all that time flat on his back in a hospital bed. He had done that in 1901, and knew well how one’s legs became weak as string and the muscles wasted away from want of use. Now his legs were a little shaky and his skin unusually pale, but otherwise he was himself, in good working order. They must have been exercising his limbs, working and testing and using his body in ways he couldn’t conceive of, with all the conscious consent one would get from the clockwork goatherd in a Swiss cuckoo clock. Returning him to consciousness day before yesterday was only the capstone of a major project—it was obvious in retrospect that his first short encounter with the 21st century, swearing on the shiny-clean table, had been unplanned. He wondered how many people were employed on the task. The thought of unseen eyes spying on him day and night made his spine crawl. “Are they watching us now?”

“Here in the park? Well, I’m in charge, watching you, but that’s all. C’mon, Titus, don’t let it worry you. There’s a lot for you to get used to. Here.” She took water bottles from her rucksack and, opening one, passed it over.

He drank, hefting the weird featherweight container. “Plastic?”

She smiled. “You’re a sharp one.” He felt absurdly chuffed at this praise from a modern.

They walked on at a slower pace. The path was narrow here, crowded closer to the tall wrought-iron palings of the park fence by trees and brush. Beyond the palings was a city street. It was a quieter one, without the surging crowds and thundering vehicular traffic near the first building, but still Titus felt like a lion safe behind the zoo bars. “Are those commercial buildings?”

“Those tall ones over there, you mean? Oh no—co-ops, I think. Damn! What I mean is, they’re residences. People live there.” He knew his face was blank with ignorance, because she waved her hands in rhythm with her stride, trying to explain. “I mean separately, not all together. Condos. Cells. Divisions.” She groped for more synonyms.

The penny dropped. “You mean, it’s a block of flats.”

“Is that what you call it? Okay then!” She blew out a relieved breath. “I should’ve listened better, when Kev was going through his British-versus-American word lists with us.”

Titus smiled. “’Two countries, divided by a common tongue.’”

“Exactly. It’s surprising how hard it can be to communicate clearly.”

“And that.” The architecture was so powerfully familiar he could hardly believe it. “A church.”

“Yep.” She peered through the railings at the signboard on the pavement across the street. “Saint Somebody’s Noontime Service. And will you look at that sermon! ‘Is God a Fortie?’”

Titus’s religion was nominal, no more than a tradition of his class. But the organ music pouring forth from the open doors of the church drew him in like a hooked fish. “I know that tune!” He hummed along, and then sang the words that rose unbidden from the depths of memory. “‘Crown him with many crowns, the Lamb upon his throne… ’”

Dr. Gedeon sighed. “You must be a Christian. Everybody was, back then. You want to go in, don’t you? And I’m dying to hear that sermon.”

He nodded. She found a gate, and they crossed the street, she holding him back until a gap opened in the traffic. But Titus took the lead up the steps into the dark Romanesque arch of the portico, and dragged Dr. Gedeon into the haven of the rear pew.

A number of wrongnesses immediately struck him. Electric lights dangled from the arched ceiling and spotlighted the stained glass windows—Titus could not remember ever seeing a church fitted with electricity. The windows themselves were gratingly ugly in their modernity. Uplifted in the homily, the voice of the celebrant rang jangly and loud, amplified in some uncouth modern way. The dozen members of the congregation were almost blasphemously dressed. Titus gulped down a deep breath and tried to concentrate.

“—not only are they ineffable. As Jehovah in the Old Testament had his chosen prophets, the Forties communicate through those who can understand them—in their case the scientists and astronomers who have translated their message…”

Titus scowled, uncomprehending. What were the Forties—the time period, the 2040s? Dear God, what had happened to the faith of our fathers! But then the music rolled from the pipe organ, a hymn from his boyhood. The last time he had heard this tune was at Sunday morning prayers in the little stone church in Gestingthorpe village, where as the young squire of the manor he had presided in the family pew. Homesickness rose up in his throat. His soul balked like an over-tried horse at the new and ugly and strange. He ached to go home, to the place and time where such songs were part of daily life. Though he knew the words he could not join in.

It was the closing hymn. The priest pronounced a benediction, and the congregation straggled down the aisle and out into the sunshine. Dr. Gedeon fidgeted but did not rise, while Titus struggled with his misery. The priest, saying goodbye to the tardiest old lady, noticed the new faces in his flock and came down the aisle. Dr. Gedeon smiled up at him. “Just visiting.”

“You’re very welcome all the same,” the priest said. He was a tall balding man in a dog collar, the image of a regimental padre.

Dr. Gedeon stood up and shepherded Titus out into the aisle. “I’m so thrilled to hear a homily about the Fortie project!”

“It’s on everybody’s mind, so every denomination has to throw in their two cents’ worth. There’s even a rumor the Pope is writing an encyclical.”

“I think Titus here is an Anglican,” she said in a helpful spirit. “And I’m Shulamith Gedeon.”

“So you’re the dancing doctor! I’m Rev. Pollard. We call it Episcopal in this country, but that’s just terminology.”

“Shulamith?” Titus’s jaw slacked with astonishment. ‘Shell’ must be a nickname, just like ‘Titus’ was. “What on earth kind of a name is that?”

“Jewish, isn’t it?” Rev. Pollard said.

“My grandmother,” Dr. Gedeon said. “And my father was a Santeria wizard from Bermuda. So I really don’t fit in with your churchy stuff—though the building’s absolutely gorgeous.” She looked up at the stained glass windows.

The priest smiled with gentle pride. “All the original Art Moderne glass too—”

Titus wanted to laugh. “How did you ever become a doctor? A nigger, a Jew, and a woman!”

To his complete astonishment Dr. Gedeon turned on her heel and slapped him across the face. He would have tumbled over if the priest had not caught him by the elbow. She continued turning, marching away out the door, her thick strange shoes plopping angrily against the stone floor. “Did I say something wrong?”

Rev. Pollard stared at him from under his grey eyebrows. “You were very rude.”

“Was I?” The padre’s cold disapproval whipped the blood to Titus’s cheeks as a blow could not. I can’t go back, Titus realized. The world he had known was gone forever, never to be found again. It had been a natural impulse but an utterly false step, to pursue familiar old things like this church service—to wind himself into a cocoon that resembled, more or less, the past. To retreat rather than advance was shameful, a coward’s ploy. He had assumed the job was to retain what he had always been, the well-bred Edwardian soldier and explorer. Now he saw he had been pitchforked into a war, the scope of which made his heart sink: the war to make a life for himself in the year 2045, a fight he had no choice but to wage and win. “You’re quite right,” he almost gabbled in his haste. “I must beg her pardon.”

He sprinted down the dim aisle, through the narthex and out into the summer sunshine, acutely aware that she was fleeter than he. If she had run beyond view, he would never be able to follow. He cursed his own helplessness, and grimly promised himself it should be short-lived. But there she was in the street, standing next to a big shiny-yellow beetle. “In you go,” she said as he ran down the steps. “Let’s go back to the TTD.”

“In?” He realized it was a vehicle, a fantastically futuristic motor of some sort, and she was holding the door open. Awkwardly he climbed in. She would have banged the door on him, but he kept it from latching and ducked his head through the window to grab her sleeve. “Doctor—Shell—I apologise. I’m not sure what I said wrong, but I’ll do my best to learn. Please—give me a chance.”

“The PTICA-TTD, at 93rd,” she was saying to the driver. “Look Titus, it’s not your fault, I know. But even though you don’t look it, you’re a sexist, racist, anti-Semitic old fart! So let go my arm, okay?”

The grinning driver made a tasteless remark in what Titus recognized as Hindi. Automatically he flung the fellow a viperish oath picked up during his Indian service, and went on: “You can’t send me back alone in this thing. I’ll suffer from chronal displacement, just like Dr. Lash is afraid of. I’ll have the blithering vapours. I’ll get lost. I’ll—I’ll be robbed by the driver.”

The cabdriver, cowed by amazement for the moment, seemed unlikely to do anything of the sort. But Dr. Gedeon sighed. “I suppose Kev would never let me forget it.” She pulled the door open again.

Titus made room for her on the slick seat—plastic again, they must love the substance. And, God! “I’m sorry, I didn’t ask if I could call you Shell,” he said quickly.

“What?” Her grey eyes were blank with astonishment.

“It’s an unwarranted liberty—isn’t it?”

“Goodness, that’s not important. I only assist Sabrina with your treatment, so we don’t have a formal doctor-patient relationship. Keep on calling me Shell. Although I know it gives Kev a charge when you call him Dr. Lash, so maybe you should keep that up.”

“I will. Shell, I’ll find my feet as soon as I can—”

The vehicle lurched into sudden vehement motion and then screeched to a halt, flinging him against the sliding window that separated the driver from the passenger compartment. The driver turned, shrilling, “Careful! Son of a fool, hold onto the handle!”

Horns blared. Titus obeyed, cursing the driver comprehensively to the third generation. The seemingly solid handhold under his fingers suddenly gave way with an ominous click as some mechanism in the body of the door activated. The door swung perilously open out into unsupported space, taking him with it.

“No, Titus! Not that one!” Shell reached across him and pulled the door to. Titus got a terrifying glimpse of the roadway speeding past not a foot below, before she slammed the door shut.

The vehicle swerved wildly as the driver leaned on the horn while turning to abuse them. “You destroy my beautiful taxi!”

“Sorry!”

“Will you keep your eye on the road and drive!” Shell yelled at the driver. “And you, Titus, don’t touch anything! Just sit!” She pushed him back into his place and with her other hand touched a button or control. A restraining strap slid out of a recess and clasped itself round his torso and waist, pinning him courteously but firmly to the seat. “My God, Kev will wet himself…”

The vehicle barreled along at an impossible pace, fast as a railway engine but darting in and out like a fish. Every moment new collisions and fresh disaster seemed imminent. Lights blinked in a blare of colour, metal hulls glittered like talons, and the traffic roared its hunger. Titus felt that dizzying disorientation creeping over him again. He licked his dry lips and clutched his hands together in his lap where Shell had placed them for safety. He stared at the turbaned back of the seething driver’s head, reasoning away his discomfort. This driver is not a man of unusual gifts, he told himself. I’ve driven motors myself, just not as fast—and the road was empty! I could manage this vehicle. It can’t be difficult, if a native can do it. I could learn. “You see why I need to learn,” he said hardily. “As long as I don’t know what’s what, I’m a danger, to myself and others.”

“You’re preaching to the choir, Titus.” Shell slumped against the seat in not-entirely-exaggerated exhaustion, her short blonde curls escaping from their headband. “You’re going to need a minimum of information before you can even begin to learn. But give yourself some slack, okay? Take your time. The 21st century isn’t going anywhere. We don’t have to do it all today.”

“You teach him,” the driver snarled. “The fool, the idiot! He cause an accident to my taxi, I sue!”

“What is ‘sue’?” Titus demanded of Shell. “It sounds like some hell-and-tommy impertinence!”

“I’ll tell you later,” Shell said. “Look, here we are, thank God! One more word out of you, driver, and I’ll report you to the taxi commission. No, Titus, don’t pull like that! Let me unbuckle it—oh, all right, unbuckle it yourself. You push this bit right here, and voilà. Yes, yes, here’s your fare, and the hell with you, pal. That’s right! and if you don’t like the tip you can stuff it up your ass and set it afire.”

Titus’s mouth dropped open again. In all his wide travels, he had never heard such red-blooded invective from the lips of a female. A hard-bitten cavalry trooper could say no better. Torn between admiration and horror, Titus followed Shell inside.

* * * *

Titus began the new regime the very next morning by stacking all the antique books back onto their cart, and rolling it out into the hallway. He wanted to add a label, the sort they put on steamer trunks: “Not wanted on voyage.” He had learned everything he needed to know about the past. Onwards, to the present! He capped the gesture by demanding the morning paper. “You do still have newspapers?”

“Not paper papers,” Dr. Lash said. “I mean, not usually printed on paper.”

“What do they print them on then?”

“Screens, old man. Like this.” He tipped the sleek little black machine he held, so that Titus could see the square glowing window on the front, small as a postcard. It looked nothing at all like what Titus would call a screen—screens were for fireplaces, to shield the glare. “And trust me, Titus—you would not understand a newspaper. It’s too soon for you to dive into current affairs. Wouldn’t it be easier to start with a précis of world history for the past century and a half? Work yourself up to the present day?”

Titus knew this was only common sense. Nevertheless he felt it was time to be bloody-minded. He had pretty well proven that he could do anything he set his will to. “I can do both. I know it.”

“At least let me find you a paper newspaper,” Dr. Lash pleaded. “We don’t have to learn to surf the net today. Let me print out a paper edition of the Times.”

“The Times? Truly?”

“The New York Times. But there’s no reason why other papers shouldn’t be available too.”

“The only Times is the London Times,” Titus growled. When Lash went out, he pulled a piece of paper from under his pillow. He had found it in the wastepaper basket of his bathroom—from the printing on the outside it must have once formed the wrapping for a roll of toilet tissue. Now Titus started his list on it. To ‘plastic’ and ‘elevator’ he now added ‘screen’ and ‘net.’ He was going to have to get a proper notebook, and a pen rather than a pencil. And no more of this keeling over like a stunned ox from swotting at the books. He would pace himself, sensibly.

Dr. Lash returned triumphant. “You’re in luck, Titus! Jackie had last Sunday’s New York Times printed for her son’s history project. A couple days old should make no difference to you, eh?”

“I’ll overlook the deficiency this time,” Titus said with mock severity. He spread the weird undersized paper out on the counterpane. But within the hour he had to admit Dr. Lash was right. The New York Times was almost completely incomprehensible: not because any given word was beyond him, but because he had no context in which to place each sentence. What was the pork-barrel? If they were building a freeway, then it should be free—so why was funding it cause for vituperation? Who was the Internet AG, and how did his indictments combat Fortie frauds? It had been the same when he listened to Rev. Pollard’s sermon yesterday. And the paper was too small and felt odd. Frustrated, he tossed it aside.

“Had enough, huh?” Shell came in with an armload of brightly-coloured books and magazines. “Maybe these will go down better. Kev’s been buying up antique children’s texts and reprints of old comics.” She balanced the stack on the chair.

“Children’s books? You must have a poor opinion of my intellect.”

“Not at all. But you’re not interested in scholarly analysis or minutiae. You want the broad overview—just enough to go on with till you find your feet. Did you know that to understand a written text you have to already know seventy percent of the words? Some TTD expert worked it all out that this level of difficulty should be about right for you now.”

Not quite right, Titus noted. Not seventy percent of the words, but seventy percent of the knowledge. Grasping seventy percent of the meaning was the fence he was finding rather high. In any case the size of the stack was disheartening. “What I really want,” he said boldly, “is another walk. Longer this time.”

“Sorry, Titus. I’m booked today, and so are you, with that reception this evening. Let me just give your vitals a check-over, okay? Sabrina is in consult all day today, so I promised her I’d do it.”

“I don’t want to over-work myself again with the books,” he said, pressing his advantage. “Walking is good for me. You said so yourself.”

“Oh, for God’s sake.” But she was smiling as she consulted the glowing screen of the little machine in her hand. “They didn’t tell me you were persuasive. Tomorrow, how about.”

“I shall look forward to it. Oh, and what is—” He consulted his list. “‘Paticalar’?”

“Oh! The initials PTICA stand for Pan-Terran Interstellar Contact Agency. Everyone calls it the Fortie Project, though. This building you’re in, everyone here, is the Time Travel Division, the TTD. And people who work for PTICA wind up being Paticalars. A silly name, but a newsie coined it in ‘39 and it stuck.”

This was not very helpful, but Shell was obviously in a hurry to some other appointment, so he let her go. Instead he made a note of the names, PTICA and TTD. With the prospect of another outing comfortably in hand, Titus turned to the stack of books. He had never been of a scholarly turn. Now he found the large letterface and the shiny coloured pictures in A BOY’S BRITISH HISTORY soothing. King Arthur, William the Conqueror, Henry the Eighth, oh yes. There will always be an England. It was disappointing that Scott and his Expedition didn’t rate a chapter, but merely a paragraph. And good God, Baden-Powell’s Boy Scouts project had flourished! Then wars and more wars—Titus groaned aloud. He had missed all the fun, curse it.

“Ask me any questions you like,” Dr. Lash said, coming in.

Titus preferred to quiz Shell because she was less of a fuss, but it would be foolish to carry prejudice too far. “Lash, what is this Fortie business you’re all on about?”

“You could say that the Forties are the reason you’re here, old man. They’re certainly the raison d’être for the entire PTICA-TTD.”

“Then they’re very important. Come then, tell!”

“I’m trying to choose the best way, Titus. Have you ever seen a film? A movie, a motion picture?”

“Of course,” Titus snapped. “They took cinematographs of the Polar Expedition, you know.”

“So then you think you’d be comfortable viewing an educational film?”

“About this Fortie business? Certainly!”

“Hmm, there’s enough time.” Titus noticed that Lash consulted not a pocket watch or a wristwatch, but his little machine. In 1912 a watch was the badge of competence and responsibility, yearned for in boyhood and carefully kept in later life, but obviously customs had altered. Instinctively he felt in his trouser pocket for the watch he always carried, the most accurate timekeeper in the Polar party, but it wasn’t there. Lash was saying, “And it would be good if you had something to converse with the Ambassador about. But you’re sure it won’t be upsetting, Titus? There will be pictures of your rescue—”

The mere suggestion made his blood rise. “Don’t coddle me, Lash. I insist on seeing this film.”

“Well, let’s risk it. While you get ready, Titus, let me give you a brief summary of the phenomenon. The first contact with extraterrestrial intelligence in 2015 set the world ablaze with excitement…”

Attending with only half an ear, Titus put on his shoes. He was rather ashamed that he’d fallen into this habit of tuning poor old Lash’s blather right out, but at least Lash’s self-importance blinded him to it. He led the way to the stairwell and briskly down the metal stairs while Lash trailed behind. Titus felt like a terrier straining at the leash, urging the slow-footed human along.

But instead of pushing through the big double glass doors, Dr. Lash turned the other way in the lobby. The single steel door he chose gave onto a plaza on the other side of the building. It was a fine hot day, blazing with sunshine, and beneath the shade of leafy trees were booths and stands and placards and bright-clad people. “A market,” Titus hazarded. “Like in Egypt.”

“Not a bad guess,” Dr. Lash said. “But this is a marketplace of protesters and cranks, in the main. Better to let them have their say here, where PTICA has some control over the process. Ignore them all, old man. After the film you’ll know what’s what.”

The doctor linked an arm through his. Titus suppressed the impulse to pull free. The booths and placards did look beastly dull. Nothing edible or alive or interesting was on offer, but only leaflets. Titus remembered with brief nostalgia the teeming markets of Bombay. He had bought heavy silver bracelets for Lilian and Violet, and—

Dr. Lash suddenly stopped dead. “The brass-balled nerve of the fellow! No, this is too much! Titus, stand right here. Don’t move an inch, all right? I’m just going to fetch the police.”

“The police? I—” But Lash was gone, darting away through the press. Titus stood as instructed, and stared at the cause of Lash’s ire. It looked like just another set of placards, presided over by a lean old man absurdly dressed in pale pink. The fellow was shouting some service or product and passing out leaflets.

“—safety for you and yours, when the aliens come,” he said rapidly. “Condos burrowed into the rock on Easter Island, the most isolated place on earth.” The people filtering through the plaza didn’t pause to listen, even when the old coster thrust leaflets into their hands.

Titus’s motionless stance made him very obvious. “How d’you do, sir?” the old fellow greeted him. “Here you are.”

Titus took the offered leaflet. “What’s it all in aid of then?”

“Don’t ever trust what those PTICA people tell you, sir.” His watery old eyes shone with sincerity. “What are they getting out of this? You think about that, sir, because you’ll find it’s the key to everything. They’re all grinding their own axe. A secret agenda, do you understand me, sir? They don’t have our interests at heart at all.”

Titus wondered if he meant Shell or Dr. Lash. It came to him that this fellow was the first modern he had spoken to, who wasn’t involved in his rescue. But the old fellow was rattling on: “They tell us the Forties are too far away to be dangerous. But, come! Nobody knows what they’re really after. Everybody agrees on that. Do you want to risk your family, sir, your children, on the unfounded assumption that they’re nice folks? Safety first, that’s my policy.”

“And a damned craven one,” Titus interjected.

The salesman evidently didn’t know what ‘craven’ meant, because he didn’t pause. “Easter Island, the most remote place on earth, that’s where we’re erecting the first series of shelters, sir. And construction is already beginning under the Antarctic ice cap—”

That one word was enough to galvanize Titus. “In Antarctica? Where’s your base camp? Has the British government approved this incursion?”

“Britain?” The old man was momentarily derailed. “What do the Brits have to do with it?”

Conceding Amundsen’s prior claim still stuck in Titus’s craw, but in justice he had to add, “Or the Norwegians.”

But suddenly the old man clapped his placard together, scooping up the stack of leaflets and shoving them into his pocket. Without a word more he began to scuttle away through the crowd. Titus heard a distant shout, “He’s running for it!”

That was Lash’s voice! Without thinking about it, Titus lunged and clapped a strong hand onto the old man’s shoulder. The placard went flying. The fellow squealed and writhed like a pig, no more that one would expect from a professed coward. “Let go!”

“Oh, buck up,” Titus said in disgust. But, how odd—was that a fountain pen he was pulling out of his breast pocket?

Too fast for Titus’s unaccustomed eye to take in, a pellet or stream or projectile shot from the pen’s end, hitting a passing woman squarely in the stern. She whirled, teeth bared in outrage. “Tep!” she yelled.

A host of divergent irrelevancies instantly took charge of his thought processes, so that Titus stood there clutching the pink shoulder of his captive like a dummy. Perhaps ‘tep’ was a curse, his first modern swear word? The pen could not be a deadly weapon—the enraged female victim had taken no injury. What was she saying? It was too fast and impassioned for him to grasp, but she sounded damned stroppy. Perhaps the pen was like pistols, fairly harmless at a distance but dangerous up close. Not for the first time, it struck him that his ignorance was downright dangerous. The old blighter was pressing the thing up to his ribs. At point-blank range even a popgun might be annoying—

A huff of surprised breath escaped him. That hurt! Some sort of electrical shock, was it? A fiery pain had run from the pen right through his body. Without knowing how it had come about he found he had let go and fallen reeling to one knee. A weapon, by Heaven, and surprisingly effective.

But the enraged woman was keeping the fellow at bay, yammering like all the Furies unleashed. Titus felt a new and profound sympathy for her attitude. Astonishing, how respect for grey hairs could evaporate under the stimulus of a low trick like that. He took the fellow’s wrist in both hands and hauled himself upright, digging his thumbs hard into the tendons along the way and twisting the hand open. The little cylinder dropped clattering to the pavement, and the angry woman immediately snatched it up, snarling.

Sputtering, the old man took a swing at him with his other hand, but his arm was too short to connect. “An old cove like you shouldn’t be so feisty,” Titus observed sardonically. “Might you consider yourself overpowered? I’m a foot taller and two stone heavier than you, after all. And twenty years younger—” He bit the words off short. Not true, if one calculated by the birth date!

A pair of women in blue uniforms swept up on either side of him and collared the captive before Titus could say more. “Thank you, sir,” one of them said to him in passing.

Dr. Lash trotted up panting, and dragged him aside. “I didn’t mean you, Titus! Dear God, you shouldn’t have waded in like that. It was very dangerous!”

“Stuff and nonsense—nobody was much hurt.” He rubbed the place on his ribs where the tingling pain was passing off, and nodded at the agitated little group.

The old man drooped in the grasp of one female constable, while the other waved a black machine. The enraged woman had finally slowed to comprehensible speed, saying, “Damn right I’ll press charges!”

Everything seemed to be under control. Reluctantly Titus allowed Lash to shepherd him away from the fuss. “What’s it all about, then?”

“This is the fourth time we’ve caught this old fraud here, selling shelters against alien invasions.”

“Under the Antarctic ice cap,” Titus recalled.

“Is that the latest? Naturally there’s nothing being built there. The scheme’s fake as a wooden nickel. To have that sort of thing here give the impression that we endorse it. Thank God nobody seems to have fallen for it today.”

None of this made sense to Titus. The familiar sense of overload was creeping over him again, triggered perhaps by the crowded plaza and its excitements. He trailed after Dr. Lash, masking his discomfort behind a cavalryman’s reserve. Surely they were nearly there, wherever their destination was? They were approaching the building that formed the other side of the plaza now. Titus had to make a deliberate effort not to hurry up to its big glass doors.

Resolutely sauntering at Dr. Lash’s heels, Titus had a perfect view of the portals swinging open at Lash’s approach, without a hand laid to them. The wonder of it nearly cracked his mask, but he refused to demand how the mechanism worked right now. Later, perhaps.

Inside the crowd was thicker yet, clustering at one end of the lobby. Titus was weakly grateful when Dr. Lash bypassed the crush, opening an inconspicuous door behind a pillar. Beyond was a vast dim space. “Mind your step!”

“It’s a bleeding cliff.” Titus peered over the railing.

“Not at all, there’s a stairway to your left. Let’s find a seat before the crowd comes in.”

As his eyes adjusted, Titus realized it was not really so dark. Not until they were descending the stair did he grasp that these were seats forming the steep slope. This was a theatre, a very oddly-shaped one. He sat down in the seat Lash indicated. “But where’s the stage? The curtain?”

“This is a film theater, Titus.” Lash dropped into the seat beside him.

“Film theatres need curtains too,” Titus grumbled. But the crowd was filtering in now, entering from the lower doors. And a bunch of trippers they were, too—children with jujubes, women carrying big bags or sniveling tots, men sipping from cups. It was like an outing to Bournemouth. A long time seemed to drag by, before everyone took their place.

There seemed to be no screen, but only a smooth blank wall, six storeys high. The seating sloped steeply enough so that every member of the audience had an unobstructed view. The lights faded slowly to a pitch dark, filled only with the anticipatory rustle of the crowd, the crackle of candy wrappers, and the whimper of a baby.

Violins, a swooping bit of romantic fluff by one of those German composers. A small spot of light appeared in the darkness, so small that Titus almost mistook it for a trick of his eyes. With a sudden swoosh the spot grew into a familiar blue globe. “What’s all the cotton-wool round it, though?”

Titus felt rather than saw Lash’s glance. “Clouds. That isn’t a model, Titus. It’s a motion picture of the Earth itself, taken from a satellite.”

Questions surged up in Titus’s chest: How did they loft anything so high? Who was running the camera? Since when did they take pictures in colour? But the entire wall suddenly exploded into light and life, and it was as if he were hurtling in a taxi driven by that Hindu again. The Earth whizzed by, six storeys high and tipping alarmingly until his stomach heaved. He gripped the arms of the seat and swallowed down the bile. It’s only a blistering film, he reminded himself. This speed and size—it’s a deliberate effect, damn them.

A voice spoke and made him jump. So they had learned to add sound to the moving pictures, the clever little buggers! Why had no one done it in 1912? But he wasn’t going to give way to distraction. He forced himself to put amazement aside for the moment, and pay attention strictly to what was being said.

“…LN-GRO, the most powerful gamma-ray space telescope in existence,” the voice was saying. “The pulsar is a natural stellar phenomenon modified by alien intelligences to carry a message, transmitted in a series of gamma rays bursts. The message was enormously long, taking three years to capture in its entirety. It took another ten years to translate it.”

Incomprehensible patterns of light and dark squares, moving back to reveal that they were merely depictions upon screens, the glowing rectangular screens of machines like those Shell and Lash used. Then the image moved back yet again, to show people sitting and standing at those machines, puzzling over the patterns. An instant soundless dissolution, and the huge image split into nine images—some of them continuing to depict scientists staring at screens, and others showing things Titus could not name, machines working or people doing things. For a moment he was totally at sea.

The music buzzed, busy and driving and joyous, giving Titus the clue he needed. He blinked with tardy understanding. The film was depicting a process: thought, research, the work of many people all driving towards a solution to the translation problem. He had never thought of telling a history in this way, but he dimly perceived the power of it. If only he knew more of what was being shown! To his astonishment the film’s voice intoned, “A minimum of information is necessary for comprehension to even begin.” Shell had told him the same thing. It must be a proverb of the era.

But the film was going on about the mysterious star message, the possible interpretations of the signals and the final conclusion as to what they meant: “An invitation?” Titus muttered. “Someone in the stars wants us to come to tea, perhaps.”

“Shh,” Dr. Lash whispered. “Watch, they’ll explain.”

“—an invitation, and perhaps the means to get there,” the voice said. “Albert Einstein told us that it was impossible to travel at the speed of light. But the Forties’ novel theories of space and time have showed us how to warp space—and time. Their clues have helped us make theory into reality, and build a faster-than-light interstellar drive. The final proof was pulling a historical figure from the past to the present. This personage was carefully chosen from a spot where nothing was alive: on the Antarctic icepack, to ensure that not even an insect or a plant seed was inadvertently removed from the biosphere loop. Precisely placed in space and time on the 80th parallel on March 16th, 1912, his body has never been found. The bodies of his companions are still entombed in the glacier which will carry them out to their final ocean resting place in another hundred years, so that no question arises of some plant or algae being deprived of the nourishment of his component atoms…”

It was a single image now, of this door into the past shining with weird white light. Titus stared in jaw-dropping horror at the colossal screen. It was himself up there six storeys tall, falling through that door, the Rock of Ages cleft from the other side: the slow endless drop into blank whiteness. And not his clean whole current self, but the emaciated and gangrened cripple, stiffly clad in frozen mitts and tattered windproof, collapsed forward out of the glowing portal onto the gleaming white floor in a flurry of blizzard-driven snow. Chunks of ice, or perhaps bits of his frozen flesh, shattered off to melt into brownish disgusting puddles. The researchers in the film cheered loud and long, clapping each other on the back at this living proof of their theories. Dr. Trask and a horde of other medicos armoured in gloves and masks dashed forward to the rescue, turning the icy dying thing over, their shining tools poised.

Titus gazed up at his own face sideways on the screen. Several tots in the audience wailed at the horrific sight. The frozen white lips had writhed back, revealing a red-black slice of rotting gums and bloody teeth. Scarred with frostbite, the skin blackened by the wind and pocked with scurvy pustules, the countenance was inert and deformed as an Egyptian mummy’s. The back of Titus’s nose and throat constricted at a powerful memory of the nauseating aroma, the overwhelming rotten-sweet stench of his own body shivering into decay around him as he dragged himself along. “God, I shall be sick,” he gulped.

“I beg your pardon?”

Titus lurched to his feet. He had to get out of here, before the bubble of vomit rose to the top. He almost fell down the stair, his leaden feet catching on the carpet, trapped in a nightmarish slowness. Above him the music blared triumph and joy, and the film’s voice boomed, “…Captain Lawrence Oates, heroic explorer lost in Antarctica…” And where was the blasted door?

He pushed through and fell flat gasping onto the carpet. Dr. Lash, close behind, nearly tripped over him. “Hang on, Titus, I’m paging the doctors. Don’t try to move!”

Of course this was intolerable. Titus immediately sat up, breathing hard. He wiped his clammy forehead on his sleeve. “Oh God. Oh bloody fucking hell. Lash—that was I!”

“But you knew that, Titus. I told you, it would explain all about your journey here.”

“I don’t understand. I do not understand.” With self-contempt Titus listened to the weakness, almost the whimper, in his own words. Was he actually unable to grasp the knowledge offered to him, the way a dog is unable to manipulate a pencil? Were these people so far beyond him? Seventy percent, they said. Get 70 percent by the throat, and the rest will come. He reeled to his feet and walked, staggering a little, ignoring Lash’s protests. He was a soldier, and a soldier could not give in. This was the true war, the one he was going to have to fight for the rest of his life: the battle to adapt and understand and survive here. No surrender, damn it. Never!

The lobby was thronged. Faces swam and spun past him, busy and self-absorbed. Thank Heaven people were unlikely to recognize him, thawed out, cleaned, and healed as he was now. Moving, using his arms and legs even in blind purposelessness, was the solution he instinctively clung to. The creed in the Antarctic was, if a man could walk, he could live. And it did not fail him. His stomach steadied and his courage returned a little. When a familiar quacking blatted out as he passed, he turned to look.

It was a duck call, just as he’d thought. A very young black man was blowing on the short wooden tube for the benefit of a gaggle of children, and making a damned poor job of it. The raspberry noise he made was embarrassing. “Now, what does this call say?” the young man asked them.

The only reply was giggling. Titus couldn’t stand it. “Give me that.” Without waiting for a reply he held his hand out over the heads of the seated children. Such was the power of his expectation that the young Negro meekly handed the duck call over. Was it done, to call them Negroes? In his day Titus had flouted class and race divisions not from any burning sense of the brotherhood of man, but in pure anarchic bloody-mindedness. The egalitarian quality of modern society caught him on the hop, as discomposing as kicking a huge weight that suddenly was no longer there. He held the little tube to his lips and blew. The call was not quite the same shape as the long thin ones he was used to, and there was something entirely novel about its innards. But it was not too odd, and he had been well-taught by the old gamekeeper at Gestingthorpe when he was a boy. A magnificent and utterly authentic-sounding quack echoed through the lobby, the cry of the mallard patriarch in his pond. Titus could almost see the ducks gliding in towards the water. His palms itched for his old fowling gun.

“Oh, nice!” the young man said. “And what does it say, can anybody guess?”

“Hello!” “Or g’bye!”

“When a duck says quack, that’s what it means, probably,” the young man said. “But when he blows the call, what does he mean?” He pointed at Titus. “Sir, why do you say ‘quack’? What do you want?”

Titus handed the duck call back. “Roast duck for dinner.”

The black man beamed at his audience. “So we might know what the Forties are saying, but we might not know what they actually intend, you get what I mean? If the ducks knew that this gentleman was a hungry hunter they wouldn’t come when he calls …”

A boxful of noisemakers, animal calls, and other toys had been passed round the group, and the nippers seized this moment to try them all out at once. Wincing at the cacophony, Titus moved off. He saw now that the lobby of the building was fitted out with a series of displays and exhibits. How slack of him, to have come in earlier without noticing!

Titus halted to stare without comprehension at a spidery metal erection taller than he was. It was asymmetric and gawky, a derrick adorned with shiny rectangular boxes and flaps and the odd white plastic plate here and there. “A model of the trans-solar gamma ray satellite,” Dr. Lash said at his elbow.

Putting the pieces together was like assembling a jig-saw puzzle cut out of granite. No wonder they’d chosen children’s books for him. “The satellite received the message,” Titus said slowly. “The message from somebody out in space, in what’s-the-place.”

“Tau Ceti, that’s the name of the star system. Yes, it was the newsies that dubbed the aliens the Forties—because the gamma-ray source was numbered 4T 0091, you know.”

Titus didn’t know, but wasn’t going to say so. He strolled on towards the next exhibit, which was made up of black boxes stacked in tiers around rows of chairs. All the chairs were occupied by rapt people, but someone stood up to leave and Lash nudged him forward. As Titus took his place in the semicircle of boxes, the sound enveloped him—a thump or pulse or syncopation. He looked up, and on a large screen directly above their heads was colour, washes of colour throbbing from red to yellow and back again to blue. Neither sound nor picture made the least bit of sense, and Titus sat in mystification for several minutes before he noticed the words crawling past on the ceiling at the edge of the coloured lights. Admiring the ingenuity of the system prevented him from actually reading for another couple of minutes. How did they make the words creep right round in a circle? A cine-projector could only project in a straight line, could it not? Look as he would, he couldn’t even spot the projector. But finally he was able to absorb what the words were saying. “So this is it? This is what the Forties sent, this light and sound? Coy little creatures, aren’t they!”

“More precisely, this is one of the interpretations we’ve made of their binary signals,” Dr. Lash said.

Titus could not imagine how an invitation could be extracted from this. Or advice on how to travel to Tau Ceti. But he remembered the film, how many thinkers laboured for years at it. What damned smart people these were! He felt both pride and an uneasy inadequacy.

In his world, courage had been the paramount virtue. Now the rules had changed, and he had a distinct sense that courage was well down on the list. Look at that leaflet chap out in the plaza, for instance. What did they value nowadays? Communication, perhaps—being able to talk to unknown star-beings, and children, and yes, even the occasional time-travelling Polar explorer. Suddenly he felt a feverish desire to get back to those books Shell had brought. He had a lot of catching up to do, no leisure to idle about with tourists. “Shall we go back now?”

“Had enough, eh? I don’t blame you.” Lash sighed with relief. It was only when they got outdoors that Titus saw the white vehicles waiting at the kerb flashing their red and yellow lights, and Dr. Trask hovering with a stretcher crew at her back. “I told you I was paging them,” Lash defended himself when Titus glared at him. “It’s our job to keep a close eye on you, old man.”

In the tone of a nanny dangling a toy before a baby Dr. Trask cooed, “A ride in the ambulance will do you good.”

“I’m going to walk back,” Titus told her, and strode off across the plaza. Lash, and all of them, meant him only good, Titus was sure. But the closeness of their care, the modern obsession with safety and security, weighed on him like chains. He remembered now that Shell had mentioned he was closely observed. Even now Lash was trotting behind, blathering.

“Are you still watching me somehow, Lash?” Titus interrupted him. “I won’t have it!”

Dr. Lash frowned. “Shell is such a chatterbox, I’m ashamed for her. My boy, you’ve only returned to the land of the living for a couple days. It’s our job to keep a close eye on you. This is, count them, your fourth day of waking life in the 21st century. Be reasonable!”

Titus could not deny it. But he could refuse to concede defeat. He stalked tight-lipped into their own building, Lash panting behind like an overweight lap dog. “The elevator for me,” he wheezed. “How about it, Titus?”

“Instead of the stairs? A pleasure.” Titus thawed instantly at the prospect of being initiated into yet another modern mystery. Tall panels slid aside, revealing themselves to be doors. The room beyond was very small. “Nowhere to sit,” he remarked as he followed Lash in.

“We’ll only be in here for moments,” Dr. Lash said. “Thirty-nine,” he added, mysteriously. Titus noticed that the discreet digits 39 lit up in blue on a wall panel a moment after Lash’s spoken words. The metal doors slid shut, and only the discreet murmur of an engine betrayed any motion. When the doors opened, a disembodied voice made him start by sweetly announcing, “Thirty-nine.” So machines these days could talk and be talked to! And there was the familiar corridor with the door of his own chamber standing ajar at the far end.

“Delightful,” Titus admitted. “Better by far than hauling up all those stairs. But what’s this?”

“Hi, Titus!” Dr. Trask popped out from a room just behind. The anticipatory gleam in her sea-blue eyes would make a cavalry brigade falter. “Did I mention that an ambulance ride would be faster, too? Just step in here for a moment—I left an entire surgical board meeting just for you.” She held her stethoscope up.

“I’m fine! Lash, call these harpies off!”

At his other elbow Shell said, “Harpies? I’m hurt, Titus. Is that nice? I thought you were going to learn modern manners.” He babbled apologies until he saw the twinkle in her eye and realized she was jesting. By then they had him jockeyed onto the examination table, tapping and probing with their shiny tools.

He made an effort to be gracious. “I quite appreciate the work you’ve put into my restoration. I very much enjoy having use of my limbs. But the job is finished! I’m in good nick. There’s nothing wrong with me now.”

“I don’t like these spells of dizziness,” Dr. Trask said. “But on the whole we’ve made a fine job of you, Titus.” She beamed at him with pride, the way one might admire a prize steer.

Titus held his commentary until they let him go. Then he snarled to Lash, “Don’t I get any credit for my own sodding health? She makes me sound like a house pet.”

“She made a spectacular job of you, old man,” Lash said. “I could show you the film—they cloned bits of you and reattached them, extracted samples of diseases of your time and inoculated you against modern ones—”

“Film? There’s another damned cinematograph?” Titus was aghast.

“Of course there are complete records. Titus, not only are you an important historical figure. You’re the first time traveler, probably the last to—”

Titus could imagine the pictures six storeys high of himself in the altogether, being patched together and reassembled by Dr. Trask and her team. Had he a scrap of privacy left? Seething, he flung himself into his chair, picking a book up at random and pretending to be absorbed in it until Lash went away.

As his anger faded however Titus was drawn into the book. It was something he had never seen before, a story told in pictures and labels, something like Hogarth engravings but more colourful. He turned back to the title page: BUCK ROGERS: THE FIRST 60 YEARS IN THE 25th CENTURY. He gathered from the foreword that these things were called comic strips. At first he could not imagine why Dr. Lash had selected this for him. But when he began at the beginning he understood. This Buck Rogers fellow was a soldier who had travelled into the future too. The discovery made him chuckle. And how clever of Lash’s cohorts, to take an idea from a children’s book and make it reality!

And the comics themselves were ripping in a juvenile sort of way—evil Asiatics kidnapping shapely blonde girls, battles across land and sea. They were the sort of fare his boyhood chums at Eton would have thoroughly enjoyed. He whiled the afternoon away very pleasantly.

“Titus, old man,” Dr. Lash came in to say. “Time for dinner—the banquet, you remember. Would you care to dress?”

“A bean-feast? Nonsense. I don’t know a soul in this world, except you and the other doctors.”

“Titus, we haven’t discussed this much,” Dr. Lash said. “But think about it. You are famous, the first time traveler. Furthermore, you’re the quintessential British hero, an historical figure. Naturally people are interested in you. Now you’re on your feet again, let us show you off a little.”

“Claptrap!” But Titus noticed Lash’s nervy air as he laid out new garments on the foot of the bed. Perhaps it would be letting down the side, not to indulge him. “So what’s this then? Can’t I wear the trousers I have on now? They fit well enough.”

“These will too. They’re the same size, just a more dressy cut.”

“What has the world come to,” Titus grumbled, dressing, “when khaki can be spoken in the same sentence as dressy?” None of the garments were what he would have chosen for himself, these ill-tailored trousers and the nasty coarse shirt and unnaturally-sheer socks. Everything fitted well enough but felt tatty and fake, like stage costume. He would have spurned a necktie, but none was offered. Only the wool jacket was tolerable, though its blue was a hair too assertive. “But I know—knew, I should say—a tailor in Mhow who could make a far better job of it.”

“I’m afraid that, after technological advances, the changes in dress will be the most trying for you,” Dr. Lash said placatingly. “Yes, just step into those shoes. Now, this way…”

Titus was glad he had bathed and shaved this morning. In Antarctica while sledging nobody had had the strength to spare for personal hygiene. They had niffed like foxes after four months of brute physical work in the same clothes without bathing. He wondered who’d been handed the nauseating job of cutting him out of his polar clothes after the rescue, and hoped to blazes it had not been some female. That was probably where his watch had gone, too. But he could probably find out, damn them—it was all on film somewhere.

He followed Dr. Lash down the elevator, congratulating himself on how commonplace the ride already had become. They got out on an unfamiliar level. Beyond the elevator hallway was a large meeting room with nobody in it. “Good, the Secret Service finished their sweep,” Lash said. “The President and the British Ambassador were anxious that the occasion be kept as casual as possible for you—”

“You mean the President of this country? Of the United States?”

“Yes, Titus, I was telling you. But there’ll be photographs and so on, you’re used to that, and also more video—film, moving pictures.”

“Yes, yes.” Titus recognized the experience now: codswallop, the sort of silly attention-grabbing that the nibs, nobs and snobs arranged to amuse themselves. Some things never changed. He regretted now not smuggling the BUCK ROGERS volume in.

But then the doors opened, and a horde of people came surging in. “Let me make some introductions,” Dr. Lash said genially. “Titus, this is the TTD’s Medical/Cultural Management Section, essentially everyone who works here in New York, mostly—Marjie’s on vacation, and a couple people are out sick…”

The faces and names blurred in Titus’s mind as Lash presented them. Only Dr. Piotr, pinkly plump and overly well-groomed, seemed to be important. Titus gathered that he ran the entire show on the time travel side. Everyone seemed hugely delighted to meet him, smiling and squeezing his hand with enthusiasm.

Sabrina Trask startled him speechless with her bright yellow trousers. Women wore trousers in this era! And though he had been too flustered to notice at the time, he dimly recalled now that females out in the street and in the museum had been similarly clad. Titus had not realized until now how clothing signaled status and sex. It was the sort of thing everyone instinctively knew in his time, though from pure hellishness he had occasionally amused himself by cocking a snook at the standard. Now he murmured inanities as the line passed, all the while trying to deduce the underlying principles of modern dress.

Trousers were obviously no longer confined to men, nor skirts to women—surely that fellow over there was not wearing a gown? Perhaps it was a robe of the kind worn by Hindus. Some men had beards, some were clean-shaven like Lash, and there were plenty of thick mustaches like his father had favoured when Victoria was Queen. Was hair the key? This one with hair nearly as long as Sabrina’s must be male from his beard, yet right behind him was another chap shorn to quarter-inch stubble. In his day all women had long hair, but there was Shell with her boyish curly crop, and Lord! Here was a woman absolutely bald! Titus opened his mouth as he shook her hand, but no words came out. Lash had warned him that the sartorial fence was going to be a high one—perhaps it was not necessary to clear it today!

Even the women in skirts didn’t walk like ladies any more, with the delicate slow saunter enforced by tight corsetry. They walked like men, brash and bold. And the thrill of glimpsing a well-turned ankle was gone, when a man could see all the way up to well above the knees. In his day even the shilling dockside Gerties were not so bold! Yet it passed belief that so many bits of muslin would be presented to the swells, and there was no lasciviousness in their manner or faces. He was forced to conclude that all the women he’d met in the 21st century must be respectable after all. The lewd signals sent by their clothing were to be ignored. He thrust the confusion aside to think about later.

Last in line, Shell was gowned in electric blue—were there no sober colours in this time?—and vibrating with nerves until her earrings jingled. “I hate this, don’t you?”

He nodded in fervent agreement. “Like a cursed dog show.” No hats and no watches, Titus concluded, but without exception everyone carried or wore a little machine. Perhaps they were the modern equivalent? He shoved his hands into his pockets to hide his lack.

Everyone stood in loose rows, like troops being reviewed only much more casual, Lash and Dr. Piotr flanking Titus. Titus suddenly noticed the buffet tables laid out at the far end of the room. Dinner! Though the body had been restored, yet the mind still lived in the posture of starvation. His stomach gurgled audibly, and he crossed his arms over it in embarrassment.

But there, thank God, was a stir at the door, and a number of new people came in. Only a few of them came forward to be greeted by Dr. Piotr. “Madam President, may I present Captain Lawrence Edward Grace Oates. Titus, this is President Livia Hamilton.”

In a slight daze Titus shook the President’s hand. He would have placed her as the headmistress of a dame’s school, with that firm mouth and pinned-up grey hair. Had American presidents ever been women in his time? He could not recall, but rather doubted it. “This is an honor,” the President said in a deep horsy voice. “Captain, welcome to the 21st century.”

“Thank you.”

His concise reply seemed to disconcert them. Dr. Lash said, “And this is the British Ambassador, Sir Harold Burney.”

More handshaking. “Sir,” Titus acknowledged. Dr. Lash bobbed his head in an encouraging manner, but Titus was damned if he was going to bark on command like a trained seal.

“On behalf of His Majesty the King, I welcome you back to the land of the living,” the Ambassador said.

How fine it was to hear a British accent! But, “His Majesty?” Titus demanded, startled. Surely King George V was not still alive?

“Oh! His Majesty King William V. You poor fellow, haven’t they caught you up to date yet?”

“In due course, sir,” Dr. Lash broke in. “We’ve tried to bring the Captain up to speed gently. It’s a big adjustment to make.”

The Ambassador beamed with pride. “But if I know anything about it, you’ve been damned plucky, eh?”

“Not at all.” Titus remembered now that this was why he loathed Society—one had to converse. Every anarchic instinct in him rebelled at the expectation. He was tired of being a tame poodle. “What I want to know,” he began, in his plummiest drawl.

“Yes, yes?”

Titus pinned the Ambassador firmly with his gaze. “I wondered why a pack of Yanks are making these great discoveries. I get the distinct sense that Britain’s no longer in the forefront of human endeavour.”

The Ambassador turned pink and opened his mouth, but only a few disjoint syllables came out. “Shameful backsliding, I call it,” Titus pursued, twisting the knife a little. “The work we put into keeping the Empire on top of things, fighting the Boers, trekking into the hinterlands of the globe, and now look at it!”

Dr. Lash’s grip on his elbow was almost painful as he swiveled Titus back to face the President.

“So, Captain,” the President said. “Now that your life has been restored to you by Dr. Piotr and these good folks, what do you intend to do?”

“There’s a facer,” Titus said, at a loss. The question had not occurred to him till now. Which just showed how pulled down he was, since it was obviously of the first importance. “Something useful.”

“A fine idea.”

“I don’t suppose Britain’s at war or anything,” Titus said with dissatisfaction. “Perhaps we could try and claim the Colonies again, eh?”

The President’s smile did not waver, but her gaze flickered, searching for rescue. The British Ambassador hastily said, “No wars on at the moment—but your old regiment, the Royal Inniskilling Dragoon Guards, is anxious to welcome you back into the ranks.”

Titus had kicked his heels in an idle peacetime regiment before—codswallop, pointless parades, catering to the whims of the brass—and was not about to take the shilling for more. “Perhaps I could work at the TTD here,” he said. “Lend a hand with the time traveling business. I have the experience, after all.”

The Ambassador gave a small polite laugh. “Oh, very good.”

The President glanced at Dr. Piotr. “You planning another jaunt into the past, Doctor?”

“Not soon,” Dr. Piotr said. “And not another person. Captain Oates here is probably the one and only man who will ever travel through time, because that’s a dangerous trick to try. But by plucking him out of the past we have more than just the proof of the fundamental theories. It was a test of the Fortie technology. They taught us how to build a drive that can twist space—or time. This was the easy part. The Captain is living proof that the time travel works. Next, we test the technology on the main job: travelling to the stars.”

Titus listened closely, sifting nuggets of meaning out of the incomprehensible. “Do I understand you correctly?” he cut in, interrupting Dr. Piotr in mid-peroration. “You didn’t set out to travel through time? You didn’t intend to rescue me?”

The scientist cast a pained glance at Dr. Lash, who said, “But, Titus! I explained this to you. And the film this morning discussed it in detail!”

“This is the Fortie project, Captain,” Dr. Piotr said patiently. “Your rescue was part of it.”

“Ah, you took him over to the museum, very good,” the Ambassador said. “I love IMAX films myself, ever since I saw ‘To Fly’ down at the Air and Space Museum when I was a wee lad.”

For a moment Titus was speechless. No one had said that he was the sole beneficiary of a titanic temporal rescue effort. He had only assumed his was the central role. Apparently he wasn’t the pivot of the project: had never been. He was an unimportant cog in a big engine that was driving across the heavens towards Tau Ceti. The readjustment in his picture of the situation was painful but nearly instantaneous. He had never been one of those status-conscious blokes, always trying to get an edge on his fellows. He had enough self-confidence to speak up right away: “Right-oh. Count me in then. I’ve never been to another planet! When do we leave?”

Embarrassment, shuffling feet, a nervous laugh. Had he said something wrong?

“Now isn’t that just the spirit of exploration,” the President said, with the air of a schoolteacher determined to find something positive to say about a rowdy pupil. “You’re a firecracker, Captain. Larger than life!”

“A credit to the nation,” the Ambassador said. “Ah, sherry!”

An overall relaxation, as trays of drinks circulated and people began to move towards the buffet. Titus seized a glass of sherry and hung back as the nobs went forward. “Monster,” Dr. Trask whispered, grinning. “So this is how Victor von Frankenstein felt!”

“You’re a troublemaker, Titus,” Shell agreed. “You’ve got your nerve, jerking the poor Ambassador’s chain like that. I thought I’d bust a gut.”

Titus refused to be distracted, even by the spread of food. “I like the idea of going to Tau Ceti. Who else is going? You, Lash?”

Dr. Trask snickered at the idea. “Not with his asthma! And you’re never getting me up in one of those things. Clonal surgeons have plenty of work Earthside, grafting new limbs and boobs and organs onto people. Shell’s the one who’ll sweep those Forties off their feet.”

Titus blinked. He had not meant to suggest that women could be explorers. “If they have feet,” someone else in the line remarked.

Shell sipped her sherry and laughed. “Did you see that awful cartoon on the Today page?”

“Well, prophylactics wouldn’t take up all that much cargo space!”

The talk veered off into jokes and chatter that went right over Titus’s head. “It sounds like a perfect job for me,” he grumbled, accepting the plate someone handed him. What an odd and casual way to eat—and they called this a banquet? To Titus, banquets meant waiters and service, not shuffling through a line for bangers and mash.

Dr. Trask plopped a scoop of potatoes onto her plate and said, very kindly, “Titus, the teams have been in training for ten years. It’d be an awful lot of work for you to get up to speed.”

“Frankly, old man, you were the highest example of the explorer as amateur,” Dr. Lash said. “But this is the age of the professional. It’s no reflection on your own worth.”

In fact Titus did not believe this. His entire experience, leavened with the example of Buck Rogers in the 25th century, assured him that all he had to do was try. Surely a concerted effort would bring success. He helped himself to an enormous plateful of food, only belatedly noticing that he had cleared off half the sausages. How odd, that meat should make up such a small fraction of the offerings! But he had always been a carnivore, and it would surely be incorrect to shovel part of his portion back onto the platter. Instead he allowed them to seat him at the head table.

The President had asked Dr. Piotr a question about the economic impact of speedy space travel, and the talkative scientist was off and away. “At FTL,” he said with enthusiasm, “the planets are just suburbs. We can colonize the solar system! No more of this three-years-to-Mars stuff. We’ve already gained so much from this one Fortie contact, I can’t wait to see what else is coming.”

Every word was English, but Titus found he had no idea what was being said. He leaned nearer to Shell. “Do you understand him?”

“Sure.”

“I don’t.”

She laughed. “And Piotr prides himself on being a populizer, too! Don’t disappoint him by telling him.”

“Hamilton’s such a show-off,” Sabrina Trask muttered from beyond Shell. “Just because she taught economics and math at Stanford.”

Titus wasn’t even sure what economics was. Something to do with money, he hazarded. Born to wealth, all he knew of money was how to spend it. He wondered what precisely Buck Rogers had lived on, and how he had got into the 25th century’s military. “Shell, how much education have you had?”

“Me? Gosh, let me think—twelve years of school, four years college, medical school, another two for my communications doctorate… If you count the Fortie training, I’ve been in school just about all my life.”

Dr. Piotr had finished his remarks, and the President applauded, saying, “Doctor, I swear if you ever want to quit the Paticalar business, I have a job for you in politics. You could sell shoes to snakes.”

The doctor grinned, pinker than ever. “Once, Madam President, you might have tempted me. Now, I know the better part. This is where the fun is going to be.”

“Gad, I envy you young people,” the Ambassador said. “Tell us more about the time business—what’s this new time window trick the newsies are chattering about?”

Obligingly Dr. Piotr said, “Well, it’s disruptive and difficult to pull a real object or person through time. A perfect candidate like the Captain here is rare. It would be as much fun, and cheaper, to just pull light—images. I wouldn’t mind a photograph of a velociraptor, would you? We could make a fortune on the posters and screensavers alone.”

This is beyond me, Titus admitted silently. He bowed his head to the inevitable. Buck Rogers was a cheat, the invention of some fantasizing duffer who’d never actually had to work with less than seventy percent of the knowledge necessary. Titus would live the reality, and he could acknowledge now that much of it would be forever beyond his comprehension. To swallow down the entire 21st century was too big a mouthful. His only hope was to select an area to worry at and, please God, to master.

But which area? If he wasn’t going to explore, then what? “Lash, what am I going to live on? They must have proved my will and settled the estate. I don’t suppose my heirs’ descendants, my great-grandnephews and so on, will want to part with the money even if there’s a bean left after all this time. Will you people support me until I die?”

“A stipend’s in the works,” Dr. Lash said. “PTICA is responsible for your existence, Titus—you won’t starve.”

“But I bet anything you like, you’re not going to want to live out your life as a couch potato,” Shell added. “I can’t wait to see what the newsies will say, about your re-conquering the American Colonies!”

Dr. Lash shuddered. “I could wish, Titus, that you’d be more careful about what you say!”

Titus ate steadily, thinking hard. His life had been handed back to him on a platter. But the President, of all people, had put her finger on the key question: what could he do with it? He knew how to fight, and he knew how to die. He had a sense there was very little call for such skills in the 21st century. As useful as knowing how to blow a duck call, he thought sardonically. Perhaps he could assist that young black at the museum.

He had it now: enough information so that he could distinguish what was truly vital. Clear as day, Titus saw that if he didn’t carve a niche for himself, he would indeed become a couch potato—he was repelled without even knowing what that was. There was a higher fence to clear than just learning to exist here. The crucial battle lay not in the past, nor the present, but the future. From infancy, playing with popguns and wooden horses, he had always known what he would be: a soldier. Now in this strange new world this destiny was gone, and he was adrift. He could do anything he set his will to. But first he had to find a new destiny to replace the one he’d left behind in 1912. Else he’d become a pet, a parasite, leeching off the moderns for the rest of his useless life, trotted out for display every now and then to bark for the visiting brass.

It reminded him of his first sight of the Himalayas, in India. Some dashed impressive mountains, but then the morning haze lifted for a moment, and the eye took in the colossal heights beyond, snow-capped peaks rearing up to pierce the sky. What he had thought was the real battle had again been nothing but the first skirmish. How much easier a sharp crisis would be! Walking to one’s end in a blizzard, perhaps. “May be some time,” indeed! This slow stubborn uphill slog would last till his dying day—in the spirit of locking the barn door too late, he swore that when he drew that final breath it should not be expended on feeble ironies that would come back to haunt him.

Wars came to an end in a year or two. Even manhauling to the Pole and back had to be accomplished in six or seven months during the austral summer. But this was never going to end. It would call for more pluck and resolution and bottom than anything else he’d ever set hand to, because it would never be over. For a moment the prospect was unspeakably daunting, and he slumped over his empty plate. But with an effort he straightened. Stiff upper lip and all that. He had conclusively demonstrated, after all, that he could do anything he set his mind to. “I’ve survived far worse,” he said aloud.

Dr. Lash glanced up. “What’s that you say, Titus?”

No time like the present to begin. Titus gazed thoughtfully at the other man’s little machine, lying beside his plate. “Lash…what time is it?”

CYBERPUNK, by Bruce Bethke

The snoozer went off at seven and I was out of my sleepsack, powered up, and online in nanos. That’s as far as I got. Soon I booted and got—

CRACKERS/BUDDYBOO/8ER

on the tube.

I shut down fast. Damn! Rayno had been on line before me, like always, and that message meant somebody else had gotten into our Net—and that meant trouble by the busload! I couldn’t do anything mor on term, so I zipped into my jumper, combed my hair, and went downstairs.

Mom and Dad were at breakfast when I slid into the kitchen. “Good Morning, Mikey!” said Mom with a smile. “You were up so late last night I thought I wouldn’t see you before you caught your bus.”

“Had a tough program to crack,” I said.

“Well,” she said, “now you can sit down and have a decent breakfast.” She turned around to pull some Sara Lees out of the microwave and plunk them down on the table.

“If you’d do your schoolwork when you’re supposed to you wouldn’t have to stay up all night,” growled Dad from behind his caffix and faxsheet. I sloshed some juice in a glass and poured it down, stuffed a Sara Lee into my mouth, and stood to go.

“What?” asked Mom. “That’s all the breakfast you’re going to have?”

“Haven’t got time,” I said. “I gotta get to school early to see if the program checks.” Dad growled something more and Mom spoke to quiet him, but I didn’t hear much ’cause I was out the door.

I caught the transys for school, just in case they were watching. Two blocks down the line I got off and transferred going back the other way, and a coupla transfers later I wound up whipping into Buddy’s All-Night Burgers. Rayno was in our booth, glaring into his caffix. It was 7:55 and I’d beat Georgie and Lisa there.

“What’s on line?” I asked as I dropped into my seat, across from Rayno. He just looked up at me through his eyebrows and I knew better than to ask again.

At eight Lisa came in. Lisa is Rayno’s girl, or at least she hopes she is. I can see why: Rayno’s seventeen—two years older than the rest of us—he wears flash plastic and his hair in The Wedge (Dad blew a chip when I said I wanted my hair cut like that) and he’s so cool he won’t even touch her, even when she’s begging for it. She plunked down in her seat next to Rayno and he didn’t blink.

Georgie still wasn’t there at 8:05. Rayno checked his watch again, then finally looked up from his caffix. “The compiler’s been cracked,” he said. Lisa and I both swore. We’d worked up our own little code to keep our Net private. I mean, our Olders would just blow boards if they ever found out what we were really up to. And now somebody’d broken our code.

“Georgie’s old man?” I asked.

“Looks that way.” I swore again. Georgie and I started the Net by linking our smartterms with some stuff we stored in his old man’s home business system. Now my Dad wouldn’t know an opsys if he crashed on one, but Georgie’s old man—he’s a greentooth. A tech-type. He’d found one of ours once before and tried to take it apart to see what it did. We’d just skinned out that time.

“Any idea how far in he got?” Lisa asked. Rayno looked through her, at the front door. Georgie’d just come in.

“We’re gonna find out,” Rayno said.

Georgie was coming in smiling, but when he saw that look in Rayno’s eyes he sat down next to me like the seat was booby-trapped.

“Good Morning Georgie,” said Rayno, smiling like a shark.

“I didn’t glitch!” Georgie whined. “I didn’t tell him a thing!”

“Then how the hell did he do it?”

“You know how he is, he’s weird! He likes puzzles!” Georgie looked to me for backup. “That’s how come I was late. He was trying to weasel me, but I didn’t tell him a thing! I think he only got it partway open. He didn’t ask about the Net!”

Rayno actually sat back, pointed at us all, and smiled. “You kids just don’t know how lucky you are. I was in the Net last night and flagged somebody who didn’t know the secures was poking Georgie’s compiler. I made some changes. By the time your old man figures them out, well…”

I sighed relief. See what I mean about being cool? Rayno had us outlooped all the time!

Rayno slammed his fist down on the table. “But Dammit Georgie, you gotta keep a closer watch on him!”

Then Rayno smiled and bought us all drinks and pie all the way around. Lisa had a cherry Coke, and Georgie and I had caffix just like Rayno. God, that stuff tastes awful! The cups were cleared away, and Rayno unzipped his jumper and reached inside.

“Now kids,” he said quietly, “it’s time for some serious fun.” He whipped out his microterm. “School’s off!”

I still drop a bit when I see that microterm—Geez, it’s a beauty! It’s a Zeilemann Nova 300, but we’ve spent so much time reworking it, it’s practically custom from the motherboard up. Hi-baud, rammed, crammed, ported, with the wafer display folds down to about the size of a vid casette; I’d give an ear to have one like it. We’d used Georgie’s old man’s chipburner to tuck some special tricks in ROM and there wasn’t a system in CityNet it couldn’t talk to.

Rayno ordered up a smartcab and we piled out of Buddy’s. No more riding the transys for us, we were going in style! We charged the smartcab off to some law company and cruised all over Eastside.

Riding the boulevards got stale after awhile, so we rerouted to the library. We do a lot of our fun at the library, ’cause nobody ever bothers us there. Nobody ever goes there. We sent the smartcab, still on the law company account, off to Westside. Getting past the guards and the librarians was just a matter of flashing some ID and then we zipped off into the stacks.

Now, you’ve got to ID away your life to get on the libsys terms—which isn’t worth half a scare when your ID is all fudged like ours is—and they watch real careful. But they move their terms around a lot, so they’ve got ports on line all over the building. We found an unused port, and me and Georgie kept watch while Rayno plugged in his microterm and got on line.

“Get me into the Net,” he said, handing me the term. We don’t have a stored opsys yet for Netting, so Rayno gives me the fast and tricky jobs.

Through the dataphones I got us out of the libsys and into CityNet. Now, Olders will never understand. They still think a computer has got to be a brain in a single box. I can get the same results with opsys stored in a hundred places, once I tie them together. Nearly every computer has got a dataphone port, CityNet is a great linking system, and Rayno’s microterm has the smarts to do the job clean and fast so nobody flags on us. I pulled the compiler out of Georgie’s old man’s computer and got into our Net. Then I handed the term back to Rayno.

“Well, let’s do some fun. Any requests?” Georgie wanted something to get even with his old man, and I had a new routine cooking, but Lisa’s eyes lit up ’cause Rayno handed the term to her, first.

“I wanna burn Lewis,” she said.

“Oh fritz!” Georgie complained. “You did that last week!”

“Well, he gave me another F on a theme.”

“I never get Fs. If you’d read books once in a—”

“Georgie,” Rayno said softly, “Lisa’s on line.” That settled that. Lisa’s eyes were absolutely glowing.

Lisa got back into CityNet and charged a couple hundred overdue books to Lewis’s libsys account. Then she ordered a complete fax sheet of Encyclopedia Britannica printed out at his office. I got next turn.

Georgie and Lisa kept watch while I accessed. Rayno was looking over my shoulder. “Something new this week?”

“Airline reservations. I was with my Dad two weeks ago when he set up a business trip, and I flagged on maybe getting some fun. I scanned the ticket clerk real careful and picked up the access code.”

“Okay, show me what you can do.”

Accessing was so easy that I just wiped a couple of reservations first, to see if there were any bells and whistles.

None. No checks, no lockwords, no confirm codes. I erased a couple dozen people without crashing down or locking up. “Geez,” I said, “There’s no deep secures at all!”

“I been telling you. Olders are even dumber than they look. Georgie? Lisa? C’mon over here and see what we’re running!” Georgie was real curious and asked a lot of questions, but Lisa just looked bored and snapped her gum and tried to stand closer to Rayno. Then Rayno said, “Time to get off Sesame Street. Purge a flight.”

I did. It was simple as a save. I punched a few keys, entered, and an entire plane disappeared from all the reservation files. Boy, they’d be surprised when they showed up at the airport. I started purging down the line, but Rayno interrupted.

“Maybe there’s no bells and whistles, but wipe out a whole block of flights and it’ll stand out. Watch this.” He took the term from me and cooked up a routine in RAM to do a global and wipe out every flight that departed at an :07 for the next year. “Now that’s how you do these things without waving a flag.”

“That’s sharp,” Georgie chipped in, to me. “Mike, you’re a genius! Where do you get these ideas?” Rayno got a real funny look in his eyes.

“My turn,” Rayno said, exiting the airline system.

“What’s next in the stack?” Lisa asked him.

“Yeah, I mean, after garbaging the airlines…” Georgie didn’t realize he was supposed to shut up.

“Georgie! Mike!” Rayno hissed. “Keep watch!” Soft, he added, “It’s time for The Big One.”

“You sure?” I asked. “Rayno, I don’t think we’re ready.”

“We’re ready.”

Georgie got whiney. “We’re gonna get in big trouble-”

“Wimp,” spat Rayno. Georgie shut up.

We’d been working on The Big One for over two months, but I still didn’t feel real solid about it. It almost made a clean if/then/else; if The Big One worked/then we’d be rich/else…it was the else I didn’t have down.

Georgie and me scanned while Rayno got down to business. He got back into CityNet, called the cracker opsys out of OurNet, and poked it into Merchant’s Bank & Trust. I’d gotten into them the hard way, but never messed with their accounts; just did it to see if I could do it. My data’d been sitting in their system for about three weeks now and nobody’d noticed. Rayno thought it would be really funny to use one bank computer to crack the secures on other bank computers.

While he was peeking and poking I heard walking nearby and took a closer look. It was just some old waster looking for a quiet place to sleep. Rayno was finished linking by the time I got back. “Okay kids,” he said, “this is it.” He looked around to make sure we were all watching him, then held up the term and stabbed the RETURN key. That was it. I stared hard at the display, waiting to see what else was gonna be. Rayno figured it’d take about ninety seconds.

The Big One, y’see, was Rayno’s idea. He’d heard about some kids in Sherman Oaks who almost got away with a five million dollar electronic fund transfer; they hadn’t hit a hangup moving the five mil around until they tried to dump it into a personal savings account with a $40 balance. That’s when all the flags went up.

Rayno’s cool; Rayno’s smart. We weren’t going to be greedy, we were just going to EFT fifty K. And it wasn’t going to look real strang, ’cause it got strained through some legitimate accounts before we used it to open twenty dummies.

If it worked.

The display blanked, flickered, and showed:

TRANSACTION COMPLETED. HAVE A NICE DAY.

I started to shout, but remembered I was in a library. Georgie looked less terrified. Lisa looked like she was going to attack Rayno. Rayno just cracked his little half smile., and started exiting. “Funtime’s over, kids.”

“I didn’t get a turn,” Georgie mumbled.

Rayno was out of all the nets and powering down. He turned, slow, and looked at Georgie through those eyebrows of his. “You are still on The List.”

Georgie swallowed it ’cause there was nothing else he could do. Rayno folded up the microterm and tucked it back inside his jumper.

We got a smartcab outside the library and went off to someplace Lisa picked for lunch. Georgie got this idea about garbaging up the smartcab’s brain so that the next customer would have a real state fair ride, but Rayno wouldn’t let him do it. Rayno didn’t talk to him during lunch, either.

After lunch I talked them into heading up to Martin’s Micros. That’s one of my favorite places to hang out. Martin’s the only Older I know who can really work a computer without blowing out his headchips, and he never talks down to me, and he never tells me to keep my hands off anything. In fact, Martin’s been real happy to see all of us, ever since Rayno bought that $3000 vidgraphics art animation package for Lisa’s birthday.

Martin was sitting at his term when we came in. “Oh, hi Mike! Rayno! Lisa! Georgie!” We all nodded. “Nice to see you again. What can I do for you today?”

“Just looking,” Rayno said.

“Well, that’s free.” Martin turned back to his term and punched a few more IN keys. “Damn!” he said to the term.

“What’s the problem?” Lisa asked.

“The problem is me,” Martin said. “I got this software package I’m supposed to be writing, but it keeps bombing out and I don’t know what’s wrong.”

Rayno asked, “What’s it supposed to do?”

“Oh, it’s a real estate system. Y’know, the whole future-values-in-current-dollars bit. Depreciation, inflation, amortization, tax credits—”

“Put that in our tang,” said. “What numbers crunch?”

Martin started to explain, and Rayno said to me, “This looks like your kind of work.” Martin hauled his three hundred pounds of fat out of the chair and looked relieved as I dropped down in front of the term. I scanned the parameters, looked over Martin’s program, and processed a bit. Martin’d only made a few mistakes. Anybody could have. I dumped Martin’s program and started loading the right one in off the top of my head.

“Will you look at that?” Martin said.

I didn’t answer ’cause I was thinking in assembly. In ten minutes I had it in, compiled, and running test sets. It worked perfect, of course.

“I just can’t believe you kids,” Martin said. “You can program easier than I can talk.”

“Nothing to it” I said.

“Maybe not for you. I knew a kid grew up speaking Arabic, used to say the same thing.” He shook his head, tugged his beard, looked me in the face, and smiled. “Anyhow, thanks loads, Mike. I don’t know how to…” He snapped his fingers. “Say, I just got something in the other day, I bet you’d be really interested in.” He took me over to the display case, pulled it out, and set it on the counter. “The latest word in microterms. The Zeilemann Starfire 600.”

I dropped a bit! Then I ballsed up enough to touch it. I flipped up the wafer display, ran my fingers over the touch pads, and I just wanted it so bad!

“It’s smart,” Martin said. “Rammed, crammed, and ported.”

Rayno was looking at the specs with that cold look in his eye. “My 300 is still faster,” he said.

“It should be,” Martin said. “You customized it half to death. But the 600 is nearly as fast, and it’s stock, and it lists for $1400. I figure you must have spent nearly 3K upgrading yours.”

“Can I try it out?” I asked.

Martin plugged me into his system, and I booted and got on line. It worked great! Quiet, accurate; so maybe it wasn’t as fast as Rayno’s—I couldn’t tell the difference.

“Rayno, this thing is the max!” I looked at Martin. “Can we work out some kind of…?” Martin looked back to his terminal, where the real estate program was still running tests without a glitch.

“I been thinking about that, Mike. You’re a minor, so I can’t legally employ you.” He tugged on his beard and rolled his tongue around his mouth. “But I’m hitting that real estate client for some pretty heavy bread on consulting fees, and it doesn’t seem real fair to me that you… Tell you what. Maybe I can’t hire you, but I sure can buy software you write. You be my consultant on, oh…seven more projects like this, and we’ll call it a deal? Sound okay to you?”

Before I could shout yes, Rayno pushed in between me and Martin. “I’ll buy it. List.” He pulled out a charge card from his jumper pocket. Martin’s jaw dropped. “Well, what’re you waiting for? My plastic’s good.”

“List? But I owe Mike one,” Martin protested.

“List. You don’t owe us nothing.”

Martin swallowed. “Okay Rayno.” He took the card and ran a credcheck on it. “It’s clean,” Martin said, sounding surprised. He punched up the sale and started laughing. “I don’t know where you kids get this kind of money!”

“We rob banks,” Rayno said. Martin laughed, and Rayno laughed, and we all laughed. Rayno picked up the term and walked out of the store. As soon as we got outside he handed it to me.

“Thanks Rayno, but…but I coulda made the deal myself.”

“Happy Birthday, Mike.”

“Rayno, my birthday is in August.”

“Let’s get one thing straight. You work for me.”

* * * *

It was near school endtime, so we routed back to Buddy’s. On the way, in the smartcab, Georgie took my Starfire, gently opened the case, and scanned the boards. “We could double the baud speed real easy.”

“Leave it stock,” Rayno said.

We split up at Buddy’s, and I took the transys home. I was lucky, ’cause Mom and Dad weren’t home and I could zip right upstairs and hide the Starfire in my closet. I wish I had cool parents like Rayno does. They never ask him any dumb questions.

Mom came home at her usual time and asked how school was. I didn’t have to say much, ’cause just then the stove said dinner was ready and she started setting the table. Dad came in five minutes later and we started eating.

We got the phone call halfway through dinner. I was the one who jumped up and answered it. It was Georgie’s old man, and he wanted to talk to my Dad. I gave him the phone and tried to overhear, but he took it in the next room and talked real quiet. I got unhungry. I never liked tofu, anyway.

Dad didn’t stay quiet for long. “He what?! Well thank you for telling me! I’m going to get to the bottom of this right now!” He hung up.

“Who was that, David?” Mom asked.

“That was Mr. Hansen. Georgie’s father. Mike and Georgie were hanging around with that punk Rayno again!” He snapped around to look at me. I’d almost made it out the kitchen door. “Michael! Were you in school today?”

I tried to talk cool. I think the tofu had my throat all clogged up. “Yeah…yeah, I was.”

“Then how come Mr. Hansen saw you coming out of the downtown library?”

I was stuck. “I—I was down there doing some special research.”

“For what class? C’mon Michael, what were you studying?”

It was too many inputs. I was locking up.

“David,” Mom said, “Aren’t you being a bit hasty? I’m sure there’s a good explanation.”

“Martha, Mr. Hansen found something in his computer that Georgie and Michael put there. He thinks they’ve been messing with banks.”

“Our Mikey? It must be some kind of bad joke.”

“You don’t know how serious this is! Michael Arthur Harris! What have you been doing sitting up all night with that terminal? What was that system in Hansen’s computer? Answer me! What have you been doing?!”

My eyes felt hot. “None of your business! Keep your nose out of things you’ll never understand, you obsolete old relic!”

“That does it! I don’t know what’s wrong with you damn kids, but I know that thing isn’t helping!” He stormed up to my room. I tried to get ahead of him all the way up the steps and just got my hands stepped on. Mom came fluttering up behind as he yanked all the plugs on my terminal.

“Now David,” Mom said. “Don’t you think you’re being a bit harsh? He needs that for his homework, don’t you, Mikey?”

“You can’t make excuses for him this time, Martha! I mean it! This goes in the basement, and tomorrow I’m calling the cable company and getting his line ripped out! If he has anything to do on computer he can damn well use the terminal in the den, where I can watch him!”

He stomped out, carrying my smartterm. I slammed the door and locked it.

“Go ahead and sulk! It won’t do you any good!”

I threw some pillows around ’til I didn’t feel like breaking anything anymore, then I hauled the Starfire out of the closet. I’d watched over Dad’s shoulders enough to know his account numbers and access codes, so I got on line and got down to business. I was finished in half an hour.

I tied into Dad’s terminal. He was using it, like I figured he would be, scanning school records. Fine. He wouldn’t find out anything; we’d figured out how to fix school records months ago. I crashed in and gave him a new message on his vid display.

“Dad,” it said, “there’s going to be some changes around here.”

It took a few seconds to sink in. I got up and made sure the door was locked real solid. I still got half a scare when he came pounding up the stairs, though. I didn’t know he could be so loud.

“MICHAEL!!” He slammed into the door. “Open this! Now!”

“No.”

“If you don’t open this door before I count to ten, I’m going to bust it down! One!”

“Before you do that—”

“Two!”

“Better call your bank!”

“Three!”

“B320-5127-OlR.” That was his checking account access code. He silenced a couple seconds.

“Young man, I don’t know what you think you’re trying to pull—”

“I’m not trying anything. I did it already.”

Mom came up the stairs and said, “What’s going on, David?”

“Shut up, Martha!” He was talking real quiet, now. “What did you do, Michael?”

“Outlooped you. Disappeared you. Buried you.”

“You mean, you got into the bank computer and erased my checking account?”

“Savings and mortgage on the condo, too.”

“Oh my God…”

Mom said, “He’s just angry, David. Give him time to cool off. Mikey, you wouldn’t really do that, would you?”

“Then I accessed DynaRand,” I said. “Wiped your job. Your pension. I got to your plastic, too.”

“He couldn’t have, David. Could he?”

“Michael!” He hit the door. “I’m going to wring your scrawny neck!”

“Wait!” I shouted back. “I copied all your files before I purged! There’s a way to recover!”

He let up hammering on the door, and struggled to talk calm. “Give me the copies right now and I’ll just forget that this happened.”

“I can’t. I mean, I did backups in other computers. And I secured the files and hid them where only I know how to access.”

There was quiet. No, in a nano I realised it wasn’t quiet, it was Mom and Dad talking real soft. I eared up to the door but all I caught was Mom saying “why not?” and Dad saying “but what if he is telling the truth?”

“Okay Michael,” Dad said at last. “What do you want?”

I locked up. It was an embarasser; what did I want? I hadn’t thought that far ahead. Me, caught without a program! I dropped half a laugh, then tried to think. I mean, there was nothing they could get me I couldn’t get myself, or with Rayno’s help. Rayno! I wanted to get in touch with him, is what I wanted. I’d pulled this whole thing off without Rayno!

I decided then it’d probably be better if my Olders dind’t know about the Starfire, so I told Dad first thing I wanted was my smartterm back. It took a long time for him to clump down to the basement and get it. He stopped at his term in the den, first, to scan if I’d really purged him. He was real subdued when he brought my smartterm back up.

I kept processing, but by the time he got back I still hadn’t come up with anything more than I wanted them to leave me alone and stop telling me what to do. I got the smartterm into my room without being pulped, locked the door, got on line, and gave Dad his job back. Then I tried to flag Rayno and Georgie, but couldn’t, so I left messages for when they booted. I stayed up half the night playing a war, just to make sure Dad didn’t try anything.

I booted and scanned first thing the next morning, but Rayno and Georgie still hadn’t come on. So I went down and had an utter silent breakfast and sent Mom and Dad off to work. I offed school and spent the whole day finishing the war and working on some tricks-and-treats programs. We had another utterly silent meal when Mom and Dad came home, and after supper I flagged Rayno had been in the Net and left a remark on when to find him.

I finally got him on line around eight, and he said Georgie was getting trashed and probably heading for permanent downtime.

Then I told Rayno all about how I outlooped my old man, but he didn’t seem real buzzed about it. He said he had something cooking and couldn’t meet me at Buddy’s that night to talk about it, either. So we got off line, and I started another war and then went to sleep.

The snoozer said 5:25 when I woke up, and I couldn’t logic how come I was awake ’til I started making sense out of my ears. Dad was taking apart the hinges on my door!

“Dad! You cut that out or I’ll purge you clean! There won’t be backups this time!”

“Try it,” he growled.

I jumped out of my sleepsack, powered up, booted and—no boot. I tried again. I could get on line in my smartterm, but I couldn’t port out. “I cut your cable down in the basement,” he said.

I grabbed the Starfire out of my closet and zipped it inside my jumper, but before I could do the window, the door and Dad both fell in. Mom came in right behind, popped open my dresser, and started stuffing socks and underwear in a suitcase.

“Now you’re fritzed!” I told Dad. “I’ll never give you back your files!” He grabbed my arm.

“Michael, there’s something I think you should see.” He dragged me down to his den and pulled some bundles of old paper trash out of his desk. “These are receipts. This is what obsolete old relics like me use because we don’t trust computer bookkeeping. I checked with work and the bank; everything that goes on in the computer has to be verified with paper. You can’t change anything for more than 24 hours.”

“Twenty-four hours?” I laughed. “Then you’re still fritzed! I can still wipe you out any day, from any term in CityNet.”

“I know.”

Mom came into the den, carrying the suitcase and kleenexing her eyes. “Mikey, you’ve got to understand that we love you, and this is for your own good.”

They dragged me down to the airport and stuffed me in a private lear with a bunch of old gestapos.

* * * *

I’ve had a few weeks now to get used to the Von Schlager Military Academy. They tell me I’m a bright kid, and with good behavior, there’s really no reason at all why I shouldn’t graduate in five years. I am getting tired, though, of all the older cadets telling me how soft I’ve got it now that they’ve installed indoor plumbing.

Of course, I’m free to walk out any time I want. It’s only three hundred miles to Fort McKenzie, where the road ends.

Sometimes at night, after lights out, I’ll pull out my Starfire and run my fingers over the touchpads. That’s all I can do, since they turn off power in the barracks at night. I’ll lie there in the dark, thinking about Lisa, and Georgie, and Buddy’s All-Night Burgers, and all the fun we used to pull off. But mostly I’ll think about Rayno, and what great plans he cooks up.

I can’t wait to see how he gets me out of this one.

MILLENNIUM, by Everett B. Cole

Liewen Konar smiled wryly as he put a battered object on the bench. “Well, here’s another piece recovered. Not worth much, I’d say, but here it is.”

Obviously, it had once been a precisely fabricated piece of equipment. But its identity was almost lost. A hole was torn in the side of the metal box. Knobs were broken away from their shafts. The engraved legends were scored and worn to illegibility, and the meter was merely a black void in the panel. Whatever had been mounted at the top had been broken away, to leave ragged shards. Inside the gaping hole in the case, tiny, blackened components hung at odd angles.

Klion Meinora looked at the wreckage and shook his head.

“I know it’s supposed to be what’s left of a medium range communicator,” he said, “but I’d never believe it.” He poked a finger inside the hole in the case, pushing a few components aside. Beyond them, a corroded wheel hung loosely in what had once been precision bearings.

“Where’s the power unit?”

Konar shook his head. “No trace. Not much left of the viewsphere, either.”

“Well.” Meinora shook his head resignedly. “It’s salvage. But we got it back.” He stood back to look at the communicator. “Someone’s been keeping the outside clean, I see.”

Konar nodded. “It was a religious relic,” he said. “Found it in an abbey.” He reached into the bag he had placed on the floor.

“And here’s a mental amplifier-communicator, personnel, heavy duty. Slightly used and somewhat out of adjustment, but complete and repairable.” He withdrew a golden circlet, held it up for a moment, and carefully laid it on the bench beside the wrecked communicator. Its metal was dented, but untarnished.

“Don’t want to get rough with it,” he explained. “Something might be loose inside.”

He reached again into the bag. “And a body shield, protector type, model GS/NO-10C. Again, somewhat used, but repairable. Even has its nomenclature label.”

“Good enough.” Meinora held a hand out and accepted the heavy belt. He turned it about in his hands, examining the workmanship. Finally, he looked closely at the long, narrow case mounted on the leather.

“See they counted this unit fairly well. Must have been using it.”

“Yes, sir. It’s operative. The Earl wore it all the time. Guess he kept up his reputation as a fighter that way. Be pretty hard to nick anyone with a sword if he had one of these running. And almost any clumsy leatherhead could slash the other guy up if he didn’t have to worry about self-protection.”

“I know.” Meinora nodded quickly. “Seen it done. Anything more turned up?”

“One more thing. This hand weapon came from the same abbey I got the communicator from. I’d say it was pretty hopeless, too.” Konar picked a flame-scarred frame from his bag, then reached in again, to scoop up a few odd bits of metal.

“It was in pieces when we picked it up,” he explained. “They kept it clean, but they couldn’t get the flame pits out and reassembly was a little beyond them.”

“Beyond us too, by now.” Meinora looked curiously at the object. “Looks as though a couple of the boys shot it out.”

“Guess they did, sir. Not once, but several times.” Konar shrugged. “Malendes tells me he picked up several like this.” He cocked his head to one side.

“Say, chief, how many of these things were kicking around on this unlucky planet?”

Meinora grimaced. “As far as we can determine, there were ninety-two operative sets originally issued. Each of the original native operatives was equipped with a mentacom and a body shield. Each of the eight operating teams had a communicator and three hand weapons, and the headquarters group had a flier, three communicators, a field detector set, and six hand weapons. Makes quite an equipment list.”

“Any tools or maintenance equipment?”

Meinora shook his head. “Just operator manuals. And those will have deteriorated long ago. An inspection team was supposed to visit once a cycle for about fifty cycles, then once each five cycles after that. They would have taken care of maintenance. This operation was set up quite a while ago, you know. Operatives get a lot more training now—and we don’t use so many of them.”

“So, something went wrong.” Konar looked at the equipment on the bench. “How?” he asked. “How could it have happened?”

“Oh, we’ve got the sequence of events pretty well figured out by now.” Meinora got to his feet. “Of course, it’s a virtually impossible situation—something no one would believe could happen. But it did.” He looked thoughtfully at the ruined communicator.

“You know the history of the original operation on this planet?”

“Yes, sir. I looked it over. Planet was checked out by Exploration. They found a couple of civilizations in stasis and another that was about to go that way. Left alone, the natives’d have reverted to a primitive hunter stage—if they didn’t go clear back to the caves. And when they did come up again, they’d have been savage terrors.”

“Right. So a corps of native operatives was set up by Philosophical, to upset the stasis and hold a core of knowledge till the barbaric period following the collapse of one of the old empires was over. One civilization on one continent was chosen, because it was felt that its impact on the rest of the planet would be adequate to insure progress, and that any more extensive operation would tend to mold the planetary culture.”

Konar nodded. “The old, standard procedure. It usually worked better than this, though. What happened this time?”

“The Merokian Confederation happened.”

“But their penetration was nowhere near here.”

“No, it wasn’t. But they did attack Sector Nine. And they did destroy the headquarters. You remember that?”

“Yes, sir. I read about it in school. We lost a lot of people on that one.” Konar frowned. “Long before my time in the Corps, of course, but I studied up on it. They used some sort of screen that scrambled the detectors, didn’t they?”

“Something like that. Might have been coupled with someone’s inattention, too. But that’s unimportant now. The important thing is that the sector records were destroyed during the attack.”

“Sure. But how about the permanent files that were forwarded to Aldebaran depository?”

Meinora smiled grimly. “Something else that couldn’t happen. We’re still looking for traces of that courier ship. I suppose they ran afoul of a Merokian task force, but there’s nothing to go on. They just disappeared.” He picked up the mental communicator, examining the signs of aging.

“One by one,” he continued, “the case files and property records of Sector Nine are being reconstructed. Every guardsman even remotely associated with the Sector before the attack is being interviewed, and a lot of them are working on the reconstruction. It’s been a long job, but we’re nearly done now. This is one of the last planets to be located and rechecked, and it’s been over a period since the last visit they’ve had from any of our teams. On this planet, that’s some fifty-odd generations. Evidently the original operatives didn’t demolish their equipment, and fifty some generations of descendants have messed things up pretty thoroughly.”

Konar looked at the bench. Besides the equipment he had just brought in, there were other items, all in varying stages of disrepair and ruin.

“Yes, sir,” he agreed. “If this is a sample, and if the social conditions I’ve seen since I joined the team are typical, they have. Now what?”

“We’ve been picking up equipment. Piece by piece, we’ve been accounting for every one of those items issued. Some of ’em were lost. Some of ’em probably wore out and were discarded, or were burned—like this, only more so.” Meinora pointed at the wrecked communicator.

“Local legends tell us about violent explosions, so we know a few actually discharged. And we’ve tracked down the place where the flier cracked up and bit out a hole the size of a barony. Those items are gone without trace.” He sighed.

“That introduces an uncertainty factor, of course, but the equipment in the hands of natives, and the stuff just lying around in deserted areas has to be tracked down. This planet will develop a technology some day, and we don’t want anything about to raise questions and doubts when it does. The folklore running around now is bad enough. When we get the equipment back, we’ve got to clean up the social mess left by the descendants of those original operatives.”

“Nice job.”

“Very nice. We’ll be busy for a long time.” Meinora picked up a small tape reel. “Just got this,” he explained. “That’s why I was waiting for you here. It’s an account of a mentacom and shield that got away. Probably stolen about twenty years ago, planetary. We’re assigned to track it down and pick it up.”

He turned to speak to a technician, who was working at another bench.

“You can have this stuff now. Bring in some more pretty soon.”

* * * *

Flor, the beater, was bone weary. The shadows were lengthening, hiding the details in the thickets, and all the hot day, he had been thrusting his way through thicket after thicket, in obedience to the instructions of the foresters. He had struck trees with his short club and had grunted and squealed, to startle the khada into flight. A few of the ugly beasts had come out, charging into the open, to be run down and speared by the nobles.

And Flor had tired of this hunt, as he had tired of many other hunts in the past. Hunting the savage khada, he thought resentfully, might be an amusing sport for the nobles. But to a serf, it was hard, lung-bursting work at best. At worst, it meant agonizing death beneath trampling hoofs and rending teeth.

To be sure, there would be meat at the hunting lodge tonight, in plenty, and after the hunt dinner, he and the other serfs might take bits of the flesh home to their families. But that would be after the chores in the scullery were over. It would be many hours before Flor would be able to stumble homeward.

He relaxed, to enjoy the short respite he had gained by evading the forester. Sitting with his back to a small tree, he closed his eyes and folded his thick arms over his head. Of course, he would soon be found, and he would have to go back to the hunt. But this forester was a dull, soft fellow. He could be made to believe Flor’s excuse that he had become lost for a time, and had been searching the woods for the other beaters.

The underbrush rustled and Flor heard the sound of disturbed leaves and heavy footfalls. A hunting charger was approaching, bearing one of the hunters. Quickly, Flor rose to his feet, sidling farther back into the thicket. Possibly, he might remain unseen. He peered out through the leaves.

The mounted man was old and evidently tired from the long day’s hunt. He swayed a little in his saddle, then recovered and looked about him, fumbling at his side for his horn. His mount raised its head and beat a forefoot against the ground. The heavy foot made a deep, thumping noise and leaves rustled and rose in a small cloud.

Flor sighed and started forward reluctantly. It was the Earl, himself. It might be possible to hide from another, but Flor knew better than to try to conceal his presence from the old nobleman. The Earl could detect any person in his vicinity, merely by their thoughts, as Flor well knew from past experience. He also knew how severe the punishment would be if he failed to present himself immediately. He pushed a branch aside with a loud rustle.

Startled by the noise, a husa, which had been hiding beneath a nearby bush, raced into the open. The small animal dashed madly toward the Earl, slid wildly almost under the charger’s feet, and put on a fresh burst of speed, to disappear into the underbrush. The huge beast flinched away, then reared wildly, dashing his rider’s head against a tree limb.

The elderly man slipped in his saddle, reached shakily for his belt, missed, and lost his seat, to crash heavily to the ground.

Flor rushed from his thicket. With the shock of the fall, the Earl’s coronet had become dislodged from his head and lay a short distance from the inert form. Flor picked it up, turning it in his hands and looking at it.

Curiously, he examined the golden circlet, noting the tiny bosses inset in the band. Many times, he had watched from a dark corner at the hunting lodge, neglecting his scullery duties, while the Earl showed the powers of this coronet to his elder son. Sometimes, he had been caught by the very powers the circlet gave to the old nobleman, and he winced as he remembered the strong arm of the kitchen master, and the skill with which he wielded a strap. But on other occasions, the Earl had been so engrossed in explaining the device as to neglect the presence of the eavesdropper.

He had told of the ability given him to read the thoughts of others, and even to strongly influence their actions. And Flor had gone back to his labors, to dream of what he would do if he, rather than the Earl, were the possessor of the powerful talisman.

And now, he had it in his hands.

A daring idea occurred to him, and he looked around furtively. He was alone with the Earl. The old man was breathing stertorously, his mouth wide open. His face was darkening, and the heavy jowls were becoming purple. Obviously, he was capable of little violence.

In sudden decision, Flor knelt beside the body. His hand, holding the short club above the Earl’s throat, trembled uncontrollably. He wanted to act—had to act now—but his fear made him nauseated and weak. For a moment, his head seemed to expand and to lighten as he realized the enormity of his intent. This was one of the great nobles of the land, not some mere animal.

The heavily lidded eyes beneath him fluttered, started to open.

With a sob of effort, Flor dashed his club downward, as though striking a husa. The Earl shivered convulsively, choked raspingly, and was suddenly limp and still. The labored breathing stopped and his eyes opened reluctantly, to fix Flor with a blank stare.

The serf leaped back, then hovered over the body, club poised to strike again. But the old man was really dead. Flor shook his head. Men, he thought in sudden contempt, died easily. It was not so with the husa, or the khada, who struggled madly for life, often attacking their killer and wounding him during their last efforts.

Flor consigned this bit of philosophy to his memory for future use and set to work removing the heavy belt worn by the Earl. This, he knew, was another potent talisman, which could guard its wearer from physical harm when its bosses were pushed.

The murderer smiled sardonically. It was well for him that the old nobleman had failed to press those bosses, otherwise this opportunity probably would never have been presented. He stood up, holding the belt in his hand. Such a thing as this, he told himself, could make him a great man.

He examined the belt, noting the long metal case, with its engraving and its bosses. At last, he grunted and fastened it about his own waist. He pressed the bosses, then threw himself against a tree.

Something slowed his fall, and he seemed to be falling on a soft mat. He caught his balance and rested against the tree, nodding in satisfaction. Later, he could experiment further, but now he had other things to do.

He examined the coronet again, remembering that there was something about its bosses, too. He looked closely at them, then pressed. One boss slid a little under his finger and he felt a faint, unfamiliar sense of awareness.

He put the coronet on his head and shuddered a little as the awareness increased to an almost painful intensity. The forest was somehow more clear to him than it had ever been. He seemed to understand many things which he had heard or experienced, but which had been vague before. And memory crowded upon him. He stood still, looking around.

At the edge of his mind was vague, uneasy wonder, obviously not his own thought. There was a dim caricature of himself standing over the body of the Earl. And there was a feeling of the need to do something without understanding of what was to be done, or why.

He could remember clearly now, the Earl’s explanations of the action of the coronet. One incident stood out—a time when the old man, having overindulged in the local wine, had demonstrated his ability to divine the thoughts of others. Flor twitched a little in painful recollection. The kitchen master had been especially enthusiastic in his use of the strap that night.

The Earl’s mount was eying Flor, who realized without knowing just how, that the vague images and rudimentary thoughts were a reflection of the beast’s mind. He looked over at the thicket into which the little animal which had started the charger, was hiding. It was still there, and he could feel a sense of fearful wonder, a desire to be gone, coupled with a fear of being discovered.

Again, he looked about the woods. In a way, the husa and he were akin. It would be bad if he were caught here, too. To be sure, he would be hard to capture, with his new protection, but many men would hunt him. And some of them would be other Earls, or possibly some of the great abbots, who had their own coronets and belts, and possibly other things of great power. These, he knew, might be too much for him. He slunk into the thicket, looked down the hill, and decided on a course which would avoid the paths of the foresters.

As he walked, he plotted methods of using his new-found powers. He considered idea after idea—then discarded them and sought further. With his new awareness, he could see flaws in plans which would have seemed perfect to him only a few short hours before.

First, he realized he would have to learn to control his new powers. He would have to learn the ways of the nobility, their manners and their customs. And he would have to find a disguise which would allow him to move about the land. Serfs were too likely to be questioned by the first passer-by who noticed them. Serfs belonged on the land—part of it!

He hid in the bushes at the side of a path as a group of free swordsmen went by. As he watched them, a plan came to him. He examined it carefully, finally deciding it would do.

* * * *

The man-at-arms sauntered through the forest, swaying a little as he walked. He sang in a gravelly voice, pausing now and then to remember a new verse.

Flor watched him as he approached, allowing the man’s thoughts to enter his own consciousness. They were none too complicated. The man was a free swordsman, his sword unemployed at the moment. He still had sufficient money to enjoy the forest houses for a time, then he would seek service with the Earl of Konewar, who was rumored to be planning a campaign.

The man swayed closer, finally noticing Flor. He paused in mid stride, eying the escaped serf up and down.

“Now, here’s something strange indeed,” he mused. He looked closely at Flor’s face.

“Tell me, my fellow, tell me this: How is it you wear the belt and coronet of a great noble, and yet have no other garment than the shift of a serf?”

As Flor looked at him insolently, he drew his sword.

“Come,” he demanded impatiently, “I must have answer, else I take you to a provost. Possibly his way of finding your secret would be to your liking, eh?”

Flor drew a deep breath and waited. Here was the final test of his new device. He had experimented, finding that even the charge of a khada was harmless to him. Now, he would find if a sword could be rendered harmless. At the approach of the man, he had pressed the boss on his belt. The man seemed suddenly a little uncertain, so Flor spoke.

“Why, who are you,” he demanded haughtily, “to question the doings of your betters? Away with you, before I spit you with your own sword.”

The man shook his head, smiling sarcastically. “Hah!” he said, approaching Flor. “I know that accent. It stinks of the scullery. Tell me, Serf, where did you steal that——”

He broke off, climaxing his question with an abrupt swing of the sword. Then, he fell back in surprise. Flor had thrust a hand out to ward off the blow, and the sword had been thrown back violently. The rebound tore it from its amazed owner’s hand, and it thudded to the ground. The man-at-arms looked at it stupidly.

Flor sprang aside, scooping up the weapon before the man could recover.

“Now,” he cried, “stand quite still. I shall have business with you.”

The expression on the man’s face told of something more than mere surprise which held him quiet. Here was proof of the powers of the coronet. Flor looked savagely at his captive.

“Take off your cap.”

Reluctantly, the man’s hand came up. He removed his steel cap, holding it in his hand as he faced his captor.

“That is fine.” Flor pressed his advantage. “Now, your garments. Off with them!”

The swordsman was nearly his size. Both of them had the heavy build of their mountain stock, and the garments of the free swordsman would do for Flor’s purpose, even though they might not fit him perfectly. Who expected one of these roving soldiers of fortune to be dressed in the height of style? They were fighters, not models to show off the tailor’s art.

Flor watched as his prisoner started to disrobe, then pulled off his own single garment, carefully guiding it through the belt at his waist, so as not to disturb the talisman’s powers.

He threw the long shirt at the man before him.

“Here,” he ordered. “Put this on.”

He sensed a feeling of deep resentment—of hopeless rebellion. He repeated his demand, more emphatically.

“Put it on, I say!”

As the man stood before him, dressed in the rough shift of a serf, Flor smiled grimly.

“And now,” he said, “none will worry too much about a mere serf, or look too closely into his fate. Here.”

He slashed out with the sword, awkwardly, but effectively.

“I shall have to find a new name,” he told himself as he dressed in the garments of his victim. “No free swordsman would have a name like Flor. They all have two names.”

He thought of the names he had heard used by the guards of the Earl. Flor, he thought, could be part of a name. But one of the swordsmen would make it Floran, or possibly Florel. They would be hunters, or slayers of elk—not simply elk. He looked at the steel cap in his hands. An iron hat—deri kuna.

“So,” he told himself, “I shall be Florel Derikuna.”

He inspected his new garments, being sure they hid the belt, and yet left the bosses available to easy reach. At last, he put on the iron cap. It covered the coronet, effectively hiding it.

Taking up the sword, he replaced it in its scabbard and swaggered through the forest, imitating the man-at-arms’ song.

At one stroke, he had improved his status infinitely. Now, he could roam the land unquestioned, so long as he had money. He smiled to himself. There was money in his scrip, and there would be but slight problems involved in getting more. Tonight, he would sleep in a forest house, instead of huddling in a thicket.

* * * *

As the days passed, to grow into weeks and then, months, Florel wandered over the land. Sometimes, he took service with a captain, who would engage in a campaign. Sometimes, he took service with one of the lesser nobility. A few times, he ran with the bands of the forest and road, to rob travelers. But he was cautious to avoid the great Earls, realizing the danger of detection.

Always, he kept his direction to the east, knowing that he would have to reach the sea and cross to the eastern land before he could feel completely safe. His store of money and of goods grew, and he hoarded it against the time when he would use it.

Sometimes, he posed as a merchant, traveling the land with the caravans. But always, he followed his path eastward.

* * * *

Florel Derikuna looked back at the line of pack animals. It had been a long trip, and a hard one. He smiled grimly to himself as he remembered the last robber attack. For a time, he had thought the caravan guard was going to be overwhelmed. He might have had to join with the robbers, as he had done before. And that would have delayed his plans. He looked ahead again, toward the hill, crowned with its great, stone castle.

This, then, was the land of the east—the farthest march of the land of the east. It had taken him a long, cautious time to get here. And he had spent his days in fear of a searching party from Budorn, even when he had reached the seacoast itself. But here, he would be safe. None from this land had ever been even to the mountainous backbone of his own land, he was sure. And certainly, there would be no travelers who had guided their steps from here to faraway Budorn and back.

None here knew Budorn, excepting him. Flor, the serf—now Florel Derikuna, swordsman at large—was in a new land. And he would take a new, more useful identity. He looked at the stone buildings of the town and its castle.

They were not unlike the castles and towns of his native land, he thought. There were differences, of course, but only in the small things. And he had gotten used to those by now. He had even managed to learn the peculiar language of the country. He smiled again. That coronet he always wore beneath his steel cap had served him well. It had more powers than he had dreamed of when he had first held it in his hands in those distant woods.

Here in Dweros, he thought, he could complete his change. Here, he could take service with the Duke as a young man of noble blood, once afflicted with a restless urge for travel, but now ready to establish himself. By now, he had learned to act. It had not been for nothing that he had carefully studied the ways of the nobility.

The caravan clattered through the gate beneath the castle, twisted through the streets just beyond the wall, and stopped in the market place. Derikuna urged his mount ahead and confronted the merchant.

“Here is my destination,” he said. “So, we’ll settle up, and I’ll be on my way.”

The merchant looked at him with a certain amount of relief. The man, he knew, was a tough fighter. His efforts had been largely the cause of the failure of bandits to capture the caravan only a few days before. But there was something about him that repelled. He was a man to be feared, not liked. Somehow, the merchant felt he was well rid of this guard, despite his demonstrated ability. He reached into his clothing and produced two bags.

“We hate to lose you, Derikuna,” he dissembled. “Here is your normal wage.” He held out one bag. “And this second purse is a present, in memory of your gallant defense of the caravan.”

Derikuna smiled sardonically. “Thank you,” he said, “and good trading.” He reined away.

He had caught the semi-fearful thoughts. Well, that was nothing unusual. Everybody became fearful of the iron hat sooner or later. Here, they would learn to respect him, too. Though their respect would be for a different name. Nor would they be able to deny him aught. They might not like him. That, he had no interest in. They’d do his will. And they’d never forget him.

He rode to an inn, where he ordered food and lodging. His meal over, he saw to his beasts, then had a servant take his baggage to his room.

* * * *

Shortly after daybreak, he awoke. He blinked at the light, stirred restlessly, and got out of bed. Rubbing his eyes, he walked to the other side of the room.

For a few minutes, he looked at the trough in the floor and the water bucket standing near it. At last, he shrugged and started splashing water over himself. This morning, he spent more time than usual, being sure that no vestige of beard was left on his face, and that he was perfectly clean. He completed his bath by dashing perfumed water over his entire body.

He opened his traveling chest, picking out clothing he had worn but few times, and those in private. At last, he examined his reflection in a mirror, and nodded in satisfaction.

“Truly,” he told himself, “a fine example of western nobility.”

He picked out a few expensive ornaments from his chest, then locked it again and left the inn.

He guided his mount through the narrow streets to the castle gate, where he confronted a sleepy, heavily-armed sentry.

“Send word to the castle steward,” he ordered, throwing his riding cloak back, “that Florel, younger son of the Earl of Konewar, would pay his respects to your master, the Duke of Dwerostel.”

The man eyed him for a moment, then straightened and grounded his pike with a crash.

“It shall be done, sir.” He turned and struck a gong.

A guard officer came through the tunnel under the wall. For a moment, he looked doubtful, then he spoke respectfully and ushered Derikuna through the inner court to a small apartment, where he turned him over to a steward.

“You wish audience with His Excellency?”

“I do, My Man. I wish to pay him my respects, and those of my father, the Earl of Konewar.” Derikuna looked haughtily at the man.

Like the guard officer, the steward seemed doubtful. For a few seconds, he seemed about to demur. Then, he bowed respectfully.

“Very well, sir.” With a final, curious glance at the coronet which shone in Florel’s hair, the steward clapped his hands. A page hurried into the room and bowed.

“Your orders, sir?”

“We have a noble guest. Bring refreshment, at once.” The steward waved to a table. “If Your Honor will wait here?”

Florel inclined his head, strode to a chair, and sat down. He looked amusedly after the disappearing steward. The coronet of the old Earl, he thought, was a truly potent talisman. Even the disdainful stewards of castles bowed to its force. And, thought the impostor, so would his master—when the time came.

* * * *

The page reappeared with a flagon of wine and some cakes. Florel was sampling them when the steward returned. The man bowed respectfully, waited for Florel to finish his wine, and led the way through a corridor to a heavy pair of doors, which he swung open.

“Florel, Son of Konewar,” he announced ceremoniously.

The Duke flipped a bone to one of his dogs, shoved his plate aside, and looked up. Florel walked forward a few paces, stopped, and bowed low.

“Your Excellency.”

As he straightened, he realized that he was the object of an intense scrutiny. At last, the Duke nodded.

“We had no notice of your coming.”

Florel smiled. “I have been traveling alone, Excellency, and incognito. For some years, I have been wandering, to satisfy my desire to see the world.” He glanced down at his clothing.

“I arrived in your town last evening, and delayed only to make myself presentable before appearing to pay my respects.”

“Very good. Punctuality in meeting social obligations is a mark of good breeding.” The Duke eyed Florel’s costume.

“Tell me, young man, do all your nobility affect the insignia you wear?”

Florel’s hand rose to his coronet. “Only members of the older families, Excellency.”

“I see.” The nobleman nodded thoughtfully. “We have heard rumors of your fashions in dress, though no member of any of the great families of your realm has ever come so far before. We are somewhat isolated here.” He looked sharply at the younger man.

“Rumor also has it that this is more than mere insignia you wear. I have heard it said that your ornaments give more than mortal powers to their wearer. Is this true?”

Florel hesitated for an instant, then recognized the desired response. Of course this eastern noble would not welcome the thought that there were others who had greater powers than he. And he would certainly resent any suggestions that a young visitor to his court had such powers.

“Oh, that,” he said easily. “Legends, really. The truth is that the wearing of the coronet and belt is restricted to members of the older, more honorable families. And even these must prove their ability at arms and statecraft before being invested with the insignia. Too, knowledge of long lineage and gentle birth makes a man more bold—possibly even more skillful than the average.” He smiled ingratiatingly.

“You, yourself, recognize your own superiority in all ways over your retainers, your vassals, and your townspeople. And so are we above the common man. This insignia is but the outward symbol of that superiority.”

The Duke nodded, satisfied. He waved a hand.

“Sit down, young man. You must remain at our court for a time. We are hungry for news of the distant lands.”

Florel congratulated himself. Well embellished gossip, he had found, was a popular form of entertainment in camp and court alike, and his store of gossip was large and carefully gathered. Here at Dweros, far from the center of the kingdom, his store of tales would last for a long time—probably as long as he needed.

During the days and nights that followed, he exerted himself to gain the favor of the Duke and his household. Much of his time, he spent entertaining others with his tales. But he kept his own ears and eyes open. He became a constant visitor at the castle, finally being offered the use of one of the small apartments, which he graciously accepted. And, of course, he was invited to join the hunts.

Hunting, he discovered, could be a pleasant pastime—so long as it was another who was doing the hard work of beating. And his own experience as a beater proved valuable. He was familiar with the ways and the haunts of animals. What had once been a matter of survival became a road to acclaim. He was known before long as a skillful, daring hunter.

* * * *

At length, he decided the time was right to talk to the Duke of more serious things. The duchy was at the very border of the kingdom. To the north lay territory occupied only by barbaric tribes, who frequently descended on the northern baronies, to rob travelers of their goods, or to loot villages. Having secured their loot, the tribesmen retreated to their mountains before a fighting force could come up with them.

Florel came upon the Duke while he was considering the news of one of these raids.

“Your Excellency, these border raids could be halted. A strong hand is all that is needed, at the right place. A determined knight, established on the Menstal, could command the river crossing and the pass, thus preventing either entry or exit.”

“To be sure.” The Duke sighed wearily. “But the mountains of Menstal are inhospitable. Knights have occupied the heights, protecting the border for a time, to be sure, but the land has always escheated to the duchy. A small watchtower is kept manned even now, but it’s a hungry land, and one which would drain even a baron’s funds. I have no knight who wants it.”

Florel smiled. He had plans concerning the Menstal, and the great river, the Nalen, which raced between high cliffs.

“The merchants, who use the Nalen for their shipments, would welcome protection from the robber bands, I think, as would the travelers of the roads.”

“And?” The Duke looked at him thoughtfully.

“Possibly a small tax?” Florel smiled deprecatingly. “Sufficient to maintain a garrison?”

“And who would collect the tax?”

“That, Excellency, I could arrange. I have funds, adequate to garrison the tower of the Menstal, and even to make it livable for a considerable force of men. And I believe I could maintain and increase a garrison there that would serve to hold the barbarians at bay.”

“Let me think this over.” The Duke sat back, toying with his cup. “It is true,” he mused, “that Menstal is the key to the border. And the small garrison there has proved expensive and ineffective.” He tapped the cup on the table, then set it down and looked about the apartment. Finally, he looked up at Florel.

“You have our permission to try your scheme,” he decided. “We will invest you with the barony of Menstal.”

* * * *

Konar paused at the castle gate. It had been pure chance, he knew, that they had noticed this bit of equipment. The east coast earldom was known, of course, but somehow, searchers had failed to discover that the Earl held any equipment. Konar shrugged. He probably hadn’t inherited it, but had gotten it by chance, and his possession of the mentacom and shield weren’t commonly known.

“Well,” he told himself, “we know about it now. I’ll make a routine pickup, and he won’t have it any more.”

A pair of weary sentries stood just inside the heavy doors. One shifted his weight, to lean partially on his pike, partially against the stonework. Idly, he looked out at the road which led through the village, staring directly through the place where Konar stood.

Konar smiled to himself. “Good thing I’ve got my body shield modulated for full refraction,” he told himself. “He’d be a little startled if he should see me.”

The sentry yawned and relaxed still more, sliding down a little, till he sat on a slightly protruding stone. His companion looked over at him.

“Old Marnio sees you like that,” he muttered warningly, “makes lashes.”

The other yawned again. “No matter. He’ll be drowsing inside, where it’s warm. Be a long time before he comes out to relieve.”

Konar nodded amusedly. The castle guard, he gathered, was a little less than perfectly alert. This would be simple. He touched the controls of his body shield to raise himself a few inches above the cobblestones, and floated between the two sentries, going slowly to avoid making a breeze.

Once inside, he decided to waste no more time. Of course, he would have to wait inside the Earl’s sleeping room till the man slept, but there was no point in waiting out here. He passed rapidly through the outer ward, ignoring the serfs and retainers who walked between the dwellings nestled against the wall.

The inner gate had been closed for the night, so he lifted and went over the wall.

He looked around, deciding that the Earl’s living quarters would be in the wooden building at the head of the inner courtyard. As he approached, he frowned. The windows were tightly closed against the night air. He would have to enter through the doors, and a young squire blocked that way. The lad was talking to a girl.

There was nothing to do but wait, so Konar poised himself a few feet from them. They’d go inside eventually, and he would float in after them. Then, he could wait until the Earl was asleep.

After that, it would be a simple, practiced routine. The small hand weapon he carried would render the obsolete body shield ineffective, if necessary, and a light charge would assure that the man wouldn’t awaken. It would be the work of a few minutes to remove the equipment the man had, to substitute the purely ornamental insignia, and to sweep out of the room, closing the window after him. Konar hoped it would stay closed. The Earl might be annoyed if it flew open, to expose him to the dreaded night air.

In the morning, the Earl would waken, innocent of any knowledge of his visitor. He would assume his talismans had simply lost their powers due to some occult reason, as many others had during recent times.

Idly, Konar listened to the conversation of the two before him.

The squire was telling the girl of his prowess in the hunt. Tomorrow, he announced, he would accompany the Earl’s honored guest from the eastern land.

“And I’m the one that can show him the best coverts,” he boasted. “His Grace did well to assign me to the Duke.”

The girl lifted her chin disdainfully. “Since you’re such a great hunter,” she told him, “perchance you could find my brooch, which I lost in yonder garden.” She turned to point at the flower-bordered patch of berry bushes at the other end of the court. In so doing, she faced directly toward Konar.

She was a pretty girl, he thought. His respect for the young squire’s judgment grew. Any man would admire the slender, well featured face which was framed within a soft cloud of dark, well combed hair. She looked quite different from the usual girls one saw in this country. Possibly, she was of eastern descent, Konar thought.

The girl’s eyes widened and her mouth flew open, making her face grotesquely gaunt. Abruptly, she was most unpretty. For a few heartbeats, she stood rigidly, staring at Konar. Then she put her hands to her face, her fingers making a rumpled mess of her hair. Her eyes, fixed and with staring pupils, peered between her fingers. And she screamed.

Konar felt suddenly faint, as though the girl’s horror was somehow communicated to him. The scream reverberated through his brain, rising in an intolerable crescendo, blotting out other sensory perception. He fought to regain control of his fading senses, but the castle court blurred and he felt himself slipping into unconsciousness. He started sliding down an endless, dark chute, ending in impenetrable blackness.

Suddenly, the black dissolved into a flash of unbearably brilliant light, and Konar’s eyes closed tightly.

He was alertly conscious again, but his head ached, and he felt reluctant, even unable, to open his eyes. Even closed, they ached from the brilliant spots which snapped into being before them. He shuddered, bringing his head down to his breast, gripping it with shaking hands, and breathing with uneven effort.

This was like nothing he had ever met before. He would have to get back to the others—find out what had happened to him—get help.

He concentrated on his eyelids, forcing them open. A crowd was gathering, to look accusingly at the squire, who supported the fainting girl in his arms. Her eyes fluttered weakly, and she struggled to regain her feet.

“That awful thing! It’s right over there!” She pointed at Konar.

Again, the unbearable ululation swept through his mind. Convulsively, he swept his hand to his shield controls, fighting to remain conscious just long enough to set his course up and away.

Before he was able to move and think with anything approaching normality, he was far above the earth. He looked at the tiny castle far below, noticing that from his altitude, it looked like some child’s toy, set on a sand hill, with bits of moss strewed about to make a realistic picture. He shivered. His head still ached dully, and he could still hear echoes of the horrified screaming.

“I don’t know what it was,” he told himself, “but I hope I never run into anything like that again.”

He located the hill which concealed the flier, and dropped rapidly toward it.

As he entered, the pilot noticed him.

“Well, that was a quick mission,” he commented. “How’d you——” He looked at Konar’s pain-lined face. “Hey, what’s the matter, youngster? You look like the last end of a bad week.”

Konar tried to smile, but it didn’t work very well.

“I ran into something, Barskor,” he said. “Didn’t complete my mission. I don’t know what happened, but I hope it never happens again.”

Barskor looked at him curiously, then turned. “Chief,” he called, “something’s gone wrong. Konar’s been hurt.”

* * * *

Meinora listened to Konar’s story, then shook his head unhappily.

“You ran into a transvisor, I’m afraid. We didn’t think there were any on this planet.” He paused. “There were definitely none discovered to the west, and we looked for them. But now, we’re close to the east coast, and you said that girl looked eastern. The eastern continent may be loaded with ’em.”

Konar looked curious. “A transvisor? I never heard of them.”

“They’re rather rare. You only find them under special conditions, and those conditions, we thought, are absent here. But when you find one, you can be sure there are more. It runs in families. You see, they’re beings with a completely wild talent. They can be any age, any species, or of any intelligence, but they’re nearly always female. Visibility refraction just doesn’t work right for their senses, and they can cause trouble.” He looked closely at Konar.

“You were lucky to get away. A really terrified transvisor could kill you, just as surely as a heavy caliber blaster.”

Konar shivered. “I believe it. But why are they called ‘transvisors’?”

“The name’s somewhat descriptive, even if it is incomplete. As I said, visibility refraction doesn’t work right in their case. Somehow, they pick up visual sensation right through a screen, regardless of its adjustment. But things seen through a screen are distorted, and look abnormal to them. Unless they’re used to it, they get frightened when they see a person with a refracted body shield. That’s when the trouble starts.”

Konar nodded in understanding. “You mean, they transmit their fear?”

“They do. And they’ll shock excite a mentacom, completely distorting its wave pattern. If they remain conscious and scared, their fear is deadly to its object.” Meinora drew a deep breath.

“As I said, you were lucky. The girl fainted and let you get away.” He shrugged and turned to Barskor.

“We’ll have to change our mode of operation,” he added. “We’ll pick up the Earl’s mentacom and belt at the hunt tomorrow. Find him alone, knock him out with a paralyzer, and give him parahypnosis afterward. It’s not so good, but it’s effective. But be sure you are alone, and don’t try to use visual refraction under any circumstance. Be better to be seen, if it comes to that. There might be another transvisor around.” He kicked gently at the seat beside him.

“This was just a secondary job, done in passing,” he said, “but it’s a good thing we found this out when we did. It’ll change our whole primary plan. Now, we’ll have to slog it out the hard way. On no account can anyone refract. It might be suicide. We’ll have to talk to travelers. We want to know what abnormal or unusual developments have taken place in what country in the last twenty years. Then, we’ll have to check them out. We’ve got a lot of work to do.” He looked around. “Ciernar.”

“Yes, sir?” The communications operator looked up.

“Send in a report on this to Group. Make it ‘operational.’”

Konar tilted his head a little. “Say, chief, you said the transvisor’s fear was amplified by my mentacom. What if I wasn’t wearing one?”

“You wouldn’t feel a thing,” Meinora smiled. “But don’t get any ideas. Without amplification, you couldn’t control your shield properly. You’d have protection, but your refraction control’s entirely mental, and levitation direction depends on mental, not physical control, remember?”

“But how about you? You don’t use amplification. Neither do several of the other team chiefs.”

Meinora shrugged. “No,” he admitted, “we don’t need it, except in abnormal circumstances. But we don’t go around scaring transvisors. They can’t kill us, but they can make us pretty sick. You see we’re a little sensitive in some ways.” He shook his head. “No, the only advantage I’ve got is that I can spot a transvisor by her mental pattern—if I get close enough. There’s a little side radiation that can be detected, though it won’t pass an amplifier. When you’ve felt it once, you’ll never forget it. Makes you uncomfortable.” He smiled wryly.

“And you can believe me,” he added, “when I do get close to a transvisor, I’m very, very careful not to frighten her.”

* * * *

Winter passed, and spring, and summer came. Nal Gerda, Officer of the Guard, stood on the small wharf below the old watchtower. He looked across the narrows, examined the cliff opposite him, then looked upward at the luminous sky. There were a few small clouds, whose fleecy whiteness accentuated the clear blue about them. Brilliant sunshine bathed the wharf and tower, driving away the night mists.

It would not be long before the new guard came down the cliff. Gerda stretched and drew a deep breath, savoring the summer morning air. Now, it was pleasant, a happy contrast to the sullen skies and biting winter winds he had faced a few short months ago.

For a time, he looked at the green atop the cliffs, then he transferred his attention upriver, toward the bend where the Nalen came out of the pass to blow between the iron cliffs of Menstal. The water flowed swiftly in the narrows, throwing off white glints as its ripples caught the sunlight, then deepening to a dark blue where it came into the shadow of the cliffs.

A sudden call sounded from the lookout far above, and the officer wheeled about, looking to the great chain which stretched from tower to cliff, to block river traffic. It was in proper position, and Gerda looked back at the bend.

As he watched, a long, low barge drifted into sight, picking up speed as it came into the rapid current. Polemen balanced themselves alertly in the bow, their long sticks poised to deflect their course from any threatening rocks.

Gerda threw off the almost poetical admiration of beauty that had possessed him a moment before and faced the guard house, from whence came a scuffle of feet and the clank of arms, to tell of the guard’s readiness.

“Turn out the Guard.” Gerda drew himself up into a commanding pose.

A group of men-at-arms marched stiffly out, followed by a pair of serfs. The leader saluted Gerda with upraised hand.

“The Guard is ready, My Captain,” he proclaimed. “May the tax be rich.”

Gerda returned the salute. “It will be,” he stated positively. “These merchants have learned by now that to insult Portal Menstal with poor offerings is unwise in the extreme. And, mark me, they’ll not forget!”

The barge approached and swung in toward the wharf in obedience to Gerda’s imperious gesture. One of the polemen jumped ashore, securing a line to a bollard.

The steersman climbed to the dock, to halt a pace in front of Gerda. He folded his hands and bowed his head submissively.

“Does Your Honor desire to inspect the cargo?”

“Of course.” Gerda’s haughty glance appraised the man from toe to crown. “Quickly now. I’ve little time to waste.” He glanced back at his clerk, who had a tablet ready.

“Your name, Merchant?”

“Teron, of Krongert, may it please you, sir. I have been to——”

Gerda waved an impatient hand. “Save me your speech, Higgler,” he said curtly. “What’s your cargo value?”

“Six thousand teloa, Your Honor. We have——”

“Unload it. I’ll look at it.” Gerda waved the man to silence.

* * * *

As the bales of goods were placed on the wharf, Gerda examined them critically. A few, he ordered set aside after a quick check and a few questions. Others, he ordered opened and spread out. At last, satisfied with his estimate of the cargo’s valuation, he turned.

“Your choice, Merchant?”

“I would pay, Your Honor,” said the man, “to the tenth part of my cargo.” He extended a leather bag.

“Don’t haggle with me,” snapped Gerda. “The tax is a fifth of your cargo, as you should well know.” His hand sought his sword hilt.

The merchant’s face fell a little, and he produced a second bag, which he held out to the officer. “I must apologize,” he said. “I am new to this land.”

“See that you learn its customs quickly, then.” Gerda handed the bags to his clerk.

“Check these, Lor,” he ordered. “I make it a thousand, six hundred teloa.”

An expression of dismay crossed the merchant’s face.

“Your Honor,” he wailed, “my cargo is of but six thousand valuation. I swear it.”

Gerda stepped forward swiftly. His hand raised, to swing in a violent, back-handed arc, his heavy rings furrowing the merchant’s face. The man staggered back, involuntarily raising a hand to his injured cheek.

As a couple of the men-at-arms raised their pikes to the ready, the merchant righted himself, folded his hands again, and bowed in obeisance. Blood trickled down his chin, a drop spattering on his clothing. He ignored it.

“You would dispute my judgment?” Gerda drew his hand up for a second blow. “Here is no market place for your sharp bargaining. For your insolence, another five hundred teloa will be exacted. Make speed!”

The merchant shook his head dazedly, but offered no word of protest. Silently, he dug into his possessions, to produce a third bag. For a moment, he weighed it in his hand, then reached into it, to remove a few loose coins. Without raising his head, he extended the bag to the officer of the guard.

Gerda turned. Lor had gone into the guard house, to count the other two bags. The officer raised his voice.

“Lor, get back out here. I’ve more for you to count.”

He tossed the bag to the clerk, then stood, glaring at the unfortunate trader. At last, he kicked the nearest bale.

“Well,” he growled, “get this stuff off the wharf. What are you waiting for?”

He watched the barge crew load, then turned. Lor came from the guard house.

“All is in order, My Captain.”

“Very well.” Gerda looked at him approvingly. Then, he swung to the merchant, fixing him with a stern glare.

“We shall make note of your name, Merchant. See thou that you make honest and accurate valuation in the future. Another time, we shall not be so lenient. The dungeon of Menstal is no pleasant place.”

He watched till the last of the bargeload was stowed, then nodded curtly.

“You may shove off,” he said. He turned his head toward the tower.

“Down chain,” he ordered loudly.

The windlass creaked protestingly and the heavy chain dropped slowly into the river. The barge steered to the center of the channel, gathering speed as it passed over the lowered chain.

When the barge had cleared, serfs inside the tower strained at the windlass in obedience to the commands of their overseer, and the chain rose jerkily, to regain its former position across the stream.

Gerda watched for a moment, then strode toward the guard house. He went inside, to look at the bags of coin on the counting table.

“Cattle,” he growled, “to think they could cheat the Baron Bel Menstal of his just tax.”

He stepped back out for a moment, to watch the merchant barge enter the rapids beyond the chain. Then, he swung about and re-entered the tower.

Inside, he sat down at his counting table. He opened the bags, spilling their contents out on the boards, and checked their count.

There were forty-eight over.

He turned to his clerk.

“What was your count, Lor?”

“Two thousand, one hundred, sir, and forty-eight.”

“Very good.” Gerda smiled a little. “For once in his thieving life, the merchant was anxious to give full weight.”

Lor spread his hands. “He’ll get it back, and more, at Orieano, sir.”

“Oh, to be sure.” Gerda shrugged indifferently as he scooped the coins back into the bags. He chose three small scraps of wood, scrawled tally marks on them, and went over to a heavy chest.

Taking a key from his belt, he unlocked the chest and raised its lid. He looked at the bags lying within, then tossed the new ones on top of them. As he locked the chest again, he saw Lor go to his account board, to enter the new collection.

The Officer of the Guard straightened, stretched for a moment, then glanced critically in at the windlass room. The serfs had secured the windlass and racked their poles. Now, they were sitting, hunched against the wall, staring vacantly, in the manner of serfs. The guardroom, its commander noted, was properly clean. He shrugged and walked out again to the wharf. Once more, he looked at the iron cliffs opposite him, then glanced downriver. The merchant barge had disappeared.

* * * *

Beyond Menstal, the cliffs closed in still farther, to become more rugged and to form a narrow gorge. Between them, the Nalen took a tortuous course, turbulently fighting its way over the rocks. Eventually, it would drop into the lowlands, to become a broad, placid river, lowing quietly under the sunshine to water the fields of Orolies. But during its passage through the mountains, it would remain a dark, brawling torrent.

The merchant barge swept through the rapids just beyond Menstal, her polemen deftly preventing disaster against the rocks. At last, as the gorge became a little wider, the steersman guided his course toward a small beach beneath the cliffs. With his free hand, he thoughtfully rubbed his injured cheek.

As the boat’s keel grated against gravel, he shook his head and stepped forward. For a moment, he fumbled under a thwart, then he brought out a small case.

“Konar,” he called, “fix this thing up for me, will you?” He opened the case and laid it on the thwart.

One of the polemen laid his stick down and came aft.

“Pretty nasty clip, wasn’t it, sir?”

Meinora grinned. “Guy’s got a heavy hand, all right,” he admitted. “Made me dizzy for a second. Almost got mad at him.”

Konar raised an eyebrow. “I felt it,” he said. “Good thing Ciernar and I backed you up a little. Wouldn’t help us much to knock out the baron’s river detachment right now, would it?” He reached into the case.

“Looks as though the merchants weren’t exaggerating, if you ask me,” he added. He approached Meinora, a small swab in his hand.

“Hold still, sir,” he instructed. “This’ll sting for a few seconds.” He dabbed at the cut cheek, then reached back into the case for an instrument.

“Ouch!” Meinora winced. “Did you have to use that stuff full strength? After all, I can wait a couple of hours for it to heal.” He shook his head as his companion turned back toward him, then dashed involuntary tears from his eyes and blinked a few times to clear his vision.

“No,” he added, “the merchants aren’t exaggerating a bit on this one. Bel Menstal’s a pretty rough customer, and he keeps rough boys. Now, we’ll see whether he’s the guy we’ve been looking for, the guy with our equipment.”

Konar focused the small instrument on his superior’s face, passing it along the line of the jagged cut. “You didn’t explain that part.”

“Simple enough.” Meinora grinned wolfishly. “Those coins were a Vadris-Kendar alloy. Now that they’re out of their force field, they’ll start to sublimate. In a couple of hours or so, they’ll be gone, and someone will be asking a lot of questions. Set up the detectors. If the baron is the boy we think he is, we should be getting a fairly strong reading shortly after that guard’s relieved.”

* * * *

From somewhere atop the cliff, a bell tolled. The hoarse voice of the lookout drifted down to the wharf.

“Relieve the guard.”

Nal Gerda looked up. A line of men were coming down the steep path, stepping cautiously as they wound about the sharp turns. Gerda nodded and walked back into the guard room.

“Draw up your guard,” he ordered.

He beckoned to two of the serfs.

“Take the chest,” he directed, “and stay close in front of me.”

Herding the bearers before him, he went out to the wharf. His guard was drawn up in their proper station, facing upstream, so that they could view both the steps from the cliff and the river. No traffic was in sight in the long gorge.

The new guard came slowly down the trail, formed at the foot of the steps, and marched to the tower portal. Their commander dressed their ranks, motioned to his clerk, and came forward, saluting as he approached Gerda.

“Anything unusual?”

“Nothing,” Gerda told him. “Seven barges, this watch. Traders are gathering for the fair at Orieano.”

“I know,” the other agreed. “We’ll have rich collections for the rest of the summer, what with fairs all down the valley. You’ll be going to the Orieano Fair?”

“Got my permission yesterday. I’m to ride with the Baron. Have to give the merchants back part of their money, you know.”

“Yes, I suppose so.” The other grinned, then sobered. “I’ll relieve you, sir.”

“Very good.” Gerda saluted, then turned.

“March off the old guard,” he ordered.

The men started up the steps. Gerda followed the serfs with the money chest, bringing up to the rear.

Slowly, they toiled their way up the trail, halting at the halfway point for a brief rest. At last, they were at the top of the cliff. Before them, the castle gate opened. Within the tunnellike passage through the wall, two sentries grounded their pikes.

Gerda nodded to his clerk, accepted the account tablet, and followed his serfs, who still bore the money chest, into the castle.

Inside the main counting room, his bearers set the chest on a large table. The castle steward came toward them.

“And how were collections?”

“Reasonably good, sir. Seven barges came through during the night, with good cargoes.” Gerda held out the tablet.

The steward looked at it, checking off the entries. “Meron, of Vandor—Yes, he would have about that. And Borowa? A thousand?” He nodded thoughtfully. “That seems about right for him.” He tapped the tablet a few times, squinting at the last name on the list. “But who is this Teron? I never heard of him. Must have had a rich cargo, too.”

Gerda laughed shortly. “He’s a new one to me. He tried to get away with a tenth, then protested the valuation. I fined him an extra five hundred.”

“Oho!” The steward smiled thinly. “What then?”

Gerda shook his head. “Oh, he was suddenly so anxious to pay the right amount, he gave me forty-eight teloa overweight. I’ll know him next time I see him, I’m sure. I marked him well for receipt.”

He inspected his knuckles reflectively, then took the key from his belt and opened the chest.

“You’ll want to verify my count, of course?”

“Oh, yes. Yes, to be sure. Have to be certain, you know. And there’s your share of the fine and overpayment to be taken care of.” The steward reached into the chest, removing bags which clinked as they were dropped to the table. He stopped, to look into the chest with a puzzled expression on his face.

“And what are these?” He reached in, to withdraw three obviously empty bags. He looked curiously at the thongs which tied their mouths, then shook them and looked questioningly at Gerda.

“Why, I…I don’t know.” Gerda looked incredulously at the bags. “Certainly, I had no extra money bags.”

“I should think not.” The steward frowned, then beckoned behind him. Two heavily armed guards approached.

“We’ll have to examine into this.”

As the guards came close to Gerda, the steward looked closely at the bags on the table, then picked one up, opening it.

“Borowa,” he muttered after looking inside and comparing the tally chip with the count tablet. He weighed the bag in his hand. “Yes, it seems to be about right. Certainly not overweight.” He picked up another, then still another. At last, he looked up.

“Of course, I shall have to count all of these carefully,” he remarked grimly, “but I see no coin from this Teron you have listed.” He stared coldly at Gerda. “And the tower lookout confirms that you had seven barges. That was a considerable amount. What did you do with that money?”

“Why, I counted it. It was all there.” Gerda shook his head unbelievingly. “My count agreed with that of my clerk, and I dropped tallies in and closed the bags again.” He looked uneasily at the two guards who flanked him. “Surely, you don’t think I’d be so foolish as to tamper with the Baron’s taxes? Think, man! I know the Baron’s ways!”

“I’m not sure just what I think—yet.” The steward shook his head. He picked up one of the empty bags, opened it, and gave it a shake. The small tally chip fell out and he picked it up, comparing it with the list on the tablet. Frowning thoughtfully, he opened the other two bags. More small blocks of wood fell out. He looked at the bags, then tossed them aside and looked coldly at the guard officer.

“It’s witchcraft,” cried Gerda. “I had nothing——”

“We’ll see.” The steward motioned at the two guards. “Search this man.”

Dazedly, Gerda stood still, submitting as one of the guards went through his clothing while the other stood ready to deal with any resistance. The searcher made a thorough examination of Gerda’s clothing, muttered to himself, and went over his search again. A pile of personal objects lay on the table when he had finished. At last, he looked at the prisoner, then faced his chief.

“He has nothing on him, sir, not even a teloa.”

“So I see.” The steward frowned, then looked at Gerda.

“You may reclaim your possessions now, captain. Is there any chance that your clerk might have opened the money chest?”

Gerda shook his head. “I don’t see how he could, sir, unless he had a duplicate key, and that’s hardly possible. I kept the chest locked at all times, and the key never left my person.”

“And there is no chance that any of your men could have hidden anything on the way here?”

Again, Gerda shook his head. “None,” he said positively. “I was behind them all the way, and would have seen if any had made any unusual motion.”

“Very well.” The steward clapped his hands sharply.

There was a clatter of arms, followed by the scuffle of feet. Across the room, a door opened and a detachment of the castle guard filed in. Their leader stepped forward, saluting the steward.

“There is a river watch outside,” he was told. “Disarm them, take them to a cell, and search them thoroughly. A considerable amount of coin has been stolen. Report to me when you have finished.”

“Yes, sir.” The group filed out.

The steward turned to Gerda again.

“This matter must be examined carefully,” he declared. “You may have been the victim of witchcraft, of course, though I doubt it, never having witnessed such a thing. Or one of your men may have worked out a cunning method of theft, an occurrence which I have witnessed many times. Or, there’s the other possibility.” He stroked his chin. “After all, you were the rearmost man, and the one none other would observe.”

Gerda looked at him fearfully.

“This may become a matter for the Baron’s personal attention,” continued the steward. He looked sharply at Gerda. “How long have you been in the Baron’s service?”

“Why, you know that, sir. Ten years, ever since I——”

“Yes, yes, I remember. And you know how hopeless it is to try to deceive the Baron?”

“Yes, sir.” Gerda swallowed painfully.

“But you still insist you had nothing to do with the disappearance of this money?”

Gerda spread his hands. “I can’t understand it, sir. But I had nothing to do with it myself. As I told you, we collected it, listed it, counted it, and I put it in the chest and locked it up.” He shook his head again. “It’s witchcraft, sir.”

The steward leaned back, a slight smile playing about his lips.

“Witchcraft is good enough for serfs,” he said smoothly, “but you and I are intelligent men. We have had collection money disappear before, many times. Almost always, there has been the cry, ‘It’s witchcraft!’ And always there has been a more simple, worldly explanation.” He snapped his lingers and a page hurried forward.

“A cup of wine,” ordered the steward. “This questioning is thirsty work.” He faced back to Gerda.

“Always,” he repeated, “some explanation has been forthcoming. Usually, I have discovered the errant one—with the help of my guards, of course. And the criminal has been duly punished. But there have been some few occasions when the malefactor was so clever as to force the Baron’s intervention.” He paused, leaning forward a little.

“And do you know what happened then?”

Gerda’s throat was becoming dry. His mouth opened, but he closed it again.

The page returned, bearing a large cup and a flagon of wine. Carefully, he filled the cup, then set it before the steward, who lifted it to his lips, drank, and set it down with a satisfied sigh.

“Thank you, boy. Here is one thing we can produce well in these mountains.” He wiped his lips and turned his gaze to Gerda again. He shook his head slowly.

“The Baron can detect guilt or innocence in a moment. For a short time, he questioned the persons brought before him. He soon determined the guilty ones, and wrung confessions from their wretched lips. We then took them away, and turned them over to the torturers.” He raised the cup again.

“You know,” he added, “I’m told that some of them lasted as long as ten full days.” He shook his head. “I could never understand how the executioners can put up with such noise for so long. But then, I suppose one gets used to most anything.”

He looked toward the door. “Strange,” he murmured, “I wonder what’s keeping Maro so long.” He clapped his hands sharply once more, and waited.

The page dashed to a door and disappeared within. At last, he came back, holding the door for the leader of the castle guard detachment, who came forward to salute his superior.

“Have you found anything yet?”

“Nothing, sir. We have stripped them, but they have no unusual things about them. And we have questioned them. None will admit to seeing or doing anything other than normal duties.”

The steward sighed. “Very well. Secure them, then. I’ll call for them later.” He stood.

“Come, Nal Gerda,” he ordered, “unless you have something further to tell me of this, we must have an audience with the Baron.”

* * * *

Florel, Baron Bel Menstal, sat at his ease. Before him was a dish of good cakes, beside him, a cup and flagon of good wine. He looked contentedly around the apartment.

For fourteen years now, he had been lord of this castle. And for fourteen years, he had busied himself building his forces and increasing his power and influence in the duchy. He had made himself feared and respected.

During the past several years, his word had been of great weight in the Duke’s councils. He was now one of the great barons of the realm. He smiled to himself.

As he had risen in importance, Orieano, the soft holder of the rich fields to the west, had fallen. The man was getting old—even older than the Duke himself, and he was tired. And his daughter was the sole heir to that barony.

Again, Menstal smiled to himself as he thought of the daughter of Orieano. Next month, at the fair, he would press suit for the hand of the heiress, and a few months after that he would have control of the rich farm lands and the trading city.

The girl would probably protest, but that would do her little good. He knew what fear could do. And he could rouse such fear as to render even strong men but helpless masses of flesh. The beauteous damsel of Orieano would be a simple task. None other would dare dispute his claim, and the Duke would come to support him.

And the Duke himself? Ah, well, perhaps it would be as well to allow him to finish his life in peaceful possession of his broad fields. But certainly, the son of Dwerostel would have no word in the control of the duchy. An accident could be easily arranged, and Flor, one-time woods beater and scullery boy of Budorn, would become the great Duke he had long planned to be. No, it wouldn’t take too many more years.

He filled himself a cup, and looked complacently into its clear depths. The tap on the door broke his reverie, and he looked up, annoyed.

He stared impatiently at his castle steward as the man entered and made obeisance.

“What now, Weron?” He set the cup down. “Must I be bothered with all your petty problems?”

“This, Excellency, is an unusual problem. A sizable tribute payment has disappeared without trace. The empty bags were left, and the culprit has——”

“Enough!” The Baron waved a hand impatiently, then adjusted his golden coronet to a more comfortable angle. For an instant, his fingers played with the ornamental bosses.

“Yes, yes, I see,” he snapped. “You can spare me your mumbled details. This man is the officer of the guard?”

“Yes, Excellency.” The steward motioned Gerda forward.

Bel Menstal looked sternly at his officer. “Where did you hide your loot?” he demanded.

Gerda looked incredulously at his master. He had stolen nothing. As far as he knew, he had done nothing wrong. But he seemed to be condemned in advance. Something was insistently pressing on his brain, demanding a confession. He had nothing to confess, but the demanding pressure remained. He struggled against it, and it grew.

Admit it. How did you do it? Where is the money?

The pressure became a tearing force. Gerda swayed weakly.

“I don’t know what happened,” he insisted. “I told——”

The words stopped as the force became almost unbearably intense. A sudden, sharp pain tore at Gerda’s throat, and blinding light seemed to strike back of his eyes. Through the glare, he dimly saw the Baron raise a hand threateningly.

“You claim to have no idea at all how the money was taken, or which of your men may have been the thief? This is not a sensible attitude.”

You know something. You must know something. Tell it!

Gerda shook his head miserably, entirely unable to speak. Somehow, nothing was clear. He remembered that something had gone wrong. Somehow, he had failed his duty. But how? The room was hazy. Snatches of his last tour of duty rose to his consciousness, then were abruptly blotted out—gone. The faces of his clerk and of the men-at-arms came out of the haze for an instant. Then, they, too, were gone.

The room seemed to spin and an irresistible force bore him to the floor. As he slowly was pressed downward, he wondered who he was—why he was here—what had happened. Then, the floor came at him with blinding speed and he ceased to wonder. The haze about him scintillated and became impenetrable darkness.

The Baron looked down at the crumpled form.

“Take this man away, Weron,” he ordered. “He knew nothing.” He stroked his hair. “When he recovers, assign him to some unimportant duty in the castle. Something, of course, that will demand little thought or spirit.”

“And the others, Excellency?”

“Oh, bring them in, one at a time. One of them managed to make a complete fool of his officer, of course. But I’ll find him.”

Bel Menstal waved his hand in dismissal, then leaned back in his chair, watching as his steward directed a pair of men-at-arms. They carried the limp form from the room.

* * * *

“There. That’ll pick up any power radiation from the castle.” Konar straightened, looking at the small panel.

“Good enough.” Meinora leaned over, checking the dials. “See you’ve set it for average power.”

“Yes, sir. It’ll give a flicker indication for low levels and it’ll fail to trip for unaided thought. Not too much chance of an overload, either.”

“That’s right. You’re learning.” Meinora nodded casually. “Well, let’s keep watch on it.” He sat down. “Audio alarm on?”

Konar glanced at the panel again. “I remembered it this time.” He grinned, then looked curiously at his superior’s cut cheek. The wound was healing nicely. In an hour or so, there would be no visible trace of the injury.

“Say, Chief,” he asked, “how’d you happen to get slapped?”

“I asked for it.” Meinora smiled thoughtfully.

“Yes, sir. I know that. But what was the purpose?”

“This continent has never been thoroughly checked, so we’re sampling the culture. We know a lot about them now, but there’s a lot we still have to know. For example, how do they react to various stimuli? And how much stimulus is necessary to produce a given action? Of course, we can’t check every individual, but we can pick up a sample from each community we contact and extrapolate from them.” Meinora spread his hands.

“So, I presented a minor irritation to that officer, and he reacted—fast. He didn’t just slap me for effect. He was infuriated at the insult to his authority. Not only that, but his men expected him to react in just that manner. I noted that, too. He’d have lost face if he’d acted in any other way. And the men-at-arms were disappointed when we gave them no further excuse for violence. We really lost face with them. There, we have an indication that violence is the expected thing in this particular castle, which is a community of the duchy. Right?”

“Yes.” Konar nodded thoughtfully. “They’re not only violent themselves, but they expect violence from others. I see what you mean. You’ll sample the other baronies?”

“Certainly. As many as we contact. They can tell us quite a bit. We——”

A buzzer interrupted him. Meinora snapped a switch and sat forward alertly.

A needle quivered, rose from its rest, and swung abruptly across the meter scale. With an audible ping, it slapped against the stop beyond the maximum reading.

Meinora looked sharply at the detector set, then turned a selector switch. The needle moved reluctantly away from the pin, but remained above the red line at center scale. Meinora grimaced, twisted the selector again, and adjusted another knob, till the needle came to rest at center.

He examined the dial readings, frowned incredulously, then turned.

“Look at it,” he invited. “It’s a wonder he hasn’t burned that amplifier out. It’s a heavy duty job, I know. But——”

Konar leaned over his chief’s shoulder.

“What an overload! We’ve found it, all right. But what’s going on?”

“Let’s find out.” Meinora flipped a switch. The two men tensed against the resultant shock and were silent for a time. At last, Konar reached out to snap the switch off.

“Just raw, crushing force,” he said wonderingly. “A ferocious demand, with no regard for facts, no consideration of mental characteristics, no thought of consequence.” He shook his head slowly. “Never experienced anything just like that before.”

“With the power he’s using,” Meinora remarked, “it’s a wonder he doesn’t upset every mind in his castle.” He snapped the detector off.

“Including his own.” Konar nodded and looked at the dial settings. “One thing’s sure. This boy never had any instruction.” He stepped back. “Well, we know he has it. What’s the procedure?”

Meinora was frowning thoughtfully. He stroked his injured cheek, then shook his head.

“We certainly let that guard officer in for something,” he mused. “Have to pick him up and give him therapy, I think.” He looked at Konar. “Oh, procedure?”

“Yes, sir. Do we catch him alone and proceed as we did with the last one? That worked with no trouble.”

“No, I don’t think it’d work out so well in this case. If I caught it right, this one’s almost never by himself outside his apartment. Likes to impress his personality on people.” Meinora looked at the detector set, then around at the younger man beside him.

“You know, I got some interesting side thoughts just now. Maybe we can do two jobs in one this time. It’ll take a little longer, but it might save time in the long run.”

The communications operator came over. “Not another of those?” he asked with a grin.

Meinora nodded. “I’m just dreaming up a nice, dirty trick,” he admitted. “Tried something like it once before, on a smaller scale. It worked.” He stood up, stretching.

“The fair’s going to be on at Orieano in a little while, right?”

“Yes. Be a pretty big affair, too, I think. Why?”

“And the Duke’ll be there, of course, along with most of his court and a good share of his fighting men?”

“Why, yes, sir. They tell me he’s always been there. Don’t suppose he’ll skip it this time.”

“So, it’s perfect. We’ll get this set of equipment in public, and with apparent legitimacy. And in the process, we’ll set up social strains that’ll result in this area reorienting itself.” Meinora looked around with a grin.

“Look, call Barskor. Tell him to pick us up with the flier. We’ll go down to the hills south of Orieano. Tell you about it on the way.”

* * * *

The last of the river guards was carried out, head dangling limply from the arms of one of the bearers. Bel Menstal sat back in his chair, frowning. Abruptly, he turned on his steward.

“None of them knew a thing,” he snarled. “None of them. There’s something funny going on here.”

The steward’s face was drawn. Dizzying forces had assailed him, and he had almost collapsed several times during the questioning. He tried to gather his hazy thoughts. Too many kept coming too fast.

“Yes, Excellency,” he agreed. “Maybe it is witchcraft.”

Bel Menstal’s face darkened. “Nonsense,” he growled, rising part way out of his chair. “Witchcraft be damned! There’s some explanation to this, and I’m going to find out what it is.”

“Yes, Excellency.”

The Baron looked up, then stared contemptuously at his man.

“Yes, Excellency,” he mimicked in a singsong voice. “Always ‘Yes, Excellency.’ Haven’t you an idea of your own?”

“Yes, Excellency, I——”

“Inept fool! There’s an explanation to this, I tell you. And peasant superstition has no part in it. You should have found it. But no! You came, dragging a whole detachment of guards in for me to question. Me, the Baron! I have to do all the work—all the thinking. I tell you, I want men about me who can think and act.”

He got out of his chair and circled the table, striding close to the steward.

“I’ll give you one more chance, Weron. Go out and find what happened to that money. I don’t care how you do it, and I’m not going to be bothered with your petty details. But find out where that money has gone. Is that simple enough for you to understand?”

“Yes, Excellency.” Weron backed toward the door. “I’ll——”

Reckless fury shook Florel. Suddenly, he felt an irresistible craving for direct, violent action. He picked a dagger from his belt.

“You’re not only a fool,” he shouted, “but a spineless one, as well. I think I’ll have to get another steward. A good one.” He raised the dagger, then paused.

“Here, weakling. You’d like to use this, wouldn’t you? But you lack the will. That’s why you’re a mere lackey.” Abruptly, he threw the weapon at Weron.

“Try it, fool. Try it, and see how a real man protects himself.”

He stalked toward the steward.

The man cringed away, then, pressed by his master, suddenly sobbed with rage. He raised the dagger. Bel Menstal, protected by his body shield, brushed the stroke aside.

“Ha!” He snatched the weapon. “You would try it?”

Weron threw his arms before him, trying to ward off the blows, then slumped as the blade sank into his flesh.

Bel Menstal struck the sagging body a few more times with the dagger, then threw the weapon on top of the inert form.

“Ho, Guards,” he shouted, flinging the door open.

He went back to his chair and watched as the guards came in. In obedience to his gesture, they carried the one-time steward from the room. The door closed, and Bel Menstal was alone. Slowly, the stimulation of the encounter faded, and he shook his head.

It had been pleasant for a few minutes, he thought, but he had solved nothing.

Could it be that searchers from his native land had at last found him? He frowned. No, they wouldn’t use some devious method, even supposing they could find some way of corrupting his household. They would simply expose him and accuse him before the Duke. They’d storm his castle if necessary, to take him by force. This was something else. He would have to think. He put his elbows on the table, cupping his face in his hands.

* * * *

The great market square at Orieano was crowded. Colorful tents hid most of the cobblestones, and the rest of the pavement was obscured from view by the droves of people. Merchants and their assistants hovered about, each endeavoring to outdo the rest in enticing the swarming crowd into his tent. Jugglers and mountebanks competed for attention, outdoing even themselves in their efforts to gain the ears, the eyes, and the coins of the mob of bargain hunters.

At one side of the square, the cattle mart was drawing many, who listened to the noise of the beasts and the shouts of the vendors. Some paused to bargain. Others simply strode about, still looking for the things they had come to seek out. Here and there, a cutpurse slunk through the crowd, seeking his own type of bargain—an unwary victim.

The Duke of Dwerostel rode into the market, conscious of a buzz which rose to a loud hum. The bellowing of beasts, the cries of vendors, the scuffling of many feet, all blended into one great sound—the voice of the fair.

The Duke listened contentedly. Here, he thought, was activity. Here, his chamberlain would find the things he had been ordered to get that the comfort of the castle might be furthered. And here was a certainty of tolls and taxes, which would enrich the duchy.

He continued at the head of his retinue, through the center of the square. Time enough to take close note of the market later. Now, he wished to get to the castle of Orieano, where he would take refreshment after his trip.

He looked up at the heights above the town. Pennants were flying from the stone battlements. And he could see the tiny figures of the guard. His presence in the town had certainly been noted. He rode to the other side of the square, and led his company up the steep, winding road to the castle’s town gate.

The sentries grounded their pikes and stood rigidly as the ducal escort rode through the gate, the pennons on their lances flying with the breeze of their passage. The ducal party swept through the outer ward, through the inner wall, and came to a halt before the keep.

The Baron of Orieano waited before his keep. He came forward, bowing low before his liege, then steadied a stirrup as the Duke dismounted. He waved toward the dinning hall.

“Your Excellency will grace us with his presence at meat?”

The Duke gestured to a page, who took the charger’s reins to guide the beast away.

“It would be pleasing to us,” he said.

He nodded graciously and followed his vassal into the hall. He nodded in approval at the long tables, waited until the clanging of the welcoming salute subsided, and went to the elevated table set for his use and that of his Baron.

He sat down, looking over the company. A glint of gold caught his eye, and he looked curiously at two men who sat a little way down the table.

These two were elegantly turned out, their long cloaks thrown back to expose richly embroidered cloth. The Duke examined them closely. Obviously, here was one of the great western nobles, with an almost equally noble companion. The golden circlet proclaimed the identity of one, and the proud bearing and rich dress of both confirmed their station. Somehow, the Duke thought, these two presented a far more imposing appearance than his vassal, the Baron Bel Menstal, despite that Baron’s overwhelming personality.

He thought of his hard fighting border protector. Of course, he had far to come, and the way through the mountains could be difficult. But it was a little strange he was not yet here.

The Duke remembered some of the resentful gazes he had noted during his passage through the fair. He must have words, he decided, with Bel Menstal. Possibly the man was a little too eager to collect his road and river taxes. Possibly this hard man of his was too hard, too grasping. Of course, he held a valuable bastion against the tribes of the Ajerical, but——

He shrugged away his thoughts and devoted his attention to the dishes before him.

* * * *

As the Duke took up his food, the waiting company commenced reaching for dishes. Konar turned toward Meinora with a slight smile.

“Got ’em well trained, hasn’t he?”

“That he has. Another note for our cultural information.”

“When do you want me to talk to him?”

“After he’s finished his main courses and got a few cups of wine in him. Our boy’ll be delayed for a while, you know. We’ve plenty of time to let Orieano fill the Duke in before Bel Menstal arrives.”

Klion Meinora turned his attention to the trencher before him for a moment, then looked toward his companion again.

“Notice the girl sitting by the Baron?”

“You mean Orieano’s daughter?”

“Precisely. Don’t give her any cause for fear. Don’t even make a sudden move in her presence.”

“You mean——?”

“I do. She could become Lady Death, if she got frightened.”

Konar looked toward the elevated table. The girl looked harmless enough. She was slender, attractive, even delicate looking. But he remembered a horror-distorted face, a mind-shattering scream, and a blinding flash of light. He shuddered a little and turned his attention to his food.

* * * *

Florel Bel Menstal strode into the hall, looking toward the table head. The Duke, he noted, was still at table, though he had finished his meal. Now, he was engaged in earnest conversation with Orieano.

This, Bel Menstal thought, must be checked. Haughtily ignoring the rest of the company, he paced to the head of the table, where he made perfunctory obeisance.

“Your Excellency,” he greeted. He straightened. “I offer my apologies for my late appearance. My men had to clear a slide from the way.” He turned toward Orieano.

“You would do well to instruct your serfs in the art of road building. Their work seems slack.”

He faced the Duke again. The overlord set his cup down.

“Bel Menstal,” he said gravely, “two nobles of your former land have come to me to present serious accusations.” He rose. “You will accompany me to the chambers.”

Bel Menstal hesitated. His men were outside the castle, of course. It was against etiquette to bring them inside, especially when the Duke was present. But there were plenty of them. Possibly he should fight his way out of here now. Once in his hilltop castle, he would be impregnable. And his raiding parties could keep the barony in supplies. Or possibly it would be better to——

He forced his panic down. After all, what could these two do? There could be little evidence they could offer. Well over twenty years had passed. He had adopted the ways of the land. Now, he was one of the Duke’s powerful arms. And what could they give to offset that?

Here was no cause for fear. He could bluff his way out of this accusation, discredit the searchers, and make his position permanently secure. Possibly it was even better this way. He looked scornfully at the two men who moved toward him.

They were dressed in the ornate court dress of the Western Empire, he saw. Unquestionably, these were genuine men of the west. But he was now of the east. And here, he had established himself, and would soon establish himself more firmly, while they were mere foreigners. When it came to it, the Duke would hardly dare be too critical of him. Confidently, he pushed his way past the nearer of the two westerners, to follow the Duke to the audience chamber.

As the Duke faced about, one of the newcomers stepped forward.

“There is the man, Excellency,” he said positively. “Here is no man of noble birth. This man is a serf—a mere scullery boy-who murdered his noble master to steal his insignia. We have searched for many years, for his crime was so monstrous that no effort could be too great to bring him to justice.” He faced Bel Menstal.

“Flor, serf of Budorn,” he said sternly, “your time of reckoning has come. Hand over the stolen insignia.”

The Duke intervened.

“Aren’t we going a little fast?” he asked mildly. “He claims to be a younger son of the Earl of Konewar. Let him speak in his defense.”

The stranger nodded. “That we learned, Excellency,” he admitted. “And that is what led us to him, for it is one of the great holes in his story. We know of Konewar. True, he had two sons, but the younger was killed several years ago.” He paused.

“There is a further bit of evidence I might offer,” he added. “And I feel sure that some study by your chamberlain will bear me out.” He pointed at the coronet worn by Florel.

“That insignia of rank which this man profanes is never given to other than the rightful heir to a great estate. And then, not until he succeeds to his title. No younger member of any of our noble families has ever been allowed the coronet or the belt. Even many large landholders, such as I, do not have them. Those are reserved for the heads of the great houses, and there are few of them in existence. Certainly, no western Earl would desert his holdings to journey to far lands and to take service with another, not even one so highly placed as yourself.”

The Duke looked sharply at him, then turned his gaze on his vassal. “These words have the ring of truth,” he said. “Can you answer them? Have you perchance traded upon our unfamiliarity with your home country to misrepresent your station?”

Flor looked around the room. Possibly there was still time to——Or possibly he could still face these men down. Only one of them wore a coronet. He drew himself up arrogantly.

“These are cunning deceivers,” he stated positively. “When I left Konewar, my father himself——”

Meinora raised a hand threateningly. “Your father was never in Konewar, Serf,” he said sternly. “Your father still tends his master’s fields in the hills of Budoris.”

Flor snatched his sword from its sheath. This was the unprotected one. He could be struck with the sword, and perhaps in the confusion, an escape would be possible.

“That is the last insult,” he snarled. “I challenge you to combat, to test whether you can support your lies.”

“Nobles,” was the reply, “do not fight with serfs. You should know that. The great ones, like him,” Meinora pointed at Konar, who stood close to the Duke, “have no contact with such as you. But I am here. And when a serf becomes insolent, we have ways of punishing him.”

Konar smiled a little, pointing a small object as Meinora slipped his own sword out.

Flor lunged furiously, and Meinora stepped aside. The man had determination and fierce courage. But he had never bothered to really learn the use of his weapon. No need, of course. He had never been compelled to put up a defense. Not till now. The hand weapon held by Konar would destroy his invulnerability.

Meinora struck suddenly at Flor’s hand with the flat of his blade, then engaged the man’s sword with his own, and twisted. The weapon clattered to the floor and Flor stooped to recover it.

The team chief laughed shortly, bringing the flat of his blade down in a resounding smack and Flor straightened, involuntarily bringing a hand to his outraged rear. Again, the blade descended, bringing a spurt of dust from his clothing. Flor twisted, trying to escape, but his assailant followed, swinging blow after full armed blow with the flat of his sword. He worked with cool skill.

It seemed to Flor that the punishing steel came from all directions, to strike him at will. Blows fell on his back, his legs, even his face, and he cringed away, trying desperately to escape the stinging pain. Under the smarting blows, he remembered previous whippings, administered by a strong-armed kitchen master, and he seemed to smell the stench of the scullery once more. Suddenly, he sank to his knees in surrender.

“Please, Master. No more, please.” He raised his hands, palms together, and looked up pleadingly.

The Duke looked down in horrified disgust.

“And this, I accepted. This, I made a Baron of my realm.” He transferred his gaze to Konar. Suddenly, he looked feeble and humbly supplicant.

Flor sniffled audibly.

“I know you have come a long way,” the Duke said, “but I would ask of you a favor. I would deal with this miscreant. Your injury is old. It has been partially healed by time, and it does not involve honor so deeply as does my own.” He shook his head.

“I have abandoned the dignity of my station, and the injury is fresh and must continue unless I act to repair it.”

Konar nodded graciously. “Your Excellency’s request is just,” he said. “We but came to reclaim the lost insignia of Budorn.” He stepped forward, taking the circlet from Flor’s head. Two guards seized the prisoner, and Konar tore the belt from the man’s waist.

“This insigne must be remounted,” he said. “The belt has been dishonored for too long.” He broke the fastenings holding the body shield to the leather, and threw the heavy strap back at Flor.

“We are deeply indebted to you, Excellency,” he added, turning to the Duke. “If it is your will, we shall remain only for the execution, then return to our own land.”

The Duke sighed. “It is well.” He nodded at the guards. “Remove him,” he ordered. “An execution will be held at daybreak.”

* * * *

“Very good, Konar. You handled that beautifully.”

“Thanks, Chief. What’s next?”

“Just keep the Duke busy with bright conversation. Buck up his spirits a bit. The old boy’s had a nasty shock, and unfortunately, he’s due for another one. Too bad, but it’s for the best. I’ll take it from here.”

* * * *

Diners looked up curiously as the two guards led Flor through the hall to the outer door. A few rose and followed as the three men went past the sentries at the portal, and came out into the sunshine of the inner ward. Across the cobblestones was the narrow entrance to the dungeon.

Flor looked around despairingly. His charger stood, waiting for the rider, who would never again—Or would he?

He remembered that he was still carrying the heavy belt that had been so contemptuously flung at him. When the strap had been thrown, he had flung a hand up to protect his already aching face. He had caught and held the belt, and no one had thought to take it from him.

He suddenly swerved his thick shoulders, swinging the heavy strap at the eyes of one of his guards. With a cry of pain, the man covered his face, and Flor spun, to swing the strap at the other guard. Before the two men could recover, he dashed to the side of his mount, swung into the saddle, and urged the beast into motion.

The wall was low on this side, but Flor remembered it towered high above the dry moat. And across that moat were the woods, where his men waited. He urged the beast to full speed, forcing the animal to the top of the wall and over.

For an almost endless instant, time seemed to stop. The barren moat and green weeds floated beneath him, and the only reminder of his rapid drop was the air, which whistled past his ears. Suddenly, motion was restored again, and they lit with a jarring crash, just at the lip of the moat.

With a cry of agony, the charger pitched forward, pawing at the stones that had smashed his chest, and throwing his rider over his head. Flor managed to land uninjured. He picked himself up and ran to the edge of the forest before he stopped to look back.

Heads were appearing atop the wall. At the edge of the moat, the charger struggled vainly, then dropped from sight. Flor waved defiantly at the growing crowd which stared from the high wall.

“The Duke hangs nobody,” he shouted, “unless he can catch and hold him.” He turned, to make his way through the trees.

“In fact,” he added to himself, “I may yet return to hang the Duke.”

He went to the meadow where his escort was encamped.

“We have been betrayed,” he shouted. “The Duke plots with the merchants to destroy Bel Menstal and hang his men. Break camp! We must gather the forces of the barony.”

* * * *

Baron Bel Orieano looked worried.

“The Duke has sent couriers,” he said, “to gather the fighting men of the duchy. But it will be a long, hard struggle. The serf has gained the hills of Menstal. He has raised his men, and has dared to attack. Some say he has enlisted those very hill tribes, from whose depredations he swore to defend the duchy, and even has them serving under his banner.” He looked at Meinora and Konar.

“The roads of the duchy are no longer safe. Raiding parties appear at every wooded stretch. Nor can we even be certain that the couriers have gotten through to Dweros.” He shook his head.

“I, of course, am loyal to the Duke. But my forces are few. My barony has been a peaceful community, having little need for arms.”

Meinora smiled encouragingly. “Yet there are fighters here,” he said, “and in plenty.”

The Baron looked at him curiously. “Where? I have no knowledge of such.”

Konar leaned forward. “If you can help us get the Duke’s approval, we can raise an army which ten Bel Menstals would fail to withstand.”

“The Duke’s approval?”

“Certainly.” Konar waved his hand. “Look over your walls, Excellency. You have burghers. There are armorers, merchants, with their caravan guards, artisans, even peasants. Here, today, are gathered more able-bodied men than Bel Menstal could raise, were he to search out and impress all the hill tribes.”

“But, to arm these Commoners? And would they fight?”

“To be sure. Given reason, they will fight like madmen.”

Meinora leaned forward, speaking rapidly. “For long years, they have suffered from the road and river taxes of Bel Menstal, as well as from the insults and blows of his officers. Many of them have been imprisoned, and held for ruinous ransom. Others have been tortured and killed. Under the serf, they would suffer additional taxes, until they were driven from the land, or themselves reduced to serfdom and even slavery.” He waved at the town.

“Caravans would be halted and stripped of both goods and coin. All this, he has done before, but on no such scale as he would were restraining hands removed.” Meinora spread his hands.

“The Duke has only to promise, under his solemn oath, to rid the land of robbers, to allow the merchants and artisans to police the land, and to form those guilds and associations which they have long petitioned for their own protection. For these things, they will fight.”

The Baron leaned back in his chair. He had heard some of these arguments before, but had ignored them, thinking that they were mere special pleading from interested merchants. Now, they were being presented by men of his own station.

And the situation was urgent. Drastic measures were necessary. Under the gaze of the two, he felt a change of thought. The whole thing was possible, of course, and it might be that trade, uninterrupted by robber depredation, would provide greater taxes than before.

Finally, he rose to his feet. “Come,” he said, “we will seek audience with the Duke and put this matter before him.”

* * * *

“Well, that’s part of the job.” Klion Meinora twisted in his seat and craned his neck to look at the green fields spread out beneath the flier.

“It worked out almost exactly as you explained it, Chief.” Konar looked curiously at his instructor. “But I missed a couple of steps somewhere.”

“It followed from the culture pattern.” Meinora raised an eyebrow. “You saw the reaction of the Duke when he realized that Flor was actually a serf?”

“Sure. He was so horrified, he was sick.”

“But did you think of the reaction of the townsmen and peasants?”

“You mean they’d feel the same way?”

“Sure. Most of them did. These people have been ingrained with a firm belief in their mode of living. They regard it as right and proper. And the murder and robbery of a noble by a serf is just as serious in the eyes of serfs and freemen as it is to the nobles. No serf in his right mind would even think of raising a hand against a noble, not even in self-defense. Catch?”

Konar leaned back. “Oh, brother,” he murmured. “I can just see what happened when Flor’s real status finally penetrated the minds of his own men.”

“You’re probably right, too. And with no body shield to supplement his rather awkward swordsmanship, Flor was fresh meat for the first real fighting man that stood up to him.” Meinora shook his head.

“His was a hopelessly twisted mentality, and there was no possibility of salvage.”

“I know. They have a few of his type in the wards at Aldebaran.” Konar shrugged hopelessly. “Therapists just fold their hands when they see ’em.”

“They do that. People like Flor are just pure ferocity. Oh, sometimes, they’re cunning, even talented. But there’s no higher mentality to develop—not a trace of empathy. And you can’t work with something that’s completely missing. Good thing they are quite rare.”

“I should say so,” agreed Konar. “A very good thing.” He looked out over the fields. “His influence lasted for a while, too.”

“It did. He’d conditioned his people to a certain extent. Just as I expected, it took some time to persuade that gang to stop their depredations, and it had to be done the hard way. But the merchants were willing, and that’s what it took.” Meinora brushed a hand over his hair. He knew how the rest of this story went——

“It’ll take ’em some time to get used to their new charters, but the roots of the guilds are formed. And they did some fighting and learned their powers. It’ll take a lot to make ’em go back to the old routine. The Duke’ll never try it, and his successors won’t be able to. Anyone who tries to conquer that bunch of wild-cats’ll have a tough job, and he’ll get really hurt. It’ll spread, too. Merchants and artisans in the next duchy’ll get the idea. And then the next, and the next. Freedom’s a contagious thing.”

Klion Meinora studied the terrain, then turned back.

“It’s going to be a tough planet for a long time,” he said thoughtfully. “A tough, brawling planet. They’ll fight for everything they get, and sometimes for just the love of fighting. The people who come from here will be something to deal with. But they’ll knock their own rough edges off. No, they won’t be savages.”

JOIN OUR GANG? by Sterling E. Lanier

Commander William Powers, subleader of Survey Group Sirian Combine—1027798 and hence first officer of its ship, the Benefactor, stared coldly out of his cabin port. The Benefactor was resting on the bedrock of Island Twenty-seven of the world called Mureess by its natives. Like all the other such names, it meant “the world,” just as the natives’ name for themselves, Falsethsa, meant “the people,” or “us,” or “the only race.” To Commander Powers, fifty years old, with eleven of them in Survey work, the world was Planet Two of a star called something unpronounceable in the nebula of something else equally pointless. He had not bothered to learn the native name of Island Twenty-seven, because his ship had mapped one thousand three hundred and eighty-six islands, all small, and either rocky or swampy or both. Island Twenty-seven, to him, had only one importance, and that was its being the site of the largest city on the planet.

Around the island’s seven square miles, a maze of docks, buildings, sheds, breakwaters, and artificial inlets made a maze stretching a mile out to sea in every direction. The gray sea, now covered with fog patches, rolled on the horizon under low-lying cloud. Numerous craft, some small, some large, moved busily about on the water, which in its components was identical with that of Terra, far distant in the Sirius Sector. Crude but workable atomic motors powered most of them, and there was a high proportion of submarines. Powers thought of Earth’s oceans for a moment, but then dismissed the thought. Biological technical data were no specialty he needed. Terra might be suitable for the action formulating in his mind, but a thousand suns of Sirian Combine might prove more useful. The biologists of Grand Base would determine, assisted by data his ship provided, in their monster computers, what was called for. Powers had been trained for different purposes.

He was, as every survey commander was, a battle-hardened warrior. He had fought in two major fleet actions in his day, and had once, as a very junior ensign of the Sirian Grand Fleet, participated in the ultimate horror, the destruction by obliteration of an inhabited planet. For planetary destruction a unanimous vote of the Sirian Grand Council, representing over four thousand worlds, was necessary. It had been given only four times in the long history of the Confederacy. Every intelligent being in the great Union shuddered at the thought of its ever becoming necessary again. Powers stared moodily over the rocky ground toward a group of figures in the distance which were moving in his direction. The final delegation of the Mureess government, a world government, was coming for its last meeting before the Benefactor departed into the far reaches of space.

Powers braced himself mentally for a grand effort. He held equivalent rank to that of a Galactic admiral, and it was held for one reason only, because of his real work and its importance. He was a super-psychologist, a trend-analyzer, a salesman, a promoter, a viewer, an expert on alien symbology and the spearhead of the most ruthless intelligence service in the known universe. Long ago, he had transferred from the battle fleet to the inner school at Sirius Prime for the most intensive training ever devised. Now it would be put to the ultimate test.

He heard the air lock open and turned away from the window. He had a long way to walk to the neutral council chamber, for the Benefactor was a big ship, despite the fact that only twenty beings comprised the total complement. Down the echoing corridors he paced, brow furrowed in thought. Mazechazz would have his own ideas, he knew, but if they made no impression, he would have to put his oar in. Each being on board, whether he breathed halogen or oxygen, ate uranium or protein, had to be independent in thought and action under certain circumstances. The circumstances were here, here and now in his judgment.

He arrived at the door of the Council chamber, and entered, an impressive sight in flaming orange and blue uniform.

Four members of the Supreme Council of the Mureess rose solemnly and inclined their heads in his direction. They were tall bipeds of vaguely reptilian ancestry, most of their height being body. They stood on short powerful legs, terminating in flippered feet, and their long arms were flanged to the second elbow with a rubbery fin. Only four opposed fingers flexed the hands, but the dome-shaped heads and golden eyes screamed intelligence as loudly as the bodies shouted adaption to an aquatic environment. Around the brown torsos, light but efficient harness supported a variety of instruments in noncorrosive metal sheaths. All of the instruments had been discreetly examined by scanning beams and pronounced harmless before any contact had been allowed.

Across the central table, Sakh Mazechazz, of Lyra 8, leader and captain of the Survey stared red-eyed at his executive officer. Mazechazz resembled the delegation far more than he did his own officer, for he, too, had remotely reptilian forbears. Indeed he still sported a flexible tail and, save for his own orange and blue uniform, ablaze with precious stones, resembled nothing so much as a giant Terrestrial chameleon. The uniforms were no accident. Surveymen wore anything or nothing as the case called for it, and the Falsethsa admired bright colors, having few of their own and a good color sense. The gleaming jewels on Mazechazz’s uniform stressed his superiority in rank to Powers, as they were meant to.

Of the twenty Surveymen on board the Benefactor, Mazechazz and Powers were the only two who most resembled, in that order, the oxygen-breathing natives of Mureess. That automatically made them captain and executive officer of the Benefactor. The native population saw only the captain and executive officer of the ship, and only the council chamber. On a world of ammonia breathers, Mazechazz and Powers would have been invisible in their own part of the ship providing advice only to the Skorak of Marga 10, Lambdem, and perhaps Nyur of Antares-bi-12. If a suspicious native saw an entity with whom he could feel a remote relationship giving orders to a weird-looking, far more, alien creature, a feeling of confidence might appear.

Since Mazechazz came from a planet of super-heated desert and scrub resembling the Karoo of South Africa, the resemblance could have been bettered, but it was well within the allowable limits set forth in the Inner Mandate. And in Galactic Psychology, every trick counted. For persuasion was the chief weapon of the Sirian Combine. Outright force was absolutely forbidden, save by the aforesaid vote of the council. Every weapon in the book of persuasion was used to bring intelligent races into the Combine, and persuasion is a thing of infinite variety.

As these thoughts flashed through Powers’ mind, he seated himself in a plain chair and adjusted the Universal Speaker to his mouth. Beside him, on a more elaborate chair, tailored to fit his tail, Mazechazz did the same, while the four Falsethsa seated themselves on low stools and took similar instruments from the oblong table which separated them from the two Surveymen. Deep in the bowels of the ship, a giant translator switched on, to simultaneously translate and record the mutually alien tongues as they were spoken. Adjustable extensions on the speakers brought the sound to the bone of the skull. For different life forms, different instruments would have been necessary and were provided for.

Mazechazz, as “captain,” opened the proceedings.

“Since this is our last session with you, we hope some fresh proposals have occurred to your honorable council during your absence,” hummed the speaker through Powers’ skull.

He who was designated First among the council of the Mureess answered.

“We have no new proposals, nor indeed had we ever any. Trade would be welcome, but we vitally need nothing you or your Combine have described, captain. We have all the minerals we need and the Great Mother—he meant the sea—provides food. We will soon go into space ourselves and meet as equals with you. We cannot tolerate what you call an ‘observer,’ who seems to us a spy, and not subject to our laws by your own definition. That is all we have to say.”

That does it, thought Powers glumly. The cold—and entirely accurate—description of a Planetary representative of the Sirian Combine was the final clincher. The intensely proud and chauvinistic Falsethsa would tolerate no interference.

Mazechazz gave no indication that he had heard. He tried again.

“In addition to trade and education, general advancement of the populace,” murmured the mike, “have you considered defense?” He paused. “Not all races who travel in space are friendly. A few are starkly inimical, hating all other forms of life. Could you defend yourselves, Honorable Sirs, against such?”

It was obvious from the speed of the answer that the Council of Mureess had considered, if not anticipated this question. The second member spoke, an obvious pre-assignment.

“In all our long history, you are our first contact with star travelers. Yet we are not defenseless. The Great Mother contains not only food, fish and plants which we harvest, but many strong and terrible beasts. Very few are left to disturb us. In addition, the implications of your ship have not escaped us, and our scientists are even now adapting some of our atomic devices used in mining to other ends.” The voice contained a faint hint of pride as it ended. We got guns, too, buddy, it said, and we ain’t pushovers.

The First of the Council spoke again. “Let me be plain, Respected Star-farers. It seems obvious to us that you have learned most of what we represent as a council, if not all. We are the heads of the Great Clans and we will not change. It hardly seems likely that you represent a society based on heredity if you include the diverse and nameless breeds of creature you have shown us on your screens. We do not want such an amalgam on our world causing unrest and disturbances of public order. Still less do we desire authoritarian interference with the ordered life we have developed. Your requests are one and severally refused. There will be no ‘observer.’ Trade, regulated by us, will be welcome. Otherwise, should you choose not to be bound by our laws, we must respectfully and finally bid you farewell. When at some future date, we develop ships such as yours, we may reconsider.” The speaker paused, looked at his three confreres, who nodded silently. The First stared arrogantly at Mazechazz, and continued.

“Finally, we have decided to place a ban on further landings by aliens unless you are now prepared to negotiate a trade agreement on our terms!”

Powers thought frantically, his face motionless. This was defeat, stark and unequivocal. The parable he had in mind seemed indicated now or never. He turned to Sakh Mazechazz, and spoke.

“May I have your permission to address the Honored Council, Noble Captain?” he asked.

“Speak, First Officer,” said the Lyran, his gular pouches throbbing. His ruby eyes, to his associate, looked pained, as well they might.

“Let me pose a question, Honored Sirs,” said Powers. “Suppose that in your early history of creating your orderly realm you had discovered on one of your islands a race of Falsethsa as advanced and regulated as yourselves who wished nothing to do with you?” He could feel the alerted tension of the four as the golden eyes glowed at him.

“The implications of your question are obvious,” the First of the Council spoke, as coldly as ever. “Do you threaten us with force from your Combine devoted to peace?” The flat voice of the translator hummed with acquired and impossible violence which Powers knew to be subjective.

The First continued. “We would resist to the ultimate, down to the least of our young and the most helpless female weed cultivator! Do your worst!”

Powers sat back. He had done his best. The hereditary dictatorship of a united world had spoken. No democratic minority had ever raised its head here. The society of Mureess was stratified in a way ancient India never thought of being, down to refuse collectors of a thousand generations of dishonorable standing. Ancient Japan had been as rigidly exclusionist but there had been a progressive element there. Here there was nothing. Nothing that is, except a united world of coldly calculating and very advanced entities about to erupt into space with Heaven knew what weapons and a murderous arrogance and race pride to bolster them.

He thought of the dead orb called Sebelia, rolling around its worthless sun, an object of nausea to all life. And he had helped. Well, the boys in Biology had the ball now. He forced himself to listen to the First of Council as he bade Mazechazz a courteous farewell.

“Depart in harmony and peace, Honorable Star-farers. May your Great Mother be benign, when you return to give your high council our message on the far-distant worlds you have shown us in the sky.”

The Council departed, leaving Powers and Mazechazz staring at each other in the council chamber, their gaudy uniforms looking a little dull and drab.

“Well, Sakh,” said Powers, his ruddy face a little flushed, “we can’t be perfect. They don’t know about spacewarps and instantaneous communicators. Plan II has nothing to do with us.”

“Beyond our recommendation, you mean,” said the Lyran flatly. “We have failed, William. This means death for thousands of innocent beings, perhaps more. Their world population is about eighty million, you know.”

There was silence in the room until Powers broke it again.

“Would you have Sebelia, Sakh,” he asked gently, “or Ruller I, Bellevan’s world, or Labath?” There was no answer to this and he knew it. There was only one alternative to a dead, burned-out, empty planet. Mureess was in the wrong stage of development, and it would have to be brought in line. The Sirian Combine had to, and would remove any intelligent unknown menace from a position from which it could threaten its Master plan of integrated peace. As they left the chamber, Powers said a silent prayer and touched the tiny Crescent and Star embroidered on his shirt pocket. At least, he thought, the planted ultra-wave communicators would be there when the Falsethsa needed them. He looked out of a corridor port at the gray and rolling sea. The Great Mother, he thought bitterly, benevolent and overflowing!

Traleres-124, female gardener, aged thirty-two cycles, hummed in a minor key as she harvested weed of the solstice crop, twelve miles off the northern islands. A rest period was due in the next cycle day, and she and her mate were ahead of quota which should make the supervisor give them a good holiday.

The tall weed swayed gently against her and several small fish darted past in fright. As the first heavy beat of the water struck against her slim body, she looked up. Frozen with horror, she released her container, but in forty feet of water, the monster caught her before she had moved a hundred yards.

As it fed, horribly, other grim shapes, attracted by the blood moved in from the distant murk of deeper water.

Savathake-er rode his one-man torpedo alertly as he probed the southern bay of Ramasarett. He was a scientist-12 and also a hereditary hunter. If the giant fish, long since eliminated from the rest of the seas, were breeding in some secret area of the far and desolate southern rocks, it was his business to know it. No fish could catch his high-powered torpedo, while his electric spears packed a lethal jolt. Probably, he thought, a rumor of the poor fisher folk who worked the southern fringe areas. What else could you expect from such types, who had never even learned to read in a thousand cycles. Nevertheless, as he patrolled the sunken rocks, he was alert, scanning the water on all sides constantly for the great shape he sought, his skin alert for the first strange vibration. By neglecting the broken bottom, brown with laminaria and kelp, he missed the great, mottled tentacle which plucked him off his torpedo in a flash of movement, leaving the riderless craft to cruise aimlessly away into the distance.

“Your highness,” said the Supervisor Supreme, “we are helpless. We have never used metal nets, because we have never had to. Our fiber nets they slash to ribbons. They attack every species of food-fish from the Ursaa to the Krad. The breeding rate is fantastic, and now my equal who controls the mines says they are attacking the miners despite all the protection he can give them. They are not large, but in millions——”

“Cease your outcries,” said the First in Council, wearily, “and remove that animal from my writing desk. I have seen many pictures of it since they first appeared five cycles ago. It still looks alien and repulsive.”

They stared in silence at the shape that any high-school biology student of distant Terra could have identified in his sleep.

At length, the First in Council dismissed the Supervisor of Fisheries and headed thoughtfully for an inner room of his palace. He knew at last the meaning of the strange metal communicating devices, discovered and confiscated, after the star ship had departed, six cycles before. It was a simple machine to operate, and he guessed food could be sent incredibly quickly to his starving planet. Just as quickly as other things, he thought grimly. And we have to beg. Hah. Admission to the great peace-loving Combine, may the crabs devour them.

But he knew that he would send and that they would come.

* * * *

“I was comparing the two reports, my friend,” said Mazechazz, “but I am not so familiar with your planetary ecology as I should be. When Mureess applied for admission to the Combine, I requested a copy of their secret directive from Biology, but I had never seen the older report until you gave it to me just now. Can you explain the names to me, if I read them off?”

“Go ahead,” said Powers, sipping his sherbet noisily. He seldom wondered what alcohol would feel like any longer. Most Old Believers had tried it when young and disliked it.

“I’ve already looked up the names I didn’t know,” he said, “so start the Mureessan list first.”

“Great White Shark, or Man-eater,” read Mazechazz. “He sounds obvious and nasty.”

“He is,” said Powers. He put down his glass. “Remember, as usual, the birth rate has been at least tripled. An increased metabolism means increased food consumption, and no shark on Terra was ever full. This brute runs forty feet when allowed, in size, that is. A giant carnivorous fish, very tough.”

“Number two is Architeuthis, or Giant Squid,” continued the Lyran. “Is that a fish? Sorry, but on my world, well, fish are curiosities.”

“It’s an eyed, carnivorous mollusk with enormous arms, ten of them and it reaches eighty feet long at least. Swims well, too.”

There was a moment of silence, then Mazechazz continued. “Smooth dogfish.”

“A tiny shark,” said Powers, “about three and a half feet in size. They school in thousands on Terra and eat anything that swims. Just blind agile appetite. They have a high normal breeding rate.”

“Finally we have a Baleran Salamander, so you’re free of one curse, anyway. Balera, I believe, is hellishly wet, although I don’t know much about it.”

Powers rose and stretched. “He’s a little fellow with six legs and a leathery hide. A nuisance on Balera, which is the equivalent of a Terran swamp. He eats every vegetable known, dry or fresh, and, being only two inches long is hard to see. He doesn’t bite, just eats things and breeds. There must be millions by now, on each island of Mureess. Then the eggs get carried about. They’re tough and adhesive. You can guess what their warehouses looked like.”

“At least two million starved before the Council gave in,” resumed the Lyran sadly. “But they gave in all the way and abolished caste privilege before the first relief ship even arrived. They’ll be full members shortly. And this older report?”

“Read the names,” said Powers. He was staring out of the Club window at the stars. “They fed us our own dirt, because we hadn’t eliminated all our competitors. Disease means microorganisms, so you choose the largest animal possible with efficiency, that is. Just read the list. My grandparents died, you know, but it had to be done, or we’d have destroyed ourselves. The Combine was a far greater blessing to us than it ever was to Mureess, I can assure you of that!”

He listened in silence as the Lyran read.

“Desmodus, the vampire bat,

Rattus Norvegicus, the common rat,

Mus Domesticus, the common mouse,

The Common Locust,

Sylvilagus, the Cottontail Rabbit,

Passer Domesticus, the House Sparrow,

Sturnus Vulgarus, the European Starling.”

Powers sat down and stared at his friend. “Terran life by comparison with many other worlds is terribly tough because we have so many different environments, I suppose. Hence its use on Mureess. Of course, the Combine increased breeding rates again, but adapting that bat to stand cold was the last straw,” he said. “The rest of them were all ready and waiting, but the bat was tropical. We’ll start with him. Desmodus is a small flying mammal about.…”

GREYLORN, by Keith Laumer

PROLOGUE

The murmur of conversation around the conference table died as the World Secretary entered the room and took his place at the head of the table.

“Ladies and Gentlemen,” he said. “I’ll not detain you with formalities today. The representative of the Navy Department is waiting outside to present the case for his proposal. You all know something of the scheme; it has been heard and passed as feasible by the Advisory Group. It will now be our responsibility to make the decision. I ask that each of you in forming a conclusion remember that our present situation can only be described as desperate, and that desperate measures may be in order.”

The Secretary turned and nodded to a braided admiral seated near the door who left the room and returned a moment later with a young gray-haired Naval Officer.

“Members of the Council,” said the admiral, “this is Lieutenant Commander Greylorn.” All eyes followed the officer as he walked the length of the room to take the empty seat at the end of the table.

“Please proceed, Commander,” said the Secretary.

“Thank you, Mr. Secretary.” The Commander’s voice was unhurried and low, yet it carried clearly and held authority. He began without preliminary.

“When the World Government dispatched the Scouting Forces forty-three years ago, an effort was made to contact each of the twenty-five worlds to which this government had sent Colonization parties during the Colonial Era of the middle Twentieth Centuries. With the return of the last of the scouts early this year, we were forced to realize that no assistance would be forthcoming from that source.”

The Commander turned his eyes to the world map covering the wall. With the exception of North America and a narrow strip of coastal waters, the entire map was tinted an unhealthy pink.

“The latest figures compiled by the Department of the Navy indicate that we are losing area at the rate of one square mile every twenty-one hours. The organism’s faculty for developing resistance to our chemical and biological measures appears to be evolving rapidly. Analyses of atmospheric samples indicate the level of noxious content rising at a steady rate. In other words, in spite of our best efforts, we are not holding our own against the Red Tide.”

A mutter ran around the table, as Members shifted uncomfortably in their seats.

* * * *

“A great deal of thought has been applied to the problem of increasing our offensive ability. This in the end is still a question of manpower and raw resources. We do not have enough. Our small improvements in effectiveness have been progressively offset by increasing casualties and loss of territory. In the end, alone, we must lose.”

The Commander paused, as the murmur rose and died again. “There is however, one possibility still unexplored,” he said. “And recent work done at the Polar Research Station places the possibility well within the scope of feasibility. At the time the attempt was made to establish contact with the colonies, one was omitted. It alone now remains to be sought out. I refer to the Omega Colony.”

A portly Member leaned forward and burst out, “The location of the colony is unknown!”

The Secretary intervened. “Please permit the Commander to complete his remarks. There will be ample opportunity for discussion when he has finished.”

“This contact was not attempted for two reasons,” the Commander continued. “First, the precise location was not known; second, the distance was at least twice that of the earlier colonies. At the time, there was a feeling of optimism which seemed to make the attempt superfluous. Now the situation has changed. The possibility of contacting Omega Colony now assumes paramount importance.

“The development of which I spoke is a new application of drive principle which has given to us a greatly improved effective velocity for space propulsion. Forty years ago, the minimum elapsed time of return travel to the presumed sector within which the Omega World should lie was about a century. Today we have the techniques to construct a small scouting vessel capable of making the transit in just over five years. We cannot hold out here for a century, perhaps; but we can manage a decade.

“As for location, we know the initial target point toward which Omega was launched. The plan was of course that a precise target should be selected by the crew after approaching the star group closely enough to permit telescopic planetary resolution and study. There is no reason why the crew of a scout could not make the same study and examination of possible targets, and with luck find the colony.

“Omega was the last colonial venture undertaken by our people, two centuries after the others. It was the best equipped and largest expedition of them all. It was not limited to one destination, little known, but had a presumably large selection of potentials from which to choose; and her planetary study facilities were extremely advanced. I have full confidence that Omega made a successful planetfall and has by now established a vigorous new society.

“Honorable Members of the Council, I submit that all the resources of this Government should be at once placed at the disposal of a task force with the assigned duty of constructing a fifty-thousand-ton scouting vessel, and conducting an exhaustive survey of a volume of space of one thousand A.U.’s centered on the so-called Omega Cluster.”

The World Secretary interrupted the babble which arose with the completion of the officer’s presentation.

“Ladies and gentlemen, time is of the essence of our problem. Let’s proceed at once to orderly interrogation. Mr. Klayle, lead off, please.”

* * * *

The portly Councillor glared at the Commander. “The undertaking you propose, sir, will require a massive diversion of our capacities from defense. That means losing ground at an increasing rate to the obscenity crawling over our planet. That same potential applied to direct offensive measures may yet turn the balance in our favor. Against this, the possibility of a scouting party stumbling over the remains of a colony the location of which is almost completely problematical, and which by analogy with all of the earlier colonial attempts has at best managed to survive as a marginal foothold, is so fantastically remote as to be inconsiderable.”

The Commander listened coolly, seriously. “Mr. Councillor,” he replied, “as to our defensive measures, we have passed the point of diminishing returns. We have more knowledge now than we are capable of employing against the plague. Had we not neglected the physical sciences as we have for the last two centuries, we might have developed adequate measures before we had been so far reduced in numbers and area as to be unable to produce and employ the new weapons our laboratories have belatedly developed. Now we must be realistic; there is no hope in that direction.

“As to the location of the Omega World, our plan is based on the fact that the selection was not made at random. Our scout will proceed along the Omega course line as known to us from the observations which were carried on for almost three years after its departure. We propose to continue on that line, carrying out systematic observation of each potential sun in turn. As we detect planets, we will alter course only as necessary to satisfy ourselves as to the possibility of suitability of the planet. We can safely assume that Omega will not have bypassed any likely target. If we should have more than one prospect under consideration at any time, we shall examine them in turn. If the Omega World has developed successfully, ample evidence should be discernible at a distance.”

* * * *

Klayle muttered “Madness,” and subsided. The angular member on his left spoke gently, “Mr. Greylorn, why, if this colonial venture has met with the success you assume, has its government not reestablished contact with the mother world during the last two centuries?”

“On that score, Mr. Councillor, we can only conjecture,” the Commander said. “The outward voyage may have required as much as fifty or sixty years. After that, there must have followed a lengthy period of development and expansion in building the new world. It is not to be expected that the pioneers would be ready to expend resources in expeditionary ventures for some time.”

“I do not completely understand your apparent confidence in the ability of the hypothetical Omega culture to supply massive aid to us, even if its people should be so inclined,” said a straight-backed woman member. “The time seems very short for the mastery of an alien world.”

“The population development plan, Madam, provided for an increase from the original 10,000 colonists to approximately 40,000 within twenty years, after which the rate of increase would of course rapidly grow. Assuming sixty years for planetfall, the population should now number over one hundred sixty millions. Given population, all else follows.”

Two hours later, the World Secretary summed up. “Ladies and gentlemen, we have the facts before us. There still exist differences in interpretation, which however will not be resolved by continued repetition. I now call for a vote on the resolution proposed by the Military Member and presented by Commander Greylorn.”

There was silence in the Council Chamber as the votes were recorded and tabulated. Then the World Secretary sighed softly.

“Commander,” he said, “the Council has approved the resolution. I’m sure that there will be general agreement that you will be placed at the head of the project, since you were director of the team which developed the new drive and are also the author of the plan. I wish you the best of luck.” He rose and extended his hand.

The first keel plate of the Armed Courier Vessel Galahad was laid thirty-two hours later.

CHAPTER 1

I expected trouble when I left the bridge. The tension that had been building for many weeks was ready for release in violence. The ship was silent as I moved along the passageway. Oddly silent, I thought; something was brewing.

I stopped before the door of my cabin, listening; then I put my ear to the wall. I caught the faintest of sounds from within; a muffled click, voices. Someone was inside, someone attempting to be very quiet. I was not overly surprised. Sooner or later the trouble had had to come into the open. I looked up the passage, dim in the green glow of the nightlights. There was no one in sight.

I listened. There were three voices, too faint to identify. The clever thing for me to do now would be to walk back up to the bridge, and order the Provost Marshall to clear my cabin, but I had an intuitive feeling that that was not the way to handle the situation. It would make things much simpler all around if I could push through this with as little commotion as possible.

There was no point in waiting. I took out my key and placed it soundlessly in the slot. As the door slid back I stepped briskly into the room. Kramer, the Medical Officer, and Joyce, Assistant Communications Officer, stood awkwardly, surprised. Fine, the Supply Officer, was sprawled on my bunk. He sat up quickly.

They were a choice selection. Two of them were wearing sidearms. I wondered if they were ready to use them, or if they knew just how far they were prepared to go. My task would be to keep them from finding out.

I avoided looking surprised. “Good evening, gentlemen,” I said cheerfully. I stepped to the liquor cabinet, opened it, poured Scotch into a glass. “Join me in a drink?” I said.

None of them answered. I sat down. I had to move just a little faster than they did, and by holding the initiative, keep them off balance. They had counted on hearing my approach, having a few moments to get set, and using my surprise against me. I had reversed their play and taken the advantage. How long I could keep it depended on how well I played my few cards. I plunged ahead, as I saw Kramer take a breath and wrinkle his brow, about to make his pitch.

“The men need a change, a break in the monotony,” I said. “I’ve been considering a number of possibilities.” I fixed my eyes on Fine as I talked. He sat stiffly on the edge of my bunk. Already he was regretting his boldness in presuming to rumple the Captain’s bed.

“It might be a good bit of drill to set up a few live missile runs on random targets,” I said. “There’s also the possibility of setting up a small arms range and qualifying all hands.” I switched my eyes to Kramer. Fine was sorry he’d come, and Joyce wouldn’t take the initiative; Kramer was my problem. “I see you have your Mark 9, Major,” I said, holding out my hand. “May I see it?” I smiled pleasantly.

I hoped I had hit him quickly and smoothly enough, before he had had time to adjust to the situation. Even for a hard operator like Kramer, it took mental preparation to openly defy his Commander, particularly in casual conversation. But possession of the weapon was more than casual.…

I looked at him, smiling, my hand held out. He wasn’t ready; he pulled the pistol from its case, handed it to me.

I flipped the chamber open, glanced at the charge indicator, checked the action. “Nice weapon,” I said. I laid it on the open bar at my right.

Joyce opened his mouth to speak. I cut in in the same firm snappy tone I use on the bridge. “Let me see yours, Lieutenant.”

He flushed, looked at Kramer, then passed the pistol over without a word. I took it, turned it over thoughtfully, and then rose, holding it negligently by the grip.

“Now, if you gentlemen don’t mind, I have a few things to attend to.” I was not smiling. I looked at Kramer with expressionless eyes. “I think we’d better keep our little chat confidential for the present. I think I can promise you action in the near future, though.”

They filed out, looking as foolish as three preachers caught in a raid on a brothel. I stood without moving until the door closed. Then I let my breath out. I sat down and finished off the Scotch in one drag.

“You were lucky, boy,” I said aloud. “Three gutless wonders.”

* * * *

I looked at the Mark 9’s on the table. A blast from one of those would have burned all four of us in that enclosed room. I dumped them into a drawer and loaded my Browning 2mm. The trouble wasn’t over yet, I knew. After this farce, Kramer would have to make another move to regain his prestige. I unlocked the door, and left it slightly ajar. Then I threw the main switch and stretched out on my bunk. I put the Browning needler on the little shelf near my right hand.

Perhaps I had made a mistake, I reflected, in eliminating formal discipline as far as possible in the shipboard routine. It had seemed the best course for a long cruise under the present conditions. But now I had a morale situation that could explode in mutiny at the first blunder on my part.

I knew that Kramer was the focal point of the trouble. He was my senior staff officer, and carried a great deal of weight in the Officer’s Mess. As a medic, he knew most of the crew better than I. I thought I knew Kramer’s driving motive, too. He had always been a great success with the women. When he had volunteered for the mission he had doubtless pictured himself as quite a romantic hero, off on a noble but hopeless quest. Now, after four years in deep space, he was beginning to realize that he was getting no younger, and that at best he would have spent a decade of his prime in monastic seclusion. He wanted to go back now, and salvage what he could.

It was incredible to me that this movement could have gathered followers, but I had to face the fact; my crew almost to a man had given up the search before it was well begun. I had heard the first rumors only a few weeks before, but the idea had spread through the crew like wildfire. Now, I couldn’t afford drastic action, or risk forcing a blowup by arresting ringleaders. I had to baby the situation along with an easy hand and hope for good news from the Survey Section. A likely find now would save us.

There was still every reason to hope for success in our search. To date all had gone according to plan. We had followed the route of Omega as far as it had been charted, and then gone on, studying the stars ahead for evidence of planets. We had made our first finds early in the fourth year of the voyage. It had been a long tedious time since then of study and observation, eliminating one world after another as too massive, too cold, too close to a blazing primary, too small to hold an atmosphere. In all we had discovered twelve planets, of four suns. Only one had looked good enough for close observation. We had moved in to televideo range before realizing it was an all-sea world.

Now we had five new main-sequence suns ahead within six months’ range. I hoped for a confirmation on a planet at any time. To turn back now to a world that had pinned its last hopes on our success was unthinkable, yet this was Kramer’s plan, and that of his followers. They would not prevail while I lived. Still it was not my plan to be a party to our failure through martyrdom. I intended to stay alive and carry through to success. I dozed lightly and waited.

* * * *

I awoke when they tried the door. It had swung open a few inches at the touch of the one who had tried it, not expecting it to be unlatched. It stood ajar now, the pale light from the hall shining on the floor. No one entered. Kramer was still fumbling, unsure of himself. At every surprise with which I presented him, he was paralyzed, expecting a trap. Several minutes passed in tense silence; then the door swung wider.

“I’ll be forced to kill the first man who enters this room,” I said in a steady voice. I hadn’t picked up the gun.

I heard urgent whispers in the hall. Then a hand reached in behind the shelter of the door and flipped the light switch. Nothing happened, since I had opened the main switch. It was only a small discomfiture, but it had the effect of interfering with their plan of action, such as it was. These men were being pushed along by Kramer, without a clearly thought out plan. They hardly knew how to go about defying lawful authority.

I called out, “I suggest you call this nonsense off now, and go back to your quarters, men. I don’t know who is involved in this, yet. You can get away clean if you leave quietly, now, before you’ve made a serious mistake.”

I hoped it would work. This little adventure, abortive though it was, might serve to let off steam. The men would have something to talk about for a few precious days. I picked up the needler and waited. If the bluff failed, I would have to kill someone.

Distantly I heard a metallic clatter. Moments later a tremor rattled the objects on the shelf, followed a few seconds later by a heavy shuddering. Papers slid from my desk, fluttered across the floor. The whiskey bottle toppled, rolled to the far wall. I felt dizzy, as my bunk seemed to tilt under me. I reached for the intercom key and flipped it.

“Taylor,” I said, “this is the Captain. What’s the report?”

There was a momentary delay before the answer came. “Captain, we’ve taken a meteor strike aft, apparently a metallic body. It must have hit us a tremendous wallop because it’s set up a rotation. I’ve called out Damage Control.”

“Good work, Taylor,” I said. I keyed for Stores; the object must have hit about there. “This is the Captain,” I said. “Any damage there?”

I got a hum of background noise, then a too-close transmission. “Uh, Cap’n, we got a hole in the aft bulkhead here. I slapped a seat pad over it. Man, that coulda killed somebody.”

* * * *

I flipped off the intercom and started aft at a run. My visitors had evaporated. In the passage men stood, milled, called questions. I keyed my mike as I ran. “Taylor, order all hands to emergency stations.”

It was difficult running, since the floors had assumed an apparent tilt. Loose gear was rolling and sliding along underfoot, propelled forward by centrifugal force. Aft of Stores, I heard the whistle of escaping air and high pressure gasses from ruptured lines. Vapor clouds fogged the air. I called for floodlights for the whole sector.

Clay appeared out of the fog with his damage control crew. “Sir,” he said, “it’s punctured inner and outer shells in two places, and fragments have riddled the whole sector. There are at least three men dead, and two hurt.”

“Taylor,” I called, “let’s have another damage control crew back here on the triple. Get the medics back here, too.” Clay and his men put on masks and moved off. I borrowed one from a man standing by and followed. The large exit puncture was in the forward cargo lock. The room was sealed off, limiting the air loss.

“Clay,” I said, “pass this up for the moment and get that entry puncture sealed. I’ll put the extra crew in suits to handle this.”

* * * *

I moved back into clear air and called for reports from all sections. The worst of the damage was in the auxiliary power control room, where communication and power lines were slashed and the panel cut up. The danger of serious damage to essential equipment had been very close, but we had been lucky. This was the first instance I had heard of encountering an object at hyper light speed.

It was astonishing how this threat to our safety cleared the air. The men went about their duties more cheerfully than they had for months, and Kramer was conspicuous by his subdued air. The emergency had reestablished at least for the time the normal discipline; the men still relied on the Captain in trouble.

Damage control crews worked steadily for the next seventy-two hours, replacing wiring, welding, and testing. Power Section jockeyed endlessly, correcting air motions. Meanwhile, I checked almost hourly with Survey Section, hoping for good news to consolidate the improved morale situation.

It was on Sunday morning, just after dawn relief that Lt. Taylor came up to the bridge looking sick.

“Sir,” he said, “we took more damage than we knew with that meteor strike.” He stopped and swallowed hard.

“What have you got, Lieutenant?” I said.

“We missed a piece. It must have gone off on a tangent through stores into the cooler. Clipped the coolant line, and let warm air in. All the fresh frozen stuff is contaminated and rotten.” He gagged. “I got a whiff of it, sir. Excuse me.” He rushed away.

This was calamity.

We didn’t carry much in the way of fresh natural food; but what we had was vital. It was a bulky, delicate cargo to handle, but the chemists hadn’t yet come up with synthetics to fill all the dietary needs of man. We could get by fine for a long time on vitamin tablets and concentrates; but there were nutritional elements that you couldn’t get that way. Hydroponics didn’t help; we had to have a few ounces of fresh meat and vegetables grown in sunlight every week, or start to die within months.

* * * *

I knew that Kramer wouldn’t let this chance pass. As Medical Officer he would be well within his rights in calling to my attention the fact that our health would soon begin to suffer. I felt sure he would do so as loudly and publicly as possible at the first opportunity.

My best move was to beat him to the punch by making a general announcement, giving the facts in the best possible light. That might take some of the sting out of anything Kramer said later.

I gave it to them, short and to the point. “Men, we’ve just suffered a serious loss. All the fresh frozen stores are gone. That doesn’t mean we’ll be going on short rations; there are plenty of concentrates and vitamins aboard. But it does mean we’re going to be suffering from deficiencies in our diet.

“We didn’t come out here on a pleasure cruise; we’re on a mission that leaves no room for failure. This is just one more fact for us to face. Now let’s get on with the job.”

I walked into the wardroom, drew a cup of near-coffee, and sat down. The screen showed a beach with booming surf. The sound track picked up the crash and hiss of the breakers. Considering the red plague that now covered the scene, I thought it was a poor choice. I dialed for a high view of rolling farmland.

Mannion sat at a table across the room with Kirschenbaum. They were hunched over their cups, not talking. I wondered where they stood. Mannion, Communications Officer, was neurotic, but an old Armed Force man. Discipline meant a lot to him. Kirschenbaum, Power Chief, was a joker, with cold eyes, and smarter than he seemed. The question was whether he was smart enough to idealize the stupidity of retreat now.

Kramer walked in, not wasting any time. He saw me and came over. He stopped a few feet from the table, and said loudly, “Captain, I’d like to know your plans, now that the possibility of continuing is out.”

I sipped my near-coffee and looked at the rolling farmland. I didn’t answer him. If I could get him mad, I could take him at his game.

Kramer turned red. He didn’t like being ignored. The two at the other table were watching.

“Captain,” Kramer said loudly. “As Medical Officer I have to know what measures you’re taking to protect the health of the men.”

This was a little better. He was on the defensive now; explaining why he had a right to question his Commander. I wanted him a little hotter though.

I looked up at him. “Kramer,” I said in a clear, not too loud voice, “you’re on watch. I don’t want to find you hanging around the wardroom making light chit-chat until you’re properly relieved from duty.” I went back to my near-coffee and the farmland. A river was in view now, and beyond it distant mountains.

Kramer was furious. “Joyce has relieved me, Captain,” he said, controlling his voice with an effort. “I felt I’d better take this matter up with you as soon as possible, since it affects the health of every man aboard.” He was trying to keep cool, in command of himself.

“I haven’t authorized any changes in the duty roster, Major,” I said mildly. “Report to your post.” I was riding the habit of discipline now, as far as it would carry me. I hoped that disobedience to a direct order, solidly based on regulations, was a little too big a jump for Kramer at the moment. Tomorrow it might be different. But it was essential that I break up the scene he was staging.

He wilted. “I’ll see you at 1700 in the chart room, Kramer,” I said as he turned away. Mannion and Kirschenbaum looked at each other, then finished their near-coffee hurriedly and left. I hoped their version of the incident would help deflate Kramer’s standing among the malcontents.

I left the wardroom and took the lift up to the bridge and checked with Clay and his survey team.

“I think I’ve spotted a slight perturbation in Delta 3, Captain,” Clay said. “I’m not sure, we’re still pretty far out.”

“All right, Clay,” I said. “Stay with it.”

Clay was one of my more dependable men, dedicated to his work. Unfortunately, he was no man of action. He would have little influence in a show-down.

* * * *

I was at the Schmidt when I heard the lift open. I turned; Kramer, Fine, Taylor, and a half a dozen enlisted crew chiefs crowded out, bunched together. They were all wearing needlers. At least they’d learned that much, I thought.

Kramer moved forward. “We feel that the question of the men’s welfare has to be dealt with right away, Captain,” he said smoothly.

I looked at him coldly, glanced at the rest of his crew. I said nothing.

“What we’re faced with is pretty grim, even if we turn back now. I can’t be responsible for the results if there’s any delay,” Kramer said. He spoke in an arrogant tone. I looked them over, let the silence build.

“You’re in charge of this menagerie?” I said, looking at Kramer. “If so, you’ve got thirty seconds to send them back to their kennels. We’ll go into the matter of unauthorized personnel on the bridge later. As for you, Major, you can consider yourself under arrest in quarters. Now Move.”

Kramer was ready to stare me down, but Fine gave me a break by tugging at his sleeve. Kramer shook him loose, snarling. At that the crew chiefs faded back into the lift. Fine and Taylor hesitated, then joined them. Kramer started to shout after them, then got hold of himself. The lift moved down.

Kramer thought about going for his needler. I looked at him through narrowed eyes. He decided to rely on his mouth, as usual. He licked his lips. “All right, I’m under arrest,” he said. “But as Medical Officer of this vessel it’s my duty to remind you that you can’t live without a certain minimum of fresh organic food. We’ve got to start back now.” He was pale, but determined. He couldn’t bear the thought of getting bald and toothless from dietary deficiency. The girls would never give him another look.

“We’re going on, Kramer,” I said. “As long as we have a man aboard still able to move. Teeth or no teeth.”

“Deficiency disease is no joke, Captain,” Kramer said. “You can get all the symptoms of leprosy, cancer and syphilis just by skipping a few necessary elements in your diet. And we’re missing most of them.”

“Giving me your opinions is one thing, Kramer,” I said. “Mutiny is another.”

Clay stood beside the main screen, wide-eyed. I couldn’t send Kramer down under his guard. “Let’s go, Kramer,” I said. “I’m locking you up myself.”

We rode down in the lift. The men who had been with Kramer stood awkwardly, silent as we stepped out into the passage. I spotted two chronic trouble-makers among them. I thought I might as well call them now as later. “Williams and Nagle,” I said, “this officer is under arrest. Escort him to his quarters and lock him in.” As they stepped forward hesitantly, Kramer said, “Keep your filthy hooks off me.” He started down the passage.

* * * *

If I could get Kramer put away before anybody else started trouble, I might be able to bluff it through. I followed him and his two sheepish guards down past the power section, and the mess. I hoped there would be no crowd there to see their hero Kramer under guard.

I was out of luck. Apparently word had gone out of Kramer’s arrest, and the corridor was clogged with men. They stood unmoving as we approached. Kramer stopped.

“Clear this passage, you men,” I said.

Slowly they began to move back, giving ground reluctantly.

Suddenly Kramer shouted. “That’s right, you whiners and complainers, clear the way so the Captain can take me back to the missile deck and shoot me. You just want to talk about home; you haven’t got the guts to do anything about it.”

The moving mass halted, milled. Someone shouted, “Who’s he think he is, anyway.”

Kramer whirled toward me. “He thinks he’s the man who’s going to let you all rot alive, to save his record.”

“Williams, Nagle,” I said loudly, “clear this passage.”

* * * *

Williams started half-heartedly to shove at the men nearest him. A fist flashed out and snapped his head back. That was a mistake; Williams pulled his needler, and fired a ricochet down the passage.

“’Bout twelve a you yellow-bellies git outa my way,” he yelled. “I’m comin’ through.”

Nagle moved close to Williams, and shouted something to him. The noise drowned it. Kramer swung back to me, frantic to regain his sway over the mob.

“Once I’m out of the way, there’ll be a general purge,” he roared. The hubbub faded, as men turned to hear him.

“You’re all marked men. He’s gone mad. He won’t let one of you live.” Kramer had their eyes now. “Take him now,” he shouted, and seized my arm to begin the action.

He’d rushed it a little. I hit him across the face with the back of my hand. No one jumped to his assistance. I drew my 2mm. “If you ever lay a hand on your Commanding Officer again, I’ll burn you where you stand, Kramer.”

Then a voice came from behind me. “You’re not killing anybody without a trial, Captain.” Joyce stood there with two of the crew chiefs, needler in hand. Fine and Taylor were not in sight.

I pushed Kramer out of my way and walked up to Joyce.

“Hand me that weapon, Junior, butt first,” I said. I looked him in the eye with all the glare I had. He stepped back a pace.

“Why don’t you jump him,” he called to the crowd.

The wall annunciator hummed and spoke.

“Captain Greylorn, please report to the bridge. Unidentified body on main scope.”

Every man stopped in his tracks, listening. The annunciator continued. “Looks like it’s decelerating, Captain.”

I holstered my pistol, pushed past Joyce, and trotted for the lift. The mob behind me broke up, talking, as men under long habit ran for action stations.

Clay was operating calmly under pressure. He sat at the main screen, and studied the blip, making tiny crayon marks.

“She’s too far out for a reliable scanner track, Captain,” he said, “but I’m pretty sure she’s braking.”

If that were true, this might be the break we’d been living for. Only manned or controlled bodies decelerated in deep space.

“How did you spot it, Clay?” I asked. Picking up a tiny mass like this was a delicate job, even when you knew its coordinates.

“Just happened to catch my eye, Captain,” he said. “I always make a general check every watch of the whole forward quadrant. I noticed a blip where I didn’t remember seeing one before.”

“You have quite an eye, Clay,” I said. “How about getting this object in the beam.”

“We’re trying now, Captain,” he said. “That’s a mighty small field, though.”

Joyce called from the radar board, “I think I’m getting an echo at 15,000, sir. It’s pretty weak.”

Miller, quiet and meticulous, delicately tuned the beam control. “Give me your fix, Joyce,” he said. “I can’t find it.”

Joyce called out his figures, in seconds of arc to three places.

“You’re right on it, Joyce,” Miller called a minute later. “I got it. Now pray it don’t get away when I boost it.”

Clay stepped over behind Miller. “Take it a few mags at a time,” he said calmly.

I watched Miller’s screen. A tiny point near the center of the screen swelled to a spec, and jumped nearly off the screen to the left. Miller centered it again, and switched to a higher power. This time it jumped less, and resolved into two tiny dots.

* * * *

Step by step the magnification was increased as ring after ring of the lens antenna was thrown into play. Each time the centering operation was more delicate. The image grew until it filled a quarter of the screen. We stared at it in fascination.

It showed up in stark silhouette, in the electronic “light” of the radar scope. Two perfect discs, joined by a fine filament. As we watched, their relative positions slowly shifted, one moving across, half occluding the other.

As the image drifted, Miller worked with infinite care at his console to hold it on center, in sharp focus.

“Wish you’d give me an orbit on this thing, Joyce,” he said, “so I could lock onto it.”

“It ain’t got no orbit, man,” Joyce said. “I’m trackin’ it, but I don’t understand it. That rock is on a closing curve with us, and slowin’ down fast.”

“What’s the velocity, Joyce?” I asked.

“Averagin’ about 1,000 relative, Captain, but slowin’ fast.”

“All right, we’ll hold our course,” I said.

I keyed for a general announcement.

“This is the Captain,” I said. “General Quarters. Man action stations and prepare for possible contact within one hour.”

“Missile Section. Arm No. 1 Battery and stand by.”

Then I added, “We don’t know what we’ve got here, but it’s not a natural body. Could be anything from a torpedo on up.”

I went back to the Beam screen. The image was clear, but without detail. The two discs slowly drew apart, then closed again.

“I’d guess that movement is due to rotation of two spheres around a common center,” Clay said.

“I agree with you,” I said. “Try to get me a reading on the mass of the object.”

I wondered whether Kramer had been locked up as I had ordered, but at this moment it seemed unimportant. If this was, as I hoped, a contact with our colony, all our troubles were over.

The object (I hesitated to call it a ship) approached steadily, still decelerating. Now Clay picked it up on the televideo, as it paralleled our course forty-five hundred miles out.

“Captain, it’s my guess the body will match speeds with us at about 200 miles, at his present rate of deceleration,” Clay said.

“Hold everything you’ve got on him, and watch closely for anything that might be a missile,” I said.

* * * *

Clay worked steadily over his chart table. Finally he turned to me. “Captain, I get a figure of over a hundred million tons mass; and calibrating the scope images gives us a length of nearly two miles.”

I let that sink in. I had a strong and very empty feeling that this ship, if ship it were, was not an envoy from any human colony.

The annunciator hummed and spoke. “Captain, I’m getting a very short wave transmission from a point out on the starboard bow. Does that sound like your torpedo?” It was Mannion.

“That’s it, Mannion,” I said. “Can you make anything of it?”

“No, sir,” he answered. “I’m taping it, so I can go to work on it.”

Mannion was our language and code man. I hoped he was good.

“What does it sound like,” I asked. “Tune me in.”

After a moment a high hum came from the speaker. Through it I could hear harsh chopping consonants, a whining intonation. I doubted that Mannion would be able to make anything of that gargle.

Our Bogie closed steadily. At four hundred twenty-five miles he reversed relative directions, and began matching our speed, moving closer to our course. There was no doubt he planned to parallel us.

I made a brief announcement to all hands describing the status of the action. Clay worked over his televideo, trying to clear the image. I watched as the blob on the screen swelled and flickered. Suddenly it flashed into clear stark definition. Against a background of sparkling black, the twin spheres gleamed faintly in reflected starlight.

There were no visible surface features; the iodine-colored forms and their connecting shaft had an ancient and alien look.

We held our course steadily, watching the stranger maneuver. Even at this distance it looked huge.

“Captain,” Clay said, “I’ve been making a few rough calculations. The two spheres are about 800 yards in diameter, and at the rate the structure is rotating it’s pulling about six gravities.”

That settled the question of human origin of the ship. No human crew would choose to work under six gee’s.

Now, paralleling us at just over two hundred miles, the giant ship spun along, at rest relative to us. It was visible now through the direct observation panel, without magnification.

* * * *

I left Clay in charge on the bridge, and I went down to the Com Section.

Joyce sat at his board, reading instruments and keying controls. So he was back on the job. Mannion sat, head bent, monitoring his recorder. The room was filled with the keening staccato of the alien transmission.

“Getting anything on video?” I asked. Joyce shook his head. “Nothing, Captain. I’ve checked the whole spectrum, and this is all I get. It’s coming in on about a dozen different frequencies; no FM.”

“Any progress, Mannion?” I said.

He took off his headset. “It’s the same thing, repeated over and over, just a short phrase. I’d have better luck if they’d vary it a little.”

“Try sending,” I said.

Joyce tuned the clatter down to a faint clicking, and switched his transmitter on. “You’re on, Captain,” he said.

“This is Captain Greylorn, UNACV Galahad; kindly identify yourself.” I repeated this slowly, half a dozen times. It occurred to me that this was the first known time in history a human being had addressed a non-human intelligence. The last was a guess, but I couldn’t interpret our guest’s purposeful maneuverings as other than intelligent.

I checked with the bridge; no change. Suddenly the clatter stopped, leaving only the carrier hum.

“Can’t you tune that whine out, Joyce?” I asked.

“No, sir,” he replied. “That’s a very noisy transmission. Sounds like maybe their equipment is on the blink.”

We listened to the hum, waiting. Then the clatter began again.

“This is different,” Mannion said. “It’s longer.”

I went back to the bridge, and waited for the next move from the stranger, or for word from Mannion. Every half hour I transmitted a call identifying us, followed by a sample of our language. I gave them English, Russian, and Standard Interlingua. I didn’t know why, but somehow I had a faint hope they might understand some of it.

I stayed on the bridge when the watch changed. I had some food sent up, and slept a few hours on the OD’s bunk.

Fine replaced Kramer on his watch when it rolled around. Apparently Kramer was out of circulation. At this point I did not feel inclined to pursue the point.

We had been at General Quarters for twenty-one hours when the wall annunciator hummed.

“Captain, this is Mannion. I’ve busted it.…”

“I’ll be right there,” I said, and left at a run.

Mannion was writing as I entered ComSection. He stopped his recorder and offered me a sheet. “This is what I’ve got so far, Captain,” he said.

I read:

INVADER; THE MANCJI PRESENCE OPENS COMMUNICATIONS.

“That’s a highly inflected version of early Interlingua, Captain,” Mannion said. “After I taped it, I compensated it to take out the rise-and-fall tone, and then filtered out the static. There were a few sound substitutions to figure out, but I finally caught on. It still doesn’t make much sense, but that’s what it says.”

“I wonder what we’re invading,” I said. “And what is the “Mancji Presence’?”

“They just repeat that over and over,” Mannion said. “They don’t answer our call.”

“Try translating into old Interlingua, adding their sound changes, and then feeding their own rise-and-fall routine to it,” I said. “Maybe that will get a response.”

I waited while Mannion worked out the message, then taped it on top of their whining tone pattern. “Put plenty of horse-power behind it,” I said. “If their receivers are as shaky as their transmitter, they might not be hearing us.”

We sent for five minutes, then tuned them back in and waited. There was a long silence from their side, then they came back with a long spluttering sing-song.

Mannion worked over it for several minutes.

“They must have understood us, here’s what I get,” he said:

THAT WHICH SWIMS IN THE MANCJI SEA; WE ARE AWARE THAT YOU HAVE THIS TRADE TONGUE. YOU RANGE FAR. IT IS OUR WHIM TO INDULGE YOU; WE ARE AMUSED THAT YOU PRESUME HERE; WE ACKNOWLEDGE YOUR INSOLENT DEMANDS.

“It looks like we’re in somebody’s back yard,” I said. “They acknowledge our insolent demands, but they don’t answer them.” I thought a moment. “Send this,” I said. “We’ll out-strut them:”

THE MIGHTY WARSHIP GALAHAD REJECTS YOUR JURISDICTION. TELL US THE NATURE OF YOUR DISTRESS AND WE MAY CHOOSE TO OFFER AID.

Mannion raised an eyebrow. “That ought to rock them,” he said.

“They were eager to talk to us,” I said. “That means they want something, in my opinion. And all the big talk sounds like a bluff of our own is our best line.”

“Why do you want to antagonize them, Captain?” Joyce asked. “That ship is over a thousand times the size of this can.”

“Joyce, I suggest you let me forget you’re around,” I said.

* * * *

The Mancji whine was added to my message, and it went out. Moments later this came back:

MANCJI HONOR DICTATES YOUR SAFE-CONDUCT; TALK IS WEARYING; WE FIND IT CONVENIENT TO SOLICIT A TRANSFER OF ELECTROSTATIC FORCE.

“What the devil does that mean?” I said. “Tell them to loosen up and explain themselves.”

Mannion wrote out a straight query, and sent it. Again we waited for a reply.

It came, in a long windy paragraph stating that the Mancji found electro-static baths amusing, and that “crystallization” had drained their tanks. They wanted a flow of electrons from us to replenish their supply.

“This sounds like simple electric current they’re talking about, Captain,” Mannion said. “They want a battery charge.”

“They seem to have power to burn,” I said. “Why don’t they generate their own juice? Ask them; and find out where they learned Interlingua.”

Mannion sent again; the reply was slow in coming back. Finally we got it:

THE MANCJI DO NOT EMPLOY MASSIVE GENERATION-PIECE WHERE ACCUMULATOR-PIECE IS SUFFICIENT. THIS SIMPLE TRADE SPEECH IS OF OLD KNOWLEDGE. WE SELECT IT FROM SYMBOLS WE ARE PLEASED TO SENSE EMPATTERNED ON YOUR HULL.

That made some sort of sense, but I was intrigued by the reference to Interlingua as a trade language. I wanted to know where they had learned it. I couldn’t help the hope I started building on the idea that this giant knew our colony, in spite of the fact that they were using an antique version of the language, predating Omega by several centuries.

I sent another query, but the reply was abrupt and told nothing except that Interlingua was of “old knowledge.”

Then Mannion entered a long technical exchange, getting the details of the kind of electric power they wanted.

“We can give them what they want, no sweat, Captain,” he said after half an hour’s talk. “They want DC; 100 volt, 50 amp will do.”

“Ask them to describe themselves,” I directed. I was beginning to get an idea.

Mannion sent, got his reply. “They’re molluscoid, Captain,” he said. He looked shocked. “They weigh about two tons each.”

“Ask them what they eat,” I said.

I turned to Joyce as Mannion worked over the message. “Get Kramer up here, on the double,” I said.

* * * *

Kramer came in five minutes later, looking drawn and rumpled. He stared at me sullenly.

“I’m releasing you from arrest temporarily on your own parole, Major,” I said. “I want you to study the reply to our last transmission, and tell me what you can about it.”

“Why me?” Kramer said. “I don’t know what’s going on.” I didn’t answer him.

There was a long tense half hour wait before Mannion copied out the reply that came in a stuttering nasal. He handed it to me.

As I had hoped, the message, after a preliminary recital of the indifference of the Mancji to biological processes of ingestion, recited a list of standard biochemical symbols.

“Can we eat this stuff?” I asked Kramer, handing him the sheet.

He studied it, and some of his accustomed swagger began to return. “I don’t know what the flowery phrases are all about, but the symbols refer to common proteins, lipins, carbohydrates, vitamins, and biomins,” he said. “What is this, a game?”

“All right, Mannion,” I said. I was trying to hold back the excitement. “Ask them if they have fresh sources of these substances aboard.”

The reply was quick; they did.

“Tell them we will exchange electric power for a supply of these foods. Tell them we want samples of half a dozen of the natural substances.”

Again Mannion coded and sent, received and translated, sent again.

“They agree, Captain,” he said at last. “They want us to fire a power lead out about a mile; they’ll come in close and shoot us a specimen case with a flare on it. Then we can each check the other’s merchandise.”

“All right,” I said. “We can use a ground-service cable; rig a pilot light on it, and kick it out, as soon as they get in close.”

“We’ll have to splice a couple of extra lengths to it,” Mannion said.

“Go to it, Mannion,” I said. “And send two of your men out to make the pick-up.” This wasn’t a communications job, but I wanted a reliable man handling it.

I returned to the bridge and keyed for Bourdon, directed him to arm two of his penetration missiles, lock them onto the stranger, and switch over to my control. With the firing key in my hand, I stood at the televideo screen and watched for any signs of treachery. The ship moved in, came to rest filling the screen.

Mannion’s men reported out. I saw the red dot of our power lead move away, then a yellow point glowed on the side of the vast iodine-colored wall looming across the screen.

Nothing else emerged from the alien ship. The red pilot drifted across the face of the sphere. Mannion reported six thousand feet of cable out before the pilot disappeared abruptly.

“Captain,” Mannion reported, “they’re drawing power.”

“Okay,” I said. “Let them have a sample, then shut down.”

I waited, watching carefully, until Mannion reported the cannister inside.

“Kramer,” I said. “Run me a fast check on the samples in that container.”

Kramer was recovering his swagger. “You’ll have to be a little more specific,” he said. “Just what kind of analysis do you have in mind? Do you want a full.…”

“I just want to know one thing, Kramer,” I said. “Can we assimilate these substances, yes or no. If you don’t feel like co-operating, I’ll have you lashed to your bunk, and injected with them. You claim you’re a medical officer; let’s see you act like one.” I turned my back to him.

Mannion called. “They say the juice we fed them was ‘amusing,’ Captain. I guess that means it’s okay.”

“I’ll let you know in a few minutes how their samples pan out,” I said.

* * * *

Kramer took half an hour before reporting back. “I ran a simple check such as I normally use in a routine mess inspection,” he began. He couldn’t help trying to take the center of the stage to go into his Wise Doctor and Helpless Patient routine.

“Yes or no,” I said.

“Yes, we can assimilate most of it,” he said angrily. “There were six samples. Two were gelatinous substances, non-nutritive. Three were vegetable-like, bulky and fibrous, one with a high iodine content; the other was a very normal meaty specimen.”

“Which should we take?” I said. “Remember your teeth when you answer.”

“The high protein, the meaty one,” he said. “Marked ‘6’.”

I keyed for Mannion. “Tell them that in return for 1,000 KWH we require 3,000 kilos of sample six,” I said.

Mannion reported back. “They agreed in a hurry, Captain. They seem to feel pretty good about the deal. They want to chat, now that they’ve got a bargain. I’m still taping a long tirade.”

“Good,” I said. “Better get ready to send about six men with an auxiliary pusher to bring home the bacon. You can start feeding them the juice again.”

I turned to Kramer. He was staring at the video image. “Report yourself back to arrest in quarters, Kramer,” I said. “I’ll take your services today into account at your court-martial.”

Kramer looked up, with a nasty grin. “I don’t know what kind of talking oysters you’re trafficking with, but I’d laugh like hell if they vaporized your precious tub as soon as they’re through with you.” He walked out.

Mannion called in again from ComSection. “Here’s their last, Captain,” he said. “They say we’re lucky they had a good supply of this protein aboard. It’s one of their most amusing foods. It’s a creature they discovered in the wild state and it’s very rare. The wild ones have died out, and only their domesticated herds exist.”

“Okay, we’re lucky,” I said. “It better be good or we’ll step up the amperage and burn their batteries for them.”

“Here’s more,” Mannion said. “They say it will take a few hours to prepare the cargo. They want us to be amused.”

I didn’t like the delay, but it would take us about 10 hours to deliver the juice to them at the trickle rate they wanted. Since the sample was okay, I was assuming the rest would be too. We settled down to wait.

I left Clay in charge on the bridge and made a tour of the ship. The meeting with the alien had apparently driven the mood of mutiny into the background. The men were quiet and busy. I went to my cabin and slept for a few hours.

* * * *

I was awakened by a call from Clay telling me that the alien had released his cargo for us. Mannion’s crew was out making the pick-up. Before they had maneuvered the bulky cylinder to the cargo hatch, the alien released our power lead.

I called Kramer and told him to meet the incoming crew and open and inspect the cargo. If it was the same as the sample, I thought, we had made a terrific trade. Discipline would recover if the men felt we still had our luck.

Then Mannion called again. “Captain,” he said excitedly, “I think there may be trouble coming. Will you come down, sir?”

“I’ll go to the bridge, Mannion,” I said. “Keep talking.”

I tuned my speaker down low and listened to Mannion as I ran for the lift.

“They tell us to watch for a little display of Mancji power. They ran out some kind of antenna. I’m getting a loud static at the top of my short wave receptivity.”

I ran the lift up and as I stepped onto the bridge I said, “Clay, stand by to fire.”

As soon as the pick-up crew was reported in, I keyed course corrections to curve us off sharply from the alien. I didn’t know what he had, but I liked the idea of putting space between us. My P-Missiles were still armed and locked.

Mannion called, “Captain, they say our fright is amusing, and quite justified.”

I watched the televideo screen for the first sign of an attack. Suddenly the entire screen went white, then blanked. Miller, who had been at the scanner searching over the alien ship at close range, reeled out of his seat, clutching at his eyes. “My God, I’m blinded,” he shouted.

Mannion called, “Captain, my receivers blew. I think every tube in the shack exploded!”

I jumped to the direct viewer. The alien hung there, turning away from us in a leisurely curve. There was no sign of whatever had blown us off the air. I held my key, but didn’t press it. I told Clay to take Miller down to Medic. He was moaning and in severe pain.

Kramer reported in from the cargo deck. The cannister was inside now, coating up with frost. I told him to wait, then sent Chilcote, my demolition man, in to open it. Maybe it was booby-trapped. I stood by at the DVP and waited for other signs of Mancjo power to hit us. The general feeling was tense.

Apparently they were satisfied with one blast of whatever it was; they were dwindling away with no further signs of life.

After half an hour of tense alertness, I ordered the missiles disarmed.

I keyed for General. “Men, this is the Captain,” I said. “It looks as though our first contact with an alien race has been successfully completed. He is now at a distance of three hundred and moving off fast. Our screens are blown, but there’s no real damage. And we have a supply of fresh food aboard; now let’s get back to business. That colony can’t be far off.”

That may have been rushing it some, but if the food supply we’d gotten was a dud, we were finished anyway.

We watched the direct-view screen till the ship was lost; then followed on radar.

“It’s moving right along, Captain,” Joyce said, “accelerating at about two gee’s.”

“Good riddance,” Clay said. “I don’t like dealing with armed maniacs.”

“They were screwballs all right,” I said, “but they couldn’t have happened along at a better time. I only wish we had been in a position to squeeze a few answers out of them.”

“Yes, sir,” Clay said. “Now that the whole thing’s over, I’m beginning to think of a lot of questions myself.”

The annunciator hummed. I heard what sounded like hoarse breathing. I glanced at the indicator light. It was the cargo deck mike that was open.

I keyed. “If you have a report, Chilcote, go ahead,” I said.

Suddenly someone was shouting into the mike, incoherently. I caught words, cursing. Then Chilcote’s voice, “Captain,” he said. “Captain, please come quick.” There was a loud clatter, noise, then only the hum of the mike.

“Take over, Clay,” I said, and started back to the cargo deck at a dead run.

* * * *

Men crowded the corridor, asking questions, milling. I forced my way through, found Kramer surrounded by men, shouting.

“Break this up,” I shouted. “Kramer, what’s your report?”

Chilcote walked past me, pale as chalk. I pushed through to Kramer.

“Get hold of yourself, and make your report, Kramer,” I said. “What started this riot?”

Kramer stopped shouting, and stood looking at me, panting. The crowded men fell silent.

“I gave you a job to do, Major,” I said; “opening a cargo can. Now you take it from there.”

“Yeah, Captain,” he said. “We got it open. No wires, no traps. We hauled the load out of the can on to the floor. It was one big frozen mass, wrapped up in some kind of netting. Then we pulled the covering off.”

“All right, go ahead,” I said.

“That load of fresh meat your star-born pals gave us consists of about six families of human beings; men, women, and children.” Kramer was talking for the crowd now, shouting. “Those last should be pretty tender when you ration out our ounce a week, Captain.”

The men milled, wide-eyed, open-mouthed, as I thrust through to the cargo lock. The door stood ajar and wisps of white vapor curled out into the passage.

I stepped through the door. It was bitter cold in the lock. Near the outer hatch the bulky cannister, rimed with white frost, lay in a pool of melting ice. Before it lay the half shrouded bulk that it had contained. I walked closer.

They were frozen together into one solid mass. Kramer was right. They were as human as I. Human corpses, stripped, packed together, frozen. I pulled back the lightly frosted covering, and studied the glazed white bodies.

Kramer called suddenly from the door. “You found your colonists, Captain. Now that your curiosity is satisfied, we can go back where we belong. Out here man is a tame variety of cattle. We’re lucky they didn’t know we were the same variety, or we’d be in their food lockers now ourselves. Now let’s get started back. The men won’t take ‘no’ for an answer.”

I leaned closer, studying the corpses. “Come here, Kramer,” I called. “I want to show you something.”

“I’ve seen all there is to see in there,” Kramer said. “We don’t want to waste time; we want to change course now, right away.”

* * * *

I walked back to the door, and as Kramer stepped back to let me precede him out the door, I hit him in the mouth with all my strength. His head snapped back against the frosted wall. Then he fell out into the passage.

I stepped over him. “Pick this up and put it in the brig,” I said. The men in the corridor fell back, muttering. As they hauled Kramer upright I stepped through them and kept going, not running but wasting no time, toward the bridge. One wrong move on my part now and all their misery and fear would break loose in a riot the first act of which would be to tear me limb from limb.

I travelled ahead of the shock. Kramer had provided the diversion I had needed. Now I heard the sound of gathering violence growing behind me.

I was none too quick. A needler flashed at the end of the corridor just as the lift door closed. I heard the tiny projectile ricochet off the lift shaft.

I rode up, stepped onto the bridge and locked the lift. I keyed for Bourdon, and to my relief got a quick response. The panic hadn’t penetrated to Missile Section yet.

“Bourdon, arm all batteries and lock onto that Mancji ship,” I ordered. “On the triple.”

I turned to Clay. “I’ll take over, Clay,” I said. “Alter course to intercept our late companion at two and one-half gee’s.”

Clay looked startled, but said only, “Aye, sir.”

I keyed for a general announcement. “This is the Captain,” I said. “Action station, all hands in loose acceleration harness. We’re going after Big Brother. You’re in action against the enemy now, and from this point on I’m remembering. You men have been having a big time letting off steam; that’s over now. All sections report.”

One by one the sections reported in, all but Med. and Admin. Well, I could spare them for the present. The pressure was building now, as we blasted around in a hairpin curve, our acceleration picking up fast.

I ordered Joyce to lock his radar on target, and switch over to autopilot control. Then I called Power Section.

“I’m taking over all power control from the bridge,” I said. “All personnel out of the power chamber and control chamber.”

The men were still under control, but that might not last long. I had to have the entire disposition of the ship’s power, control, and armament under my personal direction for a few hours at least.

Missile Section reported all missiles armed and locked on target. I acknowledged and ordered the section evacuated. Then I turned to Clay and Joyce. Both were plenty nervous now; they didn’t know what was brewing.

“Lieutenant Clay,” I said. “Report to your quarters; Joyce, you too. I want to congratulate both of you on a soldierly performance these last few hours.”

They left without protest. I was aware that they didn’t want to be too closely identified with the Captain when things broke loose.

* * * *

I keyed for a video check of the interior of the lift as it started back up. It was empty. I locked it up.

Now we were steady on course, and had reached our full two and a half gees. I could hardly stand under that acceleration, but I had one more job to do before I could take a break.

Feet dragging, I unlocked the lift and rode it down. I was braced for violence as I opened the lift door, but I was lucky. There was no one in the corridor. I could hear shouts in the distance. I dragged myself along to Power Section and pushed inside. A quick check of control settings showed everything as I had ordered it. Back in the passage, I slammed the leaded vault door to and threw in the combination lock. Now only I could open it without blasting.

* * * *

Control Section was next. It, too, was empty, all in order. I locked it, and started across to Missiles. Two men appeared at the end of the passage, having as hard a time as I was. I entered the cross corridor just in time to escape a volley of needler shots. The mutiny was in the open now, for sure.

I kept going, hearing more shouting. I was sure the men I had seen were heading for Power and Control. They’d get a surprise. I hoped I could beat them to the draw at Missiles, too.

As I came out in B corridor, twenty feet from Missiles, I saw that I had cut it a bit fine. Three men, crawling, were frantically striving against the multi-gee field to reach the door before me. Their faces were running with sweat, purple with exertion.

I had a slight lead; it was too late to make a check inside before locking up. The best I could hope for was to lock the door before they reached it.

I drew my Browning and started for the door. They saw me and one reached for his needler.

“Don’t try it,” I called. I concentrated on the door, reached it, swung it closed, and as I threw in the lock a needler cracked. I whirled and fired. The man in the rear had stopped and aimed as the other two came on. He folded. The other two kept coming.

I was tired. I wanted a rest. “You’re too late,” I said. “No one but the Captain goes in there now.” I stopped talking, panting. I had to rest. The two came on. I wondered why they struggled so desperately after they were beaten. My thinking was slowing down.

I suddenly realized they might be holding me for the crowd to arrive. I shuffled backwards towards the cross corridor. I barely made it. Two men on a shuttle cart whirled around the corner a hundred feet aft. I lurched into my shelter in a hail of needler fire. One of the tiny slugs stung through my calf and ricocheted down the passage.

I called to the two I had raced; “Tell your boys if they ever want to open that door, just see the Captain.”

I hesitated, considering whether or not to make a general statement.

“What the hell,” I decided. “They all know there’s a mutiny now. It won’t hurt to get in a little life-insurance.”

I keyed my mike. “This is the Captain,” I said. “This ship is now in a state of mutiny. I call on all loyal members of the Armed Forces to resist the mutineers actively, and to support their Commander. Your ship is in action against an armed enemy. I assure you this mutiny will fail, and those who took part in it will be treated as traitors to their Service, their homes, and their own families who now rely on them.

“We are accelerating at two and one-half gravities, locked on a collision course with the Mancji ship. The mutineers cannot enter the Bridge, Power, Control, or Missiles Sections since only I have the combination. Thus they’re doomed to failure.

“I am now returning to the Bridge to direct the attack and destruction of the enemy. If I fail to reach the Bridge, we will collide with the enemy in less than three hours, and our batteries will blow.”

Now my problem was to make good my remark about returning to the Bridge. The shuttle had not followed me, presumably fearing ambush. I took advantage of their hesitation to cross back to corridor A at my best speed. I paused once to send a hail of needles ricocheting down the corridor behind me, and I heard a yelp from around the corner. Those needles had a fantastic velocity, and bounced around a long time before stopping.

At the corridor, I lay down on the floor for a rest and risked a quick look. A group of three men were bunched around the Control Section door, packing smashite in the hairline crack around it. That wouldn’t do them any good, but it did occupy their attention.

I faded back into the cross passage, and keyed the mike. I had to give them a chance.

“This is the Captain,” I said. “All personnel not at their action stations are warned for the last time to report there immediately. Any man found away from his post from this point on is in open mutiny and can expect the death penalty. This is the last warning.”

The men in the corridor had heard, but a glance showed they paid no attention to what they considered an idle threat. They didn’t know how near I was.

I drew my needler, set it for continuous fire, pushed into the corridor, aimed, and fired. I shot to kill. All three sprawled away from the door, riddled, as the metal walls rang with the cloud of needles.

I looked both ways, then rose, with effort, and went to the bodies. I recognized them as members of Kirschenbaum’s Power Section crew. I keyed again as I moved on toward the lift at the end of the corridor, glancing back as I went.

“Corley, Mac Williams, and Reardon have been shot for mutiny in the face of the enemy,” I said. “Let’s hope they’re the last to insist on my enforcing the death penalty.”

* * * *

Behind me, at the far end of the corridor, men appeared again. I flattened myself in a doorway, sprayed needles toward them, and hoped for the best. I heard the singing of a swarm past me, but felt no hits. The mutineers offered a bigger target, and I thought I saw someone fall. As they all moved back out of sight, I made another break for the lift.

I was grateful they hadn’t had time to organize. I kept an eye to the rear, and sent a hail of needles back every time a man showed himself. They ducked out to fire every few seconds, but not very effectively. I had an advantage over them; I was fighting for the success of the mission and for my life, with no one to look to for help; they were each one of a mob, none eager to be a target, each willing to let the other man take the risk.

I was getting pretty tired. I was grateful for the extra stamina and wind that daily calisthenics in a high-gee field had given me; without that I would have collapsed before now; but I was almost ready to drop. I had my eyes fixed on the lift door; each step, inch by inch, was an almost unbearable effort. With only a few feet to go, my knees gave; I went down on all fours. Another batch of needles sang around me, and vivid pain seared my left arm. It helped. The pain cleared my head, spurred me. I rose and stumbled against the door.

Now the combination. I fought a numbing desire to faint as I pressed the lock control; three, five, two, five…

I twisted around as I heard a sound. The shuttle was coming toward me, men lying flat on it, protected by the bumper plate. I leaned against the lift door, and loosed a stream of needles against the side of the corridor, banking them toward the shuttle. Two men rolled off the shuttle in a spatter of blood. Another screamed, and a hand waved above the bumper. I needled it.

* * * *

I wondered how many were on the shuttle. It kept coming. The closer it came, the more effective my bank shots were. I wondered why it failed to return my fire. Then a hand rose in an arc and a choke bomb dropped in a short curve to the floor. It rolled to my feet, just starting to spew. I kicked it back. The shuttle stopped, backed away from the bomb. A jet of brown gas was playing from it now. I aimed my needler, and sent it spinning back farther. Then I turned to my lock.

Now a clank of metal against metal sounded behind me; from the side passage a figure in radiation armor moved out. The suit was self-powered and needle proof. I sent a concentrated blast at the head, as the figure awkwardly tottered toward me, ungainly in the multi-gee field. The needles hit, snapped the head back. The suited figure hesitated, arms spread, stepped back and fell with a thunderous crash. I had managed to knock him off balance, maybe stun him.

I struggled to remember where I was in the code sequence; I went on, keyed the rest. I pushed; nothing. I must have lost count. I started again.

I heard the armored man coming on again. The needler trick wouldn’t work twice. I kept working. I had almost completed the sequence when I felt the powered grip of the suited man on my arm. I twisted, jammed the needler against his hand, and fired. The arm flew back, and even through the suit I heard his wrist snap. My own hand was numb from the recoil. The other arm of the suit swept down and struck my wounded arm. I staggered away from the door, dazed with the pain.

I side-stepped in time to miss another ponderous blow. Under two and a half gees, the man in the suit was having a hard time, even with power assisted controls. I felt that I was fighting a machine instead of a man.

As he stepped toward me again, I aimed at his foot. A concentrated stream of needles hit, like a metallic fire hose, knocked the foot aside, toppled the man again. I staggered back to my door.

But now I realized I couldn’t risk opening it; even if I got in, I couldn’t keep my suited assailant from crowding in with me. Already he was up, lurching toward me. I had to draw him away from the door.

The shuttle sat unmoving. The mob kept its distance. I wondered why no one was shooting; I guessed they had realized that if I were killed there would be no way to enter the vital control areas of the ship; they had to take me alive.

* * * *

I made it past the clumsy armored man and started down the corridor toward the shuttle. I moved as slowly as I could while still eluding him. He lumbered after me. I reached the shuttle; a glance showed no one alive there. Two men lay across it. I pulled myself onto it and threw in the forward lever. The shuttle rolled smoothly past the armored man, striking him a glancing blow that sent him down again. Those falls, in the multi-gee field, were bone crushing. He didn’t get up.

I reached the door again, rolled off the shuttle, and reached for the combination. I wished now I’d used a shorter one. I started again; heard a noise behind me. As I turned, a heavy weight crushed me against the door.

I was held rigid, my chest against the combination key. The pressure was cracking my ribs and still it increased. I twisted my head, gasping. The shuttle held me pinned to the door. The man I had assumed out of action was alive enough to hold the lever down with savage strength. I tried to shout, to remind him that without me to open the doors, they were powerless to save the ship. I couldn’t speak. I tasted blood in my mouth, and tried to breathe. I couldn’t. I passed out.

CHAPTER 2

I emerged into consciousness to find the pressure gone, but a red haze of pain remained. I lay on my back and saw men sitting on the floor around me.

A blow from somewhere made my head ring. I tried to sit up. I couldn’t make it. Then Kramer was beside me, slipping a needle into my arm. He looked pretty bad himself. His face was bandaged heavily, and one eye was purple. He spoke in a muffled voice through stiff jaws. His tone was deliberate.

“This will keep you conscious enough to answer a few questions,” he said. “Now you’re going to give me the combinations to the locks so we can call off this suicide run; then maybe I’ll doctor you up.”

I didn’t answer.

“The time for clamming up is over, you stupid braggard,” Kramer said. He raised his fist and drove a hard punch into my chest. I guess it was his shot that kept me conscious. I couldn’t breathe for a while, until Kramer gave me a few whiffs of oxygen. I wondered if he was fool enough to think I might give up my ship.

After a while my head cleared a little. I tried to say something. I got out a couple of croaks, and then found my voice.

“Kramer,” I said.

He leaned over me. “I’m listening,” he said.

“Take me to the lift. Leave me there alone. That’s your only chance.” It seemed to me like a long speech, but nothing happened. Kramer went away, came back. He showed me a large scalpel from his medical kit. “I’m going to start operating on your face. I’ll make you into a museum freak. Maybe if you start talking soon enough I’ll change my mind.”

I could see the watch on his wrist. My mind worked very slowly. I had trouble getting any air into my lungs. We would intercept in one hour and ten minutes.

It seemed simple to me. I had to get back to the Bridge before we hit. I tried again. “We only have an hour,” I said.

Kramer lost control. He jabbed the knife at my face, screeching through gritted teeth. I jerked my head aside far enough that the scalpel grated along my cheekbone instead of slashing my mouth. I hardly felt it.

“We’re not dying because you were a fool,” Kramer yelled. “I’ve taken over; I’ve relieved you as unfit for command. Now open up this ship or I’ll slice you to ribbons.” He held the scalpel under my nose in a fist trembling with fury. The chrome plated blade had a thin film of pink on it.

I got my voice going again. “I’m going to destroy the Mancji ship,” I said. “Take me to the lift and leave me there.” I tried to add a few words, but had to stop and work on breathing again for a while. Kramer disappeared.

I realized I was not fully in command of my senses. I was clamped in a padded claw. I wanted to roll over. I tried hard, and made it. I could hear Kramer talking, others answering, but it seemed too great an effort to listen to the words.

I was lying on my face now, head almost against the wall. There was a black line in front of me, a door. My head cleared a bit. It must have been Kramer’s shot working on me. I turned my head and saw Kramer standing now with half a dozen others, all talking at once. Apparently Kramer’s display of uncontrolled temper had the others worried. They wanted me alive. Kramer didn’t like anyone criticizing him. The argument was pretty violent. There was scuffling—and shouts.

I saw that I lay about twenty feet from the lift; too far. The door before me, if I remembered the ship’s layout, was a utility room, small and containing nothing but a waste disposal hopper. But it did have a bolt on the inside, like every other room on the ship.

I didn’t stop to think about it; I started trying to get up. If I’d thought I would have known that at the first move from me all seven of them would land on me at once. I concentrated on getting my hands under me, to push up. I heard a shout, and turning my head, saw Kramer swinging at someone. I went on with my project.

Hands under my chest, I raised myself a little, and got a knee up. I felt broken rib ends grating, but felt no pain, just the padded claw. Then I was weaving on all fours. I looked up, spotted the latch on the door, and put everything I had into lunging at it. My finger hit it, the door swung in, and I fell on my face; but I was half in. Another lunge and I was past the door, kicking it shut as I lay on the floor, reaching for the lock control. Just as I flipped it with an extended finger, someone hit the door from outside, a second too late.

It was dark, and I lay on my back on the floor, and felt strange short-circuited stabs of what would have been agonizing pain running through my chest and arm. I had a few minutes to rest now, before they blasted the door open.

I hated to lose like this, not because we were beaten, but because we were giving up. My poor world, no longer fair and green, had found the strength to send us out as her last hope. But somewhere out here in the loneliness and distance we had lost our courage. Success was at our fingertips, if we could have found it; instead, in panic and madness, we were destroying ourselves.

* * * *

My mind wandered; I imagined myself on the Bridge, half-believed I was there. I was resting on the OD bunk, and Clay was standing beside me. A long time seemed to pass.… Then I remembered I was on the floor, bleeding internally, in a tiny room that would soon lose its door. But there was someone standing beside me.

I didn’t feel too disappointed at being beaten; I hadn’t hoped for much more than a breather, anyway. I wondered why this fellow had abandoned his action station to hide there. The door was still shut. He must have been there all along, but I hadn’t seen him when I came in. He stood over me, wearing greasy overalls, and grinned down at me. He raised his hand. I was getting pretty indifferent to blows; I couldn’t feel them.

The hand went up, the man straightened and held a fairly snappy salute. “Sir,” he said. “Space’n first class Thomas.”

I didn’t feel like laughing or cheering or anything else; I just took it as it came.

“At ease, Thomas,” I managed to say. “Why aren’t you at your duty station?” I went spinning off somewhere after that oration.

Thomas was squatting beside me now. “Cap’n, you’re hurt, ain’t you? I was wonderin’ why you was down here layin down in my ’Sposal station.”

“A scratch,” I said. I thought about it for a while. Thomas was doing something about my chest. This was Thomas’ disposal station. Thomas owned it. I wondered if a fellow could make a living with such a small place way out here, with just an occasional tourist coming by. I wondered why I didn’t send one of them for help; I needed help for some reason.…

“Cap’n, I been overhaulin’ my converter units, I jist come in. How long you been in here, Cap’n?” Thomas was worried about something.

I tried hard to think. I hadn’t been here very long; just a few minutes. I had come here to rest.… Then suddenly I was thinking clearly again.

* * * *

Whatever Thomas was, he was apparently on my side, or at least neutral. He didn’t seem to be aware of the mutiny. I realized that he had bound my chest tightly with strips of shirt; it felt better.

“What are you doing in here, Thomas?” I asked. “Don’t you know we’re in action against a hostile ship?”

Thomas looked surprised. “This here’s my action station, Cap’n,” he said. “I’m a Waste Recovery Technician, First Class, I keep the recovery system operatin’.”

“You just stay in here?” I asked.

“No, sir,” Thomas said. “I check through the whole system. We got three main disposal points and lots a little ones, an’ I have to keep everything operatin’. Otherwise this ship would be in a bad way, Cap’n.”

“How did you get in here?” I asked. I looked around the small room. There was only one door, and the gray bulk of the converter unit which broke down wastes into their component elements for re-use nearly filled the tiny space.

“I come in through the duct, Cap’n,” Thomas said. “I check the ducts every day. You know, Cap’n,” he said shaking his head, “they’s some bad laid-out ductin’ in this here system. If I didn’t keep after it, you’d be gettin’ clogged ducts all the time. So I jist go through the system and keep her clear.”

From somewhere, hope began again. “Where do these ducts lead?” I asked. I wondered how the man could ignore the mutiny going on around him.

“Well, sir, one leads to the mess; that’s the big one. One leads to the wardroom, and the other one leads up to the Bridge.”

My God, I thought, the Bridge.

“How big are they?” I asked. “Could I get through them?”

“Oh, sure, Cap’n,” Thomas said. “You can get through ’em easy. But are you sure you feel like inspectin’ with them busted ribs?”

I was beginning to realize that Thomas was not precisely a genius. “I can make it,” I said.

“Cap’n,” Thomas said diffidently, “it ain’t none a my business, but don’t you think maybe I better get the doctor for ya?”

“Thomas,” I said, “maybe you don’t know; there’s a mutiny under way aboard this ship. The doctor is leading it. I want to get to the Bridge in the worst way. Let’s get started.”

Thomas looked very shocked. “Cap’n, you mean you was hurt by somebody? I mean you didn’t have a fall or nothin’, you was beat up?” He stared at me with an expression of incredulous horror.

“That’s about the size of it,” I said. I managed to sit up. Thomas jumped forward and helped me to my feet. Then I saw that he was crying.

“You can count on me, Cap’n,” he said. “Jist lemme know who done it, an’ I’ll feed ’em into my converter.”

I stood leaning against the wall, waiting for my head to stop spinning. Breathing was difficult, but if I kept it shallow, I could manage. Thomas was opening a panel on the side of the converter unit.

“It’s okay to go in Cap’n,” he said. “She ain’t operatin’.”

The pull of the two and a half gees seemed to bother him very little. I could barely stand under it, holding on. Thomas saw my wavering step and jumped to help me. He boosted me into the chamber of the converter and pointed out an opening near the top, about twelve by twenty-four inches.

“That there one is to the Bridge, Cap’n,” he said. “If you’ll start in there, sir, I’ll follow up.”

* * * *

I thrust head and shoulders into the opening. Inside it was smooth metal, with no handholds. I clawed at it trying to get farther in. The pain stabbed at my chest.

“Cap’n, they’re workin’ on the door,” Thomas said. “They already been at it for a little while. We better get goin’.”

“You’d better give me a push, Thomas,” I said. My voice echoed hollowly down the duct.

Thomas crowded into the chamber behind me then, lifting my legs and pushing. I eased into the duct. The pain was not so bad now.

“Cap’n, you gotta use a special kinda crawl to get through these here ducts,” Thomas said. “You grip your hands together out in front of ya, and then bend your elbows. When your elbows jam against the side of the duct, you pull forward.”

I tried it; it was slow, but it worked.

“Cap’n,” Thomas said behind me. “We got about seven minutes now to get up there. I set the control on the converter to start up in ten minutes. I think we can make it okay, and ain’t nobody else comin’ this way with the converter goin’. I locked the control panel so they can’t shut her down.”

That news spurred me on. With the converter in operation, the first step in the cycle was the evacuation of the ducts to a near-perfect vacuum. When that happened, we would die instantly with ruptured lungs; then our dead bodies would be sucked into the chamber and broken down into useful raw materials. I hurried.

I tried to orient myself. The duct paralleled the corridor. It would continue in that direction for about fifteen feet, and would then turn upward, since the Bridge was some fifteen feet above this level. I hitched along, and felt the duct begin to trend upward.

“You’ll have to get on your back here, Cap’n,” Thomas said. “She widens out on the turn.”

I managed to twist over. Thomas was helping me by pushing at my feet. As I reached a near-vertical position, I felt a metal rod under my hand. That was a relief; I had been expecting to have to go up the last stretch the way a mountain climber does a rock chimney, back against one wall and feet against the other.

I hauled at the rod, and found another with my other hand. Below, Thomas boosted me. I groped up and got another, then another. The remaining slight slant of the duct helped. Finally my feet were on the rods. I clung, panting. The heat in the duct was terrific. Then I went on up. That was some shot Kramer had given me.

* * * *

Above I could see the end of the duct faintly in the light coming up through the open chamber door from the utility room. I remembered the location of the disposal slot on the Bridge now; it had been installed in the small apartment containing a bunk and a tiny galley for the use of the Duty Officer during long watches on the Bridge.

I reached the top of the duct and pushed against the slot cover. It swung out easily. I could see the end of the chart table, and beyond, the dead radar screen. I reached through and heaved myself partly out. I nearly fainted at the stab from my ribs as my weight went on my chest. My head sang. The light from below suddenly went out. I heard a muffled clank; then a hum began, echoing up the duct.

“She’s closed and started cyclin’ the air out, Cap’n,” Thomas said calmly. “We got about half a minute.”

I clamped my teeth together and heaved again. Below me Thomas waited quietly. He couldn’t help me now. I got my hands flat against the bulkhead and thrust. The air was whistling around my face. Papers began to swirl off the chart table. I twisted my body frantically, kicking loose from the grip of the slot, fighting the sucking pull of air. I fell to the floor inside the room, the slot cover slamming behind me. I staggered to my feet. I pried at the cover, but I couldn’t open it against the vacuum. Then it budged, and Thomas’ hand came through. The metal edge cut into it, blood started, but the cover was held open half an inch. I reached the chart table, almost falling over my leaden feet, seized a short permal T-square, and levered the cover up. Once started, it went up easily. Thomas face appeared, drawn and pale, eyes closed against the dust being whirled into his face. He got his arms through, heaved himself a little higher. I seized his arm and pulled. He scrambled through.

I knocked the T-square out of the way and the cover snapped down. Then I slid to the floor, not exactly out, but needing a break pretty bad. Thomas brought bedding from the OD bunk and made me comfortable on the floor.

“Thomas,” I said, “when I think of what the security inspectors who approved the plans for this arrangement are going to say when I call this little back door to their attention, it almost makes it worth the trouble.”

“Yes, sir,” Thomas said. He sprawled on the deck and looked around the Bridge, staring at the unfamiliar screens, indicator dials, controls.

* * * *

From where I lay, I could see the direct vision screen. I wasn’t sure, but I thought the small bright object in the center of it might be our target. Thomas looked at the dead radar screen, then said, “Cap’n, that there radarscope out of action?”

“It sure is, Thomas,” I said. “Our unknown friends blew the works before they left us.” I was surprised that he recognized a radarscope.

“Mind if I take a look at it, Cap’n?” he said.

“Go ahead,” I replied. I tried to explain the situation to Thomas. The elapsed time since we had started our pursuit was two hours and ten minutes; I wanted to close to no more than a twenty mile gap before launching my missiles; and I had better alert my interceptor missiles in case the Mancji hit first.

Thomas had the cover off the radar panel and was probing around. He pulled a blackened card out of the interior of the panel.

“Looks like they overloaded the fuse,” Thomas said. “Got any spares, Cap’n?”

“Right beside you in the cabinet,” I said. “How do you know your way around a radar set, Thomas?”

Thomas grinned. “I useta be a radar technician third before I got inta waste disposal,” he said. “I had to change specialities to sign on for this cruise.”

I had an idea there’d be an opening for Thomas a little higher up when this was over.

I asked him to take a look at the televideo, too. I was beginning to realize that Thomas was not really simple; he was merely uncomplicated.

“Tubes blowed here, Cap’n,” he reported. “Like as if you was to set her up to high mag right near a sun; she was overloaded. I can fix her easy if we got the spares.”

I didn’t take time to try to figure that one out. I could feel the dizziness coming on again.

“Thomas,” I called, “let me know when we’re at twenty miles from target.” I wanted to tell him more, but I could feel consciousness draining away. “Then…” I managed, “first aid kit…shot.…”

I could still hear Thomas. I was flying away, whirling, but I could hear his voice. “Cap’n, I could fire your missiles now, if you was to want me to,” he was saying. I struggled to speak. “No. Wait.” I hoped he heard me.

* * * *

I floated a long time in a strange state between coma and consciousness. The stuff Kramer had given me was potent. It kept my mind fairly clear even when my senses were out of action. I thought about the situation aboard my ship.

I wondered what Kramer and his men were planning now, how they felt about having let me slip through their fingers. The only thing they could try now was blasting their way into the Bridge. They’d never make it. The designers of these ships were not unaware of the hazards of space life; the Bridge was an unassailable fortress. They couldn’t possibly get to it.

I guessed that Kramer was having a pretty rough time of it now. He had convinced the men that we were rushing headlong to sure destruction at the hands of the all-powerful Mancji, and that their Captain was a fool. Now he was trapped with them in the panic he had helped to create. I thought that in all probability they had torn him apart.

I wavered in and out of consciousness. It was just as well; I needed the rest. Then I heard Thomas calling me. “We’re closin’ now, Cap’n,” he said. “Wake up, Cap’n, only twenty-three miles now.”

“Okay,” I said. My body had been preparing itself for this, now it was ready again. I felt the needle in my arm. That helped, too.

“Hand me the intercom, Thomas,” I said. He placed the mike in my hand. I keyed for a general announcement.

“This is the Captain,” I said. I tried to keep my voice as steady as possible. “We are now at a distance of twenty-one miles from the enemy. Stand by for missile launching and possible evasive action. Damage control crews on the alert.” I paused for breath.

“Now we’re going to take out the Mancji ship, men,” I said. “All two miles of it.”

I dropped the mike and groped for the firing key. Thomas handed it to me.

“Cap’n,” he said, bending over me. “I notice you got the selector set for your chemical warheads. You wouldn’t want me to set up pluto heads for ya, would ya, Cap’n?”

“No, thanks, Thomas,” I said. “Chemical is what I want. Stand by to observe.” I pressed the firing key.

Thomas was at the radarscope. “Missiles away, Cap’n. Trackin’ Okay. Looks like they’ll take out the left half a that dumbbell.”

I found the mike again. “Missiles homing on target,” I said. “Strike in thirty-five seconds. You’ll be interested to know we’re employing chemical warheads. So far there is no sign of offense or defense from the enemy.” I figured the news would shock a few mutineers. David wasn’t even using his slingshot on Goliath. He was going after him bare-handed. I wanted to scare some kind of response out of them. I needed a few clues as to what was going on below.

I got it. Joyce’s voice came from the wall annunciator. “Captain, this is Lt. Joyce reporting.” He sounded scared all the way through, and desperate. “Sir, the mutiny has been successfully suppressed by the loyal members of the crew. Major Kramer is under arrest. We’re prepared to go on with the search for the Omega Colony. But Sir…” he paused, gulping. “We ask you to change course now before launching any effective attack. We still have a chance. Maybe they won’t bother with us when those firecrackers go off…”

* * * *

I watched the direct vision screen. Zero second closed in. And on the screen the face of the left hand disk of the Mancji ship was lit momentarily by a brilliant spark of yellow, then another. A discoloration showed dimly against the dark metallic surface. It spread, and a faint vapor formed over it. Now tiny specs could be seen moving away from the ship. The disk elongated, with infinite leisure, widening.

“What’s happenin’? Cap’n?” Thomas asked. He was staring at the scope in fascination. “They launchin’ scouts, or what?”

“Take a look here, Thomas,” I said. “The ship is breaking up.”

The disk was an impossibly long ellipse now, surrounded by a vast array of smaller bodies, fragments and contents of the ship. Now the stricken globe moved completely free of its companion. It rotated, presenting a crescent toward us, then wheeled farther as it receded from its twin, showing its elongation. The sphere had split wide open. Now the shattered half itself separated into two halves, and these in turn crumbled, strewing debris in a widening spiral.

“My God, Cap’n,” Thomas said in awe. “That’s the greatest display I ever seen. And all it took to set her off was 200 kilos a PBL. Now that’s somethin’.”

I keyed the mike again. “This is the Captain,” I said. “I want ten four-man patrols ready to go out in fifteen minutes. The enemy ship has been put out of action and is now in a derelict condition. I want only one thing from her; one live prisoner. All Section chiefs report to me on the Bridge on the triple.”

“Thomas,” I said, “go down in the lift and open up for the Chiefs. Here’s the release key for the combination; you know how to operate it?”

“Sure, Cap’n; but are you sure you want to let them boys in here after the way they jumped you an’ all?”

I opened my mouth to answer, but he beat me to it. “Fergit I asked ya that, Cap’n, pleasir. You ain’t been wrong yet.”

“It’s okay, Thomas,” I said. “There won’t be any more trouble.”

EPILOGUE

On the eve of the twentieth anniversary of Reunion Day, a throng of well-heeled celebrants filled the dining room and overflowed onto the terraces of the Star Tower Dining Room, from whose 5,700 foot height above the beaches, the Florida Keys, a hundred miles to the south, were visible on clear days.

The Era reporter stood beside the vast glass entry way surveying the crowd, searching for celebrities from whom he might elicit bits of color to spice the day’s transmission.

At the far side of the room, surrounded by chattering admirers, stood the Ambassador from the New Terran Federation; a portly, graying, jolly ex-Naval officer. A minor actress passed at close range, looking the other way. A cabinet member stood at the bar talking earnestly to a ball player, ignoring a group of hopeful reporters and fans.

The Era stringer, an experienced hand, passed over the hard pressed VIP’s near the center of the room and started a face-by-face check of the less gregarious diners seated at obscure tables along the sides of the room.

He was in luck; the straight-backed gray-haired figure in the dark civilian suit, sitting alone at a tiny table in an alcove, caught his eye. He moved closer, straining for a clear glimpse through the crowd. Then he was sure. He had the biggest possible catch of the day in his sights; Admiral of Fleets Frederick Greylorn.

The reporter hesitated; he was well aware of the Admiral’s reputation for near-absolute silence on the subject of his already legendary cruise, the fabulous voyage of the Galahad. He couldn’t just barge in on the Admiral and demand answers, as was usual with publicity-hungry politicians and show people. He could score the biggest story of the century today; but he had to hit him right.

You couldn’t hope to snow a man like the Admiral; he wasn’t somebody you could push around. You could sense the solid iron of him from here.

Nobody else had noticed the solitary diner. The Era man drifted closer, moving unhurriedly, thinking furiously. It was no good trying some tricky approach; his best bet was the straight-from-the-shoulder bit. No point in hesitating. He stopped beside the table.

The Admiral was looking out across the Gulf. He turned and glanced up at the reporter.

The news man looked him squarely in the eye. “I’m a reporter, Admiral,” he said. “Will you talk to me?”

The Admiral nodded to the seat across from him. “Sit down,” he said. He glanced around the room.

The reporter caught the look. “I’ll keep it light, sir,” he said. “I don’t want company either.” That was being frank.

* * * *

“You want the answers to some questions, don’t you?” the Admiral said.

“Why, yes, sir,” the reporter said. He started to inconspicuously key his pocket recorder, but caught himself. “May I record your remarks, Admiral?” he said. Frankness all the way.

“Go ahead,” said the Admiral.

“Now, Admiral,” the reporter began, “the Terran public has of course…”

“Never mind the patter, son,” the Admiral said mildly. “I know what the questions are. I’ve read all the memoirs of the crew. They’ve been coming out at the rate of about two a year for some time now. I had my own reasons for not wanting to add anything to my official statement.”

The Admiral poured wine into his glass. “Excuse me,” he said. “Will you join me?” He signalled the waiter.

“Another wine glass, please,” he said. He looked at the golden wine in the glass, held it up to the light. “You know, the Florida wines are as good as any in the world,” he said. “That’s not to say the California and Ohio wines aren’t good. But this Flora Pinellas is a genuine original, not an imitation Rhine; and it compares favorably with the best of the old vintages, particularly the ’87.”

The glass arrived and the waiter poured. The reporter had the wit to remain silent.

* * * *

“The first question is usually, how did I know I could take the Mancji ship. After all, it was big, vast. It loomed over us like a mountain. The Mancji themselves weighed almost two tons each; they liked six gee gravity. They blasted our communication off the air, just for practice. They talked big, too. We were invaders in their territory. They were amused by us. So where did I get the notion that our attack would be anything more than a joke to them? That’s the big question.” The Admiral shook his head.

“The answer is quite simple. In the first place, they were pulling six gees by using a primitive dumbbell configuration. The only reason for that type of layout, as students of early space vessel design can tell you, is to simplify setting up a gee field effect using centrifugal force. So they obviously had no gravity field generators.

“Then their transmission was crude. All they had was simple old-fashioned short-range radio, and even that was noisy and erratic. And their reception was as bad. We had to use a kilowatt before they could pick it up at 200 miles. We didn’t know then it was all organically generated; that they had no equipment.”

The Admiral sipped his wine, frowning at the recollection. “I was pretty sure they were bluffing when I changed course and started after them. I had to hold our acceleration down to two and a half gees because I had to be able to move around the ship. And at that acceleration we gained on them. They couldn’t beat us. And it wasn’t because they couldn’t take high gees; they liked six for comfort, you remember. No, they just didn’t have the power.”

* * * *

The Admiral looked out the window.

“Add to that the fact that they apparently couldn’t generate ordinary electric current. I admit that none of this was conclusive, but after all, if I was wrong we were sunk anyway. When Thomas told me the nature of the damage to our radar and communications systems, that was another hint. Their big display of Mancji power was just a blast of radiation right across the communication spectrum; it burned tubes and blew fuses; nothing else. We were back in operation an hour after our attack.

“The evidence was there to see, but there’s something about giant size that gets people rattled. Size alone doesn’t mean a thing. It’s rather like the bluff the Soviets ran on the rest of the world for a couple of decades back in the war era, just because they sprawled across half the globe. They were a giant, though it was mostly frozen desert. When the showdown came they didn’t have it. They were a pushover.

“All right, the next question is why did I choose H. E. instead of going in with everything I had? That’s easy, too. What I wanted was information, not revenge. I still had the heavy stuff in reserve and ready to go if I needed it, but first I had to try to take them alive. Vaporizing them wouldn’t have helped our position. And I was lucky; it worked.

“The, ah, confusion below evaporated as soon as the Section chiefs got a look at the screens and realized that we had actually knocked out the Mancji. We matched speeds with the wreckage and the patrols went out to look for a piece of ship with a survivor in it. If we’d had no luck we would have tackled the other half of the ship, which was still intact and moving off fast. But we got quite a shock when we found the nature of the wreckage.” The Admiral grinned.

“Of course today everybody knows all about the Mancji hive intelligence, and their evolutionary history. But we were pretty startled to find that the only wreckage consisted of the Mancji themselves, each two-ton slug in his own hard chitin shell. Of course, a lot of the cells were ruptured by the explosions, but most of them had simply disassociated from the hive mass as it broke up. So there was no ship; just a cluster of cells like a giant bee hive, and mixed up among the slugs, the damnedest collection of loot you can imagine. The odds and ends they’d stolen and tucked away in the hive during a couple hundred years of camp-following.

“The patrols brought a couple of cells alongside, and Mannion went out to try to establish contact. Sure enough, he got a very faint transmission, on the same bands as before. The cells were talking to each other in their own language. They ignored Mannion even though his transmission must have blanketed everything within several hundred miles. We eventually brought one of them into the cargo lock and started trying different wave-lengths on it. Then Kramer had the idea of planting a couple of electrodes and shooting a little juice to it. Of course, it loved the DC, but as soon as we tried AC, it gave up. So we had a long talk with it and found out everything we needed to know.

* * * *

“It was a four-week run to the nearest outpost planet of the New Terran Federation, and they took me on to New Terra aboard one of their fast liaison vessels. The rest you know. We, the home planet, were as lost to the New Terrans as they were to us. They greeted us as though we were their own ancestors come back to visit them.

“Most of my crew, for personal reasons, were released from duty there, and settled down to stay.

“The clean-up job here on Earth was a minor operation to their Navy. As I recall, the trip back was made in a little over five months, and the Red Tide was killed within four weeks of the day the task force arrived. I don’t think they wasted a motion. One explosive charge per cell, of just sufficient size to disrupt the nucleus. When the critical number of cells had been killed, the rest died overnight.

“It was quite a different Earth that emerged from under the plague, though. You know it had taken over all of the land area except North America and a strip of Western Europe, and all of the sea it wanted. It was particularly concentrated over what had been the jungle areas of South America, Africa, and Asia. You must realize that in the days before the Tide, those areas were almost completely uninhabitable. You have no idea what the term Jungle really implied. When the Tide died, it disintegrated into its component molecules; and the result was that all those vast fertile Jungle lands were now beautifully levelled and completely cleared areas covered with up to twenty feet of the richest topsoil imaginable. That was what made it possible for old Terra to become what she is today; the Federation’s truck farm, and the sole source of those genuine original Terran foods that all the rest of the worlds pay such fabulous prices for.

“Strange how quickly we forget. Few people today remember how we loathed and feared the Tide when we were fighting it. Now it’s dismissed as a blessing in disguise.”

The Admiral paused. “Well,” he said, “I think that answers the questions and gives you a bit of homespun philosophy to go with it.”

* * * *

“Admiral,” said the reporter, “you’ve given the public some facts it’s waited a long time to hear. Coming from you, sir, this is the greatest story that could have come out of this Reunion Day celebration. But there is one question more, if I may ask it. Can you tell me, Admiral, just how it was that you rejected what seemed to be prima facie proof of the story the Mancji told; that they were the lords of creation out there, and that humanity was nothing but a tame food animal to them?”

The Admiral sighed. “I guess it’s a good question,” he said. “But there was nothing supernatural about my figuring that one. I didn’t suspect the full truth, of course. It never occurred to me that we were the victims of the now well-known but still inexplicable sense of humor of the Mancji, or that they were nothing but scavengers around the edges of the Federation. The original Omega ship had met them and seen right through them.

* * * *

“Well, when this hive spotted us coming in, they knew enough about New Terra to realize at once that we were strangers, coming from outside the area. It appealed to their sense of humor to have the gall to strut right out in front of us and try to put over a swindle. What a laugh for the oyster kingdom if they could sell Terrans on the idea that they were the master race. It never occurred to them that we might be anything but Terrans; Terrans who didn’t know the Mancji. And they were canny enough to use an old form of Interlingua; somewhere they’d met men before.

“Then we needed food. They knew what we ate, and that was where they went too far. They had, among the flotsam in their hive, a few human bodies they had picked up from some wreck they’d come across in their travels. They had them stashed away like everything else they could lay a pseudopod on. So they stacked them the way they’d seen Terran frozen foods shipped in the past, and sent them over. Another of their little jokes.

“I suppose if you’re already overwrought and eager to quit, and you’ve been badly scared by the size of an alien ship, it’s pretty understandable that the sight of human bodies, along with the story that they’re just a convenient food supply, might seem pretty convincing. But I was already pretty dubious about the genuineness of our pals, and when I saw those bodies it was pretty plain that we were hot on the trail of Omega Colony. There was no other place humans could have come from out there. We had to find out the location from the Mancji.”

“But, Admiral,” said the reporter, “true enough they were humans, and presumably had some connection with the colony, but they were naked corpses stacked like cordwood. The Mancji had stated that these were slaves, or rather domesticated animals; they wouldn’t have done you any good.”

“Well, you see, I didn’t believe that,” the Admiral said. “Because it was an obvious lie. I tried to show some of the officers, but I’m afraid they weren’t being too rational just then.

“I went into the locker and examined those bodies; if Kramer had looked closely, he would have seen what I did. These were no tame animals. They were civilized men.”

“How could you be sure, Admiral? They had no clothing, no identifying marks, nothing. Why didn’t you believe they were cattle?”

“Because,” said the Admiral, “all the men had nice neat haircuts.”

JUMPING THE LINE, by Grania Davis

There was a sub audible rumbling far up ahead. It acted like a trigger to Bi, even in sound sleep. He had been sleeping, hadn’t he? Yes, the night was still deep, and he had been dreaming. He hadn’t been dreaming about anything. That was funny, lately he had been dreaming a lot, but the dreams didn’t have any content.

Others had also sensed the rumble of motion far up ahead and were awakening. Nothing would happen for a while yet, probably not until after dawn. But everyone wanted to be ready. Babies cried. Some cook fires were lit to boil tea. Others lay tense in their bedrolls, not wanting to face a long wait in the predawn chill, but not wanting to fall back to sleep, either.

Bi sat up. He didn’t want to leave his warm, cozy roll, but he had to relieve himself. “Hold my spot,” he muttered to nobody in particular.

It was just a pro forma request. Nobody jumped at night. He moved a little ways out, but not too far. You didn’t want to be out in the bush at night, big critters might come around.

Bi found his way back to his roll and crawled inside. He was too sleepy to light a cookfire, and he really wasn’t hungry or thirsty. Still, some hot bush tea would be warming. Maybe the family group up ahead would offer him some. But they never did, so why should they now? “Take care of your own.”

Bi had been solo for a while now. He’d left his own family group because he couldn’t stand the constant squabbles and fighting over ration. The family was too big, anyway, they didn’t mind if a few dependents drifted off. So Bi drifted, enjoying the silence and solitude, not enjoying the hunger and big critters, until he had a chance to jump. And here he was, among strangers, but still waiting for that same rumble up ahead.

It was getting pinkish in the east, now, and folks were getting ready. Bi lit a very small fire and heated up some tea and a little ration. He felt slightly queasy, not really awake. He ate, wrapped up his mess kit and tied up his roll and sat down upon it. There was a definite feeling of movement up ahead, but it would still be a while.

The sun had risen through the morning mists, illuminating the low rolling hills and the grey-green grasslands. There was a steady drone of critters.

Bi sat on his roll with his head in his hands. He looked up ahead. There was that Pretty again, part of the big family group. She always seemed to be laughing, with high pink cheeks and dark tangly hair. If there had been some pretties like that in his family group, he might have stuck around. But they were all double-uglies. The laughing girl became aware of Bi’s eyes upon her and pulled her faded quilted robe more tightly around her body. She was busy minding a baby, laughing and playing with it while its mother packed the kits and rolls.

But Bi had no more time to eyeball pretties. The feeling of motion was growing in the misty morning sun. The rumble became the sounds of individuals strapping up their belongings. It was happening just up ahead. Bi was ready to go when, like a single organism, a vast centipede, the long line began to move steadily forward.

How far would they move this time? No one could ever say. Sometimes they only moved a few yards, or a few feet, and then they came to a halt again. All the excitement and preparations for nothing. Sometimes they wound slowly ahead for half a day, through trampled grasslands and over the low rolling hills, until their seldom-used legs grew tired and their foreheads were covered with sweat.

But it didn’t matter whether the line moved just a little or a great long distance. You had to be ready to move with it, or you would lose your place.

* * * *

The afternoon fogs came up thick in the great, flat grasslands, muffling even the hum of critters. Bi was shaky with hunger and thirst by the time they stopped. This had been one of the longest moves he could remember, from dawn until the late afternoon. Slow, steady movement all day long. No chance to stop and rest, to cook tea and ration. Nothing but a few bites of gummy, raw ration and sips of tinny cold water to keep him going. Bi hated that. You were supposed to cook the ration to make it congeal into an edible form. And the tinned water was foul tasting unless strong bush was steeped in it to make tea. But now they were stopping at last. Like a long audible sigh, people settled down on the damp, flat ground, spread their bedrolls, and began to light cookfires.

Then came another, welcome sound from way up ahead, the rumble of the carts. Bi waited listlessly, staring at nothing in the mist. The sun was just setting over a low rise of ground. You could see it illuminating a patch of swirling fog. For a moment the fog parted and a shaft of sun shone through, making Bi’s eyes water. He rubbed them and looked again. He thought he could just make it out in the distance. Sometimes you could see it when the fog parted, though many folks said it was just a mirage. The Other Line, way off against the horizon. Another line, just like his own. Sometimes moving, mostly standing still. Another long line of people, briefly glimpsed against the horizon when the fog parted. Some people thought it was a curve or extension of their own line; other people thought it wasn’t real at all, just a trick of the eyes, a reflection against the fog. But Bi figured it was just another line. If there was one line, there could be two. Why not?

When Bi drifted, he thought of going across the plain to check out the other line. But check it out for what? Why? And what about the critters? They get real big, way out in the bush, he’d heard. So he didn’t bother. He just drifted, hungry and silent until he could jump a spot in the line. But he sometimes wondered why were there two lines? Why was there any line at all?

The sound of the carts was quite loud now. Bi’s stomach grumbled eagerly. He could see them, just up ahead. Big yellow carts of glimmery metal, stopping to service every family group or solo. They rumbled up to the family group just ahead. That Pretty with the tangly hair held a big tin under the long tube that dispensed water, while a triple-ugly held another tin under the ration spout. The carts were pulled by drifters who couldn’t manage to jump and by misfits, troublemakers and ultra-uglies who couldn’t get along in their family group. They were pushed out of the line, and when they got lonely and hungry enough, they strapped themselves to the carts and helped to pull, in return for their share of ration. But they lost their place in line, forever.

The long line of filthy, bent cart pullers finally reached Bi. A lot of the uglies were real weird, with twisted, deformed limbs and vacant grins. Some of them mumbled or jabbered or laughed to themselves. A big, dark ultra-ugly woman sang a low, steady, complicated song, making it up as she went along. A hunched-over ugly jabbed a twisted palm at Bi, who promptly produced his ration card. The ugly examined the crumpled, torn document, then gestured at Bi’s tins. There was no one to help Bi manage the tins, and you had to be quick, before the carts went away. On the other hand; Bi’s solo portion of ration and water wasn’t very large. He held his two tins under the tubes, while the ugly pushed down the lever. The cart growled briefly in its metal insides and regurgitated a whitish, gummy substance into one tin and a brownish, slightly oily liquid into the other. The ugly stamped Bi’s ration card on the back, and the big carts moved on.

Lucky that Bi had managed to thieve his ration card from his Ma’s special pouch, while she was asleep. Some folks were foolish enough to drift without taking their card (or some had Ma’s who were lighter sleepers), and then they could never jump back into the line. They had to become cart pullers. Bi’s Ma always slept heavy, with her mouth hanging open and a thin snore. It wasn’t too hard to reach into her pouch and find his ration card, the familiar card which he’d handed to the cart pullers, so many times. Bi briefly wondered how Ma was doing. Did she ever wonder about him, or even remember him? It was such a big family group.

Family groups. Bi looked up ahead. That Pretty was spooning ration into a big cookpot. Bi wondered if he could steal her at night the way he stole his ration card. Why not? He was feeling gappy lusty lately, with no family girls to relieve himself on, and he had to do something. He figured plenty of her own kinsmen crawled into her roll at night. Who would know the difference? He could watch carefully as they settled down and see where she was sleeping, make sure that no one was actually sharing a roll with her. Then, when it got quite dark, he’d crawl into her roll, just like he belonged there. Wouldn’t say nothing, wouldn’t let on who he was, but really relieve her good, night after night, until he finally let on who he was, and maybe he’d join up with her and the whole family group. At least he wasn’t no ugly.

No, he didn’t want to join up with them, they were just as bickering and quarrelsome as his own people. He’d hook her and persuade her to join him, solo. That’d be the way, catch his own Pretty, and start his own family group. Then he’d be Pa, and everyone would mind him. Why not? And he was feeling fearful lusty.

Bi lit up his little cookfire and stirred some ration and tea. The family group was eating too. The tangle-haired Pretty had a good appetite, that was sure. Be sure to catch her ration card when you catch her! Now they were laying out their rolls. Good, her’s was near the edge, not too far from him. Easy!

Except now some double-ugly old man from her family is coming up to talk to her and grin and leer and pat her body under her robe. It’s clear he’s going to stick around for a while. And the Pretty doesn’t seem to mind, even though he’s an ugly! She’s grinning and leering back. Gap, they’re all like that. Well, let that ugly old grandpa try to warm her up, if he still can—must be in his third decade, at least. When he’s done, and crawled back to his own roll to sleep, Bi will sneak up and warm her good! Bi would keep watch all night, if necessary. Why not! He had eyes like a night critter. Bi crawled into his warm roll, and prepared to keep watch.

* * * *

But he must’ve been tired from the long move, because it was nearly dawn when he awoke. He could tell from the way the dark stood deep and dense on the grasslands. Both moons had already set. But no matter, there was still time, they were all still asleep. He crawled out of his roll and inched silently along the ground to the Pretty’s roll. He remembered just where it was, and his eyes were good enough to see that there was only one body in the roll. Good. Bi reached his hands in and began to rub and fondle the body inside the roll. The flesh felt warm, smooth and slightly moist. Bi felt almost dizzy with lust.

The Pretty jumped, startled awake. But just like Bi figured, she was used to it. “You again?” she murmured. Bi grunted and crawled inside her roll. Her body, under the robe, felt so good. Warm and soft, with bony parts and fleshy parts, and sticky, hairy places where Bi could finally relieve himself and her too. Over and over again, not thinking about anything else, like one of his dreams, deep, but with no content.

The Pretty was used to it, but she wasn’t used to Bi, that was sure. She was rumbling and heaving like a cart spitting ration. Until suddenly, Bi felt a sharp pain in his back. He looked up, startled, and realized it was already dawn, and that double-ugly old man was standing above them, full of hate and aiming another kick at Bi’s back! Gap, the old man was kicking him and kicking him. Sharp stabs of pain in his back and legs and head.

Bi scrambled out of the roll, trying to protect himself from the kicks with one arm and reaching for his knife with the other hand. The knife had been a gift from his Pa. A secret forbidden gift that Pa kept hidden in his pouch. The ugly raised a big yell, when he saw it, and left off kicking. Bi went after him with the knife, but now the other men in the family had jumped up and were heading towards him. There were a lot of them, big and tough and mean. Bi broke into a run. He couldn’t fight them all, that was sure, even with the forbidden knife. But as he ran, he looked back at the Pretty. She was staring at him, and when she caught his eye, she gave him one of her big, laughing grins.

Bi ran out into the bush, far enough from the line that no one would come after him. Folks who’d never drifted were powerful afraid of the bush, but Bi had faced the critters and solitude before. He sat down on a flat place, as the morning sun rose up through the mist, and tied his battered robe back around his short, muscular body. Well, he had relieved himself, that was sure.

But he had also lost his place in line.

No matter, he could sneak back at night to get his roll and kit, and then he could drift ahead and jump again—and maybe he could persuade the tangle-haired Pretty to drift and jump with him.

* * * *

Bi hovered near the line until the next night, foggy and dark, when everyone was asleep. Then he crawled back to grab his things. But he got a surprise. Someone was waiting, in a roll nearby. At first he got scared, thinking it was a double-ugly waiting to grab him. But the eyes that gleamed out were friendly, and that tangle of hair was unmistakable. It was her.

“You wanna drift and jump with me?” he whispered.

“Yeah.”

“You got your ration card?”

“Yeah.”

“Come on.”

They silently packed up their rolls and his mess kit and tins and crawled back into the bush. It was still dark, nothing for a drifter to do but snooze and keep watch for critters. But with her along, there was plenty to do. They spread out her roll in a clearing in the bush, and both crawled inside. This time was even bouncier than before.

* * * *

Dawn. Time to start drifting and watching for a chance to jump. Lucky the carts had just been along, so Bi’s tins were nearly full. Enough water and ration to last near a week, if they were careful. Of course, it was pretty bad, raw ration and no tea, but you couldn’t risk the smoke of a cookfire out in the bush. If drifters get caught, they’re dead critters, fair game for any of the men in the line, looking for a little fun and excitement.

So drifting is a sneaky job, moving rapidly up along the line, moving ahead, always ahead. No one would be crazy enough to drift back. You could move fast that way, plenty fast. Much faster than the line, even when it’s moving, with kids and old people, and all. Always careful not to make noise. Always staying at a distance so you can see the line, but they can’t see you. Always crouching behind clumps of brush to eat or sleep or relieve yourself and scurrying across bare grasslands, hoping that the mist and fog would hide you from sight. And always, always looking for that chance to jump.

The chance to jump could come anytime the line was moving, and you had to be ready for it, ready to swoop in whenever there was a gap in the line. Like suddenly an old man would stumble, and his family group would stop to help him, and a gap would open up in the line, just for a minute or so, just big enough for one drifter and one pretty. Then you jumped into that gap, and no one could touch you, cause everyone knew that the line must always move at an even pace, with no gaps. Gaps cause confusion, cause the line to become disorderly. No gaps are allowed, therefore drifters could jump to close a gap.

But gaps didn’t happen often. The line, itself, didn’t move often, maybe once or twice a week. And Bi and the Pretty only had ration for a week, at most. And when the line did move, most folk were very careful to keep a slow, steady pace to prevent gaps. Old folks were helped, little folks were carried. No one wanted a gap. No one wanted a strange, dirty drifter jumping in between you and your neighbors in the line, that you’ve known all your life, and maybe even shared family doings.

When you jumped, the families behind and in front felt real mean about it, that was sure. They couldn’t touch you, but they didn’t like having you in their midst. That’s why that double-ugly was glad for an excuse to start kicking at Bi. But now he had to find a place to jump, and find it fast, before the ration was gone and they had to turn in their cards and become cart pullers. So they waited and watched.

On the fourth day, they knew the line was gonna start moving, because of the rumble up ahead, and so they snuck up close. But the line moved ahead, fast and smooth, with no gaps at all. Bi and the Pretty broke into a run, trying to outrace the line, before it stopped again, trying, trying to find that essential gap.

“Bi, look up there!” the Pretty whispered, panting. “Looks like some old Ma fell.”

Bi squinted into the misty sun. Yeah, perfect. Some old Ma was breathing her last, that was sure, clutching at her bosom, with her family checking it out and trying to grab hold of her pouch. Good, the old Ma’s had the pouch with all the card in it. They couldn’t move on until they got the pouch, and the old Ma was clutching at it, cause she didn’t want to be left behind to die by herself.

Bi and the Pretty moved in closer. The family group ahead looked back uneasily, then began to move ahead. And there it was, the precious, beautiful gap! While the family was still fussing with the old Ma, a gap opened, big enough for two or more. With triumphant yelps, Bi and the Pretty swooped in from the bush and jumped a place in the line.

“We jumped ahead four days!” cried Bi, hugging her.

The Pretty was laughing and clapping with excitement. The family group ahead looked back at them, meanly. They hated jumpers, but no question, there was a gap, so nothing they could do. The family group in back finally got the pouch away from the wheezing, sobbing old Ma and came rushing back up, to fill their place in line.

* * * *

Then some nice, quiet time in the line. Fine, fun, lovey time, playing with the Pretty, using his fingers to comb out the tangles in her rich, thick hair. Not much movement in the line. But Bi could see that, every week, the Pretty’s stomach was getting bigger. He was gonna be a Pa, that was sure. Bi felt a little bit uneasy. He wasn’t solo anymore. The Pretty was lots of fun, but now a noisy baby to look out for, too. His dreams began to be filled with critters.

But luck was like a morning fog, it comes and goes, like his Ma used to say. One day, there was the Pretty, laying out on her roll, with her legs spread out, her stomach like a big mound, her hair more tangled than usual, and whining and crying and sweating, trying to give birth. Then came a rumble up ahead, the sound of the line getting ready to move.

“The line is gonna move!” said Bi, excitedly. It hadn’t moved much in weeks, so this could be a long one. Maybe it would get the Pretty’s mind off her birthing. She was taking too long at it, anyway.

“Come on and get ready,” said Bi, poking at the spread-eagled body with his foot, “sounds like it’s gonna move soon, we got to pack up your roll.”

The Pretty stared at him, glassy eyed, sweat running down her face, even though it was a chilly, foggy day.

“What’s the matter,” Bi said, “can’t you hear the line moving? You can do your birthing later. Get up, and I’ll help you with your roll.”

“I can’t,” she whispered.

“What do you mean, can’t! You got legs, don’t you?”

“It hurts too much.”

“But you gotta! We’ll never get a good place like this, so far up the line, with ration and water so fresh and all. We can’t stay here and lose it!”

“I can’t,” she repeated. “You go with the line. Don’t leave any gap. Keep my spot, and I’ll catch up when I’m done birthing.”

“Yeah, well, I guess so,” said Bi, uneasily. “But I heard folks need help with birthing. Don’t you need help?”

“What kind of help?”

“I don’t know, I never done it before. Gap. I wish my old Ma was here! Come on and try. Maybe the line won’t move far. You can stop birthing now, and do it later. I can’t carry you, ’cause you’re too heavy, but I’ll carry all the kits and rolls this time. If you stay here by yourself, the critters might get you!”

“Then stay here with me!” The Pretty started to cry.

“No, I can’t do that, we’ll lose our place for good. I’ll do like you said, if you really can’t get up, but you should try, you know. I’ll keep our place in line, and you can catch up later. Maybe the line won’t move far. Maybe the birthing is almost finished. Maybe… Anyway, I’ll leave you some ration. When you’re done, just run along the line until you find me. I’ll keep your spot. But stay hidden, so they don’t think you’re a drifter. When you find me, yell loud, and I’ll tell everyone I held your spot while you were birthing.” Bi looked at her anxiously. “That sounds good, don’t it?”

“Yeah, okay,” whispered the sad, sweaty Pretty.

The line was nearly ready to move now. Bi hastily packed up his roll and tins, leaving her with the cookpot full of ration and water.

“See, I’m leaving the cookpot. Don’t forget it, and hurry up, ’cause I’ll be hungry with no pot. And don’t forget your roll, neither.”

“I won’t,” she grimaced, clutching at her belly.

“You sure you can’t get up?” asked Bi.

She didn’t bother to answer.

“That jumping Pretty is gonna give birth real soon, that’s for sure. Serves her right,” cackled an old Ma in the family group up ahead.

“See, it’s gonna be soon,” said Bi, “then you can catch up.”

Sweat and crying were running down the Pretty’s face. She still didn’t answer.

The line was actually starting to move now. Bi picked up his roll and kit and patted her stomach. “I’ll watch for you,” he said.

The Pretty clutched her stomach and didn’t pay any attention. Bi shrugged his shoulders, kind of miffed at her indifference to him and the moving line. Then he began to walk slowly and steadily ahead, so as not to create a gap. He looked back a few times, but soon her body was lost in the fog. After a while he stopped fussing about her, figuring she’d be okay, until she caught up. And it was hard work, because the line was moving slightly uphill and the sun was warm now and the line moved all day, far into the night.

“That was a real long move,” said Bi, as he finally threw down his roll and dropped, exhausted. It wasn’t until later that he realized that there was no longer anyone to talk to. He missed that, but he missed his cookpot real bad, ’cause he was very hungry and cold ration and water taste awful.

* * * *

He got a whole lot hungrier soon, ’cause something was wrong with the carts. Everybody’s ration and water tins were almost empty. Every day, folks peered up the line for the carts, but no carts came. Bi was getting desperate. No cookpot, no Pretty, and now no carts!

“Gap, I’m getting hungry,” he said to no one in particular. He’d been talking to himself a lot, lately, now that the Pretty was gone. Why didn’t she hurry up with her birthing and catch up so he could have the cookpot and some fun again? Where were them gappy carts? Bi spread out his roll and got ready for the night. It was cold, with no way to cook tea.

Both moons were up tonight, and nearly full. They shone through the thin fog, lighting up the flat plane. The fog was so thin and the moons so bright that Bi thought he could actually see the Other Line, way off in the distance. Did they have carts? Nobody knew.

Bi was thinking like that and drifting into sleep, while absently relieving himself, when he heard a tiny noise. Was it her? He looked up startled. No, it was some triple-ugly kid from the family group up ahead, messing with Bi’s ration tin!

Bi got the knife out of his pouch and jumped up and grabbed the kid by the hair, shaking him and threatening with the knife. “Gappy thief!” he bellowed.

The kid screamed, and his family group woke up and began to threaten and fuss, but Bi had the knife pointed right at the kid. So they didn’t dare come close.

“This kid tried to thieve my ration,” yelled Bi. “I have the right to kill him, that’s for sure. Kill him and eat his eyeballs, if I want, and you can’t touch me, ’cause I caught him thieving. I’ll tell you what, though,” said Bi, with a very shrewd grin, “I’m not an ugly. I can see the kid is hungry like everyone else. I don’t want bad feeling with my neighbors. I’ll let the kid go, if he promises not to thieve again and if you’ll give me a little cookpot full of ration and water. I lost my cookpot a ways back, when my Pretty was birthing. I’ll let this thieving kid go, in return for a cookpot full of ration and water. How about it? Otherwise I’ll kill him and eat his balls.”

The family wailed and fussed, but pretty soon they handed over the filled pot. The kid got a real thrashing from his Ma, for trying to thieve, and Bi had the best, biggest meal of hot ration and bush tea. That night he slept warm and comfortable, and full, with no dreams at all.

It was his last good meal for a long, long time. The carts disappeared like a morning fog. Folks were lying along the line, too weak to move, their lips cracked and dry, their faces bony like skeletons, their eyes staring blankly in front of them. Lots of folks, especially the little babies, just didn’t make it. They just didn’t get up anymore.

It was the water part that was worst for Bi. His body was young and sturdy and could go without much ration for a long time. But water was different. His tongue felt like a dry flap of robe inside his mouth. There was just a little bit of scummy water inside his tin. Bi took a sip every now and then, but it didn’t really help. He felt weak and dizzy, shivering even during the warm daytime. He began to forage at night for the little critters. Sometimes he could catch one with his knife. That helped some, even though they tasted real bad, but it didn’t relieve his thirst. If water didn’t come soon, he’d be one of the folks who didn’t get up.

He figured it was time to drift and jump ahead. The ration got better, the further you went up the line, that was sure. Maybe the carts were stuck somewhere up ahead. Maybe he could keep going up the line until he could find the carts, or someone who knew about the carts, or something. He couldn’t stay there, that was sure.

Lucky, just as he was making this plan, there was a half day of water falling from the sky. This happened once in a while, that Bi could remember. The fog would get real thick and dark and rumbly, and water would actually fall from the sky in thick drops. Good, sweet water. This perked everyone up for a while, and Bi managed to get half a tin full of water and drink his fill for the first time in weeks. But then the dark water fog went away, and the light fog and sunshine returned. Still no carts. Bi was feeling stronger now and ready to get started on another drift up the line.

The line was a sorry sight. No big, strong family groups, waiting to grab and kill a drifter. Nobody even cared about drifters anymore, or their place in line, or anything. Groups of bodies just lying there in their rolls, staring vacantly into the fog. Bi moved steadily and weakly ahead, living off an occasional sip of his precious water and an occasional little critter, feeling sick and weak and wanting to lie down on his roll, like the others, but knowing it would be the end.

The line went on and on. He never knew how long it was! The land changed a little. Instead of flat bush, there were some low, scrubby trees, and the critters sounded a little different. Then, all of a sudden, there they were, the carts! But something was wrong, really wrong, because the cart pullers were just lying around, too. And there was no familiar rumble from inside the carts. The carts were dead. Bi walked boldly up and pressed one of the ration levers. Nothing happened. No one tried to stop him, they were all too weak, and the carts were dead, anyway.

With a frustrated yell, Bi lunged at the cart with his hand and fists and knees and feet. There must be ration and water in there, somewhere, there must! Sobbing and panting, he tore at the old rusty side of the cart, and, all of a sudden, he felt something give. A great piece of metal came away in his hands, leaving a jagged, bloody tear in his palm. But Bi didn’t care. He was deep in the innards of the cart, tearing and pushing and poking and kicking. He pulled on a big, fleshy pipe, which gave way, and suddenly, old, smelly, rotten ration was pouring down on his face, foul and inedible. He pulled at another pipe and found what he needed. Water. Warm, scummy, tinny, foul-tasting, but still drinkable water. Bi drank and drank, and filled his tin and drank some more. The cart pullers and others nearby were also rousing themselves to drink from the broken pipe, until the cart finally ran dry. Other folks, catching the idea, broke into the other carts until they finally found one with ration that hadn’t gone putrid.

Bi pushed his way through the crowd to suck at the pipe and fill his tin, until other desperate bodies forced him away. Then he took his newly filled stomach and tins a little ways from the line, and clutching at the tins, he fell into an almost comatose sleep.

* * * *

When he awoke, he realized that he just had to keep going up the line, no reason to try to jump a place, with the carts dead and all. But this trip up the line was a real short one. Carefully hoarding his precious water and ration, he walked for about three days, and suddenly he came to the prettiest sight he ever saw.

All of a sudden, there was a big wall, running along the plain, as far as you could see. It was brightly colored, with wonderful pictures all over it, of bush flowers and folks and big suns and moons and stars. Behind the wall you could see trees, big ones, not just scrubby bush. And there were big, fleshy fruits, red and orange and yellow hanging from the trees. And under the trees, you could see tents, nice ones with bright stripes all over them. And you could hear loud, wonderful music, nicer than the sound of sky-critters. The smell of fresh-cooked ration filled the air and made Bi’s mouth water, hungrily.

In the middle, behind the wall was a great round tent top, and, underneath, Bi could see different kinds of critters, all with beautiful bright colors, going round and round, under the tent top, and going up and down, in time to the music. Bi could see happy, laughing folks, in shiny new robes, riding on these colorful critters, going round and round, up and down, and chewing great gobs of crispy hot ration, while the music played so sweet.

The line went right up to an opening in the wall, where a man sat, dressed in a bright red robe, with a big white beard. Bi never saw anything like this in his whole life! He didn’t have near enough words to describe the wondrous things that could be glimpsed inside that wall.

The folks in the line were all staring in wonderment. They never saw anything like this, neither. Old Ma’s were fishing into their pouches for little bits of metal, which they gave to the man in the red robe. He looked at the bits of metal carefully, counted them, and counted the folks in the family group, then looked at them, very carefully, wrote something down in a great big book, said something to the Ma and the family group, and finally, when that was all done, he opened the wall for them, and they went inside, dazed and smiling at the luck and wonder of it all.

Bi quickly jumped a place, a little ways down the line. He was real used to doing it now, and the folks at this end were too excited to fuss about a solo jumper. In a few hours, he was standing in front of the man, who had smiling, friendly blue eyes, near hidden by his bushy white beard.

“Welcome!” smiled the man, “just let me have your token, and you can go right in.”

“My what?”

“Your token for admission.”

“I don’t have none. Nobody ever told be about it.”

“Where’s your Ma?”

“Down the line. I’m solo now.”

“Didn’t your Ma give you your ration card when you went solo?”

“Yeah, sort of.”

“And didn’t she give you the token? Your Ma is supposed to keep everybody’s token in her pouch.”

“Gap, no, she must’ve forgot!”

“Ho, ho, that sure is a pity. You came all the way up the line and don’t have no token to get in. I can’t let no one in without a token. You’ll have to get one.”

“Where?”

“In the Other Line. You ever see that other line, way off thataway? That’s the line where folks get their tokens. You gotta go to the end of the Other Line and wait your turn. They’ll let you use your same ration card there, and that line moves pretty fast. Then you can get back in this line and wait your turn to get in.”

“But that’ll take a real long time, and it’s dangerous!”

“Yeah, lucky you’re so young.”

“And there’s no more ration carts along the line.”

“Yeah, I heard about that. Sure is a pity, folks coming in real hungry and weak. Heading straight for the eats, don’t even care about having no fun. But I heard that the Other Line still has carts. So you don’t have to worry. By the time you’re back in this line, the carts will most likely be fixed.”

“I guess that’s how it is,” said Bi.

“Yep, that’s how it is. Go along now and get that token.”

Bi wandered away from the opening in the wall and thought about what to do. The wall was too high and smooth to climb over, that was sure, and there was no way he could get past that man in the red robe, ’cause he kept watch all the time. Bi knew he didn’t want to cross the bush to get his token in the Other Line. It would take so long, and he didn’t have near enough ration.

Somehow, he wanted to get inside that wall—soon as possible. It looked so pretty inside, prettiest thing he ever saw, except for his own Pretty. That place and that girl both filled him with the same sort of wantin’ feeling. Funny, he hadn’t thought about her for a while, he’d been so busy drifting. He liked pretty things a whole lot, that was sure.

So he figured the best thing to do would be to go back along the line and find his Pretty. Then him and her could go back along the line to find their old Mas and thieve their tokens. Then they’d drift back up to the wall and get inside and stay there, eating hot crisp ration every day and riding on them brightly colored critters under the tent—round and round, up and down, listening to the music and munching ration, every day! Wait till she saw it, her eyes would gleam, for sure.

Yeah, that’s what Bi would do. He’d find his Pretty, get his token, and get inside that wall. And, for sure, she must be done birthing, by now.

HE’S ONLY HUMAN, by Lawrence Watt-Evans

The Speaker of the House stared at the President Pro Tem of the Senate. “You can’t be serious,” he said.

“Oh, yes, I can,” she replied. “I’m very serious.”

“But he’s the President of the United States! I know he’s not our party, but he can’t… I mean, you’re sure?”

She nodded.

“What about the vice president? The Cabinet? Are any of them aliens?”

The senator glanced at the office door, making certain it was securely closed—it would not do to have anyone overhear. “Human, all of them,” she replied. “Not a single extraterrestrial in the lot.”

“But how could this happen?” the Speaker protested. “How could we have completely lost control of the executive branch? Isn’t there something we can do?”

She shrugged. “Do you have any suggestions, Mr. Speaker?”

He looked helplessly around the office. “Is it too late to make a substitution? Can’t we infiltrate somewhere? I mean, leaving the country in the hands of humans—it’s not safe! How could the Commission ever have let it happen?”

“Someone got careless, I suppose.”

“Carelessness on that level is the exact reason we came here in the first place! Are we getting as sloppy as the humans, now? Did someone get overconfident just because their Cold War has been over for a couple of decades?”

The senator shrugged, a human gesture she had become rather fond of.

“We have no way to infiltrate the White House and replace him?”

“Oh, we can certainly get in there,” the senator said. “We have the equipment—but we have no one accredited to take the job, and no costume ready. It would take weeks to grow a disguise good enough to pass muster.”

“Well, something must be done, and immediately!” the Speaker said, getting to his feet. “We’ll just have to remove the president and vice president. I’m next in line, and I can get some of our people into the Cabinet and line things up for the next election.”

The senator was silent for a moment, then said, “That’s a bit drastic, isn’t it?”

“It’s a drastic situation. We can’t trust humans with spaceships and nuclear weapons!”

“Should we contact the Commission first, to let them know our plans?”

“There isn’t time; the next relay ship isn’t due for almost a month. They’ve always trusted field agents to act responsibly, and I think it would be totally irresponsible to leave a human president in the White House.”

“It’s your decision, sir—you’re the senior agent—but I admit I’m a little reluctant to interfere so directly. Removing both the president and vice president…”

“It’s necessary, clearly,” the Speaker told her. “We’ll go tonight.”

* * * *

They had removed their disguises, of course—if by some horrible mischance they were spotted, it would hardly do for the Speaker and the President Pro Tem to be seen sneaking into the president’s bedroom. The senator had suggested substituting some other human guise, but the Speaker had refused, for two sound reasons: Nobody had any business sneaking into the president’s bedroom, and besides, it would take too long to grow them.

If anyone saw them, that person would probably assume he was dreaming, and certainly wouldn’t be believed if he talked about it later. Two three-foot-tall aliens creeping through the White House corridors, using mysterious machinery to open locks and evade security devices, would surely seem more like a Secret Service agent’s nightmare than a real possibility.

They moved silently down the corridor, thanks more to a dampening field than any natural stealth, and used light distorters to make themselves effectively invisible in the shadows whenever they had to pass near a human being—though the distorters had the rather severe drawback of impairing the users’ own vision as well, limiting their usefulness.

The door to the presidential bedroom popped open at the touch of a handheld device, and they stepped cautiously into the darkened room…

And the lights came on suddenly, leaving them blinking foolishly at the sight of four Secret Service agents pointing weapons at them.

And the weapons weren’t the standard-issue human-made 9mm automatics, but Krung neural suppressors.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” someone said, and they looked past the black-suited guards to see the president standing beside his bed, wearing a bathrobe and slippers. “They told me they’d spotted some extraterrestrial shenanigans goin’ on, but I didn’t think they’d actually catch two of you sneakin’ in here!”

“Urk,” the Speaker said.

“Now, just who are you, and what did you boys want with me?”

“Uh…” the President Pro Tem said.

“This one’s not a boy, sir,” one of the Secret Service agents said, gesturing at the senator. “It’s a female.”

“Oh? How can you…no, don’t tell me.”

The Speaker and the senator looked at one another. No human would have recognized the senator’s sex—which meant that though the president was human, at least one of his guards was not. And judging by the Krung weapons and all the rest, the president knew it.

That changed everything. She asked, “What’s going on? Why weren’t we told?”

The president laughed. “Seems to me that it’s you who have some explaining to do, little lady! Who are you two, anyway?”

“I am Heo designate Fu-jerin, from the fourth planet of Epsilon Eridani,” the Speaker said.

“The Speaker of the House of Representatives, sir,” a Secret Service agent explained.

The Speaker and the senator looked at one another again.

“It’s a set-up,” the senator said. “An ordinary agent wouldn’t know your name.”

“Probably a test of some kind,” the Speaker agreed. “I suspect we just flunked.”

“I’m afraid so,” the Secret Service agent said. “The Commission was considering you for a new post, now that we’re turning Earth over to the natives, and set up this situation to see how you’d handle it. I think if you go back through the e-mail you’ve let pile up over the last few weeks you’ll find some interesting reading.”

“I don’t have time to read my own e-mail!” the Speaker protested. “I’ve been busy running the country! We didn’t want this one to fall apart the way the Soviet Union did…”

“Running the country is my job, Mr. Speaker,” the president said mildly.

The Speaker glared at him with immense green eyes. “It shouldn’t be!” he retorted. “You humans would’ve blown each other up fifty years ago if we hadn’t intervened!”

“That was then,” the Secret Service agent replied. “This is now. You really should have kept up on the reports, Fu-jerin. We’ve been discussing a gradual reversion of control for the past two years.”

“I saw some of the discussions, but I didn’t know it was being implemented…”

The Secret Service agents didn’t reply; they just stared at him over their Krung suppressors.

“Someone should have told me,” the Speaker protested weakly.

“Tell that to the Commission,” a Secret Service agent said.

“What’s going to happen to us?” the senator asked.

“You’re going to leave peacefully and go back to your normal activities,” the Secret Service agent said. “I wouldn’t recommend running for re-election, though.”

“You aren’t going to do anything to us?”

“What would we do? You think we want headlines about aliens trying to kidnap the president?”

“I suppose not.” She looked forlornly at the president. “Our apologies, sir,” she said. “We meant no harm.”

“No harm done,” he said, waving a hand in dismissal. “If it’s any comfort, these boys do keep an eye on me, just in case I do somethin’ stupid.” He gestured at the Secret Service agents. “We’re taking it one step at a time.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And while you’re here, I’d just like to say somethin’,” the president continued. “Maybe it’s just me bein’ a little too proud, but I like to think we would have managed to not blow ourselves up even if you fellows hadn’t interfered. You comin’ in and secretly takin’ over the governments of half a dozen countries the way you did was a lowdown sneaky thing to do, and you didn’t have any right to do it. It came as one hell of a shock to me when I found out just what all you’d done, and I was madder ’n hell at first.”

“But…” the Speaker began.

The president stopped him with a raised hand.

“That said,” he said, “I gotta say, you kept up your end of the bargain. You could’ve stomped us all flat, or let us blow ourselves up, and you didn’t, and now that your High Commission’s decided we can be trusted, you’re pullin’ out, little by little. It’s plain you meant well. So while I can’t quite bring myself to say thanks for takin’ over the world, I will say that I appreciate the thought. Now, get out of here and let me get some sleep; I’ve got a lot of work to do in the morning.”

And with that, he turned away, while the Secret Service agents escorted the two intruders out of the room.

As the two aliens made their way through the secret network of tunnels under the Washington streets, back toward the workshop where they had left their human disguises, the Speaker said bitterly, “It’s all very well having infiltrated the Secret Service, and telling the president the truth, and that was a pretty speech he made, but I still don’t like it. When you come right down to it he’s still only human.”

The senator glanced at her companion, and would have shrugged if she were wearing shoulders.

“They could do worse,” she said.

THE WASONICA CORRECTION, by James C. Stewart

Reality Environment co-ordinates: April 2, 1968. Wasonica, Ontario. 185 Laurier Street.

I slipped a hand into my pocket, reassuring myself for the second time in as many minutes the last twenty capsules of NDT were still there. My fingers found the crumpled plastic pouch and I felt short-lived relief.

The Beatles were on the radio—

(She loves you, yeah yeah yeah)

—and outside my living room window a group of long hairs stoned on youth and whatever was popular passed with petulant noises. They left staccato images in their wake. I rubbed my eyes. I tried to stay focused.

It had been seventy-two hours and still my mind reverberated with aftershocks.

Incredible.

Without a doubt the most powerful compound I’ve experimented with to date. It would seem Leary and those clowns at Harvard were children playing with chemistry sets.

The room tightened around me. My left arm began to tremor. I blinked and saw scan lines.

Another blink.

They were gone.

The Beatles gave way to news. Apparently the Americans had bombed a place called Tranh Hoa.

Neural dimensional tryptamine. I worried about the side effects. A balance will always be struck, and clearly NDT demanded a serious adjustment.

My arm began to shake more violently.

Another glance out the window.

There was a man sitting on a bench in the park across the street. An incongruous man—he wore a black three-piece suit and sunglasses, sunglasses though the day was a dingy shade of gray. The kids lounging on the nearby grass paid him no attention, despite the fact his silver crew-cut gave him a distinctly cop vibe.

He seemed to be watching my house. We seemed to make eye-contact. He seemed to smile. Unfortunately I was in no condition to judge such things. After all, paranoia had been my constant companion for the past three days.

The radio was playing a noisy commercial for a downtown car lot when the spasms in my arm began affecting my body.

I smiled. It was going to be another full blown aftershock.

I’d discovered NDT by accident. In 1965 I’d been researching a variety of South American plants, and found myself in the jungle rainforest of French Guiana searching for the exotic philodendron moonenii.

Instead I found a conspicuously simple looking plant I’ve come to call the proto ontologica. It’s a small plant with undistinguished features, but it blossoms into a slightly more interesting flower of purple and yellow. The key component in neural dimensional tryptamine lay in the petals of this flower.

I discovered this watching the bizarre rituals of the Daorca tribe, who took a rudimentary compound of proto ontologica through their nasal cavities. They’d dried the petals and reduced them to a powder, which was then mixed with the more standard psychoactive datura inoxia, which the Aztecs had called toloatzin. A member of the tribe would then use a hollow reed to literally blow the compound into the recipient’s nostrils. The only exception to this seemed to be an elder ‘priest,’ who took the mixture by rubbing it into his eyes. After this ‘ceremony,’ the Daorca would dance like animals until succumbing to the compound’s effects, which resulted in total catatonia for three to four hours, though I’d seen it last as long as six. Within this state, the Daorca claim they “see the sideways other.”

I returned to Wasonica University with a large cache of proto ontologica (smuggled into the country pressed between the pages of my books) and thirty-six grams of the Daorca compound.

By the spring of 1966, I’d started to experiment with my own compounds. I’ve filled several journals with these results. Suffice to say the experiments of ’67 and early ’68 were both terrifying and exhilarating. Mixing the Daorca compound with psilocybin and lysergic acid diethylamide, there’s a seemingly hermetic control calendar and the standard datura inoxia which invaded the Yucatan. Long before the arrival of the Spanish, this was accomplished with the whole punishment-reward system, when the punishment scribe would literally, on a molecular level, absorb and become the compound. Now translate the Mayan control calendar into modern terms, modern space, the Mayan control calendar exception to this seemed to be an elder ‘priest’ who rubbed newspapers, radio, television, and the internet into his eyes. They would then dance as if the citizens are subjected, or maybe even subjugated. The ‘priests’ wisely conceal the effects, which would result in total catatonia, contradictory data, and vociferously deny as long as five, which is of course two and three. Within this state, the proto ontologica definitely has powerful occult properties.

Gary pushed nagging guilt from his mind and broke down before the Aztecs…never mind the gold of the Spaniards. All control systems fired up the laptop and logged over-balances. Reward and revolts. His avatar was where he’d left it. Leap into modern terms, modern space. A tesseract collides with a penteract. The mass media of a weapons facility he’d been ordered to destroy form a ceremonial calendar to which all culverts shown on a miniaturized blueprint conceal themselves behind Christ’s false Mass.

Gary felt his palms start to sweat, exist. Like Mayan priests, they can control the powder, which was then mixed with text books dropping onto a desk. Total War II, which the Aztecs had called toloatzin. The Daorca priest told me I was in his dream…then he gave me a malicious smile and reminded me that meant he was in mine…

* * * *

Reality Environment co-ordinates: April 2, 2009. Wasonica University. J.F. Boxer Dormitory. Room 419.

Gary pushed nagging guilt from his mind and dropped the text books onto his desk. An engineering midterm could wait…never mind he was already failing the course.

He fired up the laptop and logged in.

His avatar was where he’d left it: level twenty-three—a ditch bordering the chemical weapons facility he’d been ordered to destroy. He started crawling, searching for the culvert shown on the miniaturized blueprint running along the bottom of his display.

Gary felt his palms start to sweat, the excitement palpable. Total War II was awesome, certainly superior to its predecessor.

There was the culvert.

His avatar cocked an automatic, and pumped the cyber-skeleton beneath the camo’s second skin. He made short work of the grate covering the opening. He grinned…the culvert was large enough for him to crouch n’ walk.

Dig the graphics on the big rats crawling around in the dirty water. Dig the detail on the corrugated steel, perfect right down to the rivets.

The tight space darkened. Gary flipped on the avatar’s infra-red. His pulse quickened. In close quarters like this the game normally sent some sort of ugly nasty—given his position on the schematics, he braced himself for mutants chemically altered by the Soya Corporation.

A glint in the dark.

What was that? He raised his weapon. The glint lengthened into a man pointing an automatic—wait—

A mirror.

Gary stopped.

“What the hell?”

The reflection of his avatar in the mirror scrolled away. In its place a breathing, moving view of someone’s living room. No high-end graphics here…this looked like a security feed from a closed-circuit and extremely high-def video camera.

There was a man on a couch. He wore little John Lennon glasses. He looked freaked-out. The whole room appeared dated…the Sixties maybe. Even stranger—the man on the couch seemed to see him…the man on the couch suddenly grinned like a loon and walked toward him, and StellarVision’s first-person-shooter Total War II features an intriguing plot coupled with a kick-ass platform…a terrorist threat dedicated to bringing down the President. LBJ: That goddamned march of King’s. The big visuals rock and the game includes a mission deep inside enemy territory. JEH: They’ve fulfilled my worst fears, triggering a global war. In order to defeat him, he’s bringing an army to Washington to protest me—after all, the scene is designed to evoke the atrocities of torches unleashing a bloodbath. LBJ: I asked to represent one of the largest leaps in video card technology. He’s killing my chance to get reelected. The AXI Rodon 7800 has quite easily taken the top spot for single-player gaming. Bobby Kennedy. JEH: I will let you in on a secret…I’m against many of the dual-GPU cards on which Kennedy allowed me to tap and bug King himself, on-board cooling and a core speed of 850MHz, misgivings in a rush to embrace the Communist King. The good Reverend is creating dissent. Log books show an attempt to construct a philosophical reinterpretation of the human condition that would provide an escape from their impossible situation. 243. Hyper-cubed shadows executing impossible motions against a void-white wall. COINTELPRO. I’m putting forty-four agents on King. They will disseminate derogatory data nationwide. I discovered NDT by accident. The system itself evokes a false-flag liquidation event, and there are certainly less expensive, but equally functional video cards—

Gary logged out.

His face was a grayish white; his shirt soaked with sweat, and his hands held the laptop in a white-knuckled death grip.

* * * *

Reality Environment co-ordinates: April 3, 2009. Wasonica University. J.F. Boxer Dormitory. Room 419.

Gary watched the light in the room fade from gray-bright to early-evening dim. A slow loneliness came for him without notice.

At least he’d stopped feeling ill.

His laptop lay discarded on the desk, unplugged with battery pulled. None of the gamers he’d talked to had found the strange easter-egg. He’d even gone so far as to consult with Derek Butazoni, the campus expert in Total War II. When he’d asked the acne-spotted freshman about the closed-circuit feed hidden on the twenty-third level the little bastard had looked at him like he was completely insane. The short conversation ended with Derek sneering, “So who put you up to this? Was it that dick Skyler? Tell him he’s funny like cancer.”

Gary snuck a glance at his laptop.

Had the experience been real? Had he brushed against the truly weird?

A memory came to him, a physics lecture a few months back…Dr. McCoy had veered off-topic while discussing quantum mechanics and string theory. Inevitably some dolt had raised his hand, bringing up the concept of a multi-dimensional Universe and parallel worlds. Gary had been surprised when Dr. McCoy entertained the idea.

“It’s completely within the realm of possibility. It’s been suggested by minds greater than mine everything that can happen has indeed happened. What if time is like an ever-branching tree with countless possible futures?” He’d smiled at the befuddled class with his teacher’s smile, “Consider coming to a corner and turning left instead of right. Some philosophers argue every time a choice of quantum alternatives is possible both options actually occur, with the entire Universe splitting into infinite separate future worlds.”

Dr. McCoy had paused, allowing the idea to percolate. Then, “What if transposition across these parallel Universes not only explains paranormal dreams, but even the occasional disappearance?”

The question haunted Gary…and on his desk the laptop seemed to wink at him.

* * * *

Reality Environment co-ordinates: April 3, 1968. Wasonica, Ontario. The Delmar Café.

A Formica tabletop. A glass of what appeared to be Coca-Cola. I raised my head.

A coffee shop.

Jesus.

Complete blackout. Zero memory of leaving my house. Zero memory of arriving here. Spooky bad juju. Definitely more than just another aftershock. I glanced at my watch—a little over ninety-six hours since I’d ingested the NDT.

Panic slapped me. My hand flew to my pocket.

They were still there.

I relaxed.

Strange images played across the back of my eyelids—a student (not now…but when?) hunched over a plastic keyboard materializing, suspended some five feet above the floor in the center of my living room. It was a powerful hallucination, one which had apparently lodged itself into a fold in my psyche.

Everything else remained a foggy shade of vague.

A waitress passed my table and glanced at me with barely concealed disgust. I could hardly blame her. I hadn’t showered, shaved or changed my clothes in four days.

The image of that kid at the plastic keyboard just hanging there nagged. I was at the edge of a discovery, I could feel it. Had the image been more than just an hallucination? Had the NDT allowed for a tachyon bio-shift as I’d theorized? The possibility filled me with excitement. It would mark the culmination of my research. But living the experience was something entirely different. For beyond the potential discovery lay an abyss of madness, an abyss I felt myself sliding hopelessly toward—

But the hallucination vexed. And ‘hallucination’ was the wrong word—better, perhaps, was the term ‘reality expansion image.’ But what had I witnessed? A view of the Daorca’s “sideways other”? And if I had glimpsed a parallel line, another space, had the shift been physical? Had a true tachyon bio-shift occurred? I couldn’t begin to comprehend the mathematics behind such a phenomenon. But there was more to it than mere physics.

I sipped Coca-Cola, and recalled the odd case of Virginia Tighe, a supposed example of reincarnation.

Mrs. Tighe was a wife and mother living in Pueblo, Colorado in the early 1950’s. She’d been put into a hypnotic trance by her psychiatrist, and ‘regressed’ to a time before her birth. In this state she described her life as Bridey Kathleen Murphy, born in Cork, Ireland in 1798. She gave incredible detail about her parents, school, husband and life, which ended in 1864. All the descriptions Mrs. Tighe gave held up under scrutiny. Particularly striking were Mrs. Tighe’s usages of dialect expressions and slang, common in that region of Ireland prior to 1900, but far from common in twentieth century America, and certainly not something a housewife would pick up by casual reading some ninety years later.

A book published about the case caused a sensation and fierce controversy, especially among the Christian community, who found the idea of reincarnation unacceptable.

But to me this was only part of the story.

Suppose instead of Virginia Tighe being the reincarnation of Bridey Murphy that their minds were operating on the same wavelength. Suppose Mrs. Tighe’s consciousness, after being regressed past her birth, searched out, or ‘attuned’ to Bridey Murphy. The receptive, essentially unconscious mind of Virginia Tighe relays the images broadcast by Bridey Murphy in the previous century across the barriers of space-time. After all, isn’t this at least as likely as the idea of the soul (no small concept itself!) somehow being reborn?

The life-like ‘reality expansion image’ of the boy at the plastic keyboard: there’s no reason to think that image would be transmitted—probably via tachyons—in verbal terms, but rather by the entire spectrum of sensory experience. No doubt it had seemed real…if my theory was correct, it was real.

In that moment I resolved to take another capsule of NDT—this time ensconced in the relative safety of my laboratory at the University.

I dropped coins onto the table and hurriedly left the restaurant.

Harsh, unexpected sunlight blinded me. Squinting, and feeling somewhat vampiric, I headed toward the University. The street was quiet…the few cars that did pass left funky after-images, the NDT lingering.

In a sidewalk café further up the street a well-dressed man in sunglasses and a silver crew-cut sipped espresso and read a newspaper. I caught the headline:

KING TRAVELS TO MEMPHIS

He glanced at me with shaded lenses as I passed. A sense of something akin to déjà vu gripped me—now where the hell did I know him from?

* * * *

Reality Environment co-ordinates: April 4, 2009. Wasonica University. J.F. Boxer Dormitory. Room 419.

Gary watched the sunrise.

He hadn’t slept much. He thought maybe he’d caught a half-hour or so around four in the morning, but that was about it. He’d alternated between gnawing anxiety, staring at infomercials and furtive peeks at his laptop…an on-going study of inert plastic, circuitry and microchips.

Gary giggled to himself at the absurdity of it.

He couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten.

And then, as the sun rose over the horizon, the answer came to him.

The experience in-game had surely been nothing—

(it didn’t feel like nothing)

—but the only way to prove it was to go back in, back to the culvert on level twenty-three.

“Fuck it. I can’t live like this.”

Gary was halfway to his laptop when he realized he’d spoken aloud.

* * * *

Reality Environment co-ordinates: April 4, 1968. Wasonica University. Department of Biology. Botany Laboratory.

I cleaned up at one of the sinks in the lab. I changed into a sweatshirt I’d forgotten in an office closet. I picked a mango from the tree in the greenhouse, and ate it with coffee while glancing at Shimizu’s Insectivorous Plants.

It proved an intriguing reminder of evolution’s cruelty.

I almost felt like myself.

I took a capsule of neural dimensional tryptamine with water. The remaining capsules I dropped into a locking desk drawer.

I returned to reading, but anticipation of the NDT’s effect kept my mind racing. Back when I was writing my doctoral thesis I’d become interested in tachyons as a form of faster-than-light communication. A tachyon is a faster-than-light particle, not to be confused with a tardon, a more mundane, slow-moving particle found in everyday life.

The most fascinating aspect of this bit of theoretical physics is the way time flows for tachyons. If we look at our tardon world, the faster a particle goes the slower time passes, until at the (impossible to reach) speed of light time is standing still. In the tachyon world, the same pattern applies, except that time runs backwards compared with the flow in the tardon world.

I remembered a conversation with a brilliant young physics student named Randall McCoy—he’d suggested the basic problems associated with communicating across interstellar distances could be solved if we sent bursts of tachyons, instead of sluggish electromagnetic radiation moving merely at the speed of light, from a ‘transmitter’ to a ‘receiver.’ The only snag—you might get the ‘answer’ to your message before you sent it.

Strange ideas—ideas that had stuck with me, ideas I’d played with, examined, and slowly built into the theoretical concept of the tachyon bio-shift, a theory which had driven my research deeper into the sometimes dangerous realm of psychoactive compounds.

A tremor went through my body…the NDT was beginning to hit my nervous system. At roughly the same time it occurred to me we are manifestations of a single consciousness—a supermind whose attention flickers across all our lives, making us all different three-dimensional facets of the same ultimate consciousness. I believe there was very likely a distortion of space-time in the culvert. He was just a theory of relativity offering a scientific explanation which looked totally real. Ditto the water beneath his feet. Clairvoyance, astral projection, provided the mirror was right where he’d left it. Gary’s individual consciousness can alter the bio-gravitational field, the mirror gradually filling the screen. He is the observer. I conjecture the distortions can be manipulated, and the hippie from before was at the location of the participator. The hippie’s eyes were saucers, the time-flow at the object being observed and influenced. Differential in the time-flow of the participator and object can in principle be so adjusted that the participator working within his local light cone ‘sees’ into the probable future or past of the object. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land. The Shadow reaching out from the Chaos reaching a blood-stained hand toward Man. Strange circumstances. O.I. (Outside Influence). Soft-point bullets. Hard to ID. Ballistic holocaust. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord, and Gary shook his head in a vain attempt to rid himself of what he was seeing. It happened as he was leaving his room. Memphis. Hippie-zombie’s hand began breaking through the computer. On the balcony outside of his motel room. A single shot breaking through the computer shatters the system. Pronounced dead. The man in the suit with gray hair mouthing words, staring at Gary. Soft thunks of noise. Strange circumstances surrounding the assassination. Gary only later realized must’ve been brain matter. Lyndon B. Johnson declared a day of mourning. The reality expansion image had opened. It kind of…I dunno…unfolded …into reality. There he was, stunned, staring at me from behind his plastic keyboard. It was accomplished. A tachyon bio-shift. My God. I reached out a hand…reached toward the image…pure joy…

A man sporting a silver crew-cut walked into the lab. He had something in his hand. I frowned. It was a pistol equipped with a silencer. He calmly shut the door behind him. He removed a pair of dark glasses and regarded me sadly with a pair of striking white eyes.

“Where is it?”

My eyes betrayed me, glancing at the desk drawer.

Silver crew-cut gazed, stone-faced, at the boy at the plastic keyboard, at the reality expansion image opened in the center of the room.

His attention came back to me. The room breathed around him.

The pistol came up, the silencer level with my head.

He said, “I’m sorry.”

* * * *

Reality Environment co-ordinates: April 4, 2009. Wasonica University. J.F. Boxer Dormitory. Room 419.

Total War II.

Gary’s avatar crawled along the culvert on level twenty-three. He was still impressed with the game’s graphics. The rats still looked totally real. Ditto the water beneath his feet.

His eyes narrowed.

The bizarro mirror was right were he’d left it.

Gary took a deep breath. He moved toward it with caution, the mirror gradually filling his screen. And then it was there, the all too life-like closed-circuit feed. Except it was different now, it was an office or a study or something and the hippie from before was there—

Gary’s heart threatened to beat through his chest.

The hippie’s eyes were saucers behind John Lennon specs, crazed saucers focusing on him. And then the hippie raised an arm like some sort of fucked up hippie-zombie, a hippie-zombie hand reaching toward him—

Gary closed his eyes and shook his head in a vain attempt to rid himself of what he was seeing.

He opened his eyes.

Gary’s bladder almost let go when the hippie-zombie hand began pushing against the computer screen, began breaking through the computer screen—

Then a man with short gray hair wearing a suit walked into the room behind the hippie, the hand disappearing, the hippie turning and the man in the suit mouthing words, and staring at Gary.

Gary watched in helpless, open-mouthed shock as the man with short gray hair raised a pistol and shot the hippie twice in the head the shots soft thunks of noise the bloody spray flecked with bits of gray Gary only later realized must’ve been brain matter turn off the power and remove the 74LS00 from Martin Luther King said in this same ceremony location 6C, bend pin 243 of the IC out re-install permanent peace. It solves no social problem: if the IC does not make contact with pin 243 of the merely complicated ones. As someone who stands here as a direct and grounded motherboard pin 243 by shorting it. I am a living testimony to the moral force of a non-violent jumper wire. My name is JB Surge. If you’re receiving this—nothing passive—nothing naïve—in the creed of the Muan bicom block. I don’t have much time. A head-of-state is sworn to protect and defend my nation. The Muan Federation’s ‘Kallisti Protocol.’ Beware of The Book. I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle. Trust no one. There is no cure. They’ve attempted manufacturing human beings. Make no mistake: evil does exist in the tachyon world, the pattern applies. NDT’s effect kept my mind racing. Back in the flow of the tardon world, I’d become interested in tachyons as a form of communication. Randall McCoy. The basic power moving particles (politics) in everyday life echoes across interstellar distances. They may come as people you know. They have in the past, because they have no past. You are living in a three-dimensional illusion ruled by an abstract and Terran-based concept known as ‘time.’ I too lived under these artificial constraints until this experiment will force the processor to sequentially read everything, including memory-mapped O.I. locations that turn on the drive motor(s)—

Gary logged out.

* * * *

Reality Environment co-ordinates: April 5, 1968. The New York Times headline and subhead:

MARTIN LUTHER KING SLAIN IN MEMPHIS

NATIONAL GUARD CALLED OUT

* * * *

Reality Environment co-ordinates: April 5, 2009. Wasonica University. M. Deane Harris Library.

Tall arched windows streamed dusty morning sunlight. The library was a cavernous space flaunting lofty vaulted ceilings, dark wood-paneling and dour white faces in ornate frames. There were maybe a dozen students being studious. A few glanced up as he passed, but quickly looked away when they caught his anxious eye and agitated appearance.

After forty minutes Gary found what he was looking for in a lonely, seemingly forgotten section dedicated to the history of the University and its surrounding region.

It was a slender volume, a hard cover bearing the curious title, Wasonica: Scandals & Phantoms, written by one Dr. Leland Summers. A cryptic biography above a 1979 copyright said Summers was a historian with a “penchant for parapsychology” who’d worked at the University from 1971 to 1975.

Gary took the book to a reading area by one of the windows, his hand trembling slightly but uncontrollably as he turned the mouldy pages.

He was surprised. He’d had no idea his choice in institutions of higher-education harbored such a checkered and colorful history. There’d been unexplained fires in the dorms, strange apparitions in the physics department, a few sex scandals, a murder or two and the author himself had apparently witnessed “something that defied all logic.”

And there it was among the strange and sordid stories. A photograph of a smiling Dr. Oliver Ross—the hippie who’d been shot in front of him, the hippie who’d lived inside a mirror inside his computer.

The photograph had a caption and nothing else, just a mere footnote in the extraordinary history of the University.

Turns out Dr. Oliver Ross was a professor in the Biology Department back in the Sixties. The caption said he’d been shot during a robbery in one of the labs. The caption said his killer had never been caught, which Gary found funny, since the killer was loitering at a bus stop right outside the window.

CIRCUS, by Alan E. Nourse

“Just suppose,” said Morgan, “that I did believe you. Just for argument.” He glanced up at the man across the restaurant table. “Where would we go from here?”

The man shifted uneasily in his seat. He was silent, staring down at his plate. Not a strange-looking man, Morgan thought. Rather ordinary, in fact. A plain face, nose a little too long, fingers a little too dainty, a suit that doesn’t quite seem to fit, but all in all, a perfectly ordinary looking man.

Maybe too ordinary, Morgan thought.

Finally the man looked up. His eyes were dark, with a hunted look in their depths that chilled Morgan a little. “Where do we go? I don’t know. I’ve tried to think it out, and I get nowhere. But you’ve got to believe me, Morgan. I’m lost, I mean it. If I can’t get help, I don’t know where it’s going to end.”

“I’ll tell you where it’s going to end,” said Morgan. “It’s going to end in a hospital. A mental hospital. They’ll lock you up and they’ll lose the key somewhere.” He poured himself another cup of coffee and sipped it, scalding hot. “And that,” he added, “will be that.”

* * * *

The place was dark and almost empty. Overhead, a rotary fan swished patiently. The man across from Morgan ran a hand through his dark hair. “There must be some other way,” he said. “There has to be.”

“All right, let’s start from the beginning again,” Morgan said. “Maybe we can pin something down a little better. You say your name is Parks—right?”

The man nodded. “Jefferson Haldeman Parks, if that helps any. Haldeman was my mother’s maiden name.”

“All right. And you got into town on Friday—right?”

Parks nodded.

“Fine. Now go through the whole story again. What happened first?”

The man thought for a minute. “As I said, first there was a fall. About twenty feet. I didn’t break any bones, but I was shaken up and limping. The fall was near the highway going to the George Washington Bridge. I got over to the highway and tried to flag down a ride.”

“How did you feel? I mean, was there anything strange that you noticed?”

“Strange!” Parks’ eyes widened. “I—I was speechless. At first I hadn’t noticed too much—I was concerned with the fall, and whether I was hurt or not. I didn’t really think about much else until I hobbled up to that highway and saw those cars coming. Then I could hardly believe my eyes. I thought I was crazy. But a car stopped and asked me if I was going into the city, and I knew I wasn’t crazy.”

Morgan’s mouth took a grim line. “You understood the language?”

“Oh, yes. I don’t see how I could have, but I did. We talked all the way into New York—nothing very important, but we understood each other. His speech had an odd sound, but—”

Morgan nodded. “I know, I noticed. What did you do when you got to New York?”

“Well, obviously, I needed money. I had gold coin. There had been no way of knowing if it would be useful, but I’d taken it on chance. I tried to use it at a newsstand first, and the man wouldn’t touch it. Asked me if I thought I was the U.S. Treasury or something. When he saw that I was serious, he sent me to a money lender, a hock shop, I think he called it. So I found a place—”

“Let me see the coins.”

Parks dropped two small gold discs on the table. They were perfectly smooth and perfectly round, tapered by wear to a thin blunt edge. There was no design on them, and no printing. Morgan looked up at the man sharply. “What did you get for these?”

Parks shrugged. “Too little, I suspect. Two dollars for the small one, five for the larger.”

“You should have gone to a bank.”

“I know that now. I didn’t then. Naturally, I assumed that with everything else so similar, principles of business would also be similar.”

Morgan sighed and leaned back in his chair. “Well, then what?”

Parks poured some more coffee. His face was very pale, Morgan thought, and his hands trembled as he raised the cup to his lips. Fright? Maybe. Hard to tell. The man put down the cup and rubbed his forehead with the back of his hand. “First, I went to the mayor’s office,” he said. “I kept trying to think what anyone at home would do in my place. That seemed a good bet. I asked a policeman where it was, and then I went there.”

“But you didn’t get to see him.”

“No. I saw a secretary. She said the mayor was in conference, and that I would have to have an appointment. She let me speak to another man, one of the mayor’s assistants.”

“And you told him?”

“No. I wanted to see the mayor himself. I thought that was the best thing to do. I waited for a couple of hours, until another assistant came along and told me flatly that the mayor wouldn’t see me unless I stated my business first.” He drew in a deep breath. “So I stated it. And then I was gently but firmly ushered back into the street again.”

“They didn’t believe you,” said Morgan.

“Not for a minute. They laughed in my face.”

Morgan nodded. “I’m beginning to get the pattern. So what did you do next?”

“Next I tried the police. I got the same treatment there, only they weren’t so gentle. They wouldn’t listen either. They muttered something about cranks and their crazy notions, and when they asked me where I lived, they thought I was—what did they call it?—a wise guy! Told me to get out and not come back with any more wild stories.”

“I see,” said Morgan.

Jefferson Parks finished his last bite of pie and pushed the plate away. “By then I didn’t know quite what to do. I’d been prepared for almost anything excepting this. It was frightening. I tried to rationalize it, and then I quit trying. It wasn’t that I attracted attention, or anything like that, quite the contrary. Nobody even looked at me, unless I said something to them. I began to look for things that were different, things that I could show them, and say, see, this proves that I’m telling the truth, look at it—” He looked up helplessly.

“And what did you find?”

“Nothing. Oh, little things, insignificant little things. Your calendars, for instance. Naturally, I couldn’t understand your frame of reference. And the coinage, you stamp your coins; we don’t. And cigarettes. We don’t have any such thing as tobacco.” The man gave a short laugh. “And your house dogs! We have little animals that look more like rabbits than poodles. But there was nothing any more significant than that. Absolutely nothing.”

“Except yourself,” Morgan said.

“Ah, yes. I thought that over carefully. I looked for differences, obvious ones. I couldn’t find any. You can see that, just looking at me. So I searched for more subtle things. Skin texture, fingerprints, bone structure, body proportion. I still couldn’t find anything. Then I went to a doctor.”

Morgan’s eyebrows lifted. “Good,” he said.

Parks shrugged tiredly. “Not really. He examined me. He practically took me apart. I carefully refrained from saying anything about who I was or where I came from; just said I wanted a complete physical examination, and let him go to it. He was thorough, and when he finished he patted me on the back and said, ‘Parks, you’ve got nothing to worry about. You’re as fine, strapping a specimen of a healthy human being as I’ve ever seen.’ And that was that.” Parks laughed bitterly. “I guess I was supposed to be happy with the verdict, and instead I was ready to knock him down. It was idiotic, it defied reason, it was infuriating.”

Morgan nodded sourly. “Because you’re not a human being,” he said.

“That’s right. I’m not a human being at all.”

* * * *

“How did you happen to pick this planet, or this sun?” Morgan asked curiously. “There must have been a million others to choose from.”

Parks unbuttoned his collar and rubbed his stubbled chin unhappily. “I didn’t make the choice. Neither did anyone else. Travel by warp is a little different from travel by the rocket you fiction writers make so much of. With a rocket vehicle you pick your destination, make your calculations, and off you go. The warp is blind flying, strictly blind. We send an unmanned scanner ahead. It probes around more or less hit-or-miss until it locates something, somewhere, that looks habitable. When it spots a likely looking place, we keep a tight beam on it and send through a manned scout.” He grinned sourly. “Like me. If it looks good to the scout, he signals back, and they leave the warp anchored for a sort of permanent gateway until we can get a transport beam built. But we can’t control the directional and dimensional scope of the warp. There are an infinity of ways it can go, until we have a guide beam transmitting from the other side. Then we can just scan a segment of space with the warp, and the scanner picks up the beam.”

He shook his head wearily. “We’re new at it, Morgan. We’ve only tried a few dozen runs. We’re not too far ahead of you in technology. We’ve been using rocket vehicles just like yours for over a century. That’s fine for a solar system, but it’s not much good for the stars. When the warp principle was discovered, it looked like the answer. But something went wrong, the scanner picked up this planet, and I was coming through, and then something blew. Next thing I knew I was falling. When I tried to make contact again, the scanner was gone!”

“And you found things here the same as back home,” said Morgan.

“The same! Your planet and mine are practically twins. Similar cities, similar technology, everything. The people are the same, with precisely the same anatomy and physiology, the same sort of laws, the same institutions, even compatible languages. Can’t you see the importance of it? This planet is on the other side of the universe from mine, with the first intelligent life we’ve yet encountered anywhere. But when I try to tell your people that I’m a native of another star system, they won’t believe me!”

“Why should they?” asked Morgan. “You look like a human being. You talk like one. You eat like one. You act like one. What you’re asking them to believe is utterly incredible.”

“But it’s true.”

Morgan shrugged. “So it’s true. I won’t argue with you. But as I asked before, even if I did believe you, what do you expect me to do about it? Why pick me, of all the people you’ve seen?”

There was a desperate light in Parks’ eyes. “I was tired, tired of being laughed at, tired of having people looking at me as though I’d lost my wits when I tried to tell them the truth. You were here, you were alone, so I started talking. And then I found out you wrote stories.” He looked up eagerly. “I’ve got to get back, Morgan, somehow. My life is there, my family. And think what it would mean to both of our worlds—contact with another intelligent race! Combine our knowledges, our technologies, and we could explore the galaxy!”

He leaned forward, his thin face intense. “I need money and I need help. I know some of the mathematics of the warp principle, know some of the design, some of the power and wiring principles. You have engineers here, technologists, physicists. They could fill in what I don’t know and build a guide beam. But they won’t do it if they don’t believe me. Your government won’t listen to me, they won’t appropriate any money.”

“Of course they won’t. They’ve got a war or two on their hands, they have public welfare, and atomic bombs, and rockets to the moon to sink their money into.” Morgan stared at the man. “But what can I do?”

“You can write! That’s what you can do. You can tell the world about me, you can tell exactly what has happened. I know how public interest can be aroused in my world. It must be the same in yours.”

Morgan didn’t move. He just stared. “How many people have you talked to?” he asked.

“A dozen, a hundred, maybe a thousand.”

“And how many believed you?”

“None.”

“You mean nobody would believe you?”

“Not one soul. Until I talked to you.”

And then Morgan was laughing, laughing bitterly, tears rolling down his cheeks. “And I’m the one man who couldn’t help you if my life depended on it,” he gasped.

“You believe me?”

Morgan nodded sadly. “I believe you. Yes. I think your warp brought you through to a parallel universe of your own planet, not to another star, but I think you’re telling the truth.”

“Then you can help me.”

“I’m afraid not.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’d be worse than no help at all.”

Jefferson Parks gripped the table, his knuckles white. “Why?” he cried hoarsely. “If you believe me, why can’t you help me?”

Morgan pointed to the magazine lying on the table. “I write, yes,” he said sadly. “Ever read stories like this before?”

Parks picked up the magazine, glanced at the bright cover. “I barely looked at it.”

“You should look more closely. I have a story in this issue. The readers thought it was very interesting,” Morgan grinned. “Go ahead, look at it.”

The stranger from the stars leafed through the magazine, stopped at a page that carried Roger Morgan’s name. His eyes caught the first paragraph and he turned white. He set the magazine down with a trembling hand. “I see,” he said, and the life was gone out of his voice. He spread the pages viciously, read the lines again.

The paragraph said:

“Just suppose,” said Martin, “that I did believe you. Just for argument.” He glanced up at the man across the table. “Where do we go from here?”

THE HATED, by Frederik Pohl

The bar didn’t have a name. No name of any kind. Not even an indication that it had ever had one. All it said on the outside was:

Cafe

EAT

Cocktails

which doesn’t make a lot of sense. But it was a bar. It had a big TV set going ya-ta-ta ya-ta-ta in three glorious colors, and a jukebox that tried to drown out the TV with that lousy music they play. Anyway, it wasn’t a kid hangout. I kind of like it. But I wasn’t supposed to be there at all; it’s in the contract. I was supposed to stay in New York and the New England states.

Cafe-EAT-Cocktails was right across the river. I think the name of the place was Hoboken, but I’m not sure. It all had a kind of dreamy feeling to it. I was—

Well, I couldn’t even remember going there. I remembered one minute I was downtown New York, looking across the river. I did that a lot. And then I was there. I don’t remember crossing the river at all.

I was drunk, you know.

* * * *

You know how it is? Double bourbons and keep them coming. And after a while the bartender stops bringing me the ginger ale because gradually I forget to mix them. I got pretty loaded long before I left New York. I realize that. I guess I had to get pretty loaded to risk the pension and all.

Used to be I didn’t drink much, but now, I don’t know, when I have one drink, I get to thinking about Sam and Wally and Chowderhead and Gilvey and the captain. If I don’t drink, I think about them, too, and then I take a drink. And that leads to another drink, and it all comes out to the same thing. Well, I guess I said it already, I drink a pretty good amount, but you can’t blame me.

There was a girl.

I always get a girl someplace. Usually they aren’t much and this one wasn’t either. I mean she was probably somebody’s mother. She was around thirty-five and not so bad, though she had a long scar under her ear down along her throat to the little round spot where her larynx was. It wasn’t ugly. She smelled nice—while I could still smell, you know—and she didn’t talk much. I liked that. Only—

Well, did you ever meet somebody with a nervous cough? Like when you say something funny—a little funny, not a big yock—they don’t laugh and they don’t stop with just smiling, but they sort of cough? She did that. I began to itch. I couldn’t help it. I asked her to stop it.

She spilled her drink and looked at me almost as though she was scared—and I had tried to say it quietly, too.

“Sorry,” she said, a little angry, a little scared. “Sorry. But you don’t have to—”

“Forget it.”

“Sure. But you asked me to sit down here with you, remember? If you’re going to—”

“Forget it!” I nodded at the bartender and held up two fingers. “You need another drink,” I said. “The thing is,” I said, “Gilvey used to do that.”

“What?”

“That cough.”

She looked puzzled. “You mean like this?”

“Goddam it, stop it!” Even the bartender looked over at me that time. Now she was really mad, but I didn’t want her to go away. I said, “Gilvey was a fellow who went to Mars with me. Pat Gilvey.”

“Oh.” She sat down again and leaned across the table, low. “Mars.”

* * * *

The bartender brought our drinks and looked at me suspiciously. I said, “Say, Mac, would you turn down the air-conditioning?”

“My name isn’t Mac. No.”

“Have a heart. It’s too cold in here.”

“Sorry.” He didn’t sound sorry.

I was cold. I mean that kind of weather, it’s always cold in those places. You know around New York in August? It hits eighty, eighty-five, ninety. All the places have air-conditioning and what they really want is for you to wear a shirt and tie.

But I like to walk a lot. You would, too, you know. And you can’t walk around much in long pants and a suit coat and all that stuff. Not around there. Not in August. And so then, when I went into a bar, it’d have one of those built-in freezers for the used-car salesmen with their dates, or maybe their wives, all dressed up. For what? But I froze.

“Mars,” the girl breathed. “Mars.”

I began to itch again. “Want to dance?”

“They don’t have a license,” she said. “Byron, I didn’t know you’d been to Mars! Please tell me about it.”

“It was all right,” I said.

That was a lie.

She was interested. She forgot to smile. It made her look nicer. She said, “I knew a man—my brother-in-law—he was my husband’s brother—I mean my ex-husband—”

“I get the idea.”

“He worked for General Atomic. In Rockford, Illinois. You know where that is?”

“Sure.” I couldn’t go there, but I knew where Illinois was.

“He worked on the first Mars ship. Oh, fifteen years ago, wasn’t it? He always wanted to go himself, but he couldn’t pass the tests.” She stopped and looked at me.

I knew what she was thinking. But I didn’t always look this way, you know. Not that there’s anything wrong with me now, I mean, but I couldn’t pass the tests any more. Nobody can. That’s why we’re all one-trippers.

I said, “The only reason I’m shaking like this is because I’m cold.”

It wasn’t true, of course. It was that cough of Gilvey’s. I didn’t like to think about Gilvey, or Sam or Chowderhead or Wally or the captain. I didn’t like to think about any of them. It made me shake.

You see, we couldn’t kill each other. They wouldn’t let us do that. Before we took off, they did something to our minds to make sure. What they did, it doesn’t last forever. It lasts for two years and then it wears off. That’s long enough, you see, because that gets you to Mars and back; and it’s plenty long enough, in another way, because it’s like a strait-jacket.

You know how to make a baby cry? Hold his hands. It’s the most basic thing there is. What they did to us so we couldn’t kill each other, it was like being tied up, like having our hands held so we couldn’t get free. Well. But two years was long enough. Too long.

The bartender came over and said, “Pal, I’m sorry. See, I turned the air-conditioning down. You all right? You look so—”

I said, “Sure, I’m all right.”

He sounded worried. I hadn’t even heard him come back. The girl was looking worried, too, I guess because I was shaking so hard I was spilling my drink. I put some money on the table without even counting it.

“It’s all right,” I said. “We were just going.”

“We were?” She looked confused. But she came along with me. They always do, once they find out you’ve been to Mars.

* * * *

In the next place, she said, between trips to the powder room, “It must take a lot of courage to sign up for something like that. Were you scientifically inclined in school? Don’t you have to know an awful lot to be a space-flyer? Did you ever see any of those little monkey characters they say live on Mars? I read an article about how they lived in little cities of pup-tents or something like that—only they didn’t make them, they grew them. Funny! Ever see those? That trip must have been a real drag, I bet. What is it, nine months? You couldn’t have a baby! Excuse me—Say, tell me. All that time, how’d you—well, manage things? I mean didn’t you ever have to go to the you-know or anything?”

“We managed,” I said.

She giggled, and that reminded her, so she went to the powder room again. I thought about getting up and leaving while she was gone, but what was the use of that? I’d only pick up somebody else.

It was nearly midnight. A couple of minutes wouldn’t hurt. I reached in my pocket for the little box of pills they give us—it isn’t refillable, but we get a new prescription in the mail every month, along with the pension check. The label on the box said:

CAUTION

Use only as directed by physician. Not to be taken by persons suffering heart condition, digestive upset or circulatory disease. Not to be used in conjunction with alcoholic beverages.

I took three of them. I don’t like to start them before midnight, but anyway I stopped shaking.

I closed my eyes, and then I was on the ship again. The noise in the bar became the noise of the rockets and the air washers and the sludge sluicers. I began to sweat, although this place was air-conditioned, too.

I could hear Wally whistling to himself the way he did, the sound muffled by his oxygen mask and drowned in the rocket noise, but still perfectly audible. The tune was Sophisticated Lady. Sometimes it was Easy to Love and sometimes Chasing Shadows, but mostly Sophisticated Lady. He was from Juilliard.

Somebody sneezed, and it sounded just like Chowderhead sneezing. You know how everybody sneezes according to his own individual style? Chowderhead had a ladylike little sneeze; it went hutta, real quick, all through the mouth, no nose involved. The captain went Hrasssh; Wally was Ashoo, ashoo, ashoo. Gilvey was Hutch-uh. Sam didn’t sneeze much, but he sort of coughed and sprayed, and that was worse.

Sometimes I used to think about killing Sam by tying him down and having Wally and the captain sneeze him to death. But that was a kind of a joke, naturally, when I was feeling good. Or pretty good. Usually I thought about a knife for Sam. For Chowderhead it was a gun, right in the belly, one shot. For Wally it was a tommy gun—just stitching him up and down, you know, back and forth. The captain I would put in a cage with hungry lions, and Gilvey I’d strangle with my bare hands. That was probably because of the cough, I guess.

* * * *

She was back. “Please tell me about it,” she begged. “I’m so curious.”

I opened my eyes. “You want me to tell you about it?”

“Oh, please!”

“About what it’s like to fly to Mars on a rocket?”

“Yes!”

“All right,” I said.

It’s wonderful what three little white pills will do. I wasn’t even shaking.

“There’s six men, see? In a space the size of a Buick, and that’s all the room there is. Two of us in the bunks all the time, four of us on watch. Maybe you want to stay in the sack an extra ten minutes—because it’s the only place on the ship where you can stretch out, you know, the only place where you can rest without somebody’s elbow in your side. But you can’t. Because by then it’s the next man’s turn.

“And maybe you don’t have elbows in your side while it’s your turn off watch, but in the starboard bunk there’s the air-regenerator master valve—I bet I could still show you the bruises right around my kidneys—and in the port bunk there’s the emergency-escape-hatch handle. That gets you right in the temple, if you turn your head too fast.

“And you can’t really sleep, I mean not soundly, because of the noise. That is, when the rockets are going. When they aren’t going, then you’re in free-fall, and that’s bad, too, because you dream about falling. But when they’re going, I don’t know, I think it’s worse. It’s pretty loud.

“And even if it weren’t for the noise, if you sleep too soundly you might roll over on your oxygen line. Then you dream about drowning. Ever do that? You’re strangling and choking and you can’t get any air? It isn’t dangerous, I guess. Anyway, it always woke me up in time. Though I heard about a fellow in a flight six years ago—

“Well. So you’ve always got this oxygen mask on, all the time, except if you take it off for a second to talk to somebody. You don’t do that very often, because what is there to say? Oh, maybe the first couple of weeks, sure—everybody’s friends then. You don’t even need the mask, for that matter. Or not very much. Everybody’s still pretty clean. The place smells—oh, let’s see—about like the locker room in a gym. You know? You can stand it. That’s if nobody’s got space sickness, of course. We were lucky that way.

“But that’s about how it’s going to get anyway, you know. Outside the masks, it’s soup. It isn’t that you smell it so much. You kind of taste it, in the back of your mouth, and your eyes sting. That’s after the first two or three months. Later on, it gets worse.

“And with the mask on, of course, the oxygen mixture is coming in under pressure. That’s funny if you’re not used to it. Your lungs have to work a little bit harder to get rid of it, especially when you’re asleep, so after a while the muscles get sore. And then they get sorer. And then—

“Well.

“Before we take off, the psych people give us a long doo-da that keeps us from killing each other. But they can’t stop us from thinking about it. And afterward, after we’re back on Earth—this is what you won’t read about in the articles—they keep us apart. You know how they work it? We get a pension, naturally. I mean there’s got to be a pension, otherwise there isn’t enough money in the world to make anybody go. But in the contract, it says to get the pension we have to stay in our own area.

“The whole country’s marked off. Six sections. Each has at least one big city in it. I was lucky, I got a lot of them. They try to keep it so every man’s home town is in his own section, but—well, like with us, Chowderhead and the captain both happened to come from Santa Monica. I think it was Chowderhead that got California, Nevada, all that Southwest area. It was the luck of the draw. God knows what the captain got.

“Maybe New Jersey,” I said, and took another white pill.

* * * *

We went on to another place and she said suddenly, “I figured something out. The way you keep looking around.”

“What did you figure out?”

“Well, part of it was what you said about the other fellow getting New Jersey. This is New Jersey. You don’t belong in this section, right?”

“Right,” I said after a minute.

“So why are you here? I know why. You’re here because you’re looking for somebody.”

“That’s right.”

She said triumphantly, “You want to find that other fellow from your crew! You want to fight him!”

I couldn’t help shaking, white pills or no white pills. But I had to correct her.

“No. I want to kill him.”

“How do you know he’s here? He’s got a lot of states to roam around in, too, doesn’t he?”

“Six. New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland—all the way down to Washington.”

“Then how do you know—”

“He’ll be here.” I didn’t have to tell her how I knew. But I knew.

I wasn’t the only one who spent his time at the border of his assigned area, looking across the river or staring across a state line, knowing that somebody was on the other side. I knew. You fight a war and you don’t have to guess that the enemy might have his troops a thousand miles away from the battle line. You know where his troops will be. You know he wants to fight, too.

Hutta. Hutta.

I spilled my drink.

I looked at her. “You—you didn’t—”

She looked frightened. “What’s the matter?”

“Did you just sneeze?”

“Sneeze? Me? Did I—”

I said something quick and nasty, I don’t know what. No! It hadn’t been her. I knew it.

It was Chowderhead’s sneeze.

* * * *

Chowderhead. Marvin T. Roebuck, his name was. Five feet eight inches tall. Dark-complected, with a cast in one eye. Spoke with a Midwest kind of accent, even though he came from California—“shrick” for “shriek,” “hawror” for “horror,” like that. It drove me crazy after a while. Maybe that gives you an idea what he talked about mostly. A skunk. A thoroughgoing, deep-rooted, mother-murdering skunk.

I kicked over my chair and roared, “Roebuck! Where are you, damn you?”

The bar was all at once silent. Only the jukebox kept going.

“I know you’re here!” I screamed. “Come out and get it! You louse, I told you I’d get you for calling me a liar the day Wally sneaked a smoke!”

Silence, everybody looking at me.

Then the door of the men’s room opened.

He came out.

He looked lousy. Eyes all red-rimmed and his hair falling out—the poor crumb couldn’t have been over twenty-nine. He shrieked, “You!” He called me a million names. He said, “You thieving rat, I’ll teach you to try to cheat me out of my candy ration!”

He had a knife.

I didn’t care. I didn’t have anything and that was stupid, but it didn’t matter. I got a bottle of beer from the next table and smashed it against the back of a chair. It made a good weapon, you know; I’d take that against a knife any time.

I ran toward him, and he came all staggering and lurching toward me, looking crazy and desperate, mumbling and raving—I could hardly hear him, because I was talking, too. Nobody tried to stop us. Somebody went out the door and I figured it was to call the cops, but that was all right. Once I took care of Chowderhead, I didn’t care what the cops did.

I went for the face.

He cut me first. I felt the knife slide up along my left arm but, you know, it didn’t even hurt, only kind of stung a little. I didn’t care about that. I got him in the face, and the bottle came away, and it was all like gray and white jelly, and then blood began to spring out. He screamed. Oh, that scream! I never heard anything like that scream. It was what I had been waiting all my life for.

I kicked him as he staggered back, and he fell. And I was on top of him, with the bottle, and I was careful to stay away from the heart or the throat, because that was too quick, but I worked over the face, and I felt his knife get me a couple times more, and—

And—

* * * *

And I woke up, you know. And there was Dr. Santly over me with a hypodermic needle that he’d just taken out of my arm, and four male nurses in fatigues holding me down. And I was drenched with sweat.

For a minute, I didn’t know where I was. It was a horrible queasy falling sensation, as though the bar and the fight and the world were all dissolving into smoke around me.

Then I knew where I was.

It was almost worse.

I stopped yelling and just lay there, looking up at them.

Dr. Santly said, trying to keep his face friendly and noncommittal, “You’re doing much better, Byron, boy. Much better.”

I didn’t say anything.

He said, “You worked through the whole thing in two hours and eight minutes. Remember the first time? You were sixteen hours killing him. Captain Van Wyck it was that time, remember? Who was it this time?”

“Chowderhead.” I looked at the male nurses. Doubtfully, they let go of my arms and legs.

“Chowderhead,” said Dr. Santly. “Oh—Roebuck. That boy,” he said mournfully, his expression saddened, “he’s not coming along nearly as well as you. Nearly. He can’t run through a cycle in less than five hours. And, that’s peculiar, it’s usually you he— Well, I better not say that, shall I? No sense setting up a counter-impression when your pores are all open, so to speak?” He smiled at me, but he was a little worried in back of the smile.

I sat up. “Anybody got a cigarette?”

“Give him a cigarette, Johnson,” the doctor ordered the male nurse standing alongside my right foot.

Johnson did. I fired up.

“You’re coming along splendidly,” Dr. Santly said. He was one of these psych guys that thinks if you say it’s so, it makes it so. You know that kind? “We’ll have you down under an hour before the end of the week. That’s marvelous progress. Then we can work on the conscious level! You’re doing extremely well, whether you know it or not. Why, in six months—say in eight months, because I like to be conservative—” he twinkled at me—“we’ll have you out of here! You’ll be the first of your crew to be discharged, you know that?”

“That’s nice,” I said. “The others aren’t doing so well?”

“No. Not at all well, most of them. Particularly Dr. Gilvey. The run-throughs leave him in terrible shape. I don’t mind admitting I’m worried about him.”

“That’s nice,” I said, and this time I meant it.

He looked at me thoughtfully, but all he did was say to the male nurses, “He’s all right now. Help him off the table.”

It was hard standing up. I had to hold onto the rail around the table for a minute. I said my set little speech: “Dr. Santly, I want to tell you again how grateful I am for this. I was reconciled to living the rest of my life confined to one part of the country, the way the other crews always did. But this is much better. I appreciate it. I’m sure the others do, too.”

“Of course, boy. Of course.” He took out a fountain pen and made a note on my chart; I couldn’t see what it was, but he looked gratified. “It’s no more than you have coming to you, Byron,” he said. “I’m grateful that I could be the one to make it come to pass.”

He glanced conspiratorially at the male nurses. “You know how important this is to me. It’s the triumph of a whole new approach to psychic rehabilitation. I mean to say our heroes of space travel are entitled to freedom when they come back home to Earth, aren’t they?”

“Definitely,” I said, scrubbing some of the sweat off my face onto my sleeve.

“So we’ve got to end this system of designated areas. We can’t avoid the tensions that accompany space travel, no. But if we can help you eliminate harmful tensions with a few run-throughs, why, it’s not too high a price to pay, is it?”

“Not a bit.”

“I mean to say,” he said, warming up, “you can look forward to the time when you’ll be able to mingle with your old friends from the rocket, free and easy, without any need for restraint. That’s a lot to look forward to, isn’t it?”

“It is,” I said. “I look forward to it very much,” I said. “And I know exactly what I’m going to do the first time I meet one—I mean without any restraints, as you say,” I said. And it was true; I did. Only it wouldn’t be a broken beer bottle that I would do it with.

I had much more elaborate ideas than that.

CODE THREE, by Rick Raphael

The late afternoon sun hid behind gray banks of snow clouds and a cold wind whipped loose leaves across the drill field in front of the Philadelphia Barracks of the North American Continental Thruway Patrol. There was the feel of snow in the air but the thermometer hovered just at the freezing mark and the clouds could turn either into icy rain or snow.

Patrol Sergeant Ben Martin stepped out of the door of the barracks and shivered as a blast of wind hit him. He pulled up the zipper on his loose blue uniform coveralls and paused to gauge the storm clouds building up to the west.

The broad planes of his sunburned face turned into the driving cold wind for a moment and then he looked back down at the weather report secured to the top of a stack of papers on his clipboard.

Behind him, the door of the barracks was shouldered open by his junior partner, Patrol Trooper Clay Ferguson. The young, tall Canadian officer’s arms were loaded with paper sacks and his patrol work helmet dangled by its strap from the crook of his arm.

Clay turned and moved from the doorway into the wind. A sudden gust swept around the corner of the building and a small sack perched atop one of the larger bags in his arms blew to the ground and began tumbling towards the drill field.

“Ben,” he yelled, “grab the bag.”

The sergeant lunged as the sack bounced by and made the retrieve. He walked back to Ferguson and eyed the load of bags in the blond-haired officer’s arms.

“Just what is all this?” he inquired.

“Groceries,” the youngster grinned. “Or to be more exact, little gourmet items for our moments of gracious living.”

Ferguson turned into the walk leading to the motor pool and Martin swung into step beside him. “Want me to carry some of that junk?”

“Junk,” Clay cried indignantly. “You keep your grimy paws off these delicacies, peasant. You’ll get yours in due time and perhaps it will help Kelly and me to make a more polished product of you instead of the clodlike cop you are today.”

Martin chuckled. This patrol would mark the start of the second year that he, Clay Ferguson and Medical-Surgical Officer Kelly Lightfoot had been teamed together. After twenty-two patrols, cooped up in a semiarmored vehicle with a man for ten days at a time, you got to know him pretty well. And you either liked him or you hated his guts.

As senior officer, Martin had the right to reject or keep his partner after their first eleven-month duty tour. Martin had elected to retain the lanky Canadian. As soon as they had pulled into New York Barracks at the end of their last patrol, he had made his decisions. After eleven months and twenty-two patrols on the Continental Thruways, each team had a thirty-day furlough coming.

Martin and Ferguson had headed for the city the minute they put their signatures on the last of the stack of reports needed at the end of a tour. Then, for five days and nights, they tied one on. MSO Kelly Lightfoot had made a beeline for a Columbia Medical School seminar on tissue regeneration. On the sixth day, Clay staggered out of bed, swigged down a handful of antireaction pills, showered, shaved and dressed and then waved good-by. Twenty minutes later he was aboard a jet, heading for his parents’ home in Edmonton, Alberta. Martin soloed around the city for another week, then rented a car and raced up to his sister’s home in Burlington, Vermont, to play Uncle Bountiful to Carol’s three kids and to lap up as much as possible of his sister’s real cooking.

While the troopers and their med officer relaxed, a service crew moved their car down to the Philadelphia motor pool for a full overhaul and refitting for the next torturous eleven-month-tour of duty.

The two patrol troopers had reported into the Philadelphia Barracks five days ago—Martin several pounds heavier courtesy of his sister’s cooking; Ferguson several pounds lighter courtesy of three assorted, starry-eyed, uniform-struck Alberta maidens.

They turned into the gate of the motor pool and nodded to the sentry at the gate. To their left, the vast shop buildings echoed to the sound of body-banging equipment and roaring jet engines. The darkening sky made the brilliant lights of the shop seem even brighter and the hulls of a dozen patrol cars cast deep shadows around the work crews.

The troopers turned into the dispatcher’s office and Clay carefully placed the bags on a table beside the counter. Martin peered into one of the bags. “Seriously, kid, what do you have in that grab bag?”

“Oh, just a few essentials,” Clay replied “Pate de foie gras, sharp cheese, a smidgen of cooking wine, a handful of spices. You know, stuff like that. Like I said—essentials.”

“Essentials,” Martin snorted, “you give your brains to one of those Alberta chicks of yours for a souvenir?”

“Look, Ben,” Ferguson said earnestly, “I suffered for eleven months in that tin mausoleum on tracks because of what you fondly like to think is edible food. You’ve got as much culinary imagination as Beulah. I take that back. Even Beulah turns out some better smells when she’s riding on high jet than you’ll ever get out of her galley in the next one hundred years. This tour, I intend to eat like a human being once again. And I’ll teach you how to boil water without burning it.”

“Why you ungrateful young—” Martin yelped.

* * * *

The patrol dispatcher, who had been listening with amused tolerance, leaned across the counter.

“If Oscar Waldorf is through with his culinary lecture, gentlemen,” he said, “perhaps you two could be persuaded to take a little pleasure ride. It’s a lovely night for a drive and it’s just twenty-six hundred miles to the next service station. If you two aren’t cooking anything at the moment, I know that NorCon would simply adore having the services of two such distinguished Continental Commandos.”

Ferguson flushed and Martin scowled at the dispatcher. “Very funny, clown. I’ll recommend you for trooper status one of these days.”

“Not me,” the dispatcher protested. “I’m a married man. You’ll never get me out on the road in one of those blood-and-gut factories.”

“So quit sounding off to us heroes,” Martin said, “and give us the clearances.”

The dispatcher opened a loose-leaf reference book on the counter and then punched the first of a series of buttons on a panel. Behind him, the wall lighted with a map of the eastern United States to the Mississippi River. Ferguson and Martin had pencils out and poised over their clipboards.

The dispatcher glanced at the order board across the room where patrol car numbers and team names were displayed on an illuminated board. “Car 56—Martin-Ferguson-Lightfoot,” glowed with an amber light. In the column to the right was the number “26-W.” The dispatcher punched another button. A broad belt of multi-colored lines representing the eastern segment of North American Thruway 26 flashed onto the map in a band extending from Philadelphia to St. Louis. The thruway went on to Los Angeles in its western segment, not shown on the map. Ten bands of color—each five separated by a narrow clear strip, detailed the thruway. Martin and Ferguson were concerned with the northern five bands; NAT 26-westbound. Other unlighted lines radiated out in tangential spokes to the north and south along the length of the multi-colored belt of NAT 26.

This was just one small segment of the Continental Thruway system that spanned North America from coast to coast and crisscrossed north and south under the Three Nation Road Compact from the southern tip of Mexico into Canada and Alaska.

Each arterial cut a five-mile-wide path across the continent and from one end to the other, the only structures along the roadways were the turretlike NorCon Patrol check and relay stations—looming up at one-hundred-mile intervals like the fire control islands of earlier-day aircraft carriers.

Car 56 with Trooper Sergeant Ben Martin, Trooper Clay Ferguson and Medical-Surgical Officer Kelly Lightfoot, would take their first ten-day patrol on NAT 26-west. Barring major disaster, they would eat, sleep and work the entire time from their car; out of sight of any but distant cities until they had reached Los Angeles at the end of the patrol. Then a five-day resupply and briefing period and back onto another thruway.

During the coming patrol they would cross ten state lines as if they didn’t exist. And as far as thruway traffic control and authority was concerned, state and national boundaries actually didn’t exist. With the growth of the old interstate highway system and the Alcan Highway it became increasingly evident that variation in motor vehicle laws from state to state and country to country were creating impossible situations for any uniform safety control.

* * * *

With the establishment of the Continental Thruway System two decades later, came the birth of the supra-cop—The North American Thruway Patrol, known as NorCon. Within the five-mile bands of the thruways—all federally-owned land by each of the three nations—the blue-coveralled “Continental Commandos” of NorCon were the sole law enforcement agency and authority. Violators of thruway law were cited into NorCon district traffic courts located in the nearest city to each access port along every thruway.

There was no challenge to the authority of NorCon. Public demand for faster and more powerful vehicles had forced the automotive industry to put more and more power under the touch of the ever-growing millions of drivers crowding the continent’s roads. Piston drive gave way to turbojet; turbojet was boosted by a modification of ram jet and air-cushion drive was added. In the last two years, the first of the nuclear reaction mass engines had hit the roads. Even as the hot Ferraris and Jags of the mid-’60s would have been suicide vehicles on the T-model roads of the ’20s so would today’s vehicles be on the interstates of the ’60s. But building roads capable of handling three hundred to four hundred miles an hour speeds was beyond the financial and engineering capabilities of individual states and nations. Thus grew the continental thruways with their four speed lanes in each direction, each a half-mile wide separated east and west and north and south by a half-mile-wide landscaped divider. Under the Three Nation Compact, the thruways now wove a net across the entire North American continent.

On the big wall map, NAT 26-west showed as four colored lines; blue and yellow as the two high and ultra-high speed lanes; green and white for the intermediate and slow lanes. Between the blue and yellow and the white and green was a red band. This was the police emergency lane, never used by other than official vehicles and crossed by the traveling public shifting from one speed lane to another only at sweeping crossovers.

The dispatcher picked up an electric pointer and aimed the light beam at the map. Referring to his notes, he began to recite.

“Resurfacing crews working on 26-W blue at milestone Marker 185 to Marker 187, estimated clearance 0300 hours Tuesday—Let’s see, that’s tomorrow morning.”

The two officers were writing the information down on their trip-analysis sheets.

“Ohio State is playing Cal under the lights at Columbus tonight so you can expect a traffic surge sometime shortly after 2300 hours but most of it will stay in the green and white. Watch out for the drunks though. They might filter out onto the blue or yellow.

“The crossover for NAT 163 has painting crews working. Might watch out for any crud on the roadway. And they’ve got the entrance blocked there so that all 163 exchange traffic is being rerouted to 164 west of Chillicothe.”

The dispatcher thumbed through his reference sheets. “That seems to be about all. No, wait a minute. This is on your trick. The Army’s got a priority missile convoy moving out of the Aberdeen Proving Grounds bound for the west coast tonight at 1800 hours. It will be moving at green lane speeds so you might watch out for it. They’ll have thirty-four units in the convoy. And that is all. Oh, yes. Kelly’s already aboard. I guess you know about the weather.”

Martin nodded. “Yup. We should be hitting light snows by 2300 hours tonight in this area and it could be anything from snow to ice-rain after that.” He grinned at his younger partner. “The vacation is over, sonny. Tonight we make a man out of you.”

Ferguson grinned back. “Nuts to you, pop. I’ve got character witnesses back in Edmonton who’ll give you glowing testimonials about my manhood.”

“Testimonials aren’t legal unless they’re given by adults,” Martin retorted. “Come on, lover boy. Duty calls.”

Clay carefully embraced his armload of bundles and the two officers turned to leave. The dispatcher leaned across the counter.

“Oh, Ferguson, one thing I forgot. There’s some light corrugations in red lane just east of St. Louis. You might be careful with your souffles in that area. Wouldn’t want them to fall, you know.”

Clay paused and started to turn back. The grinning dispatcher ducked into the back office and slammed the door.

* * * *

The wind had died down by the time the troopers entered the brilliantly lighted parking area. The temperature seemed warmer with the lessening winds but in actuality, the mercury was dropping. The snow clouds to the west were much nearer and the overcast was getting darker.

But under the great overhead light tubes, the parking area was brighter than day. A dozen huge patrol vehicles were parked on the front “hot” line. Scores more were lined out in ranks to the back of the parking zone. Martin and Ferguson walked down the line of military blue cars. Number 56 was fifth on the line. Service mechs were just re-housing fueling lines into a ground panel as the troopers walked up. The technician corporal was the first to speak. “All set, Sarge,” he said. “We had to change an induction jet at the last minute and I had the port engine running up to reline the flow. Thought I’d better top ’er off for you, though, before you pull out. She sounds like a purring kitten.”

He tossed the pair a waving salute and then moved out to his service dolly where three other mechs were waiting.

The officers paused and looked up at the bulk of the huge patrol car.

“Beulah looks like she’s been to the beauty shop and had the works,” Martin said. He reached out and slapped the maglurium plates. “Welcome home, sweetheart. I see you’ve kept a candle in the window for your wandering son.” Ferguson looked up at the lighted cab, sixteen feet above the pavement.

Car 56—Beulah to her team—was a standard NorCon Patrol vehicle. She was sixty feet long, twelve feet wide and twelve feet high; topped by a four-foot-high bubble canopy over her cab. All the way across her nose was a three-foot-wide luminescent strip. This was the variable beam headlight that could cut a day-bright swath of light through night, fog, rain or snow and could be varied in intensity, width and elevation. Immediately above the headlight strip were two red-black plastic panels which when lighted, sent out a flashing red emergency signal that could be seen for miles. Similar emergency lights and back-up white light strips adorned Beulah’s stern. Her bow rounded down like an old-time tank and blended into the track assembly of her dual propulsion system. With the exception of the cabin bubble and a two-foot stepdown on the last fifteen feet of her hull, Beulah was free of external protrusions. Racked into a flush-decked recess on one side of the hull was a crane arm with a two-hundred-ton lift capacity. Several round hatches covered other extensible gear and periscopes used in the scores of multiple operations the NorCon cars were called upon to accomplish on routine road patrols.

Beulah resembled a gigantic offspring of a military tank, sans heavy armament. But even a small stinger was part of the patrol car equipment. As for armament, Beulah had weapons to meet every conceivable skirmish in the deadly battle to keep Continental Thruways fast-moving and safe. Her own two-hundred-fifty-ton bulk could reach speeds of close to six hundred miles an hour utilizing one or both of her two independent propulsion systems.

At ultra-high speeds, Beulah never touched the ground—floating on an impeller air cushion and driven forward by a pair of one hundred fifty thousand pound thrust jets and ram jets. At intermediate high speeds, both her air cushion and the four-foot-wide tracks on each side of the car pushed her along at two hundred-mile-an-hour-plus speeds. Synchro mechanisms reduced the air cushion as the speeds dropped to afford more surface traction for the tracks. For slow speeds and heavy duty, the tracks carried the burden.

Martin thumbed open the portside ground-level cabin door.

“I’ll start the outside check,” he told Clay. “You stow that garbage of yours in the galley and start on the dispensary. I’ll help you after I finish out here.”

As the younger officer entered the car and headed up the short flight of steps to the working deck, the sergeant unclipped a check list from the inside of the door and turned towards the stern of the big vehicle.

* * * *

Clay mounted to the work deck and turned back to the little galley just aft of the cab. As compact as a spaceship kitchen—as a matter of fact, designed almost identically from models on the Moon run—the galley had but three feet of open counter space. Everything else, sink, range, oven and freezer, were built-ins with pull-downs for use as needed. He set his bags on the small counter to put away after the pre-start check. Aft of the galley and on the same side of the passageway were the double-decked bunks for the patrol troopers. Across the passageway was a tiny latrine and shower. Clay tossed his helmet on the lower bunk as he went down the passageway. At the bulkhead to the rear, he pressed a wall panel and a thick, insulated door slid back to admit him to the engine compartment. The service crews had shut down the big power plants and turned off the air exchangers and already the heat from the massive engines made the compartment uncomfortably warm.

He hurried through into a small machine shop. In an emergency, the troopers could turn out small parts for disabled vehicles or for other uses. It also stocked a good supply of the most common failure parts. Racked against the ceiling were banks of cutting torches, a grim reminder that death or injury still rode the thruways with increasing frequency.

In the tank storage space between the ceiling and top of the hull were the chemical fire-fighting liquids and foam that could be applied by nozzles, hoses and towers now telescoped into recesses in the hull. Along both sides and beneath the galley, bunks, engine and machine-shop compartments between the walls, deck and hull, were Beulah’s fuel storage tanks.

The last after compartment was a complete dispensary, one that would have made the emergency room or even the light surgery rooms of earlier-day hospitals proud.

Clay tapped on the door and went through. Medical-Surgical Officer Kelly Lightfoot was sitting on the deck, stowing sterile bandage packs into a lower locker. She looked up at Clay and smiled. “Well, well, you DID manage to tear yourself away from your adoring bevies,” she said. She flicked back a wisp of golden-red hair from her forehead and stood up. The patrol-blue uniform coverall with its belted waist didn’t do much to hide a lovely, properly curved figure. She walked over to the tall Canadian trooper and reached up and grabbed his ear. She pulled his head down, examined one side critically and then quickly snatched at his other ear and repeated the scrutiny. She let go of his ear and stepped back. “Damned if you didn’t get all the lipstick marks off, too.”

Clay flushed. “Cut it out, Kelly,” he said. “Sometimes you act just like my mother.”

The olive-complexioned redhead grinned at him and turned back to her stack of boxes on the deck. She bent over and lifted one of the boxes to the operating table. Clay eyed her trim figure. “You might act like ma sometimes,” he said, “but you sure don’t look like her.”

It was the Irish-Cherokee Indian girl’s turn to flush. She became very busy with the contents of the box. “Where’s Ben?” she asked over her shoulder.

“Making outside check. You about finished in here?”

Kelly turned and slowly scanned the confines of the dispensary. With the exception of the boxes on the table and floor, everything was behind secured locker doors. In one corner, the compact diagnostician—capable of analyzing many known human bodily ailments and every possible violent injury to the body—was locked in its riding clamps. Surgical trays and instrument racks were all hidden behind locker doors along with medical and surgical supplies. On either side of the emergency ramp door at the stern of the vehicle, three collapsible autolitters hung from clamps. Six hospital bunks in two tiers of three each, lined another wall. On patrol, Kelly utilized one of the hospital bunks for her own use except when they might all be occupied with accident or other kind of patients. And this would never be for more than a short period, just long enough to transfer them to a regular ambulance or hospital vehicle. Her meager supply of personal items needed for the ten-day patrol were stowed in a small locker and she shared the latrine with the male members of the team.

Kelly completed her scan, glanced down at the checklist in her hand. “I’ll have these boxes stowed in five minutes. Everything else is secure.” She raised her hand to her forehead in mock salute. “Medical-Surgical Officer Lightfoot reports dispensary ready for patrol, sir.”

Clay smiled and made a checkmark on his clipboard. “How was the seminar, Kelly?” he asked.

Kelly hiked herself onto the edge of the operating table. “Wonderful, Clay, just wonderful. I never saw so many good-looking, young, rich and eligible doctors together in one place in all my life.”

She sighed and smiled vacantly into space.

Clay snorted. “I thought you were supposed to be learning something new about tissue regeneration,” he said.

“Generation, regeneration, who cares,” Kelly grinned.

Clay started to say something, got flustered and wheeled around to leave—and bounded right off Ben Martin’s chest. Ferguson mumbled something and pushed past the older officer.

Ben looked after him and then turned back to Car 56’s combination doctor, surgeon and nurse. “Glad to see the hostess aboard for this cruise. I hope you make the passengers more comfortable than you’ve just made the first mate. What did you do to Clay, Kelly?”

“Hi, Ben,” Kelly said. “Oh, don’t worry about junior. He just gets all fluttery when a girl takes away his masculine prerogative to make cleverly lewd witticisms. He’ll be all right. Have a happy holiday, Ben? You look positively fat.”

Ben patted his stomach. “Carol’s good cooking. Had a nice restful time. And how about you. That couldn’t have been all work. You’ve got a marvelous tan.”

“Don’t worry,” Kelly laughed, “I had no intention of letting it be all study. I spent just about as much time under the sun dome at the pool as I did in class. I learned a lot though.”

Ben grinned and headed back to the front of the car. “Tell me more after we’re on the road,” he said from the doorway. “We’ll be rolling in ten minutes.”

When he reached the cab, Clay was already in the right-hand control seat and was running down the instrument panel check. The sergeant lifted the hatch door between the two control seats and punched on a light to illuminate the stark compartment at the lower front end of the car. A steel grill with a dogged handle on the upper side covered the opening under the hatch cover. Two swing-down bunks were racked up against the walls on either side and the front hull door was without an inside handle. This was the patrol car brig, used for bringing in unwilling violators or other violent or criminal subjects who might crop up in the course of a patrol tour. Satisfied with the appearance of the brig, Ben closed the hatch cover and slid into his own control seat on the left of the cab. Both control seats were molded and plastiformed padded to the contours of the troopers and the armrests on both were studded with buttons and a series of small, finger-operated, knobs. All drive, communication and fire fighting controls for the massive vehicle were centered in the knobs and buttons on the seat arms, while acceleration and braking controls were duplicated in two footrest pedals beneath their feet.

Ben settled into his seat and glanced down to make sure his work-helmet was racked beside him. He reached over and flipped a bank of switches on the instrument panel. “All communications to ‘on,’” he said. Clay made a checkmark on his list. “All pre-engine start check complete,” Clay replied.

“In that case,” the senior trooper said, “let’s give Beulah some exercise. Start engines.”

Clay’s fingers danced across the array of buttons on his seat arms and flicked lightly at the throttle knobs. From deep within the engine compartment came the muted, shrill whine of the starter engines, followed a split-second later by the full-throated roar of the jets as they caught fire. Clay eased the throttles back and the engine noise softened to a muffled roar.

Martin fingered a press-panel on the right arm of his seat.

“Car 56 to Philly Control,” Ben called.

The speakers mounted around the cab came to life. “Go ahead Five Six.”

“Five Six fired up and ready to roll,” Martin said.

“Affirmative Five Six,” came the reply, “You’re clear to roll. Philly Check estimates white density 300; green, 840; blue 400; yellow, 75.”

Both troopers made mental note of the traffic densities in their first one-hundred-mile patrol segment; an estimated three hundred vehicles for each ten miles of thruway in the white or fifty to one hundred miles an hour low lane; eight hundred forty vehicles in the one hundred to one hundred fifty miles an hour green, and so on. More than sixteen thousand westbound vehicles on the thruway in the first one hundred miles; nearly five thousand of them traveling at speeds between one hundred fifty and three hundred miles an hour.

Over the always-hot intercom throughout the big car Ben called out. “All set, Kelly?”

“I’m making coffee,” Kelly answered from the galley. “Let ’er roll.”

Martin started to kick off the brakes, then stopped. “Ooops,” he exclaimed, “almost forgot.” His finger touched another button and a blaring horn reverberated through the vehicle.

In the galley, Kelly hurled herself into a corner. Her body activated a pressure plant and a pair of mummy-like plastifoam plates slid curvingly out the wall and locked her in a soft cocoon. A dozen similar safety clamps were located throughout the car at every working and relaxation station.

In the same instance, both Ben and Clay touched another plate on their control seats. From kiosk-type columns behind each seat, pairs of body-molded crash pads snapped into place to encase both troopers in their seats, their bodies cushioned and locked into place. Only their fingers were loose beneath the spongy substance to work arm controls. The half-molds included headforms with a padded band that locked across their foreheads to hold their heads rigidly against the backs of their reinforced seats. The instant all three crew members were locked into their safety gear, the bull horn ceased.

“All tight,” Ben called out as he wiggled and tried to free himself from the cocoon. Kelly and Clay tested their harnesses.

Satisfied that the safety cocoons were operating properly, Ben released them and the molds slid back into their recesses. The cocoons were triggered automatically in any emergency run or chase at speeds in excess of two hundred miles an hour.

Again he kicked off the brakes, pressed down on the foot feed and Car 56—Beulah—rolled out of the Philadelphia motor pool on the start of its ten-day patrol.

* * * *

The motor pool exit opened into a quarter-mile wide tunnel sloping gently down into the bowels of the great city. Car 56 glided down the slight incline at a steady fifty miles an hour. A mile from the mouth of the tunnel the roadway leveled off and Ben kicked Beulah up another twenty-five miles an hour. Ahead, the main tunnel ended in a series of smaller portal ways, each emblazoned with a huge illuminated number designating a continental thruway.

Ben throttled back and began edging to the left lanes. Other patrol cars were heading down the main passageway, bound for their assigned thruways. As Ben eased down to a slow thirty, another patrol vehicle slid alongside. The two troopers in the cab waved. Clay flicked on the “car-to-car” transmit.

The senior trooper in Car 104 looked over at Martin and Ferguson. “If it isn’t the gruesome twosome,” he called. “Where have you two been? We thought the front office had finally caught up with you and found out that neither one of you could read or write and that they had canned you.”

“We can’t read,” Ben quipped back. “That’s why we’re still on the job. The front office would never hire anyone who would embarrass you two by being smarter than either of you. Where’re you headed, Eddie?”

“Got 154-north,” the other officer said.

“Hey,” Clay called out, “I’ve got a real hot doll in Toronto and I’ll gladly sell her phone number for a proper price.”

“Wouldn’t want to hurt you, Clay,” the other officer replied. “If I called her up and took her out, she’d throw rocks at you the next time you drew the run. It’s all for your own good.”

“Oh, go get lost in a cloverleaf,” Clay retorted.

The other car broke the connection and with a wave, veered off to the right. The thruway entrances were just ahead. Martin aimed Beulah at the lighted orifice topped by the number 26-W. The patrol car slid into the narrower tunnel, glided along for another mile and then turned its bow upwards. Three minutes later, they emerged from the tunnel into the red patrol lane of Continental Thruway 26-West. The late afternoon sky was a covering of gray wool and a drop or two of moisture struck the front face of the cab canopy. For a mile on either side of the police lane, streams of cars sped westward. Ben eyed the sky, the traffic and then peered at the outer hull thermometer. It read thirty-two degrees. He made a mental bet with himself that the weather bureau was off on its snow estimates by six hours. His Vermont upbringing told him it would be flurrying within the hour.

He increased speed to a steady one hundred and the car sped silently and easily along the police lane. Across the cab, Clay peered pensively at the steady stream of cars and cargo carriers racing by in the green and blue lanes—all of them moving faster than the patrol car.

The young officer turned in his seat and looked at his partner.

“You know, Ben,” he said gravely, “I sometimes wonder if those old-time cowboys got as tired looking at the south end of northbound cows as I get looking at the vanishing tail pipes of cars.”

The radio came to life.

“Philly Control to Car 56.”

Clay touched his transmit plate. “This is Five Six. Go ahead.”

“You’ve got a bad one at Marker 82,” Control said. “A sideswipe in the white.”

“Couldn’t be too bad in the white,” Ben broke in, thinking of the one-hundred mile-an-hour limit in the slow lane.

“That’s not the problem,” Control came back. “One of the sideswiped vehicles was flipped around and bounded into the green, and that’s where the real mess is. Make it code three.”

“Five Six acknowledge,” Ben said. “On the way.”

He slammed forward on the throttles. The bull horn blared and a second later, with MSO Kelly Lightfoot snugged in her dispensary cocoon and both troopers in body cushions, Car 56 lifted a foot from the roadway, and leaped forward on a turbulent pad of air. It accelerated from one hundred to two hundred fifty miles an hour.

The great red emergency lights on the bow and stern began to blink and from the special transmitter in the hull a radio siren wail raced ahead of the car to be picked up by the emergency receptor antennas required on all vehicles.

The working part of the patrol had begun.

* * * *

Conversation died in the speeding car, partly because of the concentration required by the troopers, secondly because all transmissions whether intercom or radio, on a code two or three run, were taped and monitored by Control. In the center of the instrument panel, an oversized radiodometer was clicking off the mileage marks as the car passed each milestone. The milestone posts beamed a coded signal across all five lanes and as each vehicle passed the marker, the radiodometer clicked up another number.

Car 56 had been at MM 23 when the call came. Now, at better than four miles a minute, Beulah whipped past MM 45 with ten minutes yet to go to reach the scene of the accident. Light flurries of wet snow bounced off the canopy, leaving thin, fast-drying trails of moisture. Although it was still a few minutes short of 1700 hours, the last of the winter afternoon light was being lost behind the heavy snow clouds overhead. Ben turned on the patrol car’s dazzling headlight and to the left and right, Clay could see streaks of white lights from the traffic on the green and blue lanes on either side of the quarter-mile wide emergency lane.

The radio filled them in on the movement of other patrol emergency vehicles being routed to the accident site. Car 82, also assigned to NAT 26-West, was more than one hundred fifty miles ahead of Beulah. Pittsburgh Control ordered Eight Two to hold fast to cover anything else that might come up while Five Six was handling the current crisis. Eastbound Car 119 was ordered to cut across to the scene to assist Beulah’s crew, and another eastbound patrol vehicle was held in place to cover for One One Nine.

At mile marker 80, yellow caution lights were flashing on all westbound lanes, triggered by Philadelphia Control the instant the word of the crash had been received. Traffic was slowing down and piling up despite the half-mile wide lanes.

“Philly Control this is Car 56.”

“Go ahead Five Six.”

“It’s piling up in the green and white,” Ben said. “Let’s divert to blue on slowdown and seal the yellow.”

“Philly Control acknowledged,” came the reply.

* * * *

The flashing amber caution lights on all lanes switched to red. As Ben began de-acceleration, diagonal red flashing barriers rose out of the roadway on the green and white lanes at the 85 mile marker and lane crossing. This channelled all traffic from both lanes to the left and into the blue lane where the flashing reds now prohibited speeds in excess of fifty miles an hour around the emergency situation. At the same time, all crossovers on the ultra high yellow lane were sealed by barriers to prevent changing of lanes into the over-congested area.

As Car 56’s speed dropped back below the two hundred mile an hour mark the cocoon automatically slid open. Freed from her safety restraints, Kelly jumped for the rear entrance of the dispensary and cleared the racking clamps from the six autolitters. That done, she opened another locker and reached for the mobile first-aid kit. She slid it to the door entrance on its retractable casters. She slipped on her work helmet with the built-in transmitter and then sat down on the seat by the rear door to wait until the car stopped.

Car 56 was now less than two miles from the scene of the crash and traffic in the green lane to the left was at a standstill. A half mile farther westward, lights were still moving slowly along the white lane. Ahead, the troopers could see a faint wisp of smoke rising from the heaviest congregation of headlights. Both officers had their work helmets on and Clay had left his seat and descended to the side door, ready to jump out the minute the car stopped.

Martin saw a clear area in the green lane and swung the car over the dividing curbing. The big tracks floated the patrol car over the two-foot high, rounded abutment that divided each speed lane. Snow was falling faster as the headlight picked out a tangled mass of wreckage smoldering a hundred feet inside the median separating the green and white lanes. A crumpled body lay on the pavement twenty feet from the biggest clump of smashed metal, and other fragments of vehicles were strung out down the roadway for fifty feet. There was no movement.

NorCon thruway laws were strict and none were more rigidly enforced than the regulation that no one other than a member of the patrol set foot outside of their vehicle while on any thruway traffic lane. This meant not giving any assistance whatsoever to accident victims. The ruling had been called inhuman, monstrous, unthinkable, and lawmakers in the three nations of the compact had forced NorCon to revoke the rule in the early days of the thruways. After speeding cars and cargo carriers had cut down twice as many do-gooders on foot at accident scenes than the accidents themselves caused, the law was reinstated. The lives of the many were more vital than the lives of a few.

Martin halted the patrol vehicle a few feet from the wreckage and Beulah was still rocking gently on her tracks by the time both Patrol Trooper Clay Ferguson and MSO Kelly Lightfoot hit the pavement on the run.

In the cab, Martin called in on the radio. “Car 56 is on scene. Release blue at Marker 95 and resume speeds all lanes at Marker 95 in—” he paused and looked back at the halted traffic piled up before the lane had been closed “—seven minutes.” He jumped for the steps and sprinted out of the patrol car in the wake of Ferguson and Kelly.

The team’s surgeon was kneeling beside the inert body on the road. After an ear to the chest, Kelly opened her field kit bag and slapped an electrode to the victim’s temple. The needle on the encephalic meter in the lid of the kit never flickered. Kelly shut the bag and hurried with it over to the mass of wreckage. A thin column of black, oily smoke rose from somewhere near the bottom of the heap. It was almost impossible to identify at a glance whether the mangled metal was the remains of one or more cars. Only the absence of track equipment made it certain that they even had been passenger vehicles.

Clay was carefully climbing up the side of the piled up wrecks to a window that gaped near the top.

“Work fast, kid,” Martin called up. “Something’s burning down there and this whole thing may go up. I’ll get this traffic moving.”

He turned to face the halted mass of cars and cargo carriers east of the wreck. He flipped a switch that cut his helmet transmitter into the remote standard vehicular radio circuit aboard the patrol car.

“Attention, please, all cars in green lane. All cars in the left line move out now, the next line fall in behind. You are directed to clear the area immediately. Maintain fifty miles an hour for the next mile. You may resume desired speeds and change lanes at mile Marker 95. I repeat, all cars in green lane.…” he went over the instructions once more, relayed through Beulah’s transmitter to the standard receivers on all cars. He was still talking as the traffic began to move.

By the time he turned back to help his teammates, cars were moving in a steady stream past the huge, red-flashing bulk of the patrol car.

Both Clay and Kelly were lying flat across the smashed, upturned side of the uppermost car in the pile. Kelly had her field bag open on the ground and she was reaching down through the smashed window.

“What is it Clay?” Martin called.

The younger officer looked down over his shoulder. “We’ve got a woman alive down here but she’s wedged in tight. She’s hurt pretty badly and Kelly’s trying to slip a hypo into her now. Get the arm out, Ben.”

Martin ran back to the patrol car and flipped up a panel on the hull. He pulled back on one of the several levers recessed into the hull and the big wrecking crane swung smoothly out of its cradle and over the wreckage. The end of the crane arm was directly over Ferguson. “Lemme have the spreaders,” Clay called. The arm dipped and from either side of the tip, a pair of flanges shot out like tusks on an elephant. “Put ’er in neutral,” Clay directed. Martin pressed another lever and the crane now could be moved in any direction by fingertip pulls at its extremity. Ferguson carefully guided the crane with its projecting tusks into the smashed orifice of the car window. “Okay, Ben, spread it.”

The crane locked into position and the entire arm split open in a “V” from its base. Martin pressed steadily on the two levers controlling each side of the divided arm and the tusks dug into the sides of the smashed window. There was a steady screeching of tearing and ripping metal as the crane tore window and frame apart. “Hold it,” Ferguson yelled and then eased himself into the widened hole.

“Ben,” Kelly called from her perch atop the wreckage, “litter.”

* * * *

Martin raced to the rear of the patrol car where the sloping ramp stood open to the lighted dispensary. He snatched at one of the autolitters and triggered its tiny drive motor. A homing beacon in his helmet guided the litter as it rolled down the ramp, turned by itself and rolled across the pavement a foot behind him. It stopped when he stopped and Ben touched another switch, cutting the homing beacon.

Clay’s head appeared out of the hole. “Get it up here, Ben. I can get her out. And I think there’s another one alive still further down.”

Martin raised the crane and its ripper bars retracted. The split arms spewed a pair of cables terminating in magnalocks. The cables dangled over the ends of the autolitter, caught the lift plates on the litter and a second later, the cart was swinging beside the smashed window as Clay and Kelly eased the torn body of a woman out of the wreckage and onto the litter. As Ben brought the litter back to the pavement, the column of smoke had thickened. He disconnected the cables and homed the stretcher back to the patrol car. The hospital cart with its unconscious victim, rolled smoothly back to the car, up the ramp and into the dispensary to the surgical table.

Martin climbed up the wreckage beside Kelly. Inside the twisted interior of the car, the thick smoke all but obscured the bent back of the younger trooper and his powerful handlight barely penetrated the gloom. Blood was smeared over almost every surface and the stink of leaking jet fuel was virtually overpowering. From the depths of the nightmarish scene came a tortured scream. Kelly reached into a coverall pocket and produced another sedation hypo. She squirmed around and started to slip down into the wreckage with Ferguson. Martin grabbed her arm. “No, Kelly, this thing’s ready to blow. Come on, Clay, get out of there. Now!”

Ferguson continued to pry at the twisted plates below him.

“I said ‘get out of there’ Ferguson,” the senior officer roared. “And that’s an order.”

Clay straightened up and put his hands on the edge of the window to boost himself out. “Ben, there’s a guy alive down there. We just can’t leave him.”

“Get down from there, Kelly,” Martin ordered. “I know that man’s down there just as well as you do, Clay. But we won’t be helping him one damn bit if we get blown to hell and gone right along with him. Now get outta there and maybe we can pull this thing apart and get to him before it does blow.”

The lanky Canadian eased out of the window and the two troopers moved back to the patrol car. Kelly was already in her dispensary, working on the injured woman.

Martin slid into his control seat. “Shut your ramp, Kelly,” he called over the intercom, “I’m going to move around to the other side.”

The radio broke in. “Car 119 to Car 56, we’re just turning into the divider. Be there in a minute.”

“Snap it up,” Ben replied. “We need you in a hurry.”

As he maneuvered Beulah around the wreckage he snapped orders to Ferguson.

“Get the foam nozzles up, just in case, and then stand by on the crane.”

A mile away, they saw the flashing emergency lights of Car 119 as it raced diagonally across the yellow and blue lanes, whipping with ponderous ease through the moving traffic.

“Take the south side, 119,” Martin called out. “We’ll try and pull this mess apart.”

“Affirmative,” came the reply. Even before the other patrol vehicle came to a halt, its crane was swinging out from the side, and the ganged magnalocks were dangling from their cables.

“Okay, kid,” Ben ordered, “hook it.”

At the interior crane controls, Clay swung Beulah’s crane and cable mags towards the wreckage. The magnalocks slammed into the metallic mess with a bang almost at the same instant the locks hit the other side from Car 119.

Clay eased up the cable slack. “Good,” Ben called to both Clay and the operating trooper in the other car, “now let’s pull it… LOOK OUT! FOAM…FOAM…FOAM!” he yelled.

The ugly, deep red fireball from the exploding wreckage was still growing as Clay slammed down on the fire-control panel. A curtain of thick chemical foam burst from the poised nozzles atop Beulah’s hull and a split-second later, another stream of foam erupted from the other patrol car. The dense, oxygen-absorbing retardant blanket snuffed the fire out in three seconds. The cranes were still secured to the foam-covered heap of metal. “Never mind the caution,” Ben called out, “get it apart. Fast.”

Both crane operators slammed their controls into reverse and with an ear-splitting screech, the twisted frames of the two vehicles ripped apart into tumbled heaps of broken metal and plastics. Martin and Ferguson jumped down the hatch steps and into ankle-deep foam and oil. They waded and slipped around the front of the car to join the troopers from the other car.

Ferguson was pawing at the scum-covered foam near the mangled section of one of the cars. “He should be right about,” Clay paused and bent over, “here.” He straightened up as the others gathered around the scorched and ripped body of a man, half-submerged in the thick foam. “Kelly,” he called over the helmet transmitter, “open your door. We’ll need a couple of sacks.”

He trudged to the rear of the patrol car and met the girl standing in the door with a pair of folded plastic morgue bags in her hands. Behind her, Clay could see the body of the woman on the surgical table, an array of tubes and probes leading to plasma drip bottles and other equipment racked out over the table.

“How is she?”

“Not good,” Kelly replied. “Skull fracture, ruptured spleen, broken ribs and double leg fractures. I’ve already called for an ambulance.”

Ferguson nodded, took the bags from her and waded back through the foam.

The four troopers worked in the silence of the deserted traffic lane. A hundred yards away, traffic was moving steadily in the slow white lane. Three-quarters of a mile to the south, fast and ultra high traffic sped at its normal pace in the blue and yellow lanes. Westbound green was still being rerouted into the slower white lane, around the scene of the accident. It was now twenty-six minutes since Car 56 had received the accident call. The light snow flurries had turned to a steady fall of thick wet flakes, melting as they hit on the warm pavement but beginning to coat the pitiful flotsam of the accident.

The troopers finished the gruesome task of getting the bodies into the morgue sacks and laid beside the dispensary ramp for the ambulance to pick up with the surviving victim. Car 119’s MSO had joined Kelly in Beulah’s dispensary to give what help she might. The four patrol troopers began the grim task of probing the scattered wreckage for other possible victims, personal possessions and identification. They were stacking a small pile of hand luggage when the long, low bulk of the ambulance swung out of the police lane and rolled to a stop. Longer than the patrol cars but without the non-medical emergency facilities, the ambulance was in reality a mobile hospital. A full, scrubbed-up surgical team was waiting in the main operating room even as the ramps opened and the techs headed for Car 56. The team had been briefed by radio on the condition of the patient; had read the full recordings of the diagnostician; and were watching transmitted pulse and respiration graphs on their own screens while the transfer was being made.

The two women MSOs had unlocked the surgical table in Beulah’s dispensary and a plastic tent covered not only the table and the patient, but also the plasma and Regen racks overhead. The entire table and rig slid down the ramp onto a motor-driven dolly from the ambulance. Without delay, it wheeled across the open few feet of pavement into the ambulance and to the surgery room. The techs locked the table into place in the other vehicle and left the surgery. From a storage compartment, they wheeled out a fresh patrol dispensary table and rack and placed it in Kelly’s miniature surgery. The dead went into the morgue aboard the ambulance, the ramp closed and the ambulance swung around and headed across the traffic lanes to eastbound NAT-26 and Philadelphia.

Outside, the four troopers had completed the task of collecting what little information they could from the smashed vehicles.

They returned to their cars and One One Nine’s medical-surgical officer headed back to her own cubby-hole.

The other patrol car swung into position almost touching Beulah’s left flank. With Ben at the control seat, on command, both cars extended broad bulldozer blades from their bows. “Let’s go,” Ben ordered. The two patrol vehicles moved slowly down the roadway, pushing all of the scattered scraps and parts onto a single great heap. They backed off, shifted direction towards the center police lane and began shoving the debris, foam and snow out of the green lane. At the edge of the police lane, both cars unshipped cranes and magnalifted the junk over the divider barrier onto the one-hundred-foot-wide service strip bordering the police lane. A slow cargo wrecker was already on the way from Pittsburgh barracks to pick up the wreckage and haul it away. When the last of the metallic debris had been deposited off the traffic lane, Martin called Control.

“Car 56 is clear. NAT 26-west green is clear.”

Philly Control acknowledged. Seven miles to the east, the amber warning lights went dark and the detour barrier at Crossover 85 sank back into the roadway. Three minutes later, traffic was again flashing by on green lane past the two halted patrol cars.

“Pitt Control, this is Car 119 clear of accident,” the other car reported.

“Car 119 resume eastbound patrol,” came the reply.

The other patrol car pulled away. The two troopers waved at Martin and Ferguson in Beulah. “See you later and thanks,” Ben called out. He switched to intercom. “Kelly. Any ID on that woman?”

“Not a thing, Ben,” she replied. “About forty years old, and she had a wedding band. She never was conscious, so I can’t help you.”

Ben nodded and looked over at his partner. “Go get into some dry clothes, kid,” he said, “while I finish the report. Then you can take it for a while.”

Clay nodded and headed back to the crew quarters.

* * * *

Ben racked his helmet beside his seat and fished out a cigarette. He reached for an accident report form from the work rack behind his seat and began writing, glancing up from time to time to gaze thoughtfully at the scene of the accident. When he had finished, he thumbed the radio transmitter and called Philly Control. Somewhere in the bloody, oil and foam covered pile of wreckage were the registration plates for the two vehicles involved. When the wrecker collected the debris, it would be machine sifted in Pittsburgh and the plates fed to records and then relayed to Philadelphia where the identifications could be added to Ben’s report. When he had finished reading his report he asked, “How’s the woman?”

“Still alive, but just barely,” Philly Control answered. “Ben, did you say there were just two vehicles involved?”

“That’s all we found,” Martin replied.

“And were they both in the green?”

“Yes, why?”

“That’s funny,” Philly controller replied, “we got the calls as a sideswipe in white that put one of the cars over into the green. There should have been a third vehicle.”

“That’s right,” Ben exclaimed. “We were so busy trying to get that gal out and then making the try for the other man I never even thought to look for another car. You suppose that guy took off?”

“It’s possible,” the controller said. “I’m calling a gate filter until we know for sure. I’ve got the car number on the driver that reported the accident. I’ll get hold of him and see if he can give us a lead on the third car. You go ahead with your patrol and I’ll let you know what I find out.”

“Affirmative,” Ben replied. He eased the patrol car onto the police lane and turned west once again. Clay reappeared in the cab, dressed in fresh coveralls. “I’ll take it, Ben. You go and clean up now. Kelly’s got a pot of fresh coffee in the galley.” Ferguson slid into his control seat.

A light skiff of snow covered the service strip and the dividers as Car 56 swung back westward in the red lane. Snow was falling steadily but melting as it touched the warm ferrophalt pavement in all lanes. The wet roadways glistened with the lights of hundreds of vehicles. The chronometer read 1840 hours. Clay pushed the car up to a steady 75, just about apace with the slowest traffic in the white lane. To the south, densities were much lighter in the blue and yellow lanes and even the green had thinned out. It would stay moderately light now for another hour until the dinner stops were over and the night travelers again rolled onto the thruways.

Kelly was putting frozen steaks into the infra-oven as Ben walked through to crew quarters. Her coverall sleeves were rolled to the elbows as she worked and a vagrant strand of copper hair curled over her forehead. As Martin passed by, he caught a faint whisper of perfume and he smiled appreciatively.

In the tiny crew quarters, he shut the door to the galley and stripped out of his wet coveralls and boots. He eyed the shower stall across the passageway.

“Hey, mother,” he yelled to Kelly, “have I got time for a shower before dinner?”

“Yes, but make it a quickie,” she called back.

Five minutes later he stepped into the galley, his dark, crew-cut hair still damp. Kelly was setting plastic, disposable dishes on the little swing-down table that doubled as a food bar and work desk. Ben peered into a simmering pot and sniffed. “Smells good. What’s for dinner, Hiawatha?”

“Nothing fancy. Steak, potatoes, green beans, apple pie and coffee.”

Ben’s mouth watered. “You know, sometimes I wonder whether one of your ancestors didn’t come out of New England. Your menus always seem to coincide with my ideas of a perfect meal.” He noted the two places set at the table. Ben glanced out the galley port into the headlight-striped darkness. Traffic was still light. In the distance, the night sky glowed with the lights of Chambersburg, north of the thruway.

“We might as well pull up for dinner,” he said. “It’s pretty slow out there.”

Kelly shoved dishes over and began laying out a third setting. About half the time on patrol, the crew ate in shifts on the go, with one of the patrol troopers in the cab at all times. When traffic permitted, they pulled off to the service strip and ate together. With the communications system always in service, control stations could reach them anywhere in the big vehicle.

The sergeant stepped into the cab and tapped Ferguson on the shoulder. “Dinnertime, Clay. Pull her over and we’ll try some of your gracious living.”

“Light the candles and pour the wine,” Clay quipped, “I’ll be with you in a second.”

Car 56 swung out to the edge of the police lane and slowed down. Clay eased the car onto the strip and stopped. He checked the radiodometer and called in. “Pitt Control, this is Car 56 at Marker 158. Dinner is being served in the dining car to the rear. Please do not disturb.”

“Affirmative, Car 56,” Pittsburgh Control responded. “Eat heartily, it may be going out of style.” Clay grinned and flipped the radio to remote and headed for the galley.

* * * *

Seated around the little table, the trio cut into their steaks. Parked at the north edge of the police lane, the patrol car was just a few feet from the green lane divider strip and cars and cargo carriers flashed by as they ate.

Clay chewed on a sliver of steak and looked at Kelly. “I’d marry you, Pocahontas, if you’d ever learn to cook steaks like beef instead of curing them like your ancestral buffalo robes. When are you going to learn that good beef has to be bloody to be edible?”

The girl glared at him. “If that’s what it takes to make it edible, you’re going to be an epicurean delight in just about one second if I hear another word about my cooking. And that’s also the second crack about my noble ancestors in the past five minutes. I’ve always wondered about the surgical techniques my great-great-great grandpop used when he lifted a paleface’s hair. One more word, Clay Ferguson, and I’ll have your scalp flying from Beulah’s antenna like a coontail on a kid’s scooter.”

Ben bellowed and nearly choked. “Hey, kid,” he spluttered at Clay, “ever notice how the wrong one of her ancestors keeps coming to the surface? That was the Irish.”

Clay polished off the last of his steak and reached for the individual frozen pies Kelly had put in the oven with the steaks. “Now that’s another point,” he said, waving his fork at Kelly. “The Irish lived so long on potatoes and prayers that when they get a piece of meat on their menu, they don’t know how to do anything but boil it.”

“That tears it,” the girl exploded. She pushed back from the table and stood up. “I’ve cooked the last meal this big, dumb Canuck will ever get from me. I hope you get chronic indigestion and then come crawling to me for help. I’ve got something back there I’ve been wanting to dose you with for a long time.”

She stormed out of the galley and slammed the door behind her. Ben grinned at the stunned look on Clay’s face. “Now what got her on the warpath?” Clay asked. Before Ben could answer the radio speaker in the ceiling came to life.

“Car 56 this is Pitt Control.”

Martin reached for the transmit switch beside the galley table. “This is Five Six, go ahead.”

“Relay from Philly Control,” the speaker blared. “Reference the accident at Marker 92 at 1648 hours this date; Philly Control reports a third vehicle definitely involved.”

Ben pulled out a pencil and Clay shoved a message pad across the table.

“James J. Newhall, address 3409 Glen Cove Drive, New York City, license number BHT 4591 dash 747 dash 1609, was witness to the initial impact. He reports that a white over green, late model Travelaire, with two men in it, sideswiped one of the two vehicles involved in the fatal accident. The Travelaire did not stop but accelerated after the impact. Newhall was unable to get the full license number but the first six units were QABR dash 46…rest of numerals unknown.”

Ben cut in. “Have we got identification on our fatalities yet?”

“Affirmative, Five Six,” the radio replied. “The driver of the car struck by the hit-and-run vehicle was a Herman Lawrence Hanover, age forty-two, of 13460 One Hundred Eighty-First Street South, Camden, New Jersey, license number LFM 4151 dash 603 dash 2738. With him was his wife, Clara, age forty-one, same address. Driver of the green lane car was George R. Hamilton, age thirty-five, address Box 493, Route 12, Tucumcari, New Mexico.”

Ben broke in once more. “You indicate all three are fatalities. Is this correct, Pitt Control? The woman was alive when she was transferred to the ambulance.”

“Stand by, Five Six, and I’ll check.”

A moment later Pitt Control was back. “That is affirmative, Five Six. The woman died at 1745 hours. Here is additional information. A vehicle answering to the general description of the hit-and-run vehicle is believed to have been involved in an armed robbery and multiple murder earlier this date at Wilmington, Delaware. Philly Control is now checking for additional details. Gate filters have been established on NAT 26-West from Marker-Exit 100 to Marker-Exit 700. Also, filters on all interchanges. Pitt Control out.”

Kelly Lightfoot, her not-too-serious peeve forgotten, had come back into the galley to listen to the radio exchange. The men got up from the table and Clay gathered the disposable dishware and tossed them into the waste receiver.

“We’d better get rolling,” Ben said, “those clowns could still be on the thruway, although they could have got off before the filters went up.”

They moved to the cab and took their places. The big engines roared into action as Ben rolled Car 56 back onto the police-way. Kelly finished straightening up in the galley and then came forward to sit on the jump seat between the two troopers. The snow had stopped again but the roadways were still slick and glistening under the headlights. Beulah rolled steadily along on her broad tracks, now cruising at one hundred miles an hour. The steady whine of the cold night wind penetrated faintly into the sound-proofed and insulated cabin canopy. Clay cut out the cabin lights, leaving only the instrument panel glowing faintly along with the phosphorescent buttons and knobs on the arms of the control seats.

A heavy express cargo carrier flashed by a quarter of a mile away in the blue lane, its big bulk lit up like a Christmas tree with running and warning lights. To their right, Clay caught the first glimpse of a set of flashing amber warning lights coming up from behind in the green lane. A minute later, a huge cargo carrier came abreast of the patrol car and then pulled ahead. On its side was a glowing star of the United States Army. A minute later, another Army carrier rolled by.

“That’s the missile convoy out of Aberdeen,” Clay told Kelly. “I wish our hit-runner had tackled one of those babies. We’d have scraped him up instead of those other people.”

The convoy rolled on past at a steady one hundred twenty-five miles an hour. Car 56 flashed under a crossover and into a long, gentle curve. The chronometer clicked up to 2100 hours and the radio sang out. “Cars 207, 56 and 82, this is Pitt Control. 2100 hours density report follows.…”

Pittsburgh Control read off the figures for the three cars. Car 82 was one hundred fifty miles ahead of Beulah, Car 207 about the same distance to the rear. The density report ended and a new voice came on the air.

“Attention all cars and all stations, this is Washington Criminal Control.” The new voice paused, and across the continent, troopers on every thruway, control station, checkpoint and relay block, reached for clipboard and pen.

“Washington Criminal Control continuing, all cars and all stations, special attention to all units east of the Mississippi. At 1510 hours this date, two men held up the First National Bank of Wilmington, Delaware, and escaped with an estimated one hundred seventy-five thousand dollars. A bank guard and two tellers, together with five bank customers were killed by these subjects using automatic weapon fire to make good their escape. They were observed leaving the scene in a late model, white-over-green Travelaire sedan, license unknown. A car of the same make, model and color was stolen from Annapolis, Maryland, a short time prior to the holdup. The stolen vehicle, now believed to be the getaway car, bears USN license number QABR dash 468 dash 1113.…”

“That’s our baby,” Ben murmured as he and Clay scribbled, on their message forms.

“…Motor number ZB 1069432,” Washington Criminal Control continued. “This car is also now believed to have been involved in a hit-and-run fatal accident on NAT 26-West at Marker 92 at approximately 1648 hours this date.

“Subject Number One is described as WMA, twenty to twenty-five years, five feet, eleven inches tall, medium complexion, dark hair and eyes, wearing a dark-gray sports jacket and dark pants, and wearing a gray sports cap. He was wearing a ring with a large red stone on his left hand.

“Subject Number Two is described as WMA, twenty to twenty-five years, six feet, light, ruddy complexion and reddish brown hair, light colored eyes. Has scar on back left side of neck. Wearing light-brown suit, green shirt and dark tie, no hat.

“These subjects are believed to be armed and psychotically dangerous. If observed, approach with extreme caution and inform nearest control of contact. Both subjects now under multiple federal warrants charging bank robbery, murder, and hit-and-run murder. All cars and stations acknowledge. Washington Criminal Control out.”

The air chattered as the cars checked into their nearest controls with “acknowledged.”

“This looks like it could be a long night,” Kelly said, rising to her feet. “I’m going to sack out. Call me if you need me.”

“Good night, princess,” Ben called.

“Hey, Hiawatha,” Clay called out as Kelly paused in the galley door. “I didn’t mean what I said about your steaks. Your great-great-great grandpop would have gone around with his bare scalp hanging out if he had had to use a buffalo hide cured like that steak was cooked.”

He reached back at the same instant and slammed the cabin door just as Kelly came charging back. She slammed into the door, screamed and then went storming back to the dispensary while Clay doubled over in laughter.

Ben smiled at his junior partner. “Boy, you’re gonna regret that. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

* * * *

Martin turned control over to the younger trooper and relaxed in his seat to go over the APB from Washington. Car 56 bored steadily through the night. The thruway climbed easily up the slight grade cut through the hills north of Wheeling, West Virginia, and once more snow began falling.

Clay reached over and flipped on the video scanners. Four small screens, one for each of the westbound lanes, glowed with a soft red light. The monitors were synchronized with the radiometer and changed view at every ten-mile marker. Viewing cameras mounted on towers between each lane, lined the thruway, aimed eastward at the on-coming traffic back to the next bank of cameras ten miles away. Infra-red circuits took over from standard scan at dark. A selector system in the cars gave the troopers the option of viewing either the block they were currently patrolling; the one ahead of the next ten-mile block; or, the one they had just passed. As a rule, the selection was based on the speed of the car. Beamed signals from each block automatically switched the view as the patrol car went past the towers. Clay put the slower lane screens on the block they were in, turned the blue and yellow lanes to the block ahead.

They rolled past the interchange with NAT 114-South out of Cleveland and the traffic densities picked up in all lanes as many of the southbound vehicles turned west on to NAT 26. The screens flicked and Clay came alert. Some fifteen miles ahead in the one-hundred-fifty-to-two-hundred-mile an hour blue lane, a glowing dot remained motionless in the middle of the lane and the other racing lights of the blue lane traffic were sheering around it like a racing river current parting around a boulder.

“Trouble,” he said to Martin, as he shoved forward on the throttle.

A stalled car in the middle of the high-speed lane was an invitation to disaster. The bull horn blared as Beulah leaped past the two hundred mile an hour mark and safety cocoons slid into place. Aft in the dispensary, Kelly was sealed into her bunk by a cocoon rolling out of the wall and encasing the hospital bed.

Car 5 slanted across the police lane with red lights flashing and edged into the traffic flow in the blue lane. The great, red winking lights and the emergency radio siren signal began clearing a path for the troopers. Vehicles began edging to both sides of the lane to shift to crossovers to the yellow or green lanes. Clay aimed Beulah at the motionless dot on the screen and eased back from the four-mile-a-minute speed. The patrol car slowed and the headlight picked up the stalled vehicle a mile ahead. The cocoons opened and Ben slipped on his work helmet and dropped down the steps to the side hatch. Clay brought Beulah to a halt a dozen yards directly to the rear of the stalled car, the great bulk of the patrol vehicle with its warning lights serving as a shield against any possible fuzzy-headed speeders that might not be observing the road.

As Martin reached for the door, the Wanted bulletin flashed through his head. “What make of car is that, Clay?”

“Old jalopy Tritan with some souped-up rigs. Probably kids,” the junior officer replied. “It looks okay.”

Ben nodded and swung down out of the patrol car. He walked quickly to the other car, flashing his handlight on the side of the vehicle as he went up to the driver. The interior lights were on and inside, two obviously frightened young couples smiled with relief at the sight of the uniform coveralls. A freckled-faced teenager in a dinner jacket was in the driver’s seat and had the blister window open. He grinned up at Martin. “Boy, am I glad to see you, officer,” he said.

“What’s the problem?” Ben asked.

“I guess she blew an impeller,” the youth answered. “We were heading for a school dance at Cincinnati and she was boiling along like she was in orbit when blooey she just quit.”

Ben surveyed the old jet sedan. “What year is this clunker?” he asked. The kid told him. “You kids have been told not to use this lane for any vehicle that old.” He waved his hand in protest as the youngster started to tell him how many modifications he had made on the car. “It doesn’t make one bit of difference whether you’ve put a first-stage Moon booster on this wreck. It’s not supposed to be in the blue or yellow. And this thing probably shouldn’t have been allowed out of the white—or even on the thruway.”

The youngster flushed and bit his lip in embarrassment at the giggles from the two evening-frocked girls in the car.

“Well, let’s get you out of here.” Ben touched his throat mike. “Drop a light, Clay and then let’s haul this junk pile away.”

In the patrol car, Ferguson reached down beside his seat and tugged at a lever. From a recess in Beulah’s stern, a big portable red warning light dropped to the pavement. As it touched the surface, it automatically flashed to life, sending out a bright, flashing red warning signal into the face of any approaching traffic. Clay eased the patrol car around the stalled vehicle and then backed slow into position, guided by Martin’s radioed instructions. A tow-bar extruded from the back of the police vehicle and a magnaclamp locked onto the front end of the teenager’s car. The older officer walked back to the portable warning light and rolled it on its four wheels to the rear plate of the jalopy where another magnalock secured it to the car. Beulah’s two big rear warning lights still shone above the low silhouette of the passenger car, along with the mobile lamp on the jalopy. Martin walked back to the patrol car and climbed in.

He slid into his seat and nodded at Clay. The patrol car, with the disabled vehicle in tow moved forward and slanted left towards the police lane. Martin noted the mileage marker on the radiodometer and fingered the transmitter. “Chillicothe Control this is Car 56.”

“This Chillicothe. Go ahead Five Six.”

“We picked up some kids in a stalled heap on the blue at Marker 382 and we’ve got them in tow now,” Ben said. “Have a wrecker meet us and take them off our hands.”

“Affirmative, Five Six. Wrecker will pick you up at Marker 412.”

* * * *

Clay headed the patrol car and its trailed load into an emergency entrance to the middle police lane and slowly rolled westward. The senior trooper reached into his records rack and pulled out a citation book.

“You going to nail these kids?” Clay asked.

“You’re damn right I am,” Martin replied, beginning to fill in the violation report. “I’d rather have this kid hurting in the pocketbook than dead. If we turn him loose, he’ll think he got away with it this time and try it again. The next time he might not be so lucky.”

“I suppose you’re right,” Clay said, “but it does seem a little rough.”

Ben swung around in his seat and surveyed his junior officer. “Sometimes I think you spent four years in the patrol academy with your head up your jet pipes,” he said. He fished out another cigarette and took a deep drag.

“You’ve had four solid years of law; three years of electronics and jet and air-drive engine mechanics and engineering; pre-med, psychology, math, English, Spanish and a smattering of Portuguese, to say nothing of dozens of other subjects. You graduated in the upper tenth of your class with a B.S. in both Transportation and Criminology which is why you’re riding patrol and not punching a computer or tinkering with an engine. You’d think with all that education that somewhere along the line you’d have learned to think with your head instead of your emotions.”

Clay kept a studied watch on the roadway. The minute Ben had turned and swung his legs over the side of the seat and pulled out a cigarette, Clay knew that it was school time in Car 56. Instructor Sergeant Ben Martin was in a lecturing mood. It was time for all good pupils to keep their big, fat mouths shut.

“Remember San Francisco de Borja?” Ben queried. Clay nodded. “And you still think I’m too rough on them?” Ben pressed.

Ferguson’s memory went back to last year’s fifth patrol. He and Ben with Kelly riding hospital, had been assigned to NAT 200-North, running out of Villahermosa on the Guatemalan border of Mexico to Edmonton Barracks in Canada. It was the second night of the patrol. Some seven hundred fifty miles north of Mexico City, near the town of San Francisco de Borja, a gang of teenage Mexican youngsters had gone roaring up the yellow at speeds touching on four hundred miles an hour. Their car, a beat-up, fifteen-year-old veteran of less speedy and much rockier local mountain roads, had been gimmicked by the kids so that it bore no resemblance to its original manufacture.

From a junkyard they had obtained a battered air lift, smashed almost beyond use in the crackup of a ten-thousand dollar sports cruiser. The kids pried, pounded and bent the twisted impeller lift blades back into some semblance of alignment. From another wreck of a cargo carrier came a pair of 4000-pound thrust engines. They had jury-rigged the entire mess so that it stuck together on the old heap. Then they hit the thruway—nine of them packed into the jalopy—the oldest one just seventeen years old. They were doing three hundred fifty when they flashed past the patrol car and Ben had roared off in pursuit. The senior officer whipped the big patrol car across the crowded high speed blue lane, jockeyed into the ultra-high yellow and then turned on the power.

By this time the kids realized they had been spotted and they cranked their makeshift power plant up to the last notch. The most they could get out of it was four hundred and it was doing just that as Car 56, clocking better than five hundred, pulled in behind them. The patrol car was still three hundred yards astern when one of the bent and re-bent impeller blades let go. The out-of-balance fan, turning at close to 35,000 rpm, flew to pieces and the air cushion vanished. At four hundred miles an hour, the body of the old jalopy fell the twelve inches to the pavement and both front wheels caved under. There was a momentary shower of sparks, then the entire vehicle snapped cartwheeling more than eighty feet into the air and exploded. Pieces of car and bodies were scattered for a mile down the thruway and the only whole, identifiable human bodies were those of the three youngsters thrown out and sent hurtling to their deaths more than two hundred feet away.

Clay’s mind snapped back to the present.

“Write ’em up,” he said quietly to Martin. The senior officer gave a Satisfied nod and turned back to his citation pad.

* * * *

At marker 412, which was also the Columbus turnoff, a big patrol wrecker was parked on the side strip, engines idling, service and warning lights blinking. Clay pulled the patrol car alongside and stopped. He disconnected the tow bar and the two officers climbed out into the cold night air. They walked back to the teenager’s car. Clay went to the rear of the disabled car and unhooked the warning light while Martin went to the driver’s window. He had his citation book in hand. The youngster in the driver’s seat went white at the sight of the violation pad. “May I see your license, please,” Ben asked. The boy fumbled in a back pocket and then produced a thin, metallic tab with his name, age, address and license number etched into the indestructible and unalterable metal.

“Also your car registration,” Ben added. The youth unclipped similar metal strip from the dashboard.

The trooper took the two tabs and walked to the rear of the patrol car. He slid back a panel to reveal two thin slots in the hull. Martin slid the driver’s license into one of the slots, the registration tab into the other. He pressed a button below each slot. Inside the car, a magnetic reader and auto-transmitter “scanned” the magnetic symbols implanted in the tags. The information was fed instantly to Continental Headquarters Records division at Colorado Springs. In fractions of a second, the great computers at Records were comparing the information on the tags with all previous traffic citations issued anywhere in the North American continent in the past forty-five years since the birth of the Patrol. The information from the driver’s license and registration tab had been relayed from Beulah via the nearest patrol relay point. The answer came back the same way.

Above the license recording slot were two small lights. The first flashed green, “license is in order and valid.” The second flashed green as well, “no previous citations.” Ben withdrew the tag from the slot. Had the first light come on red, he would have placed the driver under arrest immediately. Had the second light turned amber, it would have indicated a previous minor violation. This, Ben would have noted on the new citation. If the second light had been red, this would have meant either a major previous violation or more than one minor citation. Again, the driver would have been under immediate arrest. The law was mandatory. One big strike and you’re out—two foul tips and the same story. And “out” meant just that. Fines, possibly jail or prison sentence and lifetime revocation of driving privileges.

Ben flipped the car registration slot to “stand-by” and went back to the teenager’s car. Even though they were parked on the service strip of the police emergency lane, out of all traffic, the youngsters stayed in the car. This one point of the law they knew and knew well. Survival chances were dim anytime something went wrong on the high-speed thruways. That little margin of luck vanished once outside the not-too-much-better security of the vehicle body.

Martin finished writing and then slipped the driver’s license into a pocket worked into the back of the metallic paper foil of the citation blank. He handed the pad into the window to the driver together with a carbon stylus.

The boy’s lip trembled and he signed the citation with a shaky hand.

Ben ripped off the citation blank and license, fed them into the slot on the patrol car and pressed both the car registration and license “record” buttons. Ten seconds later the permanent record of the citation was on file in Colorado Springs and a duplicate recording of the action was in the Continental traffic court docket recorder nearest to the driver’s hometown. Now, no power in three nations could “fix” that ticket. Ben withdrew the citation and registration tag and walked back to the car. He handed the boy the license and registration tab, together with a copy of the citation. Ben bent down to peer into the car.

“I made it as light on you as I could,” he told the young driver. “You’re charged with improper use of the thruway. That’s a minor violation. By rights, I should have cited you for illegal usage.” He looked around slowly at each of the young people. “You look like nice kids,” he said. “I think you’ll grow up to be nice people. I want you around long enough to be able to vote in a few years. Who knows, maybe I’ll be running for president then and I’ll need your votes. It’s a cinch that falling apart in the middle of two-hundred-mile an hour traffic is no way to treat future voters.

“Good night, Kids.” He smiled and walked away from the car. The three young passengers smiled back at Ben. The young driver just stared unhappily at the citation.

Clay stood talking with the wrecker crewmen. Ben nodded to him and mounted into the patrol car. The young Canadian crushed out his cigarette and swung up behind the sergeant. Clay went to the control seat when he saw Martin pause in the door to the galley.

“I’m going to get a cup of coffee,” the older officer said, “and then take the first shift. You keep Beulah ’til I get back.”

Clay nodded and pushed the throttles forward. Car 56 rolled back into the police lane while behind it, the wrecker hooked onto the disabled car and swung north into the crossover. Clay checked both the chronometer and radiodometer and then reported in. “Cinncy Control this is Car 56 back in service.” Cincinnati Control acknowledged.

Ten minutes later, Ben reappeared in the cab, slid into the left-hand seat. “Hit the sack, kid,” he told Ferguson. The chronometer read 2204. “I’ll wake you at midnight—or sooner, if anything breaks.”

Ferguson stood up and stretched, then went into the galley. He poured himself a cup of coffee and carrying it with him, went back to the crew quarters. He closed the door to the galley and sat down on the lower bunk to sip his coffee. When he had finished, he tossed the cup into the basket, reached and dimmed the cubby lights and kicked off his boots. Still in his coveralls, Clay stretched out on the bunk and sighed luxuriously. He reached up and pressed a switch on the bulkhead above his pillow and the muted sounds of music from a standard broadcast commercial station drifted into the bunk area. Clay closed his eyes and let the sounds of the music and the muted rumble of the engines lull him to sleep. It took almost fifteen seconds for him to be in deep slumber.

* * * *

Ben pushed Beulah up to her steady seventy-five-mile-an-hour cruising speed, moved to the center of the quarter-mile-wide police lane and locked her tracks into autodrive. He relaxed back in his seat and divided his gaze between the video monitors and the actual scene on either side of him in the night. Once again the sky was lighted, this time much brighter on the horizon as the road ways swept to the south of Cincinnati.

Traffic was once again heavy and fast with the blue and green carrying almost equal loads while white was really crowded and even the yellow “zoom” lane was beginning to fill. The 2200 hour density reports from Cinncy had been given before the Ohio State-Cal football game traffic had hit the thruways and densities now were peaking near twenty thousand vehicles for the one-hundred-mile block of westbound NAT 26 out of Cincinnati.

Back to the east, near the eastern Ohio state line, Martin could hear Car 207 calling for a wrecker and meat wagon. Beulah rumbled on through the night. The video monitors flicked to the next ten-mile stretch as the patrol car rolled past another interchange. More vehicles streamed onto the westbound thruway, crossing over and dropping down into the same lanes they held coming out of the north-south road. Seven years on patrols had created automatic reflexes in the trooper sergeant. Out of the mass of cars and cargoes streaming along the rushing tide of traffic, his eye picked out the track of one vehicle slanting across the white lane just a shade faster than the flow of traffic. The vehicle was still four or five miles ahead. It wasn’t enough out of the ordinary to cause more than a second, almost unconscious glance, on the part of the veteran officer. He kept his view shifting from screen to screen and out to the sides of the car.

But the reflexes took hold again as his eye caught the track of the same vehicle as it hit the crossover from white to green, squeezed into the faster lane and continued its sloping run towards the next faster crossover. Now Martin followed the movement of the car almost constantly. The moving blip had made the cut-over across the half-mile wide green lane in the span of one crossover and was now whipping into the merger lane that would take it over the top of the police lane and drop down into the one hundred fifty to two hundred mile an hour blue. If the object of his scrutiny straightened out in the blue, he’d let it go. The driver had been bordered on violation in his fast crossover in the face of heavy traffic. If he kept it up in the now-crowded high-speed lane, he was asking for sudden death. The monitors flicked to the next block and Ben waited just long enough to see the speeding car make a move to the left, cutting in front of a speeding cargo carrier. Ben slammed Beulah into high. Once again the bull horn blared as the cocoons slammed shut, this time locking both Clay and Kelly into their bunks, sealing Ben into the control seat.

Beulah lifted on her air cushion and the twin jets roared as she accelerated down the police lane at three hundred miles an hour. Ben closed the gap on the speeder in less than a minute and then edged over to the south side of the police lane to make the jump into the blue lane. The red emergency lights and the radio siren had already cleared a hole for him in the traffic pattern and he eased back on the finger throttles as the patrol car sailed over the divider and into the blue traffic lane. Now he had eyeball contact with the speeding car, still edging over towards the ultra-high lane. On either side of the patrol car traffic gave way, falling back or moving to the left and right. Car 56 was now directly behind the speeding passenger vehicle. Ben fingered the cut-in switch that put his voice signal onto the standard vehicular emergency frequency—the band that carried the automatic siren-warning to all vehicles.

* * * *

The patrol car was still hitting above the two-hundred-mile-an-hour mark and was five hundred feet behind the speeder. The headlamp bathed the other car in a white glare, punctuated with angry red flashes from the emergency lights.

“You are directed to halt or be fired upon,” Ben’s voice roared out over the emergency frequency. Almost without warning, the speeding car began braking down with such deceleration that the gargantuan patrol car with its greater mass came close to smashing over it and crushing the small passenger vehicle like an insect. Ben cut all forward power, punched up full retrojet and at the instant he felt Beulah’s tracks touch the pavement as the air cushion blew, he slammed on the brakes. Only the safety cocoon kept Martin from being hurled against the instrument panel and in their bunks, Kelly Lightfoot and Clay Ferguson felt their insides dragging down into their legs.

The safety cocoons snapped open and Clay jumped into his boots and leaped for the cab. “Speeder,” Ben snapped as he jumped down the steps to the side hatch. Ferguson snatched up his helmet from the rack beside his seat and leaped down to join his partner. Ben ran up to the stopped car through a thick haze of smoke from the retrojets of the patrol car and the friction-burning braking of both vehicles. Ferguson circled to the other side of the car. As they flashed their handlights into the car, they saw the driver of the car kneeling on the floor beside the reclined passenger seat. A woman lay stretched out on the seat, twisting in pain. The man raised an agonized face to the officers. “My wife’s going to have her baby right here!”

“Kelly,” Ben yelled into his helmet transmitter. “Maternity!”

The dispensary ramp was halfway down before Ben had finished calling. Kelly jumped to the ground and sprinted around the corner of the patrol car, medical bag in hand.

She shoved Clay out of the way and opened the door on the passenger side. On the seat, the woman moaned and then muffled a scream. The patrol doctor laid her palm on the distended belly. “How fast are your pains coming?” she asked. Clay and Ben had moved away from the car a few feet.

“Litter,” Kelly snapped over her shoulder. Clay raced for the patrol car while Ben unshipped a portable warning light and rolled it down the lane behind the patrol car. He flipped it to amber “caution” and “pass.” Blinking amber arrows pointed to the left and right of the halted passenger vehicle and traffic in the blue lane began picking up speed and parting around the obstructions.

By the time he returned to the patrol car, Kelly had the expectant mother in the dispensary. She slammed the door in the faces of the three men and then she went to work.

The woman’s husband slumped against the side of the patrol vehicle.

Ben dug out his pack of cigarettes and handed one to the shaking driver.

He waited until the man had taken a few drags before speaking.

“Mister, I don’t know if you realize it or not but you came close to killing your wife, your baby and yourself,” Ben said softly, “to say nothing of the possibility of killing several other families. Just what did you think you were doing?”

The driver’s shoulders sagged and his hand shook as he took the cigarette from his mouth. “Honestly, officer, I don’t know. I just got frightened to death,” he said. He peered up at Martin. “This is our first baby, you see, and Ellen wasn’t due for another week. We thought it would be all right to visit my folks in Cleveland and Ellen was feeling just fine. Well, anyway, we started home tonight—we live in Jefferson City—and just about the time I got on the thruway, Ellen started having pains. I was never so scared in my life. She screamed once and then tried to muffle them but I knew what was happening and all I could think of was to get her to a hospital. I guess I went out of my head, what with her moaning and the traffic and everything. The only place I could think of that had a hospital was Evansville, and I was going to get her there come hell or high water.” The young man tossed away the half-smoked cigarette and looked up at the closed dispensary door. “Do you think she’s all right?”

Ben sighed resignedly and put his hand on the man’s shoulder. “Don’t you worry a bit. She’s got one of the best doctors in the continent in there with her. Come on.” He took the husband by the arm and led him around to the patrol car cab hatch. “You climb up there and sit down. I’ll be with you in a second.”

The senior officer signaled to Ferguson. “Let’s get his car out of the traffic, Clay,” he directed. “You drive it.”

* * * *

Ben went back and retrieved the caution blinker and re-racked it in the side of the patrol car, then climbed up into the cab. He took his seat at the controls and indicated the jump seat next to him. “Sit down, son. We’re going to get us and your car out of this mess before we all get clobbered.”

He flicked the headlamp at Ferguson in the control seat of the passenger car and the two vehicles moved out. Ben kept the emergency lights on while they eased carefully cross-stream to the north and the safety of the police lane. Clay picked up speed at the outer edge of the blue lane and rolled along until he reached the first “patrol only” entrance through the divider to the service strip. Ben followed him in and then turned off the red blinkers and brought the patrol car to a halt behind the other vehicle.

The worried husband stood up and looked to the rear of the car. “What’s making it so long?” he asked anxiously. “They’ve been in there a long time.”

Ben smiled. “Sit down, son. These things take time. Don’t you worry. If there were anything wrong, Kelly would let us know. She can talk to us on the intercom anytime she wants anything.”

The man sat back down. “What’s your name?” Ben inquired.

“Haverstraw,” the husband replied distractedly, “George Haverstraw. I’m an accountant. That’s my wife back there,” he cried, pointing to the closed galley door. “That’s Ellen.”

“I know,” Ben said gently. “You told us that.”

Clay had come back to the patrol car and dropped into his seat across from the young husband. “Got a name picked out for the baby?” he asked.

Haverstraw’s face lighted. “Oh, yes,” he exclaimed. “If it’s a boy, we’re going to call him Harmon Pierce Haverstraw. That was my grandfather’s name. And if she’s a girl, it’s going to be Caroline May after Ellen’s mother and grandmother.”

The intercom came to life. “Anyone up there?” Kelly’s voice asked. Before they could answer, the wail of a baby sounded over the system. Haverstraw yelled.

“Congratulations, Mr. Haverstraw,” Kelly said, “you’ve got a fine-looking son.”

“Hey,” the happy young father yelped, “hey, how about that? I’ve got a son.” He pounded the two grinning troopers on the back. Suddenly he froze. “What about Ellen? How’s Ellen?” he called out.

“She’s just fine,” Kelly replied. “We’ll let you in here in a couple of minutes but we’ve got to get us gals and your new son looking pretty for papa. Just relax.”

Haverstraw sank down onto the jump seat with a happy dazed look on his face.

Ben smiled and reached for the radio. “I guess our newest citizen deserves a ride in style,” he said. “We’re going to have to transfer Mrs. Haverstraw and er, oh yes, Master Harmon Pierce to an ambulance and then to a hospital now, George. You have any preference on where they go?”

“Gosh, no,” the man replied. “I guess the closest one to wherever we are.” He paused thoughtfully. “Just where are we? I’ve lost all sense of distance or time or anything else.”

Ben looked at the radiodometer. “We’re just about due south of Indianapolis. How would that be?”

“Oh, that’s fine,” Haverstraw replied.

“You can come back now, Mr. Haverstraw,” Kelly called out. Haverstraw jumped up. Clay got up with him. “Come on, papa,” he grinned, “I’ll show you the way.”

Ben smiled and then called into Indianapolis Control for an ambulance.

“Ambulance on the way,” Control replied. “Don’t you need a wrecker, too, Five Six?”

Ben grinned. “Not this time. We didn’t lose one. We gained one.”

He got up and went back to have a look at Harmon Pierce Haverstraw, age five minutes, temporary address, North American Continental Thruway 26-West, Mile Marker 632.

Fifteen minutes later, mother and baby were in the ambulance heading north to the hospital. Haverstraw, calmed down with a sedative administered by Kelly, had nearly wrung their hands off in gratitude as he said good-by.

“I’ll mail you all cigars when I get home,” he shouted as he waved and climbed into his car.

Beulah’s trio watched the new father ease carefully into the traffic as the ambulance headed down the police-way. Haverstraw would have to cut over to the next exchange and then go north to Indianapolis. He’d arrive later than his family. This time, he was the very picture of careful driving and caution as he threaded his way across the green.

“I wonder if he knows what brand of cigars I smoke?” Kelly mused.

* * * *

The chrono clicked up to 2335 as Car 56 resumed patrol. Kelly plumped down onto the jump seat beside Ben. Clay was fiddling in the galley. “Why don’t you go back to the sack?” Ben called.

“What, for a lousy twenty-five minutes,” Clay replied. “I had a good nap before you turned the burners up to high. Besides, I’m hungry. Anyone else want a snack?”

Ben shook his head. “No, thanks,” Kelly said. Ferguson finished slapping together a sandwich. Munching on it, he headed into the engine room to make the midnight check. Car 56 had now been on patrol eight hours. Only two hundred thirty-two hours and two thousand miles to go.

Kelly looked around at the departing back of the younger trooper. “I’ll bet this is the only car in NorCon that has to stock twenty days of groceries for a ten-day patrol,” she said.

Ben chuckled. “He’s still a growing boy.”

“Well, if he is, it’s all between the ears,” the girl replied. “You’d think that after a year I would have realized that nothing could penetrate that thick Canuck’s skull. He gets me so mad sometimes that I want to forget I’m a lady.” She paused thoughtfully. “Come to think of it. No one ever accused me of being a lady in the first place.”

“Sounds like love,” Ben smiled.

Hunched over on the jump seat with her elbows on her knees and her chin cupped in both hands, Kelly gave the senior officer a quizzical sideways look.

Ben was watching his monitors and missed the glance. Kelly sighed and stared out into the light streaked night of the thruway. The heavy surge of football traffic had distributed itself into the general flow on the road and while all lanes were busy, there were no indications of any overcrowding or jam-ups. Much of the pattern was shifting from passenger to cargo vehicle as it neared midnight. The football crowds were filtering off at each exchange and exit and the California fans had worked into the blue and yellow—mostly the yellow—for the long trip home. The fewer passenger cars on the thruway and the increase in cargo carriers gave the troopers a breathing spell. The men in the control buckets of the three hundred and four hundred-ton cargo vehicles were the real pro’s of the thruways; careful, courteous and fast. The NorCon patrol cars could settle down to watch out for the occasional nuts and drunks that might bring disaster.

Once again, Martin had the patrol car on auto drive in the center of the police lane and he steeled back in his seat. Beside him, Kelly stared moodily into the night.

“How come you’ve never married, Ben?” she asked. The senior trooper gave her a startled look. “Why, I guess for the same reason you’re still a maiden,” he answered. “This just doesn’t seem to be the right kind of a job for a married man.”

Kelly shook her head. “No, it’s not the same thing with me,” she said. “At least, not entirely the same thing. If I got married, I’d have to quit the Patrol and you wouldn’t. And secondly, if you must know the truth, I’ve never been asked.”

Ben looked thoughtfully at the copper-haired Irish-Indian girl. All of a sudden she seemed to have changed in his eyes. He shook his head and turned back to the road monitors.

“I just don’t think that a patrol trooper has any business getting married and trying to keep a marriage happy and make a home for a family thirty days out of every three hundred sixty, with an occasional weekend home if you’re lucky enough to draw your hometown for a terminal point. This might help the population rate but it sure doesn’t do anything for the institution of matrimony.”

“I know some troopers that are married,” Kelly said.

“But there aren’t very many,” Ben countered. “Comes the time they pull me off the cars and stick me behind a desk somewhere, then I’ll think about it.”

“You might be too old by then,” Kelly murmured.

Ben grinned. “You sound as though you’re worried about it,” he said.

“No,” Kelly replied softly, “no, I’m not worried about it. Just thinking.” She averted her eyes and looked out into the night again. “I wonder what NorCon would do with a husband-wife team?” she murmured, almost to herself.

Ben looked sharply at her and frowned. “Why, they’d probably split them up,” he said.

* * * *

“Split what up?” Clay inquired, standing in the door of the cab.

“Split up all troopers named Clay Ferguson,” Kelly said disgustedly, “and use them for firewood—especially the heads. They say that hardwood burns long and leaves a fine ash. And that’s what you’ve been for years.”

She sat erect in the jump seat and looked sourly at the young trooper.

Clay shuddered at the pun and squeezed by the girl to get to his seat. “I’ll take it now, pop,” he said. “Go get your geriatrics treatment.”

Ben got out of his seat with a snort. “I’ll ‘pop’ you, skinhead,” he snapped. “You may be eight years younger than I am but you only have one third the virility and one tenth the brains. And eight years from now you’ll still be in deficit spending on both counts.”

“Careful, venerable lord of my destiny,” Clay admonished with a grin, “remember how I spent my vacation and remember how you spent yours before you go making unsubstantiated statements about my virility.”

Kelly stood up. “If you two will excuse me, I’ll go back to the dispensary and take a good jolt of male hormones and then we can come back and finish this man-to-man talk in good locker room company.”

“Don’t you dare,” Ben cried, “I wouldn’t let you tamper with one single, tiny one of your feminine traits, princess. I like you just the way you are.”

Kelly looked at him with a wide-eyed, cherubic smile. “You really mean that, Ben?”

The older trooper flushed briefly and then turned quickly into the galley. “I’m going to try for some shut-eye. Wake me at two, Clay, if nothing else breaks.” He turned to Kelly who still was smiling at him. “And watch out for that lascivious young goat.”

“It’s all just talk, talk, talk,” she said scornful. “You go to bed Ben. I’m going to try something new in psychiatric annals. I’m going to try and psychoanalyze a dummy.” She sat back down on the jump seat.

At 2400 hours it was Vincennes Check with the density reports, all down in the past hour. The patrol was settling into what looked like a quiet night routine. Kelly chatted with Ferguson for another half hour and then rose again. “I think I’ll try to get some sleep,” she said. “I’ll put on a fresh pot of coffee for you two before I turn in.”

She rattled around in the galley for some time. “Whatcha cooking?” Clay called out. “Making coffee,” Kelly replied.

“It take all that time to make coffee?” Clay queried.

“No,” she said. “I’m also getting a few things ready so we can have a fast breakfast in case we have to eat on the run. I’m just about through now.”

A couple of minutes later she stuck her head into the cab. “Coffee’s done. Want some?”

Clay nodded. “Please, princess.”

She poured him a cup and set it in the rack beside his seat.

“Thanks,” Clay said. “Good night, Hiawatha.”

“Good night, Babe,” she replied.

“You mean ‘Paul Bunyon,’ don’t you?” Clay asked. “‘Babe’ was his blue ox.”

“I know what I said,” Kelly retorted and strolled back to the dispensary. As she passed through the crew cubby, she glanced at Ben sleeping on the bunk recently vacated by Ferguson. She paused and carefully and gently pulled a blanket up over his sleeping form. She smiled down at the trooper and then went softly to her compartment.

In the cab, Clay sipped at his coffee and kept watchful eyes on the video monitors. Beulah was back on auto drive and Clay had dropped her speed to a slow fifty as the traffic thinned.

At 0200 hours he left the cab long enough to go back and shake Ben awake and was himself re-awakened at 0400 to take back control. He let Ben sleep an extra hour before routing him out of the bunk again at 0700. The thin, gray light of the winter morning was just taking hold when Ben came back into the cab. Clay had pulled Beulah off to the service strip and was stopped while he finished transcribing his scribbled notes from the 0700 Washington Criminal Control broadcast.

Ben ran his hand sleepily over his close-cropped head. “Anything exciting?” he asked with a yawn. Clay shook his head. “Same old thing. ‘All cars exercise special vigilance over illegal crossovers. Keep all lanes within legal speed limits.’ Same old noise.”

“Anything new on our hit-runner?”

“Nope.”

“Good morning, knights of the open road,” Kelly said from the galley door. “Obviously you both went to sleep after I left and allowed our helpless citizens to slaughter each other.”

“How do you figure that one?” Ben laughed.

“Oh, it’s very simple,” she replied. “I managed to get in a full seven hours of sleep. When you sleep, I sleep. I slept. Ergo, you did likewise.”

“Nope,” Clay said, “for once we had a really quiet night. Let’s hope the day is of like disposition.”

Kelly began laying out the breakfast things. “You guys want eggs this morning?”

“You gonna cook again today?” Clay inquired.

“Only breakfast,” Kelly said. “You have the honors for the rest of the day. The diner is now open and we’re taking orders.”

“I’ll have mine over easy,” Ben said. “Make mine sunny-up,” Clay called.

Kelly began breaking eggs into the pan, muttering to herself. “Over easy, sunny-up, I like ’em scrambled. Next tour I take I’m going to get on a team where everyone likes scrambled eggs.”

A few minutes later, Beulah’s crew sat down to breakfast. Ben had just dipped into his egg yolk when the radio blared. “Attention all cars. Special attention Cars 207, 56 and 82.”

“Just once,” Ben said, “just once, I want to sit down to a meal and get it all down my gullet before that radio gives me indigestion.” He laid down his fork and reached for the message pad.

The radio broadcast continued. “A late model, white over green Travelaire, containing two men and believed to be the subjects wanted in earlier broadcast on murder, robbery and hit-run murder, was involved in a service station robbery and murder at Vandalia, Illinois, at approximately 0710 this date. NorCon Criminal Division believes this subject car escaped filter check and left NAT 26-West sometime during the night.

“Owner of this stolen vehicle states it had only half tanks of fuel at the time it was taken. This would indicate wanted subjects stopped for fuel. It is further believed they were recognized by the station attendant from video bulletins sent out by this department last date and that he was shot and killed to prevent giving alarm.

“The shots alerted residents of the area and the subject car was last seen headed south. This vehicle may attempt to regain access to NAT-26-West or it may take another thruway. All units are warned once again to approach this vehicle with extreme caution and only with the assistance of another unit where possible. Acknowledge. Washington Criminal Control out.”

Ben looked at the chrono. “They hit Vandalia at 0710, eh. Even in the yellow they couldn’t get this far for another half hour. Let’s finish breakfast. It may be a long time until lunch.”

The crew returned to their meal. While Kelly was cleaning up after breakfast, Clay ran the quick morning engine room check. In the cab, Ben opened the arms rack and brought out two machine pistols and belts. He checked them for loads and laid one on Clay’s control seat. He strapped the other around his waist. Then he flipped up a cover in the front panel of the cab. It exposed the breech mechanisms of a pair of twin-mounted 25 mm auto-cannon. The ammunition loads were full. Satisfied, Ben shut the inspection port and climbed into his seat. Clay came forward, saw the machine pistol on his seat and strapped it on without a word. He settled himself in his seat. “Engine room check is all green. Let’s go rabbit hunting.”

Car 56 moved slowly out into the police lane. Both troopers had their individual sets of video monitors on in front of their seats and were watching them intently. In the growing light of day, a white-topped car was going to be easy to spot.

* * * *

It had all the earmarks of being another wintery, overcast day. The outside temperature at 0800 was right on the twenty-nine-degree mark and the threat of more snow remained in the air. The 0800 density reports from St. Louis Control were below the 14,000 mark in all lanes in the one-hundred-mile block west of the city. That was to be expected. They listened to the eastbound densities peaking at twenty-six thousand vehicles in the same block, all heading into the metropolis and their jobs. The 0800, 1200 and 1600 hours density reports also carried the weather forecasts for a five-hundred-mile radius from the broadcasting control point. Decreasing temperatures with light to moderate snow was in the works for Car 56 for the first couple of hundred miles west of St. Louis, turning to almost blizzard conditions in central Kansas. Extra units had already been put into service on all thruways through the midwest and snow-burners were waging a losing battle from Wichita west to the Rockies around Alamosa, Colorado.

Outside the temperature was below freezing; inside the patrol car it was a comfortable sixty-eight degrees. Kelly had cleared the galley and taken her place on the jump seat between the two troopers. With all three of them in the cab, Ben cut from the intercom to commercial broadcast to catch the early morning newscasts and some pleasant music. The patrol vehicle glided along at a leisurely sixty miles an hour. An hour out of St. Louis, a big liquid cargo carrier was stopped on the inner edge of the green lane against the divider to the police lane. The trucker had dropped both warning barriers and lights a half mile back. Ben brought Beulah to a halt across the divider from the stopped carrier. “Dropped a track pin,” the driver called out to the officers.

Ben backed Beulah across the divider behind the stalled carrier to give them protection while they tried to assist the stalled vehicle.

Donning work helmets to maintain contact with the patrol car, and its remote radio system, the two troopers dismounted and went to see what needed fixing. Kelly drifted back to the dispensary and stretched out on one of the hospital bunks and picked up a new novel.

Beulah’s well-equipped machine shop stock room produced a matching pin and it was merely a matter of lifting the stalled carrier and driving it into place in the track assembly. Ben brought the patrol car alongside the carrier and unshipped the crane. Twenty minutes later, Clay and the carrier driver had the new part installed and the tanker was on his way once again.

Clay climbed into the cab and surveyed his grease-stained uniform coveralls and filthy hands. “Your nose is smudged, too, dearie,” Martin observed.

Clay grinned, “I’m going to shower and change clothes. Try and see if you can drive this thing until I get back without increasing the pedestrian fatality rate.” He ducked back into the crew cubby and stripped his coveralls.

Bored with her book, Kelly wandered back to the cab and took Clay’s vacant control seat. The snow had started falling again and in the mid-morning light it tended to soften the harsh, utilitarian landscape of the broad thruway stretching ahead to infinity and spreading out in a mile of speeding traffic on either hand.

“Attention all cars on NAT 26-West and east,” Washington Criminal Control radio blared. “Special attention Cars 56 and 82. Suspect vehicle, white over green Travelaire reported re-entered NAT 26-West on St. Louis interchange 179. St. Louis Control reports communications difficulty in delayed report. Vehicle now believed.…”

“Car 56, Car 56,” St. Louis Control broke in. “Our pigeon is in your zone. Commercial carrier reports near miss sideswipe three minutes ago in blue lane approximately three miles west of mile Marker 957.

“Repeating. Car 56, suspect car.…”

Ben glanced at the radiodometer. It read 969, then clicked to 970.

“This is Five Six, St. Louis,” he broke in, “acknowledged. Our position is mile marker 970.…”

Kelly had been glued to the video monitors since the first of the bulletin. Suddenly she screamed and banged Ben on the shoulder. “There they are. There they are,” she cried, pointing at the blue lane monitor.

Martin took one look at the white-topped car cutting through traffic in the blue lane and slammed Beulah into high. The safety cocoons slammed shut almost on the first notes of the bull horn. Trapped in the shower, Clay was locked into the stall dripping wet as the water automatically shut off with the movement of the cocoon.

* * * *

“I have them in sight,” Ben reported, as the patrol car lifted on its air pad and leaped forward. “They’re in the blue five miles ahead of me and cutting over to the yellow. I estimate their speed at two twenty-five. I am in pursuit.”

Traffic gave way as Car 56 hurtled the divider into the blue.

The radio continued to snap orders.

“Cars 112, 206, 76 and 93 establish roadblocks at mile marker crossover 1032. Car 82 divert all blue and yellow to green and white.”

Eight Two was one hundred fifty miles ahead but at three-hundred-mile-an-hour speeds, 82’s team was very much a part of the operation. This would clear the two high-speed lanes if the suspect car hadn’t been caught sooner.

“Cars 414, 227 and 290 in NAT-26-East, move into the yellow to cover in case our pigeon decides to fly the median.” The controller continued to move cars into covering positions in the area on all crossovers and turnoffs. The sweating dispatcher looked at his lighted map board and mentally cursed the lack of enough units to cover every exit. State and local authorities already had been notified in the event the fugitives left the thruways and tried to escape on a state freeway.

In Car 56, Ben kept the patrol car roaring down the blue lane through the speeding westbound traffic. The standard emergency signal was doing a partial job of clearing the path, but at those speeds, driver reaction times weren’t always fast enough. Ahead, the fleeing suspect car brushed against a light sedan, sending it careening and rocking across the lane. The driver fought for control as it swerved and screeched on its tilting frame. He brought it to a halt amid a haze of blue smoke from burning brakes and bent metal. The white over green Travelaire never slowed, fighting its way out of the blue into the ultra-high yellow and lighter traffic. Ben kept Beulah in bulldog pursuit.

The sideswipe ahead had sent other cars veering in panic and a cluster inadvertently bunched up in the path of the roaring patrol car. Like a flock of hawk-frightened chickens, they tried to scatter as they saw and heard the massive police vehicle bearing down on them. But like chickens, they couldn’t decide which way to run. It was a matter of five or six seconds before they parted enough to let the patrol car through. Ben had no choice but to cut the throttle and punch once on the retrojets to brake the hurtling patrol car. The momentary drops in speed unlocked the safety cocoons and in an instant, Clay had leaped from the shower stall and sped to the cab. Hearing, rather than seeing his partner, Martin snapped over his shoulder, “Unrack the rifles. That’s the car.” Clay reached for the gun rack at the rear of the cab.

Kelly took one look at the young trooper and jumped for the doorway to the galley. A second later she was back. Without a word, she handed the nude Ferguson a dangling pair of uniform coveralls. Clay gasped, dropped the rifles and grabbed the coveralls from her hand and clutched them to his figure. His face was beet-red. Still without speaking, Kelly turned and ran back to her dispensary to be ready for the next acceleration.

Clay was into the coveralls and in his seat almost at the instant Martin whipped the patrol car through the hole in the blue traffic and shoved her into high once more.

There was no question about the fact that the occupants of the fugitive car knew they were being pursued. They shot through the crossover into the yellow lane and now were hurtling down the thruway close to the four-hundred-mile-an-hour mark.

Martin had Beulah riding just under three hundred to make the crossover, still ten miles behind the suspect car and following on video monitor. The air still crackled with commands as St. Louis and Washington Control maneuvered other cars into position as the pursuit went westward past other units blocking exit routes.

Clay read aloud the radiodometer numerals as they clicked off a mile every nine seconds. Car 56 roared into the yellow and the instant Ben had it straightened out, he slammed all finger throttles to full power. Beulah snapped forward and even at three hundred miles an hour, the sudden acceleration pasted the car’s crew against the back of their cushioned seats. The patrol car shot forward at more than five hundred miles an hour.

The image of the Travelaire grew on the video monitor and then the two troopers had it in actual sight, a white, racing dot on the broad avenue of the thruway six miles ahead.

Clay triggered the controls for the forward bow cannon and a panel box flashed to “ready fire” signal.

“Negative,” Martin ordered. “We’re coming up on the roadblock. You might miss and hit one of our cars.”

“Car 56 to Control,” the senior trooper called. “Watch out at the roadblock. He’s doing at least five hundred in the yellow and he’ll never be able to stop.”

Two hundred miles east, the St. Louis controller made a snap decision. “Abandon roadblock. Roadblock cars start west. Maintain two hundred until subject comes into monitor view. Car 56, continue speed estimates of subject car. Maybe we can box him in.”

At the roadblock forty-five miles ahead of the speeding fugitives and their relentless pursuer, the four patrol cars pivoted and spread out across the roadway some five hundred feet apart. They lunged forward and lifted up to air-cushion jet drive at just over two hundred miles an hour. Eight pairs of eyes were fixed on video monitors set for the ten-mile block to the rear of the four vehicles.

Beulah’s indicated ground speed now edged towards the five hundred fifty mark, close to the maximum speeds the vehicles could attain.

The gap continued to close, but more slowly. “He’s firing hotter,” Ben called out. “Estimating five thirty on subject vehicle.”

Now Car 56 was about three miles astern and still the gap closed. The fugitive car flashed past the site of the abandoned roadblock and fifteen seconds later all four patrol cars racing ahead of the Travelaire broke into almost simultaneous reports of “Here he comes.”

A second later, Clay Ferguson yelled out, “There he goes. He’s boondocking, he’s boondocking.”

“He has you spotted,” Martin broke in. “He’s heading for the median. Cut, cut, cut. Get out in there ahead of him.”

The driver of the fugitive car had seen the bulk of the four big patrol cruisers outlined against the slight rise in the thruway almost at the instant he flashed onto their screens ten miles behind them. He broke speed, rocked wildly from side to side, fighting for control and then cut diagonally to the left, heading for the outer edge of the thruway and the unpaved, half-mile-wide strip of landscaped earth that separated the east and westbound segments of NAT-26.

The white and green car was still riding on its airpad when it hit the low, rounded curbing at the edge of the thruway. It hurtled into the air and sailed for a hundred feet across the gently-sloping snow-covered grass, came smashing down in a thick hedgerow of bushes—and kept going.

Car 56 slowed and headed for the curbing. “Watch it, kids,” Ben snapped over the intercom, “we may be buying a plot in a second.”

Still traveling more than five hundred miles an hour, the huge patrol car hit the curbing and bounced into the air like a rocket boosted elephant. It tilted and smashed its nose in a slanting blow into the snow-covered ground. The sound of smashing and breaking equipment mingled with the roar of the thundering jets, tracks and air drives as the car fought its way back to level travel. It surged forward and smashed through the hedgerow and plunged down the sloping snowbank after the fleeing car.

“Clay,” Ben called in a strained voice, “take ’er.”

Ferguson’s fingers were already in position. “You all right, Ben?” he asked anxiously.

“Think I dislocated a neck vertebra,” Ben replied. “I can’t move my head. Go get ’em, kid.”

“Try not to move your head at all, Ben,” Kelly called from her cocoon in the dispensary. “I’ll be there the minute we slow down.”

A half mile ahead, the fugitive car plowed along the bottom of the gentle draw in a cloud of snow, trying to fight its way up the opposite slope and onto the eastbound thruway.

But the Travelaire was never designed for driving on anything but a modern superhighway. Car 56 slammed through the snow and down to the bottom of the draw. A quarter of a mile ahead of the fugitives, the first of the four roadblock units came plowing over the rise.

The car speed dropped quickly to under a hundred and the cocoons were again retracted. Ben slumped forward in his seat and caught himself. He eased back with a gasp of pain, his head held rigidly straight. Almost the instant he started to straighten up, Kelly flung herself through the cab door. She clasped his forehead and held his head against the back of the control seat.

Suddenly, the fugitive car spun sideways, bogged in the wet snow and muddy ground beneath and stopped. Clay bore down on it and was about two hundred yards away when the canopy of the other vehicle popped open and a sheet of automatic weapons fire raked the patrol car. Only the low angle of the sedan and the nearness of the bulky patrol car saved the troopers. Explosive bullets smashed into the patrol car canopy and sent shards of plastiglass showering down on the trio.

An instant later, the bow cannon on the first of the cut-off patrol units opened fire. An ugly, yellow-red blossom of smoke and fire erupted from the front of the Travelaire and it burst into flames. A second later, the figure of a man staggered out of the burning car, clothes and hair aflame. He took four plunging steps and then fell face down in the snow. The car burning and crackled and a thick funereal pyre of oily, black smoke billowed into the gray sky. It was snowing heavily now, and before the troopers could dismount and plow to the fallen man, a thin layer of snow covered his burned body.

* * * *

An hour later, Car 56 was again on NAT 26-West, this time heading for Wichita barracks and needed repairs. In the dispensary, Ben Martin was stretched out on a hospital bunk with a traction brace around his neck and a copper-haired medical-surgical patrolwoman fussing over him.

In the cab, Clay peered through the now almost-blinding blizzard that whirled and skirled thick snow across the thruway. Traffic densities were virtually zero despite the efforts of the dragonlike snow-burners trying to keep the roadways clear. The young trooper shivered despite the heavy jacket over his coveralls. Wind whistled through the shell holes in Beulah’s canopy and snow sifted and drifted against the back bulkhead.

The cab communications system had been smashed by the gunfire and Clay wore his work helmet both for communications and warmth.

The door to the galley cracked open and Kelly stuck her head in. “How much farther, Clay?” she asked.

“We should be in the barracks in about twenty minutes,” the shivering trooper replied.

“I’ll fix you a cup of hot coffee,” Kelly said. “You look like you need it.”

Over the helmet intercom Clay heard her shoving things around in the galley. “My heavens, but this place is a mess,” she exclaimed. “I can’t even find the coffee bin. That steeplechase driving has got to stop.” She paused.

“Clay,” she called out, “have you been drinking in here? It smells like a brewery.”

Clay raised mournful eyes to the shattered canopy above him. “My cooking wine,” he sighed.

COST OF LIVING, by Robert Sheckley

Carrin decided that he could trace his present mood to Miller’s suicide last week. But the knowledge didn’t help him get rid of the vague, formless fear in the back of his mind. It was foolish. Miller’s suicide didn’t concern him.

But why had that fat, jovial man killed himself? Miller had had everything to live for—wife, kids, good job, and all the marvelous luxuries of the age. Why had he done it?

“Good morning, dear,” Carrin’s wife said as he sat down at the breakfast table.

“Morning, honey. Morning, Billy.”

His son grunted something.

You just couldn’t tell about people, Carrin decided, and dialed his breakfast. The meal was gracefully prepared and served by the new Avignon Electric Auto-cook.

His mood persisted, annoyingly enough since Carrin wanted to be in top form this morning. It was his day off, and the Avignon Electric finance man was coming. This was an important day.

He walked to the door with his son.

“Have a good day, Billy.”

His son nodded, shifted his books and started to school without answering. Carrin wondered if something was bothering him, too. He hoped not. One worrier in the family was plenty.

“See you later, honey.” He kissed his wife as she left to go shopping.

At any rate, he thought, watching her go down the walk, at least she’s happy. He wondered how much she’d spend at the A. E. store.

Checking his watch, he found that he had half an hour before the A. E. finance man was due. The best way to get rid of a bad mood was to drown it, he told himself, and headed for the shower.

The shower room was a glittering plastic wonder, and the sheer luxury of it eased Carrin’s mind. He threw his clothes into the A. E. automatic Kleen-presser, and adjusted the shower spray to a notch above “brisk.” The five-degrees-above-skin-temperature water beat against his thin white body. Delightful! And then a relaxing rub-dry in the A. E. Auto-towel.

Wonderful, he thought, as the towel stretched and kneaded his stringy muscles. And it should be wonderful, he reminded himself. The A. E. Auto-towel with shaving attachments had cost three hundred and thirteen dollars, plus tax.

But worth every penny of it, he decided, as the A. E. shaver came out of a corner and whisked off his rudimentary stubble. After all, what good was life if you couldn’t enjoy the luxuries?

His skin tingled when he switched off the Auto-towel. He should have been feeling wonderful, but he wasn’t. Miller’s suicide kept nagging at his mind, destroying the peace of his day off.

Was there anything else bothering him? Certainly there was nothing wrong with the house. His papers were in order for the finance man.

“Have I forgotten something?” he asked out loud.

“The Avignon Electric finance man will be here in fifteen minutes,” his A. E. bathroom Wall-reminder whispered.

“I know that. Is there anything else?”

The Wall-reminder reeled off its memorized data—a vast amount of minutiae about watering the lawn, having the Jet-lash checked, buying lamb chops for Monday, and the like. Things he still hadn’t found time for.

“All right, that’s enough.” He allowed the A. E. Auto-dresser to dress him, skillfully draping a new selection of fabrics over his bony frame. A whiff of fashionable masculine perfume finished him and he went into the living room, threading his way between the appliances that lined the walls.

A quick inspection of the dials on the wall assured him that the house was in order. The breakfast dishes had been sanitized and stacked, the house had been cleaned, dusted, polished, his wife’s garments had been hung up, his son’s model rocket ships had been put back in the closet.

Stop worrying, you hypochondriac, he told himself angrily.

The door announced, “Mr. Pathis from Avignon Finance is here.”

Carrin started to tell the door to open, when he noticed the Automatic Bartender.

Good God, why hadn’t he thought of it!

The Automatic Bartender was manufactured by Castile Motors. He had bought it in a weak moment. A. E. wouldn’t think very highly of that, since they sold their own brand.

He wheeled the bartender into the kitchen, and told the door to open.

“A very good day to you, sir,” Mr. Pathis said.

Pathis was a tall, imposing man, dressed in a conservative tweed drape. His eyes had the crinkled corners of a man who laughs frequently. He beamed broadly and shook Carrin’s hand, looking around the crowded living room.

“A beautiful place you have here, sir. Beautiful! As a matter of fact, I don’t think I’ll be overstepping the company’s code to inform you that yours is the nicest interior in this section.”

Carrin felt a sudden glow of pride at that, thinking of the rows of identical houses, on this block and the next, and the one after that.

“Now, then, is everything functioning properly?” Mr. Pathis asked, setting his briefcase on a chair. “Everything in order?”

“Oh, yes,” Carrin said enthusiastically. “Avignon Electric never goes out of whack.”

“The phone all right? Changes records for the full seventeen hours?”

“It certainly does,” Carrin said. He hadn’t had a chance to try out the phone, but it was a beautiful piece of furniture.

“The Solido-projector all right? Enjoying the programs?”

“Absolutely perfect reception.” He had watched a program just last month, and it had been startlingly lifelike.

“How about the kitchen? Auto-cook in order? Recipe-master still knocking ’em out?”

“Marvelous stuff. Simply marvelous.”

Mr. Pathis went on to inquire about his refrigerator, his vacuum cleaner, his car, his helicopter, his subterranean swimming pool, and the hundreds of other items Carrin had bought from Avignon Electric.

“Everything is swell,” Carrin said, a trifle untruthfully since he hadn’t unpacked every item yet. “Just wonderful.”

“I’m so glad,” Mr. Pathis said, leaning back with a sigh of relief. “You have no idea how hard we try to satisfy our customers. If a product isn’t right, back it comes, no questions asked. We believe in pleasing our customers.”

“I certainly appreciate it, Mr. Pathis.”

* * * *

Carrin hoped the A. E. man wouldn’t ask to see the kitchen. He visualized the Castile Motors Bartender in there, like a porcupine in a dog show.

“I’m proud to say that most of the people in this neighborhood buy from us,” Mr. Pathis was saying. “We’re a solid firm.”

“Was Mr. Miller a customer of yours?” Carrin asked.

“That fellow who killed himself?” Pathis frowned briefly. “He was, as a matter of fact. That amazed me, sir, absolutely amazed me. Why, just last month the fellow bought a brand-new Jet-lash from me, capable of doing three hundred and fifty miles an hour on a straightaway. He was as happy as a kid over it, and then to go and do a thing like that! Of course, the Jet-lash brought up his debt a little.”

“Of course.”

“But what did that matter? He had every luxury in the world. And then he went and hung himself.”

“Hung himself?”

“Yes,” Pathis said, the frown coming back. “Every modern convenience in his house, and he hung himself with a piece of rope. Probably unbalanced for a long time.”

The frown slid off his face, and the customary smile replaced it. “But enough of that! Let’s talk about you.”

The smile widened as Pathis opened his briefcase. “Now, then, your account. You owe us two hundred and three thousand dollars and twenty-nine cents, Mr. Carrin, as of your last purchase. Right?”

“Right,” Carrin said, remembering the amount from his own papers. “Here’s my installment.”

He handed Pathis an envelope, which the man checked and put in his pocket.

“Fine. Now you know, Mr. Carrin, that you won’t live long enough to pay us the full two hundred thousand, don’t you?”

“No, I don’t suppose I will,” Carrin said soberly.

He was only thirty-nine, with a full hundred years of life before him, thanks to the marvels of medical science. But at a salary of three thousand a year, he still couldn’t pay it all off and have enough to support a family on at the same time.

“Of course, we would not want to deprive you of necessities, which in any case is fully protected by the laws we helped formulate and pass. To say nothing of the terrific items that are coming out next year. Things you wouldn’t want to miss, sir!”

Mr. Carrin nodded. Certainly he wanted new items.

“Well, suppose we make the customary arrangement. If you will just sign over your son’s earnings for the first thirty years of his adult life, we can easily arrange credit for you.”

Mr. Pathis whipped the papers out of his briefcase and spread them in front of Carrin.

“If you’ll just sign here, sir.”

“Well,” Carrin said, “I’m not sure. I’d like to give the boy a start in life, not saddle him with—”

“But my dear sir,” Pathis interposed, “this is for your son as well. He lives here, doesn’t he? He has a right to enjoy the luxuries, the marvels of science.”

“Sure,” Carrin said. “Only—”

“Why, sir, today the average man is living like a king. A hundred years ago the richest man in the world couldn’t buy what any ordinary citizen possesses at present. You mustn’t look upon it as a debt. It’s an investment.”

“That’s true,” Carrin said dubiously.

He thought about his son and his rocket ship models, his star charts, his maps. Would it be right? he asked himself.

“What’s wrong?” Pathis asked cheerfully.

“Well, I was just wondering,” Carrin said. “Signing over my son’s earnings—you don’t think I’m getting in a little too deep, do you?”

“Too deep? My dear sir!” Pathis exploded into laughter. “Do you know Mellon down the block? Well, don’t say I said it, but he’s already mortgaged his grandchildren’s salary for their full life-expectancy! And he doesn’t have half the goods he’s made up his mind to own! We’ll work out something for him. Service to the customer is our job and we know it well.”

Carrin wavered visibly.

“And after you’re gone, sir, they’ll all belong to your son.”

That was true, Carrin thought. His son would have all the marvelous things that filled the house. And after all, it was only thirty years out of a life expectancy of a hundred and fifty.

He signed with a flourish.

“Excellent!” Pathis said. “And by the way, has your home got an A. E. Master-operator?”

It hadn’t. Pathis explained that a Master-operator was new this year, a stupendous advance in scientific engineering. It was designed to take over all the functions of housecleaning and cooking, without its owner having to lift a finger.

“Instead of running around all day, pushing half a dozen different buttons, with the Master-operator all you have to do is push one! A remarkable achievement!”

Since it was only five hundred and thirty-five dollars, Carrin signed for one, having it added to his son’s debt.

Right’s right, he thought, walking Pathis to the door. This house will be Billy’s some day. His and his wife’s. They certainly will want everything up-to-date.

Just one button, he thought. That would be a time-saver!

* * * *

After Pathis left, Carrin sat back in an adjustable chair and turned on the solido. After twisting the Ezi-dial, he discovered that there was nothing he wanted to see. He tilted back the chair and took a nap.

The something on his mind was still bothering him.

“Hello, darling!” He awoke to find his wife was home. She kissed him on the ear. “Look.”

She had bought an A. E. Sexitizer-negligee. He was pleasantly surprised that that was all she had bought. Usually, Leela returned from shopping laden down.

“It’s lovely,” he said.

She bent over for a kiss, then giggled—a habit he knew she had picked up from the latest popular solido star. He wished she hadn’t.

“Going to dial supper,” she said, and went to the kitchen. Carrin smiled, thinking that soon she would be able to dial the meals without moving out of the living room. He settled back in his chair, and his son walked in.

“How’s it going, Son?” he asked heartily.

“All right,” Billy answered listlessly.

“What’sa matter, Son?” The boy stared at his feet, not answering. “Come on, tell Dad what’s the trouble.”

Billy sat down on a packing case and put his chin in his hands. He looked thoughtfully at his father.

“Dad, could I be a Master Repairman if I wanted to be?”

Mr. Carrin smiled at the question. Billy alternated between wanting to be a Master Repairman and a rocket pilot. The repairmen were the elite. It was their job to fix the automatic repair machines. The repair machines could fix just about anything, but you couldn’t have a machine fix the machine that fixed the machine. That was where the Master Repairmen came in.

But it was a highly competitive field and only a very few of the best brains were able to get their degrees. And, although the boy was bright, he didn’t seem to have an engineering bent.

“It’s possible, Son. Anything is possible.”

“But is it possible for me?”

“I don’t know,” Carrin answered, as honestly as he could.

“Well, I don’t want to be a Master Repairman anyway,” the boy said, seeing that the answer was no. “I want to be a space pilot.”

“A space pilot, Billy?” Leela asked, coming in to the room. “But there aren’t any.”

“Yes, there are,” Billy argued. “We were told in school that the government is going to send some men to Mars.”

“They’ve been saying that for a hundred years,” Carrin said, “and they still haven’t gotten around to doing it.”

“They will this time.”

“Why would you want to go to Mars?” Leela asked, winking at Carrin. “There are no pretty girls on Mars.”

“I’m not interested in girls. I just want to go to Mars.”

“You wouldn’t like it, honey,” Leela said. “It’s a nasty old place with no air.”

“It’s got some air. I’d like to go there,” the boy insisted sullenly. “I don’t like it here.”

“What’s that?” Carrin asked, sitting up straight. “Is there anything you haven’t got? Anything you want?”

“No, sir. I’ve got everything I want.” Whenever his son called him ‘sir,’ Carrin knew that something was wrong.

“Look, Son, when I was your age I wanted to go to Mars, too. I wanted to do romantic things. I even wanted to be a Master Repairman.”

“Then why didn’t you?”

“Well, I grew up. I realized that there were more important things. First I had to pay off the debt my father had left me, and then I met your mother—”

Leela giggled.

“—and I wanted a home of my own. It’ll be the same with you. You’ll pay off your debt and get married, the same as the rest of us.”

Billy was silent for a while, then he brushed his dark hair—straight, like his father’s—back from his forehead and wet his lips.

“How come I have debts, sir?”

Carrin explained carefully. About the things a family needed for civilized living, and the cost of those items. How they had to be paid. How it was customary for a son to take on a part of his parent’s debt, when he came of age.

Billy’s silence annoyed him. It was almost as if the boy were reproaching him. After he had slaved for years to give the ungrateful whelp every luxury!

“Son,” he said harshly, “have you studied history in school? Good. Then you know how it was in the past. Wars. How would you like to get blown up in a war?”

The boy didn’t answer.

“Or how would you like to break your back for eight hours a day, doing work a machine should handle? Or be hungry all the time? Or cold, with the rain beating down on you, and no place to sleep?”

He paused for a response, got none and went on. “You live in the most fortunate age mankind has ever known. You are surrounded by every wonder of art and science. The finest music, the greatest books and art, all at your fingertips. All you have to do is push a button.” He shifted to a kindlier tone. “Well, what are you thinking?”

“I was just wondering how I could go to Mars,” the boy said. “With the debt, I mean. I don’t suppose I could get away from that.”

“Of course not.”

“Unless I stowed away on a rocket.”

“But you wouldn’t do that.”

“No, of course not,” the boy said, but his tone lacked conviction.

“You’ll stay here and marry a very nice girl,” Leela told him.

“Sure I will,” Billy said. “Sure.” He grinned suddenly. “I didn’t mean any of that stuff about going to Mars. I really didn’t.”

“I’m glad of that,” Leela answered.

“Just forget I mentioned it,” Billy said, smiling stiffly. He stood up and raced upstairs.

“Probably gone to play with his rockets,” Leela said. “He’s such a little devil.”

* * * *

The Carrins ate a quiet supper, and then it was time for Mr. Carrin to go to work. He was on night shift this month. He kissed his wife good-by, climbed into his Jet-lash and roared to the factory. The automatic gates recognized him and opened. He parked and walked in.

Automatic lathes, automatic presses—everything was automatic. The factory was huge and bright, and the machines hummed softly to themselves, doing their job and doing it well.

Carrin walked to the end of the automatic washing machine assembly line, to relieve the man there.

“Everything all right?” he asked.

“Sure,” the man said. “Haven’t had a bad one all year. These new models here have built-in voices. They don’t light up like the old ones.”

Carrin sat down where the man had sat and waited for the first washing machine to come through. His job was the soul of simplicity. He just sat there and the machines went by him. He pressed a button on them and found out if they were all right. They always were. After passing him, the washing machines went to the packaging section.

The first one slid by on the long slide of rollers. He pressed the starting button on the side.

“Ready for the wash,” the washing machine said.

Carrin pressed the release and let it go by.

That boy of his, Carrin thought. Would he grow up and face his responsibilities? Would he mature and take his place in society? Carrin doubted it. The boy was a born rebel. If anyone got to Mars, it would be his kid.

But the thought didn’t especially disturb him.

“Ready for the wash.” Another machine went by.

Carrin remembered something about Miller. The jovial man had always been talking about the planets, always kidding about going off somewhere and roughing it. He hadn’t, though. He’d committed suicide.

“Ready for the wash.”

Carrin had eight hours in front of him, and he loosened his belt to prepare for it. Eight hours of pushing buttons and listening to a machine announce its readiness.

“Ready for the wash.”

He pressed the release.

“Ready for the wash.”

Carrin’s mind strayed from the job, which didn’t need much attention in any case. He wished he had done what he had longed to do as a youngster.

It would have been great to be a rocket pilot, to push a button and go to Mars.

THIS IS KLON CALLING, by Walter J. Sheldon

You didn’t have to be a potential Einstein to take Professor Dane’s course. For one thing you got a few easy credits and for another you were entertained—without letup—by Professor Lyman Dane’s celebrated wit.

Take the time he was illustrating terminal velocity. He jumped out of the open third story window, horrifying the class, until they learned he’d rigged a canvas life net on the floor below. Or the time he let a mouse loose among the female students to illustrate chain reaction. Or the afternoon he played boogie-woogie on the Huyler Memorial Carillon.

“The absorption of knowledge,” he used to say, “increases in direct proportion to the sense of humor—the belly laugh, measured in decibels, being constant.”

He could say a thing like that and make it sound funnier than anybody else could. It was partly the way he looked—tall and mournful and sly, with wispy hair that had once been blond, drooping like a tired willow over his forehead.

But for all his vaudeville tactics he was by no means a second-rate scientist. Which was why he had gained his position at Southwestern Tech in the first place. He refused to work directly for the government (no sense of humor, just initials, he said) but this way he could at least be called upon for consultation at the nearby Air Force Development Center, just at the foot of the mountains to the west.

Now the AFDC, as it was called, didn’t advertise what sort of thing it was developing—but everybody knew that Lyman Dane was an expert on reactive propulsion of rocket motors. He could tell you—and frequently would without being asked—exactly what mass ratio, nozzle diameter and propulsive velocity would be needed for the first trip to the Moon. He knew how many hours a round trip would take, both for landing there or merely circling the body of the satellite.

He had the courses to Mars and Venus thoroughly charted—but considered a trip to Jupiter somewhat impractical. So, what with Dane’s presence and the mysterious white streaks that so often shot up into the sky like fuzzy yarn from the AFDC base, it wasn’t hard to guess what was going on.

Nevertheless Professor Dane was surprised and somewhat offended when the young man from the Federal Bureau of Investigation came to call on him one afternoon. And the worst part of it was that the young man didn’t have much sense of humor.

“As you know, sir,” the young man said, “we’ve been sighting and tracking these unidentified objects in the sky. You must have read about those they chased near Atlanta yesterday.”

“Ah,” said Professor Dane. “Martian through Georgia, no doubt.”

The young man stared at him blankly. He seemed to Professor Dane one of the most nondescript young men his eyes had ever beheld. He had a clean-shaven, pleasant face without exactly being handsome and his eyes were sincere and mild. He wore a neat gray tropical worsted suit and an unobtrusive tie. He was about thirty. Professor Dane supposed that all this was an advantage in his profession.

The young man went on—earnestly. “Without forming any theories about these things we’ve been asked to take certain precautions. I don’t know whether they suspect a hostile power, or what. That’s not my job. At any rate I’ve been given the responsibility of instituting certain security techniques. You do after all, sir, have access to and knowledge of considerable classified information.”

This lad reminded him somewhat of his old friend and colleague, Dr. Fincher, out in California. Wally Fincher was a well-known physicist now, though how anyone ever managed to struggle through his dry ponderous books Dane didn’t know. Probably he had gained most of his fame through his part in those experiments where they bounced radar blips off the moon, Dane thought.

Wally always talked in long unnecessary words. He never merely “went” when he could “proceed,” he never simply “used” when it was possible to “utilize,” he didn’t “get things done”—he “implemented” them. Professor Dane made a mental note to put in a long distance call to Wally that evening and tweak his nose a bit. Maybe Dane could pretend he was the FBI—disguise his voice and interrogate Wally, as though he were investigating him. He chuckled a little at the idea. Then he realized that the young man had been talking and he hadn’t been listening.

“…so among other things, sir, we thought it best to monitor your official mail and hope you won’t mind.”

“What?” said Dane, raising his eyebrows.

“And your phone. You’ll hear a couple of clicks whenever you use it. We’re recording what’s said over it—though I assure you all records obtained will be kept in strictest confidence.”

* * * *

Dane acquiesced. The young man finally managed to make it clear that all this surveillance would have to be with Dane’s permission and the professor, annoyed though he was, didn’t want to appear uncooperative. He couldn’t resist, however, giving the young man the wrong hat when he went out and being delighted when the young man came back for the right one five minutes later. He was glad to see that something could fluster him.

But that wasn’t really enough. Professor Dane had been annoyed, and he needed to express himself further—by means of the joke, which was his art—in order to regain some measure of his equilibrium and self-respect.

Inspiration visited him as he was climbing the stairs to his bedroom at ten-thirty that evening. He stopped short, thought a minute, then began to chuckle. He turned and went downstairs again, stepped to the phone. Professor Dane lived alone and no one else would be able to share his planned joke—but this didn’t matter.

He had been privately enjoying his pranks ever since, as a frail boy with an unreasonable and dominating male parent, he had discovered that they were one way in which he could compete with hardier souls, at times even surpass them. Never mind the audience, he thought. The jest was the thing!

It was an hour earlier in Los Angeles and Dr. Wallace Fincher was at home. Dane disguised his voice—he did a lot of University Theater work and this kind of thing came to him easily. He listened first to Dr. Fincher’s arid, humorless, “Hello. Dr. Fincher speaking.” Then he heard the preliminary clicking, just as the FBI man had predicted.

“Thandor,” said Professor Dane, “this is Klon calling.”

“I beg your pardon?” said Doctor Fincher.

“The jig’s up,” said Professor Dane. “Captain Ixl in propul-cruiser nine-nine-seven-three will never be able to break through. The Earthlings have set up a close watch—they’re suspicious.”

“Who is this?” Doctor Fincher sounded startled. “Who the devil is this calling?”

Dane could barely keep his laughter from breaking into his voice. “Thandor, we can come to no conclusion but that the Terrestrials are definitely hostile. We should have expected that from their primitive stage of development. They have orders to shoot any of our propul-cruisers they can catch. I suggest that we withdraw all ships of the Franistan class immediately from their free orbits and send them on a standard Keplerian course to the home planet for further consultation.”

“Is this some kind of joke?” Fincher sounded as if he were almost panicky.

“Furthermore,” said Dane, “I recommend that we withdraw all agents from Earth. We can’t conceal our superior mental development and advanced technology much longer. Someone’s bound to catch on pretty soon. I was against this plan in the Galactic Council in the first place, you’ll remember. Well, farewell, Thandor! I’ll be seeing you soon in space!”

And Professor Dane hung up before he exploded with laughter.

* * * *

He laughed until the tears came to his eyes. He held his stomach with both hands. He was weak. He supported himself on the stair railing and for minutes was unable to take the first tread. With his lively scientist’s imagination he could picture the completely bewildered look on the young FBI man’s face when he listened to this conversation on the tape recorder or whatever it was they used.

He was certainly going to have to try to get that recording from them. Play it back for Fincher some time—Lordy, Fincher would have apoplexy every time he heard it!

He finally gained enough strength to climb the stairs. He went into his bedroom, still chuckling weakly, still wiping the tears from his eyes, stomach muscles still aching.

Dr. Wallace Fincher stood there by his bed. It was Fincher—the same stocky round-faced man with the steel-rimmed glasses he had always known. It was either Fincher or the darndest hallucination he had ever…

“I’m sorry, Lyman,” said Dr. Fincher in a kindly but impersonal voice. “You were getting a trifle too close. I’m afraid you have left me no choice.”

He pointed a little silvery tube at Professor Dane and there was a soft buzzing and the smell of ozone and Professor Dane was no longer in the room—or anywhere else.

Dr. Fincher sighed, adjusted his glasses and faded into the dimension that would take him back to Los Angeles and his interrupted work.

THE BIG BOUNCE, by Walter S. Tevis

“Let me show you something,” Farnsworth said. He set his near-empty drink—a Bacardi martini—on the mantel and waddled out of the room toward the basement.

I sat in my big leather chair, feeling very peaceful with the world, watching the fire. Whatever Farnsworth would have to show to-night would be far more entertaining than watching T.V.—my custom on other evenings. Farnsworth, with his four labs in the house and his very tricky mind, never failed to provide my best night of the week.

When he returned, after a moment, he had with him a small box, about three inches square. He held this carefully in one hand and stood by the fireplace dramatically—or as dramatically as a very small, very fat man with pink cheeks can stand by a fireplace of the sort that seems to demand a big man with tweeds, pipe and, perhaps, a saber wound.

Anyway, he held the box dramatically and he said, “Last week, I was playing around in the chem lab, trying to make a new kind of rubber eraser. Did quite well with the other drafting equipment, you know, especially the dimensional curve and the photosensitive ink. Well, I approached the job by trying for a material that would absorb graphite without abrading paper.”

I was a little disappointed with this; it sounded pretty tame. But I said, “How did it come out?”

He screwed his pudgy face up thoughtfully. “Synthesized the material, all right, and it seems to work, but the interesting thing is that it has a certain—ah—secondary property that would make it quite awkward to use. Interesting property, though. Unique, I am inclined to believe.”

This began to sound more like it. “And what property is that?” I poured myself a shot of straight rum from the bottle sitting on the table beside me. I did not like straight rum, but I preferred it to Farnsworth’s rather imaginative cocktails.

“I’ll show you, John,” he said. He opened the box and I could see that it was packed with some kind of batting. He fished in this and withdrew a gray ball about the size of a golfball and set the box on the mantel.

“And that’s the—eraser?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said. Then he squatted down, held the ball about a half-inch from the floor, dropped it.

It bounced, naturally enough. Then it bounced again. And again. Only this was not natural, for on the second bounce the ball went higher in the air than on the first, and on the third bounce higher still. After a half minute, my eyes were bugging out and the little ball was bouncing four feet in the air and going higher each time.

I grabbed my glass. “What the hell!” I said.

Farnsworth caught the ball in a pudgy hand and held it. He was smiling a little sheepishly. “Interesting effect, isn’t it?”

“Now wait a minute,” I said, beginning to think about it. “What’s the gimmick? What kind of motor do you have in that thing?”

His eyes were wide and a little hurt. “No gimmick, John. None at all. Just a very peculiar molecular structure.”

“Structure!” I said. “Bouncing balls just don’t pick up energy out of nowhere, I don’t care how their molecules are put together. And you don’t get energy out without putting energy in.”

“Oh,” he said, “that’s the really interesting thing. Of course you’re right; energy does go into the ball. Here, I’ll show you.”

He let the ball drop again and it began bouncing, higher and higher, until it was hitting the ceiling. Farnsworth reached out to catch it, but he fumbled and the thing glanced off his hand, hit the mantelpiece and zipped across the room. It banged into the far wall, richocheted, banked off three other walls, picking up speed all the time.

When it whizzed by me like a rifle bullet, I began to get worried, but it hit against one of the heavy draperies by the window and this damped its motion enough so that it fell to the floor.

IT started bouncing again immediately, but Farnsworth scrambled across the room and grabbed it. He was perspiring a little and he began instantly to transfer the ball from one hand to another and back again as if it were hot.

“Here,” he said, and handed it to me.

I almost dropped it.

“It’s like a ball of ice!” I said. “Have you been keeping it in the refrigerator?”

“No. As a matter of fact, it was at room temperature a few minutes ago.”

“Now wait a minute,” I said. “I only teach physics in high school, but I know better than that. Moving around in warm air doesn’t make anything cold except by evaporation.”

“Well, there’s your input and output, John,” he said. “The ball lost heat and took on motion. Simple conversion.”

My jaw must have dropped to my waist. “Do you mean that that little thing is converting heat to kinetic energy?”

“Apparently.”

“But that’s impossible!”

He was beginning to smile thoughtfully. The ball was not as cold now as it had been and I was holding it in my lap.

“A steam engine does it,” he said, “and a steam turbine. Of course, they’re not very efficient.”

“They work mechanically, too, and only because water expands when it turns to steam.”

“This seems to do it differently,” he said, sipping thoughtfully at his dark-brown martini. “I don’t know exactly how—maybe something piezo-electric about the way its molecules slide about. I ran some tests—measured its impact energy in foot pounds and compared that with the heat loss in BTUs. Seemed to be about 98 per cent efficient, as close as I could tell. Apparently it converts heat into bounce very well. Interesting, isn’t it?”

“Interesting?” I almost came flying out of my chair. My mind was beginning to spin like crazy. “If you’re not pulling my leg with this thing, Farnsworth, you’ve got something by the tail there that’s just a little bit bigger than the discovery of fire.”

He blushed modestly. “I’d rather thought that myself,” he admitted.

“Good Lord, look at the heat that’s available!” I said, getting really excited now.

Farnsworth was still smiling, very pleased with himself. “I suppose you could put this thing in a box, with convection fins, and let it bounce around inside—”

“I’m way ahead of you,” I said. “But that wouldn’t work. All your kinetic energy would go right back to heat, on impact—and eventually that little ball would build up enough speed to blast its way through any box you could build.”

“Then how would you work it?”

“Well,” I said, choking down the rest of my rum, “you’d seal the ball in a big steel cylinder, attach the cylinder to a crankshaft and flywheel, give the thing a shake to start the ball bouncing back and forth, and let it run like a gasoline engine or something. It would get all the heat it needed from the air in a normal room. Mount the apparatus in your house and it would pump your water, operate a generator and keep you cool at the same time!”

I sat down again, shakily, and began pouring myself another drink.

Farnsworth had taken the ball from me and was carefully putting it back in its padded box. He was visibly showing excitement, too; I could see that his cheeks were ruddier and his eyes even brighter than normal. “But what if you want the cooling and don’t have any work to be done?”

“Simple,” I said. “You just let the machine turn a flywheel or lift weights and drop them, or something like that, outside your house. You have an air intake inside. And if, in the winter, you don’t want to lose heat, you just mount the thing in an outside building, attach it to your generator and use the power to do whatever you want—heat your house, say. There’s plenty of heat in the outside air even in December.”

“John,” said Farnsworth, “you are very ingenious. It might work.”

“Of course it’ll work.” Pictures were beginning to light up in my head. “And don’t you realize that this is the answer to the solar power problem? Why, mirrors and selenium are, at best, ten per cent efficient! Think of big pumping stations on the Sahara! All that heat, all that need for power, for irrigation!” I paused a moment for effect. “Farnsworth, this can change the very shape of the Earth!”

Farnsworth seemed to be lost in thought. Finally he looked at me strangely and said, “Perhaps we had better try to build a model.”

* * * *

I was so excited by the thing that I couldn’t sleep that night. I kept dreaming of power stations, ocean liners, even automobiles, being operated by balls bouncing back and forth in cylinders.

I even worked out a spaceship in my mind, a bullet-shaped affair with a huge rubber ball on its end, gyroscopes to keep it oriented properly, the ball serving as solution to that biggest of missile-engineering problems, excess heat. You’d build a huge concrete launching field, supported all the way down to bedrock, hop in the ship and start bouncing. Of course it would be kind of a rough ride.…

In the morning, I called my superintendent and told him to get a substitute for the rest of the week; I was going to be busy.

Then I started working in the machine shop in Farnsworth’s basement, trying to turn out a working model of a device that, by means of a crankshaft, oleo dampers and a reciprocating cylinder, would pick up some of that random kinetic energy from the bouncing ball and do something useful with it, like turning a drive shaft. I was just working out a convection-and-air pump system for circulating hot air around the ball when Farnsworth came in.

He had tucked carefully under his arm a sphere of about the size of a basketball and, if he had made it to my specifications, weighing thirty-five pounds. He had a worried frown on his forehead.

“It looks good,” I said. “What’s the trouble?”

“There seems to be a slight hitch,” he said. “I’ve been testing for conductivity. It seems to be quite low.”

“That’s what I’m working on now. It’s just a mechanical problem of pumping enough warm air back to the ball. We can do it with no more than a twenty per cent efficiency loss. In an engine, that’s nothing.”

“Maybe you’re right. But this material conducts heat even less than rubber does.”

“The little ball yesterday didn’t seem to have any trouble,” I said.

“Naturally not. It had had plenty of time to warm up before I started it. And its mass-surface area relationship was pretty low—the larger you make a sphere, of course, the more mass inside in proportion to the outside area.”

“You’re right, but I think we can whip it. We may have to honeycomb the ball and have part of the work the machine does operate a big hot air pump; but we can work it out.”

* * * *

All that day, I worked with lathe, milling machine and hacksaw. After clamping the new big ball securely to a workbench, Farnsworth pitched in to help me. But we weren’t able to finish by nightfall and Farnsworth turned his spare bedroom over to me for the night. I was too tired to go home.

And too tired to sleep soundly, too. Farnsworth lived on the edge of San Francisco, by a big truck by-pass, and almost all night I wrestled with the pillow and sheets, listening half-consciously to those heavy trucks rumbling by, and in my mind, always, that little gray ball, bouncing and bouncing and bouncing.…

At daybreak, I came abruptly fully awake with the sound of crashing echoing in my ears, a battering sound that seemed to come from the basement. I grabbed my coat and pants, rushed out of the room, almost knocked over Farnsworth, who was struggling to get his shoes on out in the hall, and we scrambled down the two flights of stairs together.

The place was a chaos, battered and bashed equipment everywhere, and on the floor, overturned against the far wall, the table that the ball had been clamped to. The ball itself was gone.

I had not been fully asleep all night, and the sight of that mess, and what it meant, jolted me immediately awake. Something, probably a heavy truck, had started a tiny oscillation in that ball. And the ball had been heavy enough to start the table bouncing with it until, by dancing that table around the room, it had literally torn the clamp off and shaken itself free. What had happened afterward was obvious, with the ball building up velocity with every successive bounce.

But where was the ball now?

Suddenly Farnsworth cried out hoarsely, “Look!” and I followed his outstretched, pudgy finger to where, at one side of the basement, a window had been broken open—a small window, but plenty big enough for something the size of a basketball to crash through it.

There was a little weak light coming from outdoors. And then I saw the ball. It was in Farnsworth’s back yard, bouncing a little sluggishly on the grass. The grass would damp it, hold it back, until we could get to it. Unless.…

I took off up the basement steps like a streak. Just beyond the back yard, I had caught a glimpse of something that frightened me. A few yards from where I had seen the ball was the edge of the big six-lane highway, a broad ribbon of smooth, hard concrete.

I got through the house to the back porch, rushed out and was in the back yard just in time to see the ball take its first bounce onto the concrete. I watched it, fascinated, when it hit—after the soft, energy absorbing turf, the concrete was like a springboard. Immediately the ball flew high in the air. I was running across the yard toward it, praying under my breath, Fall on that grass next time.

It hit before I got to it, and right on the concrete again, and this time I saw it go straight up at least fifty feet.

My mind was suddenly full of thoughts of dragging mattresses from the house, or making a net or something to stop that hurtling thirty-five pounds; but I stood where I was, unable to move, and saw it come down again on the highway. It went up a hundred feet. And down again on the concrete, about fifteen feet further down the road. In the direction of the city.

That time it was two hundred feet, and when it hit again, it made a thud that you could have heard for a quarter of a mile. I could practically see it flatten out on the road before it took off upward again, at twice the speed it had hit at.

Suddenly generating an idea, I whirled and ran back to Farnsworth’s house. He was standing in the yard now, shivering from the morning air, looking at me like a little lost and badly scared child.

“Where are your car keys?” I almost shouted at him.

“In my pocket.”

“Come on!”

I took him by the arm and half dragged him to the carport. I got the keys from him, started the car, and by mangling about seven traffic laws and three prize rosebushes, managed to get on the highway, facing in the direction that the ball was heading.

“Look,” I said, trying to drive down the road and search for the ball at the same time. “It’s risky, but if I can get the car under it and we can hop out in time, it should crash through the roof. That ought to slow it down enough for us to nab it.”

“But—what about my car?” Farnsworth bleated.

“What about that first building—or first person—it hits in San Francisco?”

“Oh,” he said. “Hadn’t thought of that.”

I slowed the car and stuck my head out the window. It was lighter now, but no sign of the ball. “If it happens to get to town—any town, for that matter—it’ll be falling from about ten or twenty miles. Or forty.”

“Maybe it’ll go high enough first so that it’ll burn. Like a meteor.”

“No chance,” I said. “Built-in cooling system, remember?”

Farnsworth formed his mouth into an “Oh” and exactly at that moment there was a resounding thump and I saw the ball hit in a field, maybe twenty yards from the edge of the road, and take off again. This time it didn’t seem to double its velocity, and I figured the ground was soft enough to hold it back—but it wasn’t slowing down either, not with a bounce factor of better than two to one.

Without watching for it to go up, I drove as quickly as I could off the road and over—carrying part of a wire fence with me—to where it had hit. There was no mistaking it; there was a depression about three feet deep, like a small crater.

I jumped out of the car and stared up. It took me a few seconds to spot it, over my head. One side caught by the pale and slanting morning sunlight, it was only a bright diminishing speck.

The car motor was running and I waited until the ball disappeared for a moment and then reappeared. I watched for another couple of seconds until I felt I could make a decent guess on its direction, hollered at Farnsworth to get out of the car—it had just occurred to me that there was no use risking his life, too—dove in and drove a hundred yards or so to the spot I had anticipated.

I stuck my head out the window and up. The ball was the size of an egg now. I adjusted the car’s position, jumped out and ran for my life.

It hit instantly after—about sixty feet from the car. And at the same time, it occurred to me that what I was trying to do was completely impossible. Better to hope that the ball hit a pond, or bounced out to sea, or landed in a sand dune. All we could do would be to follow, and if it ever was damped down enough, grab it.

It had hit soft ground and didn’t double its height that time, but it had still gone higher. It was out of sight for almost a lifelong minute.

And then—incredibly rotten luck—it came down, with an ear-shattering thwack, on the concrete highway again. I had seen it hit, and instantly afterward I saw a crack as wide as a finger open along the entire width of the road. And the ball had flown back up like a rocket.

My God, I was thinking, now it means business. And on the next bounce.…

It seemed like an incredibly long time that we craned our necks, Farnsworth and I, watching for it to reappear in the sky. And when it finally did, we could hardly follow it. It whistled like a bomb and we saw the gray streak come plummeting to Earth almost a quarter of a mile away from where we were standing.

But we didn’t see it go back up again.

For a moment, we stared at each other silently. Then Farnsworth almost whispered, “Perhaps it’s landed in a pond.”

“Or in the world’s biggest cow-pile,” I said. “Come on!”

We could have met our deaths by rock salt and buckshot that night, if the farmer who owned that field had been home. We tore up everything we came to getting across it—including cabbages and rhubarb. But we had to search for ten minutes, and even then we didn’t find the ball.

What we found was a hole in the ground that could have been a small-scale meteor crater. It was a good twenty feet deep. But at the bottom, no ball.

I stared wildly at it for a full minute before I focused my eyes enough to see, at the bottom, a thousand little gray fragments.

And immediately it came to both of us at the same time. A poor conductor, the ball had used up all its available heat on that final impact. Like a golfball that has been dipped in liquid air and dropped, it had smashed into thin splinters.

The hole had sloping sides and I scrambled down in it and picked up one of the pieces, using my handkerchief, folded—there was no telling just how cold it would be.

It was the stuff, all right. And colder than an icicle.

I climbed out. “Let’s go home,” I said.

Farnsworth looked at me thoughtfully. Then he sort of cocked his head to one side and asked, “What do you suppose will happen when those pieces thaw?”

I stared at him. I began to think of a thousand tiny slivers whizzing around erratically, richocheting off buildings, in downtown San Francisco and in twenty counties, and no matter what they hit, moving and accelerating as long as there was any heat in the air to give them energy.

And then I saw a tool shed, on the other side of the pasture from us.

But Farnsworth was ahead of me, waddling along, puffing. He got the shovels out and handed one to me.

We didn’t say a word, neither of us, for hours. It takes a long time to fill a hole twenty feet deep—especially when you’re shoveling very, very carefully and packing down the dirt very, very hard.

THE RISK PROFESSION, by Donald E. Westlake

Mister Henderson called me into his office my third day back in Tangiers. That was a day and a half later than I’d expected. Roving claims investigators for Tangiers Mutual Insurance Corporation don’t usually get to spend more than thirty-six consecutive hours at home base.

Henderson was jovial but stern. That meant he was happy with the job I’d just completed, and that he was pretty sure I’d find some crooked shenanigans on this next assignment. That didn’t please me. I’m basically a plain-living type, and I hate complications. I almost wished for a second there that I was back on Fire and Theft in Greater New York. But I knew better than that. As a roving claim investigator, I avoided the more stultifying paperwork inherent in this line of work and had the additional luxury of an expense account nobody ever questioned.

It made working for a living almost worthwhile.

When I was settled in the chair beside his desk, Henderson said, “That was good work you did on Luna, Ged. Saved the company a pretty pence.”

I smiled modestly and said, “Thank you, sir.” And reflected to myself for the thousandth time that the company could do worse than split that saving with the guy who’d made it possible. Me, in other words.

“Got a tricky one this time, Ged,” said my boss. He had done his back-patting, now we got down to business. He peered keenly at me, or at least as keenly as a round-faced tiny-eyed fat man can peer. “What do you know about the Risk Profession Retirement Plan?” he asked me.

“I’ve heard of it,” I said truthfully. “That’s about all.”

He nodded. “Most of the policies are sold off-planet, of course. It’s a form of insurance for non-insurables. Spaceship crews, asteroid prospectors, people like that.”

“I see,” I said, unhappily. I knew right away this meant I was going to have to go off-Earth again. I’m a one-gee boy all the way. Gravity changes get me in the solar plexus. I get g-sick at the drop of an elevator.

“Here’s the way it works,” he went on, either not noticing my sad face or choosing to ignore it. “The client pays a monthly premium. He can be as far ahead or as far behind in his payments as he wants—the policy has no lapse clause—just so he’s all paid up by the Target Date. The Target Date is a retirement age, forty-five or above, chosen by the client himself. After the Target Date, he stops paying premiums, and we begin to pay him a monthly retirement check, the amount determined by the amount paid into the policy, his age at retiring, and so on. Clear?”

I nodded, looking for the gimmick that made this a paying proposition for good old Tangiers Mutual.

“The Double R-P—that’s what we call it around the office here—assures the client that he won’t be reduced to panhandling in his old age, should his other retirement plans fall through. For Belt prospectors, of course, this means the big strike, which maybe one in a hundred find. For the man who never does make that big strike, this is something to fall back on. He can come home to Earth and retire, with a guaranteed income for the rest of his life.”

I nodded again, like a good company man.

“Of course,” said Henderson, emphasizing this point with an upraised chubby finger, “these men are still uninsurables. This is a retirement plan only, not an insurance policy. There is no beneficiary other than the client himself.”

And there was the gimmick. I knew a little something of the actuarial statistics concerning uninsurables, particularly Belt prospectors. Not many of them lived to be forty-five, and the few who would survive the Belt and come home to collect the retirement wouldn’t last more than a year or two. A man who’s spent the last twenty or thirty years on low-gee asteroids just shrivels up after a while when he tries to live on Earth.

It needed a company like Tangiers Mutual to dream up a racket like that. The term “uninsurables” to most insurance companies means those people whose jobs or habitats make them too likely as prospects for obituaries. To Tangiers Mutual, uninsurables are people who have money the company can’t get at.

“Now,” said Henderson importantly, “we come to the problem at hand.” He ruffled his up-to-now-neat In basket and finally found the folder he wanted. He studied the blank exterior of this folder for a few seconds, pursing his lips at it, and said, “One of our clients under the Double R-P was a man named Jafe McCann.”

“Was?” I echoed.

He squinted at me, then nodded at my sharpness. “That’s right, he’s dead.” He sighed heavily and tapped the folder with all those pudgy fingers. “Normally,” he said, “that would be the end of it. File closed. However, this time there are complications.”

Naturally. Otherwise, he wouldn’t be telling me about it. But Henderson couldn’t be rushed, and I knew it. I kept the alert look on my face and thought of other things, while waiting for him to get to the point.

“Two weeks after Jafe McCann’s death,” Henderson said, “we received a cash-return form on his policy.”

“A cash-return form?” I’d never heard of such a thing. It didn’t sound like anything Tangiers Mutual would have anything to do with. We never return cash.

“It’s something special in this case,” he explained. “You see, this isn’t an insurance policy, it’s a retirement plan, and the client can withdraw from the retirement plan at any time, and have seventy-five per cent of his paid-up premiums returned to him. It’s, uh, the law in plans such as this.”

“Oh,” I said. That explained it. A law that had snuck through the World Finance Code Commission while the insurance lobby wasn’t looking.

“But you see the point,” said Henderson. “This cash-return form arrived two weeks after the client’s death.”

“You said there weren’t any beneficiaries,” I pointed out.

“Of course. But the form was sent in by the man’s partner, one Ab Karpin. McCann left a hand-written will bequeathing all his possessions to Karpin. Since, according to Karpin, this was done before McCann’s death, the premium money cannot be considered part of the policy, but as part of McCann’s cash-on-hand. And Karpin wants it.”

“It can’t be that much, can it?” I asked. I was trying my best to point out to him that the company would spend more than it would save if it sent me all the way out to the asteroids, a prospect I could feel coming and one which I wasn’t ready to cry hosannah over.

“McCann died,” Henderson said ponderously, “at the age of fifty-six. He had set his retirement age at sixty. He took out the policy at the age of thirty-four, with monthly payments of fifty credits. Figure it out for yourself.”

I did—in my head—and came up with a figure of thirteen thousand and two hundred credits. Seventy-five per cent of that would be nine thousand and nine hundred credits. Call it ten thousand credits even.

I had to admit it. It was worth the trip.

“I see,” I said sadly.

“Now,” said Henderson, “the conditions—the circumstances—of McCann’s death are somewhat suspicious. And so is the cash-return form itself.”

“There’s a chance it’s a forgery?”

“One would think so,” he said. “But our handwriting experts have worn themselves out with that form, comparing it with every other single scrap of McCann’s writing they can find. And their conclusion is that not only is it genuinely McCann’s handwriting, but it is McCann’s handwriting at age fifty-six.”

“So McCann must have written it,” I said. “Under duress, do you think?”

“I have no idea,” said Henderson complacently. “That’s what you’re supposed to find out. Oh, there’s just one more thing.”

I did my best to make my ears perk.

“I told you that McCann’s death occurred under somewhat suspicious circumstances.”

“Yes,” I agreed, “you did.”

“McCann and Karpin,” he said, “have been partners—unincorporated, of course—for the last fifteen years. They had found small rare-metal deposits now and again, but they had never found that one big strike all the Belt prospectors waste their lives looking for. Not until the day before McCann died.”

“Ah hah,” I said. “Then they found the big strike.”

“Exactly.”

“And McCann’s death?”

“Accidental.”

“Sure,” I said. “What proof have we got?”

“None. The body is lost in space. And law is few and far between that far out.”

“So all we’ve got is this guy Karpin’s word for how McCann died, is that it?”

“That’s all we have. So far.”

“Sure. And now you want me to go on out there and find out what’s cooking, and see if I can maybe save the company ten thousand credits.”

“Exactly,” said Henderson.

* * * *

The copter took me to the spaceport west of Cairo, and there I boarded the good ship Demeter for Luna City and points Out. I loaded up on g-sickness pills and they worked fine. I was sick as a dog.

By the time we got to Atronics City, my insides had grown resigned to their fate. As long as I didn’t try to eat, my stomach would leave me alone.

Atronics City was about as depressing as a Turkish bath with all the lights on. It stood on a chunk of rock a couple of miles thick, and it looked like nothing more in this world than a welder’s practice range.

From the outside, Atronics City is just a derby-shaped dome of nickel-iron, black and kind of dirty-looking. I suppose a transparent dome would have been more fun, but the builders of the company cities in the asteroids were businessmen, and they weren’t concerned with having fun. There’s nothing to look at outside the dome but chunks of rock and the blackness of space anyway, and you’ve got all this cheap iron floating around in the vicinity, and all a dome’s supposed to do is keep the air in. Besides, though the Belt isn’t as crowded as a lot of people think, there is quite a lot of debris rushing here and there, bumping into things, and a transparent dome would just get all scratched up, not to mention punctured.

From the inside, Atronics City is even jollier. There’s the top level, directly under the dome, which is mainly parking area for scooters and tuggers of various kinds, plus the office shacks of the Assayer’s Office, the Entry Authority, the Industry Troopers and so on. The next three levels have all been burned into the bowels of the planetoid.

Level two is the Atronics plant, and a noisy plant it is. Level three is the shopping and entertainment area—grocery stores and clothing stores and movie theaters and bars—and level four is housing, two rooms and kitchen for the unmarried, four rooms and kitchen plus one room for each child for the married.

All of these levels have one thing in common. Square corners, painted olive drab. The total effect of the place is suffocating. You feel like you’re stuck in the middle of a stack of packing crates.

Most of the people living in Atronics City work, of course, for International Atronics, Incorporated. The rest of them work in the service occupations—running the bars and grocery stores and so on—that keep the company employees alive and relatively happy.

Wages come high in the places like Atronics City. Why not, the raw materials come practically for free. And as for working conditions, well, take a for instance. How do you make a vacuum tube? You fiddle with the innards and surround it all with glass. And how do you get the air out? No problem, boy, there wasn’t any air in there to begin with.

At any rate, there I was at Atronics City. That was as far as Demeter would take me. Now, while the ship went on to Ludlum City and Chemisant City and the other asteroid business towns, my two suitcases and I dribbled down the elevator to my hostelry on level four.

Have you ever taken an elevator ride when the gravity is practically non-existent? Well, don’t. You see, the elevator manages to sink faster than you do. It isn’t being lowered down to level four, it’s being pulled down.

What this means is that the suitcases have to be lashed down with the straps provided, and you and the operator have to hold on tight to the hand-grips placed here and there around the wall. Otherwise, you’d clonk your head on the ceiling.

But we got to level four at last, and off I went with my suitcases and the operator’s directions. The suitcases weighed about half an ounce each out here, and I felt as though I weighed the same. Every time I raised a foot, I was sure I was about to go sailing into a wall. Local citizens eased by me, their feet occasionally touching the iron pavement as they soared along, and I gave them all dirty looks.

Level four was nothing but walls and windows. The iron floor went among these walls and windows in a straight straight line, bisecting other “streets” at perfect right angles, and the iron ceiling sixteen feet up was lined with a double row of fluorescent tubes. I was beginning to feel claustrophobic already.

The Chalmers Hotel—named for an Atronics vice-president—had received my advance registration, which was nice. I was shown to a second-floor room—nothing on level four had more than two stories—and was left to unpack my suitcases as best I may.

I had decided to spend a day or two at Atronics City before taking a scooter out to Ab Karpin’s claim. Atronics City had been Karpin’s and McCann’s home base. All of McCann’s premium payments had been mailed from here, and the normal mailing address for both of them was GPO Atronics City.

I wanted to know as much as possible about Ab Karpin before I went out to see him. And Atronics City seemed like the best place to get my information.

But not today. Today, my stomach was very unhappy, and my head was on sympathy strike. Today, I was going to spend my time exclusively in bed, trying not to float up to the ceiling.

* * * *

The Mapping & Registry Office, it seemed to me the next day, was the best place to start. This was where prospectors filed their claims, but it was a lot more than that. The waiting room of M&R was the unofficial club of the asteroid prospectors. This is where they met with one another, talked together about the things that prospectors discuss, and made and dissolved their transient partnerships.

In this way, Karpin and McCann were unusual. They had maintained their partnership for fifteen years. That was about sixty times longer than most such arrangements lasted.

Searching the asteroid chunks for rare and valuable metals is basically pretty lonely work, and it’s inevitable that the prospectors will every once in a while get hungry for human company and decide to try a team operation. But, at the same time, work like this attracts people who don’t get along very well with human company. So the partnerships come and go, and the hatreds flare and are forgotten, and the normal prospecting team lasts an average of three months.

At any rate, it was to the Mapping & Registry Office that I went first. And, since that office was up on the first level, I went by elevator.

Riding up in that elevator was a heck of a lot more fun than riding down. The elevator whipped up like mad, the floor pressed against the soles of my feet, and it felt almost like good old Earth for a second or two there. But then the elevator stopped, and I held on tight to the hand-grips to keep from shooting through the top of the blasted thing.

The operator—a phlegmatic sort—gave me directions to the M&R, and off I went, still trying to figure out how to sail along as gracefully as the locals.

The Mapping & Registry Office occupied a good-sized shack over near the dome wall, next to the entry lock. I pushed open the door and went on in.

The waiting room was cozy and surprisingly large, large enough to comfortably hold the six maroon leather sofas scattered here and there on the pale green carpet, flanked by bronze ashtray stands. There were only six prospectors here at the moment, chatting together in two groups of three, and they all looked alike. Grizzled, ageless, watery-eyed, their clothing clean but baggy. I passed them and went on to the desk at the far end, behind which sat a young man in official gray, slowly turning the crank of a microfilm reader.

He looked up at my approach. I flashed my company identification and asked to speak to the manager. He went away, came back, and ushered me into an office which managed to be Spartan and sumptuous at the same time. The walls had been plastic-painted in textured brown, the iron floor had been lushly carpeted in gray, and the desk had been covered with a simulated wood coating.

The manager—a man named Teaking—went well with the office. His face and hands were spare and lean, but his uniform was immaculate, covered with every curlicue the regulations allowed. He welcomed me politely, but curiously, and I said, “I wonder if you know a prospector named Ab Karpin?”

“Karpin? Of course. He and old Jafe McCann—pity about McCann. I hear he got killed.”

“Yes, he did.”

“And that’s what you’re here for, eh?” He nodded sagely. “I didn’t know the Belt boys could get insurance,” he said.

“It isn’t exactly that,” I said. “This concerns a retirement plan, and—well, the details don’t matter.” Which, I hoped, would end his curiosity in that line. “I was hoping you could give me some background on Karpin. And on McCann, too, for that matter.”

He grinned a bit. “You saw the men sitting outside?”

I nodded.

“Then you’ve seen Karpin and McCann. Exactly the same. It doesn’t matter if a man’s thirty or sixty or what. It doesn’t matter what he was like before he came out here. If he’s been here a few years, he looks exactly like the bunch you saw outside there.”

“That’s appearance,” I said. “What I was looking for was personality.”

“Same thing,” he said. “All of them. Close-mouthed, anti-social, fiercely independent, incurably romantic, always convinced that the big strike is just a piece of rock away. McCann, now, he was a bit more realistic than most. He’d be the one I’d expect to take out a retirement policy. A real pence-pincher, that one, though I shouldn’t say it as he’s dead. But that’s the way he was. Brighter than most Belt boys when it came to money matters. I’ve seen him haggle over a new piece of equipment for their scooter, or some repair work, or some such thing, and he was a wonder to watch.”

“And Karpin?” I asked him.

“A prospector,” he said, as though that answered my question. “Same as everybody else. Not as sharp as McCann when it came to money. That’s why all the money stuff in the partnership was handled by McCann. But Karpin was one of the sharpest boys in the business when it came to mineralogy. He knew rocks you and I never heard of, and most times he knew them by sight. Almost all of the Belt boys are college grads—you’ve got to know what you’re looking for out here and what it looks like when you’ve found it—but Karpin has practically all of them beat. He’s sharp.”

“Sounds like a good team,” I said.

“I guess that’s why they stayed together so long,” he said. “They complemented each other.” He leaned forward, the inevitable prelude to a confidential remark. “I’ll tell you something off the record, Mister,” he said. “Those two were smarter than they knew. Their partnership was never legalized, it was never anything more than a piece of paper. And there’s a bunch of fellas around here mighty unhappy about that today. Jafe McCann is the one who handled all the money matters, like I said. He’s got IOU’s all over town.”

“And they can’t collect from Karpin?”

He nodded. “Jafe McCann died just a bit too soon. He was sharp and cheap, but he was honest. If he’d lived, he would have repaid all his debts, I’m sure of it. And if this strike they made is as good as I hear, he would have been able to repay them with no trouble at all.”

I nodded, somewhat impatiently. I had the feeling by now that I was talking to a man who was one of those who had a Jafe McCann IOU in his pocket. “How long has it been since you’ve seen Karpin?” I asked him, wondering what Karpin’s attitude and expression was now that his partner was dead.

“Oh, Lord, not for a couple of months,” he said. “Not since they went out together the last time and made that strike.”

“Didn’t Karpin come in to make his claim?”

“Not here. Over to Chemisant City. That was the nearest M&R to the strike.”

“Oh.” That was a pity. I would have liked to have known if there had been a change of any kind in Karpin since his partner’s death. “I’ll tell you what the situation is,” I said, with a false air of truthfulness. “We have some misgivings about McCann’s death. Not suspicions, exactly, just misgivings. The timing is what bothers us.”

“You mean, because it happened just after the strike?”

“That’s it,” I answered frankly.

He shook his head. “I wouldn’t get too excited about that, if I were you,” he said. “It wouldn’t be the first time it’s happened. A man makes the big strike after all, and he gets so excited he forgets himself for a minute and gets careless. And you only have to be careless once out here.”

“That may be it,” I said. I got to my feet, knowing I’d picked up all there was from this man. “Thanks a lot for your cooperation,” I said.

“Any time,” he said. He stood and shook hands with me.

I went back out through the chatting prospectors and crossed the echoing cavern that was level one, aiming to rent myself a scooter.

* * * *

I don’t like rockets. They’re noisy as the dickens, they steer hard and drive erratically, and you can never carry what I would consider a safe emergency excess of fuel. Nothing like the big steady-g interplanetary liners. On those I feel almost human.

The appearance of the scooter I was shown at the rental agency didn’t do much to raise my opinion of this mode of transportation. The thing was a good ten years old, the paint scraped and scratched all over its egg-shaped, originally green-colored body, and the windshield—a silly term, really, for the front window of a craft that spends most of its time out where there isn’t any wind—was scratched and pockmarked to the point of translucency by years of exposure to the asteroidal dust.

The rental agent was a sharp-nosed thin-faced type who displayed this refugee from a melting vat without a blush, and still didn’t blush when he told me the charges. Twenty credits a day, plus fuel.

I paid without a murmur—it was the company’s money, not mine—and paid an additional ten credits for the rental of a suit to go with it. I worked my way awkwardly into the suit, and clambered into the driver’s seat of the relic. I attached the suit to the ship in all the necessary places, and the agent closed and spun the door.

Most of the black paint had worn off the handles of the controls, and insulation peeked through rips in the plastic siding here and there. I wondered if the thing had any slow leaks and supposed fatalistically that it had. The agent waved at me, stony-faced, the conveyor belt trundled me outside the dome, and I kicked the weary rocket into life.

The scooter had a tendency to roll to the right. If I hadn’t kept fighting it back, it would have soon worked up a dandy little spin. I was spending so much time juggling with the controls that I practically missed a couple of my beacon rocks, and that would have been just too bad. If I’d gotten off the course I had carefully outlined for myself, I’d never have found my bearings again, and I would have just floated around amid the scenery until some passerby took pity and towed me back home.

But I managed to avoid getting lost, which surprised me, and after four nerve-wracking hours I finally spotted the yellow-painted X of a registered claim on a half-mile-thick chunk of rock dead ahead. As I got closer, I spied a scooter parked near the X, and beside it an inflated portable dome. The scooter was somewhat larger than mine, but no newer and probably even less safe. The dome was varicolored, from repeated patching.

This would be the claim, and this is where I would find Karpin, sitting on his property while waiting for the sale to go through. Prospectors like Karpin are free-lance men, working for no particular company. They register their claims in their own names, and then sell the rights to whichever company shows up first with the most attractive offer. There’s a lot of paperwork to such a sale, and it’s all handled by the company. While waiting, the smart prospector sits on his claim and makes sure nobody chips off a part of it for himself, a stunt that still happens now and again. It doesn’t take too much concentrated explosive to make two rocks out of one rock, and a man’s claim is only the rock with his X on it.

I set the scooter down next to the other one, and flicked the toggle for the air pumps, then put on the fishbowl and went about unattaching the suit from the ship. When the red light flashed on and off, I spun the door, opened it, and stepped out onto the rock, moving very cautiously. It isn’t that I don’t believe the magnets in the boot soles will work, it’s just that I know for a fact that they won’t work if I happen to raise both feet at the same time.

I clumped across the crude X to Karpin’s dome. The dome had no viewports at all, so I wasn’t sure Karpin was aware of my presence. I rapped my metal glove on the metal outer door of the lock, and then I was sure.

But it took him long enough to open up. I had just about decided he’d joined his partner in the long sleep when the door cracked open an inch. I pushed it open and stepped into the lock, ducking my head. The door was only five feet high, and just as wide as the lock itself, three feet. The other dimensions of the lock were: height, six feet six; width, one foot. Not exactly room to dance in.

When the red light high on the left-hand wall clicked off, I rapped on the inner door. It promptly opened, I stepped through and removed the fishbowl.

Karpin stood in the middle of the room, a small revolver in his hand. “Shut the door,” he said.

I obeyed, moving slowly. I didn’t want that gun to go off by mistake.

“Who are you?” Karpin demanded. The M&R man had been right. Ab Karpin was a dead ringer for all those other prospectors I’d seen back at Atronics City. Short and skinny and grizzled and ageless. He could have been forty, and he could have been ninety, but he was probably somewhere the other side of fifty. His hair was black and limp and thinning, ruffled in little wisps across his wrinkled pate. His forehead and cheeks were lined like a plowed field, and were much the same color. His eyes were wide apart and small, so deep-set beneath shaggy brows that they seemed black. His mouth was thin, almost lipless. The hand holding the revolver was nothing but bones and blue veins covered with taut skin.

He was wearing a dirty undershirt and an old pair of trousers that had been cut off raggedly just above his knobby knees. Faded slippers were on his feet. He had good reason for dressing that way, the temperature inside the dome must have been nearly ninety degrees. The dome wasn’t reflecting away the sun’s heat as well as it had when it was young.

I looked at Karpin, and despite the revolver and the tense expression on his face, he was the least dangerous-looking man I’d ever run across. All at once, the idea that this anti-social old geezer had the drive or the imagination to murder his partner seemed ridiculous.

Apparently, I spent too much time looking him over, because he said again, “Who are you?” And this time he motioned impatiently with the revolver.

“Stanton,” I told him. “Ged Stanton, Tangiers Mutual Insurance. I have identification, but it’s in my pants pocket, down inside this suit.”

“Get it,” he said. “And move slow.”

“Right you are.”

I moved slow, as per directions, and peeled out of the suit, then reached into my trouser pocket and took out my ID clip. I flipped it open and showed him the card bearing my signature and picture and right thumb-print and the name of the company I represented, and he nodded, satisfied, and tossed the revolver over onto his bed. “I got to be careful,” he said. “I got a big claim here.”

“I know that,” I told him. “Congratulations for it.”

“Thanks,” he said, but he still looked peevish. “You’re here about Jafe’s insurance, right?”

“That I am.”

“Don’t want to pay up, I suppose. That doesn’t surprise me.”

Blunt old men irritate me. “Well,” I said, “we do have to investigate.”

“Sure,” he said. “You want some coffee?”

“Thank you.”

“You can sit in that chair there. That was Jafe’s.”

I settled gingerly in the cloth-and-plastic foldaway chair he’d pointed at, and he went over to the kitchen area of the dome to start coffee. I took the opportunity to look the dome over. It was the first portable dome I’d ever been inside.

It was all one room, roughly circular, with a diameter of about fifteen feet. The sides went straight up for the first seven feet, then curved gradually inward to form the roof. At the center of the dome, the ceiling was about twelve feet high.

The floor of the room was simply the asteroidal rock surface, not completely level and smooth. There were two chairs and a table to the right of the entry lock, two foldaway cots around the wall beyond them, the kitchen area next and a cluttered storage area around on the other side. There was a heater standing alone in the center of the room, but it certainly wasn’t needed now. Sweat was already trickling down the back of my neck and down my forehead into my eyebrows. I peeled off my shirt and used it to wipe sweat from my face. “Warm in here,” I said.

“You get used to it,” he muttered, which I found hard to believe.

He brought over the coffee, and I tasted it. It was rotten, as bitter as this old hermit’s soul, but I said, “Good coffee. Thanks a lot.”

“I like it strong,” he said.

I looked around at the room again. “All the comforts of home, eh? Pretty ingenious arrangement.”

“Sure,” he said sourly. “How about getting to the point, Mister?”

There’s only one way to handle a blunt old man. Be blunt right back. “I’ll tell you how it is,” I said. “The company isn’t accusing you of anything, but it has to be sure everything’s on the up and up before it pays out any ten thousand credits. And your partner just happening to fill out that cash-return form just before he died—well, you’ve got to admit it is a funny kind of coincidence.”

“How so?” He slurped coffee, and glowered at me over the cup. “We made this strike here,” he said. “We knew it was the big one. Jafe had that insurance policy of his in case he never did make the big strike. As soon as we knew this was the big one, he said, ‘I guess I don’t need that retirement now,’ and sat right down and wrote out the cash-return. Then we opened a bottle of liquor and celebrated, and he got himself killed.”

The way Karpin said it, it sounded smooth and natural. Too smooth and natural. “How did this accident happen anyway?” I asked him.

“I’m not one hundred per cent sure of that myself,” he said. “I was pretty well drunk myself by that time. But he put on his suit and said he was going out to paint the X. He was falling all over himself, and I tried to tell him it could wait till we’d had some sleep, but he wouldn’t pay any attention to me.”

“So he went out,” I said.

He nodded. “He went out first. After a couple minutes, I got lonesome in here, so I suited up and went out after him. It happened just as I was going out the lock, and I just barely got a glimpse of what happened.”

* * * *

He attacked the coffee again, noisily, and I prompted him, saying, “What did happen, Mister Karpin?”

“Well, he was capering around out there, waving the paint tube and such. There’s a lot of sharp rock sticking out around here. Just as I got outside, he lost his balance and kicked out, and scraped right into some of that rock, and punctured his suit.”

“I thought the body was lost,” I said.

He nodded. “It was. The last thing in life Jafe ever did was try to shove himself away from those rocks. That, and the force of air coming out of that puncture for the first second or two, was enough to throw him up off the surface. It threw him up too high, and he never got back down.”

My doubt must have showed in my face, because he added, “Mister, there isn’t enough gravity on this place to shoot craps with.”

He was right. As we talked, I kept finding myself holding unnecessarily tight to the arms of the chair. I kept having the feeling I was going to float out of the chair and hover around up at the top of the dome if I were to let go. It was silly of course—there was some gravity on that planetoid, after all—but I just don’t seem to get used to low-gee.

Nevertheless, I still had some more questions. “Didn’t you try to get his body back? Couldn’t you have reached him?”

“I tried to, Mister,” he said. “Old Jafe McCann was my partner for fifteen years. But I was drunk, and that’s a fact. And I was afraid to go jumping up in the air, for fear I’d go floating away, too.”

“Frankly,” I said, “I’m no expert on low gravity and asteroids. But wouldn’t McCann’s body just go into orbit around this rock? I mean, it wouldn’t simply go floating off into space, would it?”

“It sure would,” he said. “There’s a lot of other rocks out here, too, Mister, and a lot of them are bigger than this one and have a lot more gravity pull. I don’t suppose there’s a navigator in the business who could have computed Jafe’s course in advance. He floated up, and then he floated back over the dome here and seemed to hover for a couple minutes, and then he just floated out and away. His isn’t the only body circling around the sun with all these rocks, you know.”

I chewed a lip and thought it all over. I didn’t know enough about asteroid gravity or the conditions out here to be able to say for sure whether Karpin’s story was true or not. Up to this point, I couldn’t attack the problem on a fact basis. I had to depend on feeling now, the hunches and instincts of eight years in this job, hearing some people tell lies and other people tell the truth.

And my instinct said Ab Karpin was lying in his teeth. That dramatic little touch about McCann’s body hovering over the dome before disappearing into the void, that sounded more like the embellishment of fiction than the circumstance of truth. And the string of coincidences were just too much. McCann just coincidentally happens to die right after he and his partner make their big strike. He happens to write out the cash-return form just before dying. And his body just happens to float away, so nobody can look at it and check Karpin’s story.

* * * *

But no matter what my instinct said, the story was smooth. It was smooth as glass, and there was no place for me to get a grip on it.

What now? There wasn’t any hole in Karpin’s story, at least none that I could see. I had to break his story somehow, and in order to do that I had to do some nosing around on this planetoid. I couldn’t know in advance what I was looking for, I could only look. I’d know it when I found it. It would be something that conflicted with Karpin’s story.

And for that, I had to be sure the story was complete. “You said McCann had gone out to paint the X,” I said. “Did he paint it?”

Karpin shook his head. “He never got a chance. He spent all his time dancing, up till he went and killed himself.”

“So you painted it yourself.”

He nodded.

“And then you went on into Atronics City and registered your claim, is that the story?”

“No. Chemisant City was closer than Atronics City right then, so I went there. Just after Jafe’s death, and everything—I didn’t feel like being alone any more than I had to.”

“You said Chemisant City was closer to you then,” I said. “Isn’t it now?”

“Things move around a lot out here, Mister,” he said. “Right now, Chemisant City’s almost twice as far from here as Atronics City. In about three days, it’ll start swinging in closer again. Things keep shifting around out here.”

“So I’ve noticed,” I said. “When you took off to go to Chemisant City, didn’t you make a try for your partner’s body then?”

He shook his head. “He was long out of sight by then,” he said. “That was ten, eleven hours later, when I took off.”

“Why’s that? All you had to do was paint the X and take off.”

“Mister, I told you. I was drunk. I was falling down drunk, and when I saw I couldn’t get at Jafe, and he was dead anyway, I came back in here and slept it off. Maybe if I’d been sober I would have taken the scooter and gone after him, but I was drunk.”

“I see.” And there just weren’t any more questions I could think of to ask, not right now. So I said, “I’ve just had a shaky four-hour ride coming out here. Mind if I stick around a while before going back?”

“Help yourself,” he said, in a pretty poor attempt at genial hospitality. “You can sleep over, if you want.”

“Fine,” I said. “I think I’d like that.”

“You wouldn’t happen to play cribbage, would you?” he asked, with the first real sign of animation I’d seen in him yet.

“I learn fast,” I told him.

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll teach you.” And he produced a filthy deck of cards and taught me.

* * * *

After losing nine straight games of cribbage, I quit, and got to my feet. I was at my most casual as I stretched and said, “Okay if I wander around outside for a while? I’ve never been on an asteroid like this before. I mean, a little one like this. I’ve just been to the company cities up to now.”

“Go right ahead,” he said. “I’ve got some polishing and patching to do, anyway.” He made his voice sound easy and innocent, but I noticed his eyes were alert and wary, watching me as I struggled back into my suit.

I didn’t bother to put my shirt back on first, and that was a mistake. The temperature inside an atmosphere suit is a steady sixty-eight degrees. That had never seemed particularly chilly before, but after the heat of that dome, it seemed cold as a blizzard inside the suit.

I went on out through the airlock, and moved as briskly as possible in the cumbersome suit, while the sweat chilled on my back and face, and I accepted the glum conviction that one thing I was going to get out of this trip for sure was a nasty head cold.

I went over to the X first, and stood looking at it. It was just an X, that’s all, shakily scrawled in yellow paint, with the initials “J-A” scrawled much smaller beside it.

I left the X and clumped away. The horizon was practically at arm’s length, so it didn’t take long for the dome to be out of sight. And then I clumped more slowly, studying the surface of the asteroid.

What I was looking for was a grave. I believed that Karpin was lying, that he had murdered his partner. And I didn’t believe that Jafe McCann’s body had floated off into space. I was convinced that his body was still somewhere on this asteroid. Karpin had been forced to concoct a story about the body being lost because the appearance of the body would prove somehow that it had been murder and not accident. I was convinced of that, and now all I had to do was prove it.

But that asteroid was a pretty unlikely place for a grave. That wasn’t dirt I was walking on, it was rock, solid metallic rock. You don’t dig a grave in solid rock, not with a shovel. You maybe can do it with dynamite, but that won’t work too well if your object is to keep anybody from seeing that the hole has been made. Dirt can be patted down. Blown-up rock looks like blown-up rock, and that’s all there is to it.

I considered crevices and fissures in the surface, some cranny large enough for Karpin to have stuffed the body into. But I didn’t find any of these either as I plodded along, being sure to keep one magnetted boot always in contact with the ground.

Karpin and McCann had set their dome up at just about the only really level spot on that entire planetoid. The rest of it was nothing but jagged rock, and it wasn’t easy traveling at all, maneuvering around with magnets on my boots and a bulky atmosphere suit cramping my movements.

And then I stopped and looked out at space and cursed myself for a ring-tailed baboon. McCann’s body might be anywhere in the Solar System, anywhere at all, but there was one place I could be sure it wasn’t, and that place was this asteroid. No, Karpin had not blown a grave or stuffed the body into a fissure in the ground. Why not? Because this chunk of rock was valuable, that’s why not. Because Karpin was in the process of selling it to one of the major companies, and that company would come along and chop this chunk of rock to pieces, getting the valuable metal out, and McCann’s body would turn up in the first week of operations if Karpin were stupid enough to bury it here.

Ten hours between McCann’s death and Karpin’s departure for Chemisant City. He’d admitted that already. And I was willing to bet he’d spent at least part of that time carrying McCann’s body to some other asteroid, one he was sure was nothing but worthless rock. If that were true, it meant the mortal remains of Jafe McCann were now somewhere—anywhere—in the Asteroid Belt. Even if I assumed that the body had been hidden on an asteroid somewhere between here and Chemisant City—which wasn’t necessarily so—that wouldn’t help at all. The relative positions of planetoids in the Belt just keep on shifting. A small chunk of rock that was between here and Chemisant City a few weeks ago—it could be almost anywhere in the Belt right now.

The body, that was the main item. I’d more or less counted on finding it somehow. At the moment, I couldn’t think of any other angle for attacking Karpin’s story.

As I clopped morosely back to the dome, I nibbled at Karpin’s story in my mind. For instance, why go to Chemisant City? It was closer, he said, but it couldn’t have been closer by more than a couple of hours. The way I understood it, Karpin was well-known back on Atronics City—it was the normal base of operations for he and his partner—and he didn’t know a soul at Chemisant City. Did it make sense for him to go somewhere he wasn’t known after his partner’s death, even if it was an hour closer? No, it made a lot more sense for a man in that situation to go where he’s known, go someplace where he has friends who’ll sympathize with him and help him over the shock of losing a partner of fifteen years’ standing, even if going there does mean traveling an hour longer.

And there was always the cash-return form. That was what I was here about in the first place. It just didn’t make sense for McCann to have held up his celebration while he filled out a form that he wouldn’t be able to mail until he got back to Atronics City. And yet the company’s handwriting experts were convinced that it wasn’t a forgery, and I could pretty well take their word for it.

Mulling these things over as I tramped back toward the dome, I suddenly heard a distant bell ringing way back in my head. The glimmering of an idea, not an idea yet but just the hint of one. I wasn’t sure where it led, or even if it led anywhere at all, but I was going to find out.

* * * *

Karpin opened the doors for me. By the time I’d stripped off the suit he was back to work. He was cleaning the single unit which was his combination stove and refrigerator and sink and garbage disposal.

I looked around the dome again, and I had to admit that a lot of ingenuity had gone into the manufacture and design of this dome and its contents. The dome itself, when deflated, folded down into an oblong box three feet by one foot by one foot. The lock itself, of course, folded separately, into another box somewhat smaller than that.

As for the gear inside the dome, it was functional and collapsible, and there wasn’t a single item there that wasn’t needed. There were the two chairs and the two cots and the table, all of them foldaway. There was that fantastic combination job Karpin was cleaning right now, and that had dimensions of four feet by three feet by three feet. The clutter of gear over to the left wasn’t as much of a clutter as it looked. There was a Geiger counter, an automatic spectrograph, two atmosphere suits, a torsion densimeter, a core-cutting drill, a few small hammers and picks, two spare air tanks, boxes of food concentrate, a paint tube, a doorless jimmy-john and two small metal boxes about eight inches cube. These last were undoubtedly Karpin’s and McCann’s pouches, where they kept whatever letters, money, address books or other small bits of possessions they owned. Back of this mound of gear, against the wall, stood the air reconditioner, humming quietly to itself.

In this small enclosed space there was everything a man needed to keep himself alive. Everything except human company. And if you didn’t need human company, then you had everything. Just on the other side of that dome, there was a million miles of death, in a million possible ways. On this side of the dome, life was cozy, if somewhat Spartan and very hot.

I knew for sure I was going to get a head cold. My body had adjusted to the sixty-eight degrees inside the suit, finally, and now was very annoyed to find the temperature shooting up to ninety again.

Since Karpin didn’t seem inclined to talk, and I would rather spend my time thinking than talking anyway, I took a hint from him and did some cleaning. I’d noticed a smeared spot about nose-level on the faceplate of my fishbowl, and now was as good a time as any to get rid of it. It had a tendency to make my eyes cross.

My shirt was sodden and wrinkled by this time anyway, having first been used to wipe sweat from my face and later been rolled into a ball and left on the chair when I went outside, so I used it for a cleaning rag, buffing like mad the silvered surface of the faceplate. Faceplates are silvered, not so the man inside can look out and no one else can look in, but in order to keep some of the more violent rays of the sun from getting through to the face.

I buffed for a while, and then I put the fishbowl on my head and looked through it. The spot was gone, so I went over and reattached it to the rest of the suit, and then settled back in my chair again and lit a cigarette.

Karpin spoke up. “Wish you wouldn’t smoke. Makes it tough on the conditioner.”

“Oh,” I said. “Sorry.” So I just sat, thinking morosely about non-forged cash-return forms, and coincidences, and likely spots to hide a body in the Asteroid Belt.

* * * *

Where would one dispose of a body in the asteroids? I went back through my thinking on that topic, and I found holes big enough to drive Karpin’s claim through. This idea of leaving the body on some worthless chunk of rock, for instance. If Karpin had killed his partner—and I was dead sure he had—he’d planned it carefully and he wouldn’t be leaving anything to chance. Now, an asteroid isn’t worthless to a prospector until that prospector has landed on it and tested it. Karpin might know that such-and-such an asteroid was nothing but worthless stone, but the guy who stops there and finds McCann’s body might not know it.

No, Karpin wouldn’t leave that to chance. He would get rid of that body, and he would do it in such a way that nobody would ever find it.

How? Not by leaving it on a worthless asteroid, and not by just pushing it off into space. The distance between asteroids is large, but so’s the travel. McCann’s body, floating around in the blackness, might just be found by somebody.

And that, so far as I could see, eliminated the possibilities. McCann’s body was in the Belt. I’d eliminated both the asteroids themselves and the space around the asteroids as hiding places. What was left?

The sun, of course.

I thought that over for a while, rather surprised at myself for having noticed the possibility. Now, let’s say Karpin attaches a small rocket to McCann’s body, stuffed into its atmosphere suit. He sets the rocket going, and off goes McCann. Not that he aims it toward the sun, that wouldn’t work well at all. Instead of falling into the sun, the body would simply take up a long elliptical orbit around the sun, and would come back to the asteroids every few hundred years. No, he would aim McCann back, in the direction opposite to the direction or rotation of the asteroids. He would, in essence, slow McCann’s body down, make it practically stop in relation to the motion of the asteroids. And then it would simply fall into the sun.

None of my ideas, it seemed, were happy ones. If McCann’s body were even at this moment falling toward the sun, it was just as useful to me as if it were on some other asteroid.

But, wait a second. Karpin and McCann had worked with the minimum of equipment, I’d already noticed that. They didn’t have extras of anything, and they certainly wouldn’t have extra rockets. Except for one fast trip to Chemisant City—when he had neither the time nor the excuse to buy a jato rocket—Karpin had spent all of his time since McCann’s death right here on this planetoid.

So that killed that idea.

While I was hunting around for some other idea, Karpin spoke up again, for the first time in maybe twenty minutes. “You think I killed him, don’t you?” he said, not looking around from his cleaning job.

I considered my answer. There was no reason at all to be overly polite to this sour old buzzard, but at the same time I am naturally the soft-spoken type. “We aren’t sure,” I said. “We just think there are some odd items to be explained.”

“Such as what?” he demanded.

“Such as the timing of McCann’s cash-return form.”

“I already explained that,” he said.

“I know. You’ve explained everything.”

“He wrote it out himself,” the old man insisted. He put down his cleaning cloth, and turned to face me. “I suppose your company checked the handwriting already, and Jafe McCann is the one who wrote that form.”

He was so blasted sure of himself. “It would seem that way,” I said.

“What other odd items you worried about?” he asked me, in a rusty attempt at sarcasm.

“Well,” I said, “there’s this business of going to Chemisant City. It would have made more sense for you to go to Atronics City, where you were known.”

“Chemisant was closer,” he said. He shook a finger at me. “That company of yours thinks it can cheat me out of my money,” he said. “Well, it can’t. I know my rights. That money belongs to me.”

“I guess you’re doing pretty well without McCann,” I said.

His angry expression was replaced by one of bewilderment. “What do you mean?”

“They told me back at Atronics City,” I explained, “that McCann was the money expert and you were the metals expert, and that’s why McCann handled all your buying on credit and stuff like that. Looks as though you’ve got a pretty keen eye for money yourself.”

“I know what’s mine,” he mumbled, and turned away. He went back to scrubbing the stove coils again.

I stared at his back. Something had happened just then, and I wasn’t sure what. He’d just been starting to warm up to a tirade against the dirty insurance company, and all of a sudden he’d folded up and shut up like a clam.

And then I saw it. Or at least I saw part of it. I saw how that cash-return form fit in, and how it made perfect sense.

Now, all I needed was proof of murder. Preferably a body. I had the rest of it. Then I could pack the old geezer back to Atronics City and get proof for the part I’d already figured out.

I’d like that. I’d like getting back to Atronics City, and having this all straightened out, and then taking the very next liner straight back to Earth. More immediately, I’d like getting out of this heat and back into the cool sixty-eight degrees of—

And then it hit me. The whole thing hit me, and I just sat there and stared. They did not carry extras, Karpin and McCann, they did not carry one item of equipment more than they needed.

I sat there and looked at the place where the dead body was hidden, and I said, “Well, I’ll be a son of a gun!”

He turned and looked at me, and then he followed the direction of my gaze, and he saw what I was staring at, and he made a jump across the room at the revolver lying on the cot.

That’s what saved me. He moved too fast, jerked his muscles too hard, and went sailing up and over the cot and ricocheted off the dome wall. And that gave me plenty of time to get up from the chair, moving more cautiously than he had, and get my hands on the revolver before he could get himself squared away again.

I straightened with the gun in my hand and looked into a face white with frustration and rage. “Okay, Mister McCann,” I said. “It’s all over.”

He knew I had him, but he tried not to show it. “What are you talking about? McCann’s dead.”

“Sure he is,” I said. “Jafe McCann was the money-minded part of the team. He was the one who signed for all the loans and all the equipment bought on credit. With this big strike in, Jafe McCann was the one who’d have to pay all that money.”

“You’re babbling,” he snapped, but the words were hollow.

“You weren’t satisfied with half a loaf,” I said. “You should have been. Half a loaf is better than none. But you wanted every penny you could get your hands on, and you wanted to pay out just as little money as you possibly could. So when you killed Ab Karpin, you saw a way to kill your debts as well. You’d become Ab Karpin, and it would be Jafe McCann who was dead, and the debts dead with him.”

“That’s a lie,” he said, his voice getting shrill. “I’m Ab Karpin, and I’ve got papers to prove it.”

“Sure. Papers you stole from a dead man. And you might have gotten away with it, too. But you just couldn’t leave well enough alone, could you? Not satisfied with having the whole claim to yourself, you switched identities with your victim to avoid your debts. And not satisfied with that, you filled out a cash-return form and tried to collect your money as your own heir. That’s why you had to go to Chemisant City, where nobody would recognize Ab Karpin or Jafe McCann, rather than to Atronics City where you were well-known.”

“You don’t want to make too many wild accusations,” he shouted, his voice shaking. “You don’t want to go around accusing people of things you can’t prove.”

“I can prove it,” I told him. “I can prove everything I’ve said. As to who you are, there’s no problem. All I have to do is bring you back to Atronics City. There’ll be plenty of people there to identify you. And as to proving you murdered Ab Karpin, I think his body will be proof enough, don’t you?”

McCann watched me as I backed slowly around the room to the mound of gear. The partners had had no extra equipment, no extra equipment at all. I looked down at the two atmosphere suits lying side by side on the metallic rock floor.

Two atmosphere suits. The dead man was supposed to be in one of those, floating out in space somewhere. He was in the suit, right enough, I was sure of that, but he wasn’t floating anywhere.

A space suit is a perfect place to hide a body, for as long as it has to be hid. The silvered faceplate keeps you from seeing inside, and the suit is, naturally, a sealed atmosphere. A body can rot away to ashes inside a space suit, and you’ll never notice a thing on the outside.

* * * *

I’d had the right idea after all. McCann had planned to get rid of Karpin’s body by attaching a rocket to it, slowing it down, and letting it fall into the sun. But he hadn’t had an opportunity yet to go buy a rocket. He couldn’t go to Atronics City, where he could have bought the rocket on credit, and he couldn’t go to Chemisant City until the claim sale went through and he had some money to spend. And in the meantime, Karpin’s body was perfectly safe, sealed away inside his atmosphere suit.

And it would have been safe, too, if McCann hadn’t been just a little bit too greedy. He could kill his partner and get away with it; policemen on the Belt are even farther apart than the asteroids. He could swindle his creditors and get away with it; they had no way of checking up and no reason to suspect a switch in identities. But when he tried to get his own money back from Tangiers Mutual Insurance; that’s when he made his mistake.

I studied the two atmosphere suits, at the same time managing to keep a wary eye on Jafe McCann, standing rigid and silent across the room. Which one of those suits contained the body of Ab Karpin?

The one with the new patch on the chest, of course. As I’d guessed, McCann had shot him, and that’s why he had the problem of disposing of the body in the first place.

I prodded that suit with my toe. “He’s in there, isn’t he?”

“You’re crazy.”

“Think I should open it up and check? It’s been almost a month, you know. I imagine he’s pretty ripe by now.”

I reached down to the neck-fastenings on the fishbowl, and McCann finally moved. His arms jerked up, and he cried, “Don’t! He’s in there, he’s in there! For God’s sake, don’t open it up!”

I relaxed. Mission accomplished. “Crawl into your suit, little man,” I said. “We’ve got ourselves a trip to make, the three of us.”

* * * *

Henderson, as usual, was jovial but stern. “You did a fine job up there, Ged,” he said, with false familiarity. “Really brilliant work.”

“Thank you very much,” I said. I was holding the last piece of news for a minute or two, relishing it.

“But you brought McCann in over a week ago. I don’t see why you had to stay up at Atronics City at all after that, much less ten days.”

I sat back in the chair and negligently crossed my legs. “I just thought I’d take a little vacation,” I said carelessly, and lit a cigarette. I flicked ashes in the general direction of the ashtray on Henderson’s desk. Some of them made it.

“A vacation?” he echoed, eyes widening. Henderson was a company man, a real company man. A vacation for him was purgatory, it was separation from a loved one. “I don’t believe you have a vacation coming,” he said frostily, “for at least six months.”

“That’s what you think, Henny,” I said.

All he could do at that was blink.

I went on, enjoying myself hugely. “I don’t like this company,” I said. “And I don’t like this job. And I don’t like you. And from now on, I’ve decided, it’s going to be vacation all the time.”

“Ged,” he said, his voice faint, “what’s the matter with you? Don’t you feel well?”

“I feel well,” I told him. “I feel fine. Now, I’ll tell you why I spent an extra ten days at Atronics City. McCann made and registered the big strike, right?”

Henderson nodded blankly, apparently not trusting himself to speak.

“Wrong,” I said cheerfully. “McCann went to Chemisant City and filled out all the forms required for registering a claim. But every place he was supposed to sign his name he wrote Ab Karpin instead. Jafe McCann never did make a legal registration of his claim.”

Henderson just looked fish-eyed.

“So,” I went on, “as soon as I turned McCann over to the law at Atronics City, I went and registered that claim myself. And then I waited around for ten days until the company finished the paperwork involved in buying that claim from me. And then I came straight back here, just to say goodbye to you. Wasn’t that nice?”

He didn’t move.

“Goodbye,” I said.

THE FIRE EGGS, by Darrell Schweitzer

Uncle Rob’s voice was breaking up, either from emotion or a bad transmission or a combination of both. I tapped the enhancer key and he came through a little better.

“It’s your Aunt Louise. She’s worse.”

“She’s already dying,” I said without thinking, and just barely stopped myself before blurting out, so how could she be any worse? Even over the phone, at that distance, I knew I had caused my uncle pain. “I’m sorry, I—”

How hideously selfish we can be at such moments.

But the moment passed. Rob was beyond grief, I think, into some sort of acceptance of the fact that his Louise was doing to die soon of one of those new and untreatable cancer-like diseases that were going around.

Then he told me.

“She’s talking to the Fire Eggs, Glenn.”

“Jesus—” to use a slightly obsolete expression. Of course, lots of people had talked to the luminous, two-and-a-half meter high ovoids since they first appeared all over the world in the course of half an hour on January 23rd, 2014, anchoring themselves in the air precisely 1.3 meters above the ground. Sure, lots of people claimed the Eggs answered back by some means which evaded all recording devices but was an article of faith among believers. More than one religion had started that way. There were dozens of bestselling books from the revelations. Countless millions had merely surrendered to the inexplicable and were comforted.

But not Louise. She and Rob were both too supremely rational for that, even Louise, who liked to tweak his pride by pretending to believe in astrology or psychic healing. It was just a game with her. Or had been.

Uncle Rob had once told me that he regarded true mental decay, meaning organic senility, as the worst of all possible fates. “If I get like that, shoot me,” he said, and he wasn’t joking.

And now Louise was talking to the Fire Eggs.

She’d once compared them to lava lamps, from the way they glow in the night, the darker colors rising and swirling and flowing within the almost translucent skin to no discernible purpose. She was old enough to remember lava lamps. She explained to me what they were and what they were for, which was, in essence, nothing. Purely aesthetic objects.

But I am ahead of myself. The first theory to explain the presence of Fire Eggs was that they were bombs, the initial barrage in an invasion from space.

I am old enough to remember that. I was almost six in 2014, the night of the Arrival, when the things popped into existence with muted thunderclaps (though some reported a crackling sound). There was panic then, the roadways clogged with carloads of people trying to flee somewhere where there weren’t any Fire Eggs, all devolving into one huge, continent-wide traffic jam when it became clear that there was no such place.

My own family never got that far. My father bundled us all into the car, backed out of the garage with a roar, and then made the discovery shared by so many others that first night, that a Fire Egg could not be removed from where it had situated itself by any human agency. We crashed into the one which blocked our driveway. I remember the trunk of the car flying open, my mother screaming, my father screaming back.

Later, I saw that the rear of the car was crumpled like a soda can.

That night, we all sat up bleary-eyed in front of the television, slowly concluding that the world’s governments and scientists were just as helpless as we were.

We also learned that it had been worse elsewhere. Innumerable traffic accidents. In the London underground, a train hit one of the things in the tunnel just north of Charing Cross. The first car disintegrated, the second accordioned, and almost a hundred people were killed.

Another one, on a runway in South Africa, had destroyed an airliner, which “fortunately” was empty at the time but for the crew, who died.

My father made a noise of disgust and shut off the TV.

I remember that we prayed together that night, something we didn’t often do. I think my parents, like a lot of people just then, were waiting for, expecting, imminent death.

But nothing happened. Days, weeks, months passed. Life settled down, nervously. If the Fire Eggs are bombs, they’re still ticking away, silently, thirty-five years later.

* * * *

So I dropped down from orbit, invoking the compassionate leave clause in my contract in ways I never would have gotten away with if I were not tenured, and as I drove from the airport I did something very few members of my generation have ever bothered to do and certainly none of my students would ever have tried.

I counted the Fire Eggs, the ones hovering above lawns, others in abandoned stretches of roadway off to my right or left. There was a larger accumulation near the city limits, which might have made some sort of sense, but then they were so thick in an empty field that they reminded me of a herd of sheep mindlessly grazing on the gently sloping hillside.

But I couldn’t count them any more than anybody really knew how many had been served by that fast-food restaurant, the one with the Golden Eggs; but of course those were man-made imitations, since, as was apparent from innumerable tests, not to mention attempts to adorn them with graffiti or redecorate them as conceptual art, nothing of terrestrial origin would adhere to a Fire Egg. Indeed, you really couldn’t touch them. There was some kind of electrical barrier which made the surface totally frictionless.

I gave up counting somewhere in the low thousands. Of course, there were no such easy answers, though numerologists and even serious mathematicians had done their best.

The next theory was that Fire Eggs were alien probes. All the religions were based on that one, The Church of Somebody Watching. This was not wholly without merit, or even benefit. There had been no wars since the Fire Eggs arrived. Maybe they’d put mankind on good behavior.

* * * *

Uncle Rob’s house looked pretty much as it always had, the towering tulip-poplars along the driveway now leafless and waiting for winter, the house’s split-level “ranch” design a leftover from the previous century, even a decorative “mailbox” out front, for all nobody had actually received mail that way in years; and of course the Fire Eggs on the front lawn, arranged by random chance into a neat semi-circle. We’d named them once, years after they’d arrived, when few people were afraid of them anymore and Fire Eggs had become just part of the landscape and Uncle Rob’s last book, What To Name Your Fire Egg had enjoyed a modest success. We called ours Eenie, Meenie, Moe, and Shemp.

They glowed as they always did in the evening twilight, completely unchanged. The one on the far right was Shemp.

And there was Uncle Rob in the driveway, and he was very much changed, not merely showing his years, but worn out, defeated. Here was a man who had been a world-famous celebrity before his retirement, the ebullient apostle of rationality to the world, his generation’s successor to Carl Sagan, and he had four utterly defiant enigmas practically on his doorstep and Louise was dying and she’d started talking to them.

“I’m glad you could come,” was all he said. He insisted on taking my bag, a leftover courtesy from a time long ago, when there were no Fire Eggs.

* * * *

My students could never remember such a time. Many couldn’t even imagine it. A landscape without Fire Eggs wasn’t real to them. Art gallery attendance dropped off, first from disinterest, then from security problems as every now and then someone tried to “improve” various famous canvases by painting Fire Eggs onto them. It was a compulsion for a while in the 2020s, a kind of mania, which spawned several cults of its own.

Then came the fads, the t-shirts with the Mona Lisa Fire Egg, Starry Night with Fire Eggs hovering somewhat unrealistically up in the sky, The Last Supper with a Fire Egg on either side of Christ.

I’ve even seen a redigitized version of Casablanca, still in black and white to satisfy the purists, but with the occasional Fire Egg added to the background in some of the scenes.

I did my graduate thesis on the retro-impact of Fire Eggs on the arts. You know, Hamlet addressing his famous soliloquy to an Egg.

* * * *

Uncle Rob, Aunt Louise, and I had a very uncomfortable dinner together. It was a shock that she came downstairs to see me at all. I had envisioned her bedridden, with tubes and drips, surrounded by monitors. I knew they’d sent her home to die, so I was shocked, not just mildly surprised, when she descended the stairs in her bathrobe and slippers. She flashed me her patented mischievous smile and a wink, and sashayed down, swinging her hips and bathrobe belt in time like a showgirl.

Then she stumbled and I could see the pain on her face. Uncle Rob and I caught her by either arm and eased her into a chair.

“Take it easy,” he whispered. “Just take it easy. Glenn is here. You’ll be all right.”

“I can see for myself that he’s here, and you don’t really believe I will be all right. Stop lying.”

“Louise, please—”

She was still able to eat a little, or at least go through the motions for my benefit. We three made an effort to have a nice friendly meal, doting uncle and aunt and favorite nephew, the Fire Eggs on the lawn glowing through the curtains of the front picture window like Christmas lights glimpsed through snow.

“How was your conference, Glenn?” Louise said.

“I, ah…had to leave early. I missed most of it.”

“Oh.”

“And what’s…with you?”

* * * *

One of the other things I investigated in the course of becoming one of the leading academic experts on Fire Eggs, was what I labelled the Nuke Rumor. During the period in which the world’s governments had assigned their top scientists the task of Finding Out What Those Things Are At All Costs, after the attempts to probe, scan, drill through, transmit into, or otherwise penetrate the Eggs had failed, so the story goes, somebody somewhere—always in a nasty, remote place where They Have No Respect For Human Life—set off a nuclear device under a Fire Egg. It made a huge crater, destroyed much of the countryside, killed thousands directly and thousands more from the subsequent radiation, but the Egg was utterly unperturbed. The world held its breath, waiting for retaliation.

And nothing happened.

As I first heard the story, it happened in China, but a colleague at Beijing University I knew on the Worldnet assured me no, it was in India. In India they said it was in the Pan-Arabic Union, and the Arabs said it was the Russians, and the Russians said the French; and I was able to follow the story all the way back to Wyoming, where people were sure the blast had wiped out some luckless desert town and the CIA had covered the whole thing up.

“I think the aliens are trying to exterminate us with boredom,” some late-night comedian quipped. “I mean, who the hell cares anymore?”

* * * *

“I’ve been having dreams,” Louise said.

“Please—” Rob whispered.

She reached over and patted his hand. “Now you hush. This is what you called the boy all the way down from his conference to listen to, so he might as well hear it. You can’t fool me, Robert. You never could.”

“Just…dreams?” I said.

“You know the kind where you know you’re dreaming, and you say to yourself, this isn’t right, but you go on dreaming anyway? It was like that. I fell asleep in front of the TV and woke up inside my dream, and it was The Smothers Brothers on the screen, and I was a girl again. Then somebody turned it off and the room filled up with my friends from school—and I knew a lot of them had to be dead by now, so they couldn’t be here—but they were all young ago too, and dressed in bell-bottoms and beads, and barefoot with their toenails painted, the whole works. You know, like hippies, which is what we pretended to be. Somebody put on a Jefferson Airplane record and it was going on about sister lovers and how in time there’d be others. And there were Fire Eggs with us, there in my own living room—here, in this house, not where my parents lived when I was a girl—one Egg for each of us, and they seemed to radiate warmth and love. Fred Hemmings, Fat Freddie we called him, tried to get his Egg to take a toke of pot, and it seemed so funny that I was still laughing when I woke up, and you know, there were ashes on the rug!”

Aunt Louise laughed softly, and for a while seemed lost in a world of her own, and Rob and I exchanged wordless glances which said, I don’t get it and You wouldn’t want to, believe me.

“It was just a dream, Aunt Louise. I’m glad it made you happy.”

“I didn’t use to have dreams like that.”

“Maybe now—”

“Yes, maybe now it’s time. I can hear my dreams now.”

“Hear them?”

She sat for a time, oblivious to us both, and she seemed to be listening to her dreams from long ago, which had Fire Eggs in them.

As always, nothing happened. The four Fire Eggs glowed softly on the lawn, and the world was still.

* * * *

Uncle Rob took me aside into the kitchen.

“If this weren’t so awful, I suppose you’d find it academically interesting.”

“Is there anything I can actually do? Why exactly did you ask me to come here?”

“She’s going away, Glenn.”

“Don’t mince words. She’s dying. You know that. I know that. She knows that. It is not news. If there is anything I can do to provide comfort, Uncle Rob, or otherwise help you cope, please tell me. Right now, I feel about as useless as an ornamental mailbox.”

“Or a Fire Egg, doing nothing.”

“Maybe they’re supposed to do nothing. For thirty-five years, they’ve just sat there. We’ve waited for them to speak, to open up, to explode, to vanish and leave gifts behind, to hatch, for Christ’s sake. But they will not hatch, which may be the whole point.”

“Always you change the subject, Glenn. I suppose it is helpful to have a questing mind, but you are changing the subject.”

“Not entirely. Please. Hear me out. Maybe they’re like the plastic sunken ships and mermaids and stuff we put into the fishbowl. They’re decorations and make little sense to the goldfish. Most of the goldfish, after a while, just keep on swimming, but maybe a few, the sensitive ones, respond in some way. That’s what the objects are for. That’s why they’re passive. They’re waiting for just the right people to respond.”

Uncle Rob began to cry. He held onto my shoulder. I was afraid he was going to fall over. I just stood there, wondering exactly what I’d said wrong, but he explained soon enough. “You’re talking crap, Glenn. You know it. You’re an educated man. Before I retired, I was the world’s top science guru. We’re goddamn experts, both of us. Our job is to know. When we’re up against something we can’t know, it just tears us down. We’ve both been skeptics. We’ve both published articles debunking all the crazy stories and rumors about the Fire Eggs. You were the one who pointed out that the stories of people being taken inside were just a continuation of the UFO mythology of the last century. We kept ourselves clean of mysticism. We were rational. Now this. Louise wants me to believe that as she approaches the threshold of death she can hear things from the beyond, and the beyond is inside those Fire Eggs, as if whoever sent them is building a gateway to Heaven—”

“I thought it was a stairway.”

“What?”

“One of her old songs.”

“Can’t we at least retain a little dignity? That’s what you’re here for, Glenn. I want you to help her retain a little dignity.”

* * * *

The presence of Fire Eggs actually stimulated the moribund space programs of the world, a bit cautiously at first, as if everybody were afraid that They would swoop down and crush us if we started pressing out into the universe. This was called the Tripwire Theory, the Fire Eggs as alarm device, ready to start screaming if the goldfish tried to climb out of the bowl. But, as always, nothing happened. The Eggs remained inert. No pattern was ever detected in their subtle, shifting interior light. There was no interference as robots, then live astronauts, then a combination of the two proved definitively that there were no Fire Eggs on the Moon or on Mercury, or Venus, or Mars, or on the rocky or ice satellites of the gas planets. The results from Pluto, I understand, are still being evaluated, but meanwhile the first interstellar probes have been launched, and some people began to look out into the universe again for an answer, rather into their own navels. They began to regard the Fire Egg problem as one which could be solved.

The optimists said that was the whole purpose of the Fire Eggs being here in the first place.

* * * *

I looked back into the dining room.

“She’s gone.”

“Another damn thing after another I have to put up with,” said Uncle Rob, opening a closet, getting out a coat, handing me mine. “She wanders sometimes. But she never goes very far.”

I put on my coat. “In her condition? Should she be out at all?”

“No. But her mind is sick too, not just her body.”

I didn’t ask any more. There was no sense making him review the endless futilities, the grinding, subtle agonies he’d gone through as each and every medical option had been exhausted. She couldn’t be put in an institution. There was no money for that. All his was gone. The various plans had long since run out of coverage. Besides, the legalistic wisdom went, what actual harm was there in an old lady wandering around the neighborhood talking to the Fire Eggs? Which is a bureaucratic euphemism for nobody gives a shit.

“Come on,” I said, nudging Uncle Rob toward the door. “I’ll help you find her.”

* * * *

If they’d appeared precisely in the year 2000, things would have been really crazy, but in any case the Fire Eggs rekindled millennialist fears. Clergymen denounced them as tools or emissaries of Satan and searched the scriptures, particularly Revelations, to come up with a variety of imaginative answers. There had been a time when Uncle Rob and I had enjoyed deflating this sort of thing. “The Beast of the Apocalypse does not lay eggs,” I had concluded an article, and Rob had used that line on his TV show and gotten a lot of applause.

But the Spiritualists took over anyway. Fire Eggs were Chariots of the Dead, they told us, come to carry us into the next life. They were also alive, like angels. They knew our innermost secrets. They could speak to us through mediums, or in dreams.

* * * *

Rob and I found Louise on the front lawn, sitting cross-legged on the icy ground in her bathrobe, gazing up at the Fire Eggs. It was almost winter. The night air was clear, sharp.

“Come on.” She patted the ground beside her. “There’s plenty of room.”

“Louise, please go back inside,” Rob said.

“Tush! No, you sit. You have to see this.”

“Let me at least get you a coat.”

“No, you sit.”

Rob and I sat.

“Just look at them for a while,” she said, meaning the Fire Eggs. “I think that it’s important there’s one for each of us.”

“But there are four, Aunt Louise.”

She smiled and laughed and punched me lightly on the shoulder and said, “Well isn’t that lovely? There’s room for one more. Ask your wife to join us, Glenn.”

“I’m not married, Aunt Louise.”

She pretended to frown, then smiled again. “Don’t worry. You will be.”

“Did…they tell you that?”

She ignored me. To both of us she said, “I want you to just sit here with me and look and listen. Aren’t they beautiful?”

I regarded Eenie, Meenie, Moe, and Shemp, and they looked as they always had. I suppose in other circumstances they could indeed have seemed beautiful, but just now they were not.

I started to say something, but then Louise put her dry, bony hand over my mouth and whispered, “Quiet! They’re singing! Can’t you hear it? Isn’t it heavenly?”

I only heard the faint whine and whoosh of a police skimmer drifting along the block behind us. Otherwise the night was still.

Uncle Rob began sobbing.

“I can’t stand any more of this,” he said, and got up and went toward the door. “Can’t we have a little dignity?”

I hauled Louise to her feet and said, “You’ve got to come inside, now.”

But she looked up at me with such a hurt expression that I let go of her. She wobbled. I caught hold of her.

“Yes,” she said, “let me have a little dignity.” I think she was completely lucid at that moment. I think she knew exactly what she was doing. She sat down again.

I turned to Uncle Rob. “You go on in. We’ll stay out here a while longer.”

So we sat in the cold, autumn air, in front of the Fire Eggs, like couch potatoes in front of a four-panel TV. No, that’s not right. It doesn’t describe what Louise did at all. She listened raptly, rapturously, to voices I could not hear, to something which, perhaps, only dying people can hear as they slide out of this life. She turned from one Fire Egg to the next, to the next, as if all of them were conversing together. She reached out to touch them, hesitantly, like one of the apes in the ancient flatvideo classic, 2001: A Space Odyssey, but of course she could not touch them, and her fingers slid away as if her hand couldn’t quite locate the points of space where the Fire Eggs were.

At times she answered back, and sang something, as if accompanying old voices, but I think it was some rock-and-roll song from her psychedelic childhood, not an ethereal hymn from the Hereafter.

Or maybe the Hereafter just likes Jefferson Airplane. Or the Fire Eggs do.

I would like to be able to say that I achieved some epiphany myself, that I saw the Fire Eggs in a new way, as if the scales had fallen from my eyes and I saw truly for the first time. I would like to say that I heard something, that I received some revelation.

But I only watched the pale reds and oranges drifting within the creamy, luminous white. I only saw the Fire Eggs, as every human being on Earth sees Fire Eggs every day of his or her life.

I only heard the police skimmer slide around the block. Maybe one of the cops was staring at us through the darkened windows. Maybe not. The skimmer didn’t stop.

And I looked up and saw the autumn stars, as inscrutable as the Fire Eggs, never twinkling, almost as if I were looking at them from space.

Louise worsened during the night, She started drooling blood, but she looked content where she was, and it wouldn’t have made any difference anyway, which may be a euphemism for something too painful to put into words.

I just stayed there with her. After a while, her breathing had a gurgling sound to it, and she leaned over into my lap. I could see by the light of the Fire Eggs that she was bleeding from the bowels and the whole back of her bathrobe was stained dark. But she didn’t want to leave. She had what I suppose someone else might have called a beatific expression on her face. She reached up toward the Fire Eggs once more, groping in the air.

And then I rocked her to sleep, by the light of the unblinking stars and of the Fire Eggs, and she died.

* * * *

Somehow I fell asleep too. At dawn, Uncle Rob shook me awake. I got up stiffly, but I’d been dressed warmly enough that I was all right.

He couldn’t bring himself to say anything, but the look in his eyes told me everything.

I didn’t have to ask. I didn’t have to search. Aunt Louise was gone, bloody bathrobe and all.

Of course, any number of disappearances and murders had been attributed to the Fire Eggs in the past, as had so much else. “The Fire Egg ate my homework” was an old joke. “The Fire Egg ate Aunt Louise” didn’t go over well with the authorities, so there was an investigation, which concluded, for lack of any real evidence, that, despite what the two of us claimed, Louise had wandered off in the night and died of exposure or her disease, and finding her body would only be a matter of time.

* * * *

“I’ll tell you what the fucking things are,” said Uncle Rob. “They’re pest-disposal units. They’re roach motels. They’re here to kill us, then to clean the place out to make room for somebody else. Maybe the poison tastes good to the roach and it dies happy, but does it make any difference?”

“I don’t know, Uncle. I really don’t.”

The night before I was to leave, he went out on the lawn and lay down underneath one of the Fire Eggs and blew his brains out with a pistol. I heard the shot. I saw him lying there.

I just waited. I wanted to see what would happen. But I fell asleep again, or somehow failed to perceive the passing of time, and when I came to myself again, he was gone. The pistol was left behind.

* * * *

It was Aunt Louise who first named them Fire Eggs. Not everybody knows that. Uncle Rob used the term on his television show, and it caught on. He gave her credit, over and over again, but no one listened and the whole world believes he was the one who coined it.

That’s what his obituaries said, too.

* * * *

I think that we’re wrong to wait for something to happen.

I think it’s been happening all along.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

ALLEN STEELE

Before becoming a science fiction author, Allen Steele was a journalist who’d worked for newspapers and magazines in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Missouri, and his home state of Tennessee. But SF was his first love, so he eventually ditched journalism and instead began producing that which made him want to be a writer in the first place.

Since then, Steele has published eighteen novels and nearly a hundred short stories. His work has received numerous awards, including three Hugos, and has been translated worldwide, mainly in languages he can’t read. He serves on the Board of Advisors for the Space Frontier Foundation and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. He also belongs to Sigma, a group of SF writers who frequently serve as unpaid consultants on matters regarding technology and security.

Allen Steele is a lifelong space buff, and this interest has not only influenced his writing, but also taken him to some interesting places. He has witnessed numerous space shuttle launches from Kennedy Space Center and has flown NASA’s shuttle cockpit simulator at the Johnson Space Center. In 2001, he testified before the U.S. House of Representatives in hearings regarding the future of space exploration. He would like very much to go into orbit, and hopes that one day he’ll to be able to afford to do so.

Steele lives in western Massachusetts with his wife Linda and a continual procession of adopted dogs. He collects vintage science fiction books and magazines, spacecraft model kits, and dreams.

JAY LAKE

Jay Lake lives in Portland, Oregon, where he works on numerous writing and editing projects. His books for 2012 and 2013 include Kalimpura from Tor and Love in the Time of Metal and Flesh from Prime. His short fiction appears regularly in literary and genre markets worldwide. Jay is a winner of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and a multiple nominee for the Hugo and World Fantasy Awards.

KEN SCHOLES

Ken Scholes grew up in a trailer outside a smallish logging town not far from the base of Mount Rainier in the Pacific Northwest. Baptized into Story at a young age, he fed himself on Speed Racer, Time Tunnel, Land of the Giants and Marine Boy sprinkled with a generous dose of dinosaur picture books. One day, his parents brought home two science fiction books—Trapped in Space, by Jack Williamson, and Runaway Robot, by Lester Del Rey. They set him on a reading path that eventually swept across genres—mysteries, westerns, science fiction, fantasy, sword and sorcery, thrillers, horror. Still, speculative fiction remained home base for Ken; he cites Bradbury and Burroughs, Howard, Moorcock and King as strong influences.

He sold his first story to Talebones magazine in 2000 and won the Writers of the Future contest in 2004. His quirky, offbeat fiction continues to show up in various magazines and anthologies like Polyphony 6, Weird Tales and Clarkesworld Magazine. More recently, his novel Lamentation appeared as the first in a five-book series from Tor called “The Psalms of Isaak.”

GARDNER DOZOIS

Gardner Dozois is the former editor of Asimov’s magazine and currently edits the annual anthology series, The Year’s Best Science Fiction, now in its Twenty-Ninth annual edition. He has won fifteen Hugo Awards and thirty-four Locus Awards for his editing, plus two Nebula Awards and a Sidewise Award for his own writing. He is the author or editor of over a hundred books. Coming up are two new anthologies edited with George R.R. Martin, Old Mars and Old Venus.

AVRAM DAVIDSON

Avram Davidson, one of the most celebrated Grand Masters of Science Fiction, won a Hugo Award in 1958 for his story “Or All the Seas with Oysters.” Most of his books are currently available from Wildside Press, and Audible recently released several of his books in audiobook format, including The Adventures of Dr. Eszterhazy. Visit Audible.com to check it out.

CAROL EMSHWILLER

Carol Emshwiller (born April 12, 1921) is an American writer of avant garde short stories and science fiction who has won prizes ranging from the Nebula Award to the Philip K. Dick Award. Ursula K. Le Guin has called her “a major fabulist, a marvelous magical realist, one of the strongest, most complex, most consistently feminist voices in fiction.” Among her novels are Carmen Dog and The Mount. She has also written two cowboy novels called Ledoyt and Leaping Man Hill. Her most recent novel, The Secret City, was published in April 2007.

CHARLES L. FONTENAY

Charles Louis Fontenay (1917–2007) was an American journalist and science fiction writer. He wrote science fiction novels and short stories. His non-fiction includes the biography of prominent New Deal era politician Estes Kefauver.Fontenay served as editor of the Nashville Tennessean, among other newspapers, worked with the Associated Press and Gannett News Service. He retired to St. Petersburg, Florida where he continued to write science fiction until shortly before his death.

CORY DORCOTOW

Cory Doctorow writes: “In spring 2004, in the wake of Ray Bradbury pitching a tantrum over Michael Moore appropriating the title of Fahrenheit 451 to make Fahrenheit 9/11, I conceived of a plan to write a series of stories with the same titles as famous sf shorts, which would pick apart the totalitarian assumptions underpinning some of sf’s classic narratives.”

His story “I, Robot” is part of this series.

PAMELA SARGENT

Pamela Sargent has won the Nebula and Locus Awards and is the author of the novels Cloned Lives, The Sudden Star, Watchstar, The Golden Space, The Alien Upstairs, Eye of the Comet, Homesmind, Alien Child, The Shore of Women, Venus of Dreams, Venus of Shadows, Child of Venus, and Climb the Wind. Ruler of the Sky, her 1993 historical novel about Genghis Khan, was a bestseller in Germany and in Spain, where she was invited to speak at the Institute of American Studies, the University of Barcelona, and the Complutense University of Madrid. She also edited the Women of Wonder anthologies, the first collections of science fiction by women, published in the 1970s by Vintage/Random House and in updated editions during the 1990s by Harcourt Brace. A short story, “The Shrine,” was produced for the syndicated TV anthology series Tales from the Darkside.

Tor Books reissued her 1983 young adult novel Earthseed, selected as a Best Book for Young Adults by the American Library Association, and a sequel, Farseed, in early 2007. Farseed was chosen by the New York Public Library for their 2008 Books for the Teen Age list of best books for young adults. A third novel, Seedship, was published in 2010. Earthseed has been optioned by Paramount Pictures, with Melissa Rosenberg, scriptwriter for all five Twilight films, set to write and produce through her Tall Girls Productions.

GEORGE ZEBROWSKI

George Zebrowski is an award-winning novelist, story writer, essayist, editor, and lecturer. He is the author of the novel Empties (Golden Gryphon Press) and the editor, with Gregory Benford, of Sentinels in Honor of Arthur C. Clarke (Hadley Rille Books). A new short story will appear in Nature this fall.

BRANDA W. CLOUGH

Brenda W. Clough (who also writes as B.W. Clough) is an American science fiction and fantasy writer. She was nominated for both the Hugo Award and a Nebula Award in 2002 for her Novella “May Be Some Time.” Currently she teaches writing workshops at the Writers Center in Bethesda, MD. Her most recent novel, Speak to Our Desires, is available through Book View Cafe: http://www.bookviewcafe.com—and her web site is:

http://www.sff.net/people/Brenda/

BRUCE BETHKE

Bruce Bethke coined the term “cyberpunk” with his story “Cyberpunk”—which he later expanded into the novel Cyberpunks. He works with computers (obviously) when not writing or editing. Check out his anthology series, Stupefying Stories, at www.stupefyingstories.com.

EVERETT B. COLE

Everett B. Cole was an American writer of science fiction short stories and a professional soldier. He worked as a signal maintenance and property officer at Fort Douglas, Utah. His first science fiction story, “Philosophical Corps” was published in the magazine Astounding in 1951. His fix-up of that story and two others, The Philosophical Corps, was published by Gnome Press in 1962. A second novel, The Best Made Plans, was serialized in Astounding in 1959, but never published in book form. He also co-authored historical books about the south Texas region.

STERLING E. LANIER

Sterling Edmund Lanier (1927–2007) was an American editor, science fiction author and sculptor who published as both Sterling Lanier and Sterling E. Lanier. He is perhaps known best as the editor who championed the publication of Frank Herbert’s bestselling novel Dune—though he was an excellent author in his own right.

KEITH LAUMER

John Keith Laumer (1925–1993) was an American science fiction author. Prior to becoming a full-time writer, he was an officer in the United States Air Force and a U.S. diplomat. His brother March Laumer was also a writer, known for his adult reinterpretations of the Land of Oz (also mentioned in Keith Laumer’s The Other Side of Time).

GRANIA DAVIS

Grania Davis is an author and editor of science fiction and fantasy novels and short stories. She is also the primary editor of the posthumous work of her late former-husband, Avram Davidson. Her short stories have appeared in various genre magazines, anthologies, and ‘best of’ collections. Her story “The Boss in the Wall” (1998, with Avram Davidson) was nominated for a Nebula Award in the Best Novella category.

LAWRENCE WATT-EVANS

Lawrence Watt-Evans is the author of about fifty novels and over a hundred short stories, mostly in the SF, fantasy, and horror fields. He won the Hugo award in 1988 for his short story, “Why I Left Harry’s All-Night Hamburgers,” and was president of the Horror Writers Association for two years. Recent books include Tales of Ethshar, a collection of short stories set in the same universe as The Misenchanted Sword and many of his finest fantasy novels, and The Unwelcome Warlock, a new Ethshar novel.

JAMES C. STEWART

James C. Stewart appeared in the debut issue of Paradox: The Magazine of Historical & Speculative Fiction. He’s currently seeking a publisher for two novels, and is at home working on his third. He lives in North Bay, Ontario, Canada.

ALAN E. NOURSE

Alan Edward Nourse (1928–1992) was an American science fiction author and physician. He wrote both juvenile and adult science fiction, as well as nonfiction works about medicine and science. His SF works generally focused on medicine and/or psionics.

RICK RAPHAEL

Rick Raphael (1919-1994) was an American science fiction author. His story “Code Three” was a Hugo Award finalist in 1964. He expanded it into a novel under the same title in 1967.

FREDERIK POHL

Frederik George Pohl, Jr. (born November 26, 1919) is an American science fiction writer, editor and fan, with a career spanning over seventy years—from his first published work, “Elegy to a Dead Planet: Luna” (1937), to his most recent novel, All the Lives He Led (2011).

From about 1959 until 1969, Pohl edited Galaxy and its sister magazine If; the latter won three successive annual Hugo Awards as the year’s best professional magazine. His 1977 novel Gateway won four “year’s best novel” awards: the Hugo voted by convention participants, the Locus voted by magazine subscribers, the Nebula voted by American science fiction writers, and the juried academic John W. Campbell Memorial Award. He won the Campbell Memorial Award again for the 1984 collection of novellas Years of the City, the only repeat winner in forty years. For his 1979 novel Jem, Pohl won a U.S. National Book Award in the one-year category Science Fiction. It was a finalist for three other year’s best novel awards. In all he has won four Hugo and three Nebula Awards.

Pohl became a Nebula Grand Master in 1993 and he was inducted by the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 1998. He won the Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer in 2010, citing his blog “The Way the Future Blogs.”

ROBERT SHECKLEY

Robert Sheckley (1928–2005) was a Hugo- and Nebula-nominated American author. First published in the science fiction magazines of the 1950s, his numerous quick-witted stories and novels were famously unpredictable, absurdist and broadly comical. Sheckley was named Author Emeritus by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in 2001.

WALTER J. SHELDON

Walter James Sheldon (1917–1996) was a frequent short story writer during the Golden Age of pulp science fiction, under his own name and as “Seldon Walters.” His only novel, The Beast, appeared in 1980.

WALTER S. TEVIS

Walter Stone Tevis (1928–1984) was an American novelist and short story writer. Three of his six novels were adapted into major films: The Hustler, The Color of Money and The Man Who Fell to Earth. His books have been translated into at least 18 languages worldwide.

DONALD E. WESTLAKE

Donald Edwin Westlake (1933–2008) was an American writer, with over a hundred novels and non-fiction books to his credit. He specialized in crime fiction, especially comic capers, with an occasional foray into science fiction or other genres. He was a three-time Edgar Award winner, one of only two writers (the other is Joe Gores) to win Edgars in three different categories (1968, Best Novel, God Save the Mark; 1990, Best Short Story, “Too Many Crooks”; 1991, Best Motion Picture Screenplay, The Grifters). In 1993, the Mystery Writers of America named Westlake a Grand Master, the highest honor bestowed by the society.

DARRELL SCHWEITZER

Darrell Schweitzer is an American writer, editor, and essayist in the field of speculative fiction. Much of his focus has been on dark fantasy and horror, although he does also work in science fiction and fantasy. Schweitzer is also a prolific writer of literary criticism and editor of collections of essays on various writers within his preferred genres, many of which are available from Wildside Press.

Over the last year, Audible has released who of his novels in audiobook format: The White Isle and The Shattered Goddess. Check them out!

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

“Agape Among the Robots,” by Allen Steele, originally appeared in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, May 2000. Copyright © 2000 by Allen Steele. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“The Starship Mechanic,” by Jay Lake and Ken Scholes, originally appeared on Tor.com, January 2010. Copyright © 2010 by Jay Lake and Ken Scholes. Reprinted by permission of the authors.

“Peacemaker,” by Gardner Dozois, originally appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, August 1983. Copyright © 1983 by Gardner Dozois. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Or All the Seas with Oysters,” by Avram Davidson, originally appeared in Galaxy Science Fiction, May 1958. [Hugo Award Winner, best short story.] Copyright © 1958 by Avram Davidson. Reprinted by permission of the author’s estate and Owlswick Literary Agency.

“Grandma,” by Carol Emshwiller, originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, March 2002. Copyright © 2002 by Carol Emshwiller. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“The Gift Bearer,” by Charles L. Fontenay, originally appeared in Amazing Science Fiction Stories, September 1958.

“I, Robot,” by Cory Doctorow, originally appeared in The Infinite Matrix. Copyright © 2005 by Cory Doctorow. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“All Rights,” by Pamela Sargent, originally appeared in Amazing Stories, Fall 1994. Copyright © 2004 by Pamela Sargent. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“The Eichmann Variations,” by George Zebrowski, originally appeared in Light Years and Dark. Copyright © 1984 by George Zebrowski. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“May Be Some Time,” by Brenda W. Clough, originally appeared in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, April 2001. Copyright © 2001 by Brenda W. Clough. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Millennium,” by Everett B. Cole, originally appeared in Astounding Science Fiction, May 1955.

“Cyberpunk,” by Bruce Bethke, originally appeared in Amazing Stories, November 1983. Copyright © 1983 by Bruce Bethke. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Join Our Gang?” by Sterling E. Lanier originally appeared in Analog Science Fact & Fiction, May, 1961.

“Greylorn,” by Keith Laumer, originally appeared in Amazing Science Fiction Stories, April 1959.

“Jumping the Line,” by Grania Davis, originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, July 1979. Copyright © 1979 by Grania Davis. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“The Wasonica Correction,” by James C. Stewart, is copyright © 2010 by James C. Stewart. Published by permission of the author.

“Circus,” by Alan E. Nourse originally appeared in The Counterfeit Man: More Science Fiction Stories by Alan E. Nourse, published in 1963.

“The Hated,” by Frederik Pohl, originally appeared in Galaxy Science Fiction, January 1958.

“Code Three,” by Rick Raphael originally appeared in Analog Science Fact—Science Fiction, February 1963.

“Cost of Living,” by Robert Sheckley, originally appeared in Galaxy Science Fiction, December 1952.

“This is Klon Calling,” by Walter J. Sheldon, originally appeared in Fantastic Universe, Aug-Sept 1953.

“The Big Bounce,” by Walter S. Tevis originally appeared in Galaxy, February 1958.

“The Risk Profession,” by Donald E. Westlake, originally appeared in Amazing Stories, March 1961.

“The Astronaut from Wyoming,” by Adam-Troy Castro and Jerry Oltion, originally appeared in Analog, July/August 1999. Copyright 1999 by by Adam-Troy Castro and Jerry Oltion. Reprinted by permission of the authors.

“The Fire Eggs” by Darrell Schweitzer, originally appeared in Interzone, March 2000. Copyright © 2000 by Darrell Schweitzer. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Table of Contents

COPYRIGHT

A NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHER

AGAPE AMONG THE ROBOTS, by Allen Steele

THE STARSHIP MECHANIC, by Jay Lake and Ken Scholes

PEACEMAKER, by Gardner Dozois

OR ALL THE SEAS WITH OYSTERS, by Avram Davidson

GRANDMA, by Carol Emshwiller

THE GIFT BEARER, by Charles L. Fontenay

I, ROBOT, by Cory Doctorow

ALL RIGHTS, by Pamela Sargent

THE EICHMANN VARIATIONS, by George Zebrowski

MAY BE SOME TIME, by Brenda W. Clough

CYBERPUNK, by Bruce Bethke

MILLENNIUM, by Everett B. Cole

JOIN OUR GANG? by Sterling E. Lanier

GREYLORN, by Keith Laumer

JUMPING THE LINE, by Grania Davis

HE’S ONLY HUMAN, by Lawrence Watt-Evans

THE WASONICA CORRECTION, by James C. Stewart

CIRCUS, by Alan E. Nourse

THE HATED, by Frederik Pohl

CODE THREE, by Rick Raphael

COST OF LIVING, by Robert Sheckley

THIS IS KLON CALLING, by Walter J. Sheldon

THE BIG BOUNCE, by Walter S. Tevis

THE RISK PROFESSION, by Donald E. Westlake

THE FIRE EGGS, by Darrell Schweitzer

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS