The Sixth Science Fiction Megapack
Author: Arthur C. Clarke
Date: 2013-02-14 05:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Science Fiction; Short Stories; Anthologies; Science Fiction Fantasy; Fiction
Description: "The Sixth Science Fiction Megapack" presents 25 more mind-bending excursions through time and space, with great stories by such authors as Arthur C. Clarke, Nancy Kress, Lawrence Watt-Evans, George Zebrowski, Philip K. Dick, and many more! Included are:OUT OF ALL THEM BRIGHT STARS, by Nancy KressTHE HANGING STRANGER, by Philip K. DickWALKING JOHN AND BIRD, by Neal AsherTHE SYMPHONIC ABDUCTION, by Hannes BokTHE NINE BILLION NAMES OF GOD, by Arthur C. ClarkeHILLARY ORBITS VENUS, by Pamela SargentMAYBE JUST A LITTLE ONE, by Reginald BretnorTHE ULTROOM ERROR, by Jerry SohlREMEMBRANCE OF THINGS TO
Publisher: Wildside Press

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COPYRIGHT INFO

The Sixth Science Fiction Megapack is copyright © 2013
by Wildside Press LLC. Indiviual stories are copyrighted by their authors. Cover art © Innovari / 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.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

“Out of All Them Bright Stars,” by Nancy Kress, originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, March 1985. Copyright © 1985 by Nancy Kress. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“The Hanging Stranger,” by Philip K. Dick, originally appeared in Science Fiction Adventures Magazine, December 1953.

“Walking John and Bird,” by Neal Asher, originally appeared in Runcible Tales (1999). Reprinted by permission of the author.

“The Nine Billion Names of God,” by Arthur C. Clarke, originally appeared in Star Science Fiction Stories, February 1953. Copyright © 1953 by Arthur C. Clarke.

Reprinted by permission of the author’s literary agent, Scovil Galen Ghosh Literary Agency. (Winner of the 2004

Retro Hugo Award, short story category, awarded for best science fiction story of 1953.)

“Hillary Orbits Venus,” by Pamela Sargent, originally appeared in Amazing Stories, Spring 1999. Copyright ©

1999 by Pamela Sargent. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Maybe Just a Little One,” by Reginald Bretnor, originally appeared in Harper’s Magazine, August 1947. Copyright ©

1947 by Reginald Bretnor, copyright renewed © 1975.

Reprinted be permission of the copyright owner, Wildside Press LLC.

“Remembrance of Things to Come,” by Lawrence Watt-Evans, originally appeared in Analog, April 1999.

“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.

“Pride,” by Mary A. Turzillo, originally appeared in Fast Forward 1. Copyright © 1997 by Mary A Turzillo. Reprinted
by permission of the author.

“Cat and Mouse,” by Ralph Williams, originally appeared in Astounding Science Fiction, June 1959.

“The Record,” by Forrest J Ackerman and Ray Bradbury, originally appeared in Futuria Fantasia #1, Summer 1939.

“The New Reality,” by Reginald Bretnor, originally appeared in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, September 1984. Copyright © 1984 by Reginald Bretnor. Reprinted be permission of the copyright owner, Wildside Press LLC.

“What Hath Me?” by Henry Kuttner, originally appeared in Planet Stories, Spring 1946. No record of copyright renewal.

“Bridge of Silence, by George Zebrowski, is copyright ©

1986 George Zebrowski. First published in Aboriginal Science Fiction, December 1986. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Sun’s Up,” by A.A. Jackson IV and Howard Waldrop, originally appeared in Faster Than Light. Copyright © 1976
by A.A. Jackson IV and Howard Waldrop. Reprinted by permission of the authors.

Consignment, by Alan E. Nourse, originally appeared in Science Fiction Adventures, December 1953.

“The Syndic,” by C.M. Kornbluth, originally appeared in Science Fiction Adventures, December 1953 and March 1954 issues.

“The Jewels of Aptor,” by Samuel R. Delany, originally appeared in 1962.

“The Mississippi Saucer,” by Frank Belknap Long, originally appeared in Weird Tales, March 1951.

“Membership Drive,” by Murray F. Yaco, originally appeared in Amazing Stories, July 1960.

“Cancer World,” by Harry Warner, Jr. originally appeared in Imagination, May 1954.

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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 Christmas Megapack

The Second Christmas 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 Sixth Science Fiction Megapack

The Penny Parker Megapack

The Pinocchio Megapack

The Pulp Fiction Megapack

The Steampunk Megapack

The Tom Corbett, Space Cadet Megapack

The Tom Swift Megapack

The Vampire Megapack

The Victorian Mystery 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

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OUT OF ALL THEM BRIGHT STARS, by Nancy Kress

So I’m filling the catsup bottles at the end of the night, and I’m listening to the radio Charlie has stuck up on top of a movable panel in the ceiling, when the door opens and one of them walks in. I know right away it’s one of them—
no chance to make a mistake about that—even though it’s got on a nice suit and a brim hat like Humphrey Bogart used to wear in Casablanca. But there’s nobody with it, no professor or government men like on the TV show or even any students. It’s all alone. And we’re a long way out on the highway from the college.

It stands in the doorway, blinking a little, with rain dripping off its hat. Kathy, who’s supposed to be cleaning the coffee machine behind the counter, freezes and stares with one hand holding the filter up in the air like she’s never going to move again. Just then Charlie calls out from the kitchen, “Hey, Kathy, you ask anybody who won the Trifecta?” and she doesn’t even answer him. Just goes on staring with her mouth open like she’s thinking of screaming but forgot how. And the old couple in the corner booth, the only ones left from the crowd when the movie got out, stop chewing their chocolate cream pie and stare too. Kathy closes her mouth and opens it again and a noise comes out like “Uh—errrgh…”

Well, that got me annoyed. Maybe she tried to say “ugh”

and maybe she didn’t, but here it is standing in the doorway with rain falling around it in little drops and we’re staring at it like it’s a clothes dummy and not a customer.

So I think that’s not right and maybe we’re even making it feel a little bad, I wouldn’t like Kathy staring at me like that, and I dry my hands on my towel and go over.

“Yes, sir, can I help you?” I say.

“Table for one,” it says, like Charlie’s is some nice steak house in town. But I suppose that’s the kind of place the government men mostly take them to. And besides, its voice is polite and easy to understand, with a sort of accent but not as bad as some we get from the college. I can tell what it’s saying. I lead him to a booth in the corner opposite the old couple, who come in every Friday night and haven’t left a tip yet.

He sits down slowly. I notice he keeps his hands on his lap, but I can’t tell if that’s because he doesn’t know what to do with them or because he thinks I won’t want to see them. But I’ve seen the close-ups on TV—they don’t look so weird to me like they do to some. Charlie says they make his stomach turn, but I can’t see it. You think he’d of seen worse meat in Vietnam. He talks enough like he did, on and on, and sometimes we even believe him.

I say, “Coffee, sir?”

He makes a kind of movement with his eyes. I can’t tell what the movement means, but he says in that polite voice,

“No, thank you. I am unable to drink coffee,” and I think that’s a good thing because I suddenly remember Kathy’s got the filter out. But then he says, “May I have a green salad, please? With no dressing, please?”

The rain is still dripping off his hat. I figure the government people never told him to take off his hat in a restaurant, and for some reason that tickles me and makes me feel real bold. This polite blue guy isn’t going to bother nobody, and that fool Charlie was just spouting off his mouth again.

“The salad’s not too fresh, sir,” I say, experimental-like, just to see what he’ll say next. And it’s the truth—the salad is left over from yesterday. But the guy answers like I asked something else.

“What is your name?” he says, so polite I know he’s really curious and not trying to start anything. And what could he
start anyway, blue and with those hands? Still, you never know.

“Sally,” I say, “Sally Gourley.”

“I am John,” he says, and makes that movement again with his eyes. All of a sudden it tickles me—‘John!’ For this blue guy! So I laugh, and right away I feel sorry, like I might have hurt his feelings or something. How could you tell?

“Hey, I’m sorry,” I say, and he takes off his hat. He does it real slow, like taking off the hat is important and means something, but all there is underneath is a bald blue head.

Nothing weird like with the hands.

“Do not apologize,” John says. “I have another name, of course, but in my own language.”

“What is it?” I say, bold as brass, because all of a sudden I picture myself telling all this to my sister Mary Ellen and her listening real hard.

John makes some noises with his mouth, and I feel my own mouth open because it’s not a word he says at all, it’s a beautiful sound, like a bird call only sadder. It’s just that I wasn’t expecting it, that beautiful sound right here in Charlie’s diner. It surprised me, coming out of that bald blue head. That’s all it was: surprise.

I don’t say anything. John looks at me and says, “It has a meaning that can be translated. It means—” but before he can say what it means Charlie comes charging out of the kitchen, Kathy right behind him. He’s still got the racing form in one hand, like he’s been studying the Trifecta, and he pushes right up against the booth and looks red and furious. Then I see the old couple scuttling out the door, their jackets clutched to their fronts, and the chocolate pie half-eaten on their plates. I see they’re going to stiff me for the check, but before I can stop them Charlie grabs my arm and squeezes so hard his nails slice into my skin.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he says right to me. Not so much as a look at John, but Kathy can’t stop
looking and her fist is pushed up to her mouth.

I drag my arm away and rub it. Once I saw Charlie push his wife so hard she went down and hit her head and had to have four stitches. It was me that drove her to the emergency room.

Charlie says, “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

“I’m serving my table. He wants a salad. Large.” I can’t remember if John said a large or a small salad, but I figure a large order would make Charlie feel better. But Charlie don’t want to feel better.

“You get him out of here,” Charlie hisses. He still doesn’t look at John. “You hear me, Sally? You get him out. The government says I gotta serve spics and niggers but it don’t say I gotta serve him!”

I look at John. He’s putting on his hat, ramming it onto his bald head, and half standing in the booth. He can’t get out because Charlie and me are both in the way. I expect John to look mad or upset, but except that he’s holding the muscles of his face in some different way I can’t see any change of expression. But I figure he’s got to feel something bad, and all of a sudden I’m mad at Charlie, who’s a bully and who’s got the feelings of a scumbag. I open my mouth to tell him so, plus one or two other little things I been saving up, when the door flies open and in bursts four men, and damn if they aren’t all wearing hats like Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca. As soon as the first guy sees John, his walk changes and he comes over slower but more purposeful-like, and then he’s talking to John and Charlie in a sincere voice like a TV anchorman giving out the news.

I see the situation now belongs to him, so I go back to the catsup bottles. I’m still plenty burned though, about Charlie manhandling me and about Kathy rushing into the kitchen to get Charlie. She’s a flake and always has been.

Charlie is scowling and nodding. The harder he scowls, the nicer the government guy’s voice gets. Pretty soon the
government guy is smiling sweet as pie. Charlie slinks back into the kitchen, and the four men move toward the door with John in the middle of them like some high school football huddle. Next to the real men he looks stranger than he did before, and I see how really flat his face is. But then when the huddle’s right opposite my table with the catsup bottles, John breaks away and comes over to me.

“I am sorry, Sally Gourley,” he says. And then, “I seldom have the chance to show our friendliness to an ordinary earth person. I make so little difference!”

Well, that throws me. His voice sounds so sad, and besides I never thought of myself as an ordinary earth person. Who would? So I just shrug and wipe off a catsup bottle with my towel. But then John does a weird thing. He just touches my arm where Charlie squeezed it, just touches it with the palm of one of those hands. And the palm’s not slimy at all—dry, and sort of cool, and I don’t jump or anything. Instead I remember that beautiful noise when he said his other name. Then he goes out with three of the men and the door bangs behind them on a gust of rain because Charlie never fixed the air-stop from when some kids horsing around broke it last spring.

The fourth man stays and questions me: what did the alien say, what did I say. I tell him, but then he starts asking the exact same questions all over again, like he didn’t believe me the first time, and that gets me mad. Also he has this snotty voice, and I see how his eyebrows move when I slip once and say, “He don’t.” I might not know what John’s muscles mean but I sure as hell can read those eyebrows.

So I get miffed and pretty soon he leaves and the door bangs behind him.

I finish the catsup and mustard bottles and Kathy finishes the coffee machine. The radio in the ceiling plays something instrumental, no words, real sad. Kathy and me start to wash down the booths with disinfectant, and
because we’re doing the same work together and nobody comes in, I finally say to her, “It’s funny.”

She says, “What’s funny?”

“Charlie called that guy ‘him’ right off. ‘I don’t got to serve him,’ he said. And I thought of him as ‘it’ at first, leastways until I had a name to use. But Charlie’s the one who threw him out.”

Kathy swipes at the back of her booth. “And Charlie’s right. That thing scared me half to death, coming in here like that. And where there’s food being served, too.” She snorts and sprays on more disinfectant.

Well, she’s a flake. Always has been.

“The National Enquirer,” Kathy goes on, “told how they have all this firepower up in the big ship that hasn’t landed yet. My husband says they could blow us all to smithereens, they’re so powerful. I don’t know why they even came here.

We don’t want them. I don’t even know why they came, all that way.”

“They want to make a difference,” I say, but Kathy barrels on ahead, not listening.

“The Pentagon will hold them off, it doesn’t matter how much firepower they got up there or how much they insist on seeing about our defenses, the Pentagon won’t let them get any toeholds on earth. That’s what my husband says.

Blue bastards.”

I say, “Will you please shut up?”

She gives me a dirty look and flounces off. I don’t care.

None of it is anything to me. Only, standing there with the disinfectant in my hand, looking at the dark windows and listening to the music wordless and slow on the radio, I remember that touch on my arm. And I think, they didn’t come here with any firepower to blow us all to smithereens.

I just don’t believe it. So why did they come? Why come all that way from another star to walk into Charlie’s diner and order a green salad with no dressing from an ordinary earth person?

Charlie comes out with his keys to unlock the cash register and go over the tapes. I remember the old couple who stiffed me and I curse to myself. Only pie and coffee, but it still comes off my salary. The radio starts playing something else, not the sad song, but nothing snappy neither. It’s a love song, about some guy giving and giving and getting treated like dirt. I don’t like it much.

“Charlie,” I say, “what did those government men say to you?”

He looks up from his tapes and scowls. “What do you care?”

“I just want to know.”

“And maybe I don’t want you to know,” he says, and smiles nasty-like. Me asking has put him in a better mood, the creep. All of a sudden I remember what his wife said when she got the stitches: “The only way to get something from Charlie is to let him smack me around a little, and then ask him when I’m down. He’ll give me anything when I’m down. He gives me shit if he thinks I’m on top.”

I think again about the blue guy. John.

I do the rest of the clean-up without saying anything.

Charlie swears at the night’s take—I know from my tips that it’s not much. Kathy teases her hair in front of the mirror behind doughnuts and pies, and I put down the breakfast menus. But all the time I’m thinking, and I don’t much like my thoughts.

Charlie locks up and we all leave. Outside it’s stopped raining but it’s still misty and soft, real pretty but too cold.

I pull my sweater around myself and in the parking lot, after Kathy’s gone, I say, “Charlie.”

He stops walking toward his truck. “Yeah?”

I lick my lips. They’re all of a sudden dry. It’s an experiment, like, what I’m going to say. It’s an experiment.

“Charlie. What if those government men hadn’t come just then and the…the blue guy hadn’t been willing to leave?

What would you have done?”

“What do you care?”

I shrug. “I don’t. Just curious. It’s your place.”

“Damn straight it’s my place!” Through the mist I can see him scowl. “I’d of squashed him flat!”

“And then what? After you squashed him flat, what if the men came then and made a stink?”

“Too bad. It’d be too late by then, huh?” He laughs and I can see how he’s seeing it: the blue guy bleeding on the linoleum and Charlie standing over him, dusting his hands together.

Charlie laughs again and goes off to his truck, whistling.

He has a little bounce in his step. He’s still seeing it, almost like it really had happened. Over his shoulder he calls to me, “They’re built like wimps. Or girls. All bone, no muscle.

Even you must of seen that,” and his voice is cheerful. It doesn’t have any more anger in it, or hatred, or anything but a kind of friendliness. I hear him whistle some more, until the truck engine starts up and he peels out of the parking lot, laying rubber like a kid.

I unlock my Chevy. But before I get in, I look up at the sky.

Which is really stupid because of course I can’t see anything, with all the mist and clouds. No stars.

Maybe Kathy’s husband is right. Maybe they do want to blow us all to smithereens. I don’t think so, but what the hell difference does it ever make what I think? And all at once I’m furious at John, furious mad, as mad as I’ve ever been in my life.

Why does he have to come here, with his bird calls and his politeness? Why can’t they all go someplace else besides here? There must be lots of other places they can go, out of all them bright stars up there behind the clouds. They don’t need to come here, here where I need this job and so that means I need Charlie. He’s a bully, but I want to look at him and see nothing else but a bully. Nothing else but that.

That’s all I want to see in Charlie, in the government men—
just small-time bullies, nothing special, not a mirror of
anything, not a future of anything. Just Charlie. That’s all. I won’t see nothing else.

I won’t.

“I make so little difference,” he says.

Yeah. Sure.

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THE HANGING STRANGER, by Philip K. Dick

Five o’clock. Ed Loyce washed up, tossed on his hat and coat, got his car out, and headed across town toward his TV
sales store. He was tired. His back and shoulders ached from digging dirt out of the basement and wheeling it into the back yard. But for a forty-year-old man he had done okay. Janet could get a new vase with the money he had saved, and he liked the idea of repairing the foundations himself!

It was getting dark. The setting sun cast long rays over the scurrying commuters, tired and grim-faced, women loaded down with bundles and packages, students swarming home from the university, mixing with clerks and businessmen and drab secretaries. He stopped his Packard for a red light and then started it up again. The store had been open without him; he’d arrive just in time to spell the help for dinner, go over the records of the day, maybe even close a couple of sales himself. He drove slowly past the small square of green in the center of the street, the town park. There were no parking places in front of LOYCE TV

SALES AND SERVICE. He cursed under his breath and swung the car in a U-turn. Again he passed the little square of green with its lonely drinking fountain and bench and single lamppost.

From the lamppost something was hanging. A shapeless dark bundle, swinging a little with the wind. Like a dummy of some sort. Loyce rolled down his window and peered out. What the hell was it? A display of some kind?

Sometimes the Chamber of Commerce put up displays in the square.

Again he made a U-turn and brought his car around. He passed the park and concentrated on the dark bundle. It wasn’t a dummy. And if it was a display, it was a strange
kind. The hackles on his neck rose and he swallowed uneasily. Sweat slid out on his face and hands.

It was a body. A human body.

* * * *

“Look at it!” Loyce snapped. “Come on out here!”

Don Fergusson came slowly out of the store, buttoning his pin-stripe coat with dignity. “This is a big deal, Ed. I can’t just leave the guy standing there.”

“See it?” Ed pointed into the gathering gloom. The lamppost jutted up against the sky—the post and the bundle swinging from it. “There it is. How the hell long has it been there?” His voice rose excitedly. “What’s wrong with everybody? They just walk on past!”

Don Fergusson lit a cigarette slowly. “Take it easy, old man. There must be a good reason, or it wouldn’t be there.”

“A reason! What kind of a reason?”

Fergusson shrugged. “Like the time the Traffic Safety Council put that wrecked Buick there. Some sort of civic thing. How would I know?”

Jack Potter from the shoe shop joined them. “What’s up, boys?”

“There’s a body hanging from the lamppost,” Loyce said.

“I’m going to call the cops.”

“They must know about it,” Potter said. “Or otherwise it wouldn’t be there.”

“I got to get back in.” Fergusson headed back into the store. “Business before pleasure.”

Loyce began to get hysterical. “You see it? You see it hanging there? A man’s body! A dead man!”

“Sure, Ed. I saw it this afternoon when I went out for coffee.”

“You mean it’s been there all afternoon?”

“Sure. What’s the matter?” Potter glanced at his watch.

“Have to run. See you later, Ed.”

Potter hurried off, joining the flow of people moving along the sidewalk. Men and women, passing by the park. A few glanced up curiously at the dark bundle—and then went on.

Nobody stopped. Nobody paid any attention.

“I’m going nuts,” Loyce whispered. He made his way to the curb and crossed out into traffic, among the cars.

Horns honked angrily at him. He gained the curb and stepped up onto the little square of green.

The man had been middle-aged. His clothing was ripped and torn, a gray suit, splashed and caked with dried mud. A stranger. Loyce had never seen him before. Not a local man. His face was partly turned, away, and in the evening wind he spun a little, turning gently, silently. His skin was gouged and cut. Red gashes, deep scratches of congealed blood. A pair of steel-rimmed glasses hung from one ear, dangling foolishly. His eyes bulged. His mouth was open, tongue thick and ugly blue.

“For Heaven’s sake,” Loyce muttered, sickened. He pushed down his nausea and made his way back to the sidewalk. He was shaking all over, with revulsion—and fear.

Why? Who was the man? Why was he hanging there?

What did it mean?

And—why didn’t anybody notice?

He bumped into a small man hurrying along the sidewalk.

“Watch it!” the man grated, “Oh, it’s you, Ed.”

Ed nodded dazedly. “Hello, Jenkins.”

“What’s the matter?” The stationery clerk caught Ed’s arm. “You look sick.”

“The body. There in the park.”

“Sure, Ed.” Jenkins led him into the alcove of LOYCE TV

SALES AND SERVICE. “Take it easy.”

Margaret Henderson from the jewelry store joined them.

“Something wrong?”

“Ed’s not feeling well.”

Loyce yanked himself free. “How can you stand here?

Don’t you see it? For God’s sake—”

“What’s he talking about?” Margaret asked nervously.

“The body!” Ed shouted. “The body hanging there!”

More people collected. “Is he sick? It’s Ed Loyce. You okay, Ed?”

“The body!” Loyce screamed, struggling to get past them.

Hands caught at him. He tore loose. “Let me go! The police! Get the police!”

“Ed—”

“Better get a doctor!”

“He must be sick.”

“Or drunk.”

Loyce fought his way through the people. He stumbled and half fell. Through a blur he saw rows of faces, curious, concerned, anxious. Men and women halting to see what the disturbance was. He fought past them toward his store.

He could see Fergusson inside talking to a man, showing him an Emerson TV set. Pete Foley in the back at the service counter, setting up a new Philco. Loyce shouted at them frantically. His voice was lost in the roar of traffic and the murmur around him.

“Do something!” he screamed. “Don’t stand there! Do something! Something’s wrong! Something’s happened!

Things are going on!”

The crowd melted respectfully for the two heavy-set cops moving efficiently toward Loyce.

* * * *

“Name?” the cop with the notebook murmured.

“Loyce.” He mopped his forehead wearily. “Edward C.

Loyce. Listen to me. Back there—”

“Address?” the cop demanded. The police car moved swiftly through traffic, shooting among the cars and buses.

Loyce sagged against the seat, exhausted and confused. He took a deep shuddering breath.

“1368 Hurst Road.”

“That’s here in Pikeville?”

“That’s right.” Loyce pulled himself up with a violent effort. “Listen to me. Back there. In the square. Hanging from the lamppost—”

“Where were you today?” the cop behind the wheel demanded.

“Where?” Loyce echoed.

“You weren’t in your shop, were you?”

“No.” He shook his head. “No, I was home. Down in the basement.”

“In the basement?”

“Digging. A new foundation. Getting out the dirt to pour a cement frame. Why? What has that to do with—”

“Was anybody else down there with you?”

“No. My wife was downtown. My kids were at school.”

Loyce looked from one heavy-set cop to the other. Hope flicked across his face, wild hope. “You mean because I was down there I missed—the explanation? I didn’t get in on it?

Like everybody else?”

After a pause the cop with the notebook said: “That’s right. You missed the explanation.”

“Then it’s official? The body—it’s supposed to be hanging there?”

“It’s supposed to be hanging there. For everybody to see.”

Ed Loyce grinned weakly. “Good Lord. I guess I sort of went off the deep end. I thought maybe something had happened. You know, something like the Ku Klux Klan.

Some kind of violence. Communists or Fascists taking over.” He wiped his face with his breast-pocket handkerchief, his hands shaking. “I’m glad to know it’s on the level.”

“It’s on the level.” The police car was getting near the Hall of Justice. The sun had set. The streets were gloomy and dark. The lights had not yet come on.

“I feel better,” Loyce said. “I was pretty excited there, for a minute. I guess I got all stirred up. Now that I understand, there’s no need to take me in, is there?”

The two cops said nothing.

“I should be back at my store. The boys haven’t had dinner. I’m all right, now. No more trouble. Is there any need of—”

“This won’t take long,” the cop behind the wheel interrupted. “A short process. Only a few minutes.”

“I hope it’s short,” Loyce muttered. The car slowed down for a stoplight. “I guess I sort of disturbed the peace.

Funny, getting excited like that and—”

Loyce yanked the door open. He sprawled out into the street and rolled to his feet. Cars were moving all around him, gaining speed as the light changed. Loyce leaped onto the curb and raced among the people, burrowing into the swarming crowds. Behind him he heard sounds, shouts, people running.

They weren’t cops. He had realized that right away. He knew every cop in Pikeville. A man couldn’t own a store, operate a business in a small town for twenty-five years without getting to know all the cops.

They weren’t cops—and there hadn’t been any explanation. Potter, Fergusson, Jenkins, none of them knew why it was there. They didn’t know—and they didn’t care.

That was the strange part.

Loyce ducked into a hardware store. He raced toward the back, past the startled clerks and customers, into the shipping room and through the back door. He tripped over a garbage can and ran up a flight of concrete steps. He climbed over a fence and jumped down on the other side, gasping and panting.

There was no sound behind him. He had got away.

He was at the entrance of an alley, dark and strewn with boards and ruined boxes and tires. He could see the street at the far end. A street light wavered and came on. Men and women. Stores. Neon signs. Cars.

And to his right—the police station.

He was close, terribly close. Past the loading platform of a grocery store rose the white concrete side of the Hall of Justice. Barred windows. The police antenna. A great concrete wall rising up in the darkness. A bad place for him to be near. He was too close. He had to keep moving, get farther away from them.

Them?

Loyce moved cautiously down the alley. Beyond the police station was the City Hall, the old-fashioned yellow structure of wood and gilded brass and broad cement steps. He could see the endless rows of offices, dark windows, the cedars and beds of flowers on each side of the entrance.

And—something else.

Above the City Hall was a patch of darkness, a cone of gloom denser than the surrounding night. A prism of black that spread out and was lost into the sky.

He listened. Good God, he could hear something.

Something that made him struggle frantically to close his ears, his mind, to shut out the sound. A buzzing. A distant, muted hum like a great swarm of bees.

Loyce gazed up, rigid with horror. The splotch of darkness, hanging over the City Hall. Darkness so thick it seemed almost solid. In the vortex something moved.

Flickering shapes. Things, descending from the sky, pausing momentarily above the City Hall, fluttering over it in a dense swarm and then dropping silently onto the roof.

Shapes. Fluttering shapes from the sky. From the crack of darkness that hung above him.

He was seeing—them.

* * * *

For a long time Loyce watched, crouched behind a sagging fence in a pool of scummy water.

They were landing. Coming down in groups, landing on the roof of the City Hall and disappearing inside. They had wings. Like giant insects of some kind. They flew and
fluttered and came to rest—and then crawled crab-fashion, sideways, across the roof and into the building.

He was sickened. And fascinated. Cold night wind blew around him and he shuddered. He was tired, dazed with shock. On the front steps of the City Hall were men, standing here and there. Groups of men coming out of the building and halting for a moment before going on.

Were there more of them?

It didn’t seem possible. What he saw descending from the black chasm weren’t men. They were alien—from some other world, some other dimension. Sliding through this slit, this break in the shell of the universe. Entering through this gap, winged insects from another realm of being.

On the steps of the City Hall a group of men broke up. A few moved toward a waiting car. One of the remaining shapes started to re-enter the City Hall. It changed its mind and turned to follow the others.

Loyce closed his eyes in horror. His senses reeled. He hung on tight, clutching at the sagging fence. The shape, the man-shape, had abruptly fluttered up and flapped after the others. It flew to the sidewalk and came to rest among them.

Pseudo-men. Imitation men. Insects with ability to disguise themselves as men. Like other insects familiar to Earth. Protective coloration. Mimicry.

Loyce pulled himself away. He got slowly to his feet. It was night. The alley was totally dark. But maybe they could see in the dark. Maybe darkness made no difference to them.

He left the alley cautiously and moved out onto the street.

Men and women flowed past, but not so many, now. At the bus-stops stood waiting groups. A huge bus lumbered along the street, its lights flashing in the evening gloom.

Loyce moved forward. He pushed his way among those waiting and when the bus halted he boarded it and took a
seat in the rear, by the door. A moment later the bus moved into life and rumbled down the street.

* * * *

Loyce relaxed a little. He studied the people around him.

Dulled, tired faces. People going home from work. Quite ordinary faces. None of them paid any attention to him. All sat quietly, sunk down in their seats, jiggling with the motion of the bus.

The man sitting next to him unfolded a newspaper. He began to read the sports section, his lips moving. An ordinary man. Blue suit. Tie. A businessman, or a salesman.

On his way home to his wife and family.

Across the aisle a young woman, perhaps twenty. Dark eyes and hair, a package on her lap. Nylons and heels. Red coat and white angora sweater. Gazing absently ahead of her.

A high school boy in jeans and black jacket.

A great triple-chinned woman with an immense shopping bag loaded with packages and parcels. Her thick face dim with weariness.

Ordinary people. The kind that rode the bus every evening. Going home to their families. To dinner.

Going home—with their minds dead. Controlled, filmed over with the mask of an alien being that had appeared and taken possession of them, their town, their lives. Himself, too. Except that he happened to be deep in his cellar instead of in the store. Somehow, he had been overlooked.

They had missed him. Their control wasn’t perfect, foolproof.

Maybe there were others.

Hope flickered in Loyce. They weren’t omnipotent. They had made a mistake, not got control of him. Their net, their field of control, had passed over him. He had emerged from his cellar as he had gone down. Apparently their power-zone was limited.

A few seats down the aisle a man was watching him.

Loyce broke off his chain of thought. A slender man, with dark hair and a small mustache. Well-dressed, brown suit and shiny shoes. A book between his small hands. He was watching Loyce, studying him intently. He turned quickly away.

Loyce tensed. One of them? Or—another they had missed?

The man was watching him again. Small dark eyes, alive and clever. Shrewd. A man too shrewd for them—or one of the things itself, an alien insect from beyond.

The bus halted. An elderly man got on slowly and dropped his token into the box. He moved down the aisle and took a seat opposite Loyce.

The elderly man caught the sharp-eyed man’s gaze. For a split second something passed between them.

A look rich with meaning.

Loyce got to his feet. The bus was moving. He ran to the door. One step down into the well. He yanked the emergency door release. The rubber door swung open.

“Hey!” the driver shouted, jamming on the brakes. “What the hell—”

Loyce squirmed through. The bus was slowing down.

Houses on all sides. A residential district, lawns and tall apartment buildings. Behind him, the bright-eyed man had leaped up. The elderly man was also on his feet. They were coming after him.

Loyce leaped. He hit the pavement with terrific force and rolled against the curb. Pain lapped over him. Pain and a vast tide of blackness. Desperately, he fought it off. He struggled to his knees and then slid down again. The bus had stopped. People were getting off.

Loyce groped around. His fingers closed over something.

A rock, lying in the gutter. He crawled to his feet, grunting with pain. A shape loomed before him. A man, the bright-eyed man with the book.

Loyce kicked. The man gasped and fell. Loyce brought the rock down. The man screamed and tried to roll away.

“Stop! For God’s sake listen—”

He struck again. A hideous crunching sound. The man’s voice cut off and dissolved in a bubbling wail. Loyce scrambled up and back. The others were there, now. All around him. He ran, awkwardly, down the sidewalk, up a driveway. None of them followed him. They had stopped and were bending over the inert body of the man with the book, the bright-eyed man who had come after him.

Had he made a mistake?

But it was too late to worry about that. He had to get out

—away from them. Out of Pikeville, beyond the crack of darkness, the rent between their world and his.

* * * *

“Ed!” Janet Loyce backed away nervously. “What is it?

What—”

Ed Loyce slammed the door behind him and came into the living room. “Pull down the shades. Quick.”

Janet moved toward the window. “But—”

“Do as I say. Who else is here besides you?”

“Nobody. Just the twins. They’re upstairs in their room.

What’s happened? You look so strange. Why are you home?”

Ed locked the front door. He prowled around the house, into the kitchen. From the drawer under the sink he slid out the big butcher knife and ran his finger along it. Sharp.

Plenty sharp. He returned to the living room.

“Listen to me,” he said. “I don’t have much time. They know I escaped and they’ll be looking for me.”

“Escaped?” Janet’s face twisted with bewilderment and fear. “Who?”

“The town has been taken over. They’re in control. I’ve got it pretty well figured out. They started at the top, at the

City Hall and police department. What they did with the real humans they—”

“What are you talking about?”

“We’ve been invaded. From some other universe, some other dimension. They’re insects. Mimicry. And more.

Power to control minds. Your mind.”

“My mind?”

“Their entrance is here, in Pikeville. They’ve taken over all of you. The whole town—except me. We’re up against an incredibly powerful enemy, but they have their limitations.

That’s our hope. They’re limited! They can make mistakes!”

Janet shook her head. “I don’t understand, Ed. You must be insane.”

“Insane? No. Just lucky. If I hadn’t been down in the basement I’d be like all the rest of you.” Loyce peered out the window. “But I can’t stand here talking. Get your coat.”

“My coat?”

“We’re getting out of here. Out of Pikeville. We’ve got to get help. Fight this thing. They can be beaten. They’re not infallible. It’s going to be close—but we may make it if we hurry. Come on!” He grabbed her arm roughly. “Get your coat and call the twins. We’re all leaving. Don’t stop to pack. There’s no time for that.”

White-faced, his wife moved toward the closet and got down her coat. “Where are we going?”

Ed pulled open the desk drawer and spilled the contents out onto the floor. He grabbed up a road map and spread it open. “They’ll have the highway covered, of course. But there’s a back road. To Oak Grove. I got onto it once. It’s practically abandoned. Maybe they’ll forget about it.”

“The old Ranch Road? Good Lord—it’s completely closed.

Nobody’s supposed to drive over it.”

“I know.” Ed thrust the map grimly into his coat. “That’s our best chance. Now call down the twins and let’s get going. Your car is full of gas, isn’t it?”

Janet was dazed.

“The Chevy? I had it filled up yesterday afternoon.” Janet moved toward the stairs. “Ed, I—”

“Call the twins!” Ed unlocked the front door and peered out. Nothing stirred. No sign of life. All right so far.

“Come on downstairs,” Janet called in a wavering voice.

“We’re—going out for awhile.”

“Now?” Tommy’s voice came.

“Hurry up,” Ed barked. “Get down here, both of you.”

Tommy appeared at the top of the stairs. “I was doing my home work. We’re starting fractions. Miss Parker says if we don’t get this done—”

“You can forget about fractions.” Ed grabbed his son as he came down the stairs and propelled him toward the door.

“Where’s Jim?”

“He’s coming.”

Jim started slowly down the stairs. “What’s up, Dad?”

“We’re going for a ride.”

“A ride? Where?”

Ed turned to Janet. “We’ll leave the lights on. And the TV
set. Go turn it on.” He pushed her toward the set. “So they’ll think we’re still—”

He heard the buzz. And dropped instantly, the long butcher knife out. Sickened, he saw it coming down the stairs at him, wings a blur of motion as it aimed itself. It still bore a vague resemblance to Jimmy. It was small, a baby one. A brief glimpse—the thing hurtling at him, cold, multi-lensed inhuman eyes. Wings, body still clothed in yellow T-shirt and jeans, the mimic outline still stamped on it. A strange half-turn of its body as it reached him. What was it doing?

A stinger.

Loyce stabbed wildly at it. It retreated, buzzing frantically.

Loyce rolled and crawled toward the door. Tommy and Janet stood still as statues, faces blank. Watching without expression. Loyce stabbed again. This time the knife
connected. The thing shrieked and faltered. It bounced against the wall and fluttered down.

Something lapped through his mind. A wall of force, energy, an alien mind probing into him. He was suddenly paralyzed. The mind entered his own, touched against him briefly, shockingly. An utterly alien presence, settling over him—and then it flickered out as the thing collapsed in a broken heap on the rug.

It was dead. He turned it over with his foot. It was an insect, a fly of some kind. Yellow T-shirt, jeans. His son Jimmy.… He closed his mind tight. It was too late to think about that. Savagely he scooped up his knife and headed toward the door. Janet and Tommy stood stone-still, neither of them moving.

The car was out. He’d never get through. They’d be waiting for him. It was ten miles on foot. Ten long miles over rough ground, gulleys and open fields and hills of uncut forest. He’d have to go alone.

Loyce opened the door. For a brief second he looked back at his wife and son. Then he slammed the door behind him and raced down the porch steps.

A moment later he was on his way, hurrying swiftly through the darkness toward the edge of town.

* * * *

The early morning sunlight was blinding. Loyce halted, gasping for breath, swaying back and forth. Sweat ran down in his eyes. His clothing was torn, shredded by the brush and thorns through which he had crawled. Ten miles

—on his hands and knees. Crawling, creeping through the night. His shoes were mud-caked. He was scratched and limping, utterly exhausted.

But ahead of him lay Oak Grove.

He took a deep breath and started down the hill. Twice he stumbled and fell, picking himself up and trudging on. His
ears rang. Everything receded and wavered. But he was there. He had got out, away from Pikeville.

A farmer in a field gaped at him. From a house a young woman watched in wonder. Loyce reached the road and turned onto it. Ahead of him was a gasoline station and a drive-in. A couple of trucks, some chickens pecking in the dirt, a dog tied with a string.

The white-clad attendant watched suspiciously as he dragged himself up to the station. “Thank God.” He caught hold of the wall. “I didn’t think I was going to make it. They followed me most of the way. I could hear them buzzing.

Buzzing and flitting around behind me.”

“What happened?” the attendant demanded. “You in a wreck? A hold-up?”

Loyce shook his head wearily. “They have the whole town.

The City Hall and the police station. They hung a man from the lamppost. That was the first thing I saw. They’ve got all the roads blocked. I saw them hovering over the cars coming in. About four this morning I got beyond them. I knew it right away. I could feel them leave. And then the sun came up.”

The attendant licked his lip nervously. “You’re out of your head. I better get a doctor.”

“Get me into Oak Grove,” Loyce gasped. He sank down on the gravel. “We’ve got to get started—cleaning them out.

Got to get started right away.”

* * * *

They kept a tape recorder going all the time he talked.

When he had finished the Commissioner snapped off the recorder and got to his feet. He stood for a moment, deep in thought. Finally he got out his cigarettes and lit up slowly, a frown on his beefy face.

“You don’t believe me,” Loyce said.

The Commissioner offered him a cigarette. Loyce pushed it impatiently away. “Suit yourself.” The Commissioner
moved over to the window and stood for a time looking out at the town of Oak Grove. “I believe you,” he said abruptly.

Loyce sagged. “Thank God.”

“So you got away.” The Commissioner shook his head.

“You were down in your cellar instead of at work. A freak chance. One in a million.”

Loyce sipped some of the black coffee they had brought him. “I have a theory,” he murmured.

“What is it?”

“About them. Who they are. They take over one area at a time. Starting at the top—the highest level of authority.

Working down from there in a widening circle. When they’re firmly in control they go on to the next town. They spread, slowly, very gradually. I think it’s been going on for a long time.”

“A long time?”

“Thousands of years. I don’t think it’s new.”

“Why do you say that?”

“When I was a kid.… A picture they showed us in Bible League. A religious picture—an old print. The enemy gods, defeated by Jehovah. Moloch, Beelzebub, Moab, Baalin, Ashtaroth—”

“So?”

“They were all represented by figures.” Loyce looked up at the Commissioner. “Beelzebub was represented as—a giant fly.”

The Commissioner grunted. “An old struggle.”

“They’ve been defeated. The Bible is an account of their defeats. They make gains—but finally they’re defeated.”

“Why defeated?”

“They can’t get everyone. They didn’t get me. And they never got the Hebrews. The Hebrews carried the message to the whole world. The realization of the danger. The two men on the bus. I think they understood. Had escaped, like I did.” He clenched his fists. “I killed one of them. I made a mistake. I was afraid to take a chance.”

The Commissioner nodded. “Yes, they undoubtedly had escaped, as you did. Freak accidents. But the rest of the town was firmly in control.” He turned from the window.

“Well, Mr. Loyce. You seem to have figured everything out.”

“Not everything. The hanging man. The dead man hanging from the lamppost. I don’t understand that. Why?

Why did they deliberately hang him there?”

“That would seem simple.” The Commissioner smiled faintly. “Bait.”

Loyce stiffened. His heart stopped beating. “Bait? What do you mean?”

“To draw you out. Make you declare yourself. So they’d know who was under control—and who had escaped.”

Loyce recoiled with horror. “Then they expected failures!

They anticipated—” He broke off. “They were ready with a trap.”

“And you showed yourself. You reacted. You made yourself known.” The Commissioner abruptly moved toward the door. “Come along, Loyce. There’s a lot to do. We must get moving. There’s no time to waste.”

Loyce started slowly to his feet, numbed. “And the man.

Who was the man? I never saw him before. He wasn’t a local man. He was a stranger. All muddy and dirty, his face cut, slashed—”

There was a strange look on the Commissioner’s face as he answered. “Maybe,” he said softly, “you’ll understand that, too. Come along with me, Mr. Loyce.” He held the door open, his eyes gleaming. Loyce caught a glimpse of the street in front of the police station. Policemen, a platform of some sort. A telephone pole—and a rope! “Right this way,” the Commissioner said, smiling coldly.

* * * *

As the sun set, the vice-president of the Oak Grove Merchants’ Bank came up out of the vault, threw the heavy time locks, put on his hat and coat, and hurried outside

onto the sidewalk. Only a few people were there, hurrying home to dinner.

“Good night,” the guard said, locking the door after him.

“Good night,” Clarence Mason murmured. He started along the street toward his car. He was tired. He had been working all day down in the vault, examining the lay-out of the safety deposit boxes to see if there was room for another tier. He was glad to be finished.

At the corner he halted. The street lights had not yet come on. The street was dim. Everything was vague. He looked around—and froze.

From the telephone pole in front of the police station, something large and shapeless hung. It moved a little with the wind.

What the hell was it?

Mason approached it warily. He wanted to get home. He was tired and hungry. He thought of his wife, his kids, a hot meal on the dinner table. But there was something about the dark bundle, something ominous and ugly. The light was bad; he couldn’t tell what it was. Yet it drew him on, made him move closer for a better look. The shapeless thing made him uneasy. He was frightened by it.

Frightened—and fascinated.

And the strange part was that nobody else seemed to notice it.

OceanofPDF.com

WALKING JOHN AND BIRD, by Neal Asher

I grace Bird with gender yet I still do not know if she is a living creature or a machine. She has the disquieting beauty of something as perfectly functional as a honed blade, her body-shape that of an Arctic tern fashioned, or grown, of mirror-bright metal as lacking in joints as mercury. Her head is an elongated teardrop and her beak, if such it could be called, never opens. In my darker moments I entertain the notion that should it open the sound to issue forth will be my death knell. But I wax too lyrical. Killing is a function she performs so very well.

When she is visible people mistakenly believe Bird has the fragility of her namesakes. The experts who have probed and tested her have learnt to their consternation she is impervious to any scan, any radiation. Neutrons bounce off her surface as readily as bullets. The latter I discovered long ago, as did some people who had wanted to learn her secrets and who had been prepared to use any means. Past now, and those people dead. They had threatened my life and paid the penalty. But the mystery remained.

I remember the name of the world, which is unusual, for I am a traveller and the names of worlds usually slip by me as readily as the names of the people I meet. It is a dark place where green grass and oak trees grow, and had recently been opened for colonization after terraforming.

What mostly distinguishes it in my recollection is a cracked crystal ball of a moon hurtling across the sky like a bubble across molten glass, and a conversation:

“Mystery! Hah!” The old man had paused then and squinted speculatively up at Bird. After a moment he scratched his grey beard and continued,

“Yes, I suppose you’re right. It’s just I can’t take you seriously. I’ve spent a century and a half trying to resolve some…mysteries, and I’m no closer.

Your protest strikes me as feeble.”

“You do not walk with death at your shoulder,” I told him.

The old man bent down with the hose he was holding and began to vacuum dust out of the excavation.

“Don’t be so conceited. We all do.”

“It does not have the same immediacy,” I told him, feeling rather foolish.

He shrugged and continued vacuuming for a while before saying anything more.

“There was one who answered questions for me that none of Earth’s AIs could answer.”

“Yes…”

“Dragon. Speak to Dragon. But be careful. The answer sometimes given is like what’s hovering at your shoulder.”

Next I stood before a runcible, the device invented in conjunction with an AI by Iversus Skaidon that made instantaneous travel a reality. Thus I was quince: a mitter traveller. And I was on my way to see a creature reputedly older than human history and apparently the size of a mountain. Bird was with me of course, a few metres above my head, and when I stepped between those twin bull’s horns into the space-twisting cusp, she followed, but by her own methods. I know not how.

Space and time ceased to exist for…yet there was no time so it could not have been for an instant too subliminal to register. One world blinked out and another blinked into existence. I found myself gazing across a landscape of pink and black rock below a metallic red sky. This was Aster Colora; the fabled world of Dragon. I tasted salt in the air and the taint of scrap yards. Bird was with me.

* * * *

The only city on Aster Colora was called Cartis. I rented an AGC at the runcible facility and headed that way, Bird fading into invisibility at my behest. It is a one-sided communication we have with Bird simply reacting to my emotions. How well I know that she reacts to my fear. I could still see her hovering like a holographic icon, but by her translucence I knew she was invisible to others.

Once in the AGC I put its computer on line and instructed it to take me to a decent hotel. It informed me that there was only one, so I told it to take me there. It lifted from the
ground with a slight rumbling sound. I had noticed that much of the equipment round the runcible facility was somewhat decrepit, for this was how things get so far from Earth. The car accelerated with a lurch once in the air, and specks of pink snow slid from its frictionless screen. I contemplated then what I must do.

I had to speak to Dragon, which for most people is an uncomplicated affair, for all they had to do was address Dragon’s comunit through one of the local AIs. I, on the other hand, did not want anyone to know I was here, and knew that as soon as my identity was registered on the net there would be certain people who would pick it up, people I had no wish to speak to. The price of fame.

* * * *

The Metrotel was not such a bad place. I was soon ensconced in a comfortable room on the top floor ordering myself a meal and talking to hotel’s AI.

“I want a complete lock on my identity while I am here. I do not want any visitors.”

“Lock enabled,” a woman’s voice told me. “But there may have been information leakage when you were booking in.

Should anyone visit I will deny that you are present.”

“Thank you. Now, I’m hungry. Do you have a menu?”

“Yes, John. I would recommend the Scylla crab with croquette potatoes and buttered hinch-carrots…”

The menu was running down the screen as she spoke and I was surprised at some of the things being shown there. I made my selection: “Steak, chips and peas and a couple of litres of IPA.”

It was ersatz Earth, but I was mature enough to admit I could not tell the difference. It was also expensive, but what the hell, you only live once…

* * * *

Two days of work proved to me there was no way round getting my identity registered if I wanted to talk to Dragon.

I considered going to the creature in person, but the area all around was heavily monitored to prevent joy riders testing the two kilometre radius. Dragon, it seemed, had made a rule that no machinery bigger than a man was to get closer than two kilometres. I was told that there was ring of smashed AGCs and AG scooters at that limit. This was Dragon’s world and Cartis only had colony status. It was with reluctance that I registered as a petitioner and awaited my slot. The expected call was not long in coming.

“I can no longer deny your presence here,” the hotel AI informed me. “There is a Dawn Keltree here to see you.”

“Tell her I am not seeing anyone.”

I sat back in my chair and returned my concentration to the screen. The lecture was being given by a Professor Darson.

“The creature we know as Dragon consists of four conjoined spheres each a kilometre across. The primary analysis of Dragon material brought the conclusion that it is silicon based, but there are anomalies—”

I clicked back to another lecture by the same man, but retained the pictures of Dragon. There it was: the spheres, here wreathed in cloud, then a separate cut-out screen showing pseudopodia, like giant one-eyed cobras, junking an AGC that had crossed the boundary. A subscript quickly outlined the story of students getting through security for a prank. Their bodies were reportedly still in the AGC—no one could be bothered to retrieve them since that would have to have been done manually. Darson droned on.

“—was not the name given but the name claimed. So why did it name itself after a creature of myth? Gordon has it that—”

“Sorry to interrupt again. Ms Keltree has left a message.

Do you wish to view it?”

“Go on then. This is getting boring. Darson comes out with nothing but speculation.”

Ms Keltree was very pretty, in an overly athletic way, and very anxious.

“This is Dawn Keltree of The Cartis Observer. Now…I know you are pursued by the press wherever you go, but perhaps we can be of some assistance to you…I see that you have registered as a petitioner. Well…we have information about Dragon in our files you won’t find on the standard net. Interested? If you are, just get the hotel AI to contact me. I’ll be right round.”

I chuckled at her nerve. She was obviously new to the game and in hot pursuit of her big break. I then considered taking her up on her offer. What had I got to lose? I could not prevent them putting out some story about me just as I could not prevent it being known I was here. What I could do was influence the story in some way and make some money out of it.

“AI, put me through to Ms Keltree if you can.”

Instantly her face flickered back onto the screen.

“The McCaffrey at seven o’clock. You’re buying.”

Her face became one big grin, but before she could reply I turned off the screen with the manual control. Let her say it all tonight. I would listen, answer questions, and charge a suitable fee.

* * * *

The McCaffrey is one of those very expensive places that specialize in personal service and handmade foods. As I stepped through the door I noted one or two diners look at me with a deep fascination then pretend nonchalance as they once again concentrated on their food. Obviously word had got around. Ms Keltree rose from her seat to greet me and I discovered something about her that her screen image had not shown: she was very tall.

“I am glad you could spare the time,” she said as she shook my hand.

“My time is at a premium.”

“Of course…a percentage?”

She seemed at a loss. I sat down.

“A flat payment of one hundred solars. Is that agreeable?”

I picked up the menu and opened it. For a moment I thought it was real paper, but the set meals scrolled up it as I ran my finger up the side. I looked up and waited for her to take her seat. Perhaps my mercenary attitude had confused her…no, I realised she must be on a direct link with her employers as she touched her fingertips below her ears and frowned.

“Yes, that is acceptable.” She sat down.

I reached out and touched the privacy touchplate at the centre of the table and the sounds of conversation died around us.

“You may begin,” I said, interlacing my fingers before me.

She looked at me for a long moment.

“Is Bird here with you?”

I glanced up to my left to where Bird held station below the crystal lights.

“Bird is always with me.”

She looked as well and Bird slid into visible solidity then out of it again. Ms Keltree stared in fascination then turned back to me when Bird was gone.

“Are you any closer to knowing what it is?”

“I am here to speak to Dragon about her…”

I told her then about the archaeologist and about my recent travels, of the bird religion of the Knastil, the ancient writings of Baraluck, how none of these had yielded the information I sought. We ordered a meal of baked Scylla crabs and sugar bread and drank a couple of bottles of Chianti. I found I enjoyed speaking to her, even if much of what I said had been practised on other worlds and on others just like her. Near the end of the meal she came to the questions to which I knew no answer.

“You say you have been travelling with Bird for fifty years, yet I have found references to ‘Walking John and Bird’ from
as long ago as three centuries Solstan.”

“Yes, I’ve heard that before, but I can assure you it has only been fifty years. I can only ascribe those legends to hearsay.”

“Could it be that Bird travelled with someone else?”

The thought had never occurred to me. I sat back and sipped my wine.

“That might be worth looking into,” I said, grudgingly.

She nodded then looked aside as a floating vendor offered her an after-dinner selection. She took mint chocolates. I took a cigar because I was feeling pompous.

“Another aspect of your relationship I am curious about is the empathy…or telepathy. Have you ever consulted with a telepath?”

“Sorry?”

“Bird reacts to your emotions. There is some kind of mental link. I would have thought a good telepath might be able to learn something from this.”

I shook my head. She was walking into fantasy land now.

“I am sure a good telepath would be most useful, if there was such a thing.”

“There is John Tennyson of Earth and Horace Blegg.”

“Horace Blegg is a legend and I have never heard of this Tennyson.”

She nodded solemnly.

“Yes, legends…Until this morning I would have said the same about you.”

I returned to my Hotel in a bemused mood and it was only as I entered the lobby that I noticed the man who had been following me. He slid into the shadows when I turned towards him though, and was soon gone. I forgot about him.

* * * *

Dragon refused to speak to me in any sensible manner. I spent a frustrating morning putting questions through my

comlink and getting Delphic and sometimes silly replies.

“I am known as Walking John, inevitable really, as I am a traveller and my real name is John Walker. With me is the entity known simply as Bird. Do you know anything of this entity?”

“Birds have a wonderful sense of direction.”

A humourless statement of fact.

“You are reputedly aware of much that occurs in the human world. You must have known of my arrival here. I was directed here by the archaeologist Sendel Dyne who once asked you questions no AI could answer. He said you might have answers for me. Please, what do you know of Bird?”

“Digging in the dust for facts about dust.”

And so, and thus. It was almost as if I were hooked up to random sentence generator that picked up on a single fact in a spoken sentence and generated another sentence from it. I received no answers from Dragon. The frustration drove me to a bottle of whisky at midday and I was feeling somewhat lugubrious when I received Ms Keltree’s second call. She was not slow in getting to the point.

“We have information on the location of Horace Blegg.”

“That is very interesting,” I said with as much lack of interest as I could muster. I was, of course, hooked. “How did you come by this information?”

“It was recently uncovered by one of our permanent search programmes.”

“How recently?”

She paused significantly before replying. “Last night.”

The long arm of coincidence. Yeah.

“May I come and discuss this with you? We have an offer we would like to make.”

“Let’s make it the McCaffrey at seven. I am rather busy at present.”

“Okay, see you there.”

I had lied of course. I had absolutely nothing to do. I had used up my com time with Dragon and was pissed, in both senses of the word. What I really wanted was not to appear to be too eager, and to have time to sober up.

* * * *

It took an hour with two capsules and a pint of orange juice to sober me up and after that I started wandering around my apartment trying to come to a decision about what I would do next. Often I stopped and stared at Bird in the hope that inspiration would come from that source. A foolish hope, for it never had. For me, most of the time, Bird was merely present.

Another fifty minutes dragged past while I showered and changed in readiness for my jaunt to the McCaffrey. When I eventually left it was with a degree of eagerness. Things were happening, I felt. I would soon be learning something.

It never occurred to me then that I might learn things I did not want to know.

Ms Keltree was not there before me this time so I took a table and ordered a carafe of blue wine. The drink, though potent, did little for me, following as it did on the two Soberups I’d taken. Ms Keltree turned up when I was on my second glass and beginning to feel agitated.

“I’m sorry, so sorry to keep you waiting,” she said, and seated herself with artless flirtation in her tight and revealing clothing in an attempt to defuse any anger I might feel. My anger was dissipated, not because of any sexual attraction I felt, but because I found the naivety of her actions appealing. We ordered the special of the day, which was a selection of Asiatic curries, and she immediately came across with the sell.

“As I told you we know where Horace Blegg is presently located,” she told me as she thrust her cleavage in my general direction.

“And this you consider to be of interest to me?”

“Oh yes.”

“If I recollect aright the idea of a telepath being able to tell me something new about Bird came from you. As it happens I still do not believe such a creature exists.”

“He exists and I feel certain it would be to your advantage to meet him.”

“Yes, but how is it to your advantage?”

She sat back then, crossed her legs in a different direction, and shook her hair about her shoulders. I nearly burst out laughing.

“In exchange for the location of Horace Blegg we would like all rights to the story and to have a reporter with you at the moment of the encounter.”

“You, presumably?”

She smiled. “Yes, me.”

The meal arrived at that suitable juncture and we ate in silence for a short time.

“This could of course just be a ploy to get a reporter with me for a long period of time. I would have to check the validity of your information before agreeing.”

She gave me dumb blond expression of surprise number one. I was beginning to get irritated by her attitude, and by the acid stomach I’d acquired from my earlier boozing.

“I also have not finished my researches here. I was considering taking on more com time with Dragon. I find its evasiveness intriguing.”

All of a sudden Ms Keltree snapped out of her pretend daze, perhaps at the realisation that the sex slanted ploy might not work.

“Would you agree to a contract…on the validation of our information?”

“I don’t know that your information would be worth my trouble. Runcible jaunts are not so cheap.”

“We are prepared to offer a thousand solars block payment to assist things along. This way nobody loses. We get a story, and if you do not get information on Bird you
will at least have the money for much more com time with Dragon when you return.”

This was more like it. My digestion improved measurably.

“Okay, I presume this conversation is being recorded.”

“Under seal.”

“Then I agree. When do we go, and where to we go?”

Ms Keltree had difficulty suppressing her smug look of victory and I turned away to allow her a moment to get herself under control. My gaze strayed to a nearby table where a man sat alone with an untouched meal on a plate before him. He was staring at me intently. I let my slide over him and brought my attention back Ms Keltree. I knew that man, but I could not remember where from.

“If it is agreeable to you we will leave early tomorrow morning. If I may I will join you at your roofport and we’ll take an AGC to the Runcible at about eight. Is that alright?”

“Fine,” I said, still distracted by the familiar face. Ms Keltree then told me where we were going and all my attention returned to her. There, that place, full circle.

We talked a while longer and it was with a kind of inevitability I felt that we ended up in my hotel room for another drink or two. When Ms Keltree asked me if I would like to have sex with her I said ‘yes’ immediately, my decision having been made on an unconscious level sometime before, almost like it wasn’t my decision at all.

* * * *

Buying time on my hotel AI I confirmed that Horace Blegg had indeed been reported by the runcible AI of Thurvis to be present on that world. There was no other information about him; why he was there, how long he would be there, and where exactly on that world he was. The time when this information became available and the place it became available from put breaking strain on the long arm of coincidence.

The morning air was chill and specks of reddish snow blew here and there and melted on the skin to form droplets like blood. My bare arm already appeared to have been worked over with needles. Dawn swore about the red specks evenly speckling her skin-tight white trousers.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Bloody snow!” she said, which seemed apposite. She then went on to explain that this colouring was caused by a mixture of dust and iron salts blown up into the air and mixed with the high-peroxide water. The result was similar to being spattered with blood. The stuff turned brown as it dried out.

The AGC was in better condition than the one I arrived in and turned out to belong to the Cartis Observer. Once we were seated inside the vehicle and it was airborne Dawn removed a small cleaning device and ran it over her trousers. That such a device was available in the AGC
showed this snow was common.

At the runcible station there was no wait. We went directly to this open air runcible and after keying and palming to confirm our destination we stepped through one after the other into the huge lobby at Thurvis and a chaos of crowds.

“We just made it,” Dawn told me as we fought our way to the exit. She pointed to the announcement board. The runcible had gone into one way operation to prevent dangerous overcrowding. People could now only leave Thurvis, they could not arrive. All over the runcible network people bound for Thurvis would be stepping through the Skaidon cusp to be stored in no-space, basically ceasing to exist, for a while.

“I wonder what all this is about?” I asked.

“Horace Blegg,” she told me, and only then did I notice the amount of recording equipment scattered throughout the lobby. Like a swarm of huge silver bees holocorders hovered in the air. I noted with interest how some of them
became confused when Bird, though not visible in the human spectrum, floated past or through them. On the floor scent recorders and all manner of analysers scuttled about on metal insect legs, or squealed about on fat little tyres. Hover luggage weaved in and out of this crowd like pets seeking owners, which was much the case, so to speak.

“’Lo Dawn!”

“Nice to see you Dawn!”

“Ms Keltree!”

Dawn nodded and smiled at fellow professionals, but I could see she looked very worried. Perhaps she was thinking it very unlikely she would be able to get to see Horace Blegg. I was not so sure there would be a problem.

Once we were free of the lobby and out in the open where the crowds were being thinned by the AG taxis, she called up the local AI on a console inset into a rock in the shade of a huge oak tree.

“Could you give me the present location of Horace Blegg?”

“Thurvis.”

“Could you be more specific?”

“No.”

I took hold of her arm.

“There are people I can try,” she said. “I have contacts.”

“Yes,” I said, “but first we have somewhere to go. Call up a taxi.”

The taxi took a while to arrive as obviously the local service was under some pressure transporting the press of many worlds to the capital city of this one. When I told it where I wanted to go I am sure I evinced surprise from the on board computer. It took us anyway.

Thurvis:

recently
opened
for
colonization
after
terraforming, but only certain areas. It was a place of immense forests and heaths. It was a park world. But there were also a few places kept deliberately bare of life, places
where the ancient remains of a civilization already fallen into ruin when humans had not yet decided which direction to take: back into the sea or out onto the plains of Africa.

The AGC landed us in the same place I had landed only a few weeks before. As I climbed out I could hear the vacuum cleaner running in the excavation. The old man was there, carefully uncovering the shape of a wall in the earth. He looked up as we approached.

“Horace Blegg I presume,” I said.

He grinned wickedly.

* * * *

“I sent you to Dragon because Dragon will have the answers.”

I nodded, sipped at the glass of whisky he had provided, and slowly studied the interior of his tent. Dawn, sitting on a cerametal box marked ‘Artefact, Do Not Transmit’ was in her idea of heaven now she was over the initial shock.

Around her, in the air and on the ground, was a formidable array of recording equipment. She was even writing in a paper pad.

“Dragon was uncooperative,” I told him.

“You should not have used the com. You should have walked directly to Dragon.”

I nodded with cool assurance as if I had considered this.

In reality, after learning about the two-kilometre line Dragon had drawn around itself, I hadn’t. Blegg went on.

“I feel Dragon fears Bird. I would like to know why.”

“So would I, if that is the case, but I am here now and I would like to know what you can tell me, and what your interest is.”

Blegg looked at me with eyes like lead shot and I felt certain that behind those eyes was a millstone of a mind that ground very fine indeed. Something about this man exhilarated me, frightened me.

“First, my interest: I am agent Prime Cause and I work for Earth Central. Anything that might affect the stability of the human civilization is of interest to me. Bird is an unknown with unknown capabilities. As to what I know…I can tell you there is a constant subspace link between you and Bird that has a pseudo-physical integrity. It is almost matter yet it lies in the realm of the psyche.”

“What might that mean?”

“It probably means that Bird is part of you, an extension of you, but I know little beyond that without a probe.”

I felt the danger then, but my need to know was stronger.

“Probe me then.”

“It could kill you.”

“You also,” I looked over my shoulder to where Bird, now visible, turned slowly in the air like a string hung ornament. As I turned back to Blegg he suddenly seemed to be miles away from me. Abruptly I felt an abyss opening round me, then Blegg was before me again.

“First, this.”

He held in his hand a small pistol that seemed made of the most delicate chalky shell and weighed almost nothing.

“Why? What do I need this for?”

“It is there for need. You will know.”

I looked at the pistol in my hand. It was like a toy, and it faded out of existence as I looked at it. I knew then I was in some kind of dream space. I looked round at Dawn and she looked blank, mindless.

“Now,” said Blegg, and the abyss filled with fire. I might have screamed then, I do not know if it was me or Blegg. I heard the vicious drone of Bird as I had once heard it before. I think I warned him, for Blegg went flat as a picture, turned into a line, and disappeared a microsecond before Bird passed through where he had been.

* * * *

“Okay, you’re okay now.”

Dawn was holding my head against her breast and rocking me. I cannot remember what happened between this moment and the disappearance of Blegg. I breathed easy and pulled my head away. Her shirt was soaked with blood. I checked my face and head for wounds.

“Your nose bled, and you were crying blood too.”

A little unsteadily I reached for Blegg’s bottle of whisky and not bothering with a glass I drained a fair bit of it.

“Let’s get back to Dragon territory. You got enough for a story?”

“More than. Too much.”

I stood up, capped Blegg’s bottle, and peered at something he had been cleaning on a portable table. It looked like a small ceramic gun, and that reminded me of the gun he had given me, or not given me. I felt a pressure, light as a fly, at the centre of the palm of my hand. I did not believe it, and anyway, runcible proscription never let weapons through. I turned away, leaving the bottle for him, for I suspected he would be back for it. It was good whisky.

* * * *

The runcible facility had cleared of crowds by the time we reached it—we learnt to our surprise we had been gone for eleven solstan hours—though we got some strange looks from a few individuals as we walked across the lobby. I had blood crusted on my face and Dawn, what with my blood and her spattering from the red snow of Aster Colora, looked as if she had been taking a bath in it. Before heading for the runcible we stopped and enquired at a console.

“Could you tell me the present location of Horace Blegg?”

I asked.

“Who’s asking?” The question shot back immediately, and I knew I was talking directly to the Runcible AI and not one of its subminds.

“John Walker.”

“Blegg is quite safe and will be in contact with you again after you return to Aster Colora.”

Fine.

We headed for the runcible.

* * * *

Stepping from the cool outdoor runcible on Aster Colora I felt exhaustion come down on me like a lead sheet. Looking to Dawn I saw that she felt much the same. We slouched to the only AGC in the area and with a feeling of relief climbed inside.

“I want a shower, some brandy, and a sleep,” she said.

I nodded and after pushing in my credit card I spoke into the AGC’s computer, “AGC, take us to the metrotel.”

Obligingly it lifted into the air. I lay back and closed my eyes.

“What happened when Blegg probed you? Why did Bird attack him?”

“It decided he was attacking me in some way.”

“And always reacts so to a threat to you?”

“Always.”

I drifted for a moment until she brought me back with another question.

“What about indirect threats?”

“I don’t know. Nothing, I think. Bird only direct threats to my life. There has only been one other occasion.”

“Yes, I know about that. Someone kidnapped you and tried to get information from you about Bird.”

“They used drugs and VR first and when that did not work they tried pain. That is when Bird reacted. She killed three men and two women in about a second. Two of them were cyborgs. They were all Separatists.”

There was a long silence then before Dawn spoke again. I had almost drifted off to sleep.

“This AGC isn’t taking us to Cartis.”

Suddenly I was very awake. In that instant two facts became very clear to me. The man in the McCaffrey was one of the Separatists who had not been present when his fellows had decided to use torture. And I had been with Bird for more than the fifty years I had supposed and more than the three centuries Dawn Keltree had suggested.

* * * *

The AGC fled on the red sunrise of another day, not that the sun could be seen. Dawn tried all her communications equipment to no avail. I tried the one in my wristwatch and only got static. The solstan time-setting broadcast by the runcible AI had also been interrupted. I looked behind the AGC and Bird was there as solid as a heat-seeking missile.

“Try the panel. Try manual control.” Dawn sounded like she was playing a role in some VR drama. I studied her for a moment but she would not meet my gaze and I could not plumb why something seemed off about her. I next carefully pulled at the fastenings to the control panel and found them locked solid. I took hold of the joystick and found it also was locked in place.

“Oh for fucksake!”

Dawn smashed her nigh indestructible holocorder against the panel and tried to pull open the casing from the split she had made. A small red lightning flung her back in her seat and filled the inside of the AGC with the smell of burning hair.

“You alright?”

She nodded, but she was shaking badly, as if her VR role had just turned real.

“That wasn’t from the console,” she said.

“I know,” I said. I recognised the red lightning from somewhere. Where? Oh yes, place now called Tantalus III, static discharge projected through subspace, the weapon that brought an empire down. I was cold, emotionless, until I realised that the empire I had been thinking about had
not been a human empire, had not in fact been of any race I should have known…I got the horrors then.

The AGC came into land as Dawn recovered her composure and made sure all her recording devices were operating. We landed in conditions of fine sleet and would have stayed in the AGC if the door had not opened and a threatening flicker of red fire expanded into existence between us. Dawn got out first with her recording devices moving out ahead of her like faithful sheep dogs. As I stepped out there was a sound like a metal wall being hit with a hammer and all her devices ceased to function. The holocorder fell out of the air.

“What the hell is this?” she asked, and almost seemed as if she wasn’t asking me.

“Separatists I think.”

“But where?” Back in her VR role.

I shrugged. There was no one about. We moved out into the wasteland as the AGC lifted into the air behind us and headed back to Cartis. Was that it then? We weren’t going back? They would be more prepared this time. Something would happen. Something. The ground shook then and fifty metres ahead of us something broke through it and rose into the air. I recognised the giant cobra shape immediately, as did Dawn.

“Dragon, then,” I said.

It rose ten metres into the air, another rose beside it, then another on the other side. Trinocular vision? Three eyes like blue crystal observed us from where a cobra mouths should have been. I took a step forward, then hesitated.

There was something else. Had it risen to the surface also?

Lying between us and these fleshy extrusions of Dragon—
they reached for many kilometres under the ground so the tapes told me—lay something else, a black shape, almost like a coffin, only streamlined and somehow sinister.

“What is that?” she asked, playing her part.

I had no reply for her. The shape rose into the air, something rippled across its surface and a circle of ground underneath it roared and boiled and turned molten. I stepped back and Bird was in front of me in an instant, hanging in a shimmering curtain that bowed under the pressure of some force radiating from the black object. A terrible screaming filled the air. Dawn clapped her hands over her ears and fell to the ground. I felt my eardrums burst and something running down my neck. The pain did not hit me until the shimmering curtain broke and Bird and the black object met with a thunderclap, then I too fell to the ground and clasped my hands over my bleeding ears.

The storm did not abate, it moved away. The ground shook and the sky filled with flashes of light I quickly averted my eyes from. Even then the vision out of my right eye seemed charred. This was the kind of light that would do to a retina what that sound had done to my eardrums. Dawn was up onto her knees next to me. She said something, but all I got was a dull mumbling. I shook my head and wished I had not. The lights in the distance dimmed a little and I dared a quick glimpse. A flicker of something there, like a gull picked out by sunlight against tearing cloud, and its shadow, black. So much nearer the three cobra heads were watching, perhaps immune to the light that had burnt the vision of my right eye. I gestured to Dawn and we both turned away from the battle and those distant dangerous lights, right towards a closer danger.

Fifty years ago the Separatists had tried for the technology Bird represented. Two of them had been cyborgs, illegal cyborgs, because they were part man and part proscribed weaponry. One of them had been much like this one no hovering ahead of us. He was half a man, the torso, perched on a translucent sphere inside which, like metalled guts, hung an array of devices. Segmented tentacles projected from where his arms should have been, three from each shoulder, and each ending in a different
tool or weapon. Behind and curved round his distended and surgery-scarred head was a metal box like a bloated horse shoe. From this metal struts speared down through his back into the sphere. He was floating about a metre off the ground. And he had come for me. I glanced at Dawn and saw that she was saying something to the cyborg. She seemed to be remonstrating with him, which struck me as decidedly odd. When she stepped to one side to retrieve her holocorder, arc light flared between then, and the cyborg blew her spine and part of her ribcage out of her back.

I think Blegg had expected something like this, or had he just assumed I would try to kill my erstwhile captor? The pressure against the palm of my hand was still the same as I lifted that hand, pointed the gun at the cyborg and pulled back on a trigger I thought I might break if I was not careful. The weapon was something from Earth Central. It is one of the reasons Separatists cannot be tolerated because the fragmentation of human civilization greatly increases the possibility of war and war, with the weapons now available, is unthinkable. The cyborg shot back into the sky with the air seeming to distort around him, then he exploded like a balloon filled with hydrogen. I heard the clang and rattle of a few pieces of metal hitting the ground and was turning away before the fragments of burning flesh did so. Dragon: answers.

The storm had ceased moments after I killed the cyborg.

The black thing must have been controlled by one of the many battle programmes in his enlarged skull. I stepped over what was left of Dawn Keltree and walked towards the three cobra heads.

“Dragon!” As one the three heads turned towards me I demanded, “I want answers from you!”

Even as I said it a part of me looked on with a cold assurance; how human, how emotional. The three heads curved over me; three great question marks of flesh.

“Answers?” came the distant hiss of a voice. Just then Bird came in from the side, a silver flash, and three giant severed heads thudded to the ground like grain sacks. The hiss became a scream as the three pseudopodia retreated into the ground spattering all around the milky fluid that was Dragon’s blood. Those raw ends broke the surface once, twice, giving me an indication of the direction I must go. I followed, not stopping to wonder if I was meant to.

Bird was back at my shoulder, my hawk, and we hunted.

A wilderness of broken rock surrounded me as I followed disturbed earth and occasional pools of Dragon blood. As I walked I admitted to myself that yes answers were important, but that the satisfaction of violence had its place. I looked at the weapon I held and it did not fade from my hand this time. I opened my hand and it stayed affixed to my palm even when I turned it to the ground. This was a weapon that could hurt Dragon, as was Bird, and I wanted to cause hurt. I did not know the extent of Dragon’s involvement with the cyborg. What kind of deal had there been? Was Dragon only observing in its coldly alien way? In the end this did not matter to me. All I knew was that Dragon had allowed this. This was Dragon’s world, even if it was only alien indifference it could be blamed for…I swore as I walked. Whatever. A girl I had quite liked lay in the dirt with her back blown out.

Four conjoined spheres rose over the horizon like a queue of moons, misty at first then clearing. I trudged on, drawing closer, and closer still, then, in a state of near delirious exhaustion I stood peering into the shadow and darkness under the first of the spheres.

“You want answers?” hissed the darkness.

“Not particularly,” I said. I pointed the gun into that darkness and pulled the trigger. The gun collapsed in my hand like burnt paper.

“Here are answers.”

Even Bird did not move fast enough. A great saliva drooling head shot out of the undershadows, two sapphire eyes fixed on me. The jaws closed on me just as Bird shot towards the head. I hit the ground and saw the head, severed away, holding the legs and greater part of a human torso in its jaws. I died before I realised they were mine.

* * * *

I sat on a flat rock in the Dragon shadows and felt regret for my actions. Dragon, another of whose heads was now drawing away, had been an impartial observer and had just related the full story. The cyborg had come by ship so no one was to blame for his actions but himself and the agent who had informed him of my presence on this world, and she lay dead, killed by an employer who had not known who she was. Blegg had been right about some things and wrong about others. He had warned me at the first that Dragon’s answer might be death. It was, and though I did not realise it, it was the answer I had then been seeking. So much has been restored.

Blegg believed Bird was an extension of me. Here he was wrong. I am an extension of Bird, a tool she uses, a program she is allowing to run, only slightly altered for the study of this particular civilization. And there have been many others. So why does Bird protect me? She protects me because of the work involved in restoring me. There is no altruism or loyalty involved, she has no feeling for me beyond that one might feel for a useful and well-worn pen knife.

On this restoration, as on every other one, the memories she had selectively erased because their sheer extent sometimes impaired my function, were returned to me from the master copy. Not fifty years, not three hundred years, and not the millennia I had momentarily glimpsed, and not just one death. These last few centuries with Blegg have been entertaining as he has, time and time again, led me
into situations whereby he might learn something about me, about Bird. Perhaps someday he will know.

I now have little choice but to forget.

OceanofPDF.com

THE SYMPHONIC ABDUCTION, by Hannes Bok

“I suppose you’ve heard about what happened to my brother Jerry?” Ray Spencer asked me; I shook my head.

“The whole family was worried about him for a while: couldn’t tell whether he had sleeping-sickness, or what. All we knew was that he’d gone coma listening to some phonograph records when he was alone in the house.

Perhaps the intense emotional effect of the music, plus its stentor, was the cause.

“When I returned home, he lay cold on the floor in front of the radio-phonograph. The automatic release had shut off the record, but the current was still on, and the volume dial was turned full strength. Nothing I could do would rouse my brother, so—scared—I put him to bed and called a doctor, who had him taken to a hospital for observation. No one could determine what was the trouble, and since we couldn’t afford to keep him at the hospital indefinitely, we brought Jerry back home. And although it wasn’t exactly appropriate, I couldn’t help remembering the story of the Sleeping Beauty whenever I looked into his room and saw him, apparently only napping.

“Then one day I heard him—still in his trance—
whisperingly singing. The indistinct notes were reminiscent of one of Chaikovsky’s ballet pieces. I tried vainly to wake him. He sighed on and on until the faint breath of a voice softened into silence.…

“When at last he did awake, I had been listening to some continental communiques in the adjoining room, with the door open so that I could look in on him in case of emergency. The program ended and was followed by concert music. I don’t care much for symphony, so I arose and went to the radio to switch it off. At the same time, Jerry stirred: I heard his bed creak. Turning to look his way,

I twisted the wrong dial, and the music thundered: my brother began to toss on his bed. Disregarding the racket for a moment in excitement at seeing him move, I ran in to him, shouting, shaking him a little. His hands groped, found mine, and clung to them. Painfully he endeavored to raise himself, dropped back perspiring and panting. Then he screamed—horribly!—as if all Hell’s devils were shovelling all Hell’s coals on him, and opened his eyes, his face taut with dread. He recognized me. In a moment I had soothed him back to normalcy. He was perfectly all right from then on.

“Or at least we thought so. But since you’re so interested in metaphysics, get him to tell you about the vision he had during his catalepsy. He won’t feel embarrassed; he’s told it to others. Just say that I mentioned it to you.”

Ray had finished. Later, when I chanced upon Jerry Spencer, I brot him up to my apartment for dinner. The meal over, he smiled at my query concerning his comatose dream, and related:

“None in my family are as interested in music as I: my belief is that to realize its full magic you must leave off talking—better still, listen to it alone—and, closing your eyes, open your mind to it. Relax—forget yourself. All of my folks poke fun at me when I sit on the floor by the radio during the concert broadcasts, my ears close to the speaker. But that is the only way by which I can really enjoy music. The very loudness, blasting at my hearing, emphasizes the tone-magic, overwhelming everything else.

And sometimes, if my eyes are shut, I can see fantastic dream worlds, fiery pageants inspired by thundrous harmonies.

“I had never dared to turn on the amplifier as loud as I’d have wished. My family said that it would annoy the neighbors. So that day when I was alone at home, I thot that then was my chance, if ever, and proceeded to play my favorite record; the first scene of Chaikovsky’s SWAN LAKE
ballet, as loudly as possible. The sound was not so deafening as—maddening, or better still, intoxicating. How I Loved it! I sat cross-legged, eyes shut, dreaming, at last absolutely happy. More: ecstatic.

“The first notes were like an invitation emanating from a lost dimension, calling me, wheedling. Promising haven, peace. The call of the unknown: not the lure of dashing adventure but of mystery, mournful sorcery, epic splendors.…

“Deep in my heart there’s a sort of innate Slavic sadness which responded to the music’s plaint, and my thought traveled with the melody effortlessly on and on. The warm darkness of my closed eyes lightened to infinities of cold, deep-blue emptiness, through which I felt myself gliding as the theme progressed.

“Each harmonic burst, every wailing echo, dominated me.

My thought was borne farther and farther like a leaf in a tempest.… There were base chords which made my throat quiver, and tears burned under my lowered eyelids. I felt a tingling at my shoulders, and with eyes still closed but discerning by a sort of dream-vision, I half-consciously turned, beheld luminous yellow—draperies?—fluttering behind me, bouying me: like scarf-wings, whipping comet-tails.

“An instinctive transient fright gripped me, admonishing me to withdraw from this blue region into the calid darkness from which I had come—but the melody’s urge was stronger than my feeble urge to retreat. The azure became flecked with diamond points of light which augmented into great white moons, and from one to another in a vast network rayed pulsing filaments, vascular channels of fluid light.

“A stupendous chorus of clear unhuman voices, as from diamond throats, emanated from these linked moons, of which the music which had conveyed me was only a distorted, ghostly echo.… In tangible waves this greater
music rippled around the webbed moons, beating against me as though to force me away on its tides I know not whither.

“Beneath me was a limitless tract of grey slime which rose and fell torpidly as with the breathing of a somnolent subterranean thing. The moonlight burned brightly on it, and crawling across it from some remote place came—
trees?—snaky-rooted things whose prehensile branches bore, instead of leaves, flexible lenses.… They left behind them red trails on the slime, and excrementory ribbons of thin blue vapor streamed from their topmost appendages.

Occasionally they paused to feed, focussing their lenses upon the gelatinous ground, which became luminously white under the concentrated light. The sucking mouths of the serpentine roots absorbed this matter, and red viscosity seeped into the eaten places, greying rapidly under the moon’s effulgence, chemically affected by it.

“And the trees mated. Gynandrous, they converged in pairs or groups, pressing close together, thrusting their limbs into one enormous cluster, aggregating their lenses into a series of complex, compact forms…shuddering with a violent ardor.… From erectile protuberances rimming the lenses ruby liquid spurted, bursting with incandescence under the condensed moonlight.

“Spent, drooping, the trees separated, and the radiant orgasmic matter drifted lightly down to the slime, burning fitfully as the trees moved away indifferently.

“Apparently these flickering radiances fed, for gradually they grew, dulling, becoming opaque, substantial——
thrusting out probing roots, developing limbs, wandering like their parents. They snailed onward out of sight, all of them.

“Silently, a phosphorescent green river raced like a bolt of furcate lightning over the green wastes. It was composed not of water but of myriad tiny luminous crawling insects. A conscious river, altering its tortuous course at will, small
streams deviating from the main body and meandering erratically, then rejoining the general current. This river’s end drew into sight, flashed under me and into the distance, leaving fast-greying red paths on the slime.

“The moon’s music assailed me; simultaneously I felt those man-measures, which had carried me so long, cease, leaving me without a link to my own world—helpless against the inexorable tide of the lunar melody, which, bursting more loudly, swept me higher, through an interstice of the circulatory web, into blue infinity. And there it left me; fading ripples of it would lap me, but were too dissapated then to sweep me farther.

“I floated aimlessly in the void, it seemed for ages, less a body than a mind, aware of neither hunger nor thirst nor ill of any sort other than a dreadful sapping weariness.

“There was no way of reckoning time, but after an eternity of loneliness and self-boredom, I heard a glissando of mellow tintinabulations. A troop of small stars flashed toward me like a scattered handful of sparkling white gems, whirling in interweaving dance of enchantment, tinkling glad clear tunes like the babbling of crystal brooks.

The joyous, youthful essence of their song so charmed me that I forgot my weariness and vocally ventured to imitate it.

“At last they broke their circle and swept away, single-file, out of sight, diminishing with distance.

“For awhile I hummed their song, but with every repetition it lost some of its starry quality and gained a human-ness, earthiness, animalism—until it impressed me no longer beautiful, and I was silent.… Wearily the sluggish ages passed…in the illimitable blue solitudes.…

“Eventually I heard the man-music, again like a summons

—its vibrations piercing the moon-net, receding, drawing me with it. Its power increased with every unit of retregression, dragging me with it. Over the wastes of slime it dragged me, all in a fraction of seconds. Wind tore
at me, racketing in my ears, drowning music of both moons and man.

“In a flash of cataclysm, of cosmic pandemonium, the moons, jostled out of their places by my abrupt passage through the web, strained apart, snapping their pulsant filamental arteries. White, searing drops of blood of light oozed from the severed ducts, hissing as they fell, and splashed on the slime, which heaved torturedly. The crawling trees reared upon their writhing roots, flailing their lensed limbs, and the phosphorescent rivers halted suddenly, piling into swiftly disintegrating mounds.

“The rain of light blood thinned and ceased: the moons dimmed and plunged earthward, lusterless. As they touched the tempestuously tossing slime, it shrieked stridently, deafeningly—cosmically! An outcry voicing all life’s inherent dread of the horror of pain and death, which arose from all sides, like an auditory vise, tightening upon and crushing me. The blue chaos was wiped away by utter blackness; the shriek weakened, ceased.

“I opened my eyes, shut them—dazzled by daylight, and opened them again, but cautiously. My brother Ray was standing over me, shaking me, calling my name…AND IT

WAS I WHO HAD SCREAMED!”

OceanofPDF.com

THE NINE BILLION NAMES OF GOD, by Arthur C. Clarke

“This is a slightly unusual request,” said Dr. Wagner, with what he hoped was commendable restraint. “As far as I know, it’s the first time anyone’s been asked to supply a Tibetan monastery with an Automatic Sequence Computer.

I don’t wish to be inquisitive, but I should hardly have thought that your—ah—establishment had much use for such a machine. Could you explain just what you intend to do with it?”

“Gladly,” replied the lama, readjusting his silk robes and carefully putting away the slide rule he had been using for currency conversions. “Your Mark V Computer can carry out any routine mathematical operation involving up to ten digits. However, for our work we are interested in letters, not numbers. As we wish you to modify the output circuits, the machine will be printing words, not columns of figures.”

“I don’t quite understand.…”

“This is a project on which we have been working for the last three centuries—since the lamasery was founded, in fact. It is somewhat alien to your way of thought, so I hope you will listen with an open mind while I explain it.”

“Naturally.”

“It is really quite simple. We have been compiling a list which shall contain all the possible names of God.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“We have reason to believe,” continued the lama imperturbably, “that all such names can be written with not more than nine letters in an alphabet we have devised.”

“And you have been doing this for three centuries?”

“Yes: we expected it would take us about fifteen thousand years to complete the task.”

“Oh,” Dr. Wagner looked a little dazed. “Now I see why you wanted to hire one of our machines. But exactly what is the purpose of this project?”

The lama hesitated for a fraction of a second, and Wagner wondered if he had offended him. If so, there was no trace of annoyance in the reply.

“Call it ritual, if you like, but it’s a fundamental part of our belief. All the many names of the Supreme Being—God, Jehovah, Allah, and so on—they are only man-made labels.

There is a philosophical problem of some difficulty here, which I do not propose to discuss, but somewhere among all the possible combinations of letters that can occur are what one may call the real names of God. By systematic permutation of letters, we have been trying to list them all.”

“I see. You’ve been starting at AAAAAAA…and working up to ZZZZZZZZ.…”

“Exactly—though we use a special alphabet of our own.

Modifying the electromatic typewriters to deal with this is, of course, trivial. A rather more interesting problem is that of devising suitable circuits to eliminate ridiculous combinations. For example, no letter must occur more than three times in succession.”

“Three? Surely you mean two.”

“Three is correct: I am afraid it would take too long to explain why, even if you understood our language.”

“I’m sure it would,” said Wagner hastily. “Go on.”

“Luckily, it will be a simple matter to adapt your Automatic Sequence Computer for this work, since once it has been programmed properly it will permute each letter in turn and print the result. What would have taken us fifteen thousand years it will be able to do in a hundred days.”

Dr. Wagner was scarcely conscious of the faint sounds from the Manhattan streets far below. He was in a different world, a world of natural, not man-made, mountains. High
up in their remote aeries these monks had been patiently at work, generation after generation, compiling their lists of meaningless words. Was there any limit to the follies of mankind? Still, he must give no hint of his inner thoughts.

The customer was always right.…

“There’s no doubt,” replied the doctor, “that we can modify the Mark V to print lists of this nature. I’m much more worried about the problem of installation and maintenance. Getting out to Tibet, in these days, is not going to be easy.”

“We can arrange that. The components are small enough to travel by air—that is one reason why we chose your machine. If you can get them to India, we will provide transport from there.”

“And you want to hire two of our engineers?”

“Yes, for the three months that the project should occupy.”

“I’ve no doubt that Personnel can manage that.” Dr.

Wagner scribbled a note on his desk pad. “There are just two other points—”

Before he could finish the sentence the lama had produced a small slip of paper.

“This is my certified credit balance at the Asiatic Bank.”

“Thank you. It appears to be—ah—adequate. The second matter is so trivial that I hesitate to mention it—but it’s surprising how often the obvious gets overlooked. What source of electrical energy have you?”

“A diesel generator providing fifty kilowatts at a hundred and ten volts. It was installed about five years ago and is quite reliable. It’s made life at the lamasery much more comfortable, but of course it was really installed to provide power for the motors driving the prayer wheels.”

“Of course,” echoed Dr. Wagner. “I should have thought of that.”

* * * *

The view from the parapet was vertiginous, but in time one gets used to anything. After three months, George Hanley was not impressed by the two-thousand-foot swoop into the abyss or the remote checkerboard of fields in the valley below. He was leaning against the wind-smoothed stones and staring morosely at the distant mountains whose names he had never bothered to discover.

This, thought George, was the craziest thing that had ever happened to him. “Project Shangri-La,” some wit back at the labs had christened it. For weeks now the Mark V had been churning out acres of sheets covered with gibberish.

Patiently, inexorably, the computer had been rearranging letters in all their possible combinations, exhausting each class before going on to the next. As the sheets had emerged from the electromatic typewriters, the monks had carefully cut them up and pasted them into enormous books.

In another week, heaven be praised, they would have finished. Just what obscure calculations had convinced the monks that they needn’t bother to go on to words of ten, twenty, or a hundred letters, George didn’t know. One of his recurring nightmares was that there would be some change of plan, and that the high lama (whom they’d naturally called Sam Jaffe, though he didn’t look a bit like him) would suddenly announce that the project would be extended to approximately A.D. 2060. They were quite capable of it.

George heard the heavy wooden door slam in the wind as Chuck came out onto the parapet beside him. As usual, Chuck was smoking one of the cigars that made him so popular with the monks—who, it seemed, were quite willing to embrace all the minor and most of the major pleasures of life. That was one thing in their favor: they might be crazy, but they weren’t bluenoses. Those frequent trips they took down to the village, for instance…

“Listen, George,” said Chuck urgently. “I’ve learned something that means trouble.”

“What’s wrong? Isn’t the machine behaving?” That was the worst contingency George could imagine. It might delay his return, and nothing could be more horrible. The way he felt now, even the sight of a TV commercial would seem like manna from heaven. At least it would be some link with home.

“No—it’s nothing like that.” Chuck settled himself on the parapet, which was unusual because normally he was scared of the drop. “I’ve just found what all this is about.”

What d’ya mean? I thought we knew.”

“Sure—we know what the monks are trying to do. But we didn’t know why. It’s the craziest thing—”

“Tell me something new,” growled George.

“—but old Sam’s just come clean with me. You know the way he drops in every afternoon to watch the sheets roll out. Well, this time he seemed rather excited, or at least as near as he’ll ever get to it. When I told him that we were on the last cycle he asked me, in that cute English accent of his, if I’d ever wondered what they were trying to do. I said,

‘Sure’—and he told me.”

“Go on: I’ll buy it.”

“Well, they believe that when they have listed all His names—and they reckon that there are about nine billion of them—God’s purpose will be achieved. The human race will have finished what it was created to do, and there won’t be any point in carrying on. Indeed, the very idea is something like blasphemy.”

“Then what do they expect us to do? Commit suicide?”

“There’s no need for that. When the list’s completed, God steps in and simply winds things up…bingo!”

“Oh, I get it. When we finish our job, it will be the end of the world.”

Chuck gave a nervous little laugh.

“That’s just what I said to Sam. And do you know what happened? He looked at me in a very queer way, like I’d
been stupid in class, and said, ‘It’s nothing as trivial as that.’”

George thought this over a moment.

“That’s what I call taking the Wide View,” he said presently. “But what d’you suppose we should do about it? I don’t see that it makes the slightest difference to us. After all, we already knew that they were crazy.”

“Yes—but don’t you see what may happen? When the list’s complete and the Last Trump doesn’t blow—or whatever it is they expect—we may get the blame. It’s our machine they’ve been using. I don’t like the situation one little bit.”

“I see,” said George slowly. “You’ve got a point there. But this sort of thing’s happened before, you know. When I was a kid down in Louisiana we had a crackpot preacher who once said the world was going to end next Sunday.

Hundreds of people believed him—even sold their homes.

Yet when nothing happened, they didn’t turn nasty, as you’d expect. They just decided that he’d made a mistake in his calculations and went right on believing. I guess some of them still do.”

“Well, this isn’t Louisiana, in case you hadn’t noticed.

There are just two of us and hundreds of these monks. I like them, and I’ll be sorry for old Sam when his lifework backfires on him. But all the same, I wish I was somewhere else.”

“I’ve been wishing that for weeks. But there’s nothing we can do until the contract’s finished and the transport arrives to fly us out.

“Of course,” said Chuck thoughtfully, “we could always try a bit of sabotage.”

“Like hell we could! That would make things worse.”

“Not the way I meant. Look at it like this. The machine will finish its run four days from now, on the present twenty-hours-a-day basis. The transport calls in a week.

O.K.—then all we need to do is to find something that needs replacing during one of the overhaul periods—something
that will hold up the works for a couple of days. We’ll fix it, of course, but not too quickly. If we time matters properly, we can be down at the airfield when the last name pops out of the register. They won’t be able to catch us then.”

“I don’t like it,” said George. “It will be the first time I ever walked out on a job. Besides, it would make them suspicious. No, I’ll sit tight and take what comes.”

* * * *

“I still don’t like it,” he said, seven days later, as the tough little mountain ponies carried them down the winding road.

“And don’t you think I’m running away because I’m afraid.

I’m just sorry for those poor old guys up there, and I don’t want to be around when they find what suckers they’ve been. Wonder how Sam will take it?”

“It’s funny,” replied Chuck, “but when I said good-by I got the idea he knew we were walking out on him—and that he didn’t care because he knew the machine was running smoothly and that the job would soon be finished. After that

—well, of course, for him there just isn’t any After That.…”

George turned in his saddle and stared back up the mountain road. This was the last place from which one could get a clear view of the lamasery. The squat, angular buildings were silhouetted against the afterglow of the sunset: here and there, lights gleamed like portholes in the side of an ocean liner. Electric lights, of course, sharing the same circuit as the Mark V. How much longer would they share it? wondered George. Would the monks smash up the computer in their rage and disappointment? Or would they just sit down quietly and begin their calculations all over again?”

He knew exactly what was happening up on the mountain at this very moment. The high lama and his assistants would be sitting in their silk robes, inspecting the sheets as the junior monks carried them away from the typewriters and pasted them into the great volumes. No one would be
saying anything. The only sound would be the incessant patter, the never-ending rainstorm of the keys hitting the paper, for the Mark V itself was utterly silent as it flashed through its thousands of calculations a second. Three months of this, thought George, was enough to start anyone climbing up the wall.

“There she is!” called Chuck, pointing down into the valley. “Ain’t she beautiful!”

She certainly was, thought George. The battered old DC3
lay at the end of the runway like a tiny silver cross. In two hours she would be bearing them away to freedom and sanity. It was a thought worth savoring like a fine liqueur.

George let it roll round his mind as the pony trudged patiently down the slope.

The swift night of the high Himalayas was now almost upon them. Fortunately, the road was very good, as roads went in that region, and they were both carrying torches.

There was not the slightest danger, only a certain discomfort from the bitter cold. The sky overhead was perfectly clear, and ablaze with the familiar, friendly stars.

At least there would be no risk, thought George, of the pilot being unable to take off because of weather conditions.

That had been his only remaining worry.

He began to sing, but gave it up after a while. This vast arena of mountains, gleaming like whitely hooded ghosts on every side, did not encourage such ebullience. Presently George glanced at his watch.

“Should be there in an hour,” he called back over his shoulder to Chuck. Then he added, in an afterthought:

“Wonder if the computer’s finished its run. It was due about now.”

Chuck didn’t reply, so George swung round in his saddle.

He could just see Chuck’s face, a white oval turned toward the sky.

“Look,” whispered Chuck, and George lifted his eyes to heaven. (There is always a last time for everything.)

Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.

OceanofPDF.com

HILLARY ORBITS VENUS, by Pamela Sargent

“In 1963…fifteen-year-old Hillary [Rodham] wrote to NASA asking what subjects to study to prepare for becoming an astronaut. NASA wrote back that no females need apply.”

—Shana Alexander, “The Difficulties of Being Hillary,” Playboy, January 1994

As the ship’s engines reached peak acceleration and settled into a steady background drone, mission specialist Hillary Rodham sat back in her chair and thought about how her life might have been different. It was a common human tendency, she thought, to reflect on one’s life aboard trains, planes, buses, and even during an interplanetary voyage aboard the Sacajawea, now bound for Venus.

The turning point for her, Hillary supposed, had been the letter she had received from a minor NASA functionary during her sophomore year at Maine East High School. She had written to ask how a hopeful high school student should go about preparing to become an astronaut. The response to her earnest inquiry had fired her imagination and given her a mission—to travel into space, to set foot on the Moon, maybe even explore Mars. The technology that had built the Sacajawea and the fission-to-fusion engine that powered her, one of the more recent of the technological breakthroughs that had come along in such rapid succession after the first Moon landing, had finally put those early ambitions within her reach.

For now, she could take great pride in being among the first crew of astronauts to travel to Venus. They would not, of course, actually land on that hellish planet with its atmosphere of carbon dioxide and a surface temperature hot enough to melt lead. She and the other three members of the crew would have to settle for orbiting the veiled planet, doing radar mapping of the surface, and sending
down two probes. The probes and detailed radar maps would contribute to their knowledge of Earth’s sister planet, but the primary purpose of the mission was to test the Sacajawea on an interplanetary voyage.

If not for L. Bruce Thomerson, an assistant to a deputy director of public relations for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Hillary might not have been aboard this spacecraft. Another career might have claimed her—medicine, perhaps, or even law. Or, despite the urgings of a mother who had always encouraged her daughter not to limit her ambitions, she might have settled for the more conventional life of a suburban housewife in a place much like Park Ridge, Illinois, the Chicago suburb where she and her brothers had grown up.

But L. Bruce Thomerson—seized either by sympathy for her dream or perhaps merely tired of having to discourage yet another idealistic young girl—had deflected her from such possibilities with his typed postscript to the form letter that had told her NASA was not interested in any female astronauts. “No females need apply to the astronaut training program now,” Thomerson had added to the letter,

“but that could change in years to come, and there are some signs within the Agency that it may. My advice is to work hard at your high school math and science courses and prepare yourself for college work in those subjects.

Keep yourself physically fit. Consider graduate school or a career in one of the military services. Make yourself a credit to your family and community, and you might become just the kind of young woman NASA would proudly accept as one of our astronauts someday.”

There had been detours along the road that had taken her to Houston and the Johnson Space Center and to Cape Canaveral, but Hillary had kept her goal in sight, determined to be among the corps of men and women who would reach for the stars. Her marriage had been one such detour—or so it had seemed for a while. She had promised
herself never to completely surrender her own name and identity, to lose her life to her husband’s career, yet she had come perilously close to doing that.

There had been all the usual justifications. Marriage, after all, meant compromising, even when it often seemed that it was the woman who had to make most of the compromises.

Nurturing her husband, advancing his interests, and encouraging him in his work were worth a few sacrifices.

Even at the worst times, she had always, partly for their daughter’s sake, rejected the option of divorce. And the most important reason for staying with him, for sometimes looking the other way even when his lapses had hurt her—
she loved him. Throughout all the arguments, the demands of his work and hers, the flings with other women that he had not entirely given up even after they were married, she had continued to love him. She had stuck it out, stayed the course, and again Hillary was grateful that she had, even though it had meant postponing her own dream for a while.

The time had come when he had needed her, badly.

Now, aboard the Sacajawea, she wondered if, despite her own accomplishments, her husband’s reflected glory might have tipped the scales of NASA in her favor. Hillary thought of the last press conference she and her crewmates had endured before the flight; at least a third of the questions directed to her had been about her husband. Even knowing that her qualifications were the equal of any astronaut’s, and superior to many, she still feared that she might always remain in his shadow.

Foolish, she thought, to think that way. She had never been one for self-pity, even during the worst times. She would certainly not indulge in self-doubt while on the most important journey of her life.

* * * *

That the Sacajawea was going to Venus, rather than to Mars, was the reason all four of the astronauts aboard her

were women. The exigencies of politics and public relations had given Hillary and her crewmates this mission, since it had seemed appropriate that the first human beings to travel to Venus—to orbit Venus, at any rate—be female.

They would not be the first crew to test the fission-fusion pulse engine that powered the Sacajawea; an earlier version of this ship, the Selene, had gone to the Moon and back in two days almost a year ago, in 1997. But NASA’s first all-female space crew had guaranteed even more media coverage of this mission than of the pulse engine’s first test.

“Peak acceleration achieved,” Lieutenant Colonel Evelyn Holder, pilot, Air Force Academy alumna, and commander of this mission, murmured at Hillary’s left. Evelyn ran a hand through her short brown hair and leaned back in her chair. “This baby’s going to pretty much run herself from now on.”

“Never thought I’d see the day,” Judith Resnik said from behind Evelyn, “when we could get to Venus in less than three weeks.” Judy, an electrical engineer by training, was a slender woman near Hillary’s age with a cloud of thick dark hair.

“Never thought I’d see the day,” Victoria Cho muttered,

“when I’d be on Oprah and get a photo shoot in Vanity Fair.” Victoria was a geologist—or maybe “aphroditologist”

was the more appropriate term for her profession during the course of this mission.

“Letterman,” Judy said. “That had to be the worst, doing Letterman.”

Hillary wasn’t so sure about that. Exchanging sarcastic ripostes with David Letterman, schmoozing with Jay Leno, Rosie O’Donnell and Barbara Walters, fielding questions from Ted Koppel and Sam Donaldson on “This Week with Diane Sawyer”—none of that had especially bothered her. It was the intrusiveness of many in the media, their refusal to acknowledge that she and her crewmates had any rights to
privacy. During the weeks before the mission, when interest in the Sacajawea and her crew was building to a fever pitch, camera crews and reporters had been camping in front of her house in Houston at all hours. Worse still were the newspaper and magazine articles that, to Hillary’s mind anyway, bordered on tabloid journalism. The journalists had ferreted out every personal gossipy detail about her life they could find—how she had met her husband, women who claimed to have had affairs with him during the Seventies, her spiritual beliefs—nothing seemed to be off limits. Even Hillary’s daughter, who had done nothing to deserve such intrusiveness other than to have the parents she did, was not spared garbled reports about her love life and parties she had attended on campus and fellow students she had allegedly dated.

Some of the questions asked of Hillary were, she felt strongly, questions no one should have to answer. She had fielded most of them, evaded the most intrusive inquiries, and consoled herself with the thought that she had fulfilled her responsibilities to NASA’s public relations staff.

“Could be worse,” Jerrie Cobb had told her. Jerrie, the first American woman in space and the first woman to go to the Moon, was old enough to remember when things had been worse. “Could be a lot worse if nobody cared about the space program. We’d have all the privacy we wanted then.”

Hillary could not imagine people being bored by or indifferent to the space program. Her dream might have begun as a teenaged girl’s fantasy, but it had grown into something much larger than herself, humankind’s greatest venture, something that would help make the world a better place. “We are not interested in social reconstruction,” she had said in 1969, as the first student to speak at a Wellesley College commencement, “it’s human reconstruction… If the experiment in human living
doesn’t work in this country, in this age, it’s not going to work anywhere.”

That experiment had been working in recent years, not least because of the space program. That, along with ending the war in Vietnam, had been part of President Hubert Humphrey’s legacy; being out from under Lyndon Johnson’s shadow had imbued the former vice-president with a boldness few had previously believed he possessed.

By the time Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins were on their way to the Moon in July of 1969, the summer after Hillary’s graduation from Wellesley, the safe withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam was proceeding rapidly, Secretary of State Eugene McCarthy was issuing optimistic announcements about the progress of peace talks several times a week, Senator Edward M.

Kennedy had cut short his Massachusetts vacation to migrate between Palm Beach, Florida and the Kennedy Space Center making political hay by reminding people of his brother John F. Kennedy’s promise to send men to the Moon, and NASA had announced successful experiments on an ion drive and plans for building reusable shuttlecraft and a permanent space station in Earth orbit.

Hillary’s young life, marred by assassinations, violence, an unpopular war, and the increasing animosity between her generation and that of her parents, had suddenly looked brighter. In the wave of good feeling induced by Secretary McCarthy’s diplomatic successes and the Apollo 11 Moon landing, people again looked ahead. There was even talk that NASA was at long last seriously considering the recruitment of female astronauts. The summer of 1969 had evoked in Hillary the strange and eerie feeling that a bleak future had somehow been averted, that she and her fellow citizens were at last moving away from the darkness that had threatened to overwhelm them toward the light at the end of the tunnel.

* * * *

A year on Venus, the time it took the veiled planet to make one revolution around the sun, was 224.7 Earth days. The time it took Venus to rotate once on its axis was 243 Earth days, making a Venusian day longer than a Venusian year.

“A seriously weird cycle, if you ask me,” Victoria Cho said.

“Let’s face it, the whole damned planet has a major case of PMS.” The geologist had apparently heard most of the one-liners about Venus. That much of the humor was sexist didn’t surprise Hillary; NASA had remained a male bastion well into the Seventies. Jerrie Cobb and the first group of women to train as astronauts had not been recruited until early 1977, after President John Glenn’s inauguration, when even the most misogynistic guys in NASA had finally concluded that long sojourns on the planned space stations and lunar outposts almost required the presence of women.

Victoria set down her cup of coffee and gazed at the image of Venus on her laptop. “Leave it to a female,” she went on, “to get the simplest things ass-backwards.” This was a reference to Venus’s retrograde motion, to the fact that it turned on its axis from east to west. That Uranus also rotated in a retrograde direction was ignored in that particular joke. Once Venus, the brilliant morning and evening star, had been seen as a celestial embodiment of female beauty. Now she seemed to represent, for some, female peculiarities, eccentricities, and just plain orneriness.

“I think I’ve heard them all by now,” Hillary said. She and Victoria sat at the small table where the astronauts ate their meals. The constant thrust of the Sacajawea’s engines provided the one-g gravitational effect that kept their coffee in their cups and their butts in their chairs; they would not have to deal with the weightlessness of free fall until they were in orbit around Venus.

Victoria looked up from her computer. “Look, after this trip, we’ll probably each get a Venusian crater named after
us.”

A crater called Rodham, Hillary thought. That was something to look forward to, as long as her crater didn’t become yet another joke.

* * * *

To pursue her goal of becoming an astronaut had meant standing up to her father. Hugh Rodham had not been an easy man to defy. He had died almost six years ago, and Hillary still felt that loss deeply, but her father had also been a hard and unbending man.

“So,” Hugh Rodham had said to her at Wellesley, “you’ve made up your mind.”

“Yes,” Hillary said. They were in her dormitory room, packing up her things. Her father had driven the long distance from Chicago to Wellesley to see her graduate, leaving her mother with her brothers Tony and Hugh, Jr. in Park Ridge.

“Heard you’re going to some conference in Washington soon. Young leaders of the future, they called it, whatever that means.” Her solidly Republican father sounded suspicious, as if she had been invited to join some sort of leftist cabal.

“It’s sponsored by the League of Women Voters, Dad.”

One of the reporters who had interviewed her after her speech must have told him before she could. She had decided to go, even though the event seemed designed largely for young people who aspired to political careers.

She might meet some people who could one day help her at NASA. Politics had its uses.

“More money in being a doctor,” he said, “than in what you plan to do.” She thought of the game they had played when she was a child, when her father had tutored her in the statistical mysteries of the Chicago Tribune’s stock quotations and had drilled her in how to choose good investments. “Going to medical school, or even law school,
would make more practical sense if you have to have a career. You were talking about being a doctor all last year.”

It was true. Hillary had temporarily lost sight of her goal during the tumult of 1968, with its shocking assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy and the rioting in Chicago during the Democratic convention, when she had gone into the city by train only to witness kids her age being beaten by police. The wounds inflicted on society by such tragedy and disorder, especially on the poor and disenfranchised who had so few to fight for their interests, were intolerable to her. She would go to medical school, perhaps at Harvard or Yale, and specialize in pediatrics.

She would set up a clinic in the inner city, perhaps in one of the Chicago neighborhoods she had visited with the Reverend Donald Jones and the youth group of Park Ridge’s United Methodist Church. Her patients would be the impoverished urban blacks and migrant workers for whom she and her more fortunate friends had organized babysitting pools and food drives.

But such musings had been only a brief detour from her long-held aim. Doing medical and biochemical research was also a way to help people, and if she became an astronaut someday, she would have a public forum—a bully pulpit of sorts—from which she could inspire others to do the good works that could change society.

“More money in being a doctor,” her father repeated as he sat down on one of the beds.

“Maybe so, but I’ve been offered a real opportunity—I have to grab it. Things are changing, Dad.”

“Things are changing, all right, and not always for the better. Dick Nixon would have had an honorable peace with victory, not this namby-pamby time-to-reach-out-and-rebuild crapola. You wouldn’t have seen Nixon and Agnew acting like Humphrey and Muskie, running around the country apologizing to a lot of long-haired kids for—”

“Dad,” Hillary said, keeping her temper in check, “I don’t want to talk about politics.” Politics by itself, she had finally concluded, would not solve anything. President Humphrey, with all his talk of reconciliation, would be getting nowhere without the promise of technological feats that would mark the beginning of a new age. Businesses with new technologies would create new wealth; people would lift their gaze from this small planet to what lay beyond it.

Only such a dream could rouse what was best in her species. Only the prospect of great technological advances, and the wealth they would produce for everyone, could keep her country from tearing itself apart. At last the rich and powerful might be able to reach out to the less fortunate without having to fear the loss of what they had.

The wretched of the world would have a true hope of improving their lot.

“You’re stubborn, Hillary,” her father said. “You won’t change your mind, I can see that.” He had said the same thing when his once Republican daughter had come home from college and declared herself a Democrat.

Hillary sat down next to him and put her hand on his arm.

“You’ll be proud of me. It’s a great school. I’ll be one of the first women to go there.”

“Must not be much of a school, then. Maybe they lowered their standards.”

Hugh Rodham had always belittled her and her brothers that way. “Must be an easy school you go to,” he had muttered while perusing her report card of straight A’s.

“Must not be much of a college,” he had said when she was accepted at Wellesley. His words had spurred her on instead of discouraging her; she had understood what he really meant: It’s hard out there. The world is a tough place, and it’s my job to make you tough enough to deal with it. Being second-best isn’t good enough; you’d better aim high.

“Dad,” she said softly, “you’re talking about Caltech. I couldn’t have done any better. And Caltech doesn’t lower standards for anybody.”

* * * *

Venus was a world of volcanoes. They ranged from small shield volcanoes built up slowly by repeated flows of lava to huge shield volcanoes that were hundreds of miles across.

Some were flat-topped pancake domes with steep sides, while still others, unique to Venus, were circular coronae surrounded by rings of fractures and ridges.

“Here’s the deal,” Victoria Cho had explained to the reporters at the first press conference for the Sacajawea’s crew. “Like, some ninety per cent of the surface of Venus is volcanoes. You’ve got the biggest variety of volcanic forms there as anywhere else in the solar system. You’ve got these big Hawaiian-style jobs like Sapas Mons, and then you’ve got these features we call coronae that aren’t like anything on Earth—the coronae are those big circular forms you see on the screen behind me. Some of them have lava flows spreading out, some have shield volcanoes inside them. Most of these coronae aren’t so big, but there’s a few like Artemis Corona that are way humongous—about fifteen hundred miles across. And in addition to all this serious weirdness, you’ve got these big impact craters that look as if somebody just plopped them down there at the last minute—the last minute, in geological terms, meaning less than a billion years ago.”

Victoria folded her arms. “Now about ten per cent of the Venusian surface is this weird terrain we call tesserae, those bizarre, rugged deformed-looking expanses of really wrinkled land, and they’re the oldest places on the surface of Venus. It’s like the rest of the planet got flooded by lava from volcanoes, and the tesserae are islands. So here’s what I want to know. Did the whole surface look like that once, all deformed by tectonic activity, or is it just that the
tesserae are so old that they’re, like, all cracked and wrinkled from age?”

As wrinkled as some old hag who’s spent too much time at the beach, Hillary thought, remembering another crack she had overheard among the geologists. Volcanoes erupting from time to time, atmospheric pressure so intense on the Venusian surface that the lower atmosphere of carbon dioxide was suspected to be as much a liquid as a gas, the extreme heat, the poisonous sulfuric acid in the clouds—all of it made her think that giving Venus’s topographic features female names was appropriate. The planet seemed as angry as women ought to be after centuries of male oppression that had often been as oppressive as the Venusian atmosphere. Venus could almost be seen as the planetary manifestation of a just female rage.

* * * *

Hillary finished testing the crew’s latest blood samples in the Sacajawea’s small laboratory, then left the lab. She was in effect the ship’s doctor, given her degrees in biochemistry and the paramedical training she had acquired during her years of training with NASA. Along with some biological experiments, she took blood tests, checked blood pressure, analyzed urine samples, monitored cardiac function, and made other medical tests and observations. She did not expect to see any signs of calcium loss or muscle atrophy until they were in orbit around Venus and again weightless, but they were not likely to be in free fall long enough for any such loss to become significant.

Hillary’s cubicle was a small chamber aft that was about the size of a large closet. Inside were a narrow bed, a flat wall screen on which she could call up movies, television programs, and other visual material from the Sacajawea’s databases, and a sound system on which she could listen to selections from the ship’s music library. She let the door
slide shut behind her and stretched out on the bed, then impulsively reached inside her pocket for her devotional.

The crew of the Sacajawea had been allowed to bring along a few personal items. Among the few possessions Hillary had aboard were a Chicago Cubs baseball cap, some favorite photos of her daughter Chelsea Michelle, and her pocket Methodist devotional of Scriptural passages.

Hillary had begun carrying a devotional with her ever since her teen years, when Donald Jones, her church’s youth minister, had opened the eyes of his privileged white charges to the unfairness and cruelty of the world. He had believed that a true Christian had to be involved with the world. Overcoming alienation, searching for and giving meaning to modern life—that was the way to redemption; doing good works and ministering to the troubled and less fortunate was her duty.

She had done what she could, venturing out of the citadels of Wellesley and Caltech to tutor children in Boston’s Roxbury or Los Angeles’s Watts, helping to organize a medical clinic and child care program for some of Houston’s working poor. Always she had felt that she could have done more, that she had compromised, that she had often placed too much importance on worldly things.

Still, if she had not taken some trouble to make what had turned out to be lucrative investments, her husband, always oblivious to petty economic concerns, would have done little to provide them with more security. The dream of space had drawn her, but also the knowledge that, as an astronaut, she would be able to touch more lives and have a greater public forum. She had drifted away from her childhood faith, but it had helped in forming her, in making her feel her obligation to others.

Her husband had never understood her spiritual beliefs, such as they were. To him, science and religion were adversaries. “I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing,” he had often said. “It’s better to live not knowing
than to have an answer that might be wrong. I don’t know how you can think this whole universe is just some stage where some God’s watching people struggle with good and evil. Doubting, admitting our ignorance—those are our tools as scientists.”

They had argued about a lot of things. She had almost always lost the arguments, but went down fighting. Now she would give anything to be able to argue with him again.

Hillary closed her eyes for a moment and felt the pain of his loss once more.

* * * *

Unedited portion of interview with Rita Bedosky by Jane Pauley for “The Voyage of the Sacajawea,” report to be aired February 11, 1998 on “Dateline NBC.”

RITA BEDOSKY: You are going to edit this?

JANE PAULEY: Yes, of course.

BEDOSKY: You’ll have to—my friends say I’m kind of a motormouth.

PAULEY (clears throat): We’re speaking to Dr. Rita Bedosky, who was one of astronaut Hillary Rodham’s closest friends when they were both graduate students at the California Institute of Technology. Dr. Bedosky is now a professor of physics at American University in Washington, D.C.

BEDOSKY: Which is kind of weird, when you consider it. I always thought that if one of us was going to end up in Washington, it’d be Hillary. She was always more political than most of us.

PAULEY: She organized the first Caltech women’s group, didn’t she?

BEDOSKY:Sure did, and we sure as hell needed one.

There were so few of us back then—we really relied on those once-a-week meetings for moral support. First it was just the grad students, but when they started admitting women as undergraduates, we were there to look out for
them. And it was Hillary who saw that we could have some valuable allies if we brought in the secretaries and office workers and the cafeteria staff and the cleaning women.

With all those Caltech guys, we women had to stick together.

PAULEY: So it was rough for you.

BEDOSKY: Imagine the Pope and the Catholic Church having to deal with the first women in the College of Cardinals. We were intruding on the all-male priesthood of science. We didn’t belong there, the way some saw it, or else we were freaks. It’s a lot different at Caltech now, but with us, about the best you could hope for was to be treated as a kind of honorary man.

PAULEY: Did Hillary Rodham, coming into that extremely male environment from a women’s college, ever get discouraged?

BEDOSKY: If she did, she never let on. Hillary was about the most together person I’d ever met, even back then. She was kind of driven, if you want to know the truth, and she knew exactly what she wanted to do. She was going to get her doctorate in biochemistry, and then she was going to teach and do medical research on calcium deficiencies and bone loss and osteoporosis, because she guessed that would give her a better shot at being an astronaut someday.

And she was right, given the physiological problems the early astronauts developed on Skylab One, before the Doughnut—excuse me, Skylab-Mir Two—was built. And even with a revolving space station— (pause) PAULEY: She told you back then that she wanted to be an astronaut?

BEDOSKY: Yeah. It was something she basically kept to herself, but I could tell she really meant it. She’d drive up to JPL—the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena—every time she had a free moment, to see what the latest unmanned probes were sending back. Sometimes she was with her husband, when he was doing some consulting
there, but other times she went by herself. Met some important people there, too—like I said, she was always more political than the rest of us.

PAULEY: You were with Hillary when she met her husband, weren’t you?

BEDOSKY: Oh, yeah. That was in the spring of 1970.

Hillary and I were sitting in the Greasy—in the cafeteria, having some coffee. He was sitting at a table near us with some other students, talking and occasionally beating out a rhythm on the tabletop with his hands—he played the bongo drums, you know—and he kept staring at Hillary.

This wasn’t the first time, either. About a week before, in the library, he was staring at her, too. I remember wondering why, because Hillary wasn’t really his type—he was more into California blondes, your basic babe type.

Hillary had started lightening her hair some, but about all she ever wore were sweatshirts and jeans or loose dresses with Peter Pan collars, and she was still wearing thick Coke-bottle glasses, but obviously he must have noticed something that interested him. So he’s staring at her, and she’s staring right back.

PAULEY: And then what happened?

BEDOSKY: Hillary said, “I’m going to go over and speak to him,” and before I could say anything, she got up and walked over and said to him, “Look, if you’re going to keep staring at me and I’m going to keep staring back, I think we should at least know each other. I’m Hillary Rodham.”

And then she put out her hand.

PAULEY: Her daughter told me that her father used to tell that story to their friends.

BEDOSKY: I think that’s what got to him, that Hillary had that much chutzpah and just came right up and introduced herself. So he said, “Well, I’m Dick Feynman.” But of course she already knew that.

* * * *

“That’s Chelsea with her aunt Joan, Dick’s sister,” Hillary said to Judy Resnik as the other woman sat down on Hillary’s bunk. “And this photo was taken during her freshman year at M.I.T.” Chelsea Michelle Feynman strongly resembled her father, with the same lean body, unruly hair, and slightly goofy smile. There was so little of Hillary in her daughter that it was almost as though she had been no more than a receptacle and incubator for her husband’s seed, as medieval physicians had believed women were.

“And she’s going into physics,” Judy said, “just like her father and her aunt Joan. It must run in the family.”

“Dick was a great father,” Hillary said. “He liked being a father so much that he wanted another child right away. We kept trying, and we were thinking of adopting when—” She paused. Even after all the years that had passed, she found it painful to remember that time. “He’d be so proud of Chelsea now,” she finished. Her daughter, she knew, had saved her marriage.

* * * *

Unedited portion of interview with Daria Derrick by Deborah Norville for “Inside Edition,” to be aired February 12, 1998.

DARIA DERRICK: It was after Hillary moved into Dick’s house. Supposedly she was still sharing an apartment with her friend Rita, but that was just for cover—everybody knew she was living with Richard Feynman.

DEBORAH NORVILLE: He’d broken up with you by then?

DERRICK: Oh, yeah. Not that we were ever really going together. Dick was a real Lothario. I always knew he wasn’t serious about me, but— (pauses).

NORVILLE: Yes?

DERRICK: When I was with him, when he was focusing all his attention—all that high-powered genius—on me, it
was like I was the only woman in the world. He might have been this Nobel Prize-winning physicist, but he was also a very sexy guy.

NORVILLE: So you went over to his house to get something you’d left there.

DERRICK: Yeah, and Hillary answered the door. She’d only been living with him for a couple of months, but she already looked different—her hair was a lot blonder, for one thing, and she was wearing contact lenses. She was definitely looking more like a California girl—probably thought that was the way to keep him interested.

NORVILLE: Richard Feynman had a lot of unhappiness in his personal life, didn’t he?

DERRICK: You can say that again. I still remember the night he pulled out this old battered suitcase with all these old letters and photographs from his first wife—Arline, the one who died in the Forties from tuberculosis. I realized then that I could never be what she was to him, or what his third wife had been to him, either. He never talked much about his second wife.

NORVILLE: The one who divorced him during the Fifties on the grounds of mental cruelty?

DERRICK: The one who claimed he drove her crazy with his bongo drums and with doing calculus problems in bed. I think he knew that marriage was a mistake, but Arline—

Arline was always going to be perfect in his mind, because she passed away so young. And Gweneth, his third wife—if she hadn’t died in that car accident, I think he would have stayed happily married to her—she was really good for him.

That’s what one of his old friends told me, anyway—she loved him, but she was sort of independent-minded, too.

Maybe that’s what attracted him to Hillary. I think maybe he married her to keep her from moving out. She wanted a serious relationship, and I guess he was ready for marriage again by then.

NORVILLE: Did Hillary tell you that herself?

DERRICK: Oh, no. She didn’t talk about personal stuff with anybody, and I wasn’t exactly her bosom buddy. I mean, she had to have known Dick had a roving eye, but she must have forgiven him for it. After all, she was married to one of the most brilliant men in the world, and that’s worth more than monogamy, isn’t it?

* * * *

“I’m getting married,” Hillary said to her parents over the phone.

“Who’s the lucky young man?” her mother asked.

Barely pausing for breath between sentences, Hillary explained that she was going to marry a man who was almost thirty years older than she was and that this would be his fourth marriage, quickly adding that he was the world-renowned physicist Richard Feynman, that he had worked on the Manhattan Project to develop the first atomic bomb during World War II, and that he had won the Nobel Prize in physics for his work in quantum electrodynamics in 1965.

A long silence ensued. “He’s a Jew, isn’t he,” her father said at last.

“Well, yes. He’s from a Jewish family. Dick’s not very religious, though. If you must know, he’s basically an atheist.” Hillary heard her mother sigh. “We want to get married before the fall semester starts, and I hope you’ll both come out here for the wedding. Dick’s mother and sister will be there, too, but we’re not making a big fuss.”

“A physicist,” her father said, still sounding too bewildered to get really angry. “Probably an absent-minded professor.”

“He won the Nobel Prize, Dad.”

“There’s money in that, isn’t there? Did he put it into some good investments?”

“He used some of it to buy a beach house in Mexico.”

“Well, Hillary, if you’d told me you were marrying some hillbilly from the Ozarks, I couldn’t be more surprised.”

Hugh Rodham heaved a sigh. “You’re of age. I can’t stop you. I just hope you know what you’re doing.”

“You will finish your doctorate, won’t you?” her mother asked. “You won’t drop out.”

“Of course I’ll finish it,” Hillary replied. Her marriage, unlike that of her parents, would be a true partnership, a relationship of equals, a meeting of minds. It occurred to her only later that being the wife of Richard Feynman would automatically give her a status it might otherwise have taken her years to attain.

* * * *

“Shit,” Victoria Cho said, not for the first time.

Hillary floated up from her chair as the Sacajawea fell around Venus. They had been in free fall for almost thirty-six hours now, and had launched the two probes, one toward the area of Maxwell Montes, the other toward an unusual volcano near Artemis Chasma. Both probes had failed less than an hour after entering the atmosphere.

Over by the viewscreen above the pilot’s station, Evelyn Holder was listening to Sally Ride, the capcom for this mission. “The imaging team isn’t happy about the probes, either,” Sally was saying, “but we’ll still have the radar mapping, and the most important thing is…everything else is nominal, everything else is a-okay.”

The Sacajawea had begun to decelerate on schedule, gradually slowing during the second leg of their journey to Venus. They had been orbiting Venus for less than an hour before congratulatory messages were coming in from the president and the two surviving former presidents, John Glenn and Robert Dole.

“Everything’s a-okay,” Victoria muttered, “except for the fucking probes. I was really looking forward to what those babies might tell us.”

Hillary drifted over to the disappointed geologist. “Look at it this way,” she said. “At least you weren’t the poor bastard who had to go to the Kremlin and give Commander Lebed the bad news.” The Russians had designed and built the two probes. “And there’s bound to be another Venus mission before too long, with everything going this well.”

Victoria smiled, then propelled herself toward the small screen showing the radar imaging of the Venusian surface.

Hillary’s stomach lurched, then grew calmer. Evelyn was apparently over the worst of her spacesickness. Victoria, also trained as a pilot, would not have to bring them home.

They were all falling inside the Sacajawea as the ship fell around Venus. Hillary found herself thinking of how Dick had explained gravity to the five-year old Chelsea with a long stick and two lead balls dangling from a slowly twisting fiber.

Dick had not been the kind of father that Hugh Rodham had been to her; she could not imagine her own father crawling around on the floor with her or telling her detailed stories about an imaginary world of people so small that they could live in the cracks of wooden planks. “Remember, kiddo,” Dick had said to his daughter in what Hillary always thought of as his Brooklyn cabdriver’s voice,

“there’s always plenty of room at the bottom of things.

You’d be amazed how much room there is, as long as something’s tiny enough.” Hugh Rodham, with his reverence for authority, would never have told her what Dick had told Chelsea about her arithmetic. “I don’t care what the teacher told you,” he had said. “There isn’t just one right way to figure out the answer, there’s a lot of ways. You want to solve the problem, you gotta try to do it different ways and see what works. If it isn’t the teacher’s way, so what?” Sometimes, after delivering yet another criticism of accepted wisdom, he would stare at Hillary, as if daring her to object.

She knew he considered her stodgy and conservative. He could indulge his curiosity by skinny-dipping in Esalen’s hot tubs, attending an est conference on quantum field theory, or floating around in a sensory deprivation tank, but somebody had to deal with practical matters. Someone had to study what investments to make, make certain Dick got paid what he deserved for his lectures, consulting jobs, and books, and placate the Caltech administrators and faculty he annoyed with his refusal to tend to the mundane and distracting business of writing grant proposals and attending faculty meetings. Someone had to take care of all that if he was to be free to ponder the nature of the universe. She had been, to use a metaphor drawn from her Methodist youth, the Martha to his Mary.

He was a child, still free to question and wonder, a child who was a genius, who outshone even the brilliant minds of his Caltech colleagues. As she swam weightlessly toward the Sacajawea’s starboard side, Hillary remembered how her husband had floated above the constraints that bound others. A partnership, a bond between equals—that was the kind of marriage she had sought, but it was clear from the start that Richard Feynman had few mental equals.

It was a privilege, an honor, to be married to such a genius. Sometimes she had believed that. At other times, she had seen it as the kind of rationalization women had always grasped at for consolation.

After acquiring her Ph.D., Hillary had accepted a position in the biology department of U.C.L.A., content to be removed from the more competitive, high-powered, and intellectually demanding atmosphere of Caltech. It was easier to use her political skills to manage the practical side of Dick’s career while being on the faculty of another university, if only to avoid conflict of interest. She was free to teach her classes and do her research without having to feel that those she worked with might be comparing her
more conventional mind with the brilliance of her husband’s.

* * * *

“It’s still experimental eye surgery,” Hillary had told Dick one summer evening in 1977, as they sat on a Mexican beach with Chelsea, “but I’ve read all the medical studies.

With photorefractive keratectomy, there is a risk—I could end up with even worse vision—but there’s about a two-thirds chance of ending up with twenty-twenty vision, and even twenty-forty would be good enough.”

He was listening to her with his characteristic mixed expression of curiosity and amusement. “Is it worth it?” he asked.

“Well, it isn’t cheap.”

“I wasn’t asking about the cost, I was asking about the risk. Is it worth taking the chance and spending all that dough just so you won’t have to wear contacts?”

Hillary watched as their three-year-old daughter patted down another section of a sand structure that was beginning to look like a cyclotron. “That isn’t why I want the surgery,” she murmured. “NASA wouldn’t accept anybody as nearsighted as I am for astronaut training. If the operations are successful, I’ll have a chance.”

That was the first time she had confessed her long-held ambition to him. President John Glenn’s recent speech, in which he had recanted the testimony he had given before a Congressional committee in 1962, had made her old dream flower inside her once more. “I argued back then,” the president had said, “that women shouldn’t go into space, that it was the job of men to take risks exploring the unknown. As my wife and daughter recently reminded me, I can be mighty short-sighted for a guy who used to be a pilot. It’s time for women to join men in exploring the frontier of space.”

“We’d have to move to Houston if they accepted me,”

Hillary went on, “but any university in Texas would jump at the chance to have you on the faculty. They’d probably pay you a lot more than Caltech.”

Her husband said, “Let’s see how your eye surgery goes first.”

That night, he ran for the bathroom in their beach house and vomited. That autumn, still recovering from the first operation on her left eye, she finally persuaded him to consult his doctor, who found nothing. In the spring of 1978, with 20/20 vision in her left eye and her right eye healing rapidly, Hillary finally got him to a specialist recommended by her colleagues at U.C.L.A.

Dick had a tumor of the abdomen. The surgeon who operated on him told her it was myxoid liposarcoma, a rare form of cancer that had already destroyed his spleen and one of his kidneys. He had an 11 to 41 per cent chance of surviving five years, depending on which study she looked at. It was highly unlikely that he would live another ten years.

Hillary forced herself to ignore two possibilities, neither of which she would ever mention to him. The first was that his work at Los Alamos on the atomic bomb might have been responsible for his disease. The second was that, had she not been so preoccupied with her eye surgery and her applications and interviews with NASA, she might have noticed the slight bulge at his waist earlier, might have pushed him into seeing the physicians and specialists soon enough for them to have saved him.

* * * *

Hillary had not dreamed of her husband for some time, but now, drifting between sleep and wakefulness as the Sacajawea orbited Venus, she found herself standing on a sunlit beach, watching him as he waded in the surf. She had dreamed of him almost every night after his death, and

the dreams had convinced her that he was still alive, that the recurring tumors and the second rare type of cancer that had struck at his bone marrow and the failure of his remaining kidney had never happened, had been mistaken diagnoses, until she woke up and once again remembered.

Everything she knew, all the research she had done, was powerless to help him. That he had lived for another ten years after his diagnosis had been beating the odds. What had kept him going was his work, his feeling that there was still so much to teach and to learn, so many more ways to find and use the language of mathematics to convey the simple and beautiful laws of physical reality.

She had withdrawn her application to NASA, devoting herself to making his remaining time as carefree as possible. The thought that NASA might be unlikely to welcome as an astronaut a woman who would disrupt the life of a stricken man, especially a man who was one of the world’s greatest physicists, crossed her mind for only a moment, and made her despise herself for thinking it.

“You know,” he had told her a few years before his death,

“I don’t think we’d still be married if we didn’t have Chelsea. There wouldn’t have been enough to hold us together.” Cruel as the statement seemed, she knew it to be the truth. Rooted in conventionality, toiling at her own work and taking care of all the practical matters he saw as distractions, she knew that they had begun to drift apart even in the earliest days of their marriage. Having their daughter had linked his quicksilver brilliance to her stolidity; he had loved Chelsea enough to again feel some love for Hillary. She could look at their child and see what she herself might have become growing up in a different world, a world of sun and sand and a father who could reveal the wonder and beauty of that world.

After his death, she gave him the simple burial he had wanted, with no ritual and only herself, their daughter, and Dick’s sister and one of his cousins to mourn him at the
graveside. A month after that, his friends and colleagues at Caltech held a memorial gathering in his honor. Hillary found herself in a large auditorium packed with fellow physicists, graduate students, former students, engineers from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, old girl friends, and eccentrics Dick had met on the beach or in bars and cafes while playing his bongo drums. The written eulogy she had prepared suddenly seemed inadequate; it was conventional, sentimental, stodgy—all the things her husband was not.

She was to be the first to speak. She left her written remembrance on her chair; she would speak from her heart.

Chelsea watched her with Dick’s eyes as Hillary walked to the podium, looked into the sea of faces, and said, “Toward the end of Dick’s life, my dear husband and I used to talk about—pardon the cliché—the meaning of life. I can think of nothing more appropriate now than to offer some of his own remarks on that topic.” He had expressed such sentiments often enough, and the outlook they expressed was so central to his life, that she could easily recall his words. “He would say, ‘I have approximate answers and different degrees of certainty about things, but I’m not totally sure of anything and there’s a lot I don’t know, such as whether it means anything at all to ask why we’re here.

But I can live with that, and die with it, too. I’m not scared by not knowing, by being in a universe without any purpose, and as far as I can tell, that’s how it is. It doesn’t frighten me. I’d rather admit I don’t know than grab at some answer that might be wrong.’”

Hillary paused, afraid for a moment that she might cry again. “That was how he lived his life, and that’s what he believed right up to the end.” The certainties of her Methodist youth were of little use now; Dick would have been furious at her and disappointed in her if she had invoked them. Over the years, some of his doubt and uncertainty had crept into her view of the universe. Her
occasional prayers and Scriptural readings were more a nostalgic reminder of a comfort her spiritual beliefs had once provided than an affirmation of faith. She wondered if she ever would have come to that kind of agnosticism without her husband’s influence. Against everything she had been taught in childhood, she could even believe that her doubts might have made her a better person. There had always existed in her a tendency to self-righteousness; doubt made her more conscious of her failings.

Hillary bowed her head. She would honor her husband’s memory by not praying for him.

* * * *

Hillary strapped herself into her seat. “I don’t know about you,” Evelyn said from her pilot’s seat, “but I’m a little scared.” It was an admission none of them would have made had any male astronauts been present. The ship’s drive might fail, stranding them in orbit around Venus. The Sacajawea might accelerate until the midpoint of their return journey and never decelerate. If the mission failed, it would almost make certain that they would all have Venusian geological features named after themselves, which wasn’t exactly consoling.

“Maybe someday, people will settle Venus,” Chelsea had told Hillary in a phone call from M.I.T. a couple of months ago.

“No way,” Hillary had said. “You’d need a completely different planet.”

“That’s what I meant, Mom.” Chelsea had gone on to speak of terraforming—engineering algae to seed the sulfuric clouds, finding a way to shield Venus from the sun so that it could cool, maybe even using the nanotechnology Richard Feynman had envisioned, twenty years before there was even a name for that field, to build microscopic machines capable of altering the planetary environment on a molecular level. Hillary had suddenly wished that

Chelsea’s father could have seen what his daughter had become, how much of him there still was in her.

She was suddenly overwhelmed by a vision of Venus as a future home for humankind. A terraformed Venus would not isolate colonists and their descendants from Earth, as a colonized Mars would through the necessary adaptation to a much lower gravity. People would come and go freely. She remembered all the stories of Venus she had read as a girl, from the swampy planet of the earliest tales to the vision of hell transformed into a new garden.

“All systems go,” Evelyn murmured. “Girls, we’re ready to roll.” For a moment, Hillary had the sensation of being outside herself, as though everything around her were no more than a dimly imagined possibility that had never come to pass, and then the thrust of the Sacajawea’s engines pressed her against her seat.

They were on their way home—but with the success of this mission, Hillary was sure that Earth would not remain humankind’s only home for long. The Moon’s research outposts would soon welcome settlers, and there would be Mars to explore. As Venus shrank on the rear view screen, Hillary recalled the fifteen-year-old girl in Park Ridge who had dreamed of becoming an astronaut, and knew that in spite of the setbacks and delays, the years of postponing her dream and finally winning a place as an astronaut and then of waiting for a chance at a mission, that all of the hard work and the sacrifices and the disappointments had been worth it.

She had kept faith with her younger self.

* * * *

Evelyn Holder had brought her husband to the White House reception and dinner in honor of the four astronauts.

Judith Resnik was accompanied by Senator Bob Kerrey, who was rumored to be getting more serious about her; if he did decide to run for president, having an astronaut as a
wife could only help. Victoria Cho had her good friend Ellison Onizuka, fellow astronaut and space station veteran, in tow.

Hillary stood with her daughter, smiling and nodding as she shook hands and exchanged pleasantries with the other guests. Chelsea Feynman, who had given up her usual uniform of jeans and sweatshirts for a long blue silk dress, was holding the medal that the president had presented to Hillary. She proudly opened the small box to show the medal to the vice-president, as she had earlier when former president Glenn had asked to see it.

“You know,” the vice-president was saying, “I truly envy your mother. I would have loved to have been an astronaut myself. You should be very proud of your mother.”

“I am,” Chelsea said.

Hillary smiled as the vice-president turned over her medal to read the inscription on the back; he was both a space policy wonk and a big supporter of NASA, so she had resolved to be as pleasant to him as possible, despite his reputation as something of an opportunist and a hatchet man for the president. At any rate, Vice-President Newt Gingrich seemed on his best behavior tonight.

“To Hillary Rodham Feynman,” Vice-President Gingrich read from the medal, “for the courage she has shown in the exploration of space.” He beamed at her and her daughter.

Hillary remembered how, a year after Dick’s death, she had impulsively added his last name to her own on her application to NASA. In public, she was still known by her own name, the name she had kept throughout her marriage, but in NASA’s records and any awards she received for her service as an astronaut, she would always be listed as Hillary Rodham Feynman. Her feminist soul was at peace with that; her husband, perhaps in more ways than even she realized, had helped to make a better space program possible. His consultations with the NASA scientists and engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory,
she was sure, had saved the space agency many mistakes, perhaps even disasters.

The First Lady, taller in person than she seemed on TV
and with a mass of attractive curly brown hair, bore down on them, apparently about to rescue Hillary and Chelsea from the vice-president. Mary Steenburgen Clinton might give the appearance of a soft-spoken Southern lady, but it was widely believed that her husband might never have risen to become president without her. Not long after marrying the up-and-coming young Arkansan politician William Jefferson Clinton in the early Eighties, Mary Clinton had given up a promising career as an actress to become her husband’s closest advisor and unofficial campaign manager. A charming but disorganized, undisciplined, skirt-chasing, and only intermittently successful politician had gone on to win election as his state’s governor, as a senator, and finally as president in 1992. Mary Clinton’s gentle demeanor, it was said, was only part of a public performance that concealed a sharp political intelligence and the well-honed instincts of a female Machiavelli.

“That Bill Clinton was always a right smart young feller,”

one of the president’s old mentors from Arkansas had said in a television interview, after President Clinton had won a second term by a landslide, “but it was Mary who done whipped him into shape.” Hillary could well believe that.

President Bill Clinton, despite his many accomplishments in office, struck her—in his public persona, anyway—as the kind of charming rogue, weak at the center, who might never have won over the American public had he not been preceded in his office by the upright John Glenn and the dour Bob Dole. He could be grateful that people had grown tired of such rectitude and now wanted to enjoy the fruits of prosperity with a more congenial and lax chief executive.

“Ms. Rodham,” Mary Steenburgen Clinton murmured as she shook Hillary’s hand, “I am so glad you and your
daughter could both be with us. I must tell you that of all the dinners we’ve had in the White House so far, I have looked forward to this one the most.”

Hillary very much doubted that, but the sincerity and warmth in the First Lady’s voice was enough to win her over. “You gave a wonderful performance in ‘Time After Time,’” she responded. “It’s one of my favorite films.”

“That British dude who played H.G. Wells in it wasn’t bad, either,” Chelsea added.

Hillary glanced at her daughter, who probably didn’t know that it was widely rumored that Mary Steenburgen Clinton had been romantically involved with her leading man in that movie, which had been made before her marriage to Bill Clinton, but the First Lady was still smiling.

“Malcolm McDowell, you mean,” Mary Clinton said. “No, he wasn’t bad at all.”

This President and his wife had a reputation for informality, and people were already moving toward the entrance to the dining room in no discernible order. Hillary lingered near her daughter, who was answering Ms.

Clinton’s queries about her postgraduate work and her life in Boston, uncertain of what to do now, when she felt a hand gently touch her elbow.

“Ms. Rodham?”

Hillary turned and found herself looking up into the eyes of the President of the United States. He had shaken her hand impersonally at the earlier ceremony, when the members of the Venus mission had been presented with their medals, but now his gaze was definitely focused on her. With that broad grin and that twinkle in his eye, she could almost believe that he was flirting with her, unlikely as that was with his wife standing nearby.

“Mr. President,” Hillary said.

Bill Clinton took her right hand and pressed it between both of his. “You and your sister astronauts have accomplished a wonderful thing,” he said, “traveling to

Venus and back. I’ve always had great admiration for brave and brilliant women, and it’s a privilege to have you all as our guests.”

He was a charmer, all right.

Their eyes locked…and then the moment passed.

The president moved away and gracefully took the First Lady’s arm.

Chelsea glanced at Hillary and smiled.

Hillary followed her daughter toward the White House dining room, where the tables waited beneath the glittering chandeliers.

OceanofPDF.com

MAYBE JUST A LITTLE ONE, by Reginald Bretnor

Maximus Everett, who taught physics at Woodrow Wilson Union High School for nearly twenty years, was the first man to accomplish nuclear fission in his basement.

It really wasn’t much of a basement either. Along one side was the workbench, littered with tools and wire and dusty old books. On the other side was an empty birdcage and a utility sink with a dripping faucet. A couple of shabby trunks stood in a corner next to a broken lawnmower, and some baled magazines the Red Cross people had forgotten to call for were piled up behind the cyclotron.

The final result of his scientific labors pleased Everett.

After observing it quietly for a while, he went upstairs to the kitchen, where his wife was making chopped-olive-and-egg sandwiches. He sat down on a stool, wiped his long bald forehead, and remarked that it certainly was hot in the basement. Without turning around, his wife assured him that this was not abnormal. “Here in Arizona,” she observed, “right near the border, it’s always hot in summer.”

Everett did not dispute the point. “Oh, it’s not only that,”

he told her. “I’ve just been working pretty hard. It’s been a tough job.” He leaned back with a little sigh of satisfaction.

“I’ve invented atomic power, hon.”

“So that’s what you’ve been doing,” said Mrs. Everett. “I thought you were still working on your perpetual motion machine.” She cut the last sandwich diagonally in half, put some sliced pickle on the platter, and turned around, smoothing her ample apron. Then suddenly she looked accusingly at her husband. “Why, that’s ridiculous!” she exclaimed. “What do you mean, you invented it? How about Hiroshima?”

“That was different,” said Everett simply. “That was just a big bang. Anybody can invent that kind.”

Mrs. Everett—a librarian, and rather dogmatic—showed signs of irritation. “All the authorities,” she declared, “say that you have to have uranium, and that it’s very rare. Then you have to make it into something else, and it costs millions and millions of dollars.”

“That’s what they think,” replied Everett, shaking his head mildly. “Well, they ought to know, if anyone does!”

“I have the utmost respect for them,” he conceded. “After all, their work did help to make mine possible. It’s just—
well, you see, it’s just that I don’t need uranium. I discovered a new element about a week ago, and.…”

Mrs. Everett was wearing the expression she usually reserved for people who tried to explain away overdue books. “Just how could you discover a new element when they’ve all been discovered?” she asked bleakly. “And what is it called?”

“Frijolium,” Everett replied. “I discovered it a week ago Tuesday. And it hardly costs anything.”

“Yes, but where did you get it?”

“I made it. That is, I purified it. Pure frijolium, for the first time in history.”

“Well, it sounds sort of familiar to me,” mused Mrs.

Everett. “Frijolium—now wherever…?”

“Sort of familiar?” Everett echoed. “Well, it should!

Frijolium. You know, from frijoles.”

Marriage and the public library had hardened Mrs.

Everett; she took it all in her stride. “Maximus Everett!”

she snapped. “Do you mean to sit there and tell me that you’ve found a new element in plain old Mexican beans?”

Everett hooked his thumbs in his belt and tilted the stool back on its hind legs. “We-ell,” he said, obviously weighing the question carefully, “it would not be quite correct to say that frijoles contain a new element. As a matter of fact, they are the new element.”

“But frijoles are just beans!” protested Mrs. Everett, rather loudly. “Anybody’ll tell you that. They contain proteins, fats, and carbohydrates.”

“Those substances,” Everett said, “are impurities. Fresh frijoles are 92.733 per cent pure frijolium. I have isolated it. It has a relatively low atomic weight, but is adequately unstable. The nucleus may be split quite readily by…”

“Oh, never mind!” Mrs. Everett cried, stamping her foot.

“Do you really expect me to believe that? Why, there would have been an explosion.”

“No, there wouldn’t. I didn’t want an explosion. I used the frijolium from one small frijole—that’s the minimum critical mass—and it’s really quite easy to control. You can turn it on and off just like a vacuum-cleaner.”

“Well, I don’t believe a word of it! All the experts say atomic power can’t be controlled like that.”

Everett shook his head, pityingly. “That’s what they think.

I’ve had it running the washing-machine for three hours.…

And,” he added, “if I didn’t turn it off, it would run for almost exactly seventy-two years. What do you think of that?”

After this, of course, Mrs. Everett followed him back into the basement to see for herself. The washing-machine was busily churning away next to the cyclotron, quaking and rattling just as it always had. Mrs. Everett sniffed. Warily, she walked around it, peering at the chipped enamel of its framework. As far as she could determine, its appearance had not changed—and she said so rather acidly.

“If this is your idea of a joke,” she said. “I don’t think it’s at all funny. Of course, if you haven’t broken my washer, there’s no real harm done, but.…”

Everett interrupted her. He pointed to the back of the washer. “Look!” he said, with great dignity.

Looking closely, she saw a small aluminum box, with a round hole in the top and an insulated cord leading to the motor. “Wasn’t it there before?” she asked.

“It was not!” Everett said. “That is the generator. You drop the frijolium through the hole. That little switch on the box works a shield inside that turns the energy on and off.”

He flipped the switch, and the washing-machine chugged twice and was silent. He flipped it again, and the machine came back to life.

“See?” he said triumphantly.

Mrs. Everett was still dubious. “Where do you plug it in?”

she inquired. “You don’t,” her husband replied patiently.

“That’s the whole idea. The generator converts atomic power from the smashing of the frijolium nuclei directly into 110 volts A.C., just like the house current.”

“You—you mean we won’t have any bills to pay?” Mrs.

Everett said, beginning to be impressed.

“Not a penny. Not after I get the rest of the house wired.”

“Why, Maxie! Why, that’s wonderful! And we could put it on the car too, couldn’t we?”Mrs. Everett patted the washing-machine with genuine affection. “Just wait until I tell Mrs. Myers,” she exulted. “Ever since they made Henry principal, she’s been acting as if we were below them socially or something. And it was she who told the grocer-boy that you were all thumbs, not handy around the house like Henry was.”

“Oh, Henry’s all right,” Everett said. “I think he’ll be pleased when he hears about it. After all, it’ll be nice for the school, too; it’ll help to keep up interest in the physics classes.”

“I should think he ought to be pleased,” snorted Mrs.

Everett. “He couldn’t invent atomic power.”

“Maybe,” Everett said wistfully, “maybe he’ll let me give up coaching basketball.”

“I’ll phone her right after lunch,” Mrs. Everett said with a gleam in her eye.

Mrs. Everett was as good as her word. She was sweetly condescending to Henry Myers’ wife, who responded with a gratifying display of irritation, awe, and envy—and this
reaction encouraged her to call up quite a number of other people. It was Saturday, and she didn’t have to go back to the library, and so she was able to spend the rest of the afternoon on the telephone. She was still there at five o’clock, when the reporters started to arrive.

The first journalist was a brash young man with an unhealthy complexion. “I’m from the Bulletin,” he announced, cleverly getting his foot in the door as Mrs.

Everett opened it.

“There must be some mistake,” Mrs. Everett said coldly.

“We paid the boy two months in advance, and anyway we take the Tribune.”

“No mistake,” said the journalist. “Here’s the card.” He thrust a card at her menacingly and, as she retreated, thrust himself after it, craning his neck to peer around the room. “Where’s the guy with the atom bomb?” he demanded.

“Oh, you’re a reporter!” Mrs. Everett said, wide-eyed.

“Where’s the atom bomb?” repeated the journalist, peering into the fireplace. “Atom bomb?”gasped Mrs.

Everett. “Dear me, no. There isn’t any. It’s just atomic power. It’s running the washing-machine.”

The journalist seemed disappointed. “You sure?”he said.

“Why, of course,” replied Mrs. Everett. “Maximus—that’s Mr. Everett—will be here in a minute or two. He’ll explain it to you. If you’ll just have a seat for a minute, I’ll go and get him.” She started out. “If you’d like to look at the new Geographic,” she offered, “it’s on the mantel.”

The journalist grunted politely as she left the room. Then he took a quick look at the bookcase, discovered two volumes by Jules Verne and one by H.G. Wells, noted down their titles. Having done so, he opened the door for his cameraman, and together they began examining Everett’s desk for matters of scientific interest.

The Everetts, entering, did not notice this investigation; they were momentarily blinded by the flash-bulb that
greeted their return. Everett tried simultaneously to rearrange his hastily-assumed necktie with one hand and to shake hands with the journalist with the other, and succeeded in looking quite confused and slightly wild.

Mrs. Everett blinked and said something about how clever Mr. Everett was. The journalist promptly asked about the atomic bomb again, and did not conceal his resentment when Everett assured him that there was nothing so dangerous in the house. He slumped down into the nearest chair, muttered indignantly that he had flown down from Phoenix, flipped his notebook closed. “Well,” he said to Everett, “give.”

And, modestly enough, Everett gave. He told of his search for practical atomic power. He exhibited his home-made cyclotron and the converted washer. He posed for a dozen or more photographs, and he answered all questions with the utmost patience. “Of course,” he said, “I could have made a bomb if I’d wanted to, but I think this is so much more useful, don’t you?”

The journalist made a note of this remark. “Yeah,” he said,

“sure. But all the big shots say it can’t be done for ten or twently years.” Everett grinned. “That’s what they think,”

he said. “You see, they haven’t heard about my new element. It’s the new element that does the trick. And it hardly costs anything; that’s the nice thing about it.”

The journalist poised his pencil.

“I call it frijolium,” Everett continued. “From frijoles, you know.”

The journalist’s face twitched suddenly. He darted a quick, covert glance at his companion. “No kiddin’!” he said, with a nasty smile. “You mean it comes from frijoles—
from beans?”

“That’s right,” Everett assured him. “From common old Mexican beans. They’re full of it.”

“Say, that’s something! That’s really something!” The journalist slapped Everett heartily on the back. “Isn’t that
something, Pete?” he cried. Pete took another photograph.

The first journalist didn’t stay very long after that. He remembered that he was in a terrific hurry, and he delayed only long enough to use the telephone very briefly. Mrs.

Everett, overhearing part of the conversation, marvelled at the strange jargon of his craft.

“…Yeah,” he said, “…uh-huh, a squirrel…but good!…

sure…runs the washer on frijolium…from frijoles…you heard what I said, as in beans!… Willie’ll eat it up.…”

But that was all Mrs. Everett heard, because just then the other journalists started to arrive.

There were a lot of them, male and female, and they gave the Everetts a very busy evening. As a matter of fact, it was two-and-a-half hours past midnight when the last journalist

—a heavily-mustached lady who had been questioning Mrs.

Everett about the more intimate details of her married life

—folded her notes and departed.

After the door had been securely bolted, a strangely demure Mrs. Everett looked up at her husband. “Oh, Maxie,” she fluttered, “that woman asked me the most embarrassing questions.”

“Dear me,” Everett said uncomfortably. “I wonder why?”

There was a moment of silence. Then Mrs. Everett sighed.

“Well anyhow, you’ll probably be quite famous now,” she suggested. “They…they may even ask you to go to Washington.”

“That would be nice,” Everett said, “but I don’t see how I possibly could before the end of the semester.”

Mentally reading future headlines, Mrs. Everett ignored the objection. She glimpsed a brief and garbled vision of honorary degrees, speeches, movie contracts. “All those newspaper people were so disappointed because you hadn’t made a bomb,” she reflected. “It does seem a shame, too, after they went to all that trouble. Don’t you think you could make just one? Maybe just a little one.…”

“No,” Everett replied. “I’d rather not. I don’t like to seem obstinate, but whatever would we do with it?”

The Everetts were given no chance to stay in bed that Sunday morning, for the press returned in force on the heels of the milkman, and soon the household was as agitated as it had been the night before. The telephone was constantly in use; light-hearted journalists came and went; and Mrs. Everett whispered a thousand confidences to ladies who knew just how to contrive high romance from the most unpromising materials.

At fifteen minutes to twelve, Maximus Everett was perched on the pile of old magazines in the basement, rather hoarsely lecturing on the peculiar merits of the frijole as a fissionable material, while several members of his audience examined and photographed an assortment of rusty plumbing installed for an experiment long since abandoned and forgotten. It was here that Mrs. Everett found him when she descended the stairs to announce the arrival of Henry Myers.

“I do hate to interrupt,” Mrs. Everette said delicately but firmly, “but could you come upstairs for a minute, dear?

There’s someone to see you.”

“Tell him to come down,” Everett replied. “I’ll start over again so he won’t miss anything.”

“But it’s Henry!” protested Mrs. Everett, leaning out over the rickety railing. “He says it’s important!”

Everett came suddenly alive. “Henry?” he cried. “I told you so! He’s changed his mind about my coaching basketball. I’ll be right up. Tell him I’ll be right up! Boys,”

he said to the journalists,”do you mind waiting down here?

Just browse around. I won’t be a second.”

“Go right ahead,” they answered, as one man. And they followed Everett enthusiastically as he took the stairs three at a time.

Henry Myers was waiting in the livingroom, standing with his broad back to the fireplace. He held his hat in one hand,
a folded newspaper and an envelope in the other. His eyebrows slanted down toward the bridge of his nose with administrative severity—and they relaxed neither at Everett’s entrance nor at his hearty greeting.

“Henry, old boy!” At the head of his escort, Everett swept across the carpet with outstretched hand. “I’m sure glad to see you! Come on down and….” And then Maximus Everett was checked in full career. Henry Myers spoke. His voice was sharp and metallic, an unkind voice, the voice of a man who for years has dealt none too gently with refractory adolescents.

“Everett,” he said, “I had hoped to see you privately; I see that privacy is impossible. However, I anticipated such a contingency. I came prepared, and I shall do what is necessary without further discussion.”He thrust the newspaper and the envelope into Everett’s welcoming hand. “One,” he declared, “will explain the other.”

Then he turned on his heel, jammed his hat on, angrily brushed aside two questing newsmen—and the front door banged behind him.

Now, quite understandably, this interview knocked Maximus Everett slightly off-center. He stared open-mouthed at the quivering door, only remotely conscious of a buzz of voices, of questions being asked, of objects in his hand—until a voice more strident than the rest made itself heard.

“Let’s see!” it shouted. “Let’s take a look! Take a look, Maxie!”

So Everett looked. Mechanically, he started to unfold the newspaper, recalling vaguely that it was the first he had seen since his discovery was made public. As the black headlines appeared, there was a sudden hush.

At first, Everett only realized that he was reading about himself; though the meaning was seeping through, he was still protected against its full import.

WHOOPS! yelled the headlines gaily, BEAN ATOM

BUSTED.

Below that, two lines of smaller type proclaimed: Frijole Fission Runs Washer for Basement Einstein: Clean Undies Prove Plutonium Now Obsolete.

And there, to illustrate the point, was a picture of the Everetts, grinning idiotically as they displayed the significant article of apparel against the side of the cyclotron.

Still functioning mechanically, Everett bypassed the caption to find the story:

Mighty forces—[he read]—which Arizona’s old-timers have always suspected to lie lurking in the redoubtable Mexican frijole have at last been liberated, according to Maximum Everett, high school physics teacher and self-proclaimed basement genius of Concho County, who yesterday took the wraps off his home-grown Oak Ridge project for the first time and let everybody in on the swell new world now looming up (says he) on the bean horizon.…

Numbed as he was, Everett might very well have gone on to read the rest of the story, but just then some more black type, off to one side, caught his notice:

BEAN-BUSTER MAXIE

NO COLD FISH, SAYS MRS.

Atomic Love Brings…

But that was as far as Everett got. Full comprehension, long delayed, hit him with a solid rabbit-punch. The paper fell from his fingers to the floor. A large round tear, forming at the corner of his eye, began to slide slowly down his cheek.

Observing these phenomena, Everett’s audience found it expedient to melt away, motivated perhaps by delicacy, perhaps by an intuitive appreciation of the fact that the really worthwhile part of the show was over. One by one, unnoticed by their host, they made their departure, until only two or three of the unregenerate were left. These waited patiently until Everett recovered enough to open

Henry Myers’ letter. Then they read it over his shoulder, finding it brief and to the point:

My Dear Mr. Everett:

In view of the scandalous events of the past two days, the Board of Trustees has instructed me to notify you of the termination of your contract.

The Board is granting you an extended leave of absence (without pay) until the end of the present semester, at which time the termination will take effect. The Members of the Board and I agree that, under the circumstances, no additional explanation of this action can be necessary.

Very sincerely yours,

Henry T. Myers, Principal

Nobody said anything. After a moment, Everett carefully folded the letter again and returned it to its envelope. Then he walked to the door and held it open until the last of his remaining visitors had filed out, and only when it was locked behind them did he permit himself a brief outburst of emotion. He tore the letter in half. He threw it on the floor. He said, “That’s what you think!” angrily several times.

* * * *

Bean-Buster Maxie was a nine-day wonder. The press, finding him suddenly uncooperative, confined its efforts to questioning friends and neighbors, fell back on its already large store of photographs, and explained the working of the Everett washer by hinting broadly at hidden wiring and compressed air. Before fresher wonders forced frijole back through the want-ads into oblivion, its every aspect had been thoroughly explored. There had been several jolly interviews with lesser physicists, several with screen and radio comedians, one with the spiritual leader of a vegetarian cult, and one with a rather bawdy admiral.

But the giants of the scientific and political worlds had held themselves aloof, refraining from all comment. The powers-that-be had not summoned Everett to Washington.

No academic senates had honored him. No universities had invited him to join their faculties. Even the FBI, hastily
checking up on all known foreign agents and finding them uninterested, had dropped him from its social register.

During the weeks that followed this brief period of international notoriety, the Everetts kept very much to themselves, scarcely stirring out of the house, and greeting even their oldest friends with a frigid reserve. Everett buried himself in his work, first converting the house-circuit to frijolium-power, then installing a generator in the family car.

Mrs. Everett, who had resigned from the Public Library after a determined but futile resistance, was his constant companion; and many were the long evenings they spent together, reading Walt Whitman aloud and making nebulous plans for a frijolium factory. Even after small boys stopped hooting at Everett in the street, they hesitated to venture far abroad; only the inexorable operation of economic law finally forced them out of the fancied security of their retreat.

Everett had never been too provident a man, and people of moderate means who invest in cyclotrons—no matter how small—seldom retain respectable bank balances. After about two months, Everett started job-hunting. He hunted in person and he hunted by mail, and he found both methods equally fruitless. Whatever he tried, there were—
curiously enough—no vacancies. Once he was offered temporary employment as a sheepherder, but this was while he still was relatively solvent, and the chance did not come along again.

In six more weeks, the Everetts found themselves reduced to exactly 70 cents in cash and a dubious charge account.

They discovered this just after lunch, and they moved to the living-room to discuss the matter.

“All this would never have happened,” said Mrs. Everett bitterly, “if it hadn’t been for that Henry Myers. I warned you against him the first day you met him, Maximus.”

“Oh, Henry’s not so bad,” Everett protested. “It wasn’t his fault, dear, I’m sure. The press just treated the whole thing with such a complete lack of understanding.” He shrugged.

“Well, I guess we’ll just have to take out a second mortgage to tide us over. I hate to do it, but.…”

“What?” cried Mrs. Everett. “And stay in this town? I’d sooner scrub floors! We ought to sell the place, and go away to.…”

But Mrs. Everett was not fated to reveal her intended destination, for at that instant the doorbell rang. It rang once; then it rang again. It was starting its third summons when Everett opened the door, blinked into the sunlight, and found himself looking at three strangers—all of whom were dark and obviously foreign.

“What do you want?” Everett demanded rudely.

There was a tall dark man with a mustache and a black Homburg hat. There was a small dark man with a mustache and a black Homburg. There was a very large dark man with neither.

The tall dark man bowed profoundly over his stick and gloves; so did his small companion. The very large dark man kept his hands in his pockets and looked straight ahead.

“Do I address Doctor Everett?” inquired the tall dark man with grave courtesy and a marked accent.

Everett, who had obtained his B.A. with some little difficulty, was pleased in spite of himself. He blushed, cleared his throat, and coughed affirmatively. “Then permit me to introduce myself,” said the tall dark man, handing him a visiting card.

Everett took the card. Antonio L. MacJones, he read, Ph.D., LL.D. (Columbia ’22), Minister of the Interior, The Raptarian Republic.

“Won’t you come in?” Everett mumbled.

Once inside, the Minister of the Interior presented his colleague. “This,” he announced, “is our General Troppo. In
our country, he is Minister of—of Education.”

The general clicked his heels and bowed.

“Education?” Everett asked suspiciously. “And he’s a general?”

The Minister of the Interior explained that in his tranquil land military rank was largely honorary. “…in memory of our great liberator, who died in battle 112 years ago,” he added.

Everybody sat down except the very large dark man, who stood with his hands in his pockets, and kept peering out of the windows. There was some further exchange of formalities, with flowery Raptarian solicitude for the good health, past, present, and future, of Mr. and Mrs. Maximus Everett. Then the Minister of the Interior spoke at length about what his government was doing for the Common Man, and about a President so well-beloved that no other had been elected for nearly 30 years—and throughout his speech the dove of peace cooed a gentle obbligato.

The Everetts were enthralled. They saw the peaks and plains, the lush groves and verdant jungles of Raptaria.

They beheld the clean, hard-working Raptarian peasant leading his chubby children to a new and splendidly-appointed school provided by a government whose watchwords were Benevolence and Progress.

The Minister of the Interior paused, and the Everetts sighed longingly—and as they did so he rose suddenly to his feet, lifting a hand to heaven.

“That is why we are here today,” he cried out. “So that you, Maximo Everett, can aid us in our great humane task!

In our country we have a physicist, a good man. He tells us that his work confirms your wonderful discovery. Already we have formed a Frijole Control Commission!—Come to us! Though we are poor, you will have everything you need.

You will be Vice-Minister of Education. You will work directly under General Troppo!”

Having finished, the Minister of the Interior opened his arms in a magnificent gesture of ardent welcome, bowed, and sat down, quite winded by his exertions.

“Ah, not under me!” expostulated General Troppo with equal fervor. “Not under me! Say rather as a colleague, a comrade!” He smiled, radiating good fellowship. “Of course,” he said to Everett, “you can make explosives?”

Everett frowned, but before he had a chance to reply Mrs.

Everett answered for him. “Mr. Everett could make an atomic bomb just as easy as pie,” she told the general, “but he doesn”t want to. He thinks they’re very destructive, and he can’t see any point to making them.”

Everett nodded vigorously while the Raptarian dignitaries exchanged swift glances; then the Minister of the Interior stepped into the breach with hearty laughter. “My friend!”

he exclaimed, as soon as his amusement had subsided. “My very good friend! I fear that you mistake the general’s meaning! What use would we, in poor Raptaria, ever have for an atomic bomb? But we have mines in our mountains.

We must build dams across our so-swift rivers. We need many roads and bridges. That is the kind of explosives the Minister of Education means—for blasting! Is that not so, General?”

“Yes, yes,” the general said hastily—

“But of course,” smiled the Minister of the Interior, “for that—and for our national holiday, when the happy people celebrate with fireworks. That is why we may want a very few explosives, though we want power-plants even more.”

“Power-plants?” echoed General Troppo. “Yes, yes.”

“We-ell,” Everett said, scratching his head, “I guess that is sort of different.” He hesitated. “I…I won’t have to coach basketball, will I?” he asked diffidently.

Some time has passed since the Everetts went to the Republic of Raptaria. As Vice-Minister of Education, Everett naturally did not have to bother with any of the details of his departure. Everything, including a Raptarian
passport for two, had been arranged by the Minister of the Interior, and it all went off very smoothly—so smoothly, in fact, that for a long time even the Everetts’ neighbors did not know that they had moved out of town permanently.

Nobody ever dreamed that they had gone abroad.

Nobody. Not even Henry Myers, who happened to mention the Raptarian Republic when he delivered his weekly speech on world affairs in the assembly hall of Woodrow Wilson Union High School a few days ago.

“…and by contrast,” he informed the student body, “we have news of another quiet, orderly election in Raptaria, a little country many of you may not even have heard about.”

He paused, to smile benighly at the upturned faces. “A lucky little country, too,” he told them. “Too small to worry about the great quarrels that rend the world. Too poor,” he continued, “to follow any ways but those of peace.”

That’s what he thinks.

OceanofPDF.com

THE ULTROOM ERROR, by Jerry Sohl HB73782. Ultroom error. Tendal 13. Arvid 6. Kanad transfer out of 1609
complete, intact, but too near limit of 1,000 days. Next Kanad transfer ready. 1951. Reginald, son of Mr. and Mrs. Martin Laughton, 3495 Orland Drive, Marionville, Illinois, U. S. A. Arrive his 378th day. TB73782.

* * * *

Nancy Laughton sat on the blanket she had spread on the lawn in her front yard, knitting a pair of booties for the PTA bazaar. Occasionally she glanced at her son in the playpen, who was getting his daily dose of sunshine. He was gurgling happily, examining a ball, a cheese grater, and a linen baby book, all with perfunctory interest.

When she looked up again she noticed a man walking by―except he turned up the walk and crossed the lawn to her. He was a little taller than her husband, had piercing blue eyes and a rather amused set to his lips. It was her brother, who lived in Kankakee.

“Hello, Nancy,” he said.

“Hello, Joe,” she answered.

“I’m going to take the baby for a while,” he said.

“All right, Joe.”

He reached into the pen, picked up the baby. As he did so, the baby’s knees hit the side of the playpen and young Laughton let out a scream―half from hurt and half from sudden lack of confidence in his new handler. But this did not deter Joe. He started off with the child.

Around the corner and after the man came a snarling mongrel dog, eyes bright, teeth glinting in the sunlight. The man did not turn as the dog threw itself at him, burying his teeth in his leg. Surprised, the man dropped the screaming child on the lawn and turned to the dog. Joe seemed off balance, and he backed up confusedly in the face of the snapping jaws. Then he suddenly turned and walked away, the dog at his heels.

* * * *

“I tell you, the man said he was my brother, and he made me think he was,” Nancy told her husband for the tenth time. “I don’t even have a brother.”

Martin Laughton sighed. “I can’t understand why you believed him. It’s just―just plain nuts, Nancy!”

“Don’t you think I know it?” Nancy said tearfully. “I feel like I’m going crazy. I can’t say I dreamt it because there was Reggie with his bleeding knees, squalling for all he was worth on the grass― Oh, I don’t even want to think about it!”

“We haven’t lost Reggie, Nancy, remember that. Now why don’t you try to get some rest?”

“You―you don’t believe me at all, do you, Martin?”

When her husband did not answer, her head sank to her arms on the table, and she sobbed.

“Nancy, for heaven’s sake, of course I believe you. I’m trying to think it out, that’s all. We should have called the police.”

Nancy
shook
her
head
in
her
arms.

“They’d―never―believe me either,” she moaned.

“I’d better go and make sure Reggie’s all right.” Martin got up out of his chair and went to the stairs.

“I’m going with you,” Nancy said, rising and coming over to him.

“We’ll go up and look at him together.”

* * * *

They found Reggie peacefully asleep in his crib in his room upstairs. They checked the windows and tucked in the blankets. They paused in the room for a moment, and then Martin stole his arm around his wife and led her to the door.

* * * *

“As I’ve said, sergeant, this fellow hypnotized my wife. He made her think he was her brother. She doesn’t even have a brother. Then he tried to get away with the baby.” Martin

leaned down and patted the dog. “It was Tiger here who scared him off.”

The police sergeant looked at the father, at Nancy, and then at the dog. He scribbled notes in his book.

“Are you a rich man, Mr. Laughton?” he asked.

“Not at all. The bank still owns most of the house. I have a few hundred dollars, that’s all.”

“What do you do?”

“Office work, mostly. I’m a junior executive in an insurance company.”

“Any enemies?”

“No… Oh, I suppose I have a few people I don’t get along with, like anybody else. Nobody who’d do anything like this, though.”

The sergeant flipped his notebook closed. “You’d better keep your dog inside and around the kid as much as possible. Keep your doors and windows locked. I’ll see that a prowl car keeps an eye on the house. Call us if anything seems unusual or out of the way.”

* * * *

Nancy had taken a sedative and was asleep by the time Martin finished cleaning the .30-.30 rifle he used for deer hunting. He put it by the stairs, ready for use, fully loaded, leaning it against the wall next to the telephone stand.

The front door bell rang. He answered it. It was Dr. Stuart and another man.

“I came as soon as I could, Martin,” the young doctor said, stepping inside with the other man. “This is my new assistant, Dr. Tompkins.”

Martin and Tompkins shook hands.

“The baby―?” Dr. Stuart asked.

“Upstairs,” Martin said.

“You’d better get him, Dr. Tompkins, if we’re to take him to the hospital. I’ll stay here with Mr. Laughton. How’ve you been, Martin?”

“Fine.”

“How’s everything at the office?”

“Fine.”

“And your wife?”

“She’s fine, too.”

“Glad to hear it, Martin. Mighty glad. Say, by the way, there’s that bill you owe me. I think it’s $32, isn’t that right?”

“Yes, I’d almost forgotten about it.”

“Why don’t you be a good fellow and write a check for it?

It’s been over a year, you know.”

“That’s right. I’ll get right at it.” Martin went over to his desk, opened it and started looking for his checkbook. Dr.

Stuart stood by him, making idle comment until Dr.

Tompkins came down the stairs with the sleeping baby cuddled against his shoulder.

“Never mind the check, now, Martin. I see we’re ready to go.” He went over to his assistant and took the baby.

Together they walked out the front door.

“Good-bye,” Martin said, going to the door.

Then he was nearly bowled over by the discharge of the

.30-.30. Dr. Stuart crumpled to the ground, the baby falling to the lawn. Dr. Tompkins whirled, and there was a second shot. Dr. Tompkins pitched forward on his face.

A woman ran from the house, retrieved the now-squalling infant, and ran back into the house. Once inside, Nancy slammed the door, gave the baby to the stunned Martin, and headed for the telephone.

“One of them was the same man!” she cried.

Martin gasped, sinking into a chair with the baby. “I believed them,” he said slowly and uncomprehendingly.

“They made me believe them!”

* * * *

“Those bodies,” the sergeant said. “Would you mind pointing them out to me, please?”

“Aren’t they―aren’t they on the walk?” Mrs. Laughton asked.

“There is nothing on the walk, Mrs. Laughton.”

“But there must be! I tell you I shot these men who posed as doctors. One of them was the same man who tried to take the baby this afternoon. They hypnotized my husband―”

“Yes, I know, Mrs. Laughton. We’ve been through that.”

The sergeant went to the door and opened it. “Say, Homer, take another look around the walk and the bushes. There’s supposed to be two of them. Shot with a .30-.30.”

He turned and picked up the gun and examined it again.

“Ever shoot a gun before, Mrs. Laughton?”

“Many times. Martin and I used to go hunting together before we had Reggie.”

The sergeant nodded. “You were taking an awful chance, shooting at a guy carrying your baby, don’t you think?”

“I shot him in the legs. The other―the other turned and I shot him in the chest. I could even see his eyes when he turned around. If I hadn’t pulled the trigger then —” She shuddered. “I don’t want to remember it!”

The patrolman pushed the door open. “There are no bodies out here, but there’s some blood. Quite a lot of blood. A little to one side of the walk.”

The policemen went out.

“Thank God you woke up, Nancy,” Martin said. “I’d have let them have the baby.” He reached over and smoothed the sleeping Reggie’s hair.

Nancy, who was rocking the boy, narrowed her eyes.

“I wonder why they want our baby? He’s just like any other baby. We don’t have any money. We couldn’t pay a ransom.”

“Reggie’s pretty cute, though,” Martin said. “You will have to admit that.”

Nancy smiled. Then she suddenly stopped rocking.

“Martin!”

He sat up quickly.

“Where’s Tiger?”

Together they rose and walked around the room. They found him in a corner, eyes open, tongue protruding. He was dead.

* * * *

“If we keep Reggie in the house much longer, he’ll turn out a hermit,” Martin said at breakfast a month later. “He needs fresh air and sunshine.”

“I’m not going to sit on the lawn alone with him, Martin. I just can’t, that’s all. I’d be able to think of nothing but that day.”

“Still thinking about it? I think we’d have heard from them again if they were coming back. They probably got somebody else’s baby by this time.” Martin finished his coffee and rose to kiss her good-bye. “But for safety’s sake I guess you’d better keep that gun handy.”

The morning turned into a brilliant, sunshiny day. Puffs of clouds moved slowly across the summer sky, and a warm breeze rustled the trees. It would be a crime to keep Reggie inside on a day like this, Nancy thought.

So she called Mrs. MacDougal, the next door neighbor.

Mrs. MacDougal was familiar with what had happened to the Laughtons and she agreed to keep an eye on Nancy and Reggie and to call the police at the first sign of trouble.

With a fearful but determined heart, Nancy moved the playpen and set it up in the front yard. She spread a blanket for herself and put Reggie in the pen. Her heart pounded all the while, and she watched the street for any strangers, ready to flee inside if need be.

Reggie just gurgled with delight at the change in environment.

This peaceful scene was disturbed by a speeding car in which two men were riding. The car roared up the street, swerved toward the parkway, tires screaming, bounced
over the curb and sidewalk, straight toward the child and mother. Reggie, attracted by the sudden noise, looked up to see the approaching vehicle. His mother stood up, set her palms against her cheeks and shrieked.

The car came on, crunched over the playpen, killing the child. The mother was hit and instantly killed, the force of the blow snapping her spine and tossing her against the house. The car plunged on into a tree, hitting it a terrible blow, crumbling the car’s forward end so it looked like an accordion. The men were thrown from the machine.

* * * *

“We’ll never be able to prosecute in this case,” the states attorney said. “At least not on a drunken driving basis.”

“I can’t get over it,” the chief of police said. “I’ve got at least six men who will swear the man was drunk. He staggered, reeled and gave the usual drunk talk. He reeked of whiskey.”

The prosecutor handed the report over the desk. “Here’s the analysis. Not a trace of alcohol. He couldn’t have even had a smell of near beer. Here’s another report. This is his physical exam made not long afterwards. The man was in perfect health. Only variations are he had a scar on his leg where something, probably a dog, bit him once. And then a scar on his chest. It looked like an old gunshot wound, they said. Must have happened years ago.”

“That’s odd. The man who accosted Mrs. Laughton in the afternoon was bitten by their dog. Later that night, she said she shot the same man in the chest. Since the scars are healed, it obviously couldn’t be the same man. But there’s a real coincidence for you. And speaking of the dog bite, the Laughton dog died that night. His menu evidently didn’t agree with him. Never did figure what killed him, actually.”

“Any record of treatment on the man she shot?”

“The men. You’ll remember, there were two. No, we never found a trace of either. No doctor ever made a report of a
gunshot wound that night. No hospital had a case, either―at least not within several hundred miles―that night or several nights afterwards. Ever been shot with

.30-.30?”

The state attorney shook his head. “I wouldn’t be here if I had.”

“I’ll say you wouldn’t. The pair must have crawled away to die God knows where.”

“Getting back to the man who ran over the child and killed Mrs. Laughton. Why did he pretend to be drunk?”

It was the chief’s turn to shake his head. “Your guess is as good as mine. There are a lot of angles to this case none of us understand. It looks deliberate, but where’s the motive?”

“What does the man have to say?”

“I was afraid you’d get to him,” the chief said, his neck reddening. “It’s all been rather embarrassing to the department.” He coughed self-consciously. “He’s proved a strange one, all right. He says his name is John Smith and he’s got cards to prove it, too―for example, a social security card. It looks authentic, yet there’s no such number on file in Washington, so we’ve discovered. We’ve had him in jail for a week and we’ve all taken turns questioning him. He laughs and admits his guilt―in fact, he seems amused by most everything. Sometimes all alone in his cell he’ll start laughing for no apparent reason. It gives me the creeps.”

The states attorney leaned back in his chair. “Maybe it’s a case for an alienist.”

“One jump ahead of you. Dr. Stone thinks he’s normal, but won’t put down any I.Q. Actually, he can’t figure him out himself. Smith seems to take delight in answering questions―sort of anticipates them and has the answer ready before you’re half through asking.”

“Well, if Dr. Stone says he’s normal, that’s enough for me.” The prosecutor was silent for a moment. Then, “How about the husband?”

“Laughton? We’re afraid to let him see the man. All broken up. No telling what kind of a rumpus he’d start―especially if Smith started his funny business.”

“Guess you’re right. Well, Mr. Smith won’t think it’s so funny when we hang criminal negligence or manslaughter on him. By the way, you’ve checked possible family connections?”

“Nobody ever saw John Smith before. Even at the address on his driver’s license. And there’s no duplicate of that in Springfield, in case you’re interested.”

* * * *

The man who had laughingly told police his name was John Smith lay on his cot in the county jail, his eyes closed, his arms folded across his chest. This gave him the appearance of being alert despite reclining. Even as he lay, his mouth held a hint of a smile.

Arvid 6―for John Smith was Arvid 6―had lain in that position for more than four hours, when suddenly he snapped his eyes open and appeared to be listening. For a moment a look of concern crossed his face, and he swung his legs to the floor and sat there expectantly. Arvid 6 knew Tendal 13 had materialized and was somewhere in the building.

Eventually there were some sounds from beyond the steel cell and doorway. There was a clang when the outer doorway was opened, and Arvid 6 rose from his cot.

“Your lawyer’s here to see you,” the jailer said, indicating the man with the briefcase. “Ring the buzzer when you’re through.”

The jailer let the man in, locked the cell door, and walked away. The man threw his briefcase on the jail cot and stood glaring.

“Your damned foolishness has gone far enough. I’m sick and tired of it,” he declared. “If you carry on any more we’ll never get back to the Ultroom!”

“I’m sorry, Tendal,” the man on the cot said. “I didn’t think―”

“You’re absolutely right. You didn’t think. Crashing that car into that tree and killing that woman―that was the last straw. You don’t even deserve to get back to our era. You ought to be made to rot here.”

“I’m really sorry about that,” Arvid 6 said.

“You know the instructions. Just because you work in the Ultroom don’t get to thinking human life doesn’t have any value. We wouldn’t be here if it hadn’t. But to unnecessarily kill―” The older man shook his head. “You could have killed yourself as well and we’d never get the job done. As it is, you almost totally obliterated me.” Tendal 13 paced the length of the cell and back again, gesturing as he talked.

“It was only with the greatest effort I pulled myself back together again. I doubt that you could have done it. And then all the while you’ve been sitting here, probably enjoying yourself with your special brand of humor I have grown to despise.”

“You didn’t have to come along at all, you know,” Arvid 6
said.

“How well I know! How sorry I am that I ever did! It was only because I was sorry for you, because someone older and more experienced than you was needed. I volunteered.

Imagine that! I volunteered! Tendal 13 reaches the height of stupidity and volunteers to help Arvid 6 go back 6,000
years to bring Kanad back, to correct a mistake Arvid 6
made!” He snorted. “I still can’t believe I was ever that stupid. I only prove it when I pinch myself and here I am.

“Oh, you’ve been a joy to be with! First it was that hunt in ancient Mycenae when you let the lion escape the hunters’

quaint spears, and we were partly eaten by the lion in the bargain, although you dazzled the hunters, deflecting their spears. And then your zest for drink when we were with Octavian in Alexandria that led to everybody’s amusement but ours when we were ambushed by Anthony’s men. And
worst of all, that English barmaid you became engrossed with at our last stop in 1609, when her husband mistook me for you and you let him take me apart piece by piece―”

“All right, all right,” Arvid 6 said. “I’ll admit I’ve made some mistakes. You’re just not adventurous, that’s all.”

“Shut up! For once you’re going to listen to me. Our instructions specifically stated we were to have as little as possible to do with these people. But at every turn you’ve got us more and more enmeshed with them. If that’s adventure, you can have it.” Tendal 13 sat down wearily and sank his head in his hands. “It was you who conceived the idea of taking Reggie right out of his play pen. ‘Watch me take that child right out from under its mother’s nose’

were your exact words. And before I could stop you, you did. Only you forgot an important factor in the equation―the dog, Tiger. And you nursed a dogbite most of the afternoon before it healed. And then you took your spite out on the poor thing by suggesting suffocation to it that night.

“And speaking of that night, you remember we agreed I was to do the talking. But no, you pulled a switch and captured Martin Laughton’s attention. ‘I came as soon as I could, Martin,’ you said. And suddenly I played a very minor role. ‘This is my new assistant, Dr. Tompkins,’ you said. And then what happened? I get shot in the legs and you get a hole in your back. We were both nearly obliterated that time, and we didn’t even come close to getting the child.

“Still you wanted to run the whole show. ‘I’m younger than you,’ you said. ‘I’ll take the wheel.’ And the next thing I know, I’m floating in space halfway to nowhere with two broken legs, a spinal injury, a concussion and some of the finest bruises you ever saw.”

* * * *

These twentieth century machines aren’t what they ought to be,” Arvid 6 said.

“You never run out of excuses, do you, Arvid? Remember what you said in the Ultroom when you pushed the lever clear over and transferred Kanad back 6,000 years? ‘My hand slipped.’ As simple as that. ‘My hand slipped.’ It was so simple everyone believed you. You were given no real punishment. In a way it was a reward―at least to you―getting to go back and rescue the life germ of Kanad out of each era he’d be born in.”

Tendal 13 turned and looked steadily and directly at Arvid 6. “Do you know what I think? I think you deliberately pushed the lever over as far as it would go just to see what would happen. That’s how simple I think it was.”

Arvid 6 flushed, turned away, and looked at the floor.

“What crazy things have you been doing since I’ve been gone?” Tendal 13 asked.

Arvid 6 sighed. “After what you just said I guess it wouldn’t amuse you, although it has me. They got to me right after the accident before I had a chance to collect my wits, dematerialize or anything―you said we shouldn’t dematerialize in front of anybody.”

“That’s right.”

“Well, I didn’t know what to do. I could see they thought I was drunk, so I was. But they had a blood sample before I could manufacture any alcohol in my blood, although I implanted a memory in them that I reeked of it.” He laughed. “I fancy they’re thoroughly confused.”

“And you’re thoroughly amused, no doubt. Have they questioned you?”

“At great length. They had a psychiatrist in to see me. He was an odd fellow with the most stupid set of questions and tests I ever saw.”

“And you amused yourself with him.”

“I suppose you’d think so.”

“Who do you tell them you are?”

“John Smith. A rather prevalent name here, I understand.

I manufactured a pasteboard called a social security card and a driver’s license―”

“Never mind. It’s easy to see you’ve been your own inimitable self. Believe me, if I ever get back to the Ultroom I hope I never see you again. And I hope I’ll never leave there again though I’m rejuvenated through a million years.”

“Was Kanad’s life germ transferred all right this time?”

Tendal 13 shook his head. “I haven’t heard. The transfers are getting more difficult all the time. In 1609, you’ll remember, it was a case of pneumonia for the two-year-old.

A simple procedure. It wouldn’t work here. Medicine’s too far along.” He produced a notebook. “The last jump was 342 years, a little more than average. The next ought to be around 2250. Things will be more difficult than ever there, probably.”

“Do you think Kanad will be angry about all this?”

“How would you like to have to go through all those birth processes, to have your life germ knocked from one era to the next?”

“Frankly, I didn’t think he’d go back so far.”

“If it had been anybody but Kanad nobody’d ever have thought of going back after it. The life germ of the head of the whole galactic system who came to the Ultroom to be transplanted to a younger body―and then sending him back beyond his original birth date―” Tendal 13 got up and commenced his pacing again. “Oh, I suppose Kanad’s partly to blame, wanting rejuvenating at only 300 years. Some have waited a thousand or more or until their bones are like paper.”

“I just wonder how angry Kanad will be,” Arvid muttered.

* * * *

HB92167. ULTROOM ERROR. TENDAL 13. ARVID 6. KANAD TRANSFER

OUT OF 1951 COMPLETE. NEXT KANAD TRANSFER READY. 2267.

PHULLAM 19, SON OF ORLA 39 AND RHODA R, 22H LEVEL M, HEMISPHERE B, QUADRANT 3, SECTOR I. ARRIVE HIS 329TH DAY.

TB92167

* * * *

Arvid 6 rose from the cot, and the two men faced each other.

“Before we leave, Arvid,” Tendal 13 started to say.

“I know, I know. You want me to let you handle everything.”

“Exactly. Is that too much to ask after all you’ve done?”

“I guess I have made mistakes. From now on you be the boss. I’ll do whatever you say.”

“I hope I can count on that.”

Tendal 13 rang the jail buzzer. The jailer came and unlocked the cell door.

“You remember the chief said it’s all right to take him with me, Matthews,” Tendal 13 told the jailer.

“Yes, I remember,” the jailer said mechanically, letting them both out of the cell.

They walked together down the jail corridor. When they came to another barred door, the jailer fumbled with the keys and clumsily tried several with no luck.

Arvid 6, an amused set to his mouth and devilment in his eyes, watched the jailer’s expression as he walked through the bars of the door. He laughed as he saw the jailer’s eyes bulge.

“Arvid!”

Tendal 13 walked briskly through the door, snatched Arvid 6 by the shoulders and shook him.

The jailer watched stupified as the two men vanished in the middle of a violent argument.

OceanofPDF.com

REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS TO

COME, by Lawrence Watt-Evans

He stared at the student in shock.

“You think it’s a typo?” he said.

“Well, yeah,” the boy said, shifting his weight nervously from one foot to the other. “W is right above S on the keyboard; it’d be easy to type ‘wet’ instead of ‘set.’ And

‘set’ makes a lot more sense, doesn’t it?”

“No,” Williams said, his voice not entirely steady. “It changes all the imagery completely, don’t you see that? ‘He wet the blade on the floor’ is the essential clue that he’s killed her, that the floor’s covered in her blood…”

“So maybe it isn’t,” the boy said. “Maybe she really is asleep, and he’s decided to forgive her.”

“But that’s a completely different story!”

The boy shrugged. Williams stared at him in horror—
didn’t this smartass kid realize what he was trying to do?

Williams had built his career on the careful analysis of Dorrie Ledbetter’s short stories—hell, he’d written his doctoral dissertation on this very story, ‘A Sleeping Kiss,’

and had used it in class as a model for all his students to follow! His whole reputation had been founded on it. And now this…this punk dared to suggest that all the subtleties Williams had read into the story, based on that one final image of the protagonist wetting his knife in his wife’s blood, were the result of a typographical error?

When the silence threatened to become awkward, Williams cleared his throat.

“It’s an interesting theory,” he said, “but for now, we’ll just have to deal with the story as it was originally published, all right?”

The kid shrugged again. “Okay,” he said. “I just thought I’d ask. ‘Set’ seemed to make so much more sense.”

“Well, things don’t always make obvious sense,” Williams said. “Now, run along, I need to lock up.”

The boy turned, gathered his books, and trotted up the aisle, out of the classroom. Williams stared after him.

Then he pulled out his own battered copy of Seven Endings and thumbed it open to “A Sleeping Kiss” and began reading.

At supper that evening he poured out the whole thing to Dr. Garrand, his regular dinner companion. She was in the physics department, but pleasant company all the same.

“One word!” he said. “One letter, and it’s an entirely different story!”

“That’s fascinating,” Garrand said. “A classic example of a sensitive dependence upon initial conditions. I’d never thought that would have applications in your field—though I suppose I should have; chaos theory certainly does seem to turn up everywhere once you start looking…”

Williams blinked. “Chaos theory?”

“Of course.”

“Isn’t that a mathematical thing? What’s it got to do with literature?”

“It’s mathematical in nature, yes. Chaos theory is a way of looking at systems too complex to predict by ordinary means…”

“What?”

Garrand sighed. “It’s like this,” she said. “In physics, or any other science, we look for models that will predict what will happen under certain conditions. Then we create those conditions and see what happens, and see whether our prediction is correct. If it is, that’s good; if it isn’t, we throw out our model and start over. But sometimes, there are things that are so complicated we can’t say what will happen, even if our models are right. There might be a situation where the tiniest little fluctuation can completely change the outcome—the classic example is the flap of a butterfly’s wing stirring the air at just the right time, in just
the right place, to start a cascade. That one tiny movement means that a breeze is ever so slightly stronger, so a branch falls that wouldn’t have, and that changes something else, and it builds up and builds up until you have a hurricane that wouldn’t have happened if that butterfly hadn’t been there.”

“For want of a nail, the kingdom was lost.”

“Something like that, yes,” Garrand agreed. “Ordinarily, the flap of a butterfly’s wing would be lost in the noise, canceled out by other events; but if everything’s just right, it can tip the balance and change everything. That’s a sensitive dependence on initial conditions—your starting set-up determines what effect that butterfly has.”

“And that one letter is the butterfly.”

“Yes!” Garrand nodded. “If the letter is W you have the story you always thought was there, about a grief-stricken murderer; if it’s S, then you have a story of forgiveness and redemption.”

“But how do I know which is right?”

“Well, if this were quantum mechanics I’d say you can’t know, that the Heisenberg principle is in effect—but it isn’t physics, it’s literature. You can open Schroedinger’s box and see if the cat’s alive or dead by contacting the author and asking her whether she meant to say ‘set’ or ‘wet.’”

Williams had no idea who Heisenberg or Schroedinger were, or what cats had to do with anything—Ledbetter hadn’t been one of the Beat writers, she was after that. He did, however, understand Garrand’s basic suggestion.

“Dorrie Ledbetter’s dead,” he said. “She died before the story was published, in fact. Heart failure, at age forty-seven.”

“Oh,” Garrand said. Her face fell. “Maybe her editor? Or her heirs?”

“I can ask, I guess,” Williams said thoughtfully.

Two weeks later he and Garrand dined together once again after a longer hiatus than customary, and Garrand
had to struggle to hide her dismay at Williams’ appearance.

He hadn’t shaved for at least three days, and his hair, normally fussily neat, was uncombed. There were circles under his wild eyes.

“You want to know something awful?” he said. “Nobody knows. I’m not sure Ledbetter herself really knew!”

“Well, of course she did,” Garrand said soothingly. “She must have known what story she was writing.”

Williams smiled crookedly. “You’d think so, wouldn’t you?

But I’m not sure. I tracked down the original manuscript, you see, and got a photocopy.”

“So which is it in the manuscript?”

Wordlessly, Williams pulled a paper from his pocket and unfolded it.

Garrand leaned forward and looked at it.

“Oh, my,” she said.

The manuscript was typed, not computer-printed—and the key word was spelled with both an S and a W, one typed over the other.

“And even the experts can’t tell which one was first,”

Williams said wearily. “She used a non-correcting electric typewriter, and each letter was a single stroke, no white-out, no repeat. Maybe if someone did a microscopic fiber analysis of the paper, to see which fibers were stretched how by the impact—but Ledbetter’s niece won’t allow it.”

“So you aren’t the first person to wonder about this?”

Williams snorted. “No,” he said. “But it’s been kept quiet; the publisher doesn’t like to admit they might have made a vital mistake in one of their reliable sellers.”

“So nobody but Ledbetter herself ever knew which was the correct version?” Garrand asked, as she stared at the photocopy. “Huh. Or maybe she didn’t know, either—maybe she planned it both ways. Maybe she wrote the story as a wavicle, a quantum indeterminacy…”

“What?” Williams stared at her.

“I’m sorry, I’m just babbling,” Garrand said, as she slid back down into her chair.

“But you think she might have done it on purpose?”

Garrand shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe. Don’t writers do things like that sometimes? Maybe she couldn’t decide which version she liked better, and wanted to let it be determined by chance, like Marcel Duchamp and his standard curves.”

“Or she wanted to let it be determined by the typesetter,”

Williams said morosely. “Making him an unacknowledged collaborator.”

“She trusted the universe to make the correct decision,”

Garrand said. “Everything for the best, and all that.”

“Ha!”

“Oh, come on; what’s the problem? Everything will work out fine…”

“No, it won’t!” Williams burst out. “Don’t you see that? I’ll never know!”

Garrand hesitated. “Ledbetter didn’t leave a diary or anything?” she asked. “No correspondence with her editor?”

Williams shook his head. “Nothing,” he said. “She was sort of secretive; she liked to wait until everyone had had a chance to read her stories before she said anything about them. Except she died before anyone read ‘A Sleeping Kiss.’” He sighed. “If only there were some way to go back and tell her to leave a note, that she wouldn’t live to see this one in print…”

Garrand bit her lip. “You know,” she began, then stopped.

“What?” Williams asked.

Garrand hesitated, started to speak, stopped again. At last she said, “There might be a way to tell her.”

“How?” Williams demanded. “She’s been dead for thirty years—are you planning to hold a seance or something?”

Garrand shook her head quickly. “No,” she said, “not a seance. But we’ve been working on something in quantum
physics lately…”

Williams stared at her. “A time machine?”

Garrand grimaced. “Well, not in the traditional sense,”

she said. “We can’t send matter through time—that’s not allowed under our current working model of spacetime.”

“Energy, then?”

“Energy and matter are the same thing,” Garrand said.

Williams frowned. “What else is there, besides matter and energy?”

“Information.”

Williams sat back in his chair and stared silently at her for a moment.

“Okay,” he said, “I give up. How do you send information without sending matter or energy?”

“We’re back to Schroedinger’s cat,” Garrand said. “Let us suppose you have a particle that decays into two other particles, one with a positive spin and the other negative…”

“Never mind,” Williams said, interrupting her. “I don’t want to hear about any cats or quantum stuff. I just want to know what form this information would take. It can’t be a piece of paper, or even a radio signal, right? So what would it be?”

“Memory,” Garrand said. “We think we have a way to record the quantum state of a present-day brain onto a brain somewhere in the past in such a way that the patterns in the receiving brain will duplicate those in the source brain, and that as a result the receiving brain will acquire the memories of the source brain. And since memories and brain patterns are all we are, it’ll be as if the personality of the present-day person were transported into the brain of the person in the past.”

“What, you mean they’d swap bodies?”

Garrand sighed. “No,” she said. “Not at all. The present-day person wouldn’t change at all; the information is being copied, not moved. And the recipient ought to acquire the sender’s memories and personality, but there’s no reason
the recipient’s own mind would be affected. There’s plenty of room in a human brain for two personalities and two lifetimes of memories.”

“So it’d be like a split personality? Could they talk to each other?”

“I don’t see why not,” Garrand said.

“So you could send a copy of my memories back to her, to warn her?”

“That’s the theory. The fact is, though, we’ve been looking for some way to test it, but we ran into a lot of ethical issues…”

“But we want to warn her that she’s going to die! Surely that can’t be unethical!”

“Well, that would depend…”

“No, it can’t be.” Williams leaned forward across the table. “Don’t you see? You’ve got to do it!”

Four days later, as Williams lay motionless on the slab and the MRI scanner slid over him, one of the other researchers leaned over and whispered to Garrand, “Warn some poet that she’s going to have a heart attack? Why don’t we do something worthwhile, like warn the crew of the Titanic that there’s ice ahead?”

Garrand didn’t bother to correct the misstatement of Ledbetter’s chosen form; instead she shrugged. “This is safer,” she said. “We don’t know how much history might change if we did anything big. Even this wouldn’t get past the ethics committee if we’d bothered to ask them.”

“We didn’t ask…?”

Garrand smiled. “With great power comes great responsibility,” she said, “but I don’t think anyone’s responsible enough to resist testing this thing at least a little, no matter what the rules say.”

An hour later Williams sat up and reached for his shirt.

“Now what?” he said.

“That’s it,” Garrand told him. “Either Dorrie Ledbetter got a copy of your memories, or she didn’t. Now we just need
to find some evidence of which it was.”

“What sort of evidence?”

“Whatever she remembers would get to you.”

* * * *

She woke up suddenly and stared at the ceiling, momentarily confused. She remembered lying on a platform in some sort of machinery—was that a dream? She was here, safe in her own bed…

But it wasn’t her bed, was it? The ceiling was the stained and flaking ceiling of her boarding-house room, but she lived in a pleasant little apartment just off campus.

She blinked. Campus? Apartment?

She lived in a furnished room in a crumbling Edwardian disaster of a boarding house, with her cat and her typewriter, and here she was.

But she also remembered a sunny room on the fourth floor of an apartment house, a little kitchen on one side, a tidy little bedroom on the other, and that didn’t come before the boarding house, before this she’d been in the basement apartment that always smelled of mildew, and before that she’d lived with her parents in the nasty little ranch house in Poughkeepsie—where did a fourth-floor apartment fit in?

She tried to remember. She’d taken the apartment when she first came to Queensbury College (she’d barely heard of Queensbury, had never been there!) right after the turn of the century, in March of 2001…

She blinked again and sat up.

It was 1978. She knew that.

But it was 2010, and she also knew that.

She looked around the room, at the digital clock and the faded curtains and the battered IBM Selectric. This was definitely 1978; there wasn’t a computer screen anywhere in sight, and a typewriter like that would be a museum piece by 2010.

So why did she remember lying down in 2010, on a sort of hospital table surrounded by machinery? And how did she know typewriters would be obsolete, replaced by computers, by the turn of the century?

A dream was the only explanation, but it was one hell of a dream, to have this kind of effect on her! Usually the hard part was remembering dreams, keeping them from fading away, but this one seemed to be getting stronger with every second she was awake, trying to crowd out real memories.

She got up and pulled on her robe, then headed down the hall to the bathroom. She used the toilet, then stood and turned to the mirror. Her hand reached automatically for her razor.

She stopped dead. Razor?

Well, of course, she had to shave, didn’t she?

Shave what? She’d stopped shaving her legs back in college, when she finally gave up any idea that she might someday play the ugly duckling and and turn out a swan instead of the fat pig she was.

What the hell was wrong with her? Why did she remember another face, a man’s face, that ought to be in the mirror? Had she suddenly developed a split personality, like Sybil?

But Sybil’s personalities hadn’t confused memories like this. She remembered being male—and a very strange, uncomfortable memory it was. She reached up and touched her shoulders, her arms crossing across her breasts, then looked down at herself.

She was unquestionably female. Dorrie Ledbetter, age forty-seven, weight a mortifying two hundred and fifteen pounds, critically acclaimed but dirt-poor writer, teacher of creative writing at the adult education center six blocks east, where she was paid two dollars per student per hour to tell little old ladies that their inept moral tales of heroic pets and naughty children showed real promise but still needed work.

But she remembered so very clearly being Richard Williams, assistant professor of English at Queensbury College, several inches taller and only slightly overweight, with a potbelly that he knew he could eliminate any time he was willing to work at it a little.

This couldn’t be a premonition; she didn’t believe in them, for one thing, but for another, how could she foresee being someone else? And a member of the opposite sex, at that—
she wasn’t one of Le Guin’s Gethenians, able to choose her role; she was a woman, and would always be a woman.

Was this some bizarre hallucination? A flashback to her one experiment with LSD, back in ’69, perhaps? It didn’t seem anything like that experience of crawling colors and time distortion; the sink looked completely normal, white porcelain with greenish stains around the drain, and time seemed to be ticking past at the usual rate.

She was Dorrie Ledbetter—she had Dorrie Ledbetter’s body and was in Dorrie Ledbetter’s room—so why did she remember being Richard Williams?

What exactly did she remember? She leaned heavily on the sink and tried to think.

She had eaten alone the night before, sat up late reading, and gone to bed. But what had Richard Williams been doing last night?

She remembered lying on a table in a laboratory, and this huge machine like something out of “2001” moving across her. An MRI scanner, Garrand had called it…

And that was absolutely her last memory of Richard Williams; that was what had woken her up this morning, the memory of lying there while her/his memory was copied.

She’d been sent a copy of memories from the future.

Her mouth fell open, then snapped shut.

That was crazy; that was science fiction.

She stared at herself in the mirror.

Richard Williams had wanted to know what she’d meant in one of her stories, so he’d sent a copy of his memories back in time, into her sleeping mind, so she would leave him a message.

And why did she need to leave him a message? Because she was about to die! She wouldn’t live to see “A Sleeping Kiss” published.

She turned and stared out the bathroom door at the table against the wall, the little table where a manila envelope stood propped up, waiting to be mailed—an envelope containing the manuscript of “A Sleeping Kiss.”

“Oh, fuck,” she said.

Then it sank in, and she shouted it. “Oh, fuck!”

She was going to die, and this callous bastard Williams had told her about it just so he could find out what she’d meant in one of her stupid little stories?

She gripped the edge of the sink and steadied herself.

Wait a minute, she told herself. Just wait. Think about this.

Memories from the future? And she believed that?

Well, she had to. The other possibility, that she was imagining the whole thing and was therefore going insane, wasn’t any better.

And what kind of an imagination could it possibly be that would spring this on her all at once? Why would these memories all appear full-blown like this? She could remember what it felt like to be a man—and a nasty, uncomfortable memory it was, too. She could remember the Gulf War, and the huge celebrations at the turn of the millennium, and the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the Challenger explosion…how could she have made all that up overnight?

Something she—no, Williams—had said came back to her.

“So it’d be like a split personality? Could they talk to each other?”

“Hello?” she said. “Anyone there?”

No one answered; no little voice spoke up in her head. It appeared Garrand had been wrong. If she were a split personality, suddenly manifesting this new, invented identity for the first time—which didn’t at all fit her understanding of how MPD worked, in any case—then why would she have all of Williams’ memories?

No, Garrand had been wrong. The memories were not the personality. Her brain was still entirely hers; she just had a lot more jammed into it now.

And it must be real. No other explanation made sense.

After all, why shouldn’t someone invent something like this, someday? Apollo 11 must have seemed just as unlikely to her parents.

So Williams’ memories were true. And she knew the future—or thirty-two years of it, anyway.

But she wouldn’t live to see it.

“Well, screw that,” she said, looking in the mirror again.

“And screw you, assistant professor Richard Williams! You selfish, self-centered, egotistical, petty bastard! Why the hell should I care whether you know what my story’s about?” She stamped out of the bathroom, crossed the room, and snatched up the envelope, tearing it open.

She had to see whether she really had typoed that word; she hadn’t caught it.

And if she hadn’t, then she’d need to retype the last page; she couldn’t expect to get the S and the W lined up properly if she just put the existing one back in the typewriter. She’d make sure that son of a bitch didn’t know which she’d intended, not unless she was still alive to tell him!

She found the right page and scanned it. No typo. She’d had it right.

She began tearing the page into little pieces, which she would burn at the first opportunity; she could copy the carbon, and then she’d destroy that, too.

For a moment she considered destroying the entire manuscript—but she needed the money, especially now that she knew it would sell the first place she tried it, and besides, she wanted Williams to experience that horrible moment, years from now, when that smartass kid would point out the typo.

She sat down at her desk, sandwiched carbon paper between two fresh sheets of mimeo bond, and rolled them into the typewriter.

“Forewarned is forearmed,” she muttered to herself as she typed “Ledbetter/Kiss” and the page number at the top.

“A heart attack, huh? Because I’m too goddamn fat? Okay, you son of a bitch, then I’ll stop being fat! You think I can’t?

You think just because I’m a woman I’m too passive and stupid to do something about it? I’ll live, you bastard, and what’s more I’m going to be rich, because now, you moron, I know what’s coming! I’ll bet on Reagan in 1980, I’ll bet against the ’86 Red Sox—thank you, Bill Buckner! I’ll invest in Intel and Microsoft. You wait and see, Williams—one day I’ll show up on your doorstep and spit in your face!” She snorted derisively as she rapidly typed through the next sentence. “You went and wasted this on my stupid story?

You didn’t warn someone about Adolf Hitler, or Pearl Harbor, or Vietnam? Someone gave you a time machine, and all you want to do is fix a typo? Jesus, that’s like, I don’t know—destroying the planet to send a message, or something. You don’t want to interfere, my ass—God, you deserve to suffer!”

She slowed, and carefully typed “set,” then backspaced and typed a W over the S.

“There,” she said. She spaced forward and continued typing.

Water and celery, she told herself silently. She would live on water and celery until she’d lost fifty or sixty pounds.

She’d been meaning to lose weight for years, she’d known she ought to lose ninety, maybe even a hundred pounds,
but she could never force herself to diet and exercise—it wasn’t as if she’d had all that much to live for, after all.

But now—now she knew she’d be at least moderately famous. Now she knew she could be rich. With that for motivation a few weeks of starvation would be nothing.

She laughed to herself as she typed “The End” at the foot of the page.

“I’ll show you, Dickie Williams!” she said. She ripped the page from the typewriter, and rummaged in the drawer for a new manila envelope.

Ten minutes later she dropped the envelope in the corner mailbox and jogged, panting, toward the park.

* * * *

The medical examiner shook his head. “Damned stupid fad diets,” he said, tossing the folder on his desk.

The police lieutenant glanced at him.

“This Ledbetter woman,” the ME explained. “She hadn’t eaten a decent meal in weeks! She was living on carrot sticks and water. Lost forty pounds, sure—but the strain on her heart was too much.” He leaned back in his chair. “She couldn’t afford a doctor—I guess no one warned her just how risky a crash diet like that can be!”

“She was still pretty hefty,” the lieutenant remarked. “She must’ve been really something, if she’d lost forty pounds.”

“Yeah,” the ME agreed. “She might’ve had the heart attack anyway.” He shrugged.

“I guess we’ll never know,” he said.

“I can live with that,” the lieutenant replied.

OceanofPDF.com

THE ASTRONAUT FROM WYOMING, by Adam-Troy Castro & Jerry Oltion

To understand Alexander, you must first understand his time.

It was an age when the universe had been opened for us.

We knew how to look at objects a thousand light years away, and map the molecules that gave them form; we knew how things were put together and how they could be taken apart; we knew how the universe began and how it was likely to end. We knew how to reason, and how to discover, and how to add new pages to our increasing store of information.

It was also an age when ignorance was enshrined over knowledge. Every local newspaper contained a horoscope.

World leaders consulted astrologers; psychic hotlines made millions; and a United States Senator gained ten points in the polls by claiming to have been in contact with Ancient Aztecs. We knew what comets were, where they came from, and what they didn’t foretell…but in a compound in San Diego, thirty-seven intelligent, college-educated people took poison because they believed that a comet called Hale-Bopp would take them to heaven if they did.

In Alexander’s age, we had knowledge…and we had delusion. And we preferred the delusion.

You cannot understand Alexander Drier’s life without understanding that.

You cannot understand his final gesture without understanding that.

Of course, Alexander’s time is still our time. Which is why some of you are most interested in reading about a high-ranking government coverup of alien experiments on pregnant human women.

I can’t help what you want. I knew that going in.

But that’s not what happened.

Space Baby Speaks First Words at Birth!

Warns of Threat From Space, Parents Say

The first tabloid reporter arrived in town one day after the birth, the first delegation from the networks right behind him. Not long after it hit the web, the pilgrims showed up.

They came in motor homes, in vans, on motorcycles, and on foot: the four-man Sweethaven Sheriff’s Office had to import a couple of dozen state police just to keep the kooks and the loonies and the just plain curious at bay. Most just wanted a glimpse of the child. A few—thankfully, very few—
had darker things in mind; gene-splicing their mythologies, they arrived with rifles and pamphlets and hate-filled eyes, muttering black fantasies about an Antichrist seeded from the nonexistent Dark Side of the Moon.

I didn’t get to meet him until his tenth birthday, but I can only imagine how frightening a time it must have been: Alexander’s parents and the rest of the immediate family barricading themselves behind drawn curtains, looking out upon the steadily increasing madness of a crowd that seemed to represent all the rest of the world.

Alexander’s mother, Faye, was so serene about the whole thing that she seemed to be in denial. She just held the baby and sang to him, making almost no reference to the mad scene just beyond the driveway.

“It’s funny,” she said at one point. “We don’t know him, really. We don’t know whether he’ll be good or bad, smart or dumb, brave or afraid…the kind of things he’ll be interested in or the kind of things that’ll bore him silly. He’s a stranger to us. An alien, for real.”

Mark Drier winced as he glanced at the window. The blinds were drawn, but he could still see the crowds, growing larger every hour; some of them chanting, some of them singing, some of them shouting in rage. “Better not let them hear you say that.”

Many years later, telling me the story, Alexander’s Uncle George shook his head with awe as he remembered what Faye said at that moment: “Them? Who cares about them?

They’ll go away.”

She was right, of course; the crowds began to diminish as soon as even the dimmest pilgrims began to realize that they weren’t about to get beamed aboard any orbital crockery. And the tabloids went after fresher stories the first time a Sheen misbehaved in Hollywood. But her prophecy couldn’t have seemed likely to Mark Drier that morning…not with the house being monitored by ten TV
networks, the phone unplugged to keep it from ringing off the hook, and Grandma having a quiet mental breakdown in the bedroom upstairs. At the moment, he knew only that nothing would ever be all right again.

Alexander wasn’t deformed, at least, not in the sense that I’m deformed. He had two of everything he needed two of and one of everything he needed one of. And it was all functional. It all worked. He was even beautiful, in the sense that all healthy babies are beautiful. But his head was unusually large: it mushroomed above the temples, bulging up and out like a sack stuffed with more than it was designed to hold. (The doctors had feared water on the brain, but it just happened to be the shape of the kid’s head; the only problem it caused was in delivery, and that had been handled by the caesarian.) His eyes were about three times larger, proportionally, than the norm for a baby of that size; and they were all black, with no whites showing at all. His nose, as if to compensate, was unusually small, little more than a nostrilled wrinkle in the center of his face. His mouth was a slit with thin, pursed lips. His ears were little round buds with holes. His hands were odd too: there were five fingers and a thumb on each, with the fingers all disproportionately long.

Still, that, by itself, wasn’t the problem. At least, not as Mark Drier saw it. He was not a weak man. He could have
dealt with birth defects.

The problem was that everybody in America had already seen that face. They’d seen it staring at them from movie posters, from bestselling books, from artist’s renditions on the covers of supermarket tabloids. It was a face so frequently depicted in the mass media that even people who refused to subscribe recognized it as a well-known inhabitant of our shared popular culture: the face described by the growing subculture of folks who claimed to have been abducted and experimented upon—usually in the form of anal probes—by creatures from outer space.

It was, in short, the face of a Roswell Alien.

Mark Drier peered out through the curtains again. The view out there was just as disturbing. Even as he watched, a flyspecked yellow schoolbus crammed with doughy, pasty-faced adults pulled up at the curb. An inordinate number of the faces at the windows had open mouths. He couldn’t quite tell whether they were shouting, or just chronic mouth-breathers. Their expressions were both ecstatic and dull: like sheep having a party. He shuddered. “I don’t know, Faye. That’s a mob. We may have to start planning escape routes, in case they rush us.”

“They won’t,” Faye said placidly.

“They’ll do what they want,” Mark said. “Don’t you see?

Some of them came all the way across the country! They’re not going to let a front yard and a few closed doors stop them now!”

She considered that. “Then we’ll just have to go outside and tell them they’re disturbing the baby.”

“And what makes you think they’ll listen to that?”

“If they think he’s a space baby, capable of shooting deathrays from his fingers, they just might. But I don’t think it’ll be a problem. They’ll get tired. They’ll feel silly.

They’ll go home. And they’ll leave us to the business of being a family.” She smiled, and touched noses with the baby. “It’ll work out. He’s beautiful.”

Nobody said anything to that.

Then Faye looked at them, and in a voice filled with soft sweet steel, a voice that damned them for not responding, repeated, “He’s beautiful.”

The gathered Uncles and Aunts hastened to assure Faye that they agreed. Mark joined in last—reluctantly, and unpersuasively, and with what must have been shame for not being able to feel it the way she did.

Space Baby Foretold In Bible!

Will He Start World War Three?

I’m going to have to take a break to ward off the expectations of an unfortunately large percentage of the people reading this account of Alexander’s life.

Alexander was not an alien. He was not a half-human, half-alien. He was not the result of genetic manipulation by aliens who wanted an emissary on Earth. He was not the spawn of a UFO abduction his mother repressed. He learned to speak at about the same rate all children do. And he wasn’t the harbinger of a message from space, though come to think of it that eventually turned out to be a little closer to the truth. He was a boy: one who may have been a little different from the rest of us, but one whose genetic birthright, however bent, was still entirely Homo sapiens.

He came out the way he did because of an extremely rare, but identifiable and very well-documented genetic condition that affected his fetal development, subtly distorting his body in ways that mirrored the by-then well-established folklore of the UFO conspiracy buffs. A search of medical literature was able to find six other cases within the past three centuries: even photos of one poor boy from the early 1900s who spent most of his short life in a freak show in South America. Of course, in today’s media-conscious age, there was no way that the malady in question would continue to go unnamed, and so Alexander
got the honor of being immortalized in the medical textbooks before he was even old enough to recognize his mother’s face. Drier’s Syndrome, they called it: and if there was any upside to the public’s insistence on believing that the child was somehow a visitor from outer space, it was the degree to which that rescued him from a lifetime of being known as the kid with the disfiguring disease.

But he was human, all right. Gloriously human. There will not, at any point in this narrative, be a surprise revelation that he was ever, wholly or in part, anything but.

So those of you who followed the various events of Alexander’s life in the kind of newspapers that run front-page headlines about miraculous chocolate diets, can go indulge your little fantasies elsewhere. Because that’s not what happened.

Space Baby Turns Toys into Gold!

Parents Now Wealthy, Friends Say

Alexander occupied such an important part of my life that I find it hard to feel anything but contempt for anybody who had trouble loving him. I suppose that’s the main reason I’ve always been so hard on his father: why I still automatically think of him as a cold and distant man, unable to forgive his son for being less than normal. I’m also aware that it’s the way some biographers have portrayed him—some of them, God help me, even using interviews with me as a primary source.

But it wasn’t like that. In the lonely, hysterical days immediately following Alexander’s birth, Mark Drier was a frightened man, desperately searching for the plan that would render everything all right—and who can’t be hated for coming up with the wrong idea when nobody, with the possible exception of Alexander’s mother, knew what the right idea was.

He found her in the upstairs den, which was the brightest room in the house: a perfect place for a young mother to breastfeed her baby. The baby was, like all babies, trusting, hungry, squirming, and needful. I’d like to think that as Mark looked at his child that day, he felt not instinctive revulsion, but also the awe fit for all new life abroad in the world. He may even have felt the joy of fatherhood. But he was a practical man, and love must always make room for practicality…especially with buses of UFO-Abduction Faithful still converging on town from every direction.

Again: I wasn’t there. I can’t re-create the conversation precisely. But I know the people. And it happened something like this:

Mark said, “We’re going to need money.”

Faye smiled. “Well, we knew that going in, hon.”

His hands curled into fists. “Please. Babe. I’m not talking about Diapers and Dip-Tet money. I’m talking about independent wealth. I’m talking about guard dogs and chain-link fencing: the kind of money capable of keeping out the wackos for the rest of our lives.”

“We can handle the wackos,” she said softly. “They’ll get bored. Didn’t you hear what Sheriff Dooley said? Some of them are going home already.”

Mark shook his head. “Some of them, maybe. Maybe even most of them—if they behave the way mobs usually don’t.

But all of them? At home and in school and for the rest of his life? How do we stop some especially dangerous nut, who may be just getting the idea today, from coming after our boy with a gun maybe fifteen years from now? Do you honestly think that everybody who’s run out of money or vacation time, and has to go back home to East Calabash or whatever, is just going to forget this kid they were so sure came from outer space? Be real! They’ll be back when you least expect them—and if not them, then somebody else.

We can’t live an ordinary life that way. Hell, I won’t be able to hold onto my job as it is—we can’t expect me to just go
on selling hardware when every yahoo in the country’s going to flock to my store to see if I have antennae hidden under my hairline. We need money, babe. If only to protect us from what he’s going to bring.”

Faye remained as perfectly serene as before, but there was an edge to it now: a willful defiance of the places this conversation was headed. “So what do you suggest?”

He was unable to meet her eyes. “The Enquirer’s willing to pay us five million for an exclusive interview—as long as we tell them what they want to hear.”

“That your son’s a creature from outer space.”

“Don’t get me wrong,” Mark pleaded. “I hate the bastards. But I can’t think of any other way. And if they’ll be saying it anyway…we might as well get paid for it, so we can get the boy what he needs.”

“Chain-link fence,” she said, without raising her voice.

“Guard dogs. Isolation from other children.”

“Safety,” he countered.

She considered that for several seconds, glancing from the earnest face of her husband to the oddly-shaped head of her child. She’d been raised on a small family farm.

She’d seen her parents struggling through droughts; she’d lived through foreclosures and years of lean, grinding poverty. She’d even had to quit the university after only two years, when her student loans were cut. She knew what it meant to need money and not have it. Nobody can say how much the idea tempted her; nobody would have blamed her for going along with it.

But then she said, “No.”

“Come on, Faye. Be realistic—”

“I am being realistic. I’m refusing to lie.”

“It’s a white lie.”

“It’s a cruel lie,” she snapped. “He’s our child. Our human child. And it’s our job as his parents to stand up for what he is, not for what some trash newspapers want him to be. I want him to grow up knowing we defended him!” She took
the now-sleeping child from her breast, handed him to her husband, and for the first time, spat out her anger, “You want realistic? Call him by name. I haven’t heard you do that yet. You want realistic, call him by name!”

Face of Space Baby Found on Moon!

Is He Reincarnation of Ancient Lunar Pharoah?

Alexander was lucky, in some ways. Some places would have put the kid in a museum and charged visitors admission to see him—and if you think that’s overstating the situation, kindly look up the case of the Dionne Quints.

But that’s not what happened.

Sweethaven came to see the hordes of morbidly curious as invaders—uncouth, unwanted barbarians who parked on lawns, peered in windows, and dropped their garbage in the streets. What’s more, they came to see the Driers as hometown heroes being victimized by outsiders. There may have been a few voices raised against the child, at first (most of them taking refuge in the fiction that he was brain-damaged, and that he’d have been better off in an institution anyway), but as the months went on, and most of the nine hundred people of Sweethaven got to see him up close, even that faded away to silence, replaced by the determination to protect him at all costs.

Mark Drier did not lose his job at the hardware store; he had to miss a lot of time at first, whenever the Nuts and the Media got too obnoxious, but his boss covered for him, and paid him full wages even when Mark couldn’t make it in more than one or two days at a time.

Nobody denounced Alexander from the pulpit. At least, not in Sweethaven: there were some churches down south that preached about him as if he had 666 stamped on his head, but Sweethaven’s Reverend Wallace Vukcevich assured his flock that he’d seen the boy and that he seemed a perfectly fine baby, odd looks and all.

In the early months, there were two, and only two, acts of serious violence directed against the Drier family. One time, a mentally disturbed woman from Boca Raton, Florida, pulled out a gun and started shooting at the house

—but she got off exactly one very wild shot before being wrestled to the ground. It didn’t even hit the house.

Another time, when Faye was taking Alexander to the doctor for a routine examination, a car filled with tabloid reporters deliberately sideswiped the car so they could force her to stop and get a close-up picture of the baby. The good people of Sweethaven took both incidents very personally. The Boca Raton woman was charged with Attempted Murder, Illegal Possession of a Firearm, Reckless Endangerment, Trespassing, and everything else the local courts could think of; she got the maximum penalty on every count and was awarded a long string of consecutive sentences. The reporters would have been lucky to get off with just that: this was only a few years after the similar incident that caused Princess Diana’s death in France, and the small mob of local boys on the scene had a pretty poor opinion of the kind of louts capable of taking that kind of risk with the life of a baby. The tabloid stringers spent almost as much time in the hospital as they later did in jail.

As ugly and upsetting as both incidents were, they only served to cement the town’s resolve: Alexander may have been one strange-looking kid, but he was one of theirs…a feeling that only grew as he developed a personality, and turned out to be pretty normal after all. He was a child. He learned to smile, to giggle, to say his first words, to crawl, to walk, to manipulate his parents with well-placed tantrums…and that most human of all skills, to ask questions.

Which brings us to the moment he’d later describe as his earliest memory.

Like most of the rest of us, he saw it on television.

He’d watched TV before, of course. His Mommy was not above occasionally using it as a babysitter. He liked cartoons. He didn’t understand why grownups watched the things they watched, which mostly seemed to be other grownups bantering in living rooms. He certainly didn’t understand the attention his Mommy and Daddy and Uncle and Aunt gave the program on TV now, which was mostly a bunch of serious-looking people speaking in grim, measured tones. Why was this fascinating enough to keep the grownups from playing with him?

“The arrogance of it,” Mark Drier said. “The infernal…

gall.”

“It’s just symbolic,” Uncle George said. “They’re not actually erasing the accomplishment.”

“Oh, come on, George! They’re doing worse! They’re pissing on it! They’re telling the whole world that the whole thing was nothing more than a big joke!”

Alexander, who was too young to understand any of this, who was indeed frustrated by his family’s helpless fascination for something beyond his comprehension, merely wandered from one relative to another, trying to interest them in more enjoyable activities…until the network commentary switched over to the live feed, and something truly interesting showed up on-screen.

It was a strange-looking man in a chubby suit, with a big box on his back and a gleaming mirror instead of a face.

There was something irresistably puppetlike about the way the man bounced up and down when he walked: something that struck the young Alexander as both comical and graceful at the same time.

Alexander struggled free of his Mommy’s lap, toddled over to the TV, and pointed a single questing finger at the funny man. “Who dat?”

“Get away from the screen, son,” Mark said. “We’re trying to watch.”

Alexander complied as much as his curiosity would allow him, backing up all of two inches. “Who dat, Daddy? Who dat?”

“Alex, why won’t you listen to me? We’re trying to watch.

Be nice.”

“You could answer his question,” Faye said. She was, by this point, hypersensitive to slights of her son, especially where her husband was concerned: especially in light of the little subliminal flinch that sometimes passed across Mark’s face when Alexander fixed those oversized black eyes on his. She didn’t give Mark a chance to redeem himself, but instead turned to Alexander and said, “That’s an astronaut, honey.”

Alexander blinked doubtfully, and repeated the unfamiliar word, “As’not?”

Faye repeated it with exaggerated care, “As-tro-naut.

That’s what we call somebody who goes to outer space.

That man on the TV is walking on the Moon.”

Alexander knew what the Moon was. He saw it in the sky all the time, both day and night, and his Mommy had taught him what it was called. But up until this moment, it had never occured to him that it was more than a pale round ball just out of reach…that it was an actual place, so far away that there had to be a special name for the people who went there. He stabbed his finger at the astronaut’s helmet. “Dat?”

“That’s his space suit. He needs that to breathe.”

Alexander later told me how his toddler mind processed this information. He thought astronauts wore their space suits all the time, even when they weren’t on the Moon, even when they were home in bed, even when they were in the bathtub. It didn’t make much sense to him.

Mark Drier said something that couldn’t have been any help endearing him to his wife, “He’s too young, hon. He can’t possibly understand this.”

Despite his confusion about the spacesuits, Alexander resented that. He understood more than his Mommy and Daddy gave him credit for. Like most toddlers, his comprehension vocabulary was already far ahead of his deceptively primitive speech, and he’d used it to figure out a lot of things they couldn’t even begin to guess he knew: among them that his Daddy was a very sad man.

Then the astronaut on TV hopped over a small rock in his path, both rising and falling with unnatural slowness, and Alexander found himself smiling. He turned toward his mother. “I go dere? I be ast-not?”

The assembled grownups met each other’s eyes.

And Mark Drier said, “No. You won’t.”

“Dat man ast-not.”

“Yeah…well…it’s different for him.”

Alexander asked the dreaded Next Question always asked by children, “Why?”

Mark Drier silently appealed to one relative after another, imploring them to rescue him. “Because…nobody has the wrong idea about where he comes from.”

“That does it,” Faye said.

She rose from her easy chair, picked up her son, and carried him from the room, leaving Mark enveloped by a silence echoing with all the words that would have emerged from a perfect man’s mouth.

Space Boy Draws Circles in Sandbox!

UFO Scientists Note Uncanny Similarities To Crop Circles In Europe!

The young Alexander couldn’t understand why something as wondrous as an astronaut made the grownups around him so upset.

He was too young to know that he’d been watching the live coverage of the First Saudi Expedition to the Moon.

In the wake of the Third Gulf War, the Saudis, flush with their apparent invincibility, had grown rich enough and
fanatical enough and crazy enough to sink an obscene amount of petrodollars into their very own space program—
mostly staffed, in a particularly cruel irony, by unemployed veterans of the moribund Japanese and United States space programs. Like Projects Mercury through Apollo, and the Golden Dawn expeditions sponsored by the late emperor, this particular project took the better part of a decade to achieve its stated goal: and though there’d been some who said that the Saudis would change their minds before they got that far, the day had finally come, and the rest of the world could do little but watch as the Saudis did just what they’d said they would do.

Many Islamic factions had never liked the idea of a Western Moon. The Saudis had therefore taken the position that Armstrong, Aldrin, and those who followed them had profaned it with their presence. The entire purpose of their space program was to remove, and destroy, everything that the Americans and the Japanese had left behind during their various missions—starting with Tranquility Base, which they now dismantled before a television audience of two billion people.

Reactions to this varied, depending upon where in the world you were. In some parts of the world, anything that humiliated America was reason to cheer. In others, it was considered a sad victory of barbarians. Even Americans weren’t united in their reaction. Some wept for triumphs long-gone. Some were so outraged by the slap in the face they advocated military action against the Saudis. Some thought the whole space program a waste of money better spent elsewhere, and applauded the symbolic burial of Kennedy’s folly.

All too many people simply didn’t care—it was too far away, and had nothing to do with their lives. Their vote was heard in the form of over ten thousand phone calls to the TV networks, protesting not the desecration of Tranquility Base but the preemption of their favorite sitcoms. Most of
those were of the opinion that the landing on the Moon had been a hoax anyway. The Japanese, and the Saudis, had simply leased parts of Arizona to film their sequels.

I know how I reacted. I was eight years older than Alexander. I cursed at the set with all the rage of a boy who considered the desecration a personal assault, thinking the world a place ruled only by madmen and fools.

I still believe that.

As for Alexander, he never did make it to the Moon. The universe didn’t have anything that obvious in mind for him.

I didn’t make it there, either. It was a world that would never be part of our futures, either shared or separate. But I do look at it sometimes: still just as mysterious, still just as bright in the night sky. And I wonder, in light of everything that’s happened since, if the Saudis succeeded only in keeping the dream alive for us.

New Space Boy Shocker: Mirrors Don’t Reflect Him!

Will Parents Still Deny His Origin?

The year Alexander turned four, the science scores of America’s high school students hit an all-time low. The President of the United States was caught making major policy decisions on Tarot readings. The newest cult to claim one million converts preached poverty, abstinence, and the worship of the planet Jupiter. And two different prime-time newscasts began devoting five minutes of each program to the astrological readings of singers and movie stars.

I still have a copy of the reading one of those shows gave for the Space Boy himself. “This is a time of growth and learning. Expect major changes in the coming year. But don’t forget to depend on those close to you.”

A brilliantly prescient horoscope for any four-year-old child.

It wasn’t surprising they got around to him. He was, after all, still a frequent topic of the tabloids, and even the
comparatively respectable media ran updates on the various milestones of his life. The Driers had even allowed Life magazine to do a photospread of him attending the birthday party of one of his little friends—the theory being that pictures of Alexander with pink cake smeared on his chin were the only possible antidote for stories claiming that his real parents were the ancient astronauts personally responsible for the Pyramid of Cheops. Alas, they only helped to keep him in the public eye—and though the good people of Sweethaven kept direct intrusion to a minimum, coverage of Alexander’s life was still so ubiquitous that the Driers actually put their TV set in storage to save him from being traumatized by accidental exposure to Space Boy shtick.

No, he had to suffer different traumas entirely.

Take the night he spent one full hour making faces in the mirror. It wasn’t one of his favorite games—not because he hated his face, as he hadn’t been raised to have such a poisonous feeling, but because his smooth masklike features simply weren’t very good at the comical art of grinning. Alexander smiling looked a lot like Alexander frowning, and Alexander calm looked a lot like Alexander angry: there were subtle differences which his family could read, but anybody else had to rely on context or body language. Genuinely funny faces were so hard to make that even Alexander, who was at this point just beginning to get a grasp of how truly odd he looked, knew he just wasn’t very good at making them.

Today was different, though. Today he was practicing a trick he’d discovered not very long before: i.e. making the world appear to jump side to side by opening and closing each eye in turn. The phenomenon, which also has application in astronomy, is known as parallax, and every child with two functional eyes takes a turn being fascinated by it. He was most enthralled by the way it looked in the
mirror—the way his whole head flickered back and forth, just like a bouncing ball…

Somebody at the door said, “Alex.”

Alexander jumped before he saw who it was. “Oh. Daddy.”

Many years later, he’d have to grope for the words to describe his childhood feelings for Mark Drier. There was love involved, of course; Mark had been a good and gentle man, who might have been a fine father for a less unusual son. He’d certainly tried to be a fine father to Alexander, saying the things he was supposed to say, doing the things he was supposed to do, never being deliberately cruel. But he was also a man whose affection seemed forced, a man who couldn’t quite conquer that little subliminal flinch he demonstrated whenever his son entered a room…a man who had very little to say to Alexander and by this point not much more to say to Faye.

Without ever being struck, without ever being abused, Alexander couldn’t help being always just a little bit afraid of him.

And his father knew it, “Sorry. Did I scare you?”

“Maybe a little bit,” Alexander said self-consciously. “I was making faces.”

Mark flashed a little wan smile at that. “Any good ones?”

“Not really. I think maybe I need a moustache.”

Another wan smile. “I think maybe I could use one, too.”

He held the expression for all of ten seconds before seeming to remember something that pained him—then gathered up his strength, and with a joviality that rang false, said, “Hey, Sport? I know it’s near your bedtime, but how’d you like to take a walk with your old man? Just for a few minutes?”

Alexander glanced at the window beside the shower stall.

The little sliver of sky visible between the mostly drawn curtains was a shade of purple-blue not very far removed from black; it would not be long before the heavens got the
news that the sun was gone for another day. He spoke with caution: “It’s dark.”

“That’s okay. We won’t be going far.”

“Is Mom coming?”

“Not tonight,” Mark Drier said. “But don’t worry. She already knows we’re going.”

He took Alexander downstairs, zipped him up in his jacket, took his hand, and walked him into the backyard.

They had a big backyard. They were at the edge of town, just south of the hills, on a slope that was the first of a long bumpy ride to the horizon. Their property was entirely surrounded by chain-link fence, not high enough to keep away determined intruders, but enough to discourage the merely curious. Alexander had seen folks with cameras scramble over once or twice; he’d also seen his Dad chase them away, shouting words that Alexander himself was not permitted to speak. But there hadn’t been an incident like that since his last birthday.

Mark unlocked the back gate and walked Alexander to the top of the first hill, home of a jutting slab of rock that the boy was allowed to climb only when his parents were watching. It was a big rock for a kid Alexander’s age, almost as tall as his Dad. Mark didn’t give him a chance to climb it—just picked him up and put him there, before climbing the rock himself and taking his place by Alexander’s side.

They sat without speaking for the several minutes it took the last light of day to surrender to the blackness of night.

Mark said nothing because he was a smoker, and a sedentary man, who did not climb hills easily; his ragged breaths burst from him like little explosions. Alexander said nothing because his father was holding his hand, which was in and of itself such an unusual thing that he was scared to disturb it with the sound of his own voice.

Time passed. Mark’s breathing slowed to normal.

The stars came out.

It was a clear night over a very small town, and the lights burning down below were not enough to force many stars into hiding. Some of them shone like pinprick flames. And as the night grew darker above Sweethaven, and Alexander searched his father’s face for the reason they’d hiked all the way up here, Mark seemed less and less a recognizable presence and more and more a man-shaped shadow eclipsing the lights in the sky above him.

Forever came and went before Mark spoke. “You cold?”

“No,” Alexander said.

“Tired?”

How could Alexander be tired, when all this was going on? “No.”

“Good,” Mark said, still without looking at him.

More time passed. So much time that Alexander thought they were supposed to sit here, holding hands, all the way to morning.

Then Mark’s profile shifted slightly, and he spoke in a strange, faraway voice that didn’t sound like he knew who he was talking to. “You know…I used to love the stars. Not astronomy; I was never any good at that. But once upon a time, when I was a kid, I used to pitch a tent on a hilltop not far from here. I didn’t sleep in the tent unless it was raining, though. When it was a nice, clear night, like tonight, I laid out my sleeping bag and slept in the open…

just looking up at the constellations. Some of those nights, time just seemed to stop.” He hesitated, glanced at his son, and turned his gaze back to the sky. “Sometimes I wish it did.”

“You can wish on stars,” Alexander said knowledgably.

“I’ve heard that. But by the time somebody told me I was too old to believe it.” He sighed. “It took me a long time to learn that even if you do wish on stars, you don’t always get what you want from them.”

Alexander said, “You can still wish.”

“That’s right. You can.”

And because Mark seemed even sadder now than he’d ever managed to seem before, Alexander came right out and asked, “What do you wish, Daddy?”

The shadow in the shape of Alexander’s father shifted, no longer a profile turned up but a black oval looking down at the boy. Alexander didn’t have enough light to see his expression; the oval contained nothing but darkness. In the silence, Alexander was terribly afraid that he’d said something wrong.

Then Mark squeezed his hand extra tight. “We better get you back to the house. It’s getting late, and your mother’s going to want to tuck you back in.”

Alexander could only be relieved that the strange interlude was over. “Sure.” He allowed his father to help him down from the rock, even though he knew he could climb down by himself, and followed him back to the house.

Something else happened late that night, long after he went to bed. Though somewhere deep within the land of sleep, he realized he was not alone. He opened his great black eyes a slit and looked across the pitch-black room to a shape barely visible in the doorway. It was his father, standing with slumped shoulders, one arm braced against the doorframe. Alexander shouldn’t have been able to see him at all, since the hall was dark, too, but there was just enough ambient light coming from elsewhere in the house to render Mark Drier’s outline crisp and sharp. Too sleepy to get up, Alexander fell back to sleep before it occurred to him to wonder just what his father wanted now. When he opened his eyes again, still surrounded by darkness, the doorway was empty.

The divorce was uncontested. Mark Drier moved to San Francisco, where he got a one-room apartment and a job behind the counter in a souvenir shop on Fisherman’s Wharf. He didn’t aspire to anything else, he didn’t marry again, and he didn’t get a phone. The few times he received visits from journalists desiring inside gossip about his son,
he simply ejected them, always silently, and never with unnecessary force.

Father and Son didn’t see each other again for almost two decades.

Space Boy Goes to School!

Teaches Classmates Orbital Mechanics

The year Alexander Drier entered first grade, the Jupiter Cult boasted over three million members nationwide. A couple with a million-dollar home in Texas was driven to personal bankruptcy by the wife’s seven-digit debt to the Home Astrology Network. Three colleges offered their first courses in UFO abductions during the twentieth century.

Psychic surgeons opened successful clinics in New York, Los Angeles, Denver and Chicago—curing nobody but building a sizeable clientele among inoperable cancer patients who had nothing left to lose. And a certain bestselling book, written by the kind of writer who specializes in such things, declared that photographs of the stone face on Mars taken over the past ten years proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that its lips were moving. He claimed that the government was trying to prevent the rock formation from delivering its truly momentous message to humanity—his chief proof an allegation that there were no deaf lip-readers working at NASA.

I own a crayon drawing Alexander made at about this age.

His mother gave it to me—no big sacrifice on her part, since she saved all his drawings, and had hundreds of them. It’s about as impressive as you’d expect from a drawing made by a six-year-old: stick figures, lollipop trees, lopsided houses, garish color that refuses to accept the authority of the lines meant to hold it in check. Faye Drier stands at one side of the picture, with exaggerated curlycue hair that seems to be made out of wildly askew Slinkies. She is clearly smiling, clearly a figure meant to be
seen with love. The rest of Alexander’s extended family is also in the picture, though harder to identify. The bald man with the tie is probably Uncle George. The woman standing next to him, a smaller version of Faye, would then have to be Aunt Jude. Aunt Wendy, who lived on the east coast now but visited at least twice a year, stands next to her, identifiable by her big hoop earrings. Then there’s a blob of color that must have been intended to represent Alexander’s dog, Arnold….

…and next to Arnold, Alexander himself, the whole reason the drawing is so important. Because, once you take his limited drafting skills into account, it’s an accurate drawing. It shows a boy with a big round head that seems too large for his body, and big long fingers disproportionately long for their hands, and big black eyes shaped like almonds.

In the picture, he’s smiling. That’s important. Alexander wasn’t very good at smiling; his facial muscles weren’t really built for it. He couldn’t maintain the expression for long. But in the drawing he’s smiling, and waving: like for all the world a still from one of those old-time Spielberg movies.

The picture’s important because it shows that Alexander, at that age, already understood just how different he looked. He just wasn’t self-conscious about it, that’s all.

Not even the day Faye brought him to his first day at the local elementary school—a small brick building midway between Sweethaven and Monarch, a somewhat larger town that sat fifteen miles up the road.

Sweethaven and Monarch shared the school between them, in order to make the classes large enough to support a teacher for every grade. That was still an average of only ten or eleven children per class. Six of the kids in Alexander’s class were natives of Monarch and three of those would now be meeting the Space Boy for the very first time.

On the school’s insistence, Alexander was ushered in half an hour late, after his teacher, Mrs. Hirschman, had a chance to deliver her little speech about what to expect.

The speech included the standard warning that he might look a little scary, but he shouldn’t be treated any differently than anybody else. As a result, the five children who knew Alexander from Sweethaven, and the three children from Monarch who had met him already, were now reminded to consider him odd, and the three children who’d never seen him before watched his entrance with the awed fascination they would have awarded a strange and colorful new species of bug.

As he took his seat, the girl in the desk next to him, Sally Watkins, said the first thing that came to mind. “He looks like a spaceman.”

Mrs. Hirschman was scandalized. “Sally! That’s rude!”

“That’s okay,” Alexander said. “I do look like a spaceman.”

“That may be true, but we don’t like to make fun of the way people look in this class.”

“But everybody says it….”

Mrs. Hirschman now definitely had the look of a woman who feared losing control. “It’s still not a subject we’re going to discuss here. Is that clear?”

Alexander hesitated. “Okay. Sure.”

“Thank you, Alexander.”

She turned her back, to write something on the blackboard.

He simply followed her with his big black eyes, bemused by her reaction, and wondering just what he’d said to get her so upset.

He looked around at his classmates to see what they thought—and was startled to find several of them staring at him with expressions ranging from loathing to morbid fascination. Those who were looked away quickly as soon as he made eye contact, afraid to admit their interest, scared that he’d notice them as they’d noticed him. He’d
seen such reactions before (notably from his dad, and by at most a couple of other people in Sweethaven), but he was treated so normally by his mom and the rest of his family that he’d just written that off as something that strangers happened to do.

Now, looking at the faces of his classmates, it occurred to him for the very first time that this was the way some people looked at boys who looked like spacemen.

It’s a tribute to the Drier family and the people of Sweethaven that Alexander, a remarkably bright kid, didn’t have enough experiential data to reach this seemingly obvious conclusion until he was almost six. But it still hurt.

In this, the first moment where he really had a taste of what it meant to be a freak, he felt so tremendously self-conscious that he actually considered bolting from the room in tears.

Then he noticed Sally Watkins, the little girl who’d called him a spaceman, sticking out her tongue at him.

He blinked, unsure how to react.

She looked away, then turned back, and stuck out her tongue again.

Experimentally, because it was the only response that seemed to make sense, he stuck out his own tongue in kind.

She crossed her eyes.

And he felt better.

Popularity, it seemed, was not going to be a serious problem.

Space Boy’s Secret Mission on Earth!

Veni, Vidi, Vici

In a particularly frightening nationwide poll, astrology became the only “science” seventy percent of Americans could identify by name. A certain national news magazine ran a cover story about the prophecies of Nostradamus, and how they’d all come true, sorta. There was another
evolution debate in the Department of Education, with Darwin evicted from over half the nation’s schools and creationism
installed
as
the
officially
recognized
curriculum. Reports of UFO abductions reached an all-time high, to the point where they were reportedly taking place out in the open, on crowded city streets, with nobody ever managing to get one on film.

Somehow, Alexander learned. He was so anxious to get back into Mrs. Hirchman’s good graces that he paid attention to her boring lectures and did all his homework, and before long he realized he was enjoying it.

There was a problem with a couple of local adults who objected to having their kid go to the same school as Alexander. They actually picketed the school, declaring it,

“OFF LIMITS TO ALIENS.” It was ugly, and stupid…but it also died down once the idiots in question realized that nobody was going to buy it. Alexander was the local celebrity. He was the reason the world knew Sweethaven and Monarch existed. They were proud of him. Plus the owners and employees of the half dozen businesses in town owed their increased sales to him, and they knew it.

Time passed.

When Alexander was eight he surprised his mother by announcing that he wanted to become a spaceman. Faye deserves credit for immediately understanding what he meant. “Maybe you better say ‘astronaut,’ dear.”

That seemed reasonable enough to him. “Astronaut,” he agreed.

Uncle George, who was listening, said, “You know, son, that’s a pretty hard thing to want to grow up to be.”

“Why?” Alexander wanted to know.

“Because, right now, there aren’t any astronauts.”

“There are the Israelis.”

Uncle George shook his head. “They’ll quit soon. That always happens. We got tired and quit. The Russians got tired and quit. The Japanese got tired and quit. The Saudis
got tired and quit. Pretty soon the Israelis will get tired too.

I don’t know if anybody will still be doing it by the time you grow up.”

Alexander was at the stage of life where historical precedent didn’t mean a damn thing to him. “That’s okay.

I’m still going to be an astronaut.”

“How?” Uncle George wanted to know. “You gonna build a rocket ship in your backyard?”

Alexander shrugged. “If I have to.”

“And where are you going to go?”

“Venus. Saturn. Pluto. One of those places.”

“Pluto,” Uncle George repeated dubiously.

“It’s cold there,” Alexander said. “It’s cold and Mercury’s hot. But I’ll go anywhere they want to send me. It doesn’t matter where as long as I get to go.”

Faye, who was digging up a clog in the sink, grunted,

“And as long as you also get to come back.”

“Well, duh,” Alexander said.

Much later, when the boy was watching Gilligan, Uncle George took Faye aside to bring up a concern last expressed by Mark Drier during the Saudi moon landing.

“Listen, are you sure it’s a good idea to encourage him to talk about that kind of thing? Let the wrong person hear him talking about going off into space, and they’ll turn it into E.T. wanting to go home.”

Faye said, “I don’t care what they turn it into. I care what my son turns it into.”

“Oh, come on—”

“No, you come on. He’s eight years old. Are you going to tell him not to dream?”

“He can dream all he wants,” Uncle George said. “But you have to teach him to keep some things secret. He has too many people listening to him…some of whom would love to hear him talk about wanting to be an astronaut. Don’t you see that they could twist that into anything? Don’t you understand that he’s gotten to the age where we’re going
to have to keep a tight rein on the kind of things that come out of his mouth?”

Faye sighed. “I’m not going to keep him gagged, George.”

“It’s not as simple as that—”

“I’m sorry,” Faye said. “But it’s as simple, or as complicated, as my son and I choose to make it.”

Space Boy’s Plot to Hypnotize the World on TV!

Don’t Watch His Eyes, Experts Warn

When Alexander was ten, he was interviewed on TV. He’d actually appeared on television any number of times before that—starting with his birth, and continuing throughout his childhood, whenever enterprising newspeople went back to Sweethaven for regular updates. But that was just news footage. This was a fully authorized, in-depth interview, promoted on prime time and aired on the highest-rated, most influential TV news magazine of its time. It was considered a coup by all involved—not only by the network and the newspeople, but also by Faye and Alexander Drier.

This was because Faye’s refusal to exploit her son’s notoriety had prevented the Driers from earning any of the millions that might have been raised by Space Boy merchandise. In supporting him, she’d been helped not only by regular checks from Alexander’s absent father, but also by her family, which had helped her maintain their home, and by her community, which had determinedly kept her employed and protected from the worst of the UFO-abduction crazies. But that hadn’t provided for much more than necessities, birthdays, and Christmases. And when Alexander, whose interest in astronautics had not faded, and whose bedroom was now overflowing with Saturn V
models, Armstrong and Aldrin posters, and models of the solar system, announced that the one birthday present he wanted more than any other was a day at the Smithsonian

Air and Space Museum in Washington, Faye had felt her back forced against a wall.

And so she finally let it be known that she was amenable to an interview. As long as whoever performed the interview did it in Washington, providing security and travel expenses for herself, Alexander, one of Alexander’s school friends (he chose Sally Watkins), the parents of the child he chose, and two relatives to be named later. So many news organizations leaped on this offer that she’d needed almost two weeks just to decide which one was least likely to provide unpleasant surprises; she chose the one she did, despite its decades-old confrontational stance toward corrupt businessmen and politicians, because it was also a fairly honorable enterprise that could be trusted to take it easier on a kid.

As a result, Alexander enjoyed several firsts: his first trip outside Wyoming, his first airplane flight, his first journey among strangers whose reactions to him could not be safely predicted, his first time speaking for himself on television…and one other thing, which he wouldn’t find out until two days after the interview aired.

From all accounts, he acquitted himself admirably.

There was the incident on the connecting flight to Philadelphia, when a fifteen-year-old kid across the aisle elbowed his sister and said: “Hey, look. We’ve been abducted.”

“Shut up!” the sister hissed. “You’re awful!”

Instead of ignoring them, Alexander leaned over and responded in a spooky voice that carried throughout that entire section of the plane: “Actually, he’s right. And we’re not really landing in Philadelphia…Bwah-ha-ha-ha-ha!”

That made a hit. So did his unannounced appearance at the Air and Space Museum, where he found himself attracting more attention than any of the exhibits. He might have ignored the people who gathered around him to gawk. He might have gotten frightened and asked them to
leave him alone. He did neither. Instead, armed with his own intense interest in the subject, he became a tour guide: pointing out the Apollo capsule, the Space Shuttle, Skylab, and everything else he recognized from his own reading, explaining what they were and where they had gone in a loud, clear voice that communicated more enthusiasm than factual accuracy. (He was, after all, a ten-year-old.) Midway through his presentation, a local news team arrived and filmed him describing how astronauts went to the bathroom in space—scooping the interview show he was slated to do in three days, but capturing for the very first time on national television his declaration that he was going to be an astronaut himself.

There was more. He went to Arlington, the Lincoln Memorial, the Vietnam Memorial, the Clinton Museum, the Memorial for the Victims of the Toxic Spill in Honolulu. He spent one sad morning in the National Holocaust Museum, silently moving from one exhibit to another, speaking only when he encountered the Nazis’ own footage of a dwarf executed for his deformities. Alexander’s response upon realizing just how doomed his own life could have been (an angry “Were all these people stupid, or what?”) made the news that night. The local anchorman joked about comments from an alien visitor. I remember wanting to kill him.

Alexander’s live interview turned out to be more than a way to cadge a free trip to Washington; it was also a masterstroke of public relations on the part of his mother.

Because it was the last thing the UFO fanatics had expected: nothing more than a friendly conversation with a bright, articulate ten-year-old. Alexander talked about his favorite teachers at school, what TV shows he liked, the things he’d seen in Washington, even his dinner with the President (breaking up the host by taking that opportunity to wave at the camera and say “Hi”.)

At one point the conversation turned to how Alexander got along with other kids.

Q: Do your friends make a big deal about you being famous?

A: Sometimes.

Q: Does it change the way they treat you?

A: I don’t know. I’ve never been any different, so I don’t have any other experience to compare with.

Q: Well, let’s put it this way. When you play Star Trek, do they always make you play the alien?

A: No. We take turns.

Q: Do you play Kirk?

A: Sometimes. But everybody says I look more like Picard.

By the first commercial break, most people who’d tuned in to see the Space Boy were already realizing that this was just a smart and likeable kid. Unfortunately, most was not all, and polls revealed that there were still twenty million Americans more convinced of his extraterrestrial origins than ever before.

Part of that may have had something to do with the third segment, which turned out to be Alexander’s eulogy for the space program. He talked about John Glenn and he talked about the walk on the Moon and he talked about the space shuttle and he talked about wanting to be an astronaut and he talked about how everybody told him that wouldn’t happen and he talked about how he wanted to make sure it happened anyway. He talked about the planets and what they were like and which ones he’d like to visit if he only got a chance. He was, as it happens, particularly enthused about Mars, and he said he’d rather go there than just about anywhere else.

The final segment culminated in the moment of self-description that defined Alexander for millions of Americans:

Q: Do you really think you’ll be an astronaut when you grow up?

A: One way or another.

Q: What does that mean?

A: It means that I’ll do whatever I have to to make it happen.

Q: And then you’ll really be the boy from space.

A: No. I’ll never be the boy from space. I’ll be…(groping for a phrase)…the astronaut from Wyoming.

I was on the phone to the studio thirty seconds later.

What Was Spaceboy’s Real Mission in Washington?

Congressional Leaders Refuse to Comment

Two days later, the Driers were surprised in their hotel suite by their network liason, Ms. Wallace. The woman’s manner was so hesitant that Faye Drier, who answered the door, immediately assumed that something terrible had happened back home.

“Oh, no,” Ms. Wallace colored. “I’m sorry. It’s just…well, it turns out that there’s something else we’d like to ask Alexander to do for us….”

Faye was on guard at once. “The deal was for one interview. Not two.”

“I know, and we appreciate that…but this isn’t about an interview. We don’t even need him to appear on TV again.

It’s…well, it’s somewhat special…” The woman peered over Faye’s shoulder, saw the pajama-clad Alexander emerge from his bedroom, and spoke more quickly, “We would have told you before, but we got almost five thousand phone calls during the broadcast…and, well, it took a while before this one was reported to somebody with authority to make a decision…”

Faye, still suspecting the worst, unchained the door and ushered the poor woman in. Ms. Wallace sat on the couch, said hi to Alexander, looked at her hands, and went on:

“The call came from an…unfortunate young man in Georgetown. That’s a residential neighborhood here…”

“I know,” Alexander said.

“Well, we checked this out very carefully, and he’s real.

His name’s Colin Forsythe. He’s…well, an almost complete shut-in. Severe muscular dystrophy, can’t walk, can’t do much with his arms. He was five years old before his parents and his doctors realized he wasn’t hopelessly
retarded. But he’s far from that—he got his high school equivalency at fifteen, and he’s now working on an on-line physics doctorate, through a special curriculum devised at George Washington University. He’s also a big fan of the space program, just like you. And when he saw the show, he called and asked if it was possible for you to visit him.”

Faye’s frown had softened considerably. “And I suppose you want to have a camera there so you can show their conversation on television?”

Wallace shook her head: “I’d be lying if I said it hadn’t occurred to us. But we’re not asking for that. Under the circumstances, we’re just passing on the message.”

Faye looked at Alexander. “It’s up to you, son. I won’t push you either way.”

Alexander’s response was immediate: “Can we go right after breakfast?”

Cue me.

Space Boy Visits Invalid!

Promises Cure for All Human Illness

Alexander later said that walking into my room was like returning to his own. The obsessions on display were the same: identical posters of Buzz Aldrin vying for attention among mockups of the Saturn V, the lunar module, skylab and the space shuttle. The only real difference was that there was more of it: in part because my family had a lot more money than Alexander’s, in part because I was eight years older and had been nursing my obsession for that much longer, in part because I didn’t have any of the other distractions of childhood. I had about a thousand more books just in this room alone, and a much faster computer than the secondhand model Faye had been able to afford.

And I also had one puzzling decoration, hanging in what appeared to be a place of honor, that Alexander would have to ask me about: a poster of my personal hero, an
emaciated, grimacing, but oddly buoyant man in a wheelchair. (He hadn’t heard of Stephen Hawking yet.) Of course, he also had me to look at.

Like Alexander, I can be a pretty startling sight. Because my condition manifested itself at a very young age, my arms and legs never really had a chance to develop: they’re flabby, childish things too small for the torso that connects them. Because of these proportions, I can’t use a normal wheelchair; instead, I lie strapped in a recliner that holds me much like an egg held in the palm of a hand. The brace on my neck keeps my head from lolling to the side, and my face, framed by long greasy hair and marked by what is usually two or three days of stubble, makes me look like a degenerate infant. All in all, I look like a cartoon drawn by somebody with no knowledge of anatomy. Most people seeing me for the first time avert their eyes at once; I can judge their characters by how quickly they manage to steel themselves for a second try.

Alexander, who was used to that look himself, didn’t avert his eyes at all. “Hi,” he said.

My speech synthesizer responded, “Hello. Come…in. Sit down…on the bed.”

He obliged. On his way over he didn’t go out of his way to maintain eye contact. But he wasn’t fighting it either; I think he was just fascinated by all my stuff. I can usually tell if I’m going to have anything in common with somebody by how frequently they glance at my bookcase. Some folks only pretend to look because they find it preferable to looking at me. But I can tell who’s faking and who’s genuinely interested. Alexander clearly saw a dozen books he wanted in the time he took just crossing the room. Then he lowered the railing on the bed, sat down, and smiled at me.

“Thanks…for coming,” I said.

That’s the last sentence I’ll write that way. It’s there only because it’s the way I sound. The synthesizers make my
voice comprehensible, but it still takes most of my lung capacity just to get out a few short syllables, so my sentences are always filled with pauses. These days, when my words are often reported for the printed page, some reporters waste entire manuscripts putting ten sets of ellipses in each sentence. It’s a cute trick, but it tends to get on the nerves awfully fast. And it’s unnecessary, too. My friends and family mentally edit out the pauses. If you absolutely need my cadences, add them yourself with a ballpoint.

Alexander said, “Well, I don’t get to meet a lot of other people interested in space. Most people think the space stuff is just me being weird because of the way I look. Even my Mom, I think.”

“And your Dad?”

Alexander answered a bit too quickly. “I have no Dad.”

I said, “Too bad. I have a Mom and a Dad, and they’re pretty good people, most of the time. But I didn’t call you here to talk about them. I wanted to ask. Have you ever read Heinlein?”

“Not yet,” Alexander said. “I’ve seen the books around, though. The last thing I read was The Hobbit, and…”

I must have grimaced more than usual. “Elf Crap! God save me from Elf Crap! I’m talking about the real stuff!

Science Fiction, not Elf Crap!”

Alexander was a little startled by my vehemence. “Uh…

you mean like Asimov?”

“Or Niven or Barnes or Brunner. Any of those guys. But I’m specifically thinking of Heinlein. A story he wrote called

‘Waldo.’ All about somebody like me, with a body barely strong enough to pick up a pencil on Earth, who coped by living on a satellite in free fall. With no gravity holding him down, he could move around and do what he wanted and be as independent as he wanted to be. Of course, he also needed to be obscenely rich just to afford it. My parents are rich, Space Boy. But I don’t think they’ll ever be that rich.

And I’m not exactly astronaut material, so I don’t think anybody’s ever going to send me on a mission. So that’s one dream that won’t ever come true. Not for me.” I hesitated, just long enough for Alexander to know it was deliberate, and not a pause created by the speech program.

“But you. Were you really serious about wanting to be an astronaut?”

Alexander blinked. It was the first time anybody had ever asked him that without adult condescension, giving it the weight of a real question. He actually had to think about it.

But once he did, the resolve just clicked right into place, like one crucial piece of a puzzle he’d been assembling all his life. I could hear the surprise in his own voice as he said it: “Yeah. I was.”

“You picked a hard career,” I said. “There are no astronauts anymore. Even the Israelis pulled back.”

“So people keep telling me.”

“And so they tell me, too. What they fail to realize is that we’ve been going into space prematurely. We went before we had all the tools. We went when we knew so little that we had to spend billions just to get there and back. We went with a technology so primitive that only a miracle prevented us from having more Challenger explosions. But we went. And the more time passes, the more inevitable the second try. Because everything else we’re developing in the meantime, without even trying—more and more advanced computers, more and more advanced insulation materials, stronger plastics, more and more efficient fuel delivery systems—is going to make it cheaper and easier to go again. Before long, space will belong to corporations instead of governments.” I lifted a finger for emphasis, which is about as much as I can manage. “I’ve been keeping track of those developments, Space Boy. Very close track. And my most conservative guess is that this country will be returning to space in a big way within at most the
next fifteen years…which just happens to be my life expectancy.”

Alexander blinked several times in rapid succession, as our shared dream took shape in the air between us. “Wow.”

“So I ask again. Do you really want to go? Are you really willing to work hard and do whatever’s necessary?”

He was ten years old, but he grew up in that moment.

“Yeah. Whatever it takes.”

This time I smiled widely before I spoke.

“You just hired a manager. Do what I say and we’ll get you there.”

Space Boy Shocker:

“I’m Gay,” He Announces At Breakfast

We didn’t see much of each other for the first few years after that. Alexander still had grade school to finish, and I couldn’t travel without compelling reason. We racked up some big phone bills, though, making plans, keeping our mutual enthusiasm high, setting up supplemental courses of study, setting up an exercise regimen designed to put him in the top ten percentile by the time he reached adulthood, and—too often, for me—averting the crises that may seem like life or death at the time but are just, for most people, part of the cost of growing up. There were times, in those years, that I cursed Alexander’s absent father, not out of sympathy for my friend, but self-pity for the amount of time I had to spend giving the heart-to-hearts that a Dad would have.

Once, when Alexander blew two math tests in a row, he called me up all in a sweat to say that he was washed up.

He couldn’t be an astronaut, let alone read all the tougher stuff I kept sending him, if he couldn’t even understand algebra!

I pointed out that Einstein had failed math in school, and added, “How many of the other kids in your class blew
these tests?”

“About half of them. But they don’t study. I studied! I studied hard!”

“That’s your problem,” I told him. “You psyched yourself out. You were so afraid of blowing it, you left yourself no other option.”

“Huh?” he asked.

“Elementary psychology, Space Boy. The self-fulfilling prophecy. You were so worried about learning it, you couldn’t concentrate on what you were studying. So relax already. Go fishing or hiking or whatever you do out there in boonie-land. Take it a little at a time, and you’ll eventually pick it up.”

“That’s easy for you to say. You already know everything.”

There is nothing more sobering than the discovery that you’ve influenced an impressionable young mind into worshipping you. I looked at the clutter of books and papers on my desk, which I couldn’t even read unless I could first get somebody to clamp them to the book-holder attached to my chair, and at the unfinished document on my word processor, which had been mired on page fifteen since early the previous morning. “Yeah, right,” I said, damning the voice-synthesizer for its inability to convey sarcasm. “I’m just writing my doctoral thesis to prove how brilliant I am.”

He laughed, but it was an uneasy laugh that trailed off fairly quickly. “What if I flunk the next test, too?”

“Then it’ll be time to find yourself a girlfriend,” I told him.

“A smart girlfriend who can teach you math while you’re distracted.”

“Yuck!” he said, and I smiled. Right on target. Now he had something else to worry about—something not related to becoming an astronaut. The stick to go with his carrot.

That particular stick would only work for another year or two, of course—at which point I was sure another one would come into play—but that was the nature of our
relationship. Being motivated was his job. Keeping him motivated was mine.

The threat of having to study with a girl pushed him through basic algebra, and his renewed self-confidence pushed him right back into the straight-A track he’d been on since he started school. I sent him off a fresh batch of assigned reading and went back to my thesis (a feasibility study of nuclear-powered ion rockets for a manned mission to Mars).

My advice to go fishing had unexpected consequences. He asked his Uncle George to take him, and caught half a dozen brook trout on his first time out. In the process he discovered that he liked the outdoors. He became quite the fly-fisherman, in the most remote locations he could find, enjoying it in large part because it was one place he was able to pretend, at least for a little while, that there was no difference between him and the rest of humanity. It didn’t stop him joking on the phone that his big head scared the trout the moment they saw him. I told him it proved fish had more intelligence than we gave them credit for. He threatened to use me as bait. When he sent me a picture of himself wearing a floppy hat Faye had made for him, one of those vests with a bizillion pockets on it, and hip waders, I told him he looked like a redneck.

“What’s a redneck?” he asked.

He’d lived in Wyoming for a decade and didn’t know the term. People had apparently been too busy calling him names. “A redneck is the exact opposite of a space alien,” I told him.

It made his day.

Seventh grade wasn’t much trouble for him. He had to ride a bus twenty miles into Sheridan to attend junior high, but most of the kids there already knew him, or at least knew about him, so he didn’t have to face more than the usual amount of idiocy. He studied on the bus, went fishing
on weekends, continued to work on improving his time for the mile, and generally enjoyed himself.

Then he really did get a girlfriend. Actually, Sally Watkins, the same girlfriend he’d had since first grade…but it meant something different now.

You’d have thought he’d invented teenage angst. I got phone calls at all hours of the night. He was on Mountain time and I was on Eastern, so I had two time zones working against me, but he didn’t care. He called up to report every new development, from hand-holding all the way through his first kiss to their first argument after that.

“Look,” I told him one Sunday at about five A.M. “She’s a girl. You’re not supposed to understand her.”

“That’s comforting.”

He whined about how she was all smiles and friendly when they were alone, but hardly spoke to him at school.

“Be glad it’s not the other way around,” I told him. “Now go to bed.”

“That’s the problem. She wants to go to bed with me.”

He sounded so forlorn I had to laugh. “This is a problem?

You’re what, fifteen? And bouncy little Sally wants to jump your bones? No offense, but the way you look you’re probably not going to get a whole lot of other offers.” (I was wildly wrong about that, but then I had no real experience myself and had no idea how much certain women would be attracted to novelty—let alone to the increasingly remarkable person behind the strange looks.) “I’d go for it,” I told him.

“You know what’ll happen if anybody finds out,” he said.

“What? Her daddy’ll come after you with a shotgun?”

“I wish. No, half a dozen tabloids will come after me with reporters. I can see it now: ‘Alien Monster Wants Our Women!’ or ‘Kill it Before it Multiplies!’ They’ll mess up my life again, and probably hers too.”

It was the first time I’d heard him complain about the press. It was the first time he’d even indicated they
bothered him. I took it as a sign he was growing up. “Hmm.

So you’ll have to be careful. Shouldn’t be that difficult out there. There’s all those woods, right?”

“It’s October,” he reminded me. “Hunting season.”

He may not have been an alien, but he definitely lived in an alien land. The image of Alexander stuffed and mounted on somebody’s wall flitted through my head—not entirely unpleasantly, given what he was putting me through. I sighed and said, “Then borrow your mother’s car and use the back seat. Or sneak her into your bedroom. I don’t know; do I look like the sort of guy who knows this kind of stuff?”

There must have been an edge to my voice. After all, the sort of gymnastics he and his sweetie wanted to do would probably have killed me. Not that I stood much of a chance of ever finding out…

He must have suddenly remembered that he was not the only person in this conversation with problems. “Sorry, Colin,” he said. “I shouldn’t have bothered you. Not with this. I’m just all confused about it and don’t know what to do.” He paused, then asked, “You really think it’s okay if I

—?”

“Yes, yes, go get your ashes hauled, Space Boy!” I said. “I don’t care what else you are; you’re a teenager. Now that Sally’s brought it up, so to speak, your not going to be able to rest until you’ve learned what it’s all about. So do it already, or we can both kiss your ability to concentrate goodbye.”

“All right, all right,” he said. “Sorry I asked.”

“Stop apologizing!”

“Uh…okay. Sor…I mean, thanks.”

He was about to hang up when one last thought intruded.

“Hey. Remember to wear a condom.”

“Uhh…that’s a problem.” He turned all sheepish: “I’m not sure I could walk into the store and ask for a pack without causing a riot. Forget the tabloids. The news would get out,
and the parents of every teenage girl within fifty miles of here would lock their daughters in their rooms.”

He had a point. “Sit tight, then,” I said. “Don’t do anything stupid until you hear from me again.”

And so the next morning I took one of my infrequent forays out of my room, down the street in my electric scooter to the corner market, to buy a box of condoms. I bought the giant economy sized box, and grinned my silly spastic grin when the cashier gave me a “what could you possibly want these for?” look. Let her wonder.

Face on Mars Speaks!

It’s Crying for Help, Experts Say

Alex and Sally were apparently discreet. I didn’t see anything but the usual drivel in the tabloids, and I didn’t get any more frantic calls in the night for a while. Of course when they broke up a few months later I heard all about that, but it wasn’t as big a crisis as it might have been; Alex was beginning to discover that looking like an alien was a distinct advantage in the world of curious women. By the time he entered high school and started playing the “been there, done that” sophisticate, he was ten times more insufferable than he’d ever been as an anguished virgin. I hated him, and let him know it frequently.

Of course, I would have hated him even more if he hadn’t made valedictorian, let alone gotten the full scholarship I helped him apply for.

His speech was about Taking Back The Moon. He’d read it to me a week earlier. It was stirring, emotional, eloquent, and absolutely designed to get front-page attention from the tabloids. The local papers said it was brilliant. The video chip he sent me confirmed that it was. The tabloids ignored it entirely—I like to say because it was intelligent, but more likely because that happened to be the week a fifth-generation member of a certain well-known political
family got caught sharing a Memphis hotel room with half a dozen bed-partners of assorted sexes and species. You know the one…and I’m happy to report that Alexander, being of the proper age, made as many foul jokes about the incident as everybody else did. It may not have been nice, but it was human.

My doctoral thesis was published, and I even made sure copies of it got to the right people, but only one guy had ever returned my letters. He was very enthusiastic, and I felt a brief thrill at the thought that NASA might actually do something with it, until he told me that he had rescued it out of the wastebasket in the administrator’s office. He was a janitor. He had wanted to be an astronaut, too, but that was the closest he had come.

The turnaround, when it happened, came from the last place I would ever have expected: the tabloid-reading public. Regular newspapers had long since become indistinguishable from tabloids, so that included just about everybody. Even daily papers ran articles on Elvis or Madonna sightings right beside the national news…and occasionally they would do a piece on Space Aliens.

Alexander still got a lot of press, since he was a constant source of new photographs for them, but the article that tipped the scales for the space program was something else entirely.

Some poor drudge of a reporter, stumped for material and facing a deadline, must have been digging through back issues looking for something he could plagiarize when he ran across an article on the Martian pyramid and the mysterious face that supposedly looked out from the regolith beside it. Of course he didn’t know that the Mars Orbiter program in the nineties had pretty much debunked the whole idea with detailed photos from a hundred miles up, but if he did he wouldn’t have cared. He had an article to write, and suddenly he had a topic.

When the paper came out, demanding that the U.S. go back to Mars and find out what the face was trying to communicate to us, nothing much would have come of it if the reporter hadn’t found an ingenious way to eat up twelve more column-inches of space. He had printed a clip-out form for people to sign and send to the President.

He had no doubt intended it as a simple gag, but he had underestimated his audience’s credulity. A flood of clip-outs poured into the White House, many of them accompanied by long letters from people who couldn’t resist the chance to tell the President just why this was so important. A sizeable number of people were of the opinion that the face was Jesus. As other papers, not to be outdone, joined in with clip-outs of their own, the issue, stupid as it was, became the talk of the nation. When the President ignored the letters, papers printed more articles crying “coverup!”

and exhorting their readers to send even more letters.

Within a week they were arriving by the ton.

The President was no fool. He knew the controversy was ridiculous. But an election was coming up, and the economy was in the middle of a long downward slide, brought on at least in part because we weren’t fighting any wars to pump money into the big defense contractors. He needed something to toss money at. Something that would capture the public’s imagination in terms people could understand. If the public wanted to go to Mars, well then, he would lead them to Mars.

He called an old college buddy of his who worked for NASA, a former janitor who had gotten his Ph.D. and worked his way into the mission planning office, and he suggested that a Mars proposal would receive serious consideration in congress. But he would have to work fast.

The election was only a month away, and the President wanted to drop a real proposal on the public at the last moment. His buddy said, “I already know how to do it,” and dusted off his copy of my doctoral thesis.

Then the President called a dozen of the most influential senators and representatives into his office and showed them the piles of mail.

They were no fools either. Or maybe they were just fools enough. They were certain that a mission to Mars was a big waste of time and money, but they were willing to support it if it would get them reelected. So in a resounding speech on the night before the polls opened—way too late for a rebuttal from the opposition—NASA suddenly got its first new mandate in decades: Landing an American on Mars.

Space Boy Threatens Murder!!

Heroic Photog Captures Full Scope of Rampage Political correctness may not be the worst affliction of the twenty-first century, but it’s certainly the silliest. Even when I was a kid people grew uncomfortable if someone called me “crippled” rather than “differently abled,” but nobody could actually be fined for it. Nowadays I could pull mandatory counselling time for calling myself a crip, much less a gimp or a spaz. At the very worst I am “moto-neurally challenged,” and even that has a negative connotation that makes people uncomfortable.

It also opens doors. Wide open. In their pathetic attempts to ignore reality, the arbiters of morality and sentimentality in our culture have decreed that people are not to be discriminated against in any way, not for reasons of race, creed, color, age, gender, sexual preference, marital status, economic condition—or ability. Especially not ability.

Goodness no; that would mean someone was actually better at something than someone else, and that flew directly in the face of conventional wisdom.

Combine that with (a) affirmative action, which came back with a vengeance after its repeal at the turn of the century, and (b) Alex’s own marks, which now put him on the Dean’s List for the fourth straight semester, in precisely the course
of study that I’d mapped out for him, and (c) my own appointment to the Project Development Committee—and Alex suddenly had a perfect shot at his dream. Every minority of any sort had to be hired in proportion to their prevalence in society, which meant that NASA had to hire the handicapped, even for a wildly inappropriate job like

“astronaut.”

And Alex was one of very few people who qualified as handicapped
without
actually
being
handicapped.

Considering their other options, NASA was glad to accept him the moment he mailed in his application. It didn’t matter that he was still a couple of years away from graduation. In fact it helped them immensely. They had no training program in place and wouldn’t for at least two years. They had nothing really for their new astronauts to do until they created one. And in Alexander’s case, since he was merely hired as a placeholder anyway, they were happy to put him on the payroll and let him stay in school.

Besides, they figured, even if he was only an astronaut in name, his very presence would keep the masses interested.

I called him up the day the news broke. It was, by the way, one of the last times I’d ever call him from the old house in Georgetown; I already had handicap-design specialists fixing up my new place in Cocoa Beach. It would require spending all my salary and much of my trust fund on attendants, drivers, custodial workers, and increased medical costs, but there was no way I’d be able to handle the job offsite—and there was no way I’d ever want to. My clock was still ticking. Still, when I called, it was Alexander’s triumph I was thinking about. My voice synthesizer chirped out a greeting as ebullient as it could manage: “Congratulations, Space Boy.”

“Don’t call me that,” he said. “Don’t call me that ever again.”

That set me back in my anti-bedsore harness. I had called him Space Boy ever since we met. “What’s the matter?

Tabloid reporters getting you down?”

“Christ yes. I—just a minute.” I heard some scuffling, then he shouted, “Get the fuck out of my room!” and there was a loud bang.

“Alex?” I asked. My voice synthesizer wouldn’t shout.

“Alex?”

He came back to the phone. “A couple of ’em got past the dorm’s security system.”

“What was that noise? You didn’t shoot one of them, did you?”

He laughed. “I may be from Wyom-ing, but I don’t solve everything with a gun, no matter how good it would feel.

No, I just kicked one of them in the balls, grabbed the other one by her tits and shoved her out of my room, and slammed the door in their faces.”

“Ouch. That’s getting kind of personal, don’t you think?”

“And they’re not? I’m tired of being called ‘Space Boy.’ I’m tired of being called a freak. I’m the only guy in the world those bastards can make fun of because of the way I look, and they’re driving me crazy.”

I heard more pounding as he said that, but I couldn’t tell if it was on the door or him banging on his desk. “Are you going to be safe there?” I asked.

He sighed. “I saw two big security guards coming down the hallway. I’ll be all right.”

I thought about it for a minute. He was used to me pausing to catch my breath; he waited patiently until I said,

“You may not want to—you should excuse the expression—
alienate the press. They’re in charge of public opinion these days.”

“They’re a bunch of sadistic leeches,” Alexander replied.

“Powerful sadistic leeches,” I countered. “Don’t piss them off if you can help it. NASA learned long ago that public opinion is what launches rockets.”

“What, now you want me to let ’em in?”

“No. Never let them close to you. No interviews, nothing like that. Never even have a direct conversation with them.

It would be too easy for them to twist your words around.

But you can still communicate with them, and you can make them say what you want them to say.”

“How?”

I was thinking out loud, but I had plenty of time to do it while I paused for breath. “Send out press releases. All the papers will receive the same text, so we can say what we want without worrying about it being misquoted.” I laughed, and my stupid speech synthesizer said, “Ha, ha, ha.”

“Did I ever tell you that you sound like Boris Karloff when you do that?” he asked.

“Fuck Boris Karloff,” I said. “And fuck the press, too. We can feed those bastards anything we want to, and as long as it makes good copy they’ll be happy to print it.”

“So what do we want to say, besides ‘Leave me alone’?”

“How about, ‘Making a bold move in support of handicapped people everywhere, Alex Drier, the so-called

‘Space Boy,’ has accepted an offer to become one of NASA’s new generation of astronauts. Despite the barrage of tasteless taunts he will surely endure because of his unusual deformity, he has chosen to take this step to demonstrate that public humiliation should not stop anyone who is truly determined to blah blah blah.’”

“Brilliant,” he said, his tone of voice making it clear that I was anything but. “I especially like the ‘blah, blah, blah’

part. Truly inspired.”

“Thank you. So what sucked about the rest of it?”

“You used ‘Space Boy’ yourself. And you called me deformed.”

“Better we say it than the press. The way I said it, you’ll get sympathy. It’ll make the press look like the bullies they are. And the only way they can fight back is to quit printing articles about you, which is all we really want anyway.”

“Well, that’s a point,” he said after a moment’s thought.

“Did you save that?”

Everything I say is held in a temporary scroll-back buffer.

I recalled my impromptu press release and saved it permanently, then said, “Let me work on this for a few minutes, then I can transmit it to you and you can print it out and take it to the reporters.”

“I thought you said I shouldn’t ever—”

“Right. Have one of your security guards take it to the reporters. Print out only ten copies, and make them fight over ’em like the snarling dogs they are.” I laughed again.

“Ha, ha, ha. It’s time we took the high road, metaphorically as well as physically.”

Space Boy Starts Training

“He’s a Natural,” Says NASA

It didn’t work as well as we’d hoped it would, at least not right
away.

The
tabloids
weren’t
bothered
by
inconsistencies between their stories and anyone else’s; in their world that simply proved that everyone else was lying.

We did manage to direct the stories a little bit, though, and over the next couple of years we got better at it. Enough so that the media attention at least didn’t grow any worse as Alexander became more of a public figure.

Even so, America’s first four Mars astronauts were as whitebread as the Mercury seven. And so were the second crew, and the third, and the fourth. NASA may have had to hire minorities and the handicapped and the gay-lesbian-old-Baha’i—they even hired me, as a designer, before they realized I actually knew more than the rest of them put together—but they weren’t about to staff their missions that way.

I fought it as best I could from within, but I didn’t have that much power. They were using my design for the Earth-Mars transfer vehicle, but that didn’t mean squat in the
long run. If I made too big a stink, they would have thrown me right off the project without shedding a tear, and I wasn’t willing to lose that for anything.

We began testing the ion drive and the crew habitat. The lander was still mired in design snafus, but it was beginning to look like we could actually send four people to Mars and bring them back alive even if we couldn’t land them when they got there. I was busier than I’d ever been in my life, and happier, too, even if the stress was taking its toll on my wasted stamina. By the time Boeing actually delivered the lander, I could barely talk at all, and was thinking of switching over to a neural implant—one of the new generation of voice-synths that could read the electrical impulses in my brain so I didn’t have to eyeball words off a computer screen. Direct interface was becoming fairly common by that point, but it seemed like a further retreat into infirmity, and I did not look forward to taking that step.

The lander was basically an updated Lunar Module, with separate descent and ascent rockets to cut down on the weight we had to carry back into space on the return trip.

That meant the crew couldn’t use it to jump from site to site on Mars, but they carried ultralight aircraft for that. It was more efficient to use airplanes anyway. We managed to squeeze two of them on board, along with enough food and shelter for a year’s stay.

The clock was ticking. Rumors started flying as to who would crew the mission, even though the selection wouldn’t be made for over a year. But Alex was out in the cold. NASA hadn’t even given him an orbital flight, and it was conventional wisdom that nobody would be sent to Mars without at least one space flight under their belt.

“What can we do?” he asked me one evening after another request for a mission had been turned down on the grounds that he was needed more in a support capacity
than in space. “If I don’t get a flight soon, I’ll never even get on the backup crew for Mars.”

“True enough,” I said, slowly and with great difficulty. “I know how frustrating it must feel to come this far and then hit the glass ceiling, but the crew selection is out of my control.”

“That’s what I keep hearing from everybody I talk to,” he growled. “Except that bastard Ferris in the Assoff—” (that was what we called the Astronaut Office, where the crew selections were made) “—who just laughs.”

“I’ll think of something,” I told him.

“What?”

“I don’t know. Something. There’s got to be a way to show them you’re not a threat. That’s what Ferris is afraid of, after all. He knows you’re a good astronaut, but he’s afraid of the kind of publicity you’ll get if he actually sends you into space.”

“Publicity!” Alex shouted. “Everywhere I turn, publicity is standing between me and my life!” He began pacing the tiny space between my desk and the door. “I hardly even left the house until I was five because my Dad was afraid of what the crazies would do. Hell, that’s why he left. Well, if NASA hired me because of the way I look, I am not going to let them use it to stop me from getting a mission!”

I wish I could say his little rant sparked me into action, gave me the brilliant idea that salvaged his career. I’d love to take credit for it, but that’s not how it happened. What happened was that he stomped out, mad, and I sat in my office until well after dark, thinking with the lights out until I fell asleep.

Alex went home and trashed out his apartment, drinking beer and getting angrier and angrier by the minute.

Space Boy’s Secret Mission in California!

Is Killer Earthquake on the Way?

He should have died in a fiery crash somewhere over New Mexico. That he didn’t stands as testament to his skill as a pilot, but not to his calm reasoning ability while intoxicated, because what he did when he got mad enough was check out a T-38—the training jet the astronauts use to fly back and forth from Houston to the Cape—and roar off in a sentimental blaze of glory for San Francisco.

I don’t know who was the more surprised when they met.

Alex unannounced at your door in the middle of the night could scare the piss out of practically anybody, even his dad. On the other hand, Mark Drier had aged quite a bit since Alex had last seen him. Eighteen years of straight time, the salt air of Fisherman’s Wharf, and a lifetime of regrets had all left their mark on him. Alex was taller, too, so it looked to him like his father had shrunk to hobbit size and wrinkled like an apple left in the sun.

To hear him tell it, neither one of them blinked an eye.

“Hi,” Alex said.

“Hi,” said Mark.

They looked at each other for a moment, then, “Can I come in?”

“Sure.” His dad stood aside and Alex entered his one-bedroom apartment. It was lit by a single light in the kitchen, which revealed a reasonably tidy bachelor’s home.

Dirty dishes on the counter, but not more than a couple days’ worth. Newspapers and magazines on the metal table and all but one of the creaky wooden chairs around it. Full bookshelves in the living room, and a big ship in a bottle on top of a console TV.

“You make that?” Alex asked.

“Yep.”

“Looks nice. I’ve always wondered how people get the masts and sails and stuff to fit through that little hole. And how they manipulate it once it’s inside.”

“Patience,” Mark said. “And long sticks with tape on the end.”

“You never struck me as a patient sort of guy,” Alex said.

It might have been an accusation. His father chose not to interpret it that way. He just shrugged and said, “I’ve had a lot of free time on my hands. You learn.”

“I guess you could.” Alex sat down in the gray naugahyde recliner facing the TV. His dad sat on the couch off to the side. “Of course, I’ve never had much patience either. I guess I got that from you.”

Mark Drier’s hands were shaking. “Listen, Alex, I—”

“No,” Alexander said. “That’s not why I came here.” He removed a tabloid from his jacket pocket. The headline read: CITY OF IMMORTALS DISCOVERED ON THE MOON.

“You never did go to the press, not even after you left home. Why not?”

Mark studied the blank TV screen. “Your mother didn’t want me to.”

“I doubt if she wanted you to leave, either.”

“She wouldn’t have wanted me to stay, with what I was becoming.” Mark looked back at his son. “I was never built to live inside a goldfish bowl. I could feel myself becoming something I didn’t want to be. I think I was actually going crazy. That would have been a disaster for you, and for her.”

“You too,” Alex said.

His dad snorted. “Yeah, for me too. So I did the only thing I had guts enough to do. I took myself out of the picture.

Completely out, and that meant no stories in the paper, not even when I couldn’t find a job at first.” He shook his head incredulously. “Did you know that your Uncle George sent me money for three months until I got my feet under me again?”

Alex felt as if he’d fallen into ice water. Uncle George had never had a good word for Mark. “He did?”

“Yep. Wouldn’t let me pay him back, either. He wrote me letters for the first couple of years to let me know how you were doing, but I—I finally asked him to stop.”

“Why?” asked Alex.

“I’d already cut myself off from you,” Mark said. “I’d already failed you. Every letter reopened the wound.”

There was an uncomfortable silence while each man thought whatever fathers and sons think at times like these. Then Alex cleared his throat and said, “I have no problem with that, Dad. I really don’t. The only thing I have a problem with is how the media attention screwed up your life. So this may sound kind of crazy, but I want you and Mom to sell your story to the press. Auction an exclusive to the highest bidder. Run the price up into the millions and retire on the proceeds.”

Mark laughed. “Nobody’d pay for our story now.”

Alex leaned forward in his chair. “They would if you told them they were right about me all along.”

Space Boy Confirmed Alien!

Parents Reveal All

Next stop, Wyoming.

Insert a picture of Faye screaming at the top of her lungs.

Alex said his ears actually rang afterward. She nearly threw him out of the house, and it was two hours before she allowed Mark to cross the threshold. Only because the idea had come from Alex did she even listen, and only because Mark said he didn’t want to do it either did she finally decide to go ahead with it.

“I certainly hope you know what you’re doing,” she told Alex. “This could kill your career faster than a spacesuit failure.”

“Mom, my career is already dead. This is a last-ditch effort to pump some life into it.”

“Last ditch effort to make fools of us all,” Mark said softly, but he was beyond arguing at this point. He had cast his fate to the winds long ago, and was happy to drift wherever they took him. He was looking around at the house he had
left nearly two decades earlier, noting that it needed paint and wondering how the roof was holding up. He had carefully avoided looking too long at Faye, because every time he did that he felt something go wonky in his chest.

“I’m trying to make fools of NASA,” Alex protested. “If you’ve got a better idea, I’m all ears. Metaphorically speaking, of course.” He tweaked the tiny little flaps on the sides of his head. Mark looked away; Faye laughed.

“I still don’t see how it’s going to help,” she said.

“Leave that up to me. You just make up the most outrageous story you can think of. Abduction, genetic experiments, off-planet meetings with the Imperial Space Command—even Elvis—whatever you want.”

“I don’t want to have anything to do with it,” Faye protested, but she was already weakening. Twenty years of stubborn rationality in the face of rampant crackpottery had left her creative side screaming for release. She actually yearned for a chance to play the loon, at least once. And if it helped her son, she would make sure it was a doozy. The promise of a couple of million dollars didn’t hurt her creativity, either.

Alex was back in Houston by the time the story came out.

He’d spent his final day of relative obscurity briefing the other astronauts, so when Ferris called him into his office to express his false condolences for the unfair treatment he was getting in the press, Alex was ready for him.

“No, they’re absolutely right,” Alex said. “I’m a space alien.”

Ferris nearly split a seam. “What?”

“Well, I must be.” Alex walked over to the window and looked out at the lush grounds three floors below. “I mean, why else would NASA be holding back a perfectly good astronaut? They’ve got to be afraid of what’ll happen if they send him into space. And the only possible reason for that

—”

“You’re insane!”

“—is because they’re afraid he’ll steal the spaceship and go home.” He turned back from the window. “Or could it be that NASA’s simply afraid the press will make fun of them?

Well, welcome to the world of Alex Drier. Now my problem is your problem.”

“You can’t seriously think this…this circus is going to get you a mission,” Ferris said, snapping his index finger against the headline.

“I have no idea what will get me a mission,” Alex said.

“Hard work and determination certainly wasn’t good enough. Busting my butt to help train every other astronaut in the corps wasn’t good enough. Keeping a low profile to allay your paranoid fear wasn’t enough. So I decided to let my parents make some money while they still could. If that means taking some media heat again for a while, well, what’s the harm in it? I’ve survived it before. And I’m grounded anyway, aren’t I?”

Ferris loosened his collar. “Look, I’ve told you a million times—”

“Are you or are you not afraid of the publicity?” Alex demanded. “If you can sit there behind your desk and tell me with a straight face that the media attention doesn’t scare you—while you’ve got a copy of the Times right there on top of the heap—then I’ll go pack my bags and join a freak show. But if that’s why you’ve been holding me back, I and every other astronaut in the project will tell the press not only that I’m a space alien, but that this whole project is the result of rays beamed into our heads from the mothership orbiting the north pole of the Moon.”

“You can’t orbit a pole,” Ferris said contemptously.

“Damn right you can’t. And I’m not a space alien, either, but that’s what everyone has agreed to say until you stop treating me like one.”

“This is blackmail!” Ferris shouted.

“This is a fucking wake-up call,” Alex shouted back. “I’m the best damned astronaut this project has got and
everybody knows it. I’m the most dedicated, the most coordinated, the most physically fit, and with the exception of Mary Paiz, I’m the smartest. If you don’t believe me, look at the reports from your own doctors and shrinks. There’s only one reason I haven’t been in orbit yet, and one reason why I’m being shoved off the Mars mission, and that’s because you’re afraid the press will make fun of you for sending a guy with a big head into space.” He snatched up the newspaper and flung it into the wastebasket. “Well, that’s where your fear belongs, and that—” he pointed straight upward “—is where I belong. It’s your call. But this most assuredly is not blackmail, because your worst nightmare has already happened.”

Space Boy Stonewalls Parents’ Shocking Testimony!

Is NASA In On the Coverup?

Ferris suspended him, of course.

He was still free to do what he wanted on-site; he just didn’t have any official responsibilities any more. So he spent the next couple of days in the simulators, practicing launch and landing and docking maneuvers. He even spent long hours in the ultralight scout simulator, learning how to fly the ungainly fabric-covered jets in Mars’s thin atmosphere. He told me later he figured it was the closest he would ever get, so he wanted to spend as much time there as he could before he was fired.

Ferris noted what he was doing, and took it as another example of arrogant pride. Drier was so damned sure of himself he kept training even when he was suspended! But the techs kept feeding Ferris the performance ratings, and the numbers spoke for themselves. Alex successfully landed on Mars with three thrusters out and a fourth one stuck at full throttle. He correctly diagnosed and shut down a leaking fuel pump in mid-ascent before it could explode, and finished the launch and docking with only two out of
three engines. He rode out a duststorm in an ultralight, conserving power and fuel by gliding in the updraft on the windward side of Mons Olympus until the weather cleared enough for him to land. And he survived the death mission, the one that was supposed to end with a headlong crash into Mars no matter what the astronauts did to compensate for all the malfunctions on the way down.

“How did he do that?” Ferris demanded of me when he saw the results. I was the engineering genius; I was supposed to have designed the simulation to be foolproof.

“I didn’t think about deploying the scout planes after the parachutes failed,” I said. My delight was so great that I spoke at almost normal speed. “Sure, doing that adds drag, but it also means jettisoning both thruster quads on the lower stage and burning up the fuel you need for the return mission in the upper stage quads just to stay upright. He landed it all right, but he would never have gotten it back into orbit.”

“Don’t bet on it,” Ferris said. “That bugeyed bastard did this while his oxygen supply was down to practically zip and the cabin was shaking like a box falling downstairs.

The T-handle broke off in his hand—which was NOT part of the simulation—and he fixed it with duct tape without letting the lander pitch over in the process. If there’s a way to fix the damage after he got down, I’ll bet he’d find it.”

“Changing our tune, are we?” I asked him.

He glowered at me. “My tune is none of your damned business. But yes, it’s conceivable that I might have made a mistake regarding him. I just hope it’s not too late to correct it.”

“We don’t launch for eleven months,” I reminded him.

“I’m aware of the launch window,” he replied. He left my office without saying goodbye.

Space Boy Goes to Space

“It’s my destiny,” He says

His first mission was nothing special. I say that with such aplomb, knowing that anyone who goes into space for even the most routine mission thinks it’s the most fantastic thing that ever happened to them. Alex was no exception, even though he got spectacularly sick the first day.

His was the first landing mission. The mission before his had tested the Mars Descent and Ascent Module, known affectionately as MADAM, in low Earth orbit. Docking and flight maneuvers had gone well, so the next logical step was to try landing it somewhere. Earth was out of the question, since the engines only developed three-quarters of a g of thrust, but that didn’t mean they had to take it all the way to Mars untested, either. There’s a perfect testing ground only 240,000 miles away.

It’s so perfect a person might even be tempted to say God put it there to help us on our way to greater things. That was one theory proposed when the Middle Eastern fundamentalists raised a stink about us returning to profane the Moon they had so recently cleaned up, but it did little to pacify them. The US government didn’t really care. By then we were so tired of the constant squabbling that came from that part of the world that we just ignored them and went on about our business.

Alex didn’t get to actually land on the Moon. That would have been too much publicity even for a repentant Ferris to handle. But he did get to ride along in the Earth-Mars transfer module and test out its recreation facilities while the lander crew did their thing below.

He had fun playing with the entertainment and exercise equipment, the scientific instruments, and so forth. That stuff had all been tested a million times on the ground, but he dutifully put it all through its paces so we could detect any on-site problems before we sent a crew out with it for a two-year mission. About the only thing he found out of spec was a warble in the CD player, which sent Pioneer into a
tizzy for a couple of days until the problem was traced to a power supply drain from the gyroscopic stabilizers.

When he tested the surround-sound theatre system, he of course played Communion Part Six. Of the alien hysteria movies that came out when he was young, that was the one that most closely paralleled his actual life. It was also the cheesiest and most embarrassingly bad one, with the aliens stomping around flatfooted like Frankenstein monsters and sucking the blood from the poor residents in the fictitious town of Rattlesnake, Montana. Alex had always loved that one, and he hooted and laughed through all two hours and seven minutes of it while Mission Control listened in on the hab module’s live audio feed. When word got out that that’s what he was watching, it started a minor stampede to the video stores to rent copies of it, and the movie even enjoyed a brief comeback in theatres.

It also reminded people how stupid their fears over his appearance had been. An embarrassed America quietly returned a lot of DVDs to the video stores, and the nostalgia theatres switched over to Batman Seventeen in mid-week.

The guys on the Moon landed without a hitch, got out and did a walk-around inspection, practiced a few of the things they would need to do on Mars, then gathered up some rocks for the geologists back home, climbed back inside, and blasted off for rendezvous again. They didn’t leave any beer cans behind to intentionally irritate the Saudis, but the lower half of the lander and an inflatable dome are still sitting there doing a fine job of that. And they did deploy and assemble one of the ultralight aircraft for practice at doing it in low gravity with spacesuits on, so now there’s a fully assembled airplane sitting on the airless Moon, fueled and ready to puzzle the hell out of anybody who comes along after humanity has vanished into history.

The ascent stage took them back into orbit without mishap, and they flew the hab module back to Earth on a
long spiral that took them another two weeks, just to test out the recyclers and fuel cells and so forth. When they finally splashed down, three weeks after they left, Alex was beaming from tiny little ear to tiny little ear. He’d made it to space.

And he was on the backup crew for Mars. When the announcement came out, he didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Backup crew. This was a one-shot mission; unless the first crew discovered underground cities or something like it, he wouldn’t get another chance.

“Cheer up,” I told him. “Maybe somebody on the prime crew will get hit by a bus.”

Some days I look back on that moment and wonder if there really is something behind all the superstitions people have developed since we learned how to rub sticks together to make fire. Don’t say your dreams out loud or they’ll never come true, don’t break a mirror or you’ll get seven years of bad luck, and most assuredly don’t say anything that will tempt fate, at least without knocking on wood when you say it.

I’m practically paralyzed, okay? I couldn’t knock on wood if my life depended on it. I don’t believe in that crap anyway. But that didn’t stop Randy Parker from stepping out into traffic on a busy London street—instinctively looking to the left instead of the right for approaching traffic—and winding up under a tour bus filled with tennis fans on their way to Wimbledon.

It was the first time I ever allowed myself to think—even for a moment, even as grim whimsy—that maybe this Space Boy stuff had some substance after all. Maybe there was a mothership, manipulating things Alexander’s way. Maybe that was the only way to account for the way things had always seemed to work out for him.

The difference between me and the UFO nuts is that I’m capable of looking at that hypothesis and saying “Naaaah.”

And besides, I don’t consider Alex preternaturally lucky anymore.

Not at all.

Mars Crew Stops Invasion Fleet

Epic Laser Battle Ends in Victory!

Randy Parker’s death put Alex on the mission, along with Dave Anderson, Mary Paiz, and Shawnee Sanders, three straight arrows with test scores and simulator records almost as high as his. The press had fun with the idea of sending two couples to Mars. They weren’t couples, but nobody denied the probability that they would become couples on the way. It was even worked into the mission profiles, albeit secretly. And if you want me to talk about who did what to whom, you’re reading the wrong account. I bring it up because some people have suggested that sexual dynamics led to what eventually happened on Mars; it makes good tabloid fodder, I suppose, but that’s not what happened.

As for me, I had plenty of engineering snafus to take care of. The hardware worked amazingly well, which for a project this complex meant we still had one or two major complications a day. Most of them were simple malfunctions that we could fix and forget about, but a few turned out to be design flaws and those had to be reengineered. Those were the scary ones, because you never knew if your changed design would work any better than the first one, or if the different configuration would have a ripple effect that would knock out something else.

Toward the end I felt like we were sending four people out into space in a vehicle made more of hope and prayers than of hard metal.

They say a painting is never finished, only abandoned. It shouldn’t be that way with spaceships, but the sad truth is that you can always improve the design. Launch windows
won’t wait for a perfect ship, though, and funding is a finite resource, so all you can do is make the best ship you can with the time and materials you’ve got, and then trust the astronauts to keep it working throughout the mission.

We didn’t do a bad job. I can say with great pride that the spaceship didn’t kill anyone. Technically neither did the scout planes, though when a man’s body lies a few hundred feet from a crash site it’s hard to say that the plane didn’t kill him. But even if we’d known about the takeoff instability, we’d still have sent the planes along and hoped for the best. It was too late to redesign them, too late to change the mission profile, too late to do anything but light the rockets and go.

On launch day, the Cape was packed for a dozen miles in every direction, and every television in the country was tuned to the NASA channel. I think it was finally soaking in to a whole generation of people that we were once again doing something great, that there was more to life than just the day-to-day grind. We were about to explore another planet!

There wasn’t a dry eye in the house when the clock ticked down to zero and the Saturn VI bellowed its liftoff roar across the palmettos. Even the people who thought it was a waste of money were whispering, “Go, baby, go!” while the rocket struggled to lift the spaceship into orbit. I was in the control center, and people later told me that my speech synthesizer was saying, “Don blah huh,” over and over again, but what I was really saying was, “Don’t blow up, don’t blow up!”

Miraculously, it didn’t. The Saturn put them into orbit, the final stage launched them out past the Moon for a gravity assist, and the ion rocket kicked in and propelled them gently on toward Mars.

The tabloids went especially nuts during the eight months it took our guys to get there; the grinning vacuousness that seems to affect all astronaut transmissions meant for public
consumption—even Alexander’s, I’m sorry to say—palled after only a couple of weeks, and was replaced in the headlines by rampant speculation over the “real” reason for the mission. Surely it was a humanitarian gesture to take Alexander home! Or a rendezvous with the Aztecs known to inhabit Olympus Mons! And just what kind of torrid romantic doings were really going on when the cameras weren’t rolling? The most amusing of the stories were faxed to the crew until Mary Paiz, speaking for them all, sent back a transmission asking us to stop. If Alexander had a reaction, he didn’t show it.

After that they lived in their own private little world. Their recycling equipment kept them alive and healthy, and the entertainment
system
and
scientific
instruments

(indistinguishable from their point of view) kept them sane, and before they knew it they were braking into orbit around Mars.

They spent a few days sending out communications satellites so they would be in constant contact with each other no matter how far apart they got on the ground, mapping their landing site, and making sure the automatic instruments would continue to take pictures and other readings while they were gone. Then when they were sure their transfer vehicle would be warm and waiting for them when they got back, they climbed into the lander and headed down.

No waiting in orbit for one poor astronaut like the Apollo guys had done. All four went to the surface, and all four would contribute equally to the exploration. We had enough missions planned for everybody to have their fill.

They landed in the Valles Marineris, down at the lower end where there would be lots of flood debris and erosion would have exposed plenty of geological strata for them to study without digging. The valley was so wide at that point that the sides were over the horizon, and all of it was flood plain. The ultralight airplanes would allow them to range
farther afield, but that’s where everyone expected the action to be.

Except the tabloid-reading public, of course. They wanted to know about the face and the pyramid. Never mind that photos from orbit showed two unassuming hills and a few eroded craters; people were sure that an on-site investigation would turn up alien artifacts by the truckload.

When they learned that NASA had scheduled an ultralight flyby only after all the other mission objectives had been met, the ruckus could be heard all the way to Mars.

NASA didn’t budge. We released new photos from orbit showing the same thing we already knew from the last orbital survey, and the crew went on about the business of setting up their dome and making their first cautious forays into the Martian wilderness.

Cautious was the word. Mars is barely more habitable than the Moon. The air is thin and mostly carbon dioxide, so the astronauts had to wear pressure suits at all times, but there’s just enough of it for a cold wind to suck the heat out of a suit in practically no time. A single mistake could be fatal, and everyone made their share of mistakes. Not long after they got there, Mary slipped with a rock hammer and punctured her pressure suit, but Alex dragged her back to the dome and tossed her inside before she ran out of air. Dave didn’t reinstall one of the dome’s two air recycling canisters properly after he recharged it and nearly asphyxiated them all in their sleep. Shawnee stayed out too long after dusk and nearly froze to death before she could make it back to the dome.

And the ultralight airplanes turned out to be much trickier to fly than we had hoped. The problem was mostly on takeoff and landing, when they made the transition from hovering on their jet exhaust to actually flying. Mars’s atmosphere is too thin to make a rolling takeoff practical, especially on rocky ground, so the ultralights were designed like Harrier jets, with vectored thrust engines
that could be rotated downward for takeoff and landing.

Problem was, at inbetween angles they really affected the wings’ lift, and there was a configuration in the middle where the engines didn’t have enough thrust for the plane to hover anymore and the wings didn’t have enough lift for it to fly, so if you weren’t moving fast enough when you went through that phase you fell like a rock.

Alex found out about it the first time he took one of the planes up for a test flight. He was going through the checklist, calling out his actions as he rose to about fifty feet, brought the nose up, and increased the thrust for flight, when he crossed through the dead zone. “Throttle up to eighty percent, engines running smooth, tilting forward to—shit!” The stall warning buzzer overrode his voice for a moment, then his words became intelligible again as he said, “—nose down, throttles to full, gaining speed. Starting to feel some response to the controls. Okay, I think I’m flying now, but that didn’t feel right at all. I’m going to bring it around for a visual.”

“Roger,” Dave said. “I’ve got the binks on you. Don’t see anything wrong from here, but maybe when you come around. You sure you don’t want to land?”

“Not until I find out what happened,” Alex said. He had the pilots’ almost instinctive urge to put air rather than rock beneath him when he had a problem. He banked the plane around and did a slow pass over the dome—slow being about a hundred miles an hour in the thin Martian air.

Dave gave him a close inspection with binoculars, but didn’t see anything wrong. “Looks copacetic, ol’ boy,” he said.

The ultralights were mostly wing, since Mars’s atmosphere is so thin. Alex waggled them a little, then jounced the plane up and down a bit with the elevator.

“Flies like a pregnant cow,” he reported. “Just like it did in the simulator. But I never felt anything like that dropout
before. I’m going to take it up a ways and see if I can repeat it.”

“You sure you want to do that?” Dave asked him.

“I don’t want to try landing until I know what happened,”

Alex replied.

Back home at mission control we were all pulling our hair out. We had a man in the air with a problem—a hundred and fifty million miles away. What we were hearing had happened thirteen minutes ago. Alex could have been dead already and we wouldn’t know it until the radio signal carrying his last words caught up to us. We had people in the simulator trying to figure out what had happened up there the moment we heard there was a problem, but even if they figured it out instantly, it would be thirteen more minutes before their solution helped Alex any.

So we hung onto our butts and gritted our teeth while we listened to Alex calmly describe everything he did.

“Climbing through eight thousand. I can see quite a ways from up here. Man oh man, a hell of a lot of water must have come through this canyon. It looks like it was cut with a fire hose. Okay, I’m at ten oh and slowing. Bringing the engines backward to hover. Angle at ten, twenty, thirty—
there it goes! Get back here, you bastard! Throttling up and tilting on back to forty, fifty, sixty. Airspeed down to forty, thirty, twenty. It’s looking stable now. Hovering like a balloon. Plenty of control. It’s just in that transitional phase where it all goes to hell for a second.”

He tried switching back over to forward flight, and sure enough the same thing happened, so he brought it to a stop again and tried it over and over until he learned how to compensate for it. “All right, here’s what we’re going to have to do,” he said as he dropped back down toward the base for a landing. “It’ll suck fuel like a tank rupture, but we’ve got to go up and down like an elevator for at least a thousand feet before we switch flight modes, ’cause we’re going to lose a couple hundred feet in transition.”

Mary said, “Why the hell didn’t they figure that out back home?”

“Who knows?” Alex said. “Planes always act squirrelly at low speed. They couldn’t test these things in partial vacuum for more than a few seconds at a time, ’cause they don’t have a vacuum pump that’ll keep up with a wind tunnel. And they sure as hell couldn’t test it at a third of a gee.” He laughed. “I’ll bet they’re scurrying to figure it out now.”

He was right about that. Everybody involved in the ultralight design ran for days without sleep trying to understand what had happened and how to correct for it with materials the Mars crew had on hand. They figured it out, too, and cobbled together a fix out of an empty fuel tank and duct tape that reduced the instability to about half what it was originally, but that was the best they could do.

The problem was inherent in the wing design, and there wasn’t anything they could do on site to correct for that.

So the crew went on with their jobs, flying planes that were ready to smash them into the ground at a moment’s notice. It was either that or forget about ninety percent of the mission objectives, but this was our only shot at Mars.

There was no money for another mission, and even if the money miraculously showed up in the budget, these four wouldn’t be going back. There wasn’t any question what they would do. I’d have done the same thing in their place.

I keep telling myself that.

Mars Mission a Coverup!

Why NASA Won’t Ask the Questions YOU Want Answered!

For months nobody had any more problems with the planes. All four astronauts flew them dozens of times each, and they got so used to the instability that we nearly forgot it was there. With all the new discoveries the crew were
making about Mars we had so much else to think about that the airplane problem faded into the background.

When we lost the first plane it had nothing to do with the flight problem anyway. A dust storm got it during the night, plucked it away like it had never been there. Alex said the crew never even heard a noise. They just looked out in the morning after a hard blow and saw that it was gone, and the other plane was missing a couple feet of fabric at the end of its left wing.

They were able to fix that easily enough and go on flying.

Fortunately there weren’t that many flights left in the mission plan. They had accomplished all the major objectives, and now they were working their way down the

“wish list,” the extra projects that they could do if there was time before their launch window opened for the return trip to Earth.

One of those was a long-range flight to check another site on the planet for signs of life. They had found dozens of tantalizing clues, including rocks like the one found in Antarctica that contained what might have been fossilized microbes, and colored layers of sediment that had unusually high concentrations of carbon, but they hadn’t found proof that life had ever existed on the planet, much less that it existed now. That was the one big question everyone wanted an answer to, and it was looking like the crew was going to come home empty-handed.

They had already flown the two-thousand-mile length of the canyon, so when Alex proposed taking a flight of similar length northward to check out another site, nobody argued that the distance was too great. Nobody argued much at all until he revealed his intended landing site: the pyramid and face in Cydonia.

Maybe it was his idea of a practical joke. Or maybe it was revenge. He knew that actual video footage of the area taken from a low-flying plane would ruin the site forever as an object of new-age pseudoscience. Maybe he wanted to
get back at the tabloids that had made his life miserable.

We’ll never know. All we know for sure is that he justified his choice by pointing out that the geology at Cydonia was different from what they had been studying, so since they had come up empty-handed on the search for life where they were, it made a good candidate for further exploration.

And going there incidentally fulfilled the wishes of a large portion of the population who had paid for the mission.

Nobody missed the irony of sending the “space alien” to check out the site. I think Alex probably enjoyed that. And he certainly enjoyed the idea of getting out by himself for a few days. With the prospect of another eight months in a can with his three crewmates coming up, he wanted as much solitude as he could soak in before they left.

So he packed his toothbrush and enough food and water for a week, and took off for Cydonia. He would have to spend a couple of cramped nights sleeping in the cockpit of the plane, but he didn’t care about that. He had camped out plenty of times in pup tents on fishing trips in Wyoming; he was used to sleeping in tight quarters.

This had to be the happiest time in his life. Here was a kid from a small western town, a strange-looking kid that practically the whole world had made fun of—making a solo flight a sixth of the way around Mars. He was exactly where he wanted to be, and he’d gotten there despite all the superstitious, credulous, and downright malicious people who stood in his way. And not only that, but he had made his mother proud. Hell, he had made his father proud, and that’s saying something.

A straight route would have taken him to the east of the Chryse site where Viking 1 had landed, but he took the extra time to fly over it, swooping low and circling around to take pictures of the fragile little lander sitting there on the boulder-strewn plain.

Everyone back home had grown familiar with images of the habitat site from the air. Its bubble and lander and power generator provided a comforting picture of home away from home, a place we could all imagine ourselves living in our dreams. The Viking probe had the exact opposite effect. It looked lost down there among the rocks, a tiny speck of technology amid a vast, forbidding landscape, its dish antenna still pointing into the sky like a hand reaching for the planet it could never touch again.

“That’s, um, the Viking probe,” Alex said quietly after his third circle around it. “I guess I’ll be going on to Cydonia now.”

By the time he got there, hours later, his sense of humor had returned. As he approached the pyramid and the face, his onboard video camera showed the now-familiar rounded hills and craters that we know them to be, but he talked as if an entire Martian city were unfolding beneath him.

“Oh my God!” he said, “there it is. Look at the buildings, and the elevated walkways, and the flags waving from the tops of the towers. They look like—yes, yes, they’re Buffalo on a field of blue! They’re Wyoming flags! Proof positive that this is the site of a massive government coverup. And there’s the face. Is it a space alien? Sorry to say it doesn’t look a thing like me. In fact it looks more like my dad. Hi, Dad.” He banked the plane around so the bumpy hill was right in front of him. “Look, it’s speaking! What’s it saying?

Looks like, ‘Nyah, nyah, fooled you!’ And now it’s fading away. Yes, it’s turning into just an ordinary hill with craters in it. Oh, what cruel fate!”

He banked away. “Well, what a disappointment that was, eh? I guess I’ll just land over there by what used to be its chin and see about doing some real science.”

Mary, who had been monitoring his signal over the satellite link, was laughing out loud. Most of us at Mission Control were, too, but a few people weren’t. Space flight
was a popularity game, and Alex had just cost us some supporters.

He didn’t care. I never got the chance to ask him, but I know what he thought of that kind of support anyway.

He brought the plane in high, making his customary “Yee-ha!” yell as he went through the roller coaster moment, then set it down light as a feather on the rocky ground at the base of the hill. He jumped out and tied down the wings so a stray gust of wind wouldn’t blow away his ride home, then turned around and trudged through the rocks to see what he could see.

He did not send another transmission for seventeen minutes.

When he did, there was a peculiar strained quality to his voice. “Mary,” he said. “Houston. I’ve found something.”

The tone of Mary Paiz’ answering transmission clearly showed that she expected another joke announcement.

“Copy, Buck.”

“No kidding, Wilma. Hold on. Going to visual.” He switched on his video camera and broadcast an image of a jagged stone in a field of other stones. “See this?”

“Wonderful rock, Alexander.”

“Not the rock. This patch here.” His finger prodded a shadowy area. “See this? Well, close up it looks like velvet.”

“Velvet?” asked Mary.

“Yeah. It’s fuzzy, and I can’t get light to reflect from it, not even from my helmet lamp. It looks like—” He paused.

“Like what?” Mary said.

“I was going to say ‘lichen,’ but it’s soft,” he said.

“Springy. Like some kind of…” His reluctance to say the word was palpable.

After about five seconds of dead silence—which seemed like the longest hesitation in the history of the solar system

—Mary prompted him again. “Alex? Come in, Alex.”

The broadcast image grew as Alexander zoomed in. He described the image out loud in case the transmission
wasn’t getting through. “Okay. Reality check. At ten power I see little stalks with cup-shaped ends, all packed together so there’s hardly any space between them. They’re stuck to the rock by more little cups that look quite a bit like the ones on top. I’m trying not to be too credulous here, but that’s definitely an organized structure. A biological structure.”

“Are you shittin’ me?” Mary asked.

“Live transmission,” Alex reminded her. “But no, I’m not.

This is for real. They look like plants of some sort.”

“Holy…. Wow. And us with less than a week left on the planet.”

“Well, you know how it is. You don’t find the souvenirs you want until the end of your vacation.”

“Do you see any more?”

“Let me look.” Alex stood up and panned around at the other rocks. “Yeah,” he said. “Five or six patches of it. No, more than that. Oh, there’s a big one. Must be three inches across.”

“Get samples,” Mary told him.

“Duh,” he said. His voice barely betrayed the excitement he had to be feeling, but the biomonitors in his suit told a different story. His heart was racing, and his skin temperature had risen a couple of degrees. He knew he’d just made the history books again, and this entry would dwarf the one about Drier’s syndrome or even the first mission to Mars. He was now the man who had discovered the first indisputable evidence of extraterrestrial life.

He spent the next two days scraping stuff off rocks, digging in the ground for other organisms, and climbing up and down the hill looking for anything else he could find.

He even bagged up one entire rock a couple of feet across because it had four different kinds of growth on it and he thought maybe it would provide some idea of how the Martian ecosystem worked.

And then it was time to head back. He packed his samples in the plane, strapped everything down, and lifted off for home. He took the plane up a few hundred feet, tilted the engines forward—and dropped like a rock.

And kept dropping. Long after the wings should have caught enough air to start flying, the plane still generated no lift. “Shit,” Alex said, “there must be a downdraft.

Increasing thrust to max.”

The plane kept dropping. In one-third gee, he had plenty of time to watch the ground come up at him, but his biomonitors showed his pulse rate barely rising. “It’s not going to work in flight mode,” he said. “Transitioning back to hover mode.” He angled the engines back. “Come on, you dirty bitch. Come on, come on!”

We heard the impact. It sounded like someone had dropped a dictionary on a beer can.

“Alex?” Mary called out. “Alex, are you okay?”

“Well, I’m down,” he said, “but I wouldn’t say I’m okay.

Both engines broke loose in the crash. They’re doing cartwheels across the rocks now. There, one of ’em stopped. The other one’s still rolling around like a pinwheel.” He coughed. “Damn. Bit my tongue.”

“Are you…can you…?”

“Fix the plane? I don’t see how. Even if the engines still work, the wings are crumpled like tin foil. But it looks like I’m going to have to figure something out, doesn’t it?” He didn’t state the obvious: there was no backup plane to come get him.

He got out of the wreckage and hiked through the rocks to the closest engine. It had been battered so badly that it was barely recognizable. The other one had tried to suck in a rock as it was winding down, and what was left of the turbine lay scattered all around it.

“Looks like time for plan B,” Alex said.

Space Boy Mutiny!!

Did He Intend to Stay on Mars All Along?

There was no plan B. Everyone wracked their brains for a way to get an astronaut two thousand miles back to base without a plane, but there just wasn’t any. He wouldn’t make a tenth that distance on foot. Dave suggested going for him in the landing vehicle, but Alex vetoed that idea right away.

“It’s not designed for suborbital flight,” he said. “Besides, even if you could restart the lower stage and fly it, you’d have to rob fuel from the upper stage, and then all four of us would be stuck on the ground until our food and air ran out. If we don’t get back into orbit within the week we’ll miss our launch window.”

“We can’t just leave you there,” Dave said.

“I’m all for rescue if you’ve got a realistic plan, but using the lander isn’t going to work.”

At Mission Control, we had to concur. That was the hardest decision I ever made in my life, even though I was just part of the engineering group and even though I knew there wasn’t a real decision. We might have risked the other three for a chance to save Alex, but we wouldn’t doom all four of them just to make a vain attempt.

I wasn’t the capcom on this mission, but I was Alex’s best friend, so I got to deliver the bad news. There was no way to hold a conversation with the speed of light lag what it was, so I just made a short speech and had my voice synthesizer remove all the pauses before transmitting it. I won’t transcribe it here; all the radio messages from the mission are on file for the curious. There’s only one thing to say in a situation like that anyway. You say you’re sorry that things worked out the way they did, and you’re going to miss your best friend very much, but you want your other friends to come back home safe, dammit, so don’t try anything stupid.

There were a lot of tearful goodbyes. Alex’s mom and dad talked with him a couple of times, and he told them not to worry, that he’d had a pretty full life and no regrets. “I’d have come here even if I knew in advance that this was how it would end,” he said. The newspapers made quite a deal out of that, and for the first time since Alex was born some of them ran an entire article without once mentioning his physical appearance.

Mary wasn’t ready to give up. She cursed us all, including Alex, and tried to convince Dave and Shawnee to defy orders and try the lander anyway, but Dave had backed off from that idea after he’d seen how impossible it was, and Shawnee merely said, “Over my dead body. No offense, Alex.”

Alex said, “None taken.”

Launch time came, and with a great deal of argument but no real hope left, Mary and Dave and Shawnee climbed aboard the lander and rode it back into orbit. The transfer vehicle was still waiting, snug and warm, to take them back to Earth.

And Alex? He did the only thing left for him to do. He studied the lifeforms he had found and transmitted his findings back to us. He told us how the organisms’ cupped tops followed the sun, how they closed up at night, and how the whole colony moved, ever so slowly, around the face of the rocks over the course of the day. They weren’t quite plants, and they weren’t quite animals. They were something else entirely. Alex’s description of them was incredible, exciting like nothing else humanity had ever experienced, but we couldn’t forget that we were learning it from a man whose time was rapidly running out.

He couldn’t either. Occasionally his voice would crack, and he would stay quiet for a few minutes while he got his emotions under control again. Those of us listening were sniffling and wiping our eyes as well. By then we numbered at least half the people on Earth, since the TV networks as
well as the NASA channel had started live coverage. I was pissed that they hadn’t bothered until someone was about to die, but that’s the way the media do things. Science by itself isn’t interesting; human drama is what gets the ratings.

Alex knew that. He hadn’t spent a lifetime under the media bug-lens without learning what played well and what didn’t. He must have been planning his final speech since the moment he knew he was stranded. It wasn’t a long one

—he knew the average viewer’s attention span, too—but he said what he wanted to say at the one moment in his life when he knew people would hear it. And maybe even listen.

It came in the middle of day five. He had had a hard time the previous night, nearly freezing in the crumpled ultralight’s tiny cabin when the outside temperature had dropped to minus-sixty. The plane’s batteries were dead and his suit batteries were nearly gone as well; he kept from freezing by exercising constantly, which burned up air faster than his recycler could keep up with it. He was down to practically nothing by morning; it was clear he wouldn’t survive another night.

He spent half the day finishing up what observations he could make, describing what microscopic details of the

“planimals” he could see with the portable sampling kit, but just a little after noon, Cydonia time, he stopped and said, “I think it’s time we all had a little talk.”

The video camera was dead by then, so all we have to go on are the radio signals and the orbital camera’s pictures of his footprints, but it seems apparent that he climbed up the flank of the hill above the ultralight, stopping at the “chin”

and looking south as he spoke.

“I am standing here on an alien world,” he said. “I’ve been called an alien myself over the years, so maybe it’s appropriate that this is where I wound up. I certainly can’t ignore the irony of my final resting place, a hill with some craters on it that made so many people think there was life
on Mars. And so there is, but it has nothing to do with mysterious monuments to anthropocentric thinking.”

He laughed softly. “Anthropocentric. Look it up. It’s a dirty word, but it’s in the dictionary.” He must have sat down on a rock; we could hear his pressure suit creak. “I wish each and every one of you could see what I see here. Mars is nothing like Earth. It’s got a volcano the size of the United States and a canyon so wide that you can stand in the bottom and not see either side. When I woke up this morning there was dry ice on the ground. Frozen carbon dioxide. The air froze here last night. It’s like that everywhere I turn. There are more wonders here than we could even begin to imagine…and I’m here to see them because we were crazy enough to come look.”

He sighed. “Why can’t that be the thing that excites our imaginations? Why must we waste our minds and our energy on delusions that we should have put aside long ago? Faces on Mars. Alien abductions. Imaginary beings dictating our lives at every turn. What’s wrong with us? We have brains, we have senses; why can’t we use them to understand the universe around us rather than make up elaborate fantasies and pretend they’re the truth?”

“;Well, here’s a truth for you. I am Alexander Drier. Like the rest of you, I’m a human being. And from this moment on, like the rest of you, I’m a Martian. We all became Martians the second humanity set foot on this world, and because of what we’ve learned here we’ll all carry a little bit of Mars around with us for the rest of our lives.”

“Does that somehow diminish our humanity? Of course not. It means we’re more human. Because only human beings could have gotten here. We dreamt it, we wanted it, we built it, and we did it. And Mars will always be here, a beckoning light in the sky for anyone else with a dream and the determination to see it through.”

“I want you to remember that, when you look at the new face on Mars.” He stood up and walked back down the hill,
out into the sandy plain beyond.

“New face?” asked Mary, in equatorial orbit a third of the way around the planet.

“You’ll see,” Alex replied.

They didn’t see for several hours, until the polar mapping satellite made its pass over him. By then he’d made most of one circuit and he was well into a second one, scuffing up the soil with his boots like a kid making designs in fresh snow.

It was a bit lopsided, as patterns drawn on the ground without surveying instruments often are, but it was perfectly recognizable. A long oval, ballooning out on one end and narrowing down to a pointy chin on the other. Big, almond-shaped eyes filling nearly half the enclosed space.

Two little dots for a nose and a single line for a mouth, bent upward at the ends in a goofy grin. Alexander Drier’s own caricature.

“Alex, what the hell is that for?” Mary asked when she saw it.

“A…reminder,” he said. His voice was ragged and he was panting hard. “Besides, people wanted…a face. Who am I to deny them?”

She laughed, but it turned into a sob. “I’m sorry, Alex. I’m sorry it has to end like this.”

“Me too,” he said, “but believe me, it’s better than it might have been. At least I got here. Oof!” There was a thump over the radio.

“Alex?”

“S’all right. Tripped on a rock. It’s getting hard to see.

Look, I don’t have much daylight left, or air either, and I don’t really want to make people listen to me die, so I’m going to shut off my radio.”

“No! Alex, you don’t have to die alone.”

“I’m not alone. I’ve got you, and Mom and Dad, and Colin, and Uncle George, and everybody. I’ve got all these little whatever-they-ares growing on the rocks all around me.

I’ve got the whole universe right over my head. I’m not alone.”

“That’s not what I meant. I meant—”

“I know what you meant, but that’s not the way I want to go. Look, it’s time. Everyone out there, I love you. Try to love each other, too, okay? This is Alexander Drier, signing off.”

There was a click as he switched off his radio.

Mars Mission a Hoax!

Space Boy Spotted Pumping Gas In Wyoming

The next pass showed where he had fallen. He had made it back around to the chin, and had lain down with his arms and legs outstretched, a tiny body to go with the face he had drawn. The orbital camera’s resolution wasn’t good enough to tell if he had opened his suit or not, but he wouldn’t have lasted long either way. With night falling and the temperature plummeting, he would have frozen to death in minutes.

The face didn’t last a month, of course. The next windstorm obliterated his tracks, leaving only his body and the crumpled remains of the ultralight airplane as evidence that anyone had ever been there.

But we knew. Alex’s last days wouldn’t fade from our memory, not for as long as anyone looked up in the night sky and wondered what was out there.

Mary and Dave and Shawnee made it back to Earth with only the usual harrowing adventures. Congress cut NASA’s budget the next year, but not as bad as we had been afraid they would, so we cautiously began work on our next phase in exploring our solar system: an orbital habitat that people can actually live in long enough to travel to the outer planets. The first prototype will be tested for a couple of years in Earth orbit, then leased out to the highest bidder for living space. I figure I might just survive long enough to
rent some cubic there myself. It won’t be Heinlein’s Waldo, but it’ll be something for an old man who can barely move here on Earth.

In the meantime, life lurches along the way it usually does. The newspapers still carry horoscopes, but they’re not on the front page anymore. Government scandals and student unrest have taken up that space again.

And of course the latest Alien Shocker.

Three months ago a boy was born in Mississipi with Drier’s Syndrome. His parents are good but simple people who hadn’t expected a media feeding frenzy at their front door, but they knew opportunity when they saw it. They’ve been portrayed as country hicks who ran afoul of an alien mad scientist, but they’ve already bought a house on fifty acres, fenced and guarded by a dozen rent-a-cops until they can find enough rottweilers and dobermans to do the job for free.

That solved their external problem, but internally they’re still going through the same thing Mark and Faye went through nearly thirty years ago.

The Driers aren’t answering their mail, so the mother wrote me a plaintive letter, begging me to help her understand her child. Among the things she asked was a simple, straightforward question: Is my son a spaceman?

I intend to answer with the only truth I know, taught to me by my friend, the astronaut from Wyoming.

That’s up to him.

OceanofPDF.com

PRIDE, by Mary A. Turzillo The hot fur thing under Kevin’s shirt clawed at his chest.

Nice going, he thought. First the bum rap for weed, and now if I don’t get caught stealing lab animals, I’ll get rabies from this freak.

Frankenlab, at Franken U, AKA Franklin Agricultural College, was messing with animals, electrodes in their brains, cloning them like Dolly the Sheep, except not regular animals. Dead animals from frozen meat. And they were going to kill the animals.

He couldn’t save them all. Those fuzzy orange-furred mice, most wouldn’t make it. Those guys from Animals Our Brethren had pried open cages, and when the mice wouldn’t come out, they shook them out, and when the mice squeed, cowering under lab tables, they kicked them until they ran into corners, and from there may God have mercy on their itty souls.

Kevin petted the little monster through his shirt, but it writhed around and gummed him. “I’m saving your life, dumb-ox!” He dashed out of the building minutes before alarms brought the fire department.

Kevin had been in trouble before. A year ago, his girl friend’s cousin Ed and he had been cruising around in Ed’s van, which had expired plates. Kevin didn’t know about the baggie of pot under the driver’s seat. When the state patrol started following, Ed asked Kevin to switch places. His license, like the plates, was expired, he said. They switched, veering madly, on a lonely stretch of 422. When they finally stopped and the cops asked to search the van, Kevin shrugged and said okay.

“And whose is this?” Ed said, not me. Kevin was too surprised to look properly surprised, and this was a zero-tolerance state. So Ed got off with a warning, and Kevin, stuck with court-appointed counsel, served thirty days.

* * * *

Kevin had been looking for a job to pay for college, when local papers broke the story that some thousand-odd animals (mostly, admittedly, mice) would be killed because their experiment was over. What was he thinking of? He wasn’t an animal-rights kind of dude. Still, he felt panicked exultation fleeing the scene of the crime.

He struggled to control his Pinto while driving with the squirming thing scratching inside his shirt. He fumbled the back door key and pounded downstairs to the basement, where he pulled the light cord above the laundry tub and took the furball out of his shirt.

“Oh God, what have they done to you?” It was deformed: big head, chopped-off tail. Cat? Dog? A mix?

He deposited it in the laundry tub. Boggling at the size of its mouth, he realized it needed food. Now.

Forward pointing eyes. Meat-eater. He ran upstairs and grabbed a raw chicken breast from the fridge. He held it out to the cub.

The cub flopped down on its belly in the tub, and tried to howl. All that came out was a squeak.

He tried to stuff the meat into its mouth, but it flinched away and lay looking at him, sides heaving.

Maybe the mother chewed the food up for it. Mother? Not hardly. This thing didn’t have a mother. It was fucking hatched in Frankenlab.

Raised in farm country, Kevin liked animals. He sometimes even petted Rosebud, the town pit bull, when Rosebud wasn’t into tearing people’s arms off. If his parents had been rich, he’d be pre-veterinary at FrankenU.

Or a cattle rancher, or a discoverer of rare snakes.

He retrieved a knife from upstairs, hacked tidbits off the chicken breast, and put them in the cub’s mouth. The cub sucked on them, famished. It got to its feet and seized his finger with its front paws. Head held sideways, it chomped down on his finger. It did have a few teeth, it seemed.

He jerked away. “Stop it, you little monster!” Then he realized he might wake his mother.

Kevin, it’s a baby. Duh.

Where would he get a baby bottle?

He opened a can of condensed milk from the pantry, dipped a chicken chunk in it, and let the monster suck milk off the meat. Twenty minutes later it either got satisfied, or gave up. Its little belly looked marginally bigger, and the can was empty, mostly spilled on the laundry tub or his shirt.

It stretched and unsheathed claws way too big for a little guy the size of a raccoon.

Kevin thought, It’ll purr now. Instead, it washed its face, running front paws over those deformed big jaws.

And then, just when Kevin decided it was almost cute, it reached out a claw and pricked his arm, not enough to hurt, just to say, More?

“You’re beginning to tick me off,” he said. The cub’s gaze radiated adoration. It licked his hand, nearly rasping his skin off.

Its fur was golden retriever blonde, its eyes the color of river moss. Green-eyed blonde, like Sara. Dappled coat, like freckles on Sara’s sweet shoulders. Sara Jones: they were almost a couple before his arrest; now she acted distant.

The monster leapt out of the tub and landed on the floor.

It shook itself, surprised at the fall.

He lay down and stared at it, eye to eye. “You need a name.”

He was furious that they planned to kill it. It was harmless. Uh, maybe not harmless. Planning to get big, judging from those paws, each the size of cheeseburgers.

But innocent.

“What the hell have I got myself into?” he asked it.

Its grotesque little face shone with trust.

With the knife he’d used to cut the chicken, and thinking of Sara Jones, he tapped the little monster on each
shoulder, and said, “I dub thee Sir Jonesy.”

* * * *

For a week, he kept Jonesy locked in the root cellar. His mom either didn’t know, or pretended not to. Rosebud, Mr.

Trumbull’s pitbull, kept getting off his chain and sneaking over to paw at the basement door. There was an article in the paper about the lab fire, but the lab animals weren’t mentioned.

The scientists downplayed it all. The animals had been slated for “sacrifice,” Dr. Betty Hartley said. Federal regulations required that animals be euthanized at the end of an experiment, she said, plus the money had run out.

Cold. “Sacrifice”: nice euphemism. Like “put to sleep.” Like anything ever woke up from that sleep. Sacrifice? What, were they going to dance around an altar and beg God to protect them from weird-ass animal zombies?

Dr. Hartley said she was sad that the animals had all died in the fire, but accidents will happen.

So now he couldn’t let anybody in on his secret. It would be insane to let the scientists find the cub again and kill it.

But Jonesy (the cub was female, he discovered) whined and shivered in the root cellar, so he brought it upstairs.

His mother was not pleased.

“Look, Mom. I know it’s humongous for a kitten, but that’s all it is. Pet it?”

She refused to touch it. “I don’t care what it is, I don’t want it in my house.”

“Listen, they’ll kill it if I take it back. It’s cute, see?” He held it to his chest to minimize her view of the monstrous head. Its fur was rough, not silky like a kitten’s. But it was warm and happy to snuggle.

“Cute? Kevin, I’ll show you cute. I know you stole it from Frankenlab. It’ll probably get up in the night and suck our blood.”

“Shit, mom. It eats milk, not blood. You can’t just kick it out on the street like a—like a broken TV.”

“Kevin, get a job. And get that thing out of my house.”

But Kevin’s mother was too tired to put her foot down.

* * * *

The cub’s teeth started coming in. On a diet of ground meat that Kevin got from dumpster-diving, it had loads of energy. It used the energy stalking Kevin and shredding everything in Kevin’s room.

The eye teeth erupted. And erupted. And erupted. Not domestic cat teeth. Long as the fishing knife the cops had taken away from him when he was caught with the pot.

He woke up one morning to find out the monster sitting on his chest, hungry or affectionate, as if you could tell even with a tame cat.

“Man,” said Kevin, peering closer, “Your mom should have sued your orthodontist.”

The cub did not laugh.

Not a vampire, but those sharp, sharp teeth—

And then his mind chewed through a bunch of information and farted out the truth. Rumors of ice age frozen flesh?

Cloning? Bingo.

The damn thing, scrutinizing him with gold-green eyes, opening its huge mouth in a silent howl, was a sabertooth tiger.

“Woo, dude. I thought you were trouble before.”

It would need lots more meat.

At first he bought cheap cuts, then when he realized his money from mowing lawns wasn’t cutting it, he abstracted food from his own meals and from the refrigerator. And dumpster-dove the local supermarket.

One day, he found his mother in the kitchen, her hand bandaged. He hoped the bite was from Rosebud, but if Rosebud had bitten her, she’d probably be a mangled corpse.

He sank into a chair, while the sabertooth attacked the stinky mess he’d brought home for it.

“That’s it, Kevin. You’re my only son, the light of my life, a good smart boy although way too trusting, but that cat is out by tonight or I call the cops.” She blew her nose on a crumbled tissue. “I know where he came from.”

Kevin didn’t blame her. She was tired from overwork, just wanted to be left alone and sleep more than five hours at a time. They’d been moderately affluent before Kevin’s dad left. But Dad had a really good lawyer. The measly child support had stopped when Kevin turned eighteen. Dad still sent birthday cards with a two dollar bill in each.

“If the boy wants ta college education, a job will make him appreciate it more.”

Jobs, yeah, well. Jobs for twenty-one year old guys who’ve done even a little time aren’t easy to come by. Odd jobs, maybe shoveling walks in winter. Kevin wasn’t a drinker, so he didn’t have AA networking to fall back on.

Also, the damn cub was too mischievous to leave alone for long.

The week before the cat nipped Mom, he’d come home from helping a neighbor get her hay in and found the cub playing with a large rat. When the sabertooth saw him, she grabbed the rat in her mouth and tried to run away. Thank god it had been a rat and not those ratty-looking poodles the Parks owned.

So Mom was right. The cat needed a home.

Sara. Their beginning romance had aborted, but he ran into to her sometimes at the feed store. She’d understood Kevin didn’t know about the pot. But she always said, “It’s not a good time,” if he wanted to come over to the farm, or ask her out, not that he had much money for dates.

Guess she didn’t want to be with a loser.

But, hell, he could rise again. Many great men, millionaires, politicians, had a shady past.

Sara didn’t hate him.

He put the cub in an appliance carton (it whimpered, but complied), wrapped it with pink and ivory paper and gold ribbon, and lugged it to the Pinto. The cub thrashed around inside the box on his front seat, while he drove like a maniac to Sara’s farm. Sara’s parents hadn’t really worked the family farm much since her granddad died, just kept geese and a big garden, and when they moved south to escape the winters, Sara kept the farm. Kevin used to help out, before he went to jail.

He lost his nerve and left the gyrating package on her paint-peeled porch.

* * * *

The phone was ringing when he got back.

“Kevin, what is this? It nearly took my arm off.”

He breathed slowly. He’d enrolled in an anger management class while in jail, not because he had problems with anger, but because the textbook looked interesting, and he found the breathing helped calm him.

“Sara, it’s a sabertooth tiger.”

“They’re extinct.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, so’s the Bill of Rights. But this thing is a clone. From frozen meat.”

“And this concerns me how?”

“It’s, uh—”

“Look, Kevin, I remember the Maine Coon kittens you gave me. I love those cats. But this is different, no? You must have stolen this thing from the college. And that’s not all. It’s going to grow up and be really aggressive. And, well, also—”

“Sorry. I’ll come and get her back. Don’t let her out, though. I’m not sure she knows how to defend herself.”

When he got to the farm, Sara acted nervous, but she kissed him, and they sat on the couch and talked, about Ed, about jail. They didn’t have sex, but he got his hopes up they could reconnect. Jonesy, meantime, tried to shred
everything in her living room. She had put out a bowl of hamburger, otherwise the cub might have started shredding their clothes.

“It’s not exactly cute,” she said.

Jonesy’s whiskers were almost as amazing as her teeth.

Long and delicate. She stalked everything in the room, even shadows.

Kevin watched. The cub would hunker down and wriggle her backside, then dart forward and roll upside down. The hunker/wriggle part looked like any cat, but he’d never seen an animal do a half roll while attacking. Did that have anything to do with the sword-like canines?

“Kevin, you know I love animals.”

Kevin said nothing. Their shoulders touched, and he put his hand on hers.

She left it there. “Okay. Until you get a place of your own.

Don’t come visiting without calling, though.” She withdrew her hand.

Somebody was living with her. Of course.

* * * *

The arrangement lasted three weeks.

When he drove over in answer to her phone call, Sara was crying. Jonesy had killed one of her geese, a real achievement, since even Rosebud was loathe to fool with the geese. But when Kevin opened the door, he boggled at how much the sabertooth had grown. Jonesy had to weigh as much Rosebud now.

Oops. What if Jonesy had attacked Sara?

“I let her run,” she said. “You can’t keep an animal like this cooped up. And it killed Emily Dickinson.” Emily Dickinson was one of her geese. She named her geese after women poets.

“What have you been feeding her?” He felt shame that he hadn’t offered to pay for Jonesy’s food. As if he could. He had a sudden panic over the welfare of the two Maine coon
cats, but they were dozing on the sofa. The sofa was shredded, but the cats were fine.

“I feed her canned dogfood, but she’s always hungry. I haven’t seen a raccoon in the neighborhood for two weeks.

Kevin, I don’t know where you can take her but she can’t stay here.”

Was Jonesy grown enough to survive on her own, on garbage, raccoons, and people’s geese? “How did she learn to eat the raccoons?”

“When I separated them, Emily kind of—split open, you know—and Jonesy stood over Emily, and then, as if she was sorry for the poor goose, she bent over and started licking her feathers, and she tasted the blood, and all of a sudden

—”

Kevin had seen barn cats experience this epiphany. They discover their toy tastes good. Most learned from the mother cat, but get them hungry enough—

“She doesn’t bother the geese any more. They run away.

But then there’s the deer.”

Kevin looked at his baby monster. “Jonesy couldn’t take down a deer.”

“Maybe not, but she sure knows how to chase them. And I worry about Mr. Trumbull’s cows.”

Kevin stood. “Thanks for taking care of her.”

She took his hand, then moved closer. They gazed at each other. Could he kiss her?

She stepped back. “Take her somewhere. Hey, what about your dad’s old trailer?”

The trailer featured scarcely more than a bed and a mini-dinette, abandoned on the lot near his mom’s apartment.

Roof leaked, plumbing wasn’t connected. No trailer park would let him in with that wreck.

Nor with an “exotic animal.” Even if he could pass Jonesy off as a rescued bobcat or lion cub.

“I’ll call around.” He had brought a collar and leash, and he snapped these on Jonesy. Jonesy had been on leash
before and didn’t like it, but she trusted Kevin enough not to fight.

Kevin was becoming an expert on smilodons. They weren’t even from the same branch of the Felidae family as lions and tigers, but still might live in families. He must seem to Jonesy like her mother or the leader of her—what did they call lion families?—pride.

He smiled at Sara, eyes full of hope.

“Go!” she said, shoving him playfully. The sabertooth bared huge teeth at Sara until she smoothed its back fur.

“You can come back. Bring Jonesy if you can control her.

Just call first.”

He led the sabertooth to his car. His mind roiled with possibility. Ask her! he thought. She’s got a new guy, or she doesn’t. Ask!

Too many secrets in Kevin’s life: an animal he couldn’t give up and couldn’t keep, and a girl he wanted and whose life had become a mystery.

“Cat,” he said. “We ain’t neither of us got no pride.”

* * * *

Kevin’s uncle owned some unworked farmland twenty miles out of town center. He got permission to park the trailer there, planning to haul water and use cartridges for gas heat. He bought a generator and parked the trailer well back from the road.

Odd jobs weren’t enough. His mom’s restaurant needed a dishwasher. Since the owner knew him—and about the jail time—there was no background check problem. Kevin bought a cellphone that didn’t require a credit card, and the modern man out of his time and Ice Age cat went there to live their hard life.

College plans receded into mist. Maybe someday Kevin could write a book about this. He bought a cheap digital camera and started a journal of the Jonesy’s growth and behavior.

The sabertooth soon learned to paw open the refrigerator.

Kevin was forced to keep only vegetables in it. To supplement the dogfood, he brought home a cut-up chicken or a chuck steak every night. Jonesy tore into these, sometimes before Kevin could get the wrapper off.

Sometimes the wrapper would get impaled on the four inch-long canines, and she would run around the room trying to scrape them off. Kevin fell down laughing the first time that happened.

Kevin’s own meals were either vegetarian or eaten at the restaurant.

* * * *

He bought a used copy of Born Free at a yard sale. Jonesy wasn’t any kind of modern cat, but it was a start. The librarian found him treatises on the smilodons of North America, though he wasn’t even sure that’s what Jonesy was. He had to play it cool when the librarian got nosy about his interest in cloning.

Jonesy shredded any book he brought home. To her, books, like everything else, were toys. So his reading was restricted to the library and their internet computers, and since he didn’t like leaving the cat alone when she was awake, he kept all his research in his head.

He couldn’t keep the sabertooth penned up, any more than Sara could. So, after a few weeks, he let her off the long line he’d tied to the trailer, and watched her lope the perimeter of the mowed area, where the demolished farmhouse had set. The line wouldn’t hold her anyway, if she wanted to get away. She would chew through chain, though it might damage her beautiful teeth.

She stopped periodically to smell things, and her ears perked at the passage of a bird.

Then she saw the fox, and he thought he’d have to change her name to Turbo.

Did she eat the fox? No doubt she’d caught it. No bloody carcass in the trampled down area where the chase had ended. But for two days later, Jonesy looked quite pleased with herself.

The rest of that summer, the winter, and spring. The sabertooth grew sleek and menacing, muscles moving smoothly under short tawny fur. One of her magnificent eyeteeth loosened. When it fell out, she let Kevin feel inside her mouth, and underneath where it had been, he felt a new sharp point under the gum. Which grew and grew and grew. The other side did the same, and one morning he awoke to her heavy paws on his chest and opened his eyes to see her monstrous white glistening sabers new and sharp and creamy white, each as long as the knife they used in the restaurant kitchen to hack apart beef joints.

Her inscrutable face and hot moist breath made his heart jump with terror. But she was his companion; he had held her under his shirt. He had fed her milk.

He reached up and stroked her ears, which alone of her fur retained kittenish silkiness. Then, with the greatest caution, he touched her saber fangs. Smooth, like ivory knives. This meant she was—Smilodon fatalis? Smilodon neogaeus? Or the other genus—Megantereon? He couldn’t tell: he was no paleontologist.

He called Sara, to share this experience. She picked up after two rings, and hung up. But not even Sara’s rejection could spoil that moment.

He was the first man ever to touch a living smilodon’s teeth, and survive.

* * * *

Sara would call now and then to ask about Jonesy, or tell him about a job opening. He could leave the sabertooth with her during the day, she said.

But when he called, employers always knew he was the kid who went to jail for drugs. Such is rural town gossip.

Jonesy and he walked the perimeter of the farm every night, out of sight of the road. He’d been four years out of high school. College seemed much further away now. He thought, Some would say I have no life. A dumbass job. Had good grades, could gone to college, married a beautiful woman who owned land. Lost all that because I trusted the wrong person, didn’t fight the system hard enough. Could have done better. But I’ve touched the saber teeth of a smilodon, and if no other gift is given me in this life, that might be enough.

If Jonesy missed anything, she never said so.

Then Jonesy came into heat.

As she came insinuating up to him, dragging her butt against the floor, trying to hump the ragged sofa arm, beseeching him to do something, anything, he just said,

“Kitten, I’d write you a personals ad, but your kind don’t subscribe to the Country Cryer.”

Neutering, but how the hell would he pass her off as anything but what she was? The vet would remember the incident at Frankenlab, and all would be up. Another jail sentence for Kevin. Worse for Jonesy: “sacrifice” at the hands of the scientists.

He tried penning her in the trailer while he slept in the Pinto, but she started chewing through the metal window frame. He let her out, and she howled to get inside with him.

Next night, his cell phone rang.

“Kevin, Keith, whatever your name is. People hear that howling, don’t know what it is. But I do.”

Kevin’s heart lurched. Caller ID said: B. Hartley. The scientist. “Doctor Hartley. You plan to ‘sacrifice’ her now?”

“No, you dolt. Do I have to spell it out for you? I incited your stupid Animals Our Brethren people to start that fire so she’d get away.”

He took it in. “She’s in heat. What should—”

“She’ll either go out of heat, or she’ll attack somebody.

She may even decide you’re the lucky tom. Give her back to me.”

“Was there another sabertooth? A male?”

“Of course not, you idiot.”

He snapped the cellphone shut and threw it against a wall.

Jonesy disappeared into the woods behind French Lick Creek.

A week later she slunk back. Kevin waited, but she was not knocked up. How could she be?

* * * *

He was pretty sure Jonesy was keeping down the deer and raccoon population, but nobody mentioned missing any dogs. Cats, maybe.

When he needed to go to work, he had to lock her in the trailer, and she gnawed at the door and chewed the knob.

Thank God she didn’t have opposable thumbs; she was smarter than most dogs and cats. And some people.

But heaven, even Kevin and Jonesy’s twisted heaven, can never last.

He had to run an errand. The feed store, which closed in the evening, was the cheapest place to get her dogfood.

How she got out and trailed him wasn’t that hard to reconstruct. He’d been careless. As he walked out of the store, he nearly tripped over her sunning herself on the front steps.

And across the square was Rosebud. Rosebud wasn’t supposed to be out, either, but Mr. Trumbull was pretty lax too.

Rosebud hated cats. And Jonesy smelled like a big, unneutered cat. Rosebud killed cats. Smart cat owners in French Creek Township kept their pets indoors. As to farm cats, thank God Rosebud couldn’t climb trees.

Rosebud was across the square, urinating on a post. He stopped abruptly and put his leg down, tiny ears perked,
nose twitching. Then he charged.

Halfway across the square, he suddenly changed his mind. Uncertain, he froze, then turned tail.

Jonesy wasn’t a long distance runner, but she was fast on a sprint.

What Kevin saw next was that weird smilodon leap. Jonesy charged and without stopping, rolled to her back, hugged Rosebud’s neck, then sank her saber teeth into the dog’s throat. The dog heaved into the air, Jonesy rolled over on top of him, and the two struggled. Rosebud had no offensive weapons but his jaws, and he’d never had to defend himself before, so his struggles turned to spasms and in seconds, he lay still.

Jonesy straddled the dog and raised her bloodied jaws in a terrifying roar. Everybody ran out of the feed store, the diner, and the gift shop.

Jonesy lowered her jaws and began to tear pieces out of the dog’s belly.

Kevin fought vertigo and nausea. Somebody yelled,

“Anybody catch that on video?”

He charged across the square, screaming at Jonesy. Three guys tried to stop him, yelling, “It’ll kill you!” but he slid to a stop by the scene of carnage and yanked on Jonesy’s collar.

“He’s crazy!” somebody yelled.

Kevin realized he was crazy. Jonesy weighed maybe five hundred pounds by now. He’d read plenty of accounts of people mauled by previously docile big cats. Why did he assume Jonesy was different?

But he had to get the cat away, before somebody with a gun thought to use it.

A small, strong hand gripped his wrist.

Sara. Sara had the rifle her grandfather always carried in her truck. It had been a fixture in the truck for so long he’d forgotten about it. Nor did he wonder why she happened to be in town that day.

She gave him a serious look, then handed him the rifle.

“It’s under control,” she yelled at the gathering crowd.

“Back off before somebody gets hurt.”

The dog was mangled meat. Jonesy had ripped open its throat and its belly and was standing over it, sides heaving with desire, jaws quivering with hunger and triumph.

The crowd all took a step back.

“Get her in the truck,” Sara said. “You can still control her, can’t you?”

Jonesy roared again, a softer roar.

Very deliberately—he believed that crap about animals being able to sense fear, but also knew he could fake courage pretty well—he took a handful of the loose flesh at the back of Jonesy’s neck and said in a low growl, “Into the truck, bad girl.”

And it was over. Jonesy lowered her head and her stump of a tail and climbed into Sara’s truck. Kevin slammed the door.

Which left Sara and Kevin standing outside.

Sara was shaking. She reached up and grabbed Kevin’s ears and kissed him hard, tongue and all. Breaking loose, she said, “You’re an idiot! But, God almighty, you’ve got guts!”

What now? Kevin couldn’t leave Jonesy inside the truck; first, the sabertooth would demolish the inside. Second, it was a nice spring day, sunny, and heat would eventually build up and kill her.

But he could no longer predict the cat’s behavior. Jonesy’s blood was up; she might boil over.

“We have to get her out of here before the cops come,”

said Kevin. He shrugged, grabbed Sara’s keys, and sprang into the truck.

Jonesy didn’t kill him. The rest of his life, he would wonder why. Because he was dominant? Because she loved him? Do top predators know love?

He let Jonesy out of the truck outside his trailer. She lingered, licking his hand and making begging grunts, so he opened one of the dogfood cans. She took it away from him and rasped the horse meat out, then lay down in the grass.

He went inside and wept.

* * * *

Yes, somebody had videotaped it. Not the two animals running toward each other, not Jonesy’s karate-like attack, but the dog underneath Jonesy, thrashing, then still, and Jonesy pulling out intestines. The video played several times, always zooming on the dead pitbull, then panning to Kevin pulling the cat away. He lay on the bed staring at the ceiling.

Thank God the cat looked like a female lion in the video.

Some bystanders remarked on its teeth, but nobody connected it with the break-in and fire at the lab a couple years previous.

* * * *

In the evening, Sara brought his car back. He didn’t know how she started it, but she came in uninvited and lay beside him on the bed.

They kissed. She said, “Lock the door.”

He did, obediently. “It won’t stop Jonesy, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

* * * *

Hours later, they dressed and talked about hunting for Jonesy. Did anybody recognize them from the video? It was really jerky. Nobody was knocking on the door. But Kevin’s mind roiled with possibilities: if somebody recognized Sara’s truck, they’d go to her house, then figure she was here. They’d come with guns for Jonesy. Jonesy was tame; she wouldn’t know to run.

Hellfire. Maybe Jonesy should be put down.

He said, “I always thought you still loved me a little.

Unless this is just a stress reaction.”

She leaned into him, then grabbed and shook him, hard enough that he thought, she’s going to slug me next. She said, “I loved you, you jerk, but I couldn’t keep on loving somebody who was stupid enough to go to jail for what he didn’t do.”

“Ed is your cousin. I couldn’t rat out your cousin. And I never was sure the pot was his, anyway.”

“Idiot!” And she did slap him, not enough to hurt, then turned away, hiding tears. “Ed is a goddamn jerk. He got you in trouble, you shielded him. He’s my blood, but nobody I’d ever choose for family. Kevin, Kevin. I can’t be with a man who spent time in jail and who—who lives with this monster.”

“You like animals.”

She sobered. “I do. I’m not sure what you should do with Jonesy. Maybe we could get rid of her somehow? Not kill her. Find somebody who would take her and keep her safe.

Would you do that if I asked?”

“And we’d be like before?” He didn’t say, And you’ll marry me, but he hoped she’d know that’s what he meant.

“We’d at least solve a problem. I have a friend who knows how to sell things on the Internet. Remember those people who tried to sell their kid on e-Bay?”

“They got caught.”

“They were stupid. E-bay’s not the option I had in mind.

Listen, Ed isn’t the only shady character we know. Maybe we can find a place for her.”

He was reluctant. “Sara, don’t get her killed.”

* * * *

He stayed up drinking cola after she left, but fell asleep in his lounge chair and awoke to early light and his cell phone ringtone.

“It’s happened,” said Hartley.

“What?” He thought she was talking about the attack on Rosebud.

“Sara Jones, that’s your girl, right? The cat’s over at her farm.”

“Yeah, but Sara will be okay. Jonesy loves Sara.”

“Judas Priest, boy, that cat is a top predator. Her definition of love is different from yours and mine. Big cats seem okay for years, then go off like a bomb and eviscerate somebody for no reason. For hunger. For a mate. Because a fly bit them on the nose.”

“She loves Sara—”

“Yeah, she loves you, too. And maybe she thinks Sara is a rival in love.”

That sounded crazy. But Kevin pulled his clothes back on and ran to his car.

* * * *

He beat the police cruisers to the farm.

Jonesy was bashing the front door, roaring her earsplitting roar, not the roar of triumph she’d roared over Rosebud, not the roar of desire she’d yowled in heat. This was rage.

And she was destroying the door.

As the first cruiser threw open its door and a cop sprang out with weapon drawn, the door imploded and Jonesy bounded inside.

Why had he thought Sara was safe? For some reason—oh God maybe it was sexual rivalry—Jonesy was after her.

Kevin bolted out of his car and up the porch stairs.

Inside, he smelled the fury of big, enraged cat.

“I’m up here!” Sara screamed.

He pounded up the stairs three at a time.

Sara’s voice came from the upstairs bedroom. Outside that closed door, Jonesy reared on her back feet, head scraping the ceiling. She clawed at the door knob, chewed at the door panels.

One door panel split and fell inward. Jonesy threw herself with renewed rage, and the door splintered.

“Here girl! Bad girl!” Why hadn’t he thought of bringing meat?

No. Meat wouldn’t work.

Sara was screaming, punching at the jammed window.

He raced up and grabbed the cat’s collar, but she turned and knocked him flat.

As he lay gasping from the blow, Jonesy lunged for Sara.

He crawled, dizzy, trying to rise despite the agony in his chest. He just reached the door when Jonesy rolled across the floor, sprang up, and sank her teeth into Sara’s throat.

Sara’s eyes went wide, green as Jonesy’s eyes. Her head snapped back. The cat ripped out her flesh together with a piece of her tee shirt, then howled, head thrown back, whiskered black nose grazing the ceiling light fixture.

Then the cat leapt through the window, splintering the frame.

Kevin crawled over to Sara. Her head was nearly separated from her body, blood gushing everywhere, in her beautiful golden hair, on her torn shirt, the cracked linoleum floor. More blood than he had ever seen.

He buried his face in the hollow between her breasts and sobbed.

Then he rose and looked out the window. Jonesy was loping into the barn.

He felt his way down the stairs, shattered. Sara was so beautiful. And Jonesy, his charge, his responsibility, his pet, had killed her. Pet? Oh, no. Not a pet. No more than an astronaut would call the moon a pet. No more than a composer would call his greatest symphony a pet. No more than a mountain climber would call Everest a pet.

He stumbled out into the light. Five police cruisers ringed the house now, and a paramedic van. One of the paramedics had the rifle from Sara’s truck.

“Cat still in there?” one cop yelled.

“Sara’s upstairs. She’s dead,” Kevin said. He sank to his knees and sobbed.

Hartley appeared. “The cat ran into the barn. I saw it.”

The paramedic raised the rifle, and another cop hauled open the barn door. He had a German shepherd with him on a short leash. Kevin pulled himself erect.

The dog strained forward, then turned to cower behind the cop. The cop broke into a run, at the same time trying to unholster his service revolver.

Jonesy exploded out of the barn. The cop with the dog fell down and Jonesy vaulted over them.

Kevin heard the sound of the rifle being cocked.

Kevin screamed, “No!’ He launched himself at the rifleman.

The rifleman stumbled and the shot went wild.

A tawny streak—Jonesy—broke into the woods behind the barn and coursed out of sight.

Hartley screamed, “Why did you do that?”

“Killing the cat won’t make Sara be alive again.”

“You’re in denial! The smilodon will kill again.”

Kevin was silent. Hartley was right. He had no idea why he had pushed the rifleman. He felt his arms being jerked back, cuffs cut his wrists. But the sabertooth, the miracle from another world, was free.

“You were involved with Sara Jones,” Hartley said. “I thought you loved her.”

“I did. Not what matters.”

“This monster kills the woman you love, and you protect it?”

How could he explain?

* * * *

Jonesy was never found, though attacks on domestic animals and deer increased in the county for a few weeks.

Maybe the sabertooth died, maybe she went north, where the woods were thicker and the game larger.

Kevin went to jail. He got most of a college degree in there, gratis the state. He wasn’t street smart, that was obvious, but he had a talent for book learning.

His life had changed forever. He got out of jail, went to university, studied paleontology, but studiously avoided Franklin U and Hartley, though she begged him for his photos of the smilodon.

He never married.

But he had companioned a smilodon, brought back from the deeps of time. It had been like stepping on the moon.

He had touched its white, saber-like teeth. And it made him immortal.

It was enough.

OceanofPDF.com

CAT AND MOUSE, by Ralph Williams The Harn first came to the Warden’s attention through its effect on the game population of an area in World 7 of the Warden’s sector. A natural ecology was being maintained on World 7 as a control for experimental seedings of intelligent life-forms in other similar worlds. How the Harn got there, the Warden never knew. In its free-moving larval state, the Harn was a ticklike creature which might have sifted through a natural inter-dimensional rift; or it might have come through as a hitchhiker on some legitimate traveler, possibly even the Warden himself.

In any event, it was there now. Free of natural enemies and competition, it had expanded enormously. So far, the effect in the control world was localized, but this would not be the case when the Harn seeded. Prompt action was indicated.

The Warden’s inclination and training was in the direction of avoiding direct intervention in the ecology of the worlds under his jurisdiction, even in the field of predator control.

He considered introduction of natural enemies of the Harn from its own world, and decided against it. That cure was as bad, if not worse, than the disease itself.

There was, however, in one adjacent world, a life-form not normally associated with the Harn; but which analysis indicated would be inimical to it, and reasonably amenable to control.

It was worth trying, anyway.

* * * *

October 3rd, Ed Brown got up to the base cabin of his trap line with his winter’s outfit.

He hung an N. C. Company calendar on the wall and started marking off the days.

October 8th, the hole into the other world opened.

In the meantime, of course, Ed had not been idle. All summer the cabin had stood empty. He got his bedding, stove, and other cabin gear down from the cache and made the place livable. The mice were thick, a good fur sign, but a nuisance otherwise. Down in the cellar hole, when he went to clear it out for the new spud crop, he found burrowings everywhere.

Well, old Tom would take care of that in short order. Tom was a big, black, bobtailed cat eleven years old who had lived with Ed since he was a kitten. Not having any feline companionship to distract him, his only interest was hunting mice. Generally he killed a lot more than he could eat, racking the surplus in neat piles beside the trail, on the doorstep, or on a slab in the cellar. He was the best mouser in interior Alaska.

Ed propped the cellar hatch with a stick so old Tom could come and go as he pleased, and went on about his chores, working with a methodical efficiency that matched Tom’s and went with his thinning gray hair and forty years in the woods. He dug the spuds he had planted that spring. He made a swing around his beaver lakes, tallying the blankets in each house. He took the canoe and moved supplies to his upper cabin. He harvested some fat mallards that had moved down on the river with the coming of skim ice on the lakes. He bucked up firewood and stacked it to move into camp with the first snow.

On the fifth morning, as he was going down to the boat landing with a pail for water, he found the hole into the other world.

Ed had never seen a hole into another world, of course, nor even heard of such a thing. He was as surprised as any one would naturally be to find one not fifty feet from their front door.

Still, his experience had been all in the direction of believing what his eyes told him. He had seen a lot of strange things in his life, and one more didn’t strain him
too much. He stood stockstill where he had first noticed the hole and studied it warily.

It was two steps off the trail to the left, right beside the old leaning birch, a rectangular piece of scenery that did not fit. It looked to be, as nearly as he could judge, about man-size, six by three. At the bottom it was easy enough to see where this world left off and that one began. On the left side the two worlds matched pretty well, but on the right side there was a niggerhead in this world, the moss-covered relic of a centuries old stump, while that world continued level, so that the niggerhead was neatly sliced in two. Also, the vegetation was different, mossy on this side, grassy on that.

On up around the hole, though, it was harder to tell.

There was no clear-cut line, just the difference in what you could see through it. In the other world, the ground seemed to fall away, with low scrubby brush in the foreground.

Then, a mile or so away, there were rising hills with hardwood forests of some kind, still green with summer, covering them.

Ed stepped cautiously to one side. The view through the hole narrowed, as if it faced the trail squarely. He edged around the old birch to get behind it, and from that side there was no hole, just the same old Alaskan scenery, birch and rose bushes and spruce. From the front, though, it was still there.

He cut an alder shoot about eight feet long, trimmed it, and poked it through the hole. It went through easily enough. He prodded at the sod in the other world, digging up small tufts. When he pulled the stick back, some of the other world dirt was on the sharp end. It looked and smelled just about like any dirt.

Old Tom came stretching out into the morning sun and stalked over to investigate. After a careful inspection of the hole he settled down with his paws tucked under him to watch. Ed took a flat round can from his pocket, lined his
lip frugally with snuff, and sat down on the up-ended bucket to watch too. At the moment, that seemed the likeliest thing to do.

* * * *

It was nearly swarming time, the Harn had many things to preoccupy it, but it spared one unit to watch the hole into the other world. So far, nothing much had happened. A large biped had found the opening from the other side. It had been joined by a smaller quadruped; but neither showed any indication yet of coming through. The sun was shining through the hole, a large young yellow sun, and the air was crisp, with sharp interesting odors.

The biped ejected a thin squirt of brown liquid through the hole—venom of some sort, apparently. The Harn hastily drew back out of range.

* * * *

The hole into the other world stayed there, as unobtrusively fixed as if it had been there since the beginning of time. Nothing came through, and nothing moved in the other world but leaves stirring now and then with a breeze, clouds drifting across the sky. Ed began to realize it was getting late in the morning, and he had not yet had breakfast. He left old Tom to watch the hole, got stiffly to his feet and went on down the trail to get the pail of water he had started for. From the cabin door, he could still see the hole into the other world. He kept one eye on it while he cooked breakfast.

As he was finishing his second cup of coffee, he noticed the view into the other world becoming duller, dimming in a peculiar fashion. He left the dirty dishes and went over to look more closely. What was happening, he found, was just that it was getting dark in the other world. The effect was strange, much like looking out the door of a brightly lighted room at dusk. The edges of the hole cast a very clearly marked shadow now, and outside this shaft of sunlight the
view faded, until a few yards away it was impossible to make out any detail.

Presently the stars came out. Ed was not an astronomer, but he had a woodsman’s knowledge of the sky. He could find nothing familiar in any of the stars he saw. In some way, that was more unsettling than the hole itself had been.

After he had finished the dishes, he cut two gee-pole spruce, trimmed them, and stuck one on each side of the hole. He got some thin thread he used to tie beaver snares and wove it back and forth between the poles, rigging a tin can alarm. It seemed likely someone or something had put the hole there, it had not just happened. If anything came through, Ed wanted to know about it. Just to make extra sure, he got some number three traps and made a few blind sets in front of the hole.

Then he went back to his chores. Whatever was going to happen with the hole would happen when it happened, and winter was still coming.

He set some babiche to soak for mending his snowshoes.

He ran the net he had set at the edge of the eddy for late silvers and took out two fish. Old Tom had pretty well cleaned up the mice in the cellar hole, but they were still burrowing around the sills of the lean-to. Ed took a shovel and opened up a hole so Tom could get under the lean-to floor. He got out his needles, palm, thread, and wax; and mended his winter moccasins.

Off and on, he checked the hole into the other world.

There was nothing but the slow progression of alien stars across the sky. Finally old Tom grew bored and left to investigate the hole under the lean-to. Shortly there were scutterings and squeakings as evidence that he, too, had got back to business.

* * * *

Toward evening, Ed got to wondering how a living creature would take transition into the other world. He had

no intention of trying it himself until he knew a lot more about it, but he thought he might be able to scare up a surrogate. Out by the wood pile some live-traps were piled under a spruce, from the time when Ed had been catching marten for the Fish and Wildlife to transplant. One was still in pretty fair shape. He patched it up and set it among the cottonwoods at the head of the bar, where there were some rabbit trails.

When he went to bed it was still dark in the other world.

He left the cabin door ajar so he could see it from his bed and set his shotgun, loaded with 00 buck, handy.

Nearing sixty, Ed was not a sound sleeper, even when he had nothing on his mind. About ten it started to get light in the other world, and that woke him up. He padded out to look, but there was no change, it looked about the same as yesterday. He went back to bed.

The next morning there was a rabbit in the live-trap. With a pole, Ed pushed the trap with the rabbit in it through into the other world and watched. Nothing happened. After a while the rabbit began nibbling at some spears of grass that pushed through the wire of the cage. Ed pulled it back and examined the rabbit carefully. It seemed healthy and about as happy as a rabbit could expect to be in a cage.

It did not get dark in the other world till about noon, that day; and about seven, when it was dark in both worlds, Ed heard the jangle of the tin can alarm, followed by the snap of one of the steel traps.

He took a flashlight and found a small hoofed animal, hardly bigger than old Tom, rearing and bucking with a broken leg in the trap. It had sharp little spike horns, only a few inches long, but mean. Ed got several painful jabs before he got the animal tied up and out of the trap. He restrung the alarm, then took his catch into the cabin to examine.

It was herbivorous and adult, from the looks of its teeth and hoofs, though it only weighed about fifteen pounds. As
an approximation, Ed decided it was female. When he killed it and opened it up, at first glance it looked reasonably familiar, on closer study less so.

The blood, anyway, was red; not blue or yellow or green; and the bones were bones, just odd-shaped.

Ed cut off a slice of heart and tossed it to old Tom. The cat sniffed it dubiously and then decided he liked it. He meowed for more. Ed gave it to him and fried a small sliver of ham. It smelled and tasted fine, but Ed contented himself with
a
single
delicate
nibble,
pending
further
developments. Anyway, it was beginning to look like a little exploration would be feasible.

* * * *

The Harn, also, was well-satisfied with the way things were going. It had been a strain to pass up the juicy little quadruped in the cage, but the inhabitants of the other world seemed shy, and the Harn did not wish to frighten them. At least, it knew now that life could come through the hole, and the small herbivore it had herded through confirmed that passage in the opposite direction was equally possible—plus a gratis demonstration of the other world’s pitiful defenses. At swarming time, the whole new world would be open to embryo Harn, as well as this world it presently occupied.

It looked like a really notable swarming. The Harn budded three more planters on the forcing stem, to be ready to take full advantage of it.

* * * *

It got light in the other world at one in the morning that night. Ed had the days there pretty well pegged now. They were roughly twenty-seven hours, of which about thirteen hours were dark. Not too high a latitude, apparently, and probably late summer by the looks of the vegetation.

He got up a little before daylight and looked at the rabbit and old Tom. Both seemed to be doing nicely. Old Tom was
hungry for more otherworld meat. Ed gave it to him and made up a light pack. After some thought, he took the .450
bear gun he used for back-up when guiding. Whatever he ran into over there, the .450—a model 71 throwing a 400
grain slug at 2100 fps—should handle it.

The first step through into the other world was a queasy one, but it turned out to be much the same as any other step. The only difference was that now he was in the other world looking back. From this side, the niggerhead at the threshold was sliced sharply, but it had been kicked down a little when he came through, and what with shoving the cage through and pulling it back, so that some clods of moss and dirt were scattered in the other world. For some reason, that made Ed feel better, it seemed to make the joining of the two worlds a little more permanent.

Still, it had come sudden, and it might go sudden. Ed went back into his own world and got an ax, a saw, more ammunition, salt, a heavy sleeping robe, a few other possibles. He brought them through and piled them in the other world, covering them with a scrap of old tarp. He cut a couple of poles, peeled them, and stuck them in the ground to mark the hole from this side.

Then he looked around.

He stood on the shoulder of a hill, in a game trail that ran down toward a stream below, in what seemed to be a fairly recent burn. There were charred stumps, and the growth was small stuff, with some saplings pushing up through.

There was timber in the valley below, though, and on the hills beyond, deciduous, somewhat like oak. South was where east had been in his own world, and the sun seemed smaller, but brighter. The sky was a very dark blue. He seemed lighter in this world, there was a spring in his step he had not known for twenty years. He looked at his compass. It checked with the direction of the sun.

He studied the trail. It had seen a lot of use, but less in recent weeks. There were sharp hoof-prints of the animal
he had caught, larger hoof-prints, vague pad-marks of various sizes, but nothing that looked human. The trail went under a charred tree trunk at a height that was not comfortable for a man, and the spacing of the steps around the gnarled roots of an old slump did not fit a man’s stride.

He did not notice the Harn creature at all—which was understandable, it was well camouflaged.

He worked circumspectly down the trail, staying a little off it, studying tracks and droppings, noticing evidences of browsing on the shrubs—mostly old—pausing to examine tufts of hair and an occasional feather. Halfway down the slope he flushed a bird about ptarmigan-size, grayish brown in color.

The trail was more marked where it went into the timber.

It wound through the trees for a few hundred yards and came out on a canoe-sized stream. Here it forked. One trail crossed the stream and went up the hill on the other side, the other followed the stream up the valley.

* * * *

The Harn followed Ed’s movements, observing carefully. It needed a specimen from the other world, and this biped would serve nicely, but it might as well learn as much as possible about him first. It could always pick him up some time before he returned to his own world. Just to make sure, it sent a stinging unit to guard the entrance.

* * * *

All his life, except for a short period in France, Ed had been a hunter, never hunted. Still, you don’t grow old in the woods by jumping without looking. Coming into a new situation, he was wary as an old wolf. There was a little shoulder right above the fork in the trail. He stood there for several minutes, looking things over, and then went down and crossed the stream at the next riffle, above the ford. By doing so, although he did not know it, he missed the trap the Harn maintained at the ford for chance passers-by.

On the other side of the creek, the trail ran angling off downstream, skirted a small lake hidden in the trees, climbed over another low shoulder and dropped into a second valley. As Ed followed along it, he began to notice a few more signs of life—birds, small scurriers on the ground and in tree tops—and this set him thinking. The country had a picked-over feel to it, a hunted and trapped-out feel, worse where he had first come through, but still noticeable here.

* * * *

The Harn did not like to cross water, it could, but it did not like to.

* * * *

Ed looked at the sun. It was getting down in the sky. If there was any activity at all around here, the ford at dusk would be as likely a place as any to find it. He worked back along the ridge to a point above where he judged the ford to be. The breeze was drawing up the valley, but favoring the other side a little. He dropped down and crossed the stream a quarter mile above the ford, climbed well above the trail and worked along the hillside until he was in a position where he could watch both the ford and the fork in the trail. He squatted down against a tree in a comfortable position, laid his gun across his knees, and rummaged in his pack for the cold flapjacks, wrapped around slices of duck breast, which he had packed for lunch.

After he had finished eating he drank from his canteen—
the water in this world might be good, it might not, there was no point in taking chances till he could try it on the cat

—and took an economical chew of snuff. He settled back to wait.

* * * *

The Harn had lost Ed after he crossed the creek—it used a fallen tree quite a way further up for its own crossing—and did not pick him up again until just before he crossed back.

Now, however, he had been immobile for several minutes.

This looked like about as good a time as any to make the pickup. The Harn had a stinging unit just about positioned, and it had dispatched a carrier to stand by.

* * * *

After a while, sitting there, Ed began to feel uneasy. The timber was big here, and open underneath, almost parklike.

The nearest cover was fifty or sixty yards off to his left, a little tangle of brush where a tree had fallen and let a shaft of sunlight through.

It looked possible, but it didn’t feel quite right. Still, it was about the only place anything big enough to bother him could hide. The feeling was getting stronger, the back hairs on Ed’s neck were starting to stand up now. Without visible movement, or even noticing himself that he was doing it, he let awareness run over his body, checking the position and stiffness of his legs—he had been sitting there quite a while

—the balance of the gun across his knees, the nearness of his thumb to the hammer.

Thoughtfully, still studying the patch of brush, he spat a thin stream over his left shoulder at a pile of leaves a few feet away.

Thinking about it later, Ed could almost have sworn the tobacco juice sizzled as it hit. Actually, this was probably imaginary. The stinging unit was not that sensitive to tobacco, though it was sensitive enough. As the drops splattered it, the pile of leaves erupted with a snuffling hiss like an overloaded teakettle into a tornado of bucking, twisting activity.

Ed’s reflexes were not quite as fast as they had been when he was young, but they were better educated. Also, he was already keyed-up. Almost as it started, the flurry in the leaves stopped with the roar of his rifle. Fired like that, the heavy gun just about took his hand off, but he did not notice it at the moment. He came erect in a quick scramble,
jacking in a fresh round as he did so. The scene took on that strange timeless aspect it often does in moments of emergency, with a man’s whole being focused on the fleeting now—you know, in an academic sort of way, that things are moving fast, you are moving fast yourself, but there seems plenty of time to make decisions, to look things over and decide what has to be done, to move precisely, with minimum effort and maximum effect.

Whatever the thing at his feet was, it was out of the picture now—it had not even twitched after the heavy bullet tore through it. There was a stomping rush in the little thicket he had been watching. Ed took two long quick steps to one side to clear a couple of trees, threw up the gun and fired as something flashed across a thin spot in the brush. He heard the whack of the bullet in flesh and fired again. Ordinarily he did not like to shoot at things he could not see clearly, but this did not seem the time to be overly finicky. There was no further movement in the brush.

He stood there several long moments, listening, and there was no further movement anywhere. He eased the hammer down, fed in three rounds to replace those he had used, and walked slowly back to the first thing he had shot.

At that range, the bullet had not opened up, but it had not needed to. It had practically exploded the creature anyway

—the .450 has two tons of striking energy at the muzzle.

From what was left, Ed deduced a smallish, rabbit-sized thing, smooth-skinned, muscular, many-legged, flattish, mottled to camouflage perfectly in the leaves. There was a head at one end, mostly undamaged since it had been at the end of a long muscular neck, with a pair of glazing beady eyes and a surprisingly small mouth. When Ed pressed on the muscles at the base of the skull, the mouth gaped roundly and a two-inch long spine slid smoothly out of an inconspicuous slot just below it.

At middling distances or better, Ed could still see as well as ever, but close up he needed help. He got out his pocket
magnifier and studied the spine. It looked hollow, grooved back for a distance from the point. A drop of milky looking substance trembled on its tip.

Ed nodded thoughtfully to himself. This was what had made him uneasy, he was pretty sure. What was the thing in the brush, then? Innocent bystander? He got stiffly to his feet, conscious now of the ache in his wrist that had taken most of the recoil of the first shot, the torn web between his right thumb and forefinger where the hammer spur had bitten in; and walked over to the thicket.

* * * *

The thing in the brush was larger, quite a bit larger, and the bullets had not torn it up so badly. It lay sprawled with three of its eight legs doubled under it, a bear-sized animal with a gaping, cavernous, toothless mouth out of all proportion to the slender body which seemed designed mainly as a frame for the muscular legs. It was not quite dead. As Ed came up it struggled feebly to get up, but one of the heavy slugs had evidently hit the spine, or whatever carried communications to the hindquarters. It fell back, shuddering convulsively, and suddenly regurgitated a small, furry animal.

Ed stepped back quickly to bring his rifle to bear, but the newest arrival was obviously already dead.

He turned his attention back to the larger animal. It, too, was dead now. There was an obvious family resemblance to the smaller one he had shot in the leaves. Both were smooth-skinned, many-legged, and now that he looked closely he could see this one had two mouths, a small one just under the nostrils, purse-lipped and tiny in its huge face but quite like that of the other creature. Neither looked even remotely like anything he had ever seen before.

He laid down his rifle and took out his knife.

Ten minutes later, he knew quite a bit about the thing, but what he knew did not make much sense. In the first place, its blood was green, a yellowish pussy green. In the second place, the larger mouth, complete with jaws and impressive musculature, opened not into a digestive system, but into a large closed pouch which comprised most of the animal’s torso. There was no proper digestive system at all, only a rudimentary gut, heavily laced with blood vessels, terminating at one end in the small second mouth, at the other in an even smaller anus. Otherwise, the thing had no insides except a good pair of lungs and a stout heart—none at all. Bone, muscle, lung, heart—plus the ridiculously inadequate gut—that was it.

What about the small, furry, animal then; the one the other had been carrying in its pouch? There was nothing much out-of-the-way about it—a feline sort of carnivore, something like a marten. The fur looked interesting, and he skinned it out, casing the hide. On the left ham, the skin was punctured and there was a swollen, bluish area—about the sort of wound that would be made by the fang of the first thing he had shot. Ed squatted back on his heels, studying it and putting two and two together. What two and two made was pretty hard to believe, but it fitted the evidence.

He wiped his knife carefully on the grass, put it back in its sheath, and got to his feet. Suddenly, the feeling that he was not alone recurred. He looked quickly around.

Back where he had shot the first thing, a man in forest-green whipcord trousers and jacket was leaning over, hands on knees, looking at the remains. The man looked up and met Ed’s eyes. He nodded casually and walked over to the second thing, prodded it with his toe. After a long moment he nodded again to Ed, smiled briefly, and winked out.

Ed stared at the empty air where the other man had been, mouth open. It was just a little too much. A lot of things had
happened to him in the last few days, he had been able to take most of them more or less as they came along, but after all, he wasn’t a chicken any more, he was pushing sixty, and there is a limit to what a man should have to put up with at that age. The thought of his snug cabin, with a good fire going, moosemeat bubbling in the pot, the gas lantern hissing, and the bottle of Hudson’s Bay rum he had tucked under the eaves against just such an occasion as this, was suddenly very appealing.

Besides, it was getting late, and he didn’t think he cared to be stumbling around this world in the dark.

He elbowed his pack up, hooked the left shoulder strap, and headed for home, staying off the trail in ordinary caution and watching his footing, but moving pretty fast just the same.

Actually, he need not have been so careful.

The Harn had been surprised and shocked by the explosive violence of the man’s reaction to a routine harvesting maneuver. It was a relatively young Harn, but it retained memories of its own world, where there were also nasty, violent things which killed Harn. It was not pleasant to think that it might have evoked some such monster in this hitherto peaceful place.

Then, to top that, there had been the sudden appearance of the Warden. The Harn, of course, saw the Warden not as a man, but in its true aspect, which was not at all friendly.

All in all, this did not seem the moment to start any new adventures. The Harn pulled in all its mobile units, including the stinger it had left at the hole into the other world. It huddled protectively together in its nest, considering these new developments.

* * * *

By ten that evening, Ed, in conference with old Tom and the bottle of Hudson’s Bay, had done considerable hard thinking, pro and con.

Of course, he didn’t have to go into the other world, just because the hole was there. He could block it off, seal it up with timbers and forget it.

He sat there and thought about this, absently smoothing the strange fur on his knee. For an old-timer like himself, things weren’t too hot in this world. Fur didn’t bring much of a price any more, and he couldn’t get it in as he had when he was younger. His wants were simple, but there was a certain rock-bottom minimum he had to have. Too, the winters were starting to bother him a little, the arthritis in his hands was getting worse every year, times he hardly had the strength in his left hand, which was the worst, to hold an ax. Another five, ten, years and it would be the Pioneers’ Home for him—if he did not get stove up or sick sooner and die right here in the cabin, too helpless to cut wood for the fire. He had helped bury enough others, bed and all when they didn’t come down the river at breakup and somebody had to go up and look for them, to know it was possible.

The other world was milder, it had game and fur—good fur, too, from the looks of it, something new that could lick any mutation or synthetic on the market, and the income tax had still left a few fellows who could pay through the nose to see their women look nice.

And, the country was new. He’d never thought he’d have a crack at a new country again, a new, good country. Often, he’d thought how lucky people had been who were born a hundred and fifty years ago, moving into an easy, rich country like the Ohio or Kentucky when it was new, instead of the bitter North.

The Harn would be a nuisance—Ed did not think of it as the Harn, of course, but just as “they”—but he supposed he could find a way to clean them out. A man generally could, if varmints got troublesome enough.

And the man in forest-green whipcord, well, he could have been just an hallucination. Ed did not really believe in
hallucinations, but he had heard about them, and there was always a first time.

Ed sighed, looked at the clock, measured the bottle with his eye—still better than three quarters full.

All in all, he guessed, he’d leave the door into the other world open.

He put old Tom out and went to bed.

* * * *

The first order of business seemed to be to get better acquainted with the Harn, and first thing in the morning he set about it. He took the rabbit out of the live box and tethered it in a spot in the other world close to the hole, where raw earth had been exposed by a big blowdown, sweeping the ground afterward to clear it of tracks.

Getting better acquainted with the Harn, though, did not mean he had to have it come in and crawl in bed with him.

Before going to bed the night before, he had set half a can of snuff to steep in some water. He loaded a bug gun with this and sprayed the ground around the hole into the other world. From the reaction yesterday, he judged the stinging units did not like tobacco juice, and this should discourage them from coming through.

He checked his bear snares and found three in good enough shape to satisfy him—the large Harn beast, he suspected, would be about like a grizzly to hold. Three would hardly be enough for a serious trapping program. Ed made his own snares from old aircraft control cable, using a lock of his own devising which slid smoothly and cinched down tight and permanently. He got out his roll of wire and box of locks and started making up some more, sitting where he could watch the rabbit he had staked out.

By the middle of the afternoon the snares were done, but there had been no action with the rabbit, nor was there for the rest of the day.

In the morning, though, it was gone. There were three new sets of tracks in the bare spot—two smaller ones, either of which would have fitted the stinging unit, and what looked like a carrier’s. The action was clear enough.

The small things had prowled around the rabbit for some time, stopping frequently as if uncertain and suspicious.

Finally, one had moved in, with a little flurry of action when it met the rabbit. Then it had moved back and squatted again.

The big tracks came directly to the rabbit and went right out again. They were heavy enough to be clear in the grass beyond the bare spot.

* * * *

Ed went back to the cabin and rummaged till he found a pair of snakeproof pants a Stateside sport had once given him—heavy duck with an interlining of woven wire. They were heavy and uncomfortable to wear, and about as useless as wings on a pig in Alaska, where there are no snakes; but they had been brand-new and expensive when given to him, and he had put them away, thinking vaguely he might find a use for them some day. It looked like that day might be now.

He slipped them on, took his rifle and hunting pack, and set out to follow the animal that had taken the rabbit.

The trail showed well in the morning dew, going straight away along the hillside as if the thing were headed some place definite. Ed followed along for a quarter mile or so, then found himself on a fairly well beaten path, which presently joined another, and then another, till it was a definitely well used trail. It began to look to him like the thing might have a den of some sort, and he might be getting pretty close to it. He left the trail and climbed up into a lone tall tree, fire-scorched but still struggling for life. From there, he could follow the trail pretty well with his glasses for a couple of hundred yards before he lost it.

Finally, he settled on a spot under an old burnt stump as a likely spot for the den.

He focused the glasses carefully and after a few minutes saw a flash of movement there, as if something had slipped in or out. Nothing else happened for about an hour. Then the grass along one of the trails began to wave and a large beast, similar to the one he had shot, trotted into sight. It slipped in under the stump and disappeared.

For the rest of the morning, nothing went in or out.

There was a very good reason for this, and Ed was it.

* * * *

All night and day after he shot the stinging unit and the carrier unit, the Harn had stayed in its nest. By the second evening, it was getting hungry. It ventured out and found a few morsels, but the organized hunting network it ordinarily maintained had been disrupted, it had lost track of things, and the pickings were poor. Then it stumbled on the rabbit Ed had staked out.

Its first impulse was to leave the rabbit strictly alone. In spite of its early promise, the other world had so far given nothing but trouble. On the other hand, the rabbit was meat, and very good meat, by the smell and looks of it.…

The Harn kept its observation unit prowling irresolutely around the target for half the night before it finally gave in to appetite and sent in a stinger to finish the rabbit off, a carrier to pick it up.

It was still uneasy about this when it noticed Ed near the nest the next morning, confirming its fears. It promptly broke up the net it had been re-establishing and pulled all units back in. Maybe if it left him strictly alone, he might still go on about his business, whatever that was, and let the Harn get back to its harvesting.

* * * *

By noon, Ed was getting pretty stiff sitting in the tree. He climbed down and eased over toward the stump, watching

where he set his feet. He was pretty sure the snakeproof pants would stop the stingers, but he saw no point in putting them to the test until he had to.

About fifty yards away, he got a good view, and it did look like there might be a sizable hole under the stump. He studied it carefully with the glasses. There was a smooth-beaten mound in front, and exposed roots were worn slick.

As he got closer, he noticed an unpleasant smell, and near the mouth of the den he got a sudden whiff that almost gagged him—a sour, acid, carrion stink like a buzzard’s nest. He moved back a little. The hole was wide and fairly high, two or three feet, but too dark to see back into. Still, he had a sense of something stirring there not too far back.

Ed had considerable respect for caves and dens with unseen occupants—he had once helped carry in the bodies of two men who had poked a stick into a spring grizzly’s den. At the same time, he wanted pretty badly to know what was in there. He suspected there was a good deal more than what he had already seen.

The bug gun loaded with tobacco juice was in his pack, and a flashlight, a small light one designed for a lady’s purse which he always carried when away from camp. He got them out and leaned his rifle against a root sticking out just to the left of the den. Taking the bug gun in his left hand and the flashlight in his right, he stooped over to shine the light in, keeping as well clear of the entrance as possible.

All in all, he must have got about a five-second look, which is a lot longer than it sounds when things are happening.

His first impression was a jumble—eyes, scurrying movement, and bulk. Then things started to shape up.

About ten feet back from the entrance was a huge, flattish, naked, scabrous bulk, pimpled with finger-sized teats.

Clustered around and behind this were a tangle of slinging units, carrier units, observation units. Some had their mouths fixed to teats.

For a long second or two the scene stayed frozen.

Then the front edge of the bulk split and began to gape.

Ed found himself looking down a manhole-sized gullet into a shallow puddle of slime with bits of bone sticking up here and there. Toward the near end a soggy mass of fur that might have been the rabbit seemed to be visibly melting down. At the same moment, the tangle of lesser monsters sorted themselves out and a wave of stingers came boiling out at him.

Ed dropped the flashlight, gave two mighty pumps of the bug gun, and jumped clear of the entrance. For a moment, the den mouth boiled with stingers, hissing and bucking in agony. Ed sprayed them heavily again, snatched up his rifle, and ran, looking back over his shoulder. The stingers showed no inclination to follow, though, the tobacco juice seemed to be keeping them well occupied for the moment.

Halfway home, Ed had to stop and rest for a moment while he took a spell of shuddering and gagging as a sudden picture of the slimy gullet came into his mind, with Ed Brown laying where the rabbit had been, melting down into a stinking soup of bones and gobbets of flesh.

When he got to the hole, his arrangement of tin cans, traps, and tobacco juice no longer looked nearly as secure as it had. He got his ax and cut two stout posts, framing the hole; built a stout slab door and hung it from them. Then he drove stakes close together at the threshold, to foil any attempts to dig under, and trimmed a sill tight to the door.

His feeling in this matter, as it happened, was sound.

The Harn was beginning to develop a pretty strong dislike for Ed Brown. Three of its stinging units were dead, and most of the rest were in poor shape, thanks to the tobacco spray. It had got a little whiff of the stuff itself, not enough to do any serious damage ordinarily, but right now, so close to swarming time—

Ed was going to have to go.

So far, in this world, the Harn had needed only the three basic types of mobile units. There were other standard types, however, for dealing with more complicated situations. As it happened, a couple of carrier embryos were at just about the right stage. With a little forcing, they could be brought on in not too long a time. Meanwhile, the Harn would do what it could with the material available.

When Ed came through the next day to set his snares, the Harn was prepared to test his snakeproof pants. They held, which was disconcerting to the Harn, but it was a hard creature to convince, once thoroughly aroused. Ed was not too sure of how well the pants would stand up to persistent assault himself. After the third ambush, he took to spraying suspicious looking spots with tobacco juice. He shot two more stingers in this way, but it slowed him up quite a bit.

It took him all day to make four sets.

In the next three days he made a dozen sets and caught two carriers. Then, the fourth day, as he adjusted a snare, a seeming root suddenly came to life and slashed at his hand.

He was wearing gloves to keep his scent from the snares, and the fang caught the glove and just grazed the ball of his left thumb. The hatchet he had been using to cut a toggle was lying by his knee. He snatched it up and chopped the stinger before it could strike again, then yanked off the glove and looked at his hand. A thin scratch, beaded with drops of blood, showed on the flesh.

Unhesitatingly, he drew the razor edge of the hatchet across it, sucked and spat, sucked and spat again and again. Then he started for home.

He barely made it. By the time he got to the hole, he was a very sick man. He latched the door, stumbled into the cabin and fell on the bed.

It was several days before he was able to be about again, his hand still partly paralyzed.

During that time, the situation changed. The Harn took the offensive.

Ed’s first notice of this was a rhythmic crashing outside the cabin. He managed to crawl to where he could see the gate he had built to block the hole into the other world. It was shaking from repeated batterings from the other side.

Dragging his rifle with his good hand, he scrabbled down to where he could see through the chinks in the slab door.

Two of the carrier units were there, taking turns slamming their full weight against it. He had built that gate skookum, but not to take something like that.

He noted carefully where they were hitting it, then backed off twenty feet and laid the .450 across a log. He let them hit the door twice more to get the timing before he loosed off a shot, at the moment of impact. The battering stopped abruptly, and through the chinks he could see a bulk piled against the gate.

For a while there was no more action. Then, after a few tentative butts at the door, the battering started again. This time, Ed wasn’t so lucky. The battering stopped when he fired, but he got an impression that the carrier ran off. He thought he might have hit it, but not mortally.

In an hour or so the Harn was back, and it kept coming back. Ed began to worry about his ammunition, which was not unlimited. Ordinarily, two or three boxes lasted him through the winter. He got his .30-06, for which he had a sugar sack full of military ammunition. The light full-patch stuff did not have the discouraging effect of the .450, though, and he had to shoot a lot oftener.

Another thing, he wasn’t getting any rest, which was bad in his already weakened condition. Every time he dozed off the battering would start again, and he would have to wake up and snap a few shots through the door. He held pretty much on one spot, not wanting to shoot the door to pieces, but the Harn noticed this, and started hitting the door in other places.

The second day of the attack, the door came down. It had been pretty shaky for some time, and Ed had got the cabin
ready for a siege, filling butter kegs with water and nailing up the windows. As the Harn poured through, he shot several and then broke for the cabin. A carrier ran at him full tilt, bent on bowling him over. Once off his feet, he would have been easy meat for one of the stingers. He sidestepped, swung his shotgun up in one hand—he had kept it handy for the close fighting—and blew the carrier’s spine in half. He had to kick it aside to slam the cabin door.

For a few minutes, then, things were pretty hectic. Ed went from one to another of the loopholes he had cut, blasting first with the shotgun as the Harn crowded around, then using the .30 as they grew more cautious.

* * * *

After the first rush, it was obvious to the Harn that the cabin was going to be a tough nut to crack. On the other hand, there was no rush about it either. Necessarily, it had let its hunting go the past several days while it concentrated on Ed. It was pretty hungry, and it was in rich pickings now—Ed had always kept from disturbing game close to the cabin, partly because he liked to see it around, and partly because he had an idea that some day he might be in a fix where he couldn’t travel very well, and would want meat close to hand. The Harn felt no such compunctions. The stinging units spread through the woods, and shortly a steady procession of loaded carriers began to stream back through the hole. Ed picked off the first few, but then the Harn found it could route them up the river trail in such a way that he got only a glimpse as they flashed through the hole. After that he did not hit very many.

Ed stopped shooting. He was getting short on ammunition for the .30 now, too. He counted up. There were eighteen rounds for the .450, half a box of 220 grain soft point for the .30 plus about the same amount of military stuff, and a handful of shotgun shells. Of course, there was still the .30

Luger with a couple of boxes, and the .22; but they were not much account for this kind of work.

He looked at the cabin door. It was stout, built of hewed three-inch slabs, but it wouldn’t last forever against the kind of beating the gate had got. Even if it did, he was going to run out of water eventually.

Ed thought about that for a while, sitting at the table staring at the little pile of cartridges. He was going to be run out of here sooner or later, he might as well pick his own time, and now seemed about as good as any, while the Harn was busy exploring and hunting.

He sighed and got up to rummage around the cabin. The snakeproof pants had done real good, but he did not trust them entirely. There was some sheet iron laid over the ceiling joists, which he had brought up to make new stoves for his line camps. He got this down and cut it into small pieces. Around the edges he drilled a number of small holes. Then he got out his mending gear and began sewing the plates, in an overlapping pattern, to the legs of the snakeproof pants and to an old pair of moccasins. When he finished, he was pretty well armored as far as his crotch. It was an awkward outfit to move around in, but as long as he was able to stay on his feet, he figured he would be reasonably secure from the stingers. As for the bigger ones, he would just have to depend on seeing them first, and the .450.

Next, he needed some gasoline. The fuel cache was under a big spruce, about twenty yards from the door. He made the round of his loopholes. There were no Harn in sight, they were apparently ignoring him for now. He slipped out the door, closing it securely behind him, and started for the cache.

As he stepped out, a stinger came from under the sill log and lashed at his foot. He killed it with the ax beside the door, saving a cartridge, and went on, walking fairly fast but planting his feet carefully, a little awkward in his armor.

He picked up a five-gallon can of gas, a quart of motor oil, and the twenty feet of garden hose he used for siphoning gas down the bank to the boat. On the way back, another stinger hit him. He kicked it aside, not wanting to set down his load, and it came at him again and again. Just outside the door, he finally caught it under a heel and methodically trampled it to death. Then he snatched open the door, tossed the stuff inside, and pulled it quickly shut behind him.

So far, good enough.

He lashed the gas can solidly to his packboard, slipped the end of the hose into the flexible spout and wired it tight. Then he cut up an old wool undershirt and wrapped the pieces around miscellaneous junk—old nuts and bolts, chunks of leadline, anything to make up half a dozen packages of good throwing heft. He soaked these in oil and stowed them in a musette bag which he snapped to the Drings of the pack.

One of the metal plates on his moccasin was hanging by a thread, probably he had torn it loose in the scuffle at the door. They weren’t going to take too much kicking and banging around, he could see, and once he was on his way, it wouldn’t be a very good idea to be caught bending over with his bare hands at ground level to fix them. On the other hand, he couldn’t be using all his cartridges on the stingers, either, he had to save them for the carriers. He thought about this some while mending the moccasin, and decided to take the bug gun. It might not kill the stingers, but it ought to discourage them enough so they wouldn’t keep pestering him.

With his bad left arm, he had trouble getting the pack on his back. He finally managed by swinging it up on the table first. It was not too much of a load, forty or fifty pounds he guessed. Still, shaky as he was, it was about as much as he could manage. He had intended to just try it on for size, but after he got it up he thought: well, why not now? He picked
up the .450, stowed the extra cartridges in his pocket, checked to make sure he had matches, hung the bug gun on his belt, and opened the door.

* * * *

It was just getting dusk, but the other world was in broad daylight, the days and nights were almost completely reversed again. As he stepped through the hole, the first stinger struck. He gave it a good squirt of tobacco juice. It went bucking and twisting off and he went on, stepping carefully and solidly.

Luckily, most of the Harn was foraging in the new world.

Two more stingers ambushed him, but the tobacco juice got rid of them, and he had no serious trouble till he got close to the den. Two carriers came out and rushed him there.

He shot them both and then killed the stinger that was pecking at his shins. He moved quickly now, he had an idea that in about a minute all hell would break loose. He swung the pack down on the uphill side of the den, wet the musette bag with a quick spray of gas, tossed it over his shoulder, jammed the free end of the hose into the den mouth and stabbed the can with his knife to vent it. As the gas poured into the den he lit one of his oil and gas soaked bombs and ran around in front, lighting one after another from the one in his hand and tossing them into the den. The musette bag caught fire and he snatched it from his shoulder and tossed it after the bombs. A whoof and a sheet of flame blew out.

About fifty yards away there was a slender, popplelike tree. Ed had thought if he could make that, he would be reasonably secure while the Harn burned. He ran for it as hard as he could, beating at the flames that had spattered on him from the burning gas, but he never made it.

Harn were erupting everywhere. A carrier suddenly came charging out of the brush to his left. While Ed dealt with that one, the Harn played its ace in the hole. The two
special units it had been developing to deal with Ed were not quite done yet, but they were done enough to work for the few minutes the Harn needed them. Ed heard a coughing grunt behind him and spun around to see something new crawling out of the flame and smoke at the den entrance.

This one was a roughly carrier shaped creature, but half again as large, built for killing. It had powerful fanged jaws and its eight feet were armed with knifelike, disemboweling claws. As it came at Ed in a lumbering rush, another came crawling out after it.

Ed shot four times, as fast as he could work the action.

The heavy slugs did the job, but not quite well enough.

With its dying lunge the thing got to him and tossed him ten feet like a rag doll. He lit on his bad hand and felt the wrist bones go.

As he struggled to get up, digging his elbow in and using one hand, he saw a stinger darting in at him. He had lost both the bug gun and his rifle when the fighting unit swiped him. He swiveled on his hips and kicked the stinger away. Then he saw the second fighting unit coming. He forgot about the stinger. It still might get to him, but, if it did, it would be too late to matter.

He drew his knife, managed to get to one knee, and crouched there like an old gray rat, stubbly lips drawn back from worn teeth in a grin of pain and rage. This was one he wasn’t going to win, he guessed.

Ten feet away, the fighting unit suddenly ran down like a clockwork toy. It toppled over, skidded past him under its own momentum, and lay there kicking spasmodically. Ed glared at it uncomprehendingly. It arched its neck back to almost touch its haunches, stiffened, and was still.

Ed looked around. The stinger was dead too, three feet from his shoulder, and half a dozen more which had been making for him. A cloud of greasy, stinking smoke was rolling out of the den. The Harn was dead.

Ed put his knife away and lay back. He did not quite pass out, but things got pretty dim.

After a while he got hold of himself and sat up. He was not too surprised to see the man in forest green prodding at the bodies of the fighting units. The stranger looked at the smoke still oozing from the den and nodded approvingly. Then he came over and looked at Ed. He clacked his tongue in concern and bent over, touching Ed’s wrist. Ed noticed there was now a cast on it, and it didn’t hurt so much. There was also a plastic binding around his ribs and shoulder, where the claws of the first fighter had raked as it tossed him. That was a mighty neat trick, because the rags of his shirt were still buttoned around him, and he was pretty sure it had not been off at any time.

The stranger smiled at Ed, patted him on the shoulder, and disappeared. He seemed to be a busy sort of fellow, Ed thought, with not much time for visiting.

Ed felt quite a bit better now, enough better to gather up what was left of his gear and start home. He was glad to find old Tom waiting for him there. The cat had taken to the woods when the attack on the gate first started, he didn’t like shooting, and Ed had worried that the Harn might have got him.

* * * *

Ed slept till noon the next day, got up and cooked a dozen flapjacks and a pound of bacon. After breakfast, he sat around for an hour or so drinking coffee. Then he spent the rest of the afternoon puttering around the cabin.

He packed away the snakeproof pants, disassembled the flame-thrower, picked up the traps by the hole.

Old Tom seemed to have pretty well cleaned up the mice under the lean-to. Ed took his shovel and filled in the hole he had dug for the cat to get at them.

He went to bed early. Tomorrow he would take a long hike around the new world, scout out the fur and game, plan his
trap-line and pick cabin sites.

The next morning, though, the hole into the other world was gone.

The posts which had marked it were sheared neatly in half. The remains of the door still hung there, battered and sagging; but it swung open on nothing but Alaska, when Ed stepped through he found himself standing beside the old leaning birch.

He tried it several times before he convinced himself.

He walked slowly back toward the cabin, feeling old and uncertain, not quite knowing what to do with himself. Old Tom was over by the lean-to, sniffing and pawing tentatively at the fresh earth where Ed had filled in the hole. As Ed came up, he came over to rub against Ed’s leg.

They went into the cabin and Ed started fixing breakfast.

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THE RECORD, by Forrest J Ackerman and Ray Bradbury

For twenty years—for twenty long, horror filled, war laden years—the Earth had not known peace.

Hovering over the metropolises of the world came long, lean battle projectiles, glinting silver in the sunlight or coming like gaunt mirages of grey out of the midnight sky to blast man’s civilization from its cultural foundations.

Man against man, ship against ship—a ceaseless and useless orgy of slaughter. Men, at their battle stations in the ships, pressed buttons, releasing radio bombs that blistered space and lifted whole cities up in shattered pieces and flung them down, grim ruins, reminders of man’s ignorant hatreds and suspicions.

And gas—thick black clouds of it—billowing over the cities, seeking every possible egress, pushed forward by colossal wind machines. But even when victory came for the one side, often Nature, in one of her vengeful moments, would send the black gas flowing back to annihilate its senders.

Rays cut the air. Power bombs exploded incessantly.

Evaporays robbed the Earth of its water—shot it up into the atmosphere and made of it a fog that condensed only after many months. And heat rays made deserts out of fertile terrain.

Rays that hypnotized caused even the strong-minded to commit suicide or reveal military secrets. Rays that effected the optical nerves swept cities and left the population groping and blind, unable to find food.

It was a war that destroyed almost all of humanity. And why were they fighting? For pleasure and amusement!

In the middle of the twenty-second century, every nation had a standard defense. The weapons of war of each were equal—not in proportion to size, but actually, since
manpower no longer counted high. Pacifism had done its best, but the world was armed to the hilt. And now—though illogically—it felt safe—for every nation meant the same as if all had nothing.

Another thing—there was no work to be done. Robots did it. And there seemed nothing left to discover, invent, or enjoy. Art was at its perfection, poetry was mathematically correct and unutterably beautiful—worked out by the aesthetic machines. Sculptoring had been given the effect complete, artists hands guided by wonderful pieces of machinery. Huge museums were crammed with art put out synthetically.

And thus it was with the many Arts and their creators who grew stagnent in their perfection. And it was that way with the many sciences also.…

Paleontologists had found, and articulated, and catalogued every fossil. The ancestor of the Eohippus, the little four-toed Dawn Horse, was discovered; the direct line between man and ape established in skeletal remains; the seat of life itself definitely proved Holarctica. And great bio-chemists, skilled in the science of vital processes, had created synthetic tissues and muscles and flesh, built upon the frames that had been recovered bodies with skillful modeling…even supplied them with blood and given them the spark of LIFE…so that Paleobotonists recreated the flora of a prehistoric era. Again the ponderous amphibious brontosaur pushed through marshes. Fish emerged upon the land, and the first bird archaeopteryx tried his imperfect wings for flight. In the regulated climates of long dead ages, fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals lived again for the edification of those interested in the very ancient—or who were amused with queer animals.

But that was only paleontologically speaking. There were the heavens to be considered. They had been: the stars and planets weighed and measured, their composition noted, courses plotted with super-accuracy. Every feature had
been mapped—every climactic condition recorded. Life had been named and numbered…then photographed. And these were but first considerations. Actually, what wasn’t known about the Solar System had not occurred as yet. But that would probably be remedied by a machine to view the future.

There was physics, biology, anthropology, zoology, geology, bacteriology, botany—and ‘ologies’ and ‘otonies’

and ‘onomies’ such as ran into figures which only machines could calculate.

A book could indeed have been written of the accomplishments of super race. But this is of the War itself, and how it came about, and how it all ended.

Stated simply, in 2150 the point of diminishing utility had been reached. To the hungry man, the first course of dinner is wonderfully delicious, the second good, the third satisfying. Through the ages people have hungered after luxury and leisure—but when he finds his food, a lot of it, Man finds suddenly that it no longer appeals to him. In fact, too much is bound to make him sick and often disagreeable. He looks around for something else. So did the people of the 22nd Century. They had all of the pleasurable amusements they wanted, but it was all so intellectual. Everything was culture. They had surfeited with it. And suddenly they wanted to forget it. All play and no work made Man a discontented citizen. A reaction set in. Man was not completely civilized as yet THE WAR!

Twenty-one years the war raged. And scarcely a million survived. Bit by bit this million was whittled down by the weapons of destruction to ragged handfuls of things that once had been cultured. Finally only one hundred humans remained alive—and they kept fighting blindly, none of them realizing how close to oblivion they were crowding
themselves and the future of humanity—and they went on killing, killing, killing!

It is doubtless but what the entire human race would have vanished, leaving the world to the more competent, though half-ignorant, hands of the beasts, who fought and killed one another for self-preservation and for food—not because of madness…and who did not have books and talk and have culture. The human race would have gone, had it not been for the record.

The fighters of War’s End, leaving their machines and countries to congregate for personal combat, were engaging in hand-to-hand attacks in the ruins of what once had been a tall and powerful city in the Twentieth Century, but now lay crumbling, its proud buildings falling to the ground, sticking out iron-rusted skeletons to the sky—and the city was Los Angeles!

* * * *

Hedrik Hunson was fighting with phosphorized fists—

hand inclosed in chemically treated gloves that burned as they struck the antagonist, insulated on the interior for the wearer—when suddenly the two of them were caught by a spreader. The other man died instantly, but Hedrik got it in the side and was whirled about sickeningly, and survived.

He was lying painfully on something when he came to, but felt too dizzy and sick to move. At last, when his head had cleared a bit, he rolled over into a sitting position and reached out his arms to grasp—a phonograph!

Big things came in small packages in the days of 2171, and a portable phonograph might well be taken for a weapon of some sort—which was exactly what Hedrik thought! And you can hardly blame him, because no one in that generation had ever seen one of the things.

There was a curious story connected with the dying of music, concerning the days of 2050 when there was a
movement to stamp out all symphonies and songs and things even slightly sentimental.

—but back to Hedrik!

Hedrik found the crank that wound the portable, turned it, reasoning that perhaps it gave power—and then—
holding it away from him—he waited for rays to spurt out or something to explode.

Nothing happened.

Hedrik was disappointed. After an agony of perspiration and puzzlement, he finally accidentally placed the needled arm onto the disk. The disk, he noticed, was black and filled with little undulations. The disk was like a wheel—so Hedrik thought, It should revolve like one, shouldn’t it? He pushed the starter thoughtfully and was more than surprised when the disk started spinning.

From the phonograph came music—music and singing!

The lost Art had returned! The Art banished under compulsion had made a comeback.

Some man was singing on the record—in a queerly interesting and familiar tongue, the ancient English. The singer seemed sad, almost crying. And Hedrik was thrilled as he played it over and over again, drinking in the new experience like wine on the lips of a connoisseur. The voice rose, fell, lingered. And Hedrik suddenly didn’t feel like fighting anymore!

The music floated out over the tumbled ruins, descended to the ears of the other people. And the fighting ceased!

They were transformed. They came running to crowd about the machine.

And there in that aged music shop they stood enthralled—
music filled their souls. It was exactly what they had needed and wanted for many years. And it had been denied them. Music was the balancing force…the force that would help them struggle ahead rebuilding the world. And next time they would be saner…they knew…the lesson of luxury had been learned and learned well. Never again would they
leave all of the work to the machines. Now they would work and sing and play.

It would be work…hard work…for some time to come. But they had found music again, and that would anchor them to sanity.

And thus was mankind saved through a record—Sonny Boy!

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THE NEW REALITY, by Reginald Bretnor

Not one member of the President’s Crisis Commission returned Driscoll’s smile. Instead, they ignored him completely. That pleased him, for he had only smiled because all six of them were his enemies, and because he knew all the world was watching. He did not try to join them. He drew his chair out from the wall to about ten feet from the end of their long, polished table, where he could watch their faces and they could not help seeing his. He sat down, briefcase on the floor beside him and a copy of his own bestseller, the book they hated, on his lap: The New Reality, by A. Craddock Driscoll, Ph.D.

They could ignore him, just as they had ignored his theories and his carefully woven proofs ever since the book that proved them wrong was published. They could make sure that his viewpoint was not represented on the Commission. They had enough power for that, just as they had had the power to have him railroaded out of his Columbia professorship. But they could not keep the media from backing him, and the public who were his readers.

Nor, he knew, could they stop him from bringing down their whole house of cards after they had finished. They would be unprepared, and the whole world was watching.

Driscoll was a spare, almost cadaverous man, just into middle age, just under middle height. He carried himself like a soldier, and he sat bolt-upright in his chair—very much, he thought, as a Civil War general might have sat his horse. He had a good profile, a strong profile, and he sat so that the watchers would not miss it, his eyes scanning the members of the panel, but pausing each time to concentrate on the Chairwoman, Madeleine Krenn-Jakob. They had been undergraduates together; they had been in graduate school at the same time; and from the very
beginning, he had known that she—so slow, so painfully methodical—had envied him his bril liance, And of course the remarks he’d made about her had drifted back to her—
that she was the finest third-rate mind in school, that sort of thing, remarks so barbed that they had always started his own friends snickering at the sight of her. She had pretended to ignore them, just as she was now ignoring him, but he had known better.

As a young woman, Madeleine Krenn had been attractive

—not a beauty, but very fresh, a little plump, looking always deceptively vulnerable. She hadn’t been. His own one or two ritual attempts at passes had been brushed off with polite contempt.

No, she had not been stupid. His own grade-point average and hers had been almost equal. Each had done well, she with her pe destrian plodding, he with his flashes of true genius. Each had gone directly from grad school to the faculty. The only trouble had been that she was always wrong. She had been wrong when they had published her crazy dissertation, Ominous Aspects of the Socio-psychological Influence of Audio-Visual Media, more than twenty years ago, when holograms were little more than laboratory curiosities. And she had been persistently wrong ever since. The difference was that now she was riding high, with both the academic and political worlds agreeing with her, and he—except for the media and the masses of the general public—was being dismissed as a crackpot.

He smiled to himself. It was hard to make a convincing crackpot out of a scholar whose latest book was a national bestseller, and who had become as well known to the holo public as Carl Sagan had to the video audiences of an earlier day.

There she sat, Chairwoman of the President’s Crisis Commission. Quietly tailored, without makeup, without jewelry, she was heavier now, her dark hair greying perceptibly, and she looked sad and tired.

He could read her nervousness, her anxiety, in the tension of her neck muscles. She should be, he thought, with me sitting here. She would be no more able to stop him from delivering his unanswerable argument than she had been able to stop him from attending.

She was speaking, her voice soft and very weary. “You all know why we are here. We have reached a critical point in our history, in mankind’s. We have recognized for a long time that we were approaching one, but we could neither agree on its nature nor decide what steps should be taken to contend with it. That is why the President, in this country, and the Prime Minister in England, and various other heads of state, each appointed a Crisis Commission a year ago. We exchanged data, and we have reached a unanimous decision. But before I announce it, if the others on the Commission do not mind, I’d like to outline the background for you once again so that there will be no misunderstanding.”

She looked to left, to right, at Moylan and Greenspan of Harvard, Avolantis of U.C., Garfield of Loyola, Cheng of Stanford, men and women whom her faction considered the country’s most eminent socio-psychologists. They nodded, looking as anxious and as tired as she.

“Very well, then. As you have all heard, the crisis we face is a simple and terrible one: sudden and almost universal insanity. Such things have happened on a much smaller scale more than once in man’s history, when groups large and small have abruptly, and for no known reason, lost touch with reality. The Children’s Crusade during the Middle Ages was such an occurrence. So was the terrible wave of witch-burnings, especially in Germany, some centuries later. So was the mass suicide of hundreds of Americans in Guyana almost in our own times.

“After much study, we have decided that in each instance the proximate cause was an event involving what Jung called the group subconscious, a realm of being we all
share to some degree, and which we still cannot understand. That is the level, we now believe, where telepathic phenomena occur, especially those involving raw emotion—and whenever we find that disassociation from reality which defines psychosis, we always find raw emotion, frightening and powerful. Here we have the most probable explanation for what used to be called mass hysteria, mass hallucination, the madness of crowds.”

What utter bullshit! Driscoll thought—but he said nothing.

It was not yet time.

“Now,” she continued, “let us go back to the early years of this century, when radio was the main medium of popular entertain ment. Among the most addictive programs were what were called soap operas, crude tear-jerkers with devoted followings. Everyone was amused because whenever one of their characters was married, truckloads of gifts would arrive from listeners literally unable to distinguish the radio play from reality. Then later, when TV
ap peared, a new phenomenon occurred: viewers accustomed to exces sive violence in their entertainment paid no attention when it happened in real life. Time after time, they’d watch the commission of a rape or murder and not even call the police The term ‘spectator crimes’ was coined to describe this.

“Meanwhile, the behavior patterns shown on the media, the mor als and ethics or the lack of them, or their distortion, were having their effect. It is no coincidence that, as the surrogate realities of TV became more violent and less restrained in all human relations, crime and every other form of anti-social, anti-personal behavior went, up correspondingly. The hardness of reality was being diluted; the meaning of reality was being twisted. The ingredients for in dividual psychoses were already brewing, and with them, because of the emotional stress and turmoil involved, the ingredients for new mass psychoses.”

Pausing, she pointed at a video screen above their heads.

“The ingredients in our witches’ cauldron have been simmering and bubbling and getting hotter and hotter as we’ve added to them. I’m going to let Dr. Cheng show you what our computers have told us about what’s happened—”

Four dotted lines appeared one above the other in the screen’s lower left corner: yellow, green, blue, and red.

“This display covers the pre-holo period only. You’ll observe that, with an occasional minor dip, they all rise at increasing rates. The yellow line represents teenage and pre-teen self-destruction: drugs, psychotic violence, suicide. The green line shows the adult equiva lent; the blue measures violent crime at all ages; the red diagrams the incidence of mass psychosis. You will observe that, towards the end, the red line starts to climb much faster than the others. Why did this happen? The answer’s simple. The TV
habit—and it was a habit, for the average set was on six or seven hours a day—not only weaned a great many people away from the real world, but the tube became their reality.” She smiled bitterly. “But contrary to mass-media propaganda, this new reality—”

Driscoll’s mouth twisted. Had she looked at him just as she said that?

“—this new reality was not a healthy one. Remember, too, that this was TV alone, before holo. Dr. Cheng, will you show us the comparison?”

Cheng touched the unobtrusive console in front of him and four new lines appeared, solid lines.

“Now you will see the effect of our twelve years of mass holo use. For twelve years, you have been watching men, women, and children suffering, bleeding, dying, outraging each other physically in a hundred different ways, all in your own family or living rooms, all virtually indistinguishable from the real and solid. You have seen their throats cut; you have leered at their orgasms; you
have shared the fantastic thrills of risked lives at no peril to your own. Now watch!

“See how sharply each line soars past those older ones?

Do you know what the red line shows us now? It shows us episodes like the one on that eight-hundred-passenger superjet, where suddenly, at thirty thousand feet, the passengers became a mob, a rabid mob, and tore the crew to pieces before the plane finished its last dreadful dive into the Andes.”

Driscoll shook his head. Again he smiled, turning to make sure that every watcher saw him do it. His own book had refuted every one of her contentions. His chapter on “The New Dimensions of Reality” had shown definitely that the social phenomena she blamed on holo were cyclic, that indeed had it not been for holo and the new dimensions it opened to the mind things would have been infinitely worse.

He reviewed his other chapters: “Children in the New Reality,” “Holo and the Healthy Mind,” “The Empty Jungian Myth,” and all the rest. She was persuasive—he had to give her that. She had persuaded her fellow academics, all but a few politicians, and now even more and more of the media men. She was the cause and root of all of it. Had it not been for her—

Well, her day was over. His turn had almost come.

Madeleine Krenn-Jakob gestured to Cheng to wipe the screen, and the lines vanished “What you have seen has been our mea surement of the cauldron’s simmering, the cauldron that’s the mass subconscious of mankind. Now look at what our computer extrap olations tell us. Not about the remote future, no! About the next few weeks, or days, or hours!”

A red line, jagged, sprang viciously to life. For a few inches, it angled upward—and then, abruptly, straightened and slashed its way straight up.

“Look!” she said. “It’s a curve no longer. It has already reached asymptote. That means that we can count on no time at all until everything boils over!” She stopped, regarding her unseen watchers levelly.

“And that,” she told them, “is why the Commission has already rendered its unanimous report to the President of the United States. That is why, as you may have noticed, all National Guard and Reserve units have been called to active duty, and all police reserve placed on instant alert.

Even now, the President is issuing the nec essary orders.

There is only one thing we can do, and he is doing it. There will be no more holo transmissions. All holo installations will be shut down. And for the time being at least, television—or what’s left of it—will be restricted to news and commentary.”

Cheng cleared the screen. She stood.

“That is all,” she said.

“The hell it is!” growled Driscoll, no longer smiling. He too stood up, letting his book fall to the floor, his right hand in his open briefcase.

Neither she nor the other members of the panel paid him any heed.

“This idiocy has gone far enough!” Driscoll’s voice was loud and strident now. “Well, I have one argument you cannot counter, one that is going to stop this here and now!”

He saw that one of the Commission members—was it Garfield?—was making some sort of an announcement and that Madeleine Krenn-Jakob was listening closely.

“Damn you!” he shouted at her. “Damn you, look at me!”

He let the briefcase drop so all could see the .45 automatic in his hand.

She paid him no attention. Nobody turned. Garfield, unbelievably, kept on with his announcement.

Coolly, he shot her through the head, and triumphantly he watched for her to fall.

She didn’t. She seemed to be thanking Garfield for whatever it was that he had said.

Driscoll stared at her, at all of them. He could feel every nerve screaming, every muscle straining against itself. Yet he couldn’t have missed, not at that range, never. Or could he? Twice more he shot her, aiming for her body.

Then, desperately, he emptied, the gun at Cheng, at Garfield, at the others.

And nothing happened.

Driscoll threw the empty pistol at them, cursing, screaming at them. “Damn you! Damn you! Die! Why can’t you die?” Then he collapsed onto his chair, sobbing hideously, clawing at his face and forehead with his fingers.

Of course he could have turned them off at any time, but he had forgotten that.

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WHAT HATH ME? by Henry Kuttner The man running through the forest gloom breathed in hot, panting gusts, pain tearing at his chest. Underfoot the crawling, pale network of tree-trunks lay flat upon the ground, and more than once he tripped over a slippery bole and crashed down, but he was up again instantly.

He had no breath to scream. He sobbed as he ran, his burning eyes trying to pierce the shadows. Whispers rustled down from above. When the leaf-ceiling parted, a blaze of terribly bright stars flamed in the jet sky. It was cold and dark, and the man knew that he was not on Earth.

They were following him, even here.

A squat yellow figure, huge-eyed, inhuman, loomed in his path—one of the swamp people of Southern Venus. The man swung a wild blow at the thing, and his fist found nothing. It had vanished. But beyond it rose a single-legged giant, a Martian, bellowing the great, gusty laughter of the Redland tribes.

The man dodged, stumbled, and smashed down heavily.

He heard padding footsteps and tried, with horrible intensity of purpose, to rise. He could not.

The Martian crept toward him—but it was no longer a Martian. An Earthman, with the face of some obscene devil, came forward with a slow, sidling motion. Horns sprouted from the low forehead. The teeth were fangs. As the creature came nearer, it raised its hands—twisted, gnarled talons—and slid them about the man’s throat.

Through the forest thundered the deep, booming clangor of a brass gong. The sound shattered the phantom as a hammer shatters glass. Instantly the man was alone.

Making hoarse, animal sounds in his throat, he staggered upright and lurched in the direction from which the sound came. But he was too weak. Presently he fell, and this time he did not rise. His arms moved a little and then were still.

He slept, lines of tortured weariness twisting the haggard face.

Very faintly, from infinite distances, he heard a voice…two voices. Inhuman. Alien—and yet with a warmth of vital urgency that stirred something deep within him.

“He has passed our testing.”

Then a stronger, more powerful voice—answering.

“Others have passed our testing—but the Aesir slew them.”

“There is no other way. In this man I sensed something a little different. He knows hate—he has hated.”

“He will need more than hatred,” the deeper voice said.

“Even with us to aid him. And there is little time. Strip his memories from him now, so that he may not be weakened by them—”

“May the gods fight with him.”

“But he fights the gods. The only gods men know in these evil days—”

* * * *

The man awakened.

Trip-hammers beat inside his skull. He opened his eyes and closed them quickly against the sullen red glow that beat down from above. He lay motionless, gathering his strength.

What had happened?

He didn’t know. The jolting impact of that realization struck him violently. He felt a brief panic of disorientation.

Where—?

Derek Stuart, he thought. At least it isn’t complete amnesia. I know who I am. But not where I am.

This time when he opened his eyes they stayed open.

Overhead, a broad-leafed tree arched. Through its branches be could see a dark, starry sky, the glowing, ringed disc of Saturn very far away, and a deeply scarlet glow.

Not Earth, then. A Saturnian moon? No, Saturn didn’t eclipse most of the sky. Perhaps the asteroid belt.

He moved his head a little and saw the red moon.

Aesir!

The message rippled along his nerves into his brain.

Stuart reacted instantly. His hard, strong body writhed, whipped over, and then he was in a half-crouch, one hand flashing to his belt while his eyes searched the empty silence of the forest around him. There was no sound, no movement.

Sweat stood on Stuart’s forehead, and he brushed it away impatiently. His deeply-tanned face set into harsh lines of curiously hopeless desperation. There was no blaster gun at his belt, but that didn’t matter. Guns couldn’t help him now—not on Asgard.

The red moon had told him the answer. Only one world in the System had a red moon, and men didn’t go to that artificial asteroid willingly. They went, yes—but only to be doomed and damned. From Venus to Callisto spacemen spoke of Asgard in hushed voices—Asgard where the Aesir lived and ruled the worlds of Man.

No spaceships left Asgard, except the sleek black cruisers manned by the priests of Aesir. No man had ever returned from Asgard.

Stuart grinned mirthlessly. He’d learned a lesson, though he’d never profit by it now. Always before he’d been confident of his ability to outdrink anyone of his own weight and size. And certainly that slight, tired-eyed man at the Singing Star, in New Boston, should have passed out long before Stuart—under normal circumstances.

So the circumstances hadn’t been quite normal. It was a frame. A beautiful, airtight frame, because he’d never come back to squawk. Nobody came back from Asgard.

He shivered a little and looked around warily. There were legends, of course. The Watchers who patrolled the
asteroid ceaselessly—robots, men said. They served the Aesir. As, in a way, all men served the Aesir.

No sound. No movement. Only the sullen crimson light beating down ominously from that dark sky.

Stuart took stock of his clothing. Regular leatheroid spaceman’s rig; they’d left him that, anyway. Whoever they were. He couldn’t remember anything that had happened after the fifth drink with the tired-eyed man. There was a very faint recollection of running somewhere—seeing unpleasant things—and hearing two oddly unreal voices.

But the memories slipped away and vanished as he tried to focus on them.

The hell with it. He was on Asgard. And that meant—
something rather more unpleasant than death, if the legends were to be believed. A very suitable climax to an unorthodox life, in this era when obedience and law enforcement were the rigid rule.

Stuart picked up a heavy branch that might serve as a club. Then, shrugging, he turned westward, striking at random through the forest. No use waiting here till the Watchers came. At least he could fight, as he had always fought as far back as he could remember.

There wasn’t much room for fighters anymore. Not under the Aesir rule. There were nations and kings and presidents, of course, but they were puppet figures, never daring to disobey any edicts that came from the mystery-shrouded asteroid hanging off the orbit of Mars, the tiny, artificial world that had ruled the System for a thousand years.

The Aesir. The inhuman, cryptic beings who—if legend were true—once had been human. Stuart scowled, trying to remember.

An—an entropic accelerator, that was it. A device, a method that speeded up evolution tremendously. That had been the start of the tyranny. A machine that could accelerate a man’s evolution by a million years.

Some had used that method. Those were the ones who had become the Aesir, creatures so far advanced in the evolutionary scale that they were no longer remotely human. Much was lost in the mists of the past. But Stuart could recall that much—the knowledge that the Aesir had once been human, that they were human no longer, and that for a thousand years they had ruled the System, very terribly, from their forbidden asteroid that they tamed Asgard—home of the legendary Norse gods.

Maybe the tired-eyed man had been an Aesir priest, collecting victims. Certainly no others would have dared to land a ship on Asgard.

Stuart swung on, searching he empty skies, and now a queer, uneasoning excitement began to grow within him. At least, before he died, he’d learn what the Aesir were like. It probably couldn’t be pleasant knowledge, but there’d be some satisfaction in it. And there’d be even more satisfaction if he thought he had a chance of smashing a hard fist into the face of one of the Aesir priests—or even—

Hell, why not? He had nothing to lose now. From the moment he had touched Asgard soil, he was damned anyway. But of one thing Stuart was certain: he wouldn’t be led like a helpless sheep to the throat-cutting. He wouldn’t die without fighting against them.

The forest thinnned before him. There was a flicker of swift motion far ahead. Stuart froze, his grip tightening on the cudgel, his eyes searching.

Between the columnar trees, bright amid the purple shadows, a glitter of sparkling nebulae swept. A web of light, Stuart thought—so dazzling his eyes ached as he stared at the—the thing.

Bodiless, intangible, the shifting net of stars poised, high above his head. Hundreds of twinkling, glittering pinpoints flickered there, so swiftly it seemed as though an arabesque spider-web of light caved in the still, dark air.

Each flickering star-fleck—watched. Each canvas an eye.

And as the thing poised, a horrible, half-human hesitancy in its stillness, a deep, humming note sounded, from its starry heart.

Star-points shook and quivered to the sound. Again it came—deeper, more menacing.

Questioning!

Was this one of the—Watchers? Was this one of them?

Abruptly its hesitancy vanished; it swept down upon Stuart. Instinctively he swung his cudgel in a smashing blow that sent him reeling forward—for there was no resistance. The star-creature was as intangible as air.

And yet it was not. The dazzling web of light enfolded him like a blazing cloak. Instantly a cold, trembling horror crawled along his skin. Bodiless the thing might be—but it was dangerous, infinitely so!

Pressure, shifting, quicksand pressure, was all about him.

That stealthy cold crept into his flesh and bones, frigid icicles jabbing into his brain.

Gasping with shock, Stuart struck out. He had dropped the club. Now he stooped and groped for it, but he could see nothing except a glittering veil of diamonds that raced like a mad torrent everywhere.

The humming rose again—ominously triumphant.

Cursing, Stuart staggered forward. The star-cloak stayed.

He tried to grip it somewhere, to wrench it free, but he could not. The thousands of tiny eyes raced past him, glittering with alien ecstasy, shining brighter and ever brighter as they fed.

He felt the life being sucked out of him.… Deeper stabbed the gelid cold…louder roared that throbbing tone in his ears.

He heard his voice gasping furious, hopeless oaths. His eyes ached with the strain of staring at that blinding glitter.

Then—

The heart of the Watcher. Crush the heart!

The words crashed like deep thunder in his brain. Had someone spoken them—? No…for, with the command, had come a message as well. As though a thought had spoken within his mind, a telepathic warning from—where?

His eyes strained at the dazzle. Now he saw that there was a brighter core that did not shift and change when the rest of the star-cloud wove its dreadful net. A spot of light that stayed in one place.

He reached out…the nucleus darted away…he lurched forward, on legs half-frozen, and felt a stone turn under his foot. As he crashed down, his hand closed and tightened on something warm and living that pulsed frantically against his palm.

The humming rose to a shrill scream…frightened…

warning.

Stuart tightened his grip. He lay motionless, his eyes closed. But all around him he could feel the icy tendrils of the star-thing lashing at him, drinking his human warmth, probing with avid fingers at his brain.

He felt that warm—core—writhe and try to slip between his fingers. He squeezed…

The scream burst out, an inhuman agony in its raw-edged keening.

It stopped.

In Stuart’s hand was—nothing.

He opened his eyes. The dazzling glitter of star-points had vanished. Only the forest, with its purple shadows, lay empty and silent around him.

Stuart got up slowly, swallowed dry-throated. The creatures of the Aesir were not invulnerable, then. Not to one who knew their weaknesses.

How had he known? What voice had spoken in his brain?

There had been an odd, impossible familiarity to that—that mental voice, now that he remembered it. Somewhere he had heard it, sensed it before.

That gap in his memory…

He tried to bridge it, but he could not. There was only a quickening of the desire to go on westward. He felt suddenly certain that he would find the Aesir in that direction.

He took a hesitant step—and another. And with each step, a queer, unmotivated confidence poured into him. As though some barrier in his mind had broken down, letting some strange flood of proud defiance rush in.

It was impossible. It was dangerous. But—certainly—no more dangerous than supinely waiting here on Asgard till another Watcher came to destroy him. There were worse things than the starry Watchers here, if legends were to be trusted.

He went on, the curious tide of defiance rising higher and ever higher in his blood. It was a strangely intoxicating sense of—of pure, crazy self-confidence such as no man should rightfully have felt on this haunted asteroid.

He wondered—but the drunkenness was such that he did not wonder much. He did not question.

He thought: To hell with the Aesir!

The forest ended. At his feet a road began, leading off into the purple horizons of the flat plain before him. At the end of that road was a thrusting pillar of light that rose like a tower toward the dark sky.

There were the Aesir.…

II

Every spaceman has an automatic sense of orientation. In ancient days, when clipper ships sailed the seas of Earth, the Yankee skippers knew the decks beneath their feet, and they knew the stars. Southern Cross or Pole Star told them in what latitudes they sailed. In unknown waters, they still had their familiar keels and the familiar stars.

So it is with the spacemen who drift from Pluto to Mercury Darkside, trusting to metal hulls that shut in the air and shut out the vast abysses of interplanetary space.

When they work outship, a glance at the sky will tell a trained man where he is—and only tough, trained men survive the dangerous commerce of space. On Mercury the blazing solar corona flames above the horizon; on clouded Venus the green star of Earth shines sometimes.On Io, Callisto, Ganymede, a man can orient himself by the gigantic mother planet—Saturn or Jupiter—and in the Asteroid Belt, there is always the strange procession of little worlds like lanterns, some half-shadowed, others brightly reflecting the Sun’s glare. Anywhere in the System the sky is friendly.

Except on Asgard. Jupiter was too far and too small; Mars was scarcely visible; the Asteroid Belt not much thicker than the Milky Way. The unfamiliar magnitudes of the planets told Stuart, very surely, that he was in unknown territory. He was without the sure, safe anchors that spacemen depend upon, and that lack told him how utterly he stood alone now.

But the unreasoning confidence did not flag. If anything, it mounted stronger within him as he hurried along the road, his rangy legs eating up the miles with easy speed. The sooner he reached his goal, the better he’d like it. Nor did he wish to encounter any more of the Aesir’s guardians—
his business was with the Aesir!

The tower of light grew taller as he went on. Now he saw that it was a cluster of buildings, massed cylinders of varying flights, each one gigantic in diameter as well as height, and all shining with that shadowless radiance that apparently came from the stone—or metal—itself. The…

road led directly to the base of the tallest tower.

It ran between shining pillars—a gate as well as threshold

—and was lost in silvery mists. No bars were needed to keep visitors out of this fortress!

Briefly a cool wind of doubt blew upon Stuart. He hesitated, wishing he had not lost his blaster gun. But he was unarmed; he had even left the club back in the forest.

He glanced around.

The red moon was sinking. A heavier darkness was creeping over the land. Very far away he thought he saw the shifting flicker of dancing lights—a Watcher?

He hurried onward.

* * * *

Cyclopean, the tower loomed above him, a shining rod poised to strike. His gaze could not pierce the mists beyond the portal.

He stepped forward—between the twin pillars. He walked on blindly into the mists.

Twenty steps he took—and paused, as something dark and shapeless swam into view before him. A pit—at his feet.

In the dimness he could not see its botter, but a narrow bridge crossed the gulf a little to his left. Stuart crossed the bridge. Solidity was again under his feet.With shocking suddenness, a great, brazen bellow of laughter roared out.

Harsh mockery sharpened it. And it echoed around Stuart

—and was answered. The walls gave it back in echoes.

The mists drifted away—were sucked down into the pit.

They vanished as though they fled from that evil laughter.

Stuart stood in a chamber that must have occupied the entire base of that enormous tower. Behind him the abyss gaped. Before him a shifting veil of light hid whatever lay behind it. But all around, between monstrous pillars, were set thrones, ebon thrones fifty feet tall.

On the thrones sat giants!

Titan figures, armored in glittering mail, ringed Stuart, and instantly his mind fled back to half-forgotten folklore.… Asgard, Jotunheim, the lands of the giants and the gods. Thor and Odin, sly Loki and Baldur—they were all here, he thought, bearded colossi roaring their black laughter into the shaking air of the hall. Watching him from their height—

Then he looked up, and the giants were dwarfed.

The chamber was roofless. At least he could see no roof.

The pillars climbed up and up tremendously. All around, the walls that were hung with vast stretches of tapestry, till they dwindled to a pinpoint far above. The sheer magnitude of the tower made Stuart’s mind rock dizzily.

Still the laughter roared out. But now it died.

Thundered through the hall a voice…deep…resonant…the voice of the Aesir.

“A human, brother!”

“Aye! A human—and a mad one, to come here.”

“To enter the hall of the Aesir.”

A red-bearded colossus bent down, his glacial blue eyes staring at Stuart. “Shall I crush him?”

Stuart sprang back as an immense hand swooped down like a falling tree upon him. Instinctively his hand flashed to his belt, and suddenly the red-beard was shouting laughter that the others echoed.

“He has courage.”

“Let him live.”

“Aye. Let him live. He may amuse us for a while…”

“And then?”

“Then the pit—with the others.”

The others? Stuart slanted a glance downward. The silver mists had dissipated now, and he could see that the abyss was not bottomless. Its floor was fifty feet below the surface on which he stood, and a dozen figures were visible beneath. They stood motionless—like statues. A burly, leather-clad Earthmen who might have been whisked from some Plutonian mine; a slim, scantily clad Earthgirl, her hair powered blue, her costume the shining sequin-suit of a tavern entertainer. A stocky, hunch-shouldered Venusian with his slate-gray skin; a Martian girl, seven feet tall, with limbs and features of curious delicacy, her hair piled high atop that narrow skull. Another Earthman—a thin, pale, clerklike fellow. A white-skinned, handsome Callistan native, looking like Apollo, and, like all Callistans,
harboring the cold savagery of a demon behind that smooth mask.

A dozen of them—drawn from all parts of the System.

Stuart remembered that this was the time of the periodic tithing—which meant nothing less than a sacrifice. Once each month a few men and women would vanish—not many

—and the black ships of the Aesir priests sped back to Asgard with their captives.

Not one looked up. Frozen motionless as stone, they stood there in the pit—waiting.

Again the laughter crashed out. The redbeard was watching Stuart.

“His courage flags,” the great voice boomed. “Speak the truth, Earthman. Have you courage to face the gods?”

Stuart stubbornly refused to answer. He had an odd, reasonless impression that this was part of some deep game, that behind the mocking byplay lay a more serious purpose.

“He has courage now,” a giant said. “But did he always have courage? Has there never been a time in his life when courage failed him? Answer, Earthman!”

Stuart was listening to another voice, a quiet, infinitely distant voice within his brain that whispered: Do not answer them!

“Let him pass our testing,” the redbeard commanded. “If he fails, there is an end. If he does not fail—he goes into the pit to walk the Long Orbit.”

The giant leaned forward.

“Will you match skill—and courage—with us, Earthling?”

Still Stuart did not answer. More than ever now he sensed the violent, hidden undercurrents surging beneath the surface of this byplay. More than he knew swung in the balance here.

He nodded.

“He has courage,” a giant repeated. “But did he always have courage?”

“We shall see…” the redbeard said.

The air shimmered before Stuart. Through its shaking, his senses played him false. He knew quite well who he was and where he stood, in what deadly peril—but in that shimmer which bewildered the eyes and the mind he was a boy again, seeing a certain hillside he had not seen except through his boyhood’s eyes. And he saw a black horse standing above him on the slope, pawing the ground and looking at him with red eyes. And an old, old terror came flooding over him that he had not remembered for a quarter of a century. A boy’s acute and sudden terror.…

Who had opened the doors of his mind and laid this secret bare? He himself had long forgotten—and who upon this alien world could look back through space and time to remind him of that long-ago day when the vicious black horse had thrown an inexperienced boy rider and planted a seed of terror in his mind which he had been years outgrowing? But the fear was long gone now, long gone.…

Wasn’t it?

Then whence had come this monstrous black stallion that pawed the floor of the hall, glaring down red-eyed at him and showing teeth like fangs? No horse, but a monster in the shape of a horse, a monster ten feet high at the shoulder, wearing the shape of his boyhood nightmare that woke in Stuart even now the old, unreasoning horror.…

It was stamping down upon him, shaking its bridled head, snorting, lifting its lip above the impossible teeth. He saw the reins hanging loose, he saw the saddle and the swinging stirrups. He knew that the only safety in this hall for him was paradoxically upon the nightmare’s back, where the hoofs and fangs could not reach him. But the terror and revulsion which the boy bad buried long ago came welling up from founts deep-buried in the man’s subconscious mind.…

Now it was rushing him, head like a snake’s, outthrust, hissing like a snake, reins flying like Medusa-locks as it
stretched to seize him. For one instant he stood there paralyzed. He had faced dangers on many worlds to which this nightmare was nothing, but he had never since boyhood felt the paralysis of horror that gripped him now.

It was a child’s horror, resurrected from the caves of sleep to ruin him.…

With a superhuman effort he broke that frozen fear, snatching for the flying reins, whirling as the monstrous thing swept past against his thighs, and it was a smooth, pouring cold of many alien muscles working powerfully together in a way no mammal knows. He looked down.

He was riding a monstrous snake that twisted its head to look at him in the moment he realized what had happened.

Its great diamond-shaped head towered high and came looping down toward him, wide-mouthed, tongue like a flame flickering.…

It laid its cold, smooth cheek against his with a hideous caressing motion, sliding around his neck, sliding down his arm and side, laying a loop of cold, scaly strength around him and pressing, pressing.…

His hands closed around the thickness of its throat, futilely—and the throat melted in his grasp and was hairy with a hairiness no mammal ever knew. The motion of the body he bestrode changed again and was incredibly springy and light.

He rode a monstrous spider. His hands were sunk wrist-deep in loathsome coarse hair, and his eyes stared into great cold faceted eyes that mirrored his own face a thousandfold. He saw his own distorted features looking back at him in countless miniatures, but behind the faces, in the great eyes of the spider, he saw no consciousness regarding him. The cold multiple eyes were not aware of Derek Stuart. Behind the shield of its terrible face, the spider shut away its own arachnid thoughts and the memories of the red fields of Mars that were its home. With
dreadful, impersonal aloofness, its mandibles gaped forward toward its prey.

Loathing ran in waves of weakness through Stuart’s whole body, but he shut his eyes and blindly struck out at the nearer of those great mirroring eyes, feeling wetness shatter against his fist as—as—

As the horror shifted and vanished, while rippling waves of green light darkened all about him. Now they coagulated, drew together into a meadow, cool with Earthly grass, bordered by familiar trees far away. Primroses gleamed here and there. Above him was the blue sky and the warm bright sun that shone only upon the hills of Earth.

But what he felt was horror.

Twenty feet from him was a rank, rounded patch of weeds. His gaze was drawn inexorably to that spot. And it was from there that the crawling dread reached out to him.

Faintly he heard laughter…of the gods…of the Aesir. The Aesir? Who—what—were they? How had he, Derek Stuart, ever heard of them except as a name whispered in fear as the spaceships streaked through the clouds above that Dakota farmstead.…

Derek Stuart…a boy of eleven.…

But—but—that was wrong, somehow. He wasn’t a child any more. He had matured, become a spaceman.

Dreams. The dreams of an eleven-year old.

Yet the hollow, dreadful laughter throbbed somewhere, in the vaults of the blue overhead, in the solidity of the very ground beneath him.

This had happened before. It had happened to a boy in South Dakota—a boy who had not known what lay concealed in that verdant clump of weeds.

But now, somehow—and very strangely—Stuart knew what he would find there.

He was afraid. Horribly, sickeningly afraid. Cold nausea crawled up his spine and the calves of his legs. He wanted to turn and run to the farmhouse half a mile away. He
almost turned, and then paused as the distant laughter grew louder.

They wanted him to run. They were trying to scare him—
and, once the defenses of his courage had broken, he would be lost. Stuart knew that with an icy certainty.

Somewhere, very far away, he sensed a man standing in a cyclopean hall—a man in ragged spaceman’s garb, hard-faced, thin-lipped, angry-eyed. A familiar figure. The man was urging him on—telling him to go on toward that clump of weeds.

Derek Stuart obeyed the voiceless command. His throat dry, his heart pumping, he forced himself across the meadow till he stood at his goal and looked down at the bloody, twisted corpse of the tramp who had been knifed by another hobo, twenty years before, on that Dakota farm.

The old nausea of shocked horror took him by the throat and strangled him.

He fought it down. This time he didn’t run screaming back to the farmhouse.…

And suddenly the laughter of the gods was stilled. Derek Stuart, a man once more in mind, stood again in the tower of the Aesir. The thrones between the monstrous pillars were vacant.

The Aesir were gone.

Stuart let out his breath in a long sigh. He had no illusions about the vanishment of the Aesir; he knew he had not conquered those mighty beings. It would take more than human powers to do that. But at least he had a respite. All but the most stolid spacemen develop hypertension, and there seems to be a curious mathematical rule about that; it increases according to the distance from the Sun. Which may be explained by the fact that environmental differences also increase as the outer planets are reached—
and alien environments breed alien creatures. A great many men have gone insane on Pluto.…

This was not Pluto; it was nearer Sunward than Jupiter, but the utter alienage that brooded over Asgard was almost palpable. Even the solidity under Stuart’s feet, the very stones of the planetoid, were artifically created, by a science a million years beyond that of his own time. And the Aesir—

Unexpectedly his deep chest shook with laughter. The inexplicable self-confidence that had first come to him in the Asgard forests had not waned; it seemed to have grown even stronger since his meeting with the Aesir giants; Now he stared around the colossal hall, his eyes straining toward the spot of light far above where those incredible columns converged. His own insignificance by comparison did not trouble him.

Whether or not he could have the slightest hope of winning this game—at least he was giving his enemies a run for their money!

III

A sound from the pit roused him. Turning, he walked warily toward its edge.

The dozen motionless figures were still there, fifty feet below, and among them was one he had not noticed before

—an Earthgirl, he thought, with curling dark hair framing a white face as she tilted up her chin and stared at him.

At this distance he could make out few details; she wore a close-fitting green suit which left slender arms and legs bare.

“Earthman—” she said, in a clear, carrying voice.

“Earthman! Quick! The Aesir will be back—go now! Leave their temple before they—”

“Don’t waste your breath,” Stuart said. “This is Asgard.”

Whoever the girl was, she should know the impossibility of leaving the taboo world. “If I can find a rope—”

She said quickly, “You won’t find one. Not here, in the temple.”

“How can I get you out of there? And the others?”

“You’re mad,” the girl said. “What good would it do.…”

She shook her head. “Better to die at once.”

Stuart narrowed his eyes at the dozen frozen figures. “I don’t think so. Fourteen of us can put up a better fight than one. If your friends wake up—”

The girl said, “On your left, between the pillars, there’s a tapestry showing Perseus and the Gorgon. Touch the helm of Perseus and the hand of Andromeda. Then go carefully—
there may be traps.”

“What is it?”

“It will lead you down here. You can free us. If you hurry—
oh, but it’s hopeless! The Aesir—”

“Damn the Aesir,” Stuart snarled. “Wake up the others!”

He whirled and ran toward the distant wall, where he could see the Perseus tapestry, brown and gold, a huge curtain between two columns. If the Aesir saw, they made no move…

Stuart’s lips twisted in a bitter smile. The crazy confidence had not left him, but he was conscious of a reassuring warmth; at least he was no longer completely alone. That would help. Between the worlds, and on the desolate planets that swing along the edge of the System, loneliness is the lurking terror, more horrible than the most exotic monster ever spawned by the radioactive Plutonian earth. He touched the tapestry twice; it swept away from him, and a staircase was visible, leading down through stone or metal—he could not tell which. Stuart fought back the impulse that urged him to race down those curving spiral steps. The girl had spoken of traps.

He went warily, testing each tread before he put his weight upon it. Though he did not think that the snares of the Aesir would be so simple.

At the bottom, he emerged into a vaulted chamber, tiny by comparison with the one he had left. It was oval, domed
ceiling and walls and floor shining with a milky radiance—
except at one spot.

There he saw a door—transparent. Through it he looked into the pit. He was on a level with the floor of that shaft now; he could see the dozen figures still standing motionless in a huddled group, and a few feet beyond the glassy pane was the Earthgirl. She was looking directly at him, but her dark eyes had a blind seeking, as though the door was opaque from her side.

Stuart paused, his hand on the complicated mechanism that, he guessed, would open the portal. His hard, dark face was impassive, but he was conscious of an unfamiliar stirring deep within him. From above, he had not seen the girl’s beauty.

He saw it now.

She couldn’t be an Earthgirl—entirely.

She must be one of those disturbingly lovely interplanetary halfbreeds. Earth-blood she had, of course, and predominantly, but there was something more, the pure essence of beauty that blazed through her like a flame kindled in a lamp of crystal. In all his wanderings between the worlds, Stuart had never seen a girl as breathtakingly lovely as this one.

His hand moved on the controls; the door slid silently open. The girl’s eyes brightened. She gave a little gasp and ran toward him. Without question she sought refuge in his arms, and for a moment Stuart held her—not unwillingly.

He thrust her away gently.

“The others?”

She said, “It’s useless. The paralysis—”

Stuart scowled and stepped across the threshold into the pit. Uneasiness crawled along his spine as he did so. The Aesir might be watching from above, or—or—

There was nothing. Only dead silence, and the uneven breathing of the girl as she stood in the doorway watching.

Stuart stopped before the leather-clad Earthman and tested
a burly arm. The man stood frozen, his flesh cold and hard as stone, his eyes staring glassily. He was not even breathing.

So with the others. Stuart grimaced and shrugged. He turned back toward the girl and felt a pulse of relief when he stepped into the shining chamber. He might be no safer here, but at least he wasn’t so conscious of inhuman eyes that might be watching from above. Not that solid stone might be any barrier to the Aesir’s probing gaze…

The girl touched the mechanism; the door slid silently shut. “It’s no use,” she said. “The paralysis holds all the others. Only I could battle it—a little. And that was because

—”

“Save it,” Stuart said. He turned toward the door by which he had entered, but an urgent hand gripped his wrist.

“Let me talk,” the quiet voice said. “We’re as safe here as anywhere. And there may be a way—now that I can think clearly again.”

“A way out? A safe way?”

There was a haunted look in her dark eyes. “I don’t know.

I’ve lived here for a long time. The others—” she pointed toward the door of the pit. “The sacrifices were brought to Asgard only yesterday. But I’ve been here many moons. The Aesir kept me alive for a bit, to amuse them. Then they tired, and I was thrown in with the others. But I learned a little. I—I—no one can dwell here in the Aesir stronghold without—changing a little. That’s why the paralysis didn’t hold me as long as it holds the others.”

“Can we save them?”

“I don’t know,” she said, with a small, helpless shrug. “I don’t even know if we can save ourselves. It’s been so long since I was brought to Asgard that I—I scarcely remember my life before that. But I have learned a little of the Aesir, and that may help us now.”

Stuart watched her. She tried to smile, but not successfully.

She said, “I’m Kari. The rest—I’ve forgotten. You’re—”

“Derek Stuart.”

“Tell me what happened.”

“We haven’t time,” Stuart said impatiently, but Kari shook her head.

“We’ll need weapons, and I must know—first—if you can use them. Tell me!”

Well, she was right. She had knowledge that Stuart needed. So he told her, very briefly, what he remembered.

She stared at him. “Voices—in your mind?”

“Something like that. I don’t know—”

“Telepathy?”

“No. No. Or—wait—” He tried to focus his thoughts upon a far, faint calling that came from infinite distances. His name. An urgent summons.

It faded and was gone.

“There’s nothing,” Stuart said finally, and Kari moved her shoulders uneasily.

“No help there, then.”

“Tell me one thing. What’s the Aesir’s power?

Hypnotism?”

“No,” Kari said, “or not entirely. They can make thoughts into real things. They are—what the race of man will evolve into in a million years. And they have changed, into beings utterly alien to humans.”

“They looked human—giants, though.”

“They can assume any shape,” Kari told him. “Their real form is unimaginable. Beings of pure energy…mental force…matrixes of electronic power. They were striking at you through your mind.”

Stuart said, “I wondered why they didn’t set some of their Watchers on me.”

“I don’t know why they didn’t,” Kari frowned. “Instead, they hammered at your weaknesses—old fears that hung on
to you for years. Experiences that frightened you in the past. They sent your mind back into that past—but you were too strong for them.”

“Too strong—?”

“Then. They have other powers, Stuart—incredible powers. You can’t fight them alone. And you must fight them. In a thousand years no one has dared—”

Stuart remembered something. “Two dared—once.” He nodded. “I know. I know the legends, anyway. About John Starr and Lorna. The great rebels who first defied the Aesir when the tyranny began. But they may have been only legendary figures. Even if they were real—they failed.”

“Yes, they failed. And they’re a thousand years dead. But it shows something…to me at least. Man wasn’t meant to be a slave to these monsters. Rebellion—”

Kari watched him. Stuart’s eyes were shadowed.

“John Starr and Lorna,” he continued in a whisper. “I wonder what their world was like, a thousand years ago?

We’ve got all the worlds now, all the planets of the System from Jupiter to the smallest asteroid. But we don’t rule them, as men owned their own Earth in those days. We’re slaves to the Aesir.”

“The Aesir are—are gods.”

“John Starr didn’t think so,” Stuart said. “Neither do I.

And at worst I can always die, as he did. Listen, Kari.” He gripped her arms. “Think. You’ve lived here for a while. Is there any weapon against those devils?”

She met his gaze steadily. “Yes,” she said. “But—”

“What is it? Where?”

Abruptly Kari’s face changed. She pressed herself against Stuart, avoiding his lips, simply seeking—he knew—warmth and companionship. She was crying softly.

“So long—” Kari whispered, her arms tight around him.

“I’ve been here so long—with the gods. And I’m so lonely, Derek Stuart. So lonely for green fields and fires and the blue sky. I wish—”

“You’ll see Earth again,” Stuart promised. At that Kari pulled away. Her strange half-breed loveliness was never more real than then, with tears sparkling on her dark lashes, and her mouth trembling.

She said, a catch in her voice, “I’ll show you the weapon, Stuart.”

She turned toward the wall. Her hand moved in a quick gesture. A panel opened there in the glowing surface.

Kari reached in, and when she withdrew her arm, it was as though she held a torrent of blood that poured down from her grip.

It was a cloak, Stuart saw, made of some material so fine that it rippled like water. Its crimson violence was bizarre against the cool green of Kari’s garment.

“This cloak—” she said. “You must wear it if we face the Aesir.”

Stuart grimaced. “What good is a piece of cloth? A blaster gun’s what I want.”

“A blaster wouldn’t help,” Kari said. “This is more than a piece of cloth, Stuart. It is half alive—made so by the sciences of the Aesir. Wear it! It will protect you.” She swung the great, scarlet billows about Stuart’s shoulders.

Her fingers fumbled with the clasp at his throat. And then—

She lies!

The desperate urgency of the thought roared through Stuart’s mind. He knew that soundless voice, so sharp now with violent intensity. His hands came up to rip the cloak from him.

He was too late. Kari sprang back, wide-eyed, as the fastenings of the cloak tightened like a noose about Stuart’s neck. He felt a stinging shock that ran like white fire along his spine and up into his brain. One instant of blazing disorientation, a hopeless, despairing cry in his mind—a double cry, as of two telepathetic voices—and then, his muscles too weak to hold him, he crashed down upon the floor.

It was not paralysis. He was simply drained of all strength. There was pressure about his throat, cold flames along his spine and in his brain, and he could feel the texture of the cloak wrapped about him, striking through his spaceman’s garb—tingling, sentient, half-alive!

He whispered an oath. Kari’s face had not changed. He read something strangely like pity in her dark eyes.

From the gap in the wall whence she had drawn the cloak came a figure, cloaked in black, a jet cowl hiding its head and face completely. It was taller than the girl by a foot. It shuffled forward with an odd, rocking gait and paused near her.

Stuart whispered, “I—should have remembered. The—the Aesir can change their shapes. Those giants I saw weren’t real. And neither are you—not even human!”

Kari shook her head. “I am real,” she said slowly. “But—he is not.” She gestured toward the black-cloaked figure. “But we are all of the Aesir. And, as we thought, you were sent by the Protectors. Now your power is gone, and you must walk the Long Orbit with the other captives.”

The cowled creature came forward. It bent, but Stuart could see nothing in the shadow of the hood. A fold of cloth writhed out and touched Stuart’s forehead.

Darkness wrapped him like the shroud of the scarlet cloak.

IV

For a long time he had only his thoughts for company.

They were not pleasant. He felt alone, as he had never felt so utterly lonely and deserted before anywhere in the System. Now he realized that even since his landing on Asgard, he had had companionship of a sort—that the twin voices murmuring in his brain had been more real than he had realized. A living warmth, a sense of—of presence—had been with him then.

But it was gone now. Its absence left a black void within him. He stood alone.

And Kari.… If he saw her again when his hands were free, he would kill her. He knew that. But—but her shining smile lightened the darkness that engulfed him now. He had never seen loveliness like Kari’s, and he had known so many women, so many, too many.… A man who has fought his way Sunward and back again by way of Pluto’s chasmed midnight is not so easily misled by the smile of a pretty woman.

Kari was no ordinary woman—God knew she was not!

Perhaps not even human, perhaps not even real at all. It might be that very touch of alienage that had stamped her shining image upon his memory, but he could not put the image aside now. He saw her clearly in the darkness of his captivity and the deeper dark of his loneliness, now that the voices were stilled. Lovely, exotic, with the eyes full of longing and terror—what lies they told!—and that lovely, that dazzling smile.

Bitterness made a wry taste in his mouth. Either she was one of the Aesir, or she served them. Served them well. A knife in the heart was the only answer he had for her, and he meant to give her that edged answer if he lived. But she was so very lovely.…

Slowly the veil of darkness lifted. He saw a face he had seen before—the harsh, seamed features of the burly Earthman in the pit. And beyond him, the slim Martian girl.

All motionless, standing like statues beside him…beside him! For Stuart was one of them now. He was in the pit, with the other captives.

Sensation came back slowly. With it came a tingling, a warm vibration along his spine…about his throat…inside his brain. He could not move, but at the corner of his range of vision flamed a crimsonness—the cloak. He still wore it.

He wondered if the other captives could see him, if their minds were as active as his in their congealed bodies. Or
whether the chill of deathlike silence held their brains along with their frozen limbs.

A slow, volcanic fury began to glow within him. Kari—
traitor and murderess! Was she Aesir? Was she Earth-born?

And that black-cloaked, cowled creature which was not real. Another projector of the Aesir, as the giants had been?

You were sent by the Protectors. Memory of Kari’s phrase came back to Stuart now. And with it, as though he had somehow unbarred a locked gate, opened it a mere crack, came a—a whispering.

Not audible. Faint, far away, like the shadow of a wind rustling ghosts of autumn leaves, the murmur rose and fell…calling him.

The scarlet cloak moved…writhed…flowed more closely about him. Fainter grew the voices.

Stuart strained after them. His soul sprang up…reaching toward those friendly, utterly inhuman whispers that came from nowhere.

A dull lethargy numbed him. The cloak drew tighter…

He ignored it. Deep in the citadel of his mind, he made himself receptive, all his being focused on that—that strange calling from beyond.

And, suddenly, there were words—

“Derek Stuart. Can you hear us? Answer—”

His stiff lips could not speak, but his thoughts formed an answer. And, rising and falling as though the frequency of that incredible telepathy pulsed and changed continually, the message came.

“We have lost. You have lost too, Stuart. But we will stay with you—we must stay now—and perhaps your death will be easier because of that.…”

“Who are you?” he thought, oddly awed by the personality he sensed behind that voice that was really two voices.

“There is little time.” The—sound?—faded into a thin whisper, then grew stronger. “The cloak makes it hard for us to communicate with you. And now we can give you
none of our power at all. It is a monstrous thing—a blasphemy such as only the Aesir would create. Half-alive, it makes an artificial synapse between the individual and outside mental contacts. We cannot help you—”

“Who are you?”

“We are the Protectors. Listen now, Stuart, for soon you must walk the Long Orbit with the others. We removed some of your memories, so the Aesir could not read your mind and have time to prepare themselves—we hoped we might destroy them this time. But—we have failed again.

Now—we give you your memories back.” Like a slowly rising tide, Stuart’s past began to return. He did not question how this was done; he was too busy lifting the veil that had darkened his mind since—since that night at the Singing Star in New Boston. A few drinks with the tired-eyed man, and then darkness.

But the curtain was lifting now. He remembered…

* * * *

He remembered a tiny, underground room, with armed men—not many of them—staring at him. A voice that said,

“You must either join us or die. We dare run no risks. For hundreds of years a tiny band of us has survived, only because the Aesir did not know we existed.”

“Rebels?” he had asked.

“Sworn to destroy the Aesir,” the man told him, and an answering glow burned briefly in the eyes of the others.

Stuart laughed.

“You have courage,” the man said. “You’ll need it. I know why you laugh. But we don’t fight alone. Have you ever heard of the Protectors?”

“Never.”

“Few have. They aren’t human, any more than the Aesir are. But they are not evil. They are humanity’s champions.

They have sworn to destroy the Aesir, as we have—and so we serve them.”

“Who are they, then? What are they?”

“No man knows,” the other said quietly. “Who—and where

—they are is a secret they keep to themselves. But we hear their messages. And once in a lifetime, not oftener, they tell us where we may find some man they have winnowed the planets to discover. In our lifetime, Stuart, you are the man.”

He gaped at them. “Why? I—”

“To be a weapon for the Protectors—a champion for mankind. The Protectors are so far beyond humanity they cannot fight our battles in their own forms. They need a—a vessel into which they can pour their power. Or—call it a sword to wield against the Aesir. They have searched the worlds over for a long while now, and you—” The man hesitated, looking narrowly at Stuart. “You are the only vessel they found. You have a great destiny, Derek Stuart.”

He had scowled at them. “All right, suppose I have. What do they offer?”

The man shook his head. “Death—if you’re lucky. No man before you has ever won a battle for the Protectors. You know that—the Aesir still rule! Every chance is against you.

In a thousand years no man has won the gamble. But this is greater than you or us, Derek Stuart. Do you think you have any choice?”

Stuart stared the other man in the eyes. “There’s no chance?”

The leader smiled. All mankind’s indomitable hope was in the smile.

“Would the Protectors have spent all their efforts, and ours, to find you if there were no hope? They have mighty and terrible powers. With the right man for their vessel, they could be stronger than the Aesir. No man could stand alone against the Aesir. The Protectors could not stand alone. But together—sword and hand and brain welded into one—yes, Stuart, there’s a chance!”

“Then why have the others failed?”

“No one has yet been quite strong enough. Only once in forty years—fifty—is a man born who might, with luck, have the courage and the strength. Look at us here—do you think we would not offer ourselves gladly? Instead, the Protectors guided us to you. If you are willing to let them establish contact with your mind, enter it, possess it—
there’s a chance the Aesir can be destroyed. There’s a chance that man’s slavery may be ended!” His voice shook with that mighty hope.

Stuart glanced around at the ardent, fanatical faces, and something in him took a slow fire from the fire in theirs. A deep and vital purpose, as old as humanity—how many times before in Earth’s history had men of Earth gathered in hidden rooms and sworn vows against tyranny and oppression? How many times before had Earthmen dedicated themselves and their son’s sons, if need be, to the old, old dream that though men may die, mankind must in the end be free?

Here in this crowded room the torch of freedom still burned, despite the hell of slavery under which the worlds toiled now. He hesitated.

“It won’t be easy, Stuart,” the man warned. “A sword-blade must be hammered on the anvil, heated in flame, before it’s tempered. The Protectors will test you—so that your mind may be toughened to resist the attacks of the Aesir later. You will suffer.…”

He had suffered. Those agonizing, nightmare dreams in the forest, the phantoms that had tortured him—other trials he did not want to remember. But there had been no flaw in the blade. In the end, the Protectors had been satisfied, and had entered his mind—maintaining the contact that still held, though thinly now.

And the voices he heard still whispering within him were the voices of his mentors.

“We took your memories from you. So that the Aesir could not read too much in your mind and be forewarned. Now
that does not matter, and you will be stronger with your memory restored. But when you let the girl clasp the cloak about you—that was failure.”

“If I could move,” Stuart thought. “If I could rip it off—”

“It is part of you. We do not know how it can be removed.

And while you wear it, we cannot give you our power.”

Stuart said bitterly. “If you’d given me that power in the first place—”

“We did. How do you think you survived the first testing by the Aesir? And it is dangerous. We must gauge it carefully, so that we do not transmit too much of our mental energy to you. You are merely human—if we let you draw on a tenth of our power, that would burn you out like a melting wire under a strong current.”

“So—what now?”

“We have lost again. You have lost, and we are sorry. All we can do is give you an easy death. We possess you now, mentally; if we should withdraw from your brain, you would die instantly. We will do that whenever you ask. For the Aesir will kill you anyhow, and not pleasantly.”

“I’m not committing suicide. As long as I live, I can still fight.”

“We also. This has happened before. We have chosen and possessed other champions, and they have failed. We withdrew from their minds before the Aesir…killed…so that we could survive to try again. To wage another battle.

Someday we will win. Someday we shall destroy the Aesir.

But we dare not cling to our broken swords, lest we too be broken.”

“So when the going gets tough, you step out!”

Stuart sensed pity in the strange voice. “We must. We fight for the race of man. And the greatest gift we can give you now is a quick death.”

“I don’t want it,” Stuart thought furiously. “I’m going to keep on fighting! Maybe that’s why you’ve always failed
before—you were too ready to give up. So I’ll die if you step out of my mind? Well—it’s a lousy bargain!”

There was no anger, only a stronger overtone of pity in the still voice.

“What is it you want, Stuart?”

“Nothing from you! Just let me go on living. I’ll do my own fighting. There’ll be time enough for you to run away when the axe falls. I’m asking you simply this—keep me alive until I’ve had another crack at the Aesir!”

A pause. “It is dangerous. Dangerous for us. But—”

“Well?”

“We will take the risk. But understand—we must leave you if the peril grows too great. And it will—inevitably.”

“Thanks,” Stuart said, and he meant it. “One thing. What about Kari? Who is she?”

“A hundred years ago, she was human. Then she was brought here, and the Aesir possessed her—as we possess you. She has grown less human in that time, as the alien grows stronger within her. She has only faint memories of her former life now, and they will vanish soon. Contact with the Aesir is like an infection—she will grow more and more like them. Perhaps, eventually, become one of them.”

Stuart grimaced. “If the Aesir should withdraw from her

—”

“She would die, yes. Her own life-force has been sapped too far. You and she are kept alive only as long as the bond of possession holds.”

Nice, Stuart thought. If the Aesir were destroyed, Kari would die with him. And if he faced doom, he too would die, as the Protectors withdrew to avoid sharing his fate.

Hell—what did he care whether Kari lived or died? It was only the glamor of half-alienage that had drawn him to the girl. A dagger in her throat…

Besides, he was certainly facing doom now.

“All I can do—” he said—and stopped abruptly. He was speaking aloud. Patiently the twin voice in his brain waited
for him to continue.

Slowly he flexed his arms. He tilted back his head, staring up at the rim of the pit fifty feet above him. He could see the titan pillars rising toward the roof of that mighty tower, incredibly far above. But there was no sign of life.

“I can move,” he said. “I—”

Struck by a new thought, he gripped the folds of the cloak. It was nauseously warm and vibrant. It seemed to move under his hands. He jerked at it and felt a twinge of agonizing pain along his spine and about his throat, while a white-hot lance stabbed into his skull.

“If I could get rid of this—you could help me?”

“We could give you our power to use against the Aesir.

But we do not know how to remove the cloak.”

“I don’t either,” Stuart growled, and he paused as a movement caught his eye. The muscular Earthman near him was stirring. He turned slowly. Beyond him, the Martian girl swayed her feathery-crested head and lifted supple, slender arms. And the others—all about Stuart, they were wakening to motion.

But no life showed in their dull eyes. No understanding.

Only a blind, empty withdrawal.

They turned, trooped toward the wall of the pit…toward an arched opening that was gaping suddenly.

“The Long Orbit,” said the voice in Stuart’s mind.

“What’s that?”

“Death. As the Aesir feed. They feed on the life-force of living organisms.”

“Is that the only way out?”

“The only way open to you. Yes.”

* * * *

Stuart went slowly after the others. They had crossed the threshold now and were pacing along a tunnel, lit with cold blue brilliance, that curved very gradually toward the left.

Behind him, a panel closed.

The cloak swayed like a great bloodstain behind him, moving in a motion not entirely caused by Stuart’s movements. He tried again to unfasten it, but the clasp at his throat only drew tighter. And the tingling sensation increased along his spine. Could it be an artificial synapse…blocking his nerve-ends so that he could not draw upon the Protectors’ power?

At his left was an alcove in the tunnel wall. It was filled with coagulated light…bright with glaring flames…flame-hot. Within that white curtain stirred swift movement, like the leaping of fires. Above the recess a symbol was embossed in the stone. The sign of Mercury.

“Mercury,” said the voice in Stuart’s mind. “The Servant of the Sun. The Swift Messenger. Mercury, that drinks the Sun’s fires and blazes like a star in the sky’s abyss. First in the Long Orbit—Mercury.”

The crowd of prisoners, dull-eyed, swayed to and fro, a ripple of excitement rustling through them. Abruptly the Martian girl darted forward.

She was engulfed in the milky flames. Stood there, while curdled opalescence veiled her. On her face sheer horror, as…

“The Aesir feed,” the voice wispered. “They drink the cup of her life…to its last dregs.”

The captives were moving again. Silently Stuart followed them along the tunnel. Now another recess showed in the wall.

Blue…blue, this time, as hazy seas of enchantment…

misted with fog, with slow shifting movement within it.…

“The sign of Venus,” said the voice. “The Clouded World.

Planet of life and womb of creation. Ruler of mists and seas

—Venus!”

The Earthman was drawn into the alcove. Stood there, while azure seas washed higher and higher about him.

Through that glassy veil his face glared, stiff with alien fear.…

The sacrifices went on.

There was no alcove, no symbol for Earth. The Aesir had forgotten the world that had been their place of birth.

“Mars! Red star of madness! Ruler of man’s passion, lord of the bloody seas! Where scarlet sands run through Time’s hourglass—Mars, third in the Long Orbit!”

The crimson glow of a dusty ruby…the face of a Venusian, strained, twisted in agony…the hunger of the Aesir.…

“The Little Worlds! The Great Belt that girdles the Inner System! The Broken Planet—”

Tiny goblin lights, dancing and flickering, blue and sapphire and dull orange, wine-red and dawn-yellow—

The hunger of the Aesir.

“Jupiter! Titan! Colossus of the Spaceroads! Jupiter, whose mighty hands seize the ships of man and drag them to his boiling heart! The Great One-fifth in the Long Orbit!”

The hunger of the Aesir.…

“Ringed Saturn light-crowned! Guardian of the outer skies! Saturn—”

Uranus…Neptune…Pluto.

The hunger of the Aesir.…

Beyond Pluto, dark worlds Stuart had not known. Until finally he was alone. The last of his companions had been drawn into one of the vampire alcoves of the Long Orbit.

He went on.

There was another recess in the wall at his left. It was filled with night. Jet blackness, cold and horrible, brimmed it.

Something like an invisible current dragged him forward, though he fought with all his strength to resist.

Instinctively he sent out a desperate call to the Protectors.

“We cannot aid you. We must leave you…you will die instantly.”

“Wait! Don’t—don’t give up yet! Give me your power—”

“We cannot while you wear the cloak.”

The edge of blackness touched Stuart with a frigid impact. He felt something, avid with horrible hunger, strain forward from of the alcove, reaching for him. The cloak billowed.

Sweat stood out on Stuart’s face. For, suddenly, he had seen the way. It might mean death, it would certainly mean frightful agony—but he could go down fighting. If the cloak could not be removed in any other way—perhaps it could be ripped off!

He gripped the half-living fabric at its bottom, brought his arm behind him—and tore the horror from him!

Stark, abysmal nerve-shock poured like a current of fire up his spine and into his brain. It was like tearing off his own skin. Sick, blind, gasping dry-throated sobs, Stuart stumbled away from the black alcove, tearing at the cloak.

It tried to cling to him.

He ripped it away—hurled it from him. And as it fell—it screamed!

But he was free.

For an instant sheer weakness overwhelmed him. Then into him poured a racing, jubilant torrent of strength, of mighty, intoxicating power that seemed to heal his wounds and revivify him instantly.

Into him surged the power of the Protectors!

From the alcove a finger of darkness tendrilled out. He was borne away from it…along the passage. Dimly, through drifting mists, he sensed that he was moving up a ramp…

through a wall that seemed to grow intangible as he approached it, up and up…

He was in the hall of the Aesir.

Above him the cyclopean pillers towered, dwarfing the thrones set between them. Before him hung the shifting wall of light.

He was carried toward it—through it. He stood on a black dais. Facing him was the cloaked, cowled figure he had last seen when he donned the cloak.

And beside the Aesir stood Kari!

The creature lifted its arm…and a red flame spouted toward Stuart.

Sudden, mocking laughter spilled from Stuart’s lips. He no longer fought alone. The tremendous power of the Protectors blazed within him, power and energy and force that could smash suns.

In midair the fiery lance failed and died. The Aesir drew back a step, drawing its dark cloak about it as if in surprise. And Kari—Kari shrank back, too, and something strangely like hope flashed for a moment across her dazzling face. Hope? But she was of the Aesir now. And if they failed, she died. Then why—

The Aesir’s cloak flickered, and a second gush of fiery light fountained toward Stuart.

Up surged the tide of power within him again. Blind and dazed with his own tremendous energy, Stuart felt a curve like a dim shield flung up to meet that lance. The Aesir’s fire struck—and flashed into blazing fragments on the Protector’s shield. Each droplet sang intolerable music as it faded and winked out. And behind the Aesir, more dazzling than any immortal fire had been, Stuart saw Kari’s sudden, shining smile.…

She would die if the Aesir failed. She must know she would die. But the brilliance of her smile struck him as the Aesir’s spear of fire could never strike. He knew, then. He understood.…

The Aesir’s cloak whirled like a storm-cloud in dark, deep billows. The Aesir itself grew taller for a moment, as if it drew itself up to a godlike height. And then it did for Derek Stuart what no Aesir had ever done for a mortal man before. No Aesir had ever needed to. It cast off the hampering cloak and stood stripped for battle with this primitive manling whose forebears immemorially long ago had also been the Aesir’s forebears. There was in that stripping something almost of kinship—an acknowledgment
that here at last in the hall of the Aesir stood an equal, sprung of equal stock.…

Naked in its terrible power, the Aesir stood up to face the man.

Not human. Not ever human, except in the mysterious basics which these people of a thousand millenniums in the future had chosen to retain. The flesh they had cast off, and the flesh the Aesir stood up in to face his human cousin was pure, blazing, blinding energy. Twice as tall as a man it stood, shining with supernal brilliance, terrible and magnificent.

The great hall rang soundlessly with the power of the Protectors.

And then from above a streak of light came flashing, and another, and another. And were engulfed in the one Aesir who stood shining before its adversary, growing ever brighter and more terrible. The rest of the Aesir, coming to the aid of their fellow, forming a single entity to crush the champion of mankind.

Stuart braced himself for the incredible torrent of energy that would come blasting through him from the Protectors.

And in a split second—it came!

Mind and body reeled beneath the impact of that power as force flared through him and struck out at the tower of lightning which was the Aesir. But the force which was trying his human body to its utmost was not force enough to touch that blinding column. Energy lashed out from it, struck him a reeling blow—

Stuart dropped to his knees, the hall swimming in fire around him.

But what he saw was not the terrible, blazing image of his adversary, but Kari’s face beyond. His falling meant her life

—but when she saw him go down, the brilliance dimmed upon her features. The hope he had seen there went out like a candle-flame, and she was once more only a vessel of human flesh which the Aesir had possessed and degraded.

In his despair and his dizziness he cried soundlessly,

“Help me, Protectors Give me your power!”

The still double-voice said, “You could not hold it. You would be burned out utterly.”

“I’ll hold it long enough!” he promised desperately. “One second of power—only that! Enough to smash the Aesir.

Then death—but not till then!”

There was one instant when time stopped. That cataclysmic horror that had risen a thousand years ago and raged through the worlds like a holocaust stood blazing before Stuart’s eyes. It stooped toward him, poising for the hammer blow that would smash him to nothing—

Then a power like the drive of galaxies through space thundered into Stuart’s mind.

He had not expected this. Nothing in human experience could have taught him to expect it. For the Protectors were not human. No more human than the Aesir themselves. And the unleashed energy that roared soundlessly through Stuart rocked his very soul on its foundations. He could not stir. He could not think. He could only stay upon his knees facing the Aesir-thing as galactic power thundered through him and wielded him like a sword against man’s enemies.

Higher and higher rose the crashing tides of contest. The citadel shook ponderously upon the rocks of the god-made little world. Perhaps that world itself staggered in space as the titans battled together on its rocking surface.

Faster spun the core of radiant light which was the Aesir.

Faster raced the tides of power through Stuart’s blasted body, seeming to rip his very flesh apart and blaze in his brain like hammers of cosmic fire.

Terribly, terribly he yearned for surcease, for the end of this unthinkable destruction that was tearing his brain and body apart. And he knew he could end it in a moment, if he chose to let go.…

Grimly he clung to the power that was destroying him.

Second by second, counting each moment an eternity, he
clung to consciousness. The crashing lances of the Protectors drove on upon the armor of the Aesir, and the cyclopean pillars of the great hall reeled upon their foundations, and the very air blazed into liquid fire around him.

He never knew what final blow of cosmic violence ended that battle. But suddenly, without warning, the vast column of the Aesir pulsed with violent brilliance and the whole hall rang with a cry too shrill and terrible for ears or the very mind to hear, except as a thrilling of despair.

The tower rocked. All the bright tapestries billowed and flowed against the walls.

And the radiant thing that was the Aesir went out like a blown flame. Stuart saw it darken in the quickness of a heartbeat from blinding brightness to an angry, sullen scarlet, and then to the color of embers, and then to darkness.

There was nothing there at all.

And Stuart’s brain dimmed with it. One last glimpse he had of the shining smile on Kari’s face, triumph and delight, in the instant before the cloudiness of oblivion blotted her features out.

* * * *

He was not dead. Somewhere, far away, his body lay prone upon the cold pavement of the Aesir’s hall, a hall terribly empty now of life. But Stuart himself hung in empty space, somewhere between life and death.

The thought of the Protectors touched him gently, almost caressingly.

“You are a mighty man, Derek Stuart. Your name shall not be forgotten while mankind lives.”

With infinite effort he roused his mind.

“Kari—” he said.

There was silence for a moment—a warm silence. But the voices, speaking as one, said gently, “Have you forgotten?

When the Aesir died, Kari died too. And you, Derek Stuart—
you can never go back to your body now. You remember that?”

Sudden rebellion shook Stuart’s bodiless brain. “Get out of my mind!” he raged at the double voice. “What do you know about human beings? I’ve won for mankind—but what did I win for myself? Nothing—nothing! And Kari— Get out of my mind and let me die! What do you know about love?”

Amazingly, laughter pulsed softly. “Love?” said the double voice. “Love? You have not guessed who we are?”

Stuart’s bewildered mind framed only a voiceless question.

“We know humanity,” the twin voices said. “We were human once, a thousand years ago. Very human, Derek Stuart. And we remember love.”

He half guessed the answer. “You are—”

“There was a man and a woman once,” the voices told him gently. “Mankind still remembers their legend—John Starr and Lorna, who defied the Aesir.”

“John Starr and Lorna!”

“We fought the Aesir in the days when we and they were human. We worked with them on the entropy device that made them what they are now—and made us—ourselves.

When we saw what they planned with their power, we fought.… But they were five, and strong because they were ruthless. We had to flee.”

The voices that spoke as one voice were distant, remembering.

“They grew in power on their Asgard world, changing as the millenniums swept over them, as entropy accelerated for them. And we changed, too, in our own place, in our different way. We are not human now. But we are not monsters, as the Aesir were. We have known failure and bitterness and defeat many times, Derek Stuart. But we remember humanity. And as for love—”

Stuart said bitterly:

“You know your love. You have it forever. But Kari…Karl is dead.”

The voices were very gentle. “You have sacrificed more than we. Yon gave up your love and your bodies. We—”

Silence again. Then the woman, serene and gentle-voiced,

“There is a way, John. But not an easy one—for us.”

Stuart thought, “But Kari is dead.”

The woman said, “Her body is empty of the Aesir life-force. And yours is burned out by the power we poured through it, so that no human could live in it again unless—
unless one more than human upheld you.”

“Lorna—”

“We must part for awhile, John. We have been one for a long while. Now we must be two again, for the sake of these two. Until the change.…”

“What change?” asked Stuart eagerly.

“As we changed, so would you, if our lives upheld yours.

Entropy would move for you as it moved for the Aesir and for us. And that, too, I think, is good. Mankind will need a leader. And we can help—John and I—more surely if we taste again of humanity. After awhile—after millenniums—
the circle will close and John and I will be free to merge again. And you and Kari, too.”

Stuart thought, “But Kari—will it be Kari?”

“It will be,” the gentle voice said. “Cleansed of the evil of the Aesir, supported by my own strength, as you will be by John’s. You will be yourselves again, with the worlds before you, and afterward—a dwelling among the stars, with us.”

The man’s voice said, “Lorna, Lorna—”

“You know we must, beloved,” the softer voice said. “We have asked too much of them to offer nothing in repayment.

And it will not be goodbye.”

There was darkness and silence.

* * * *

Stuart grew dimly aware of cyclopean heights rising above him. Painfully he stirred. He was clothed in his own body again, and the battle-blasted hall of the dead Aesir towered high into the dimness above him.

He turned his head.

Beside him on the dais, a girl lying crumpled in the shower of her hair stirred and sighed.

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BRIDGE OF SILENCE, by George Zebrowski

If the decades and the centuries pass with no indication that there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, the long-term effects on human philosophy will be profound, and may be disastrous. Better to have neighbors we don’t like than to be utterly alone.

—Arthur C. Clarke

1

The alien walked into the room with the fragile nobility of a drunk trailing invisible robes. Gaddis leaned forward as the stick figure sat down in front of him on the floor. It was easy to imagine wisdom in those circular, watery eyes, despite their steel-gray gaze. He searched the other’s face, as if at any moment it would become possible to peer inside the gaunt, black skull.

The white patch on the alien’s chest gave him a certain air of friendliness, suggesting a man in an old-fashioned dinner jacket, about to discourse over coffee; but the torso did not seem to breathe.

Gaddis tensed as white light flashed in the high windows.

A year had not acclimated him to the planet’s nervous displays. He stared at the alien’s forehead. What would it be like to see through those eyes? What did the other feel?

Was it a he or a she, or something else? How could he expect answers? It was hard enough for people to know one another, or themselves.

Gaddis resented the layered, Troy-like accretion that was the human mind, where archaic impulses raged through a million-year-old maze, fleeing from the lamp of reason. Was it the same for the alien?

The light faded from the high windows. He thought of the jagged peaks beyond the compound and longed for Earth’s soft contours.

A year gone.

It seemed longer since he had come to this small, desolate world circling the nearly invisible red-dwarf star one light-year beyond Pluto. The alien seemed to have been waiting, as if he were a gatekeeper, or a jailer. By what right was he here? Because aliens could do things that humanity could not; everyone knew that.

He had gone out sleeping in a torchship, but the new drive would be ready by the time he got back from his reconnaissance. This wandering star would be perfect for the first short test hops, before the new ships jumped out into the galaxy.

Every day Gaddis left his ship to confront the alien, to try to say or do something that might be understood.

“If I touch you, will you pull away?” he asked, wondering what he was revealing about humankind that should better stay hidden.

The eyes stared; the four-fingered hands rested on the ceramic floor, waiting. The alien seemed very tired at times.

Gaddis made a show of taking a deep breath. Then he touched the alien’s bony extremity. The roughness of the barklike hand reminded him of the witch’s hand from his childhood nightmares.

The other drew his hand away, just out of reach. Gaddis always expected the limbs to creak, but the alien’s motion was smooth.

Gaddis sniffed the air. “Jeez! We both breathe oxygen.

That should count for something!” He clapped his hands and hooted. The other’s head turned slightly, and the white eyelids came down halfway.

Maybe he’s mocking me, Gaddis thought, even though he knew that human intuition was almost certainly blind to the alien’s body language.

Gaddis gazed into the large eyes, communing across the stillness. He had played this game with various girls at
summer camp, gaining utter devotion as often as contempt, but the alien seemed immune.

Gaddis stared at the other’s bony knees. They were together and tucked under, as usual.

“Are you anything like us?” Gaddis asked stupidly. “Or are you one of those who can never be reached?”

The eyes closed as he spoke, then opened slowly. Sylvia had been the same. He could argue for half an hour or more, until he was ready to run through a wall, and still fail to break her stubborn silence.

“If you’re really advanced,” Gaddis said bitterly, “you’d read my mind and take me off the hook.” He laughed loudly.

The frustration was claustrophobic. He was locked tightly inside his human skull. Ship and spacesuit enabled him to leave his evolutionary niche, but he had not escaped its limits, despite the dry air that he shared with the alien.

By what signs could a mind be read? Was there a universal language of telepathy? Of course not; mind reading simply moved the problem of communication back one step. Only creatures who were already in touch, who were the same in their natural history, could reach into one another.

Gaddis rose and walked around the alien. There was no reason to think that fear, joy, sadness, or even curiosity, were common in the universe.

“How about this?” he asked as he kneeled behind the alien and began to knead the hard, stringy flesh of the other’s shoulders. “More fun than the math and logic problems I showed you at Christmas, huh?” The alien sat still, accepting. “Are you as tired as I am? This should help.

We are in contact, you know, of a sort.” He pressed with his thumbs, seeking reaction. “Tell me, was it planned for us to confront each other here? Are we to form suspicions and feel kinship grow, free from the errors of language?”

Lorenz had lived with geese for decades and claimed to understand them. Skinner had insisted that given time he
could even condition pigeons to read. Gaddis had known a professor who had observed his cat making decisions.

Gaddis’s palms were red from the alien’s roughness.

Perhaps this was not a biological creature at all, he thought as he stared at the neck, but only an interstellar scarecrow, made to keep upstart races in their solar cradles. Advanced galactic races had long ago abandoned flesh for more permanent forms.

“Couldn’t you ask something of me, tell me to rub a bit to the left or right? It would be such a small thing.”

Gaddis came around again and sat down in front of the alien.

“Our problem is that we take each other for granted.”

He looked around at the room’s soft angles. Heat had shaped the chamber. He thought of bees. Was something observing them? Perhaps watching this impasse was the way to real contact. Only another can see the back of your neck. Four or five observers can therefore sit in a chain and achieve a measure of objectivity—about their necks.

Deathless humor from Earth, he thought, where they have the arrogance to name other people’s suns after themselves.

* * * *

The alien blinked, stood, and left the room.

Gaddis held up his sweaty, reddening hands. Poisoned, he thought, dead by morning. He saw himself on a spit, turning in silence over the flames, while the aliens sat around a table, waiting…

Need sleep, he told himself as he got up and walked through the portal into the hallway. He looked both ways down the tubular passage, then picked up his spacesuit from the floor and began putting it on, checking for rips.

2

The red sun was a cloud-wrapped wound looming over the ragged mountains as he stepped through the ghostly lens
of the force-lock and plodded across the sandy plain toward the ship. The dying star never rose higher; the tide-locked planet always faced the bloody stain in the sky.

Discovery, Gaddis told himself as he dragged one foot past the other, cannot be approached timidly. New experiences must be sought in the extremes of space-time, then measured and organized to produce knowledge. That was why he was here. The ageless child in him had long ago decided that he would see alien worlds circling far stars.

Earth had hung nearby, half in darkness, at the start of his journey. He had gazed at the planet, imagining people swarming in their urban mazes, suburban gardens and towns. I’m not one of you, he had thought. The lights of nightside had seemed crude, pitiable torches thrown up against the great sophisticated darkness, brightening infinitesimal interiors. He had looked away, across clear space at the cleansing sun, and its brightness had flooded his brain, illuminating the skull-darkness of a million-year-old maze, driving the lurking beasts into the black hole at the back of his mind.

Isolation and strangeness were opening up all the weaknesses within him. Despite the fragile bridge that he and the alien were building between them, the other seemed as silent as the stars had been to a century of listening radio telescopes. Scientific inquiry, so full of humble pride over its beggar’s tools of experiment and critical doubt, seemed to illuminate only an endless cosmic striptease. It was too tiring to exist as a mystery wrapped in an enigma, to learn and never be filled, hungering, to know that intimate voices were calling from alien interiors and not be able to answer.

He stopped for a moment and searched out Earth’s sun among the poisonous clouds. One of the reasons he had gone into space was to get a clear view of his world. There it was, an unimpressive yellow spark. He would have preferred to have come from Vega or Sirius.

Black clouds drifted across the red blotch. Lightning flashed within them. There was a flurry of ammonia snow as he came up to the tall egg-shape of the torchship and climbed the ladder.

The lock slid open and he stepped inside. He felt more secure as it cycled and he was able to remove his suit. He went through the inner door as it opened and climbed the ladder to his sleep alcove in the control room. He could have kept a sleeping bag in the compound, but the thought of being unconscious with the alien nearby was too disturbing.

The alien installation was a cluster of dark mounds on the ceiling screen. He wondered about the problem of psychological overlap with the alien’s physiology. The other was humanoid, and an apparent oxygen breather. There had to be some psychological overlap.

“Don’t count on it,” he told himself in a whisper. He had talked to himself more than once recently, just to hear a human voice.

He closed his eyes. The senses are a deep well, he thought, the mind a watery mirror at the bottom, dimly reflecting the universe. We hold a measurable angle of reality within ourselves, reduced to a shadow in the brain’s gray theater. The alien seems like me, but his nervous system enacts a different image of the cosmos. We meet at opposite ends of a bridge of silence…

Gaddis had never seen any sign of the alien’s ship.

Sometimes he dreamed that the other had been hatched inside the mounds.

3

A glowing window opened in the alien’s forehead.

Light speared the darkness.

Gaddis swam up through the beam to the black head and peered into the alien interior.

Thoughts danced inside—birds rising up and circling each other, quantum shards of light struggling to complete a mysterious puzzle. Gaddis was fascinated by the clarity of the pieces; they trembled with the promise of knowledge.

The alien’s white eyelids were pressed shut.

Gaddis retreated from the head, suddenly afraid.

The eyes opened and yellow beams shot out, searing Gaddis’s brain.

It began to ooze out through his nose.

He awoke in a sweat and stared at the alien compound on the screen, trying to quiet the brassy music of his fears, resisting the vast, cavernous regions of sleep as the seashore whisper of the air system grew louder. Finally, his will whored with his unconscious; his rational censor retreated behind a wall and he screamed without being able to wake up.

4

Sometimes Gaddis saw the expression and posture of an orangutan in the alien, recalling an old school acquaintance he had particularly despised. At other times the alien took on the demeanor of one chubby administrator with beady black eyes. Gaddis had never been able to convince the man of anything, and had been overjoyed to hear that the man had developed a chronic disease.

Maybe there were other aliens in the compound, Gaddis thought one day as he examined himself in his bathroom mirror. A gaunt face stared back at him, resembling the alien. Gaddis swallowed as his throat became dry. I’ve been here too long, he thought, wondering if he should continue to wait for the message he had sent home after landing. He had said that he would wait for new orders; the find was too important to leave unattended. The message had reached Earth by now, and the reply was on its way to him.

“This year,” he told himself cheerfully. One of the new jumpships could outrun the message and be here in a
month. It was up to him to keep learning all he could until he was relieved.

5

In the room—pale creature—looking, sitting—nothing to say—ship outside—touching, tiring—star
nearby—coming and going—fearing, nothing to say—empty inside—nothing—

Gaddis awoke, sweating. Stupid idea. He had become the alien, with sentence fragments tearing through his brain, deformed perceptions flashing on and off, his body throbbing with odd desires.

He dismissed the delusions and climbed out of the bunk.

Is that how I see him? Cool, unsympathetic, savage underneath. He probably loves the animals of his world and gives to charity. The poor devil is as confused and tired as I am and wants to go home. Maybe he had an accident, sustained brain damage and doesn’t know what to do.

Catatonic, but how can I help? Gaddis recalled another school chum—a small, thin boy who could never be caught, though he didn’t run far; he would simply dodge unpredictably while staying near his pursuer. It had been infuriating, to be so near and yet so far from catching him.

Gaddis had been obsessed with beating him up, if he could ever get his hands on him. Sylvia’s fortified silences had been nothing in comparison.

6

Gaddis closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead. The headache pulsed. Bursts of light dotted his field of vision.

He opened his eyes and saw his own face smiling at him.

He knew that it was his because he felt the smile from inside.

“You’re pretty stupid,” the face said, and he felt the lips move. “I’d hoped that you could talk, but you’re just a dumb animal from that nearby star.”

Gaddis opened his mouth to deny the charge, but only a clicking sound emerged from his throat.

“Poor training, even for an animal. They sent you out and forgot about you, didn’t they?”

The alien had been mocking him all along, Gaddis realized. He raised his hand in panic and cried out; it was not his own limb. A hissing sound struggled in his chest. He stood up. The other had been working up to this all the time, he thought as he looked down at his own shape sitting on the floor. The mockery and contempt that he saw in his own eyes were unbearable.

“I’m going to kill and eat you,” his human lips said.

Gaddis threw himself down on the figure, locking his rough hands around the pale creature’s throat. He squeezed, but the face laughed at him.

“Do you understand?” he demanded, but the words came out of the human face. Gaddis squeezed harder. The eyes began to bulge. “You know fear, as I do?” he asked himself.

The human shape went limp in his hands, its neck broken.

He left it on its back and tried to stand up. Something exploded gently in his head; blackness drowned him.

7

Click-click-click.

Hiss-hiss-hisssssssss!

The two sounds alternated.

Gaddis opened his eyes. He was lying across the alien.

The other’s eyes and mouth were open. Snakes danced inside the mouth.

Hiss-hiss-hisssssssss!

Click-click-click.

The mouth moved, as if trying to swallow the snakes.

Gaddis pushed himself away from the face, afraid that the snakes would dart at his throat.

He stood up slowly. The alien’s arms and legs twitched as the head rolled to one side and the eyes looked up at him.

Gaddis squatted down on one knee. The large eyes watched him. The mouth trembled. A milkiness veiled the alien’s eyes as the eyelids flickered, closed, then opened slowly.

“I’m sorry,” Gaddis said, trying to show that he cared. “I don’t know what happened. What can I do?” He stared across the silence, trying to see into the alien’s brain. It was there, behind the eyes, thinking about him, judging.

I’ve cracked up, Gaddis thought. Just a wild animal. What will I tell them back home?

The alien’s arm went up, beckoning.

Gaddis nodded. “Yes, I know. No point in letting you suffer more.” He stood up and crushed the other’s neck with his boot, sure of having understood something at last.

He wandered out of the chamber and searched the compound, but he was alone.

8

Maybe it had been a test of some kind? As the red dwarf had approached the solar system, the aliens had put an intermediary of sorts here, as bait. The entire confrontation had been recorded and was whispering between the stars to alert some alien civilization to the fact that humankind’s brain was still dipped in slime, despite a promising cortex.

The alien had sacrificed himself, Gaddis thought. He had come here knowing that the dwarf was too near the sun of Earth to be ignored; sooner or later it would be visited, and the aliens would not have to reveal the location of their home world. Clever. And I’ve gone paranoid-schizophrenic.

Sad. He had longed to be taken into the other’s mind, there to be shown around and made to understand. He had always demanded to know more than any teacher could give, often triggering resentment; this had been no different. Perhaps nothing less than seeing the face of God would ever satisfy him. What else could ever sort out his small divided nature and understand what he had done here?

The alien, he realized, had communicated by putting me in his place, but I panicked at the empathic joining and killed him.

Black clouds brushed across the red sun on the main screen as Gaddis prepared the ship for departure; there was no longer any reason to stay. For an instant he saw the homestar, bright above the wandering dwarf. Was there any reason to go back? Two solitudes had met here, two motes of awareness precipitated from a cosmic unconsciousness, but they had failed to cross the bridge of silence between them.

The alien’s body was in the freezer; it would speak worlds to human biologists. He checked the temperature controls and set his sleep period for the return into the trillion-mile whirlpool of the sun’s family. Sleep stiffened his body, and he was only dimly aware of acceleration when it kicked in.

“We didn’t do a good job of it,” he said softly to his companion in the cold.

OceanofPDF.com

SUN’S UP, by A.A. Jackson IV and Howard Waldrop

The robot exploration ship Saenger parked off the huge red sun.

It was now a tiny dot of stellar debris, bathed in light, five million nine hundred ninety-four thousand myriameters from the star. Its fusion ram had been silent for some time.

It had coasted in on its reaction motors like a squirrel climbing down a curved tree trunk.

The ship Saenger was partly a prepackaged scientific laboratory, partly a deep space probe, with sections devoted to smaller launching platforms, inflatable observatories, assembly shops. The ship Saenger had a present crew of eighteen working robots. It was an advance research station, sent unmanned to study this late-phase star. When it reached parking orbit, it sent messages back to its home world. In a year and a half, the first shipful of scientists and workers would come, finding the station set up and work underway.

The ship was mainly Saenger, a solid-state intelligence budded off the giant SSI on the Moon.

Several hours after it docked off the sun, Saenger knew it was going to die.

* * * *

There was a neutron star some thirty-four light-years away from Saenger, and fifty-three light-years away from the Earth. To look at it, you wouldn’t think it was any more than a galactic garbage dump. All you could tell by listening to it was that it was noisy, full of X-rays, that it rotated, and that it interfered with everything up and down the wavelengths.

Everything except Snapshot.

Close in to the tiny roaring star, closer than a man could go, were a series of big chunks of metal that looked like
solid debris.

They were arrays of titanium and crystal, vats of liquid nitrogen, shielding; deep inside were the real workings of Snapshot.

Snapshot was in the business of finding Kerr wormholes in the froth of garbage given off by the star. Down at the Planck length, 10-35 cm, the things appeared, formed, reappeared, twisted, broke off like steam on hot rocks. At one end of the wormholes was Snapshot, and at the other was the Universe.

It sent messages from one end, its scanners punching through the bubbling mass of waves, and it kept track of what went where and who was talking to whom.

Snapshot’s job was like that of a man trying to shoot into the hole of an invisible Swiss cheese that was turning on three axes at 3300 rpm. And it had to remember which holes it hit. And do it often.

There were a couple of Snapshots scattered within close range of Earth, and some further away. All these systems coordinated
messages,
allowed
instantaneous
communication across light-years.

All these communications devices made up Snapshot.

Snapshot was one ten-millionth the function of Plato.

Plato was a solid crystal intelligence grown on the Moon, deep under the surface. The people who worked with Plato weren’t exactly sure how he did things, but they were finding out every day. Plato came up with the right answers; he had devised Snapshot, he was giving man the stars a step or two at a time. He wasn’t human, but he had been planned by humans so they could work with him.

* * * *

“Plato, this is Saenger.”

> < (:)——— (:)(:) 666 * CCC XXXXX

“That’s being sent. I have an emergency here that will cancel the project. Please notify the responsible parties.”

> < > < ——— ‘ () * * “ “ “ > <

“I don’t think so. I’ll tell them myself.”

“ (:)(:) & ‘ ‘

“I’ll get back to you on that.”

(:)

“Holding.”

XXXXX PLATO TRANSFER SNAPSHOT re Saenger RUNNING

* * * *

Doctor Maxell leaned back in her chair. The Snapshot printout was running and the visuals awaited her attention.

“Uchi,” she said, “they’ll have to scrub Saenger.”

“I heard the bleep,” said the slight man. He pulled off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “Is Plato ready yet?”

“Let’s see it together,” she said. “It’ll save time when we have to rerun it for the Committee.”

They watched the figures, the graphics, the words.

The printout ran into storage.

“Supernova,” said Dr. Maxell.

“Well…first opportunity to see one close up.”

“But there goes the manned part of the project. There goes Saenger.”

“The Committee will have to decide what comes next.”

“You want to tell them or should I?”

* * * *

“Saenger, this is Dr. Maxell.”

“Speaking.”

No matter how many times she did it, Sondra never got used to speaking across light-years with no more delay than through an interoffice system.

“Saenger, the Committee has seen your reports and is scrubbing the remainder of your mission. The rest of your program will be modified. You’re to record events in and around the star until such time as—your functions cease.”

There was a slight pause.

“Would it be possible to send auxiliary equipment to allow me to leave this system before the star erupts?”

“I’m afraid not, Saenger. If the forces hold to your maximum predicted time, there’s still no chance of getting a booster to you.”

Saenger, like the other robot research stations, was a fusion ram. They used gigantic boosters to push them to ramming speed. The boosters, like shuttlecraft, were reusable and were piloted back to launching orbits.

Saenger used its ram to move across vast distances and to slow down. Its ion motors were useful only for maneuvering and course corrections.

The reaction motors could not bring it to ramming speed.

The booster for its return journey was to be brought out on the first manned ship which would have come to Saenger.

The manned ship was not coming.

All this was implied in Doctor Maxell’s words.

“Would I be of more use if I were to remain functioning throughout the event?”

“Certainly,” she said. “But that’s not possible. Check with Plato on the figures for the shock wave and your stress capabilities.”

Slight pause.

“I see. But, it would be even better for scientific research if I survived the explosion of the star?”

“Of course. But there is nothing you can do. Please stand by for new programming.”

There was another short silence, then:

“You will be checking on my progress, won’t you?”

“Yes, Saenger, we will.”

“Then I shall do the best possible job of information-gathering for which I am equipped.”

“You do that, Saenger. Please do that for us.”

* * * *

In Saenger’s first messages, it told them what it saw. The spectroscopy, X-ray scans, ir, uv, and neutrino grids told the same thing: the star was going to explode.

Saenger reached an optimum figure of one year, two months, and some days. The research ship checked with Plato. The crystal intelligence on the Moon told him to knock a few months off that.

Plato printed a scenario of the last stages of the 18-solar-mass star. He sent it to Doctor Maxell. It looked like this:

* * * *

START—O16 CORE IGNITION HELIUM FLARE

OPT. TIME 12 DAYS

STAGE: 16O SHELL IGNITION

DURATION 2.37 DAYS

CORE COOUNG 160 BURNOFFSTAGE: SILICONE CORE

IGNITION

DUR. 20 HOURSSTAGE: SILICONE CORE BURNING

DUR. 2.56 DAYS

STAGE: SILICONE SHELL IGNITION

DUR. 8 HOURS

STAGE: CORE CONTRACTI0N

DUR. 15 HOURS

STAGE: IRON CORE PHOTODISINTEGRATED

—CORE COLLAPSE DUR. 5 h 24 min 18 sec

SUPERNOVA no durational msmnt possible

* * * *

The same information was sent to Saenger. With the message from Plato that the first step of the scenario was less than eleven months away.

Saenger prepared himself for the coming explosion. It sent out small automatic probes to ring the star at various distances. One of them it sent on an outward orbit. It was to witness the destruction of Saenger before it, too, was vaporized by the unloosed energies of the star.

* * * *

One of the problems they had working with Plato was that he was not human. So, then, neither were any of the other SSIs budded off Plato. Of which Saenger was one. Humans had made Plato, had guided it while it evolved its own brand of sentience.

They had done all they could to guide it along human thought patterns. But if it went off on some detour which brought results, no matter how alien the process, they left it to its own means.

It had once asked for some laboratory animals to test to destruction, and they had said no. Otherwise, they let Plato do as it pleased.

They gave a little, they took a little while the intelligence grew within its deep tunnels in the Moon. What they eventually got was the best mind man could ever hope to use, to harness for his own means.

And as Plato had been budded off the earlier, smaller Socrates, they were preparing a section of Plato for excision. It would be used for even grander schemes, larger things. Aristotle’s pit was being excavated near Tycho.

That part of Plato concerned with such things was quizzical. It already knew it was developing larger capacities, and could tackle a few of the problems for which they would groom Aristotle. In a few years, it knew it might answer them all, long before the new mass had gained its full capacity.

But nobody asked it, so it didn’t mention it.

Not maliciously, though. It had been raised that way.

Thousands of small buds had already been taken off Plato, put in stations throughout the solar system, used in colonization, formed into the Snapshot system, used for the brains of exploratory ships.

Saenger was one of those.

* * * *

“Plato.” ?

“I have a problem.”

“”: —&& (‘) *

“What can I do? Besides that?”

- - - - - - ‘ & ’ (:) (:) x @ ¼ .7v x3 …

“Then what?”

- - - - - - D = RT. X, X -1

“Do go on.”

- - - - - - c2; c2 – 1/10 r t

* * * *

“Saenger is talking to Plato a lot, Sondra.”

“A lot? How much is a lot?”

“I saw some discards yesterday, had Saenger’s code on it.

Thought they were from the regular run. But I came across the same thing this morning, before the Snapshot encoding. So it couldn’t have been on regular transmission.”

“And…?” asked Sondra.

“And I ran a capacity trace on it. Saenger used four ten-billionths of Plato’s time this morning. And yesterday, a little less.”

She drummed her fingers on the desk. “That’s more than ten probes should have used, even on maintenance schedules. Maybe Plato is as interested as we are in supernovae?”

“What Saenger gave us was pretty complete. There’s not much he could tell Plato he didn’t tell us.”

“Want to run it on playback?” asked Sondra.

“I’d rather you asked Saenger yourself,” said the man.

“Maybe they just exchanged information and went over capacity”

Sondra Maxell took off her earphones. “Uchi, do you think Saenger knows it’s going to die?”

“Well, it knows what ‘ceasing to function’ is. Or has a general idea, anyway. I don’t think it has the capacity to
understand death. It has nothing to go by.”

“But it’s a reasoning being, like Plato. I…” She thought a moment. “How many of Plato’s buds have ceased to function?”

“Just the one, on the Centauri rig.”

“And that was quick, sudden, totally unexpected?”

“The crew and the ship wiped out in a couple of nanoseconds. What…?”

“I think, Uchi, that this is the first time one of Plato’s children knows it’s going to die. And so does Plato.”

“You mean it might be giving Saenger special attention, because of that?”

“Or Saenger might be demanding it.”

Uchi was silent.

“This is going to be something to see,” he said, finally.

* * * *

“Saenger, what have you been talking to Plato about?”

“The mechanics of the shock wave and the flux within the star’s loosened envelope. If you would like, I could printout everything we’ve discussed.”

“That would take months, Saenger.”

“No matter then, Dr. Maxell. I have a question.”

“Yes?”

“Could I move further away from this star? The resolution of my instruments won’t be affected up to point 10.7 AU. I could station a probe in this orbit. I thought you might get a better view and data if I were further out.”

Sondra was quiet. “Saenger,” she said, “you know you can’t possibly get away from the shock, no matter how far you move on your ion engines?”

“Yes, Doctor.”

“And that you can’t get to ramming speed, either?”

“Yes,” said Saenger.

“Then why are you trying to move further away?”

“To give you a better view,” said the ship. “Plato and I figured the further away the more chance of getting valuable information I would have. I could telemeter much more coordinated data through Snapshot. The new programming is not specific about the distance of the ship, only of the probes.”

Sondra looked at Uchi. “We’ll ask the Committee. I don’t think there’ll be any real objections. We’ll get back to you ASAP.”

“Saenger out.”

* * * *

Off that star was black, and the light was so bright on the sunward side that all Saenger’s screens had to be filtered down to No. 3.

The sun still appeared as a red giant in the optics, burning brighter than when Saenger docked around it. But Saenger had other eyes that saw in other waves. His neutrino grids saw the round ball of the star and its photosphere, but deep inside it detected a glowing core, growing larger and more open each day, rooted down inside the atmosphere of the sun. The helium flash was not far away.

Already Plato had revised his figures again. He had little more than seven months before the star blew like a cosmic steam boiler, giving men the first close look at an event they had not seen before.

The star would cover the whole sunward sky, its shell would expand, covering everything for millions of myriameters with the screaming remnants of its atmosphere.

Saenger had no margin of safety.

He did not have time, or the proper materials, or anything.

He was monitoring himself and his worker robots as he moved outward on his reaction engines. He had swung out
of the orbit as soon as the Committee had given permission.

His robots moved in and out through the airlocks and the open sides of the ship.

One of them, using a cutting laser, sawed through its leg and went whirling away on a puff of soundless force. These robots were never made to work outside the ship.

If Saenger could have, he would have said the word damn.

* * * *

“Plato?”

?

“There’s not enough material in the ship unless I cannibalize my shielding.”> < ““But that would defeat the whole purpose.”*?“How could I?”X (:)& - - - - ) ( ‘ ) ( - - -

“Hey! Why didn’t I think of that!”

& * * 0

“But they’ll know as soon as I do.”

? * (:)(:) & - - - ?

“Well…”

* * * *

“Now he’s using his scoops,” said Sondra as she monitored the Snapshot encoding for the day. “What in the hell is going on out there?”

“It’s not interfering with the monitoring programs. He’s sent out two more remote monitors. And the activity down there is picking up.”

“He’s backed off on his use of Plato. Way below normal, in fact. Do you think we ought to have him dump his grids now?” she asked.

“You’re the boss,” said Uchi. “I’d get as much information as we could first. He may find something in those last three minutes we don’t know about.”

“Has Plato contacted him?” asked Sondra.

“Hmmm. Not lately.”

“He’s cut him loose,” she said. “He’s on his own.”

* * * *

Saenger was fighting now, with every passing moment.

The ship was unrecognizable. The revamp Plato suggested changed the ship completely. Spidery arrays went out and out from the skeleton, and among them the robots worked.

Stars shone through frames which had once held thick shielding. Laboratories, quarters, all were emptied and dismantled. The frames themselves were being shaved away with improvised lasers until they were light and thin as bird’s bones. The ship was little more than a shell around the solid-state intelligence and the fusion ram.

Saenger was using the magnetic scoops at the moment.

He sucked in the loose hydrogen atmosphere which bathed the star system. The giant coils began to hum, and as they did Saenger lost some of his capacity, like a man too long under water. Part of his shielding was to protect him from the effects of the coils, and now that plating was gone. He was taking in hydrogen, compressing it, turning it to liquid hydrogen which would shield him from most of the harmful radiations.

Soon, though, he would remove the plates which shielded him from the growing bath of X-rays, photons, and other stellar garbage. He was not sure, as he told Plato, that he could remain for long in that acid shower.

Saenger pulled a sufficient quantity of hydrogen in, turned off the coils. He let two robots carry off another layer of insulation.

Saenger was like a dazed man on a battlefield, too long without rest. And the real war had not even started.

Plato was more nearly right.

Three days before the predicted time, the star entered its supernova scenario.

The Director was down in the Banks, with most of the Committee and other interested spectators. Uchi and Dr.

Maxell sat at their usual places before the Snapshot consoles.

“Really too bad,” the Director was saying. “Research project like that scratched; about to lose one of our shipboard SSIs. But it’ll give us a good look at what happens when a star dies.”

They were scanning Snapshot for full visuals, X-ray, infrared, ultraviolet, radio. This would be the most closely watched star event ever, and they were running it all into Plato’s permanent storage section where even he could not erase it.

If he had thought to try.

“How do you want to handle the monitors, Saenger?”

“I’ll keep on the innermost probes until they are overtaken, then transfer to the outermost. Then back, and I’ll hold as long as I can. Then you ought to have a few minutes on the farthest remote before it goes.”

“Good enough. Please monitor readings until the shock wave hits. We’ll listen in when we’re not too busy.”

“Certainly.”

“Oops!” someone said. “There it goes.”

* * * *

It’s hard to imagine a star shaking itself to pieces, but they saw it up close for the first time, then. One second the star seemed fine, if a little bright, then it darkened and the whole surface lifted like a trampoline top.

This from the closest of the probes, one million eight hundred thousand myriameters out. The limb of the star they were watching grew and grew and filled the screen and…

They were watching the sun expand from the second remote, two million two hundred sixty-eight thousand myriameters away, on the opposite side of the star. The sun filled that screen too, and the screen went blank before the shock front reached it and.…

“Shock wave, pulling a little ahead of the gases,” said a technician.

“Forty-seven point two seconds to the first. Seven-seven point seven to the second. About a tenth light-speed for the gases,” said Uchi.

The information sped from Saenger through Snapshot to Plato. Records, stacks of tape, videoprints, all rolled into the permanent storage units on the Moon. They watched the star kill itself with its own light and heat.

The pickup switched to the furthest probe, orbiting almost two AU from the star. For the first time, they saw the whole sun, and it grew and grew even as they watched. It was immense, the lenses kept filtering down and down and still they could not keep the sensors from burning out. Lenses rotated in to replace others, and the thing covered fully a third of the heavens even this far away.

And it got bigger.

“He’s supposed to switch back,” said the Director. “Isn’t he?”

“Do you think it already hit him?” asked one of the spectators.

“Couldn’t,” said Uchi. “We haven’t gotten his information dump through Snapshot yet.”

Then he looked at Sondra.

“He can’t hold it on us, can he?”

“No,” she said. “It’s in the program.”

But she bit her nails anyway.

Uchi timed the expansion. “It should have gotten him now! Why didn’t he dump? Is he still on?”

Sondra feared to look but she did. Two inputs still through Snapshot. The outer probe and…

They looked at the screen. The supernova appeared as a rolling unfolding bunch of dirty sheets, and the center grew whiter with each ripple shaken loose.

It covered half the screen, then two-thirds, then three-quarters.

“The shock must be almost to the probe,” said the Director.

“What happened to Saenger?” asked Sondra of Uchi.

“Where is he?”

“Look!”

They all did.

The whiteness of the star filled the screen and there was a marbled spot through which the glowing central core could be seen. The star must have lost a tenth its mass. The widening sphere of white-hot gases and debris whipped toward the probe.

And in front of it came something that looked like an old sink stopper.

Closer it came, and they saw it rode just before the shock wave, that the huge round thing caused swirls in the envelope of gases much like tension on a bubble of soap.

On it came, closer, and larger, the gases behind it moving perceptibly, quickly, toward the lens of the outermost probe.

“Saenger!” yelled Uchi, and Sondra joined him, and they all began to yell and cheer in the control room. “He built an ablation shield. He’s riding that goddamn shock wave!

Somehow, somewhere he got the stuff to make it! My God.

What a ship, oh what a ship!”

And Saenger had the lens zoom in then, and they saw the skeletal framework, the spider web of metal and shielding and plastic and burnt pieces of rock, ore and robot parts which made it up.

Then the ship flashed by and the screen melted away as the gases hit the probe.

“Doctor Maxell…” came Saenger’s voice. It was changed, and the phase kept slipping as he talked.

“Yes, Saenger? Yes?”

“Permission to abbbooort—tt—abort program and return to Earth docking orbit. Almost at ram speed—
zgichzzggzichh—at ram speed now.”

“Yes, Saenger! Yes. Yes!”

“Ram functioning. Doctor Maxell?”

“What?”

“I want to come home now. I’m very tired.”

“You will, you can,” she said.

The screen changed to an aft view from Saenger. The white, growing sphere of the burnt star was being left slowly behind. The slight wispy contrail from the ship’s ram blurred part of the screen, the gas envelope the rest.

“I’ve lost some of myself,” said Saenger.

“It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter.”

She was crying.

“Everything will be all right,” she said.

OceanofPDF.com

CONSIGNMENT, by Alan E. Nourse The three shots ripped through the close night air of the prison, sharply, unbelievably. Three guards crumpled like puppets in the dead silence that followed. The thought flashed through Krenner’s mind, incredibly, that possibly no one had heard.

He hurled the rope with all his might up the towering rock wall, waited a long eternity as the slim strong line swished through the darkness, and heard the dull “clank” as the hook took hold at the top. Like a cat he started up, frantically, scrambling, and climbing, the sharp heat of the rope searing his fingers. Suddenly daylight was around him, the bright unearthly glare of arc lights, the siren cutting in with its fierce scream. The shouts of alarm were far below him as he fought up the line, knot after knot, the carefully prepared knots. Twenty seconds to climb, he thought, just twenty seconds—

* * * *

Rifle shots rang out below, the shells smashing into the concrete around him. Krenner almost turned and snarled at the little circle of men in the glaring light below, but turning meant precious seconds. A dull, painful blow struck his foot, as his hands grasped the jagged glass at the top of the wall.

In a moment of triumph he crouched at the top and laughed at the little men and the blazing guns below; on the other side lay the blackness of the river. He turned and plunged into the blackness, his foot throbbing, down swiftly until the cool wetness of the river closed about him, soothing his pain, bathing his mind in the terrible beauty of freedom, and what went with freedom. A few dozen powerful strokes would carry him across and down the river, three miles below the prison fortress from which he
had broken. Across the hill from that, somewhere, he’d find Sherman and a wide open road to freedom—

* * * *

Free! Twenty-seven years of walls and work, bitterness and hateful, growing, simmering revenge. Twenty-seven years for a fast-moving world to leave him behind, far behind. He’d have to be careful about that. He wouldn’t know about things. Twenty-seven years from his life, to kill his ambition, to take his woman, to disgrace him in the eyes of society. But the candle had burned through. He was free, with time, free, easy, patient time, to find Markson, search him out, kill him at last.

Hours passed it seemed, in the cold, moving water.

Krenner struggled to stay alert; loss of control now would be sure death. A few shots had followed him from the wall behind, hopeless shots, hopeless little spears of light cutting across the water, searching for him, a tiny dot in the blackness. Radar could never spot him, for he wore no metal, and the sound of his movements in the water were covered by the sighing wind and the splashing of water against the prison walls.

Finally, after ages of pain and coldness, he dragged himself out onto the muddy shore, close to the calculated spot. He sat on the edge and panted, his foot swollen and throbbing. He wanted to scream in pain, but screams would bring farmers and dogs and questions. That would not do, until he found Sherman, somewhere back in those hills, with a ‘copter, and food, and medication, and quiet, peaceful rest.

He tried to struggle to his feet, but the pain was too much now. He half walked, half dragged himself into the woods, and started as best he could the trek across the hills.

* * * *

Jerome Markson absently snapped on the radiovisor on his desk. Sipping his morning coffee thoughtfully as he

leafed through the reports on his desk, he listened with half an ear until the announcer’s voice seeped through to his consciousness. He tightened suddenly in his seat, and the coffee cooled before him, forgotten.

“—Eastern Pennsylvania is broadcasting a four-state alarm with special radiovisor pictures in an effort to pick up the trail of a convict who escaped the Federal Prison here last night. The escaped man, who shot and killed two guards making good his escape, dived into the river adjoining the prison, and is believed to have headed for an outside rendezvous somewhere in the Blue Mountain region. The prisoner is John Krenner, age 51, gray hair, blue eyes, five-foot-nine. He is armed and dangerous, with four unsuccessful escape attempts, and three known murders on his record. He was serving a life term, without leniency, for the brutal murder in July, 1967, of Florence Markson, wife of the now-famous industrialist, Jerome Markson, president of Markson Foundries. Any person with information of this man’s whereabouts should report—”

Markson stared unbelieving at the face which appeared in the visor. Krenner, all right. The same cold eyes, the same cruel mouth, the same sneer. He snapped off the set, his face white and drawn. To face the bitter, unreasoning hate of this man, his former partner—even a prison couldn’t hold him.

A telephone buzzed, shattering the silence of the huge office.

“Hello, Jerry? This is Floyd Gunn in Pittsburgh. Krenner’s escaped!”

“I know. I just heard. Any word?”

“None yet. We got some inside dope from one of the men in the prison that he has an outside escape route, and that he’s been digging up all the information he could find in the past three months or so about the Roads. But I wanted to warn you.” The policeman’s voice sounded distant and
unreal. “He promised to get you, Jerry. I’m ordering you and your home heavily guarded—”

“Guards won’t do any good,” said Markson, heavily.

“Krenner will get me if you don’t get him first. Do everything you can.”

The policeman’s voice sounded more cheerful. “At any rate, he’s in the eastern part of the state now. He has four hundred miles to travel before he can get to you. Unless he has a ‘copter, or somehow gets on the Roads, he can’t get to you for a day or so. We’re doing everything we can.”

Markson hung up the receiver heavily. Twenty-seven years of peace since that devil had finally murdered his way out of his life. And now he was back again. A terrible mistake for a partner, a man with no reason, a man who could not understand the difference between right and wrong. A man with ruthless ambition, who turned on his partner when honesty got in his way, and murdered his partner’s wife in rage when his own way of business was blocked. A man so twisted with rage that he threatened on the brink of capital punishment to tear Markson’s heart out, yet Markson had saved him from the chair. An appeal, some money, some influence, had snatched him from death’s sure grasp, so he could come back to kill again. And a man with such diabolical good fortune that he could now come safely to Markson, and hunt him out, and carry out the fancied revenge that his twisted mind demanded.

Markson took the visiphone in hand again and dialed a number. The face of a young girl appeared. “Hi, dad. Did you see the news report?”

“Yes, I saw it. I want you to round up Jerry and Mike and take the ‘copter out to the summer place on Nantucket.

Wait for me there. I don’t know how soon I can make it, but I don’t want you here now. Leave immediately.”

The girl knew better than to argue with her father. “Dad, is there any chance—?”

“There’s lots of chance. That’s why I want you away from here.”

He flipped off the connection, and sighed apprehensively.

Now to wait. The furnaces had to keep going, the steel had to be turned out, one way or another. He’d have to stay.

And hope. Perhaps the police would get him—

* * * *

The elderly lady sat on the edge of the kitchen chair, shivering. “We’ll be glad to help you, but you won’t hurt us, will you?”

“Shut up,” said Krenner. The gray plastic of his pistol gleamed dully in the poor light of the farm kitchen. “Get that foot dressed, with tight pressure and plenty of ‘mycin.

I don’t want it to bleed, and I don’t want an infection.” The woman hurried her movements, swiftly wrapping the swollen foot.

The man lifted a sizzling frying pan from the range, flipping a hamburger onto a plate. He added potatoes and carrots. “Here’s the food,” he said sullenly. “And you might put the gun away. We don’t have weapons, and we don’t have a ‘phone.”

“You have legs,” snapped Krenner. “Now shut up.”

The woman finished the dressing. “Try it,” she said. The convict stood up by the chair, placing his weight on the foot gingerly. Pain leaped through his leg, but it was a clean pain. He could stand it. He took a small map from his pocket. “Any streams or gorges overland between here and Garret Valley?”

The farmer, shook, his head. “No.”

“Give me some clothes, then. No, don’t leave. The ones you have on.”

The farmer slipped out of his clothes silently, and Krenner dropped the prison grays in the corner.

“You’ll keep your mouths shut about this,” he stated flatly.

“Oh, yes, you can count on us,” exclaimed the woman, eyeing the gun fearfully. “We won’t tell a soul.”

“I’ll say you won’t,” said Krenner, his fingers tightening on the gun. The shots were muted and flat in the stillness of the kitchen.

An hour later Krenner broke through the underbrush, crossed a rutted road, and pushed on over the ridge. His cruel face was dripping with perspiration. “It should be the last ridge,” he thought. “I’ve gone a good, three miles—”

The morning sun was bright, filtering down through the trees, making beautiful wet patterns on the damp ground.

The morning heat was just beginning, but the food and medications had made progress easy. He pulled himself up onto a rock ledge, over to the edge, and felt his heart stop cold as he peered down into the valley below.

A dark blue police ‘copter nestled on the valley floor next to the sleek gray one. It must have just arrived, for the dark uniforms of the police were swarming around the gray machine He saw the pink face and the sporty clothes of the occupant as he came down the ladder, his hands in the air.

Too late! They’d caught Sherman!

He lay back shaking.

Impossible! He had to have Sherman. They couldn’t possibly have known, unless somehow they had foreseen, or heard—. His mind seethed with helpless rage. Without Sherman he was stuck. No way to reach Markson, no way to settle that score—unless possibly—.

The Roads.

He’d heard about them. Way back in 1967 when he’d gone up, the roads were underway. A whole system of Rolling Roads was proposed then, and the first had already been built, between Pittsburgh and the Lakes. A crude affair, a conveyor belt system, running at a steady seventy-five miles per hour, carrying only ore and freight.

But in the passing years reports had filtered through the prison walls. New men, coming “up for a visit” had brought
tales, gross exaggerations, of the Rolling Roads grown huge, a tremendous system building itself up, crossing hills and valleys in unbroken lines, closed in from weather and hijackers, fast and smooth and endless. Criss-crossing the nation, they had said, in never-slowing belts of passengers and freight livestock. The Great Triangle had been first, from Chicago to St. Louis to Old New York, and back to Chicago. Now every town, every village had its small branch, its entrance to the Rolling Roads, and once a man got on the Roads, they had said, he was safe until he tried to get off.

Clearly the memory of the reports filtered through Krenner’s mind. The great Central Roads run from Old New York to Chicago, through New Washington and Pittsburgh—

Markson was in Pittsburgh—

Krenner started down through the underbrush, travelling south by the sun, the urgency of his mission spurring him on against the pain of his foot, the difficulty of the terrain over which he travelled. He was too far north. Somewhere to the south he’d find the Roads. And once on the Roads, he’d find a way to get off—

* * * *

He stopped at the brink of the hill and gasped in amazement.

They ran across the wide valley like silver ribbons. The late afternoon sunlight reflected gold and pink from the plasti-glass encasement, concealing the rushing line of travel within the covering. Like twin serpents, they lay across the hills, about a mile apart, the Road travelling east, and the Road moving west. They stretched as far as he could see. And he could see the white sign which said,

“Merryvale Entrance, Westbound, Three miles.”

As he tramped, across the field he could hear the hum of the Roads grow loud in his ears. An automatic, machinelike hum, a rhythm of motion. Close to the westbound road he
moved back eastward along it, toward the little port which formed the entrance to it. And soon he saw the police

‘copter which rested near the entrance, and the uniformed men with their rifles, alert. Three of them.

Krenner fingered his weapon easily. It was almost dark; they would not see him easily. He kept a small hill between himself and the police and moved in within gunshot range.

He could see the rocket-like car resting on its single rail, waiting for a passenger to enter, to touch the button which would activate the tiny rocket engines and move it forward, ever and ever more swiftly until it reached the acceleration of the Roads, and slid over, and became a part of the Road.

Moving carefully, he slipped from rock to rock, closer to the car and the men who guarded it.

Suddenly the bay of a hound cut through the gloom. Two small brown dogs with the men, straining at their leashes.

He hadn’t counted on that. Swiftly he took cover and lined his sights with the blue uniforms. Before they knew even his approximate location he had cut them down, and the dogs also, and raced wildly down the remainder of the hill to the car.

“Fare may be calculated from the accompanying charts, and will be collected when your car has taken its place on the Roads,” said a little sign near the cockpit. Krenner studied the dashboard for a moment, then jammed in the button marked “Forward,” and settled back. The monorail slid forward without a sound, and plunged into a tunnel in the hill. Out the other side, with ever-increasing acceleration it slid in alongside the gleaming silver ribbon, faster and faster. With growing apprehension Krenner watched the speedometer mount, past two hundred, two hundred and twenty, forty, sixty, eighty—at three hundred miles per hour the acceleration force eased, and the car suddenly swerved to the left, into a dark causeway. And then into the brightly lighted plasti-glass tunnel.

He was on the Roads!

Alongside the outside lane the little car sped, moving on an independent rail, sliding gently past other cars resting on the middle lane. An opening appeared, and Krenner’s car slid over another notch, disengaged its rail, and settled to a stop on the central lane of the Road. The speedometer fell to nothing, for the car’s motion was no longer independent, but an integral part of the speeding Road itself. Three hundred miles per hour on a constant, nonstop flight across the rolling land.

A loudspeaker suddenly piped up in his car. “Welcome to the Roads,” it said. “Your fare collector will be with you in a short while. After he has arrived, feel free to leave your car and be at ease on the Road outside. Eating, resting, and sleeping quarters will be found at regular intervals. You are warned, however, not to cross either the barriers to the outside lanes, nor the barriers to the freight-carrying areas front and rear. Pleasant travelling.”

Krenner chuckled grimly, and settled down in his car, his automatic in his hand. His fare collector would get a surprise. Down the Road a short distance he saw the man approaching, wearing the green uniform of the Roads. And then he stiffened. Three blue uniforms were accompanying him. Opening the car door swiftly, he slipped out onto the soft carpeting of the Road, and raced swiftly away from the approaching men.

They saw him when he started to run. Ahead he could see a crowd of passengers around a dining area. A shout went up as he knocked a woman down in his pell-mell flight, but he was beyond them in an instant. His foot hindered him, and his pursuers were gaining. Suddenly before him he saw a barrier—a four foot metal wall. No carpet beyond it, no furnishings along the sides. A freight area! He hopped over the barrier and plunged into the blackness of the freight tunnel as he heard the shouts of his pursuers. “Stop! Come back! Stop or we’ll shoot!”

They didn’t shoot. In a moment Krenner came to the first freight carrier, one of the standard metal containers resting on the steel of the Road. He ran past it, and the next. The third and fourth were open cars, stacked high with machinery. He ran on for several moments before he glanced back.

They weren’t following him any more. He could see them, far back, where the light began, a whole crowd of people at the barrier he had crossed. But no one followed him. Odd that they should stop. He centered his mind more closely on his surroundings. Freight might conceal him to get him off the Roads where no passenger station would ever let him through. He climbed to the top of a nearby freight container and slipped down in. Chunks of rock were under his feet, and he fell in a heap on the hard bed. What possible kind of freight—? He slipped a lighter from his pocket and snapped it on.

Coal! A normal freight load. He climbed back up and looked along the road. No pursuit. An uneasy chill went through him—this was too easy. To ride a coal car to safety, without a single man pursuing him—to where? He examined the billing on the side of the car, and he forgot his fears in the rush of excitement. The billing read,

“Consignment: Coal, twenty tons, Markson Foundries, via Pittsburgh private cutoff.”

His car was carrying him to Markson!

His mind was full of the old, ugly hate, the fearful joy of the impending revenge. Fortune’s boy, he thought to himself. Even Sherman could not have done so well, to ride the Rolling Roads, not just to Pittsburgh, not to the mountains, but right to Markson’s backyard! He shivered with anticipation. Pittsburgh was only a few hundred miles away, and at three hundred miles an hour—Krenner clenched his fists in cruel pleasure. He hadn’t long to wait.

* * * *

An hour passed slowly. Krenner’s leg was growing stiff after the exertion of running. Still no sign of life. He eased his position, and stiffened when he heard the little relay box above the consignment sheet give a couple of sharp clicks.

Near the end! He hugged himself in excitement. What a neat trick, to ride a consignment of coal to the very yards where Markson would be! The coal yards which he might have owned, the furnaces, the foundry—. There would be men there to receive the car from the line, well he could remember the men, day and night, working and sweating in those yards and mills! There would be men there to brake the car and empty it. He was in old clothes, farm clothes—
he would fit in so well; as soon as the car slowed he could jump off, and simply join the other men. Or he could shoot, if he had to. A little agility in getting out of the car, and a little care in inquiring the way to Markson’s office—

The car suddenly shifted to the outer lane. Krenner gripped a handle on the inside and held tight. He felt the swerving motion, and suddenly the car moved out of the tunnel into the open night air. He climbed up the side and peered over the edge. There were five cars in the consignment; he was on the last. Travelling almost at Road speed along the auxiliary cutoff. Swiftly they moved along through the night, through the edge of the Pittsburgh steel yards. Outside he fancied he could hear the rattle of machinery in the yards, the shouts of the men at their work. Making steel was a twenty-four hour proposition.

Then they were clear of the first set of yards. The car made another switch, and Krenner’s heart beat faster. A white sign along the side said, “Private Property. Keep off.

Markson Foundries Line.” Soon now they would come to a crunching halt. Men would be there, but his gun was intact.

No matter how many men he met, he had to get to Markson.

The car shuddered a little, but the acceleration continued.

They were rising high in the air now, above the foundries.

He looked down, and could see the mighty furnaces thrusting their slim necks to the sky.

A bolt of fear went through him. How far did the automatic system go? Automatic loading of coal from the fields, automatic switching onto the Rolling Roads.

Automatic transfer of cars onto a private line which led the cars to the foundries. Where did the automatic handling stop? Where did the men come into it? Twenty-seven-year-old concepts slid through his mind, of how freight was carried, of how machines were tended, of how steel was made. In a world of rapidly changing technology, twenty-seven years can bring changes, in every walk of life, in every form of production—

Even steel—

A voice from within him screamed, “Get off, Krenner, get off! This is a one way road—” He climbed quickly to the top of the car, to find a place to jump, and turned back, suddenly sick with fear.

The car was going too fast.

The first car had moved with its load to a high point on the elevated road. A thundering crash came to Krenner’s ears as its bottom opened to dislodge its contents. Without stopping. Without men. Automatically. From below he could hear a rushing, roaring sound, and the air was suddenly warmer than before—

The next car followed the first. And the next. Krenner scrambled to the top of the car in rising horror as the car ahead moved serenely, jerked suddenly, and jolted loose its load with a crash of coal against steel. Twenty tons of coal hurtled down a chute into roaring redness—

Twenty-seven years had changed things. He hadn’t heard men, for there were no men. No men to tend the fires.

Glowing, white-hot furnaces, Markson’s furnaces, which were fed on a regular, unerring, merciless consignment
belt, running directly from the Roads. Efficient, economical, completely automatic.

Krenner’s car gave a jolt that threw his head against the side and shook him down onto the coal load like a bag of potatoes. He clawed desperately for a grip on the side, clawed and missed. The bottom of the car opened, and the load fell through with a roar, and the roar drowned his feeble scream as Krenner fell with the coal.

The last thing he saw below, rushing up, was the glowing, blistering, white-hot maw of the blast furnace.

OceanofPDF.com

THE SYNDIC, by C.M. Kornbluth (Part 1)

“It was not until February 14th that the Government declared a state of unlimited emergency. The precipitating incident was the aerial bombardment and destruction of B

Company, 27th Armored Regiment, on Fort George Hill in New York City. Local Syndic leaders had occupied and fortified George Washington High School, with the enthusiastic co-operation of students, faculty and neighborhood. Chief among them was Thomas ‘Numbers’

Cleveland, displaying the same coolness and organizational genius which had brought him to pre-eminence in the metropolitan policy-wheel organization by his thirty-fifth year.

“At 5:15 A.M. the first battalion of the 27th Armored took up positions in the area as follows: A Company at 190th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue, with the mission of preventing reinforcement of the school from the I.R.T.

subway station there; Companies B, C, and D hill down from the school on the slope of Fort George Hill poised for an attack. At 5:25 the sixteen Patton tanks of B Company revved up and moved on the school, C and D Companies remaining in reserve. The plan was for the tanks of B

Company to surround the school on three sides—the fourth is a precipice—and open fire if a telephone parley with Cleveland did not result in an unconditional surrender.

There was no surrender and the tanks attacked.

“Cleveland’s observation post was in the tower room of the school. Seeing the radio mast of the lead tank top the rise of the hill, he snapped out a telephone order to contact pilots waiting for the word at a Syndic field floating outside the seven mile limit. The pilots, trained to split-second precision in their years of public service, were airborn by 5:26, but this time their cargo was not liquor, cigarettes or
luggage. In three minutes, they were whipping rocket bombs into the tanks of Company B; Cleveland’s runners charged the company command post; the trial by fire had begun.

“Before it ended North America was to see deeds as gallant and strategy as inspired as any in the history of war: Cleveland’s historic announcement—‘It’s a great day for the race!’—his death at the head of his runners in a charge on the Fort Totten garrison, the firm hand of Amadeo Falcaro taking up the scattered reins of leadership, parley, peace, betrayal and execution of hostages, the Treaty of Las Vegas and a united Mob-Syndic front against Government, O’Toole’s betrayal of the Continental Press wire room and the bloody battle to recapture that crucial nerve center, the decisive march on Baltimore.…”

—B. Arrowsmith Hynde,

The Syndic—a Short History.

* * * *

“No accurate history of the future has ever been written—

a fact which I think disposes of history’s claim to rank as a science. Astronomers quail at the three-body problem and throw up their hands in surrender before the four-body problem. Any given moment in history is a problem of at least two billion bodies. Attempts at orderly abstraction of manipulable symbols from the realities of history seem to me doomed from the start. I can juggle mean rain-falls, car-loading curves, birth-rates and patent applications, but I cannot for the life of me fit the recurring facial carbuncles of Karl Marx into my manipulations—not even, though we know, well after the fact, that agonizing staphylococcus aureus infections behind that famous beard helped shape twentieth-century totalitarianism. In pathology alone the list could be prolonged indefinitely: Julius Caesar’s epilepsy, Napoleon’s gastritis, Wilson’s paralysis, Grant’s alcoholism, Wilhelm II’s withered arm, Catherine’s
nymphomania, George III’s paresis, Edison’s deafness, Euler’s blindness, Burke’s stammer, and so on. Is there anybody silly enough to maintain that the world today would be what it is if Marx, Caesar, Napoleon, Wilson, Grant, Wilhelm, Catherine, George, Edison, Euler and Burke—to take only these eleven—were anything but what they were? Yet that is the assumption behind theories of history which exclude the carbuncles of Marx from their referents—that is to say, every theory of history with which I am familiar.…

“Am I then saying that history, past and future, is unknowable; that we must blunder ahead in the dark without planning because no plan can possibly be accurate in prediction and useful in application? I am not. I am expressing my distaste for holders of extreme positions, for possessors of eternal truths, for keepers of the flame.

Keepers of the flame have no trouble with the questions of ends and means which plague the rest of us. They are quite certain that their ends are good and that therefore choice of means is a trivial matter. The rest of us, far from certain that we have a general solution of the two-billion body problem that is history, are much more likely to ponder on our means.…”

—F. W. Taylor,

Organization, Symbolism and Morale

* * * *

I

Charles Orsino was learning the business from the ground up—even though “up” would never be very high. He had in his veins only a drop or two of Falcaro blood: enough so that room had to be made for him; not enough for it to be a great dearth of room. Counting heavily on the good will of F. W. Taylor, who had taken a fancy to him when he lost his parents in the Brookhaven Reactor explosion of ‘83, he might rise to a rather responsible position in Alky,

Horsewire, Callgirl, recruitment and Retirement or whatever line he showed an aptitude for. But at 22 one spring day, he was merely serving a tour of duty as bagman attached to the 101st New York Police Precinct. A junior member of the Syndic customarily handled that job; you couldn’t trust the cops not to squeeze their customers and pocket the difference.

He walked absently through the not-unpleasant routine of the shakedown. His mind was on his early-morning practice session of polo, in which he had almost disgraced himself.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Orsino; a pleasure to see you again.

Would you like a cold glass of beer while I get the loot?”

“No, but thanks very much, Mr. Lefko—I’m in training, you know. Wish I could take you up on it. Seven phones, isn’t it, at ten dollars a phone?”

“That’s right, Mr. Orsino, and I’ll be with you as soon as I lay off the seventh at Hialeah; all the ladies went for a plater named Hearthmouse because they thought the name was cute and left me with a dutch book. I won’t be a minute.”

Lefko scuttled to a phone and dickered with another bookie somewhere while Charles absently studied the crowd of chattering, laughing horseplayers. (“Mister Orsino, did you come out to make a monkey of yourself and waste my time? Confound it, sir, you have just fifty round to a chukker and you must make them count!” He grinned unhappily. Old Gilby, the pro, could be abrasive when a bone-head play disfigured the game he loved. Charles had been sure Benny Grashkin’s jeep would conk out in a minute—it had been sputtering badly enough—and that he would have had a dirt-cheap scoring shot while Benny changed mounts. But Gilby blew the whistle and wasn’t interested in your fine-spun logic. “Confound it, sir, when will you young rufflers learn that you must crawl before you walk? Now let me see a team rush for the goal—and I mean team, Mr. Orsino!”)

“Here we are, Mr. Orsino, and just in time. There goes the seventh.”

Charles shook hands and left amid screams of

“Hearthmouse! Hearthmouse!” from the lady bettors watching the screen.

High up in the Syndic Building, F. W. Taylor—Uncle Frank to Charles—was giving a terrific tongue-lashing to a big, stooped old man. Thornberry, president of the Chase National Bank, had pulled a butch and F. W. Taylor was blazing mad about it.

He snarled: “One more like this, Thornberry, and you are out on your padded can. When a respectable member of the Syndic chooses to come to you for a line of credit, you will in the future give it without any tom-fool quibbling about security. You bankers seem to think this is the middle ages and that your bits of paper still have their old black magic.

“Disabuse yourself of the notion. Nobody except you believes in it. The Inexorable Laws of Economics are as dead as Dagon and Ishtar, and for the same reason. No more worshippers. You bankers can’t shove anybody around any more. You’re just a convenience, like the non-playing bankerin a card game.

“What’s real now is the Syndic. What’s real about the Syndic is its own morale and the public’s faith in it. Is that clear?”

Thornberry brokenly mumbled something about supply and demand.

Taylor sneered. “Supply and demand. Urim and Thummim. Show me a supply, Thornberry, show me a—oh, hell. I haven’t time to waste re-educating you. Remember what I told you and don’t argue. Unlimited credit to Syndic members. If they overdo it, we’ll rectify the situation. Now, get out.” And Thornberry did, with senile tears in his eyes.

At Mother Maginnis’ Ould Sod Pub, Mother Maginnis pulled a long face when Charles Orsino came in. “It’s
always a pleasure to see you, Mr. Orsino, but I’m afraid this week it’ll be no pleasure for you to see me.”

She was always roundabout. “Why, what do you mean, Mrs. M.? I’m always happy to say hello to a customer.”

“It’s the business, Mr. Orsino. It’s the business. You’ll pardon me if I say that I can’t see how to spare twenty-five dollars from the till, not if my life depended on it. I can go to fifteen, but so help me—”

Charles looked grave—graver than he felt. It happened every day. “You realize, Mrs. Maginnis, that you’re letting the Syndic down. What would the people in Syndic Territory do for protection if everybody took your attitude?”

She looked sly. “I was thinking, Mr. Orsino, that a young man like you must have a way with the girls—” By a mighty unsubtle maneuver, Mrs. Maginnis’ daughter emerged from the back room at that point and began demurely mopping the bar. “And,” she continued, “sure, any young lady would consider it an honor to spend the evening with a young gentleman from the Syndic—”

“Perhaps,” Charles said, rapidly thinking it over. He would infinitely rather spend the evening with a girl than at a Shakespeare revival as he had planned, but there were drawbacks. In the first place, it would be bribery. In the second place, he might fall for the girl and wake up with Mrs. Maginnis for his mother-in-law—a fate too nauseating to contemplate for more than a moment. In the third place, he had already bought the tickets for himself and bodyguard.

“About the shakedown,” he said decisively. “Call it fifteen this week. If you’re still doing badly next week, I’ll have to ask for a look at your books—to see whether a regular reduction is in order.”

She got the hint, and colored. Putting down fifteen dollars, she said: “Sure, that won’t be necessary. I’m expecting business to take a turn for the better. It’s sure to pick up.”

“Good, then.” To show there were no hard feelings, he stayed for a moment to ask: “How are your husbands?”

“So-so. Alfie’s on the road this week and Dinnie’s got the rheumatism again but he can tend bar late, when it’s slow.”

“Tell him to drop around to the Medical Center and mention my name, Mrs. Maginnis. Maybe they can do something for him.”

She glowed with thanks and he left.

It was pleasant to be able to do things for nice people; it was pleasant to stroll along the sunny street acknowledging tipped hats and friendly words. (That team rush for the goal had been a sorry mess, but not his fault—
quite. Vladek had loosed a premature burst from his fifty caliber at the ball, and sent it hurling off to the right; they had braked and backed with much grinding of gears to form V again behind it, when Gilby blew the whistle again.)

* * * *

A nervous youngster in the National Press Service New York drop was facing his first crisis on the job. Trouble lights had flashed simultaneously on the Kansas City-New York, Hialeah-New York and Boston-New York trunks. He stood, paralyzed.

His supervisor took it in in a flash and banged open the circuit to Service. To the genial face that appeared on the screen, he snapped: “Trace Hialeah, Boston and Kansas City—in that order, Micky.”

Micky said: “Okay, pal,” and vanished.

The supervisor turned to the youngster. “Didn’t know what to do?” he asked genially. “Don’t let it worry you. Next time you’ll know. You noticed the order of priority?”

“Yes,” the boy gulped.

“It wasn’t an accident that I gave it to him that way. First, Hialeah because it was the most important. We get the bulk of our revenue from serving the horse rooms—in fact, I understand we started as a horse wire exclusively.

Naturally the horse-room customers pay for it in the long run, but they pay without pain. Nobody’s forcing them to improve the breed, right?

“Second, Boston-New York trunk. That’s common-carrier while the Fair Grounds isn’t running up there. We don’t make any profit on common-carrier service, the rates are too low, but we owe it to the public that supports us.

“Third, Kansas City-New York. That’s common carrier too, but with one terminal in Mob Territory. No reason why we should knock ourselves out for Regan and his boys, but after the other two are traced and closed, we’ll get around to them. Think you got it straight now?”

“Yes,” the youngster said.

“Good. Just take it easy.”

* * * *

The supervisor moved away to do a job of billing that didn’t need immediate doing; he wanted to avoid the very appearance of nagging the boy. He wondered too, if he’d really put it over, and decided he hadn’t. Who could, after all. It took years on the wires to get the feel. Slowly your motivation changed. You started by wanting to make a place for yourself and earn some dough. After years you realized, not with a blinding flash, but gradually, that you were working for quite another reason. Nice gang here that treats you right. Don’t let the Syndic down. The customers pay for their fun and by God, you see that they get it or bust a gut trying.

* * * *

On his way to the 101st Precinct station house, the ears of Charles Orsino burned as he thought of the withering lecture that had followed the blast on Gilby’s whistle.

“Mister Orsino, is it or is it not your responsibility as team captain to demand that a dangerous ball be taken out of play? And did or did not that last burst from Mister Vladek beat the ball out of round, thus giving rise to a distinct
possibility of dangerous ricochets?” The old man was right of course, but it had been a pocked and battered practice ball to start with; in practice sessions, you couldn’t afford to be fussy—not with regulation 18 inch armor steel balls selling for thirty dollars each at the pro shop.

He walked between the two green lamps of the precinct station and dumped his bag on the sergeant’s desk.

Immediately the sergeant started a tale of woe: “Mr.

Orsino, I don’t like to bother you with the men’s personal troubles, but I wonder if you could come through with a hundred dollar present for a very deserving young fellow here. It’s Patrolman Gibney, seven years in the old 101st and not a black mark against him. One citation for shooting it out with a burglar and another for nabbing a past-post crook at Lefko’s horse room. Gibney’s been married for five years and has two of the cutest kids you ever saw, and you know that takes money. Now he wants to get married again, he’s crazy in love with the girl and his first wife don’t mind, she says she can use a helping hand around the house, and he wants to do it right with a big wedding.

“If he can do it on a hundred, he’s welcome to it,” Charles said, grinning. “Give him my best wishes.” He divided the pile of bills into two orderly stacks, transferred a hundred dollars to one and pocketed the other.

He dropped it off at the Syndic Building, had an uninteresting dinner in one of its cafeterias and went to his furnished room downtown. He read a chapter in F. W.

Taylor’s—Uncle

Frank’s—latest
book,

Organization,

Symbolism and Morale, couldn’t understand a word he read, bathed and got out his evening clothes.

* * * *

A thin and attractive girl entered a preposterously-furnished room in the Syndic Building, arguing bitterly with a white-bearded, hawk-nosed old man.

“My dear ancestor,” she began, with exaggerated patience.

“God-damn it, Lee, don’t call me an ancestor! Makes me feel as if I was dead already.”

“You might as well be for all the sense you’re talking.”

“All right, Lee.” He looked wounded and brave.

“Oh, I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings, Edward—” She studied his face with suddenly-narrowed eyes and her tone changed. “Listen, you old devil, you’re not fooling me for a minute. I couldn’t hurt your feelings with the blunt edge of an axe. You’re not talking me into anything. It’d just be sending somebody to his death. Besides, they were both accidents.” She turned and began to fiddle with a semi-circular screen whose focus was a large and complicated chair. Three synchronized projectors bore on the screen.

The old man said very softly: “And what if they weren’t?

Tom McGurn and Bob were good men. None better. If the damn Government’s knocking us off one by one, something ought to be done. And you seem to be the only person in a position to do it.”

“Start a war,” she said bitterly. “Sweep them from the seas. Wasn’t Dick Reiner chanting that when I was in diapers?”

“Yes,” the old man brooded. “And he’s still chanting it now that you’re in—whatever young ladies wear nowadays.

Promise me something, Lee. If there’s another try, will you help us out?”

“I am so sure there won’t be,” she said, “that I’ll promise.

And God help you, Edward, if you try to fake one. I’ve told you before and I tell you now that it’s almost certain death.”

* * * *

Charles Orsino studied himself in a three-way mirror.

The evening suit was new; he wished the gunbelt was.

The holster rode awkwardly on his hip; he hadn’t got a new
outfit since his eighteenth birthday and his chest had filled out to the last hole of the cross-strap’s buckle since then.

Well, it would have to wait; the evening would cost him enough as it was. Five bodyguards! He winced at the thought. But you had to be seen at these things and you had to do it right or it didn’t count.

He fell into a brief reverie of meeting a beautiful, beautiful girl at the theater, a girl who would think he was interesting and handsome and a wonderful polo player, a girl who would happily turn out to be in the direct Falcaro line with all sorts of powerful relations to speak up for him.…

Someone said on his room annunciator: “The limousine is here, Mr. Orsino. I’m Halloran, your chief bodyguard.”

“Very well, Halloran,” he said casually, just as he’d practiced it in the bathroom that morning and rode down.

The limousine was a beauty and the guards were faultlessly turned out. One was democratic with one’s chief guard and a little less so with the others. As Halloran drove, Charles chatted with him about the play, which was Julius Caesar in modern dress. Halloran said he’d heard it was very good.

* * * *

Their arrival in the lobby of the Costello created no sensation. Five bodyguards wasn’t a lot of bodyguards, even though there seemed to be no other Syndic people there. So much for the beautiful Falcaro girl. Charles chatted with a television director he knew slightly. The director explained to him that the theater was sick, very sick, that Harry Tremaine,—he played Brutus—made a magnificent stage picture but couldn’t read lines.

By then Halloran was whispering in his ear that it was time to take their seats. Halloran was sweating like a pig and Charles didn’t get around to asking him why. Charles
took an aisle seat, Halloran was across the aisle and the others sat to his side, front and rear.

The curtain rose on “New York—A Street.”

The first scene, a timekiller designed to let fidgeters subside and coughers finish their coughing, was a 3-D
projection of Times Square, with a stylized suggestion of a public relations consultant’s office “down in one” on the apron.

When Caesar entered Orsino started, and there was a gratified murmur around the auditorium. He was made up as French Letour, one of the Mobsters from the old days—
technically a hero, but one who had sailed mighty close to the wind. This promised to be interesting.

“Peace, ho! Caesar speaks.”

And so to the apron where the soothsayer—public relations
consultant—delivered
the
warning
contemptuously ignored by Letour-Caesar, and the spotlight shifted to Cassius and Brutus for their long, foreboding dialogue. Brutus’ back was to the audience when it started; he gradually turned—

“What means this shouting? I do fear the people will choose Caesar for their king!”

And you saw that Brutus was Falcaro—old Amadeo Falcaro himself, with the beard and hawk nose and eyebrows.

Well, let’s see now. It must be some kind of tortured analogy with the Treaty of Las Vegas when Letour made a strong bid to unite Mob and Syndic and Falcaro had fought against anything but a short-term, strictly military alliance.

Charles felt kind of sore about Falcaro not getting the title role, but he had to admit that Tremaine played Falcaro as the gutsy magnifico he had been. When Caesar re-entered, the contrast became clear; Caesar-Letour was a fidgety, fear-ridden man. The rest of the conspirators brought on through Act One turned out to be good fellows all, fresh
and hearty; Charles guessed everything was all right and he wished he could grab a nap. But Cassius was saying:

“Him and his worth and our great need of him—”

All very loyal, Charles thought, smothering a yawn. A life for the Syndic and all that, but a high-brow version. Polite and dignified, like a pavanne at Roseland. Sometimes—
after, say, a near miss on the polo field—he would wonder how polite and dignified the great old days actually had been. Amadeo Falcaro’s Third Year Purge must have been an affair of blood and guts. Two thousand shot in three days, the history books said, adding hastily that the purged were unreconstructed, unreconstructable thugs whose usefulness was past, who couldn’t realize that the job ahead was construction and organization.

* * * *

And Halloran was touching Charles on the shoulder.

“Intermission in a second, sir.”

They marched up the aisle as the curtain fell to applause and the rest of the audience began to rise. Then the impossible happened.

Halloran had gone first; Charles was behind him, with the four other guards hemming him in. As Halloran reached the door to the lobby at the top of the aisle, he turned to face Charles and performed an inexplicable pantomime. It was quite one second before Charles realized that Halloran was tugging at his gun, stuck in the holster.

The guard to the left of Charles softly said: “Jesus!” and threw himself at Halloran as the chief guard’s gun came loose. There was a .45 caliber roar, muffled. There was another that crashed, unmuffled, a yard from Charles’ right ear. The two figures at the head of the aisle collapsed limply and the audience began to shriek. Somebody with a very loud voice roared: “Keep calm! It’s all part of the play!

Don’t get panicky! It’s part of the play!”

The man who was roaring moved up to the aisle door, fell silent, saw and smelled the blood and fainted.

A woman began to pound the guard on Charles’ right with her fists, yelling: “What did you do to my husband? You shot my husband!” She meant the man who had fainted; Charles peeled her off the bodyguard.

Somehow they got into the lobby, followed by most of the audience. The three bodyguards held them at bay. Charles found he was deaf in his right ear and supposed it was temporary. Least of his worries. Halloran had taken a shot at him. The guard named Weltfisch had intercepted it. The guard named Donnel had shot Halloran down.

He said to Donnel: “You know Halloran long?”

Donnel, not taking his eyes from the crowd, said: “Couple of years, sir. He was just a guy in the bodyguard pool.”

“Get me out of here,” Orsino said. “To the Syndic Building.”

In the big black car, he could almost forget the horror; he could hope that time would erase it completely. It wasn’t like polo. That shot had been aimed.

The limousine purred to a halt before the titanic bulk of the Syndic Building, was checked and rolled on into the Unrestricted Entrance. An elevator silently lifted the car and passengers past floors devoted to Alcohol Clerical, Alcohol Research, and Testing, Transport, Collections Audit and Control, Cleaning and Dying, Female Recruitment and Retirement, up, up, up, past sections and sub-sections Charles had never entered, Syndic member though he was, to an automatic stop at a floor whose indicator said: enforcement and public relations.

It was only 9:45 P.M.; F. W. Taylor would be in and working. Charles said: “Wait here, boys,” and muttered the code phrase to the door. It sprang open.

F. W. Taylor was dictating, machine-gun fashion, to a mike.

He looked dog-tired. His face turned up with a frown as

Charles entered and then the frown became a beam of pleasure.

“Charles, my boy! Sit down!” He snapped off the machine.

“Uncle—” Charles began.

“It was so kind of you to drop in. I thought you’d be at the theater.”

“I was, Uncle, but—”

“I’m working on a revision for the next edition of Organization, Symbolism and Morale. You’d never guess who inspired it.”

“I’m sure I wouldn’t, Uncle. Uncle—”

“Old Thornberry, President of the Chase National. He had the infernal gall to refuse a line of credit to young McGurn.

Bankers! You won’t believe it, but people used to beg them to take over their property, tie up their incomes, virtually enslave them. People demanded it. The same way they demanded inexpensive liquor, tobacco and consumer goods, clean women and a chance to win a fortune and our ancestors obliged them. Our ancestors were sneered at in their day, you know. They were called criminals when they distributed goods and services at a price people could afford to pay.”

“Uncle!”

“Hush, boy, I know what you’re going to say. You can’t fool the people forever! When they’d had enough hounding and restriction, they rose in their might.

“The people demanded freedom of choice, Falcaro and the rest rose to lead them in the Syndic and the Mob and they drove the Government into the sea.”

“Uncle Frank—”

“From which it still occasionally ventures to annoy our coastal cities,” F. W. Taylor commented. He warmed to his subject. “You should have seen the old boy blubber. The last of the old-time bankers, and they deserved everything they got. They brought it on themselves. They had what they called laissez-faire, and it worked for awhile until they got
to tinkering with it. They demanded things called protective tariffs, tax remissions, subsidies—regulation, regulation, regulation, always of the other fellow. But there were enough bankers on all sides for everybody to be somebody else’s other fellow. Coercion snowballed and the Government lost public acceptance. They had a thing called the public debt which I can’t begin to explain to you except to say that it was something written on paper and that it raised the cost of everything tremendously. Well, believe me or not, they didn’t just throw away the piece of paper or scratch out the writing on it. They let it ride until ordinary people couldn’t afford the pleasant things in life.”

“Uncle—”

* * * *

A cautious periscope broke the choppy water off Sea Island, Georgia. At the other end of the periscope were Captain Van Dellen of the North American Navy, lean as a hound, and fat little Commander Grinnel.

“You might take her in a little closer, Van,” said Grinnel mildly.

“The exercise won’t do you any lasting damage,” Van Dellen said. Grinnel was very, very, near to a couple of admirals and normally Van Dellen gave him the kid-glove treatment in spite of ranking him. But this washis ship and no cloak and dagger artist from an O.N.I. desk was telling him how to con it.

Grinnel smiled genially at the little joke. “I could call it a disguise,” he said patting his paunch, “but you know me too well.”

“You’ll have no trouble with a sea like this,” Van Dellen said, strictly business. He tried to think of some appropriate phrase to recognize the danger Grinnel was plunging into with no resources except quick wits, a trick ring and a pair of guns. But all that bubbled up to the top of his head was; thank God I’m getting rid of this bastardly
little Sociocrat. He’ll kill me some day if he gets a clean shot and the chance of detection is zero. Thank God I’m a Constitutionist. We don’t go in for things like that—or do we? Nobody ever tells me anything. A hack of a pigboat driver. And this little bastard’s going to be an admiral some day. But that boy of mine’ll be an admiral. He’s brainy, like his mother.

Grinnel smiled and said: “Well, this would be it, wouldn’t it?”

“Eh?” Van Dellen asked. “Oh. I see what you mean.

Chuck!” he called a sailor. “Break out the Commander’s capsules. Pass the word to stand by for ejection.”

The Commander was fitted, puffing, into the capsule. He growled at the storekeeper: “You sure this was just unsealed? It feels sticky already.”

A brash jayee said: “I saw it unsealed myself three minutes ago, Commander. It’ll get stickier if we spend any more time talking. You have”—he glanced at his chronometer—“seventeen minutes now. Let me snap you in.”

The Commander huddled down after a searching glance at the jayee’s face which photographed it forever in his memory. The top snapped down. Some day—some happy day—that squirt would very much regret telling him off. He gave an okay sign to Van Dellen who waved back meagerly and managed a smile. Three crewmen fitted the capsule into its lock.

Foomf!

It was through the hatch and bobbing on the surface. Its color matched the water’s automatically. Grinnel waggled the lever that aimed it inshore and began to turn the propellor crank. He turned fast; the capsule—rudders, crank, flywheel, shaft and all—would dissolve in approximately fifteen minutes. It was his job to be ashore when that happened.

And ashore he’d be practically a free agent with the loosest sort of roving commission, until January 15th. Then his orders became most specific.

III

Charles Orsino squirmed in the chair. “Uncle—” he pleaded.

“Yes,” F. W. Taylor chuckled, “Old Amadeo and his colleagues were called criminals. They were called bootleggers when they got liquor to people without worrying about the public debt or excise taxes. They were called smugglers when they sold cheap butter in the south and cheap margerine in the north. They were called counterfeiters when they sold cheap cigarettes and transportation tickets. They were called high-jackers when they wrested goods from the normal inflation-ridden chain of middlemen and delivered them at a reasonable price to the consumers.

“They were criminals. Bankers were pillars of society.

“Yet these bankers who dominated society, who were considered the voice of eternal truth when they spoke, who thought it was insanity to challenge their beliefs, started somewhere and perhaps they were the best thing for their day and age that could be worked out.…”

* * * *

Father Ambrosius gnawed at a bit of salt herring, wiped his hands, dug through the litter in his chest and found a goose quill and a page of parchment. He scrubbed vigorously with a vinegar-soaked sponge, at the writing on the parchment and was pleased to see that it came off nicely, leaving him a clean surface to scribble his sermon notes on. He cut the quill and slit it while waiting for the parchment to dry, wondering idly what he had erased. (It happened to be the last surviving copy of Tacitus’ Annals, VII. i-v.)

To work then. The sermon was to be preached on Sexagesima Sunday, a prelude to the solemn season of Lent. Father Ambrosius’ mind wandered in search of a text.

Lent…salt herring…penitence…the capital sins…avarice…

usury…delinquent pew rent…fat-headed young Sir Baldwin in his tumbledown castle on the hill…salt herring now and per saeculae saeculorum unless Sir Baldwin paid up his delinquent pew rent.

At the moment, Sir Baldwin came swaggering into the cell. Father Ambrosius rose courteously and said, with some insincerity: “Pax vobiscum.”

“Eh?” asked Sir Baldwin, his silly blue eyes popping as he looked over his shoulder. “Oh, you meant me, padre. It don’t do a bit of good to chatter at me in Latin, you know.

The king’s Norman is what I speak. I mean to say, if it’s good enough for his majesty Richard, it’s good enough for me, what? Now, what can I do for you, padre?”

Father Ambrosius reminded him faintly: “You came to see me, Sir Baldwin.”

“Eh? Oh. So I did. I was huntin’ stag, padre, and I lost him after chasin’ the whole morning, and what I want to know is, who’s the right saint chap to ask for help in a pickle like that? I mean to say, I wanted to show the chaps some good sport and we started this beast and he got clean away.

Don’t misunderstand me, padre, they were good chaps and they didn’t rot me about it, but that kind of talk gets about and doesn’t do one a bit of good, what? So you tell me like a good fellow who’s the right saint chap to put the matter in the best light for me?”

Father Ambrosius repressed an urge to grind his teeth, took thought and said: “St. Hubert, I believe, is interested in the stag hunt.”

“Right-oh, padre! St. Hubert it is. Hubert, Hubert. I shan’t forget it because I’ve a cousin named Hubert. Haven’t seen him for years, poor old chap. He had the fistula—lived on slops and couldn’t sit his horse for a day’s huntin’. Poor old
chap. Well, I’m off—no, there’s another thing I wanted.

Suppose this Sunday you preach a howlin’ strong sermon against usury, what? That chap in the village, the goldsmith fellow, has the infernal gall to tell me I’ve got to give him Fallowfield! Forty acres, and he has the infernal gall to tell me they aren’t mine any more. Be a good chap, padre, and sort of glare at him from the pulpit a few times to show him who you mean, what?”

“Usury is a sin,” Father Ambrosius said cautiously, “but how does Fallowfield enter into it?”

Sir Baldwin twiddled the drooping ends of his limp, blond mustache with a trace of embarrassment. “Fact is, I told the chap when I borrowed the twenty marks that Fallowfield would stand as security. I ask you, padre, is it my fault that my tenants are a pack of lazy, thieving Saxon swine and I couldn’t raise the money?”

The parish priest bristled unnoticeably. He was pure Saxon himself. “I shall do what I can,” he said. “And Sir Baldwin, before you go—”

The young man stopped in the doorway and turned.

“Before you go, may I ask when we’ll see your pew rent, to say nothing of the tithe?”

Sir Baldwin dismissed it with an airish wave of the hand.

“I thought I just told you, padre. I haven’t a farthing to my name and here’s this chap in the village telling me to clear out of Fallowfield that I got from my father and his father before him. So how the devil—excuse me—can I pay rent and tithes and Peters pence and all the other things you priest chaps expect from a man, what?” He held up his gauntleted hand as Father Ambrosius started to speak.

“No, padre, not another word about it. I know you’d love to tell me I won’t go to heaven if I act this way. I don’t doubt you’re learned and all that, but I can still tell you a thing or two, what? The fact is, I will go to Heaven. You see, padre, God’s a gentleman and he wouldn’t bar another gentleman
over a trifle of money trouble that could happen to any gentleman, now would he?”

The fatuous beam was more than Father Ambrosius could bear; his eyes fell.

“Right-oh,” Sir Baldwin chirped. “And that saint chap’s name was St. Hubert. I didn’t forget, see? Not quite the fool some people think I am.” And he was gone, whistling a recheat.

Father Ambrosius sat down again and glared at the parchment. Preach a sermon on usury for that popinjay.

Well, usury was a sin. Christians were supposed to lend to one another in need and not count the cost or the days. But who had ever heard of Sir Baldwin ever lending anything?

Of course, he was lord of the manor and protected you against invasion, but there didn’t seem to be any invasions anymore.…

Wearily, the parish priest dipped his pen and scratched on the parchment: RON. XIII ii, viii, XV i. “Whosoever resisteth the power resisteth the ordinance of God…owe no man any thing…we that are strong ought to bear the infirmities of the weak.…” A triple-plated text, which, reinforced by a brow of thunder from the pulpit should make the village goldsmith think twice before pressing his demand on Sir Baldwin. Usury was a sin.

There was a different knock on the door frame.

The goldsmith, a leather-aproned fellow named John, stood there twisting his cap in his big, burn scarred hands.

“Yes, my son? Come in.” But he scowled at the fellow involuntarily. He should know better than to succumb to the capital sin of avarice. “Well, what is it?”

“Father,” the fellow said, “I’ve come to give you this.” He passed a soft leather purse to the priest. It clinked.

Father Ambrosius emptied it on his desk and stirred the broad silver coins wonderingly with his finger. Five marks and eleven silver pennies. No more salt herring until Lent!

Silver forwarded to his bishop in an amount that would do
credit to the parish! A gilding job for the image of the Blessed Virgin! Perhaps glass panes in one or two of the church windows!

And then he stiffened and swept the money back into the purse. “You got this by sin,” he said flatly. “The sin of avarice worked in your heart and you practiced the sin of usury on your fellow Christians. Don’t give this money to the Church; give it back to your victims.”

“Father,” the fellow said, nearly blubbering, “excuse me but you don’t understand! They come to me and come to me. They say it’s all right with them, that they’re hiring the money the way you’d hire a horse. Doesn’t that make sense? Do you think I wanted to become a moneylender?

No! I was an honest goldsmith and an honest goldsmith can’t help himself. All the money in the village drifts somehow into his hands. One leaves a mark with you for safekeeping and pays you a penny the year to guard it.

Another brings you silver coins to make into a basin, and you get to keep whatever coins are left over. And then others come to you and say ‘Let me have soandso’s mark to use for a year and then I’ll pay it back and with it another mark’. Father, they beg me! They say they’ll be ruined if I don’t lend to them, their old parents will die if they can’t fee the leech, or their dead will roast forever unless they can pay for masses and what’s a man to do?”

“Sin no more,” the priest answered simply. It was no problem.

The fellow was getting angry. “Very well for you to sit there and say so, father. But what do you think paid for the masses you said for the repose of Goodie Howat’s soul?

And how did Tom the Thatcher buy his wagon so he could sell his beer in Glastonbury at a better price? And how did Farmer Major hire the men from Wealing to get in his hay before the great storm could ruin it? And a hundred things more. I tell you, this parish would be a worse place without John Goldsmith and he doesn’t propose to be pointed at any
longer as a black sinner! I didn’t want to fall into usury but I did, and when I did, I found out that those who hoist their noses highest at the moneylender when they pass him in the road are the same ones who beg the hardest when they come to his shop for a loan!”

The priest was stunned by the outburst. John seemed honest, the facts were the facts—can good come out of evil?

And there were stories that His Holiness the Pope himself had certain dealings with the Longobards—benchers, or bankers or whatever they called themselves.…

“I must think on this, my son,” he said. “Perhaps I was over hasty. Perhaps in the days of St. Paul usury was another thing entirely. Perhaps what you practice is not really usury but merely something that resembles it. You may leave this silver with me.”

When John left, Father Ambrosius squeezed his eyes tight shut and pressed the knuckles of both hands to his forehead. Things did change. Under the dispensation of the Old Testament, men had more wives than one. That was sinful now, but surely Abraham, Isaac and Jacob were in heaven? Paul wrote his epistles to little islands of Christians surrounded by seas of pagans. Surely in those days it was necessary for Christians to be bound closely together against the common enemy, whereas in these modern times, the ties could be safely relaxed a trifle? How could sinning have paid for the repose of Goodie Howat’s soul, got a better price for brewer Thatcher’s ale and saved the village hay crop? The Devil was tricky, but not that tricky, surely. A few more such tricks and the parish would resemble the paradise terrestrial!

Father Ambrosius dashed from his study to the altar of the little stone church and began furiously to turn the pages of the huge metal-bound lectern Bible.

“For the love of money is the root of all evil—”

It burst on Father Ambrosius with a great light that the words of Paul were in reference not to John Goldsmith’s
love of money but to Sir Baldwin’s love of money.

He dashed back to his study and his pen began to squeak over the parchment, obliterating the last dim trace of Tacitus’ Annals, VIII i.v. The sermon would be a scorcher, all right, but it wouldn’t scorch John Goldsmith. It would scorch Sir Baldwin for ruthlessly and against the laws of God and man refusing to turn Fallowfield over to the moneylender. There would be growls of approval in the church that Sunday, and many black looks directed against Sir Baldwin for his attempt to bilk the parish’s friend and benefactor, the moneylender.

* * * *

“And that,” F. W. Taylor concluded, chuckling, “is how power passes from one pair of hands to another, and how public acceptance of the change follows on its heels. A strange thing—people always think that each exchange of power is the last that will ever take place.”

He seemed to be finished.

“Uncle,” Orsino said, “somebody tried to kill me.”

Taylor stared at him for a long minute, speechless. “What happened?” he finally asked.

“I went formal to the theater, with five bodyguards. The chief guard, name of Halloran, took a shot at me. One of my boys got in the way. He was killed.”

Taylor’s fingers began to play a tattoo on his annunciator board. Faces leaped into existence on its various screens as he fired orders. “Charles Orsino’s chief bodyguard for tonight—Halloran. Trace him. The works. He tried to kill Orsino.”

He clicked off the board switches and turned grimly to Orsino. “Now you,” he said. “What have you been up to?”

“Just doing my job, uncle,” Orsino said uneasily.

“Still bagman at the 101st?”

“Yes.”

“Fooling with any women?”

“Nothing special, uncle. Nothing intense.”

“Disciplined or downgraded anybody lately?”

“Certainly not. The precinct runs like a watch. I’ll match their morale against any outfit east of the Mississippi. Why are you taking this so heavy?”

“Because you’re the third. The other two—your cousin Thomas McGurn and your uncle Robert Orsino—didn’t have guards to get in the way. One other question.”

“Yes, uncle.”

“My boy, why didn’t you tell me about this when you first came in?”

IV

A family council was called the next day. Orsino, very much a junior, had never been admitted to one before. He knew why the exception was being made, and didn’t like the reason.

Edward Falcaro wagged his formidable white beard at the thirty-odd Syndic chiefs around the table and growled: “I think we’ll dispense with reviewing production and so on. I want to talk about this damn gunplay. Dick, bring us up to date.”

He lit a vile cigar and leaned back.

Richard W. Reiner rose.

“Thomas McGurn,” he said, “killed April 15th by a burst of eight machine gun bullets in his private dining room at the Astor. Elsie Warshofsky, his waitress, must be considered the principal suspect, but—”

Edward Falcaro snapped: “Suspect, hell! She killed him, didn’t she?”

“I was about to say, but the evidence so far is merely cumulative. Mrs. Warshofsky jumped—fell—or was pushed

—from the dining room window. The machine gun was found beside the window.

“There are no known witnesses. Mrs. Warshofsky’s history presents no unusual features. An acquaintance submitted a
statement—based, she frankly admitted, on nothing definite

—that Mrs. Warshofsky sometimes talked in a way that led her to wonder if she might not be a member of the secret terrorist organization known as the D.A.R. In this connection, it should be noted that Mrs. Warshofsky’s maiden name was Adams.

“Robert Orsino, killed April 21st by a thermite bomb concealed in his pillow and fuzed with a pressure-sensitive switch. His valet, Edward Blythe, disappeared from view.

He was picked up April 23rd by a posse on the beach of Montauk Point, but died before he could be questioned.

Examination of his stomach contents showed a lethal quantity of sodium fluoride. It is presumed that the poison was self-administered.”

“Presumed!” the old man snorted, and puffed out a lethal quantity of cigar smoke.

“Blythe’s history,” Reiner went on blandly, “presents no unusual features. It should be noted that a commerce-raider of the so-called United States Government Navy was reported off Montauk Point during the night of April 23rd-24th by local residents.

“Charles Orsino, attacked April 30th by his bodyguard James Halloran in the lobby of the Costello Memorial Theater. Halloran fired one shot which killed another bodyguard and was then himself killed. Halloran’s history presents no unusual features except that he had a considerable interest in—uh—history. He collected and presumably read obsolete books dealing with pre-Syndic Pre-Mob America. Investigators found by his bedside the first volume of a work published in 1942 called The Growth of The American Republic by Morison and Commager. It was opened to Chapter Ten, The War of Independence!”

Reiner took his seat.

F. W. Taylor said dryly: “Dick, did you forget to mention that Warshofsky, Blythe and Halloran are known officers of the U. S. Navy?”

Reiner said: “You are being facetious. Are you implying that I have omitted pertinent facts?”

“I’m implying that you artistically stacked the deck. With a rumor, a dubious commerce-raider report and a note on a man’s hobby, you want us to sweep the bastards from the sea, don’t you—just the way you always have?”

“I am not ashamed of my expressed attitude on the question of the so-called United States Government and will defend it at any proper time and place.”

“Shut the hell up, you two,” Edward Falcaro growled. “I’m trying to think.” He thought for perhaps half a minute and then looked up, baffled. “Has anybody got any ideas?”

Charles Orsino cleared his throat, amazed at his own temerity. The old man’s eyebrows shot up, but he grudgingly said: “I guess you can say something, since they thought you were important enough to shoot.”

Orsino said: “Maybe it’s some outfit over in Europe or Asia?”

Edward Falcaro asked: “Anybody know anything about Europe or Asia? Jimmy, you flew over once, didn’t you? To see about Anatolian poppies when the Mob had trouble with Mex labor?”

Jimmy Falcaro said creakily: “Yeah. It was a waste of time.

They have these little dirt farmers scratching out just enough food for the family and maybe raising a quarter-acre of poppy. That’s all there is from the China Sea to the Mediterranean. In England—Frank, you tell ‘em. You explained it to me once.”

Taylor rose. “The forest’s come back to England. When finance there lost its morale and couldn’t hack its way out of the paradoxes that was the end. When that happens you’ve got to have a large, virile criminal class ready to take over and do the work of distribution and production.

Maybe some of you know how the English were. The poor beggars had civilized all the illegality out of the stock. They couldn’t do anything that wasn’t respectable. From sketchy
reports, I gather that England is now forest and a few hundred starving people. One fellow says the men still wear derbies and stagger to their offices in the city.

“France is peasants, drunk three-quarters of the time.

“Russia is peasants, drunk all the time.

“Germany—well, there the criminal class was too big and too virile. The place is a cemetery.”

He shrugged: “Say it, somebody. The Mob’s gunning for us.”

Reiner jumped to his feet. “I will never support such a hypothesis!” he shrilled. “It is mischievous to imply that a century of peace has been ended, that our three-thousand-mile border with our friend to the West—”

Taylor intoned satirically: “Un-blemished, my friends, by a singlefor-ti-fi-ca-tion—”

Edward Falcaro yelled: “Stop your damn foolishness, Frank Taylor! This is no laughing matter.”

Taylor snapped: “Have you been in Mob Territory lately?”

“I have,” the old man said. He scowled.

“How’d you like it?”

Edward Falcaro shrugged irritably. “They have their ways, we have ours. The Regan line is running thin, but we’re not going to forget that Jimmy Regan stood shoulder to shoulder with Amadeo Falcaro in the old days. There’s such a thing as loyalty.”

F. W. Taylor said: “There’s such a thing as blindness.”

He had gone too far. Edward Falcaro rose from his chair and leaned forward, bracing himself on the table. He said flatly: “This is a statement, gentlemen. I won’t pretend I’m happy about the way things are in Mob Territory. I won’t pretend I think old man Regan is a balanced, dependable person. I won’t pretend I think the Mob clients are enjoying anywhere near the service that Syndic clients enjoy. I’m perfectly aware that on our visits of state to Mob Territory we see pretty much what our hosts want us to see. But I cannot believe that any group which is rooted on the
principles of freedom and service can have gone very wrong.

“Maybe I’m mistaken, gentlemen. But I cannot believe that a descendant of Jimmy Regan would order a descendant of Amadeo Falcaro murdered. We will consider every other possibility first. Frank, is that clear?”

“Yes,” Taylor said.

“All right,” Edward Falcaro grunted. “Now let’s go about this thing systematically. Dick, you go right down the line with the charge that the Government’s responsible for these atrocities. I hate to think that myself. If they are, we’re going to have to spend a lot of time and trouble hunting them down and doing something about it. As long as they stick to a little commerce-raiding and a few coastal attacks, I can’t say I’m really unhappy about them. They don’t do much harm, and they keep us on our toes and—
maybe this one is most important—they keep our client’s memories of the bad old days that we delivered them from alive. That’s a great deal to surrender for the doubtful pleasures of a long, expensive campaign. If assassination’s in the picture I suppose we’ll have to knock them off—but we’ve got to be sure.”

“May I speak?” Reiner asked icily.

The old man nodded and re-lit his cigar.

“I have been called—behind my back, naturally—a fanatic,” Reiner said. He pointedly did not look anywhere near F. W. Taylor as he spoke the word. “Perhaps this is correct and perhaps fanaticism is what’s needed at a time like this. Let me point out what the so-called Government stands for: brutal ‘taxation,’ extirpation of gambling, denial of life’s simple pleasures to the poor and severe limitation of them to all but the wealthy, sexual prudery viciously enforced by penal laws of appalling barbarity, endless regulation and coercion governing every waking minute of the day. That was its record during the days of its power and that would be its record if it returned to power. I fail to
see how this menace to our liberty can be condoned by certain marginal benefits which are claimed to accrue from its continued existence.” He faltered for a moment as his face twisted with an unpleasant memory. In a lower, unhappier voice, he went on: “I—I was alarmed the other day by something I overheard. Two small children were laying bets at the Kiddy Counter of the horse room I frequent, and I stopped on my way to the hundred-dollar window for a moment to hear their childish prattle. They were doping the forms for the sixth at Hialeah, I believe, when one of them digressed to say: ‘My Mommy doesn’t play the horses. She thinks all the horse rooms should be closed.’

“It wrung my heart, gentlemen, to hear that. I wanted to take that little boy aside and tell him: ‘Son, your Mommy doesn’t have to play the horses. Nobody has to play the horses unless he wants to. But as long as one single person wants to lay a bet on a horse and another person is willing to take it, nobody has the right to say the horse rooms should be closed.’ Naturally I did not take the little boy aside and tell him that. It would have been an impractical approach to the problem. Thepractical approach is the one I have always advocated and still do. Strike at the heart of the infection! Destroy the remnants of Government and cauterize the wound so that it will never re-infect again.

Nor is my language too strong. When I realize that the mind of an innocent child has been corrupted so that he will prattle that the liberties of his brothers must be infringed on, that their harmless pleasures must be curtailed, my blood runs cold and I call it what it is: treason.”

Orsino had listened raptly to the words and joined in a burst of spontaneous applause that swept around the table.

He had never had a brush with Government himself and he hardly believed in the existence of the shadowy, terrorist

D.A.R., but Reiner had made it sound so near and menacing!

But Uncle Frank was on his feet. “We seem to have strayed from the point,” he said dryly. “For anybody who needs his memory refreshed, I’ll state that the point is two assassinations and one near miss. I fail to see the connection, if any with Dick Reiner’s paranoid delusions of persecution. I especially fail to see the relevance of the word ‘treason.’ Treason to what—us? The Syndic is not a government. It must not become enmeshed in the symbols and folklore of a government or it will be first chained and then strangled by them. The Syndic is an organization of high morale and easy-going, hedonistic personality. The fact that it succeeded the Government occurred because the Government had become an organization of low morale and inflexible, puritanic, sado-masochistic personality. I have no illusions about the Syndic lasting forever, and I hope nobody else here has. Naturally I want it to last our lifetime, my children’s lifetime, and as long after that as I can visualize my descendants, but don’t think I have any burning affection for my unborn great-great grandchildren.

Now, if there is anybody here who doesn’t want it to last that long, I suggest to him that the quickest way to demoralize the Syndic is to adopt Dick Reiner’s proposal of a holy war for a starter. From there we can proceed to an internal heresy hunt, a census, excise taxes, income taxes and wars of aggression. Now, what about getting back to the assassinations?”

Orsino shook his head, thoroughly confused by now. But the confusion vanished as a girl entered the room, whispered something in the ear of Edward Falcaro and sat down calmly by his side. He wasn’t the only one who noticed her. Most of the faces there registered surprise and some indignation. The Syndic had a very strong tradition of masculinity.

Edward Falcaro ignored the surprise and indignation. He said placidly: “That was very interesting, Frank, what I understood of it. But it’s always interesting when I go ahead and do something because it’s the smart thing to do, and then listen to you explain my reasons—including fifty or sixty that I’m more than positive never crossed my mind.”

There was a laugh around the table that Charles Orsino thought was unfair. He knew, Edward Falcaro knew, and everybody knew that Taylor credited Falcaro with sound intuitive judgment rather than analytic power. He supposed the old man—intuitively—had decided a laugh was needed to clear the air of the quarrel and irrelevance.

Falcaro went on: “The way things stand now, gentlemen, we don’t know very much, do we?” He bit a fresh cigar and lighted it meditatively. From a cloud of rank smoke he said:

“So the thing to do is find out more, isn’t it?” In spite of the beard and the cigar, there was something of a sly, teasing child about him. “So what do you say to slipping one of our own people into the Government to find out whether they’re dealing in assassination or not?”

Charles Orsino alone was naive enough to speak; the rest knew that the old man had something up his sleeve.

Charles said: “You can’t do it, sir! They have lie-detectors and drugs and all sorts of things—” His voice died down miserably under Falcaro’s too-benign smile and the looks of irritation verging on disgust from the rest. The enigmatic girl scowled. Goddam them all! Charles thought, sinking into his chair and wishing he could sink into the earth.

“The young man,” Falcaro said blandly, “speaks the truth

—no less true for being somewhat familiar to us all. But what if we have a way to get around the drugs and lie-detectors, gentlemen? Which of you bold fellows would march into the jaws of death by joining the Government, spying on them and trying to report back?”

Charles stood up, prudence and timidity washed away by a burning need to make up for his embarrassment with a grandstand play. “I’ll go, sir,” he said very calmly. And if I get killed that’ll show ‘em; then they’ll besorry.

“Good boy,” Edward Falcaro said briskly, with a well-that’s that air. “The young lady here will take care of you.”

Charles steadily walked down the long room to the head of the table, thinking that he must be cutting a rather fine figure. Uncle Frank ruined his exit by catching his sleeve and halting him as he passed his seat. “Good luck, Charles,” Uncle Frank whispered. “And for Heaven’s sake, keep a better guard up. Can’t you see the old devil planned it this way from the beginning?”

“Good-bye, Uncle Frank,” Charles said, suddenly feeling quite sick as he walked on. The young lady rose and opened the door for him. She was graceful as a cat, and a conviction overcame Charles Orsino that he was the canary.

V

Max Wyman shoved his way through such a roar of voices and such a crush of bodies as he had never known before.

Scratch Sheet Square was bright as day—brighter. Atomic lamps, mounted on hundred-story buildings hosed and squirted the happy mob with blue-white glare. The Scratch Sheet’s moving sign was saying in fiery letters seventy-five feet tall: “11:58 PM EST…December 31st…Cops say two million jam NYC streets to greet New Year…11:59 PM

EST…December 31st…Falcaro jokes on TV ‘Never thought we’d make it’…12:00 midnight January 1st…Happy New Year…”

The roar of voices had become insane. Max Wyman held his head, hating it, hating them all, trying to shut them out.

Half a dozen young men against whom he was jammed were tearing the clothes off a girl. They were laughing and she was too, making only a pretense of defending herself. It was one of New York’s mild winter nights. Wyman looked at
the white skin not knowing that his eyes gloated. He yelled curses at her, and the young men. But nobody heard his whiskey-hoarsened young voice.

Somebody thrust a bottle at him and made mouths, trying to yell: “Happy New Year!” He grabbed feverishly at the bottle and held it to his mouth, letting the liquor gurgle once, twice, three times. Then the bottle was snatched away, not by the man who had passed it to him. A hilarious fat woman plastered herself against Wyman and kissed him clingingly on the mouth, to his horror and disgust. She was torn away from him by a laughing, white-haired man and turned willingly to kissing him instead.

Two strapping girls jockeyed Wyman between them and began to tear his clothes off, laughing at their switcheroo on the year’s big gag. He clawed out at them hysterically and they stopped, the laughter dying on their lips as they saw his look of terrified rage. A sudden current in the crowd parted Wyman from them; another bottle bobbed on the sea of humanity. He clutched at it and this time did not drink. He stuffed it hurriedly under the waistband of his shorts and kept a hand on it as the eddy of humanity bore him on to the fringes of the roaring mob.

“Syndic leaders hail New Year…Taylor praises Century of Freedom…12:05 AM EST January 1st…”

Wyman was mashed up against a girl who first smiled at his young face invitingly…and then looked again. “Get away from me!” she shrieked, pounding on his chest with her small fists. You could hear individual voices now, but the crowd was still dense. She kept screaming at him and hitting him until suddenly Scratch Sheet Square Upramp loomed and the crowd fizzed onto it like uncorked champagne, Wyman and the screaming girl carried along the moving plates underfoot. The crowd boiled onto the northbound strip, relieving the crush; the girl vanished, whimpering, into the mob.

Wyman, rubbing his ear mechanically, shuffled with downcast eyes to the Eastbound ramp and collapsed onto a bench gliding by at five miles per hour. He looked stupidly at the ten-mile and fifteen-mile strips, but did not dare step onto them. He had been drinking steadily for a month. He would fall and the bottle would break.

He lurched off the five-mile strip at Riverside Downramp.

Nobody got off with him. Riverside was a tangle of freightways over, under and on the surface. He worked there.

Wyman picked his way past throbbing conveyors roofed against pilferage, under gurgling fuel and water and waste pipes, around vast metal warehouses and storage tanks. It was not dark or idle in Riverside. Twenty-four hours was little enough time to bring Manhattan its daily needs and carry off its daily waste and manufactures. Under daylight atomics the transport engineers in their glass perches read the dials and turned the switches. Breakdown crews scurried out from emergency stations as bells clanged to replace a sagging plate, remag a failing ehrenhafter, unplug a jam of nylon bales at a too-sharp corner.

He found Breakdown Station 26, hitched his jacket over the bottle and swayed in, drunk enough to think he could pretend he was sober. “Hi,” he said hoarsely to the shift foreman. “Got jammed up in the celebration.”

“We heard it clear over here,” the foreman said, looking at him closely. “Are you all right, Max?”

The question enraged him. “’Smatter?” he yelled. “Had a couple, sure. Think ‘m drunk? Tha’ wha’ ya think?”

“Gee,” the foreman said wearily. “Look, Max, I can’t send you out tonight. You might get killed. I’m trying to be reasonable and I wish you’d do as much for me. What’s biting you, boy? Nobody has anything against a few drinks and a few laughs. I went on a bender last month myself.

But you get so Goddammed mean I can’t stand you and neither can anybody else.”

Wyman spewed obscenity at him and tried to swing on him. He was surprised and filled with self-pity when somebody caught his arm and somebody else caught his other arm. It was Dooley and Weintraub, his shift-mates, looking unhappy and concerned.

“Lousy rats!” Wyman choked out. “Leas’ a man’s buddies c’d do is back’m up.…” He began to cry, hating them, and then fell asleep on his feet. Dooley and Weintraub eased him down onto the floor.

The foreman mopped his head and appealed to Dooley:

“He always like this?” He had been transferred to Station 26 only two weeks before.

Dooley shrugged. “You might say so. He showed up about three months ago. Said he used to be a breakdown man in Buffalo, on the yards. He knew the work all right. But I never saw such a mean kid. Never a good word for anybody. Never any fun. Booze, booze, booze. This time he really let go.”

Weintraub said unexpectedly: “I think he’s what they used to call an alcoholic.”

“What the hell’s that?” the foreman demanded.

“I read about it. It’s something they used to have before the Syndic. I read about it. Things were a lot different then.

People picking on you all the time, everybody mad all the time. The girls were scared to give it away and the boys were scared to take it—but they did anyway and it was kind of like fighting with yourself inside yourself. The fighting wore some people out so much they just couldn’t take it any more. Instead of going on benders for a change of pace like sensible people, they boozed all the time—and they had a fight inside themselves about that so they boozed harder.”

He looked defensive at their skeptical faces. “I read it,” he insisted.

“Well,” the foreman said inconclusively, “I heard things used to be pretty bad. Did these alcoholers get over it?”

“I don’t know,” Weintraub admitted. “I didn’t read that far.”

“Hm. I think I’d better can him.” The foreman was studying their faces covertly, hoping to read a reaction. He did. Both the men looked relieved. “Yeh. I think I’d better can him. He can go to the Syndic for relief if he has to. He doesn’t do us much good here. Put some soup on and get it down him when he wakes up.” The foreman, an average kindly man, hoped the soup would help.

But at about three-thirty, after two trouble calls in succession, they noticed that Wyman had left leaving no word.

* * * *

The fat little man struggled out of the New Year’s eve throng; he had been caught by accident. Commander Grinnel did not go in for celebrations. When he realized that January fifteenth was now fifteen days away, he doubted that he would ever celebrate again. It was a two-man job he had to do on the fifteenth, and so far he had not found the other man.

He rode the slidewalk to Columbus Square. He had been supplied with a minimum list of contacts. One had moved, and in the crazily undisciplined Syndic Territory it was impossible to trace anybody. Another had died—of too much morphine. Another had beaten her husband almost to death with a chair leg and was in custody awaiting trial.

The Commander wondered briefly and querulously: why do we always have such unstable people here? Or does that louse Emory deliberately saddle me with them when I’m on a mission? Wouldn’t put it past him.

The final contact on the list was a woman. She’d be worthless for the business of January fifteenth; that called for some physical strength, some technical knowledge, and a residual usefulness to the Government. Professor Speiser had done some good work here on industrial sabotage, but
taken away from the scene of possible operations, she’d just be a millstone. He had his record to think of.

Sabotage—

If a giggling threesome hadn’t been looking his way from a bench across the slidewalk, he would have ground his teeth. In recent weeks, he had done what he estimated as an easy three million dollars worth of damage to Mob Territory industry. And the stupid fools hadn’t noticed it!

Repair crews had rebuilt the fallen walls, mechanics had tut-tutted over the wrecked engines and replaced them, troubleshooters had troubleshot the scores of severed communications lines and fuel mains.

He had hung around.

“Sam, you see this? Melted through, like with a little thermite bomb. How in the hell did a thing like that happen?”

“I don’t know. I wasn’t here. Let’s get it fixed kid.”

“Okay…you think we ought to report this to somebody?”

“If you want to. I’ll mention it to Larry. But I don’t see what he can do about it. Must’ve been some kids. You gotta put it down as fair wear and tear. But boys will be boys.”

Remembering, he did grind his teeth. But they were at Columbus Square.

* * * *

Professor Speiser lived in one of the old plastic brick faculty houses. Her horsy face, under a curling net, looked out of the annunciator plate. “Yes? What is it?”

“Professor Speiser, I believe you know my daughter, Miss Freeman. She asked me to look you up while I was in New York. Have I come much too late?”

“Oh, dear. Why, no. I suppose not. Come in, Mr.—Mr.

Freeman.”

In her parlor, she faced him apprehensively. When she spoke she rolled out her sentences like the lecturer she was. “Mr. Freeman—as I suppose you’d prefer me to call
you—you asked a moment ago whether you’d come too late.

I realize that the question was window-dressing, but my answer is quite serious. You have come too late. I have decided to dissociate myself from—let us say, from your daughter, Miss Freeman.”

The Commander asked only: “Is that irrevocable?”

“Quite. It wouldn’t be fair of me to ask you to leave without an explanation. I am perfectly willing to give one. I realize now that my friendship with Miss Freeman and the work I did for her stemmed from, let us say a certain vacancy in my life.”

He looked at a picture on her desk of a bald, pleasant-faced fellow with a pipe.

She followed his eyes and said with a sort of shy pride:

“That is Dr. Mordecai, of the University’s Faculty of Dentistry. Like myself, a long-time celibate. We plan to marry.”

The Commander said: “Do you feel that Dr. Mordecai might like to meet my daughter?”

“No. I do not. We expect to have very little time for outside activities, between our professional careers and our personal lives. Please don’t misunderstand, Mr. Freeman. I am still your daughter’s friend. I always shall be. But somehow I no longer find in myself an urgency to express the friendship. It seems like a beautiful dream—and a quite futile one. I have come to realize that one can live a full life without Miss Freeman. Now, it’s getting quite late—”

He smiled ruefully and rose. “May I wish you every happiness, Professor Speiser?” he said, extending his hand.

She beamed with relief. “I was so afraid you’d—”

Her face went limp and she stood swaying drunkenly as the needle in the ring popped her skin.

The Commander, his face as dead as hers, disconnected his hand and sheathed the needle carefully again. He drew one of his guns, shot her through the heart and walked out of the apartment.

Old fool! She should have known better.

* * * *

Max Wyman stumbled through the tangle of Riveredge, his head a pot of molten lead and his legs twitching under him as he fled from his shame.

Dimly, as if with new eyes, he saw that he was not alone.

Riveredge was technically uninhabited. Then what voices called guardedly to him from the shadows: “Buddy—buddy

—wait up a minute, buddy—did you score? Did you score?”

He lurched on and the voices became bolder. The snaking conveyors and ramps sliced out sectors of space. Storage tanks merged with inflow mains to form sheltered spots where they met. No spot was without its whining, appealing voice. He stood at last, quivering, leaning against a gigantic I-beam that supported a heavy-casting freightway. A scrap sheet of corrugated iron rested against the bay of the I-beam, and the sheet quivered and fell outward. An old man’s voice said: “You’re beat, son. Come on in.”

He staggered a step forward and collapsed on a pallet of rags as somebody carefully leaned the sheet back into place again.

VI

Max Wyman woke raving with the chuck horrors. There was somebody there to hand him candy bars, sweet lemonade, lump sugar. There was somebody to shove him easily back into the pallet of rags when he tried to stumble forth in a hunt for booze. On the second day he realized that it was an old man whose face looked gray and paralyzed. His name was T. G. Pendelton, he said.

After a week, he let Max Wyman take little walks about their part of Riverside—but not by night. “We’ve got some savage people here,” he said. “They’d murder you for a pint. The women are worse. If one calls to you, don’t go.

You’ll wind up dumped through a manhole into the Hudson.

Poor folk.”

“You’re sorry for them?” Wyman asked, startled. It was a new idea to him. Since Buffalo, he had never been sorry for anybody. Something awful had happened there, some terrible betrayal…he passed his bony hand across his forehead. He didn’t want to think about it.

“Would I live here if I weren’t?” T. G. asked him.

“Sometimes I can help them. There’s nobody else to help them. They’re old and sick and they don’t fit anywhere.

That’s why they’re savage. You’re young—the only young man I’ve ever seen in Riveredge. There’s so much outside for the young. But when you get old it sometimes throws you.”

“The Goddammed Syndic,” Wyman snarled, full of hate.

T. G. shrugged. “Maybe it’s too easy for sick old people to get booze. They lose somebody they spent a life with and it throws them. People harden into a pattern. They always had fun, they think they always will. Then half of the pattern’s gone and they can’t stand it, some of them. You got it early. What was the ringing bell?”

Wyman collapsed into the bay of the I-beam as if he’d been kicked in the stomach. A wave of intolerable memory swept over him. A ringing bell, a wobbling pendulum, a flashing light, the fair face of his betrayer, the hateful one of Hogan, stirred together in a hell brew. “Nothing,” he said hoarsely, thinking that he’d give his life for enough booze to black him out. “Nothing.”

“You kept talking about it,” T. G. said. “Was it real?”

“It couldn’t have been,” Wyman muttered. “There aren’t such things. No. There was her and that Syndic and that louse Hogan. I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Suit yourself.”

He did talk about it later, curiously clouded though it was.

The years in Buffalo. The violent love affair with Inge. The catastrophic scene when he found her with Regan, king-pin
mobster. The way he felt turned inside-out, the lifetime of faith in the Syndic behind him and the lifetime of a faith in Inge ahead of him, both wrecked, the booze, the flight from Buffalo to Erie, to Pittsburgh, to Tampa, to New York. And somehow, insistently, the ringing bell, the wobbling pendulum and the flashing light that kept intruding between episodes of reality.

T. G. listened patiently, fed him, hid him when infrequent patrols went by. T. G. never told him his own story, but a bloated woman who lived with a yellow-toothed man in an abandoned storage tank did one day, her voice echoing from the curving, windowless walls of corrugated plastic.

She said T. G. had been an alky chemist, reasonably prosperous, reasonably happy, reasonably married. His wife was the faithful kind and he was not. With unbelievable slyness she had dulled the pain for years with booze and he had never suspected. They say she had killed herself after one frightful week-long debauche in Riveredge. T. G. came down to Riveredge for the body and returned after giving it burial and drawing his savings from the bank. He had never left Riveredge since.

“Worsh’p the grun’ that man walks on,” the bloated woman mumbled. “Nev’ gets mad, nev’ calls you hard names. Give y’a bottle if y’ need it. Talk to y’ if y’ blue.

Worsh’p that man.”

Max Wyman walked from the storage tank, sickened. T.

G.’s charity covered that creature and him.

It was the day he told T. G.: “I’m getting out of here.”

The gray, paralyzed-looking face almost smiled. “See a man first?”

“Friend of yours?”

“Somebody who heard about you. Maybe he can do something for you. He feels the way you do about the Syndic.”

Wyman clenched his teeth. The pain still came at the thought. Syndic, Hogan, Inge and betrayal. God, to be able
to hit back at them!

The red ride ebbed. Suddenly he stared at T. G. and demanded: “Why? Why should you put me in touch? What is this?”

T. G. shrugged. “I don’t worry about the Syndic. I worry about people. I’ve been worrying about you. You’re a little insane, Max, like all of us here.”

“God damn you!”

“He has.…”

Max Wyman paused a long time and said: “Go on, will you?” He realized that anybody else would have apologized.

But he couldn’t and he knew that T. G. knew he couldn’t.

The old man said: “A little insane. Bottled-up hatred. It’s better out of you than in. It’s better to sock the man you hate and stand a chance of having him sock you back than it is just to hate him and let the hate gnaw you like a grave-worm.”

“What’ve you got against the Syndic?”

“Nothing, Max. Nothing against it and nothing for it. What I’m for is people. The Syndic is people. You’re people. Slug

‘em if you want and they’ll have a chance to slug you back.

Maybe you’ll pull down the Syndic like Samson in the temple; more likely it’ll crush you. But you’ll be doing something about it. That’s the great thing. That’s the thing people have to learn—or they wind up in Riveredge.”

“You’re crazy.”

“I told you I was, or I wouldn’t be here.”

The man came at sunset. He was short and pudgy, with a halo of wispy hair and the coldest, grimmest eyes that Wyman had ever seen. He shook hands with Wyman, and the young man noted simultaneously a sharp pain in his finger and that the stranger wore an elaborate gold ring.

Then the world got hazy and confused. He had a sense that he was being asked questions, that he was answering them, that it went on for hours and hours.

When things quite suddenly came into focus again, the pudgy man was saying: “I can introduce myself now.

Commander Grinnel, of the North American Navy. My assignment is recruiting. The preliminary examination has satisfied me that you are no plant and would be a desirable citizen of the N. A. Government. I invite you to join us.”

“What would I do?” Wyman asked steadily.

“That depends on your aptitudes. What do you think you would like to do?”

Wyman said: “Kill me some Syndics.”

The commander stared at him with those cold eyes. He said at last: “It can probably be arranged. Come with me.”

* * * *

They went by train to Cape Cod. At midnight on January 15th, the commander and Wyman left their hotel room and strolled about the streets. The commander taped small packets to the four legs of the microwave relay tower that connected Cape Cod with the Continental Press common carrier circuits and taped other packets to the police station’s motor pool gate.

At 1:00 A.M., the tower exploded and the motor pool gate fused into an impassible puddle of blue-hot molten metal.

Simultaneously, fifty men in turtle-neck sweaters and caps appeared from nowhere on Center Street. Half of them barricaded the street, firing on citizens and cops who came too close. The others systematically looted every store between the barricade and the beach.

Blinking a flashlight in code, the commander approached the deadline unmolested and was let through with Wyman at his heels. The goods, the raiders, the commander and Wyman were aboard a submarine by 2:35 and under way ten minutes later.

After Commander Grinnel had exchanged congratulations with the sub commander, he presented Wyman.

“A recruit. Normally I wouldn’t have bothered, but he had a rather special motivation. He could be very useful.”

The sub commander studied Wyman impersonally. “If he’s not a plant.”

“I’ve used my ring. If you want to get it over with, we can test him and swear him in now.”

They strapped him into a device that recorded pulse, perspiration, respiration, muscle-tension and brainwaves. A sweatered specialist came and mildly asked Wyman matter-of-fact questions about his surroundings while he calibrated the polygraph.

Then came the pay-off. Wyman did not fail to note that the sub commander loosened his gun in his holster when the questioning began.

“Name, age and origin?”

“Max Wyman. Twenty-two. Buffalo Syndic Territory.”

“Do you like the Syndic?”

“I hate them.”

“What are your feelings toward the North American Government?”

“If it’s against the Syndic, I’m for it.”

“Would you rob for the North American Government?”

“I would.”

“Would you kill for it?”

“I would.”

“Have you any reservations yet unstated in your answers?”

“No.”

It went on for an hour. The questions were re-phrased continuously; after each of Wyman’s firm answers, the sweatered technician gave a satisfied little nod. At last it ended and he was unstrapped from the device.

Max was tired.

The sub commander seemed a little awed as he got a small book and read from it: “Do you, Max Wyman, solemnly renounce all allegiances previously held by you
and pledge your allegiance to the North American Government?”

“I do,” the young man said fiercely.

In a remote corner of his mind, for the first time in months, the bell ceased to ring, the pendulum to beat and the light to flash.

Charles Orsino knew again who he was and what was his mission.

VII

It had begun when the girl led him through the conference room door. Naturally one had misgivings; naturally one didn’t speak up. But the vault-like door far downstairs was terrifying when it yawned before you and even more so when it closed behind you.

“What is this place?” he demanded at last. “Who are you?”

She said: “Psychology lab.”

It produced on him the same effect that “alchemy section”

or “Division of astrology” would have on a well-informed young man in 1950. He repeated flatly: “Psychology lab. If you don’t want to tell me, very well. I volunteered without strings.” Which should remind her that he was a sort of hero and should be treated with a certain amount of dignity and that she could save her corny jokes.

“I meant it,” she said, fiddling busily with the locks of yet another vault-like door. “I’m a psychologist. I’m also by the way, Lee Falcaro—since you asked.”

“The old man—Edward Falcaro’s line?” he asked.

“Simon pure. He’s my father’s brother. Father’s down in Miami, handling the tracks and gaming in general.”

The second big door opened on a brain-gray room whose air had a curiously dead feel to it. “Sit down,” she said, indicating a very unorthodox chair. He did, and found that the chair was the most comfortable piece of furniture he had ever known. Its contact with his body was so complete
that it pressed nowhere, it poked nowhere. The girl studied dials in its back nevertheless and muttered something about adjusting it. He protested.

“Nonsense,” she said decisively. She sat down herself in an ordinary seat. Charles shifted uneasily in his chair to find that it moved with him. Still no pressure, still no poking.

“You’re wondering,” she began, “about the word

‘psychology’. It has a bad history and people have given it up as a bad job. It’s true that there isn’t pressure nowadays to study the human mind. People get along. In general what they want they get, without crippling effort. In your uncle Frank Taylor’s language, the Syndic is an appropriately-structured organization of high morale and wide public acceptance. In my language the Syndic is a father-image which does a good job of fathering. In good times, people aren’t introspective.

“There is, literally, no reason why my line of the family should have kept up a tradition of experimental psychology.

Way, way back, old Amadeo Falcaro often consulted Professor Oscar Sternweiss of the Columbia University psychology faculty—he wasn’t as much of a dashing improvisor as the history books make him out to be.

Eventually one of his daughters married one of Sternweiss’

sons and inherited the Sternweiss notebooks and library and apparatus. It became an irrational custom to keep it alive. When each academic school of psychology managed to prove that every other school of psychology was dead wrong and psychology collapsed as a science, the family tradition was unaffected; it stood outside the wrangling.

“Now, you’re wondering what this has to do with trying to slip you into the Government.”

“I am,” Charles said fervently. If she’d been a doll outside the Syndic, he would minutes ago have protested that all this was foolish and walked out. Since she was not only in the Syndic, but in the Falcaro line, he had no choice except
to hear her babble and then walk out. It was all rot, psychology.

Id,
oversoul,
mind-vectors,
counseling,
psychosomatics—rot from sick-minded old men. Everybody knew—

“The Government, we know, uses deinhibiting drugs as a first screening of its recruits. As an infallible second screening, they use a physiological lie-detector based on the fact that telling a lie causes tensions in the liar’s body.

We shall get around this by slipping you in as a young man who hates the Syndic for some valid reason—”

“Confound it, you were just telling me that they can’t be fooled!”

“We won’t fool them. You’ll be a young man who hates the Syndic. We’ll tear down your present personality a gray cell at a time. We’ll pump you full of Seconal every day for a quarter of a year.… We’ll obliterate your personality under a new one. We’ll bury Charles Orsino under a mountain of suggestions, compulsions and obsessions shoveled at you sixteen hours a day while you’re too groggy to resist.

Naturally the supplanting personality will be neurotic, but that works in with the mission.”

He struggled with a metaphysical concept, for the first time in his life. “But—but—how will I know I’m me?”

“We think we can put a trigger on it. When you take the Government oath of allegiance, you should bounce back.”

He did not fail to note a little twin groove between her brows that appeared when she said think and should. He knew that in a sense he was nearer death now than when Halloran’s bullet had been intercepted.

“Are you staying with it?” she asked simply.

Various factors entered into it. A life for the Syndic, as in the children’s history books. That one didn’t loom very large. But multiply it by it sounds like more fun than hot-rod polo, and that by this is going to raise my stock sky-high with the family and you had something. Somehow,
under Lee Falcaro’s interested gaze, he neglected to divide it by if it works.

“I’m staying with it,” he said.

She grinned. “It won’t be too hard,” she said. “In the old days there would have been voting record, social security numbers, military service, addresses they could check on—
hundreds of things. Now about all we have to fit you with is a name and a subjective life.”

It began that spring day and went on into late fall.

The ringing bell.

The flashing light.

The wobbling pendulum.

You are Max Wyman of Buffalo Syndic Territory. You are Max Wyman of Buffalo Syndic Territory. You are Max Wyman of Buffalo Syndic.…

* * * *

Mom fried pork sausages in the morning, you loved the smell of pumpernickel from the bakery in Vesey Street.

Mr. Watsisname the English teacher with the mustache wanted you to go to college—

Nay, ye can not, though ye had Argus eyes,

In abbeyes they haue so many suttyll spyes; For ones in the yere they have secret vvsytacyons, And yf ony prynce reforme.…

—but the stockyard job was closer, they needed breakdown men—

You are Max Wyman of Buffalo Syndic Territory. You are—

The ringing bell.

The flashing light.

The wobbling pendulum.

And the pork sausages and the teacher with the mustache and poems you loved and
page 24, paragraph 3, maximum speed on a live-cattle walkway is three miles per hour: older walkways hold this speed with reduction gears coupled to a standard 18-inch
ehrenhafter unit. Standard practice in new construction calls for holding speed by direct drive from a specially-wound ehrenhafter. This places a special obligation in breakdown maintenance men, who must distinguish between the two types, carry two sets of wiring diagrams and a certain number of mutually-uninterchangeable parts, though good design principles hold these to a minimum.

The main difference in the winding of a standard 18-incher and a lowspeed ehrenhafter rotor—

Of course things are better now, Max Wyman, you owe a great debt to Jim Hogan, Father of the Buffalo Syndic, who fought for your freedom in the great old days, and to his descendants who are tirelessly working for your freedom and happiness.

And bow-happiness is a girl named Inge Klohbel now that you’re almost a man.

You are Max Wyman of Buffalo Syndic Territory. You are Max Wyman of Buffalo Syndic Territory.

And Inge Klohbel is why you put away the crazy dream of scholarship, for her lips and hair and eyes and legs mean more to you than anything, more than

Later phonologic changes include palatal mutation; i.e., before cht and hs the diphthongs eo, io, which resulted from breaking, becameie (i, y) as in cneoht, chieht, and seox (x equalling hs), siex, six, syx.…

the crazy dream of scholarship, what kind of a way is that to repay the Mob and

The ringing bell.

The flashing light.

The wobbling pendulum.

repay the Syndic and young Mike Hogan all over the neighborhood suddenly and Inge says he did stop and say hello but of course he was just being polite.

so you hit the manuals hard and one day you go out on a breakdown call and none of the older men could figure out why the pump was on the blink; a roaring, chewing
monster of a pump it was, sitting there like a dead husk and the cattlefeed backed up four miles to a storage tank in the suburbs and the steers in the yards bawling with hunger, and you traced the dead wire, you out with the spot-welder, a zip of blue flame and the pump began to chew again and you got the afternoon off.

* * * *

And there they were.

Lee Falcaro: (Bending over the ‘muttering, twitching carcass) Adrenalin. Brighter picture and louder sound.

Assistant: (Opening a pinch cock in the tube that enters the arm, increasing video contrast, increasing audio): He’s weakening.

Lee Falcaro: (In a whisper) I know. I know. But this is IT.

Assistant: (Inaudibly) You cold-blooded bitch.

You are Max Wyman, you are Max Wyman,
and you don’t know what to do about the Syndic that betrayed you, about the girl who betrayed you with the living representative of the Syndic, about the dream of scholarship that lies in ruins, the love that lies in ruins after how many promises and vows, the faith of twenty years that lies in ruins after how many declarations.

The ringing bell.

The flashing light.

The wobbling pendulum.

And a double whiskey with a beer chaser.

Lee Falcaro: The alcohol. (It drips from a sterile graduate, trickles through the rubber tubing and into the arm of the mumbling, sweating carcass. The molecules mingle with the molecules of serum: In seconds they are washed against the cell-walls of the forebrain. The cell-walls their structure as the alcohol molecules bumble against them; the lattices of jelly that wall in the cytoplasm and nuclear jelly become thinner than they were. Streams of electrons that had coursed in familiar paths through chains of
neurones find easier paths through the poison-thinned cell-walls. A “Memory” or an “Idea” or a “Hope” or a “Value”

that was a configuration of neurones linked by electron streams vanishes when the electron streams find an easier way to flow a New “Memories,” “Ideas,” “Hopes” and

“Values” that are configurations of neurones linked by electron streams are born.)

Love and loyalty die, but not as if they had never been.

Their ghosts remain, Max Wyman and you are haunted by them. They hound you from Buffalo to Erie, but there is no oblivion deep enough in the Mex joints, or in Tampa tequila or Pittsburgh zubrovka or New York gin.

You tell incurious people who came to the place on the corner for a shot and some talk that you’re the best breakdown man that ever came out of Erie; you tell them women are no God-damn good, you tell them the Syndic—
here you get sly and look around with drunken caution, lowering your voice—you tell them the Syndic’s no Goddamned good, and you drunkenly recite poetry until they move away, puzzled and annoyed.

Lee Falcaro: (Passing a weary hand across her forehead) well, he’s had it. Disconnect the tubes, give him a 48-hour stretch in bed and then get him on the street pointed towards Riveredge.

Assistant: Does the apparatus go into dead storage?

Lee

Falcaro:

(Grimacing
uncontrollably)

No.

Unfortunately, no.

Assistant: (Inaudibly, as she plucks needle-tipped tubes from the carcass’ elbows) who’s the next sucker?

VIII

The submarine surfaced at dawn. Orsino had been assigned a bunk and, to his surprise, had fallen asleep almost at once. At eight in the morning, he was shaken awake by one of the men in caps.

“Shift change,” the man explained laconically.

Orsino started to say something polite and sleepy. The man grabbed his shoulder and rolled him onto the deck, snarling: “You going to argue?”

Orsino’s reactions were geared to hot-rod polo—doing the split-second right thing after instinctively evaluating the roll of the ball, the ricochet of bullets, the probable tactics and strategy of the opposing four. They were not geared to a human being who behaved with the blind ferocity of an inanimate object. He just gawked at him from the deck, noting that the man had one hand on a sheath knife.

“All right, buster,” the man said contemptuously, apparently deciding that Orsino would stay put. “Just don’t mess with the Guard.” He rolled into the bunk and gave a good imitation of a man asleep until Orsino worked his way through the crowded compartment and up a ladder to the deck.

There was a heavy, gray over-cast. The submarine seemed to be planing the water; salt spray washed the shining deck. A gun crew was forward, drilling with a five-incher.

The rasp of a petty-officer singing out the numbers mingled with the hiss and gurgle of the spray. Orsino leaned against the conning tower and tried to comb his thoughts out clean and straight.

It wasn’t easy.

He was Charles Orsino, very junior Syndic member, with all memories pertaining thereto.

He was also, more dimly, Max Wyman with his memories.

Now, able to stand outside of Wyman, he could recall how those memories had been implanted—down to the last stab of the last needle. He thought some very bitter thoughts about Lee Falcaro—and dropped them, snapping to attention as Commander Grinnel pulled himself through the hatch. “Good morning, sir,” he said.

The cold eyes drilled him. “Rest,” the commander said.

“We don’t play it that way on a pigboat. I hear you had some trouble about your bunk.”

Orsino shrugged uncomfortably.

“Somebody should have told you,” the commander said.

“The boat’s full of Guardsmen. They have a very high opinion of themselves—which is correct. They carried off the raid in good style. You don’t mess with Guards.”

“What are they?” Orsino asked.

Grinnel shrugged. “The usual elite,” he said. “Loman’s gang.” He noted Orsino’s blank look and smiled coldly.

“Loman’s President of North America,” he said.

“On shore,” Orsino hazarded, “we used to hear about somebody named Ben Miller.”

“Obsolete information. Miller had the Marines behind him. Loman was Secretary of Defense. He beached the Marines and broke them up into guard detachments. Took away their heavy weapons. Meanwhile, he built up the Guard, very quietly—which, with the Secretary of Information behind him, he could do. About two years ago, he struck. The Marines who didn’t join the Guard were massacred. Miller had the sense to kill himself. The Veep and the Secretary of State resigned, but it didn’t save their necks. Loman assumed the Presidency automatically, of course, and had them shot. They were corrupt as hell anyway. They were owned body and soul by the southern bloc.”

Two seamen appeared with a folding cot, followed by the sub commander. He was red-eyed with lack of sleep. “Set it there,” he told them, and sat heavily on the sagging canvas.

“Morning, Grinnel,” he said with an effort. “Believe I’m getting too old for the pigboats. I want sun and air. Think you can use your influence at court to get me a corvette?”

He bared his teeth to show it was a joke.

Grinnel said, with a minimum smile: “If I had any influence, would I catch the cloak-and-dagger crap they sling at me?”

The sub commander rolled back onto the cot and was instantly asleep, a muscle twitching the left side of his face
every few seconds.

Grinnel drew Orsino to the lee of the conning tower.

“We’ll let him sleep,” he said. “Go tell that gun crew Commander Grinnel says they should lay below.”

Orsino did. The petty officer said something exasperated about the gunnery training bill and Orsino repeated his piece. They secured the gun and went below.

Grinnel said, with apparent irrelevance: “You’re a rare bird, Wyman. You’re capable—and you’re uncommitted.

Let’s go below. Stick with me.”

* * * *

He followed the fat little commander into the conning tower. Grinnel told an officer of some sort: “I’ll take the con, mister. Wyman here will take the radar watch.” He gave Orsino a look that choked off his protests. Presumably, Grinnel knew that he was ignorant of radar.

The officer, looking baffled, said: “Yes, Commander.” A seaman pulled his head out of a face-fitting box and told Wyman: “It’s all yours, stranger.” Wyman cautiously put his face into the box and was confronted by meaningless blobs of green, numerals in the dark, and a couple of arrows to make confusion complete.

He heard Grinnel say to the helmsman: “Get me a mug of joe, sailor. I’ll take the wheel.”

“I’ll pass the word, sir.”

“Nuts you’ll pass the word, sailor. Go get the coffee—and I want it now and not when some steward’s mate decides he’s ready to bring it.”

“Aye, aye, sir.” Orsino heard him clatter down the ladder.

Then his arm was gripped and Grinnel’s voice muttered in his ear: “When you hear me bitch about the coffee, sing out: ‘Aircraft 265, DX 3,000’. Good and loud. No, don’t stop looking. Repeat it.”

Orsino said, his eyes crossing on double images of the meaningless, luminous blobs: “Aircraft 265, DX 3,000. Good
and loud. When you bitch about the coffee.”

“Right. Don’t forget it.”

He heard the feet on the ladder again. “Coffee, sir.”

“Thanks, sailor.” A long sip and then another. “I always said the pigboats drink the lousiest joe in the Navy.”

“Aircraft 265, DX 3,000!” Orsino yelled.

A thunderous alarm began to sound. “Take her down!”

yelled Commander Grinnel.

“Take her down, sir!” the helmsman echoed. “But sir, the skipper—”

Orsino remembered him too then, dead asleep in his cot on the deck, the muscle twitching the left side of his face every few seconds.

“God-damn it, those were aircraft! Take her down!”

The luminous blobs and numbers and arrows swirled before Orsino’s eyes as the trim of the ship changed, hatches clanged to and water thundered into the ballast tanks. He staggered and caught himself as the deck angled sharply underfoot.

He knew what Grinnel had meant by saying he was uncommitted, and he knew now that it was no longer true.

He thought for a moment that he might be sick into the face-fitting box, but it passed.

Minutes later, Grinnel was on the mike, his voice sounding metallically through the ship: “To all hands. To all hands.

This is Commander Grinnel. We lost the skipper in that emergency dive—but you and I know that that’s the way he would have wanted it. As senior line officer aboard, I’m assuming command for the rest of the voyage. We will remain submerged until dark. Division officers report to the wardroom. That’s all.”

He tapped Orsino on the shoulder. “Take off,” he said.

Orsino realized that the green blobs—clouds, were they?—
no longer showed, and recalled that radar didn’t work through water.

He wasn’t in on the wardroom meeting, and wandered rather forlornly through the ship, incredibly jammed as it was with sleeping men, coffee-drinking men and booty. Half a dozen times he had to turn away close questioning about his radar experience and the appearance of the aircraft on the radar scope. Each time he managed it, with the feeling that one more question would have cooked his goose.

The men weren’t sentimental about the skipper they had lost. Mostly they wondered how much of a cut Grinnel would allot them from the booty of Cape Cod.

At last the word passed for “Wyman” to report to the captain’s cabin. He did, sweating after a fifteen-minute chat with a radar technician.

Grinnel closed the door of the minute cabin and smirked at him. “You have trouble, Wyman?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“You’d have worse trouble if they found out for sure that you don’t know radar. I’d be in the clear. I could tell them you claimed to be a qualified radar man. That would make me out to be pretty gullible, but it would make you out to be a murderer. Who’s backing you, Wyman? Who told you to get rid of the skipper?”

“Quite right, sir,” Orsino said. “You’ve really got me there.”

“Glad you realize it, Wyman. I’ve got you and I can use you. It was a great bit of luck, the skipper corking off on deck. But I’ve always had a talent for improvisation. If you’re determined to be a leader, Wyman, nothing is more valuable. Do you know, I can relax with you? It’s a rare feeling. For once I can be certain that the man I’m talking to isn’t one of Loman’s stooges, or one of Clinch’s N.A.B.I.

ferrets or anything else but what he says he is—

“But that’s beside the point. I have something else to tell you. There are two sides to working for me, Wyman. One of them’s punishment if you get off the track. That’s been made clear to you. The other is reward if you stay on. I
have plans, Wyman, that are large-scale. They simply eclipse the wildest hopes of Loman, Clinch, Baggot and the rest. And yet, they’re not wild. How’d you like to be on the inside when the North American Government returns to the mainland?”

Orsino uttered an authentic gasp and Commander Grinnel looked satisfied.

IX

The submarine docked at an indescribably lovely bay in the south of Ireland. Orsino asked Grinnel whether the Irish didn’t object to this, and was met with a blank stare.

It developed that the Irish consisted of a few hundred wild men in the woods—maybe a few thousand. The stupid shore-bound personnel couldn’t seem to clean them out.

Grinnel didn’t know anything about them, and he cared less.

Ireland appeared to be the naval base. The government proper was located on Iceland, vernal again after a long, climatic swing. The Canaries and Ascencion were outposts.

Orsino had learned enough on the voyage to recognize the Government for what it was. It had happened before in history; Uncle Frank had pointed it out. Big-time Caribbean piracy had grown from very respectable origins.

Gentlemen-skippers had been granted letters of marque and reprisal by warring governments, which made them a sort of contract navy. Periods of peace had found these privateers unwilling to give up their hard earned complicated profession and their investments in it. When they could no longer hoist the flag of England or France or Spain, they simply hoisted the Jolly Roger and went it alone.

Confusing? Hell, yes! The famous Captain Kidd thought he was a gallant privateer and sailed trustingly into New York.

Somewhere he had failed to touch third base; they shipped him to London for trial and hanged him as a pirate. The
famous Henry Morgan had never been anything but a pirate and a super-pirate; as admiral of a private fleet he executed a brilliant amphibious operation and sacked the city of Panama. He was knighted, made governor of a fair-sized English island in the West Indies and died loved and respected by all.

Charles Orsino found himself a member of a pirate band that called itself the North American Government.

More difficult to learn were the ins and outs of pirate politics, which were hampered with an archaic, structurally-inappropriate nomenclature and body of tradition. Commander Grinnel was a Sociocrat, which meant that he was in the same gang as President Loman.

The late sub commander had been a Constitutionist, which meant that he was allied with the currently-out “southern bloc.” The southern bloc did not consist of southerners at this stage of the North American Government’s history but of a clique that tended to include the engineers and maintenance men of the Government. That had been the reason for the sub commander’s erasure.

The Constitutionists traditionally commanded pigboats and aircraft while surface vessels and the shore establishments were in the hands of the Sociocrats—the fruit of some long-forgotten compromise.

Commander Grinnel cheerfully explained to Charles that there was a crypto-Sociocrat naval officer primed and waiting to be appointed to the command of the sub. The Constitutionist gang would back him to the hilt and the Sociocrats would growl and finally assent. If, thereafter, the Constitutionists ever counted on the sub in a coup, they would be quickly disillusioned.

There wasn’t much voting. Forty years before there had been a bad deadlock following the death by natural causes of President Powell after seventeen years in office. An ad hoc bipartisan conference called a session of the Senate and the Senate elected a new president.

It was little information to be equipped with when you walked out into the brawling streets of New Portsmouth on shore leave.

* * * *

The town had an improvised look which was strange to Orsino. There was a sanitation reactor every hundred yards or so, but he mistrusted the look of the ground-level mains that led to it from, the houses. There were house flies from which he shied violently. Every other shack on the waterfront was a bar or a notch joint. He sampled the goods at one of the former and was shocked by the quality and price. He rolled out, his ears still ringing from the belt of raw booze; as half a dozen sweatered Guards rolled in, singing some esoteric song about their high morale and even higher venereal rate. A couple of them looked at him appraisingly, as though they wondered what kind of a noise he’d make if they jumped on his stomach real hard, and he hurried away from them.

The other entertainment facilities of the waterfront were flatly ruled out by a quick inspection of the wares. He didn’t know what to make of them. Joints back in Syndic Territory if you were a man, made sense. You went to learn the ropes, or because you were afraid of getting mixed up in something intense when you didn’t want to, or because you wanted a change, or because you were too busy, lazy or shy to chase skirts on your own. If you were a woman and not too particular, a couple of years in a joint left you with a considerable amount of money and some interesting memories which you were under no obligation to discuss with your husbands or husband.

But the sloppy beasts who called to him from the windows of the joints here on the waterfront, left him puzzled and disgusted. He reflected, strolling up Washington Street with eyes straight ahead, that women must be in short
supply if they could make a living—or that the male citizens of the Government had no taste.

A whiff from one of those questionable sewer mains sent him reeling. He ducked into another saloon in self-defense and leaned groggily against the bar. A pretty brunette demanded: “What’ll you have?”

“Gin, please.” He peeled a ten off the roll Grinnel had given him. When the girl poured his gin he looked at her and found her fair. In all innocence, he asked her a question, as he might have asked a barmaid back home.

She could have answered, “Yes,” “No,” “Maybe,” or

“What’s in it for me?”

Instead she called him a lousy bastard, picked up a beer mug and was about to shatter it on his head when a hand caught her and a voice warned: “Hold it, Mabel! This guy’s off my ship.

“He’s just out of the States; he doesn’t know any better.

You know what it’s like over there.”

Mabel snarled: “You better wise him up, then, friend. He can’t go around talking like that to decent women.” She slapped down another glass, poured gin and flounced down the bar.

Charles gulped his gin and turned shakily to his deliverer, a little reactor specialist he had seen on the sub once or twice. “Thanks,” he said feeling inadequate. “Maybe you better wise me up. All I said was, ‘Darling, do you—’”

The reactor man held up his hand. “That’s enough,” he said. “You don’t talk that way over here unless you want your scalp parted.”

Charles, buzzing a little with the gin, protested hotly: “But what’s the harm? All she had to say was no; I wasn’t going to throw her down on the floor!”

It was all very confusing.

A shrug. “I heard about things in the States—Wyman, isn’t it? I guess I didn’t really believe it. You mean I could go up to any woman and just ask her how’s about it?”

“Within reason, yes.”

“And do they?”

“Some do, some don’t—like here.”

“Like hell, like here! Last liberty—” and the reactor man told him a long, confusing story about how he had picked up this pig, how she had dangled it in front of him for one solid week while he managed to spend three hundred and eighty-six dollars on her, and how finally she had bawled that she couldn’t, she just hated herself but she couldn’t do anything like that and bang went the door in his face, leaving him to finish out the evening in a notch joint.

“Good God!” Charles said, appalled. “Was she out of her mind?”

“No,” the reactor man said glumly, “but I must have been.

I should of got her drunk and raped her the first night.”

Charles was fully conscious that values were different here. Choking down something like nausea, he asked carefully: “Is there much rape?”

The little man signalled for another gin and downed it. “I guess so. Once when I was a kid a dame gave me this line about her cousin raped her when she was little so she was frigid. I had more ambition then, so I said: ‘Then this won’t be anything new to you, baby,’ I popped her on the button

—”

“I’ve got to go now,” Charles said, walking straight out of the saloon. He was beginning to understand the sloppy beasts in the windows of the notch joint and why men could bring themselves to settle for nothing better. He was also overwhelmed by a great wave of home sickness.

The ugly pattern was beginning to emerge. Prudery, rape, frigidity, intrigue for power—and assassination? Beyond the one hint, Grinnel had said nothing that affected Syndic Territory.

But nothing would be more logical than for this band of brigands to lust after the riches of the continent.

Back of the waterfront were shipfitting shops and living quarters. Work was being done by a puzzling combination of mechanization and musclepower. In one open shed he saw a lathe-hand turning a gunbarrel out of a forging; the lathe was driven by one of those standard 18-inch ehrenhaft rotors Max Wyman knew so well. But a vertical drillpress next to it—Orsino blinked. Two men, sweating and panting, were turning a stubborn vertical drum as tall as they were, and a belt drive from the drum whirled the drill bit as it sank into a hunk of bronze. The men were in rags, dirty rags. And it came to Orsino with a stunning shock when he realized what the dull, clanking things were that swung from their wrists. They were chained to the handles of the wheel.

He walked on, almost dazed, comprehending now some cryptic remarks that had been passed aboard the sub.

“No Frog has staying power. Give a Limey his beef once a day and he’ll outsweat a Frog.”

“Yeah, but you can’t whip a Limey. They just go bad when you whip a Limey.”

“They just get sullen for awhile. But let me tell you, friend, don’t ever whip a Spig. You whip a Spig, he’ll wait twenty years if he has to but he’ll get you, right between the ribs.”

“If a Spig wants to be boiled, I should worry.”

It had been broken up in laughter.

Boiled! Could such things be?

Sixteen ragged, filth-crusted sub-humans were creeping down the road, each straining at a rope. An inch at a time, they were dragging a skid loaded with one huge turbine gear whose tiny herringbone teeth caught the afternoon sun.

The Government had reactors, the Government had vehicles—why this? He slowly realized that the Government’s metal and machinery and atomic power went into its warships; that there was none left over for
consumers, and the uses of peace. The Government had degenerated into a dawn-age monster, specialized all to teeth and claws and muscles to drive them with. The Government was now, whatever it had been, a graceless, humorless incarnate ferocity. Whatever lightness or joy survived was the meaningless vestigial twitching of an obsolete organ.

Somewhere a child began to bawl and Charles was surprised to feel a profound pity welling up in him. Like a sedentary man who after a workout aches in muscles he never knew he owned, Charles was discovering that he had emotions which had never been poignantly evoked by the bland passage of the hours in Syndic Territory.

Poor little bastard, he thought, growing up in this hellhole. I don’t know what having slaves to kick around will do to you, but I don’t see how you can grow up a human being. I don’t know what fear of love will do to you

—make you a cheat? Or a graceful rutting animal with a choice only between graceless rutting violence and a stinking scuffle with a flabby and abstracted stranger in a strange unloved room? We have our guns to play with and they’re good toys, but I don’t know what kind of monster you’ll become when they give you a gun to live with and violence for a god.

Reiner was right, he thought unhappily. We’ve got to do something about this mess.

A man and a woman were struggling in an alley as he passed. Old habit almost made him walk on, but this wasn’t the playful business of ripping clothes as practiced during hilarious moments in Mob Territory. It was a grim and silent struggle—

The man wore the sweater of the Guards. Nevertheless, Charles walked into the alley and tore him away from the woman; or rather, he yanked at the man’s rock-like arm and the man, in surprise, let go of the woman and spun to face him.

“Beat it,” Charles said to the woman, not looking around.

He saw from the corner of his eye that she was staying right there.

The man’s hand was on his sheath knife. He told Charles:

“Get lost. Now. You don’t mess with the Guards.”

Charles felt his knees quivering, which was good. He knew from many a chukker of polo that it meant that he was strung to the breaking point, ready to explode into action. “Pull that knife,” he said, “and the next thing you know you’ll be eating it.”

The man’s face went dead calm and he pulled the knife and came in low, very fast. The knife was supposed to catch Charles in the middle. If Charles stepped inside it, the man would grab him in a bear hug and knife him in the back.

There was only one answer.

He caught the thick wrist from above with his left hand as the knife flashed toward his middle and shoved out. He felt the point catch and slice his cuff. The Guardsman tried a furious and ill-advised kick at his crotch; with his grip on the knife-hand, Charles toppled him into the filthy alley as he stood one-legged and off balance. He fell on his back, floundering, and for a black moment, Charles thought his weight was about to tear the wrist loose from his grip. The moment passed, and Charles put his right foot in the socket of the Guardsman’s elbow, reinforced his tiring left hand with his right and leaned, doubling the man’s forearm over the fulcrum of his boot. The man roared and dropped the knife. It had taken perhaps five seconds.

Charles said, panting: “I don’t want to break your arm or kick your head in or anything like that. I just want you to go away and leave the woman alone.” He was conscious of her, vaguely hovering in the background. He thought angrily: She might at least get his knife.

The Guardsman said thickly: “You give me the boot and I swear to God I’ll find you and cut you to ribbons if it takes me the rest of my life.”

Good, Charles thought. Now he can tell himself he scared me. Good.He let go of the forearm, straightened and took his foot from the man’s elbow, stepping back. The Guardsman got up stiffly, flexing his arm, and stooped to pick up and sheath his knife without taking his eyes off Charles. Then he spat in the dust at Charles’ feet. “Yellow crud,” he said. “If the goddam crow was worth it, I’d cut your heart out.” He walked off down the alley and Charles followed him with his eyes until he turned the corner into the street.

Then he turned, irritated that the woman had not spoken.

She was Lee Falcaro.

“Lee!” he said, thunderstruck. “What are you doing here?” It was the same face, feature for feature, and between her brows appeared the same double groove he had seen before. But she didn’t know him.

“You know me?” she asked blankly. “Is that why you pulled that ape off me? I ought to thank you. But I can’t place you at all. I don’t know many people here. I’ve been ill, you know.”

There was a difference apparent now. The voice was a little querulous. And Charles would have staked his life that never could Lee Falcaro have said in that slightly smug, slightly proprietary, slightly aren’t-I-interesting tone: “I’ve been ill, you know.”

“But what are you doing here? Damn it, don’t you know me? I’m Charles Orsino!”

He realized then that he had made a horrible mistake.

“Orsino,” she said. And then she spat: “Orsino! Of the Syndic!” There was black hatred in her eyes.

She turned and raced down the alley. He stood there stupidly, for almost a minute, and then ran after her, as far as the alley’s mouth. She was gone. You could run almost anywhere in New Portsmouth in almost a minute.

A weedy little seaman wearing crossed quills on his cap was lounging against a building. He snickered at Charles.

“Don’t chase that one, sailor,” he said. “She is the property of O.N.I.”

“You know who she is?”

The yeoman happily spilled his inside dope to the fleet gob: “Lee Bennet. Smuggled over here couple months ago by D.A.R. The hottest thing that ever hit Naval Intelligence.

Very small potato in the Syndic—knows all the families, who does what, who’s a figurehead and who’s a worker.

Terrific! Inside stuff! Hates the Syndic. A gang of big-timers did her dirt.”

“Thanks,” Charles said, and wandered off down the street.

It wasn’t surprising. He should have expected it.

Noblesse oblige.

Pride of the Falcaro line. She wouldn’t send anybody into deadly peril unless she were ready to go herself.

Only somehow the trigger that would have snapped neurotic, synthetic Lee Bennet into Lee Falcaro hadn’t worked.

He wandered on aimlessly, wondering whether it would be minutes or hours before he’d be picked up and executed as a spy.

OceanofPDF.com

THE SYNDIC, by C. M. Kornbluth (Part II)

X

It took minutes only.

He had headed back to the waterfront, afraid to run, with some vague notion of stealing a boat. Before he reached the row of saloons and joints, a smart-looking squad of eight tall men overtook him.

“Hold it, mister,” a sergeant said. “Are you Orsino?”

“No,” he said hopelessly. “That crazy woman began to yell at me that I was Orsino, but my name’s Wyman. What’s this about?”

The other men fell in beside and behind him. “We’re stepping over to O.N.I.,” the sergeant said.

“There’s the son of a bitch!” somebody bawled. Suddenly there were a dozen sweatered Guardsmen around them.

Their leader was the thug Orsino had beaten in a fair fight.

He said silkily to the sergeant: “We want that boy, leatherneck. Blow.”

* * * *

The sergeant went pale. “He’s wanted for questioning by the O.N.I.,” he said stolidly.

“Get the marine three-striper!” the Guardsman chortled.

He stuck his jaw into the sergeant’s face. “Tell your squad to blow. You marines ought to know by now that you don’t mess with the Guard.”

A very junior officer appeared. “What’s going on here, you men?” he shrilled. “Atten-shun!” He was ignored as Guardsman and marines measured one another with their eyes. “I said attention! Dammit, sergeant, report!” There was no reaction. The officer yelled: “You men may think you can get away with this but by God, you’re wrong!” He strode away, his fists clenched and his face very red.

Orsino saw him stride through a gate into a lot marked Bupers Motor Pool. And he felt a sudden wave of communal understanding that there were only seconds to go. The sergeant played for time: “I’ll be glad to surrender the prisoner,” he started, “if you have anything to show in the way of—”

The Guardsman kicked for the pit of the sergeant’s stomach. He was a sucker Orsino thought abstractedly as he saw the sergeant catch his foot, dump him and pivot to block another Guardsman. Then he was fighting for his life himself, against three bellowing Guardsmen.

A ripping, hammering noise filled the air suddenly. Like cold magic, it froze the milling mob where it stood. Fifty-caliber noise.

The jaygee was back, this time in a jeep with a twin fifty.

And he was glaring down its barrels into the crowd. People were beginning to stream from the saloons, joints and shipfitting shops.

The jaygee cocked his cap rakishly over one eye. “Fall in!”

he rasped, and a haunting air of familiarity came over Orsino.

The waiting jeep, almost bucking in its eagerness to be let loose—Orsino on the ground, knees trembling with tension

—a perfect change of mount scene in a polo match. He reacted automatically.

There was a surrealist flash of the jaygee’s face before he clipped him into the back of the square little truck. There was another flash of spectators scrambling as he roared the jeep down the road.

From then on it was just a question of hanging onto the wheel with one hand, trying to secure the free-traversing twin-fifty with the other, glancing back to see if the jaygee was still out, avoiding yapping dogs and pedestrians, staying on the rutted road, pushing all possible speed out of the jeep, noting landmarks, estimating the possibility of
dangerous pursuit. For a two-goal polo player, a dull little practice session.

The road, such as it was, wound five miles inland through scrubby woodland and terminated at a lumber camp where chained men in rags were dragging logs.

Orsino back tracked a quarter-mile from the camp and jolted overland in a kidney-cracking hare and hounds course at fifty per.

The jeep took it for an hour in the fading afternoon light and then bucked to a halt. Orsino turned for an overdue check on the jaygee and found him conscious, but greenly clinging to the sides of the vehicle. But he saw Orsino staring and gamely struggled to his feet, standing in the truck bed. “You’re under arrest, sailor,” he said. “Striking an officer, abuse of government property, driving a government vehicle without a trip-ticket—” His legs betrayed him and he sat down, hard.

Orsino thought very briefly of letting him have a burst from the twin-fifty, and abandoned the idea.

He seemed to have bitched up everything so far, but he was still on a mission. He had a commissioned officer of the Government approximately in his power. He snapped:

“Nonsense. You’re under arrest.”

The jaygee seemed to be reviewing rapidly any transgressions he may have committed, and asked at last, cautiously: “By what authority?”

“I represent the Syndic.”

It was a block-buster. The jaygee stammered: “But you can’t—But there isn’t any way—But how—”

“Never mind how.”

“You’re crazy. You must be, or you wouldn’t stop here. I don’t believe you’re from the continent and I don’t believe the jeep’s broken down.” He was beginning to sound just a little hysterical. “It can’t break down here. We must be more than thirty miles inland.”

“What’s special about thirty miles inland?”

“The natives, you fool!”

The natives again. “I’m not worried about natives. Not with a pair of fifties.”

“You don’t understand,” the jaygee said, forcing calm into his voice. “This is The Outback. They’re in charge here. We can’t do a thing with them. They jump people in the dark and skewer them. Now fix this damn jeep and let’s get rolling!”

“Into a firing squad? Don’t be silly, lieutenant. I presume you won’t slug me while I check the engine?”

The jaygee was looking around him. “My God, no,” he said. “You may be a gangster, but—” He trailed off.

Orsino stiffened. Gangster was semi-dirty talk. “Listen, pirate,” he said nastily, “I don’t believe—”

“Pirate?” the jaygee roared indignantly, and then shut his mouth with a click, looking apprehensively about. The gesture wasn’t faked; it alarmed Orsino.

“Tell me about your wildmen,” he said.

“Go to hell,” the jaygee said sulkily.

“Look, you called me a gangster first. What about these natives? You were trying to trick me, weren’t you?”

“Kiss my royal North American eyeball, gangster.”

“Don’t be childish,” Charles reproved him, feeling adult and superior. (The jaygee looked a couple of years younger than he.) He climbed out of his seat and lifted the hood.

The damage was trivial; a shear pin in the transmission had given way. He reported mournfully: “Cracked block. The jeep’s through forever. You can get on your way, lieutenant.

I won’t try to hold you.”

The jaygee fumed: “You couldn’t hold me if you wanted to, gangster. If you think I’m going to try and hoof back to the base alone in the dark, you’re crazy. We’re sticking together. Two of us may be able to hold them off for the night. In the morning, we’ll see.”

Well, maybe the officer did believe there were wildmen in the woods. That didn’t mean there were.

The jaygee got out and looked under the hood uncertainly.

It was obvious that in the first place he was no mechanic and in the second place he couldn’t conceive of anybody voluntarily risking the woods rather than the naval base.

“Uh-huh,” he said. “Dismount that gun while I get a fire started.”

“Yes, sir,” Charles said sardonically, saluting. The jaygee absently returned the salute and began to collect twigs.

Orsino asked: “How do these aborigines of yours operate?”

“Sneak up in the dark. They have spears and a few stolen guns. Usually they don’t have cartridges for them but you can’t count on that. But they have…witches.”

Orsino snorted. He was getting very hungry indeed. “Do you know any of the local plants we might eat?”

The jaygee said confidently: “I guess we can get by on roots until morning.”

Orsino dubiously pulled up a shrub, dabbed clods off its root and tasted it. It tasted exactly like a root. He sighed and changed the subject. “What do we do with the fifties when I get them both off the mount?”

“The jeep mount breaks down some damn way or other into two low-mount tripods. See if you can figure it out while I get the fire going.”

The jaygee had a small, smoky fire barely going in twenty minutes. Orsino was still struggling with the jeep gun mount. It came apart, but it couldn’t go together again. The jaygee strolled over at last contemptuously to lend a hand.

He couldn’t make it work either.

Two lost tempers and four split fingernails later it developed the “elevating screw” really held the two front legs on and that you elevated by adjusting the rear tripod leg. “A hell of an officer you are,” Orsino sulked.

It began to rain, putting the fire out with a hiss. They wound up prone under the jeep, not on speaking terms,
each tending a gun, each presumably responsible for 180
degrees of perimeter.

* * * *

Charles was fairly dry, except for a trickle of icy water following a contour that meandered to his left knee. After an hour of eye-straining—nothing to be seen—and ear-straining—only the patter of rain—he heard a snore and kicked the jaygee.

The jaygee cursed wearily and said: “I guess we’d better talk to keep awake.”

“I’m not having any trouble, pirate.”

“Oh, knock it off—where do you get that pirate bit, gangster?”

“You’re outlaws, aren’t you?”

“Like hell we are. You’re the outlaws. You rebelled against the lawfully constituted North American Government. Just because you won—for the time being—doesn’t mean you were right.”

“The fact that we won does mean that we were right. The fact that your so-called Government lives by raiding and scavenging off us means you were wrong. God, the things I’ve seen since I joined up with you thugs!”

“I’ll bet. Respect for the home, sanctity of marriage, sexual morality, law and order—you never saw anything like that back home, did you gangster?” He looked very smug.

Orsino clenched his teeth. “Somebody’s been telling you a pack of lies,” he said. “There’s just as much home and family life and morality and order back in Syndic Territory as there is here. And probably a lot more.”

“Bull. I’ve seen intelligence reports; I know how you people live. Are you telling me you don’t have sexual promiscuity? Polygamy? Polyandry? Open gambling?

Uncontrolled liquor trade? Corruption and shakedowns?”

Orsino squinted along the barrel of the gun into the rain.

“Look,” he said, “take me as an average young man from Syndic Territory. I know maybe a hundred people. I know just three women and two men who are what you’d call promiscuous. I know one family with two wives and one husband. I don’t really know any people personally who go in for polyandry, but I’ve met three casually. And the rest are ordinary middle-aged couples.”

“Ah-hah! Middle-aged! Do you mean to tell me you’re just leaving out anybody under middle age when you talk about morality?”

“Naturally,” Charles said, baffled. “Wouldn’t you?”

The only answer was a snort.

“What are bupers?” Charles asked.

“Bu-Pers,” the jaygee said distinctly. “Bureau of Personnel, North American Navy.”

“What do you do there?”

“What would a personnel bureau do?” the jaygee said patiently. “We recruit, classify, assign, promote and train personnel.”

“Paperwork, huh? No wonder you don’t know how to shoot or drive.”

“If I didn’t need you to cover my back, I’d shove this MG
down your silly throat. For your information, gangster, all officers do a tour of duty on paperwork before they’re assigned to their permanent branch. I’m going into the pigboats.”

“Why?”

“Family. My father commands a sub. He’s Captain Van Dellen.”

Oh, God. Van Dellen. The sub commander Grinnel—and he

—had murdered. The kid hadn’t heard yet that his father had been “lost” in an emergency dive.

* * * *

The rain ceased to fall; the pattering drizzle gave way to irregular, splashing drops from leaves and branches.

“Van Dellen,” Charles said. “There’s something you ought to know.”

“It’ll keep,” the jaygee answered in a grim whisper. The bolt of his gun clicked. “I hear them out there.”

XI

She felt the power of the goddess working in her, but feebly. Dark…so dark…and so tired…how old was she?

More than eight hundred moons had waxed and waned above her head since birth. And she had run at the head of her spearmen to the motor sounds. A motor meant the smithymen from the sea, and you killed smithymen when you could.

She let out a short shrill chuckle in the dark. There was a rustling of branches. One of the spearmen had turned to stare at the sound. She knew his face was worried. “Tend to business, you fool!” she wheezed. “Or by Bridget—” His breath went in with a hiss and she chuckled again. You had to let them know who was the cook and who was the potatoes every now and then. Kill the fool? Not now; not when there were smithymen with guns waiting to be taken.

The power of the goddess worked stronger in her withered breast as her rage grew at their impudence.

Coming into her woods with their stinking metal!

There were two of them. A grin slit her face. She had not taken two smithymen together for thirty moons. For all her wrinkles and creaks, what a fine vessel she was for the power, to be sure! Her worthless, slow-to-learn niece could run and jump and she had a certain air, but she’d never be such a vessel. Her sister—the crone spat—these were degenerate days. In the old days, the sister would have been spitted when she refused the ordeal in her youth. The little one now, whatever her name was, she would make a fine vessel for the power when she was gathered to the
goddess. If her sister or her niece didn’t hold her head under water too long, or have a spear shoved too deep into her gut or hit her on the head with too heavy a rock.

These were degenerate days. She had poisoned her own mother to become the vessel of power.

The spearmen to her right and left shifted uneasily. She heard a faint mumble of the two smithymen talking. Let them talk! Doubtless they were cursing the goddess obscenely; doubtless that was what the smithymen all did when their mouths were not stuffed with food.

She thought of the man called Kennedy who forged spearheads and arrowpoints for her people—he was a strange one, touched by the goddess, which proved her infinite power. She could touch and turn the head of even a smithyman. He was a strange one. Well now, to get on with it. She wished the power were working stronger in her; she was tired and could hardly see. But by the grace of the goddess there would be two new heads over her holy hut come dawn. She could hardly see, but the goddess wouldn’t fail her.…

She quavered like a screech-owl, and the spearmen began to slip forward through the brush. She was not allowed to eat honey lest its sweetness clash with the power in her, but the taste of power was sweeter than the taste of honey.

* * * *

With frightful suddenness there was an ear-splitting shriek and a trampling rush of feet. By sheer reflex, Orsino clamped down on the trigger of his fifty, and his brain rocked at its thunder. Shadowy figures were blotted out by the orange muzzle-flash. You’re supposed to fire neat, spaced bursts of eight he told himself. I wonder what old Gilby would say if he could see his star pupil burning out a barrel and swinging his gun like a fire hose?

The gun stopped firing; end of the belt. Twenty, fifty or a hundred rounds? He didn’t remember. He clawed for
another belt and smoothly, in the dark, loaded again and listened.

“You all right, gangster?” the jaygee said behind him, making him jump.

“Yes,” he said. “Will they come back?”

“I don’t know.”

“You filthy swine,” an agonized voice wheezed from the darkness. “Me back is broke, you stinking lice.” The voice began to sob.

They listened to it in silence for perhaps a minute. At last he said to the jaygee: “If the rest are gone maybe we can at least—make him comfortable.”

“Too risky,” the jaygee said after a long pause.

The sobbing went on. As the excitement of the attack drained from Orsino, he felt deathly tired, cramped and thirsty. The thirst he could do something about. He scooped water from the muddy runnel by his knee and sucked it from his palms twice. The third time, he thought of the thirst that the sobbing creature out in the dark must be feeling, and his hand wouldn’t go to his mouth.

“I’m going to get him,” he whispered to the jaygee.

“Stay where you are! That’s an order!”

He didn’t answer, but began to work his cramped and aching body from under the jeep. The jaygee, a couple of years younger and lither than he, slid out first from his own side. Orsino sighed and relaxed as he heard his footsteps cautiously circle the jeep.

“Finish me off!” the wounded man was sobbing. “For the love of the goddess, finish me off, you bitches’ bastards!

You’ve broke me back—ah!” That was a cry of savage delight.

There was a strangled noise from the jaygee and then only a soft, deadly thrashing noise from the dark. Hell, Orsino thought bitterly. It was my idea. He snaked out from under the jeep and raced through wet brush.

The two of them were a tangled knot of darkness rolling on the ground. A naked back came uppermost; Orsino fell on it and clawed at its head. He felt a huge beard, took two hand-fulls of it and pulled as hard as he could. There was a wild screech and a flailing of arms. The jaygee broke away and stood up, panting hoarsely. Charles heard a sharp crunch and a snap, and the flailing sweaty figure, beneath him lay still.

“Back to the guns,” the jaygee choked. He swayed, and Orsino took him by the arm.… On the way back to the jeep, they stumbled over something that was certainly a body.

Orsino’s flesh shrank from lying down again in the mud behind his gun, but he did, shivering. He heard the jaygee thud wearily into position. “What did you do to him?” he asked. “Is he dead?”

“Kicked him,” the jaygee choked. “His head snapped back and there was that crack. I guess he’s dead. I never heard of that broken-wing trick before. I guess he wanted to take one more with him. They have a kind of religion.”

The jaygee sounded as though he was teetering on the edge of breakdown. Make him mad, intuition said to Orsino. He might go howling off among the trees unless he snaps out of it.

“It’s a hell of way to run an island,” he said nastily. “You beggars were chased out of North America because you couldn’t run it right and now you can’t even control a lousy little island for more than five miles inland.” He added with deliberate, superior amusement: “Of course, they’ve got witches.”

“Shut your mouth, gangster—I’m warning you.” The note of hysteria was still there. And then the jaygee said dully: “I didn’t mean that. I’m sorry. You did come out and help me after all.”

“Surprised?”

“Yes. Twice. First time when you wanted to go out yourself. I suppose you can’t help being born where you
were. Maybe if you came over to us all the way, the Government would forgive and forget. But no—I suppose not.” He paused, obviously casting about for a change of subject. He still seemed sublimely confident that they’d get back to the naval base with him in charge of the detail.

“What ship did you cross in?”

“Atom sub Taft,” Orsino said. He could have bitten his tongue out.

“Taft? That’s my father’s pigboat! Captain Van Dellen.

How is he? I was going down to the dock when—”

“He’s dead,” Orsino said flatly. “He was caught on deck during an emergency dive.”

The jaygee said nothing for a while and then uttered an unconvincing laugh of disbelief. “You’re lying,” he said.

“His crew’d never let that happen. They’d let the ship be blown to hell before they took her down without the skipper.”

“Grinnel had the con. He ordered the dive and roared down the crew when they wanted to get your father inboard. I’m sorry.”

“Grinnel,” the jaygee whispered. “Grinnel. Yes, I know Commander Grinnel. He’s—he’s a good officer. He must have done it because he had to. Tell me about it, please.”

It was more than Orsino could bear. “Your father was murdered,” he said harshly. “I know because Grinnel put me on radar watch—and I don’t know a God-damned thing about reading a radarscope. He told me to sing out ‘enemy planes’ and I did because I didn’t know what the hell was going on. He used that as an excuse to crash-dive while your father was sleeping on deck. Your good officer murdered him.”

He heard the jaygee sobbing hoarsely. At last he asked Orsino in a dry, choked voice: “Politics?”

“Politics,” Orsino said.

Orsino jumped wildly as the jaygee’s machine gun began to roar a long burst of twenty, but he didn’t fire himself. He
knew that there was no enemy out there in the dark, and that the bullets were aimed only at an absent phantom.

“We’ve got to get to Iceland,” the jaygee said at last, soberly. “It’s our only chance.”

“Iceland?”

“This is one for the C.C. of the Constitutionists. The Central Committee. It’s a breach of the Freiberg Compromise. It means we call the Sociocrats, and if they don’t make full restitution—war.”

“What do you mean, we?”

“You and I. You’re the source of the story; you’re the one who’d be lie-tested.”

You’ve got him, Orsino told himself, but don’t be fool enough to count on it. He’s been light-headed from hunger and no sleep and the shock of his father’s death. You helped him in a death struggle and there’s team spirit working on him. The guy covering my back, how can I fail to trust him, how could I dare not to trust him? But don’t be fool enough to count on it after he’s slept. Meanwhile, push it for all it’s worth.

“What are your plans?” he asked gravely.

“We’ve got to slip out of Ireland by sub or plane,” the jaygee brooded. “We can’t go to the New Portsmouth or Com-Surf organizations; they’re Sociocrat, and Grinnel will have passed the word to the Sociocrats that you’re out of control.”

“What does that mean?”

“Death,” the jaygee said.

XII

Commander Grinnel, after reporting formally, had gone straight to a joint. It wasn’t until midnight that he got The Word, from a friendly O.N.I. lieutenant who had dropped into the house.

“What?” Grinnel roared. “Who is this woman? Where is she? Take me to her at once!”

“Commander!” the lieutenant said aghast. “I just got here!”

“You heard me, mister! At once!”

While Grinnel dressed he demanded particulars. The lieutenant dutifully scoured his memory. “Brought in on some cloak-and-dagger deal, Commander. The kind you usually run. Lieutenant-Commander Jacobi was in Syndic Territory on a recruiting, sabotage and reconnaissance mission and one of the D.A.R. passed the girl on him. A real Syndic member. Priceless. And, as I said, she identified this fellow as Charles Orsino, another Syndic. Why are you so interested, if I may ask?”

The Commander dearly wanted to give him a grim: “You may not,” but didn’t dare. Now was the time to be frank and open. One hint that he had anything to hide or cover up would put his throat to the knife. “The man’s my baby, lieutenant,” he said. “Either your girl’s mistaken or Van Dellen and his polygraph tech and I were taken in by a brand-new technique.” That was nice work, he congratulated himself. Got in Van Dellen and the tech.…

Maybe, come to think of it, the tech wascrooked? No; there was the way Wyman had responded perfectly under scop.

O.N.I.’s building was two stories and an attic, wood-framed, beginning to rot already in the eternal Irish damp.

“We’ve got her on the third floor, Commander,” the lieutenant said. “You get there by a ladder.”

“In God’s name, why?” They walked past the Charge of Quarters, who snapped to a guilty and belated attention, and through the deserted offices of the first and second floors.

“Frankly, we’ve had a little trouble hanging on to her.”

“She runs away?”

“No, nothing like that—not yet, at least. Marine G-2 and Guard Intelligence School have both tried to snatch her from us. First with requisitions, then with muscle. We hope
to keep her until the word gets to Iceland. Then, naturally, we’ll be out in the cold.”

The lieutenant laughed. Grinnel, puffing up the ladder, did not.

The door and lock on Lee Bennet’s quarters were impressive. The lieutenant rapped. “Are you awake, Lee?

There’s an officer here who wants to talk to you.”

“Come in,” she said.

The lieutenant’s hands flew over the lock and the door sprang open. The girl was sitting in the dark.

“I’m Commander Grinnel, my dear,” he said. After eight hours in the joint, he could feel authentically fatherly to her. “If the time isn’t quite convenient—”

“It’s all right,” she said listlessly. “What do you want to know?”

“The man you identify as Orsino—it was quite a shock to me. Commander Van Dellen, who died a hero’s death only days ago accepted him as authentic and so, I must admit, did I. He passed both scop and polygraph.”

“I can’t help that,” she said. “He came right up to me and told me who he was. I recognized him, of course. He’s a polo player. I’ve seen him play on Long Island often enough, the damned snob. He’s not much in the Syndic, but he’s close to F. W. Taylor. Orsino’s an orphan. I don’t know whether Taylor’s actually adopted him or not. I think not.”

“No—possible—mistake?”

“No possible mistake.” She began to tremble. “My God, Commander Whoever-You-Are, do you think I could forget one of those damned sneering faces. Or what those people did to me? Get the lie detector again! Strap me into the lie detector! I insist on it! I won’t be called a liar! Do you hear me? Get the lie detector!”

“Please,” the Commander soothed. “I do believe you, my dear. Nobody could doubt your sincerity. Thank you for helping us, and good night.” He backed out of the room
with the lieutenant. As the door closed he snapped at him:

“Well, mister?”

The lieutenant shrugged. “The lie detector always bears her out. We’ve stopped using it on her. We’re convinced that she’s on our side. Almost deserving of citizenship.”

“Come, now,” the Commander said. “You know better than that.”

Behind the locked door, Lee Bennet had thrown herself on the bed, dry-eyed. She wished she could cry, but tears never came. Not since those three roistering drunkards had demonstrated their virility as males and their immunity as Syndics on her…she couldn’t cry any more.

Charles Orsino—another one of them. She hoped they caught him and killed him, slowly. She knew all this was true. Then why did she feel like a murderess? Why did she think incessantly of suicide? Why, why, why?

* * * *

Dawn came imperceptibly. First Charles could discern the outline of treetops against the sky and then a little of the terrain before him and at last two twisted shadows that slowly became sprawling half-naked bodies. One of them was a woman’s, mangled by fifty-caliber slugs. The other was the body of a bearded giant—the one with whom they had struggled in the dark.

Charles crawled out stiffly. The woman was—had been—a stringy, white haired crone. Some animal’s skull was tied to her pate with sinews as a head-dress, and she was tattooed with blue crescents. The jaygee joined him standing over her and said: “One of their witches. Part of the religion, if you can call it that.”

“A brand-new religion?” Charles asked dubiously. “Made up out of whole cloth?”

“No,” the jaygee said. “I understand it’s an old religion—
pre-Christian. It kept going underground until the Troubles. Then it flared up again all over Europe. A filthy
business. Animal sacrifices every new moon. Human sacrifices twice a year. What can you expect from people like that?”

Charles reminded himself that the jaygee’s fellow-citizens boiled recalcitrant slaves. “I’ll see what I can do about the jeep,” he said.

The jaygee sat down on the wet grass. “What the hell’s the use?” he mumbled wearily. “Even if you get it running again. Even if we get back to the base. They’ll be gunning for you. Maybe they’ll be gunning for me if they killed my father.” He tried to smile. “You got any aces in the hole, gangster?”

“Maybe,” Orsino said slowly. “What do you know about a woman named Lee—Bennet? Works with O.N.I.?”

“Smuggled over here by the D.A.R. A goldmine of information. She’s a little nuts, too. What have you got on her?”

“Does she swing any weight? Is she a citizen?”

“No weight. They’re just using her over at Intelligence to fill out the picture of the Syndic. And she couldn’t be a citizen. A woman has to marry a citizen to be naturalized.

What have you got to do with her, for God’s sake? Did you know her on the other side? She’s death to the Syndic; she can’t do anything for you.”

Charles barely heard him. That had to be it. The trigger on Lee Falcaro’s conditioning had to be the oath of citizenship as it was for his. And it hadn’t been tripped because this pirate gang didn’t particularly want or need women as first-class, all-privileges citizens. A small part of the Government’s cultural complex—but one that could trap Lee Falcaro forever in the shell of her synthetic substitute for a personality. Lie-tests, yes. Scopolamine, yes. But for a woman, no subsequent oath.

“I ran into her in New Portsmouth. She knew me from the other side. She turned me in.…” He knelt at a puddle and
drank thirstily; the water eased hunger cramps a little. “I’ll see what I can do with the jeep.”

He lifted the hood and stole a look at the jaygee. Van Dellen was dropping off to sleep on the wet grass. Charles pried a shear pin from the jeep’s winch, punched out the shear pin that had given way in the transmission and replaced it. It involved some hammering. Cracked block, he thought contemptuously. An officer and he couldn’t tell whether the block was cracked or not. If I ever get out of this we’ll sweep them from the face of the earth—or more likely just get rid of their tom-fool Sociocrats and Constitutionists. The rest are probably all right. Except maybe for those bastards of Guardsmen. A bad lot. Let’s hope they get killed in the fighting.

The small of his back tickled; he reached around to scratch it and felt cold metal.

“Turn slowly or you’ll be spitted like a pig,” a bass voice growled.

He turned slowly. The cold metal now at his chest, was the leaf-shaped blade of a spear. It was wielded by a red-haired, red-bearded, barrel-chested giant whose blue-green eyes were as cold as death.

“Tie that one,” somebody said. Another half-naked man jerked his wrists behind him and lashed them together with cords.

“Hobble his feet.” It was a woman’s voice. A length of cord or sinew was knotted to his ankles with a foot or two of play. He could walk but not run. The giant lowered his spear and stepped aside.

The first thing Charles saw was that Lieutenant (j.g.) Van Dellen of the North American Navy had escaped forever from his doubts and confusions. They had skewered him to the turf while he slept. Charles hoped he had not felt the blow.

The second thing he saw was a supple and coltish girl of perhaps 20 tenderly removing the animal skull from the
head of the slain witch and knotting it to her own red-tressed head. Even to Orsino’s numbed understanding, it was clearly an act of the highest significance. It subtly changed the composition of the six-men group in the little glade. They had been a small mob until she put on the skull, but the moment she did they moved instinctively—
one a step or two, the other merely turning a bit, perhaps—
to orient on her. There was no doubt that she was in charge.

A witch, Orsino thought. “It kept going underground until the Troubles.” “A filthy business—human sacrifices twice a year.”

She approached him and, like the shifting of a kaleidoscope, the group fell into a new pattern of which she was still the focus. Charles thought he had never seen a face so humorlessly conscious of power. The petty ruler of a few barbarians, she carried herself as though she were empress of the universe. Nor did a large gray louse that crawled from her hairline across her forehead and back again affect her in the slightest. She wore a greasy animal hide as though it were royal purple. It added up to either insanity or a limitless pretension to religious authority. And her eyes were not mad.

“You,” she said coldly. “What about the jeep and the guns?

Do they go?”

He laughed suddenly and idiotically at these words from the mouth of a stone-age goddess. A raised spear sobered him instantly. “Yes,” he said.

“Show my men how,” she said, and squatted regally on the turf.

“Please,” he said, “could I have something to eat first?”

She nodded indifferently and one of the men loped off into the brush.

* * * *

His hands untied and his face greasy with venison fat, Charles spent the daylight hours instructing six savages in the nomenclature, maintenance and operation of the jeep and the twin-fifty machine gun.

They absorbed it with utter lack of curiosity. They more or less learned to start and steer and stop the jeep. They more or less learned to load, point and fire the gun.

Through the lessons the girl sat absolutely motionless, first in shadow, then in noon and afternoon sun and then in shadow again. But she had been listening. She said at last:

“You are telling them nothing new now. Is there no more?”

Charles noted that a spear was poised at his ribs. “A great deal more,” he said hastily. “It takes months.”

“They can work them now. What more is there to learn?”

“Well, what to do if something goes wrong.”

She said, as though speaking from vast experience:

“When something goes wrong, you start over again. That is all you can do. When I make death-wine for the spear blades and the death-wine does not kill, it is because something went wrong—a word or a sign or picking a plant at the wrong time. The only thing to do is make the poison again. As you grow in experience you make fewer mistakes.

That is how it will be with my men when they work the jeep and the guns.”

She nodded ever so slightly at one of the men and he took a firmer grip on his spear.

Death swooped low.

“No!” Charles exploded. “You don’t understand! This isn’t like anything you do at all!” He was sweating, even in the late afternoon chill. “You’ve got to have somebody who knows how to repair the jeep and the gun. If they’re busted they’re busted and no amount of starting over again will make them work!”

She nodded and said: “Tie his hands. We’ll take him with us.” Charles was torn between relief and wonder at the way she spoke. He realized that he had never, literally never,
seen any person concede a point in quite that fashion.

There had been no hesitation, there had been no reluctance in the voice, not a flicker of displeasure in the face. Simply, without forcing, she had said: “We’ll take him with us.” It was as though—as though she had re-made the immediate past, un-making her opposition to the idea, nullifying it.

She was a person who was not at war with herself in any respect whatever, a person who knew exactly who she was and what she was—

The girl rose in a single flowing motion, startling after her day spent in immobility. She led the way, flanked by two of the spearmen. The other four followed in the jeep, at a crawl. Last of all came Charles, and nobody had to urge him. In his portable trap his hours would be numbered if he got separated from his captors.

Stick with them, he told himself, stumbling through the brush. Just stay alive and you can outsmart these savages.

He fell, cursed, picked himself up, stumbled on after the growl of the jeep.

Dawn brought them to a collection of mud-and-wattle huts, a corral enclosing a few dozen head of wretched diseased cattle, a few adults and a few children. The girl was still clear-eyed and supple in her movements. Her spearmen yawned and stretched stiffly. Charles was a walking dead man, battered by countless trees and stumbles on the long trek. With red and swollen eyes he watched while half-naked brats swarmed over the jeep and grownups made obeisances to the girl—all but one.

This was an evil-faced harridan who said to her with cool insolence: “I see you claim the power of the goddess now, my dear. Has something happened to my sister?”

“The guns killed a certain person. I put on the skull. You know what I am; do not say ‘claim to be.’ I warn you once.”

“Liar!” shrieked the harridan. “You killed her and stole the skull! St. Patrick and St. Bridget shrivel your guts!

Abaddon and Lucifer pierce your eyes!”

An arena formed about them as the girl said coldly: “I warn you the second time.”

The harridan made signs with her fingers, glaring at her; there was a moan from the watchers; some turned aside and a half-grown girl fainted dead away.

The girl with the skull on her pate said, as though speaking from a million years and a million miles away:

“This is the third warning; there are no more. Now the worm is in your backbone gnawing. Now the maggots are at your eyes, devouring them. Your bowels turn to water; your heart pounds like the heart of a bird; soon it will not beat at all.” As the eerie, space-filling whisper drilled on the watchers broke and ran, holding their hands over their ears, white-faced, but the harridan stood as if rooted to the earth. Charles listened dully as the curse was droned, nor was he surprised when the harridan fell, blasted by it.

Another sorceress, aided it is true by pentothal, had months ago done the same to him.

The people trickled back, muttering and abject.

Just stay alive and you can outsmart these savages, he repeated ironically to himself. It had dawned on him that these savages lived by an obscure and complicated code harder to master than the intricacies of the Syndic or the Government.

A kick roused him to his feet. One of the spearmen grunted: “I’m putting you with Kennedy.”

“All right,” Charles groaned. “You take these cords off me?”

“Later.” He prodded Charles to a minute, ugly block house of logs from which came smoke and an irregular metallic clanging. He cut the cords, rolled great boulders away from a crawl-hole and shoved him through.

The place was about six by nine feet, hemmed in by ten-inch logs. The light was very bad and the smell was too. A few loopholes let in some air. There was a latrine pit and an
open stone hearth and a naked brown man with wild hair and a beard.

Rubbing his wrists, Charles asked uncertainly: “Are you Kennedy?”

The man looked up and croaked: “Are you from the Government?”

“Yes,” Charles said, hope rekindling. “Thank God they put us together. There’s a jeep. Also a twin-fifty. If we play this right the two of us can bust out—”

He stopped, disconcerted. Kennedy had turned to the hearth and the small, fierce fire glowing on it and began to pound a red-hot lump of metal. There were spear heads and arrow heads about in various stages of completion, as well as files and a hone.

“What’s the matter?” he demanded. “Aren’t you interested?”

“Of course I’m interested,” Kennedy said. “But we’ve got to begin at the beginning. You’re too general.” His voice was mild, but reproving.

“You’re right,” Charles said. “I guess you’ve made a try or two yourself. But now that there are two of us, what do you suggest? Can you drive a jeep? Can you fire a twin-fifty?”

The man poked the lump of metal into the heart of the fire again, picked up a black-scaled spear head and began to file an edge into it. “Let’s get down to essentials,” he suggested apologetically. “What is escape? Getting from an undesirable place to a desirable place, opposing and neutralizing things or persons adverse to the change of state in the process. But I’m not being specific, am I? Let’s say, then, escape is getting us from a relatively undesirable place to a relatively desirable place, opposing and neutralizing the aborigines.” He put aside the file and reached for the hone, sleeking it along the bright metal ribbon of the new edge. He looked up with a pleased smile and asked: “How’s that for a plan?”

“Fine,” Charles muttered. Kennedy beamed proudly as he repeated: “Fine, fine,” and sank to the ground, born down by the almost physical weight of his depression. His hoped-for ally was stark mad.

XIII

Kennedy turned out to have been an armorer-artificer of the North American Navy, captured two years ago while deer-hunting too far from the logging-camp road to New Portsmouth. Fed on scraps of gristle, isolated from his kind, beaten when he failed to make his daily task of spear heads and arrow points, he had shyly retreated into beautifully interminable labyrinths of abstraction. Now and then, Charles Orsino got a word or two of sense from him before the rosy clouds closed in. When attempted conversation with the lunatic palled, Charles could watch the aborigines through chinks in the palisade. There were about fifty of them. There would have been more if they hadn’t been given to infanticide—for what reason, Charles could not guess.

He had been there a week when the boulders were rolled away one morning and he was roughly called out. He said to Kennedy before stooping to crawl through the hole:

“Take it easy, friend. I’ll be back, I hope.”

Kennedy looked up with a puzzled smile: “That’s such a general statement, Charles. Exactly what are you implying

—”

The witch girl was there, flanked by spearmen. She said abruptly: “I have been listening to you. Why are you untrue to your brothers?”

He gawked. The only thing that seemed to fit was: “That’s such a general statement,” but he didn’t say it.

“Answer,” one of the spearmen growled.

“I—I don’t understand. I have no brothers.”

“Your brothers in Portsmouth, on the sea. Whatever you call them, they are your brothers, all children of the mother
called Government. Why are you untrue to them?”

He began to understand. “They aren’t my brothers. I’m not a child of the government. I’m a child of another mother far away, called Syndic.”

She looked puzzled—and almost human—for an instant.

Then the visor dropped over her face again as she said:

“That is true. Now you must teach a certain person the jeep and the guns. Teach her well. See that she gets her hands on the metal and into the grease.” To a spearman she said:

“Bring Martha.”

The spearman brought Martha, who was trying not to cry.

She was a half-naked child of ten!

The witch girl abruptly left them. Her guards took Martha and bewildered Charles to the edge of the village where the jeep and its mounted guns stood behind a silly little museum exhibit rope of vine. Feathers and bones were knotted into the vine. The spearmen treated it as though it were a high-tension transmission line.

“You break it,” one of them said to Charles. He did, and the spearmen sighed with relief. Martha stopped scowling and stared.

The spearman said to Charles: “Go ahead and teach her.

The firing pins are out of the guns, and if you try to start the jeep you get a spear through you. Now teach her.” He and the rest squatted on the turf around the jeep. The little girl shied violently as he took her hand, and tried to run away. One of the spearmen slung her back into the circle.

She brushed against the jeep and froze, white-faced.

“Martha,” Charles said patiently, “there’s nothing to be afraid of. The guns won’t go off and the jeep won’t move.

I’ll teach you how to work them so you can kill everybody you don’t like with the guns and go faster than a deer in the jeep—”

He was talking into empty air as far as the child was concerned. She was muttering, staring at the arm that had brushed the jeep: “That did it, I guess. There goes the
power. May the goddess blast her—no. The power’s out of me now. I felt it go.” She looked up at Charles, quite calmly, and said: “Go on. Show me all about it. Do a good job.”

“Martha, what are you talking about?”

“She was afraid of me, my sister, so she’s robbing me of the power. Don’t you know? I guess not. The goddess hates iron and machines. I had the power of the goddess in me, but it’s gone now; I felt it go. Now nobody’ll be afraid of me any more.” Her face contorted and she said: “Show me how you work the guns.”

* * * *

He taught her what he could while the circle of spearmen looked on and grinned, cracking raw jokes about the child as anybody anywhere, would about a tyrant deposed. She pretended to ignore them, grimly repeating names after him and imitating his practiced movements in loading drill.

She was very bright, Charles realized. When he got a chance he muttered, “I’m sorry about this, Martha. It isn’t my idea.”

She whispered bleakly: “I know. I liked you. I was sorry when the other outsider took your dinner.” She began to sob uncontrollably. “I’ll never see anything again! Nobody’ll ever be afraid of me again!” She buried her face against Charles’ shoulder.

He smoothed her tangled hair mechanically and said to the watching, grinning circle: “Look, hasn’t this gone far enough? Haven’t you got what you wanted?”

The headman stretched and spat. “Guess so,” he said.

“Come on, girl.” He yanked Martha from the seat and booted her toward the huts.

Charles scrambled down just ahead of a spear. He let himself be led back to the smithy block house and shoved through the crawl hole.

“I was thinking about what you said the other day,”

Kennedy beamed, rasping a file over an arrowhead. “When

I said that to change one molecule in the past you’d have to change every molecule in the past, and you said, ‘Maybe so.’ I’ve figured that what you were driving at was—”

“Kennedy,” Charles said, “please shut up just this once.

I’ve got to think.”

“In what sense do you mean that, Charles? Do you mean that you’re a rational animal and therefore that your being rather than essenseis—”

“Shut up or I’ll pick up a rock and bust your head in with it!” Charles roared. He more than half meant it. Kennedy hunched down before his hearth looking offended and scared. Charles squatted with his head in his hands.

I have been listening to you.

Repeated drives of the Government to wipe out the aborigines. Drives that never succeeded.

I’ll never see anything again.

The way the witch girl had blasted her rival—but that was suggestion. But—

I have been listening to you. Why are you untrue to your brothers?

He’d said nothing like that to anybody, not to her or poor Kennedy.

He thought vaguely of psi force, a fragment in his memory. An old superstition, like the id-ego-superego triad of the sick-minded psychologists. Like vectors of the mind, exploded nonsense. But—

I have been listening to you. Why are you untrue to your brothers?

Charles smacked one fist against the sand floor in impotent rage. He was going as crazy as Kennedy. Did the witch girl—and Martha—have hereditary psi power? He mocked himself savagely: that’s such ageneral question!

Neurotic adolescent girls in kerosene-lit farmhouses, he thought vaguely. Things that go bump—and crash and blooie and whoo-oo-oo! in the night. Not in electric lit city apartments. Not around fleshed-up middle-aged men and
women. You take a hyperthyroid virgin, isolate her from power machinery and electric fields, put on the pressures that make her feel alone and tense to the bursting point—
and naturally enough, something bursts. A chamberpot sails from under the bed and shatters on the skull of stepfather-tyrant.

The
wide-gilt-framed
portrait
of
thundergod-grandfather falls with a crash. Sure, the nail crystallized and broke—who crystallized it?

Neurotic adolescent girls speaking in tongues, reading face-down cards and closed books, screaming aloud when sister or mother dies in a railroad wreck fifty miles away, of cancer a hundred miles away, in a bombing overseas.

Sometimes they made saints of them. Sometimes they burned them. Burned them and then made saints of them.

A blood-raw hunk of venison came sailing through one of the loopholes and flopped on the sand.

I was sorry when the other outsider took your dinner.

Three days ago he’d dozed off while Kennedy broiled the meat over the hearth. When he woke, Kennedy had gobbled it all and was whimpering with apprehension. But he’d done nothing and said nothing; the man wasn’t responsible.

He’d said nothing, and yet somehow the child knew about it.

His days were numbered; soon enough the jeep would be out of gas and the guns would be out of ammo or an unreplaceable part lost or broken. Then, according to the serene logic that ruled the witch girl, he’d be surplus.

But there was a key to it somehow.

He got up and slapped Kennedy’s hand away from the venison. “Naughty,” he said, and divided it equally with a broad spearblade.

“Naughty,” Kennedy said morosely. “The naught-class, the null-class. I’m the null-class. I plus the universe equal one, the universe-class. If you could transpose—but you can’t transpose.” Silently they toasted their venison over the fire.

* * * *

It was a moonless night with one great planet, Jupiter he supposed, reigning over the star-powdered sky. Kennedy slept muttering feebly in a corner. The hearthfire was out.

It had to be out by dark. The spearmen took no chance of their trying to burn down the place. The village had long since gone to sleep, campfires doused, skin flaps pulled to across the door holes. From the corral one of the spavined, tick-ridden cows mooed uneasily and then fell silent.

* * * *

Charles then began the hardest job of his life. He tried to think, straight and uninterrupted, of Martha, the little girl.

Some of the things that interrupted him were: The remembered smell of fried onions; they didn’t have onions here;

Salt;

I wonder how the old 101st Precinct’s getting along; That fellow who wanted to get married on a hundred dollars;

Lee Falcaro, damn her!

This, is damn foolishness; it can’t possibly work; Poor old Kennedy;

I’ll starve before I eat another mouthful of that greasy deer-meat;

The Van Dellen kid, I wonder if I could have saved him; Reiner’s right; we’ve got to clean up the Government and then try to civilize these people;

There must be something wrong with my head, I can’t seem to concentrate;

That terrific third-chukker play in the Finals, my picture all over town;

Would Uncle Frank laugh at this?

It was hopeless. He sat bolt upright, his eyes squeezed tensely together, trying to visualize the child and call her and it couldn’t be done. Skittering images of her zipped
through his mind, only to be shoved aside. It was damn foolishness, anyway.…

He unkinked himself, stretched and lay down on the sand floor thinking bitterly: why try? You’ll be dead in a few days or a few weeks; kiss the world good-bye. Back in Syndic Territory, fat, sloppy, happy Syndic Territory, did they know how good they had it? He wished he could tell them to cling to their good life. But Uncle Frank said it didn’t do any good to cling; it was a matter of tension and relaxation.

When you stiffen up a way of life and try to fossilize it so it’ll stay that way forever, then you find you’ve lost it.

Little Martha wouldn’t understand it. Magic, ritual, the power of the goddess, fear of iron, fear of the jeep’s vine enclosure—cursed, no doubt—what went on in such a mind? Could she throw things like a poltergeist-girl? They didn’t have ‘em any more; maybe it had something to do with electric fields or even iron. Or were they all phonies?

An upset adolescent girl is a hell of a lot likelier to fake phenomena that produce them. Little Martha hadn’t been faking her despair, though. The witch-girl—her sister, wasn’t she?—didn’t fake her icy calm and power. Martha’d be better off without such stuff—

“Charles,” a whisper said.

He muttered stupidly: “My God. She heard me,” and crept to the palisade. Through a chink between the logs she was just visible in the starlight.

She whispered: “I thought I wasn’t going to see anything or hear anything ever again but I sat up and I heard you calling and you said you wanted to help me if I’d help you so I came as fast as I could without waking anybody up—
you did call me, didn’t you?”

“Yes, I did. Martha, do you want to get out of here? Go far away with me?”

“You bet I do. She’s going to take the power of the goddess out of me and marry me to Dinny, he stinks like a goat and he has a cockeye, and then she’ll kill all our
babies. Just tell me what to do and I’ll do it.” She sounded very grim and decided.

“Can you roll the boulders away from the hole there?” He was thinking vaguely of teleportation; each boulder was a two-man job.

She said no.

He snarled: “Then why did you bother to come here?”

“Don’t talk like that to me,” the child said sharply—and he remembered what she thought she was.

“Sorry,” he said.

“What I came about,” she said calmly, “was the ex-plosion.

Can you make an ex-plosion like you said? Back there at the jeep?”

What in God’s name was she talking about?

“Back there,” she said with exaggerated patience, “you was thinking about putting all the cartridges together and blowing up the whole damn shebang. Remember?”

He did, vaguely. One of a hundred schemes that had drifted through his head.

“I’d sure like to see that ex-plosion,” she said. “The way she got things figured, I’d almost just as soon get exploded myself as not.”

“I might blow up the logs here and get out,” he said slowly. “I think you’d be a mighty handy person to have along, too. Can you get me about a hundred of the machine gun cartridges?”

“They’ll miss ‘em.”

“Sneak me a few at a time. I’ll empty them, put them together again and you sneak them back.”

She said, slow and troubled: “She set the power of the goddess to guard them.”

“Listen to me, Martha,” he said. “I mean listen. You’ll be doing it for me and they told me the power of the goddess doesn’t work on outsiders. Isn’t that right?”

There was a long pause, and she said at last with a sigh:

“I sure wish I could see your eyes, Charles. I’ll try it, but

I’m damned if I would if Dinny didn’t stink so bad.” She slipped away and Charles tried to follow her with his mind through the darkness, to the silly little rope of vine with the feathers and bones knotted in it—but he couldn’t. Too tense again.

Kennedy stirred and muttered complainingly as an icy small breeze cut through the chinks of the palisade, whispering.

His eyes, tuned to the starlight, picked up Martha bent almost double, creeping toward the smithy-prison. She wore a belt of fifty-caliber cartridges around her neck like a stole. Looked like about a dozen of them. He hastily scooped out a bowl of clean sand and whispered: “Any trouble?”

He couldn’t see the grin on her face, but knew it was there. “It was easy,” she bragged. “One bad minute and then I checked with you and it was okay.”

“Good kid. Pull the cartridges out of the links the way I showed you and pass them through.”

She did. It was a tight squeeze.

He fingered one of the cartridges. The bullet fitted nicely into the socket of an arrowhead. He jammed the bullet in and wrenched at the arrowhead with thumb and forefinger

—all he could get onto it. The brass neck began to spread.

He dumped the powder into his little basin in the sand and reseated the bullet.

Charles shifted hands on the second cartridge. On the third he realized that he could put the point of the bullet on a hearth-stone and press on the neck with both thumbs. It went faster then; in perhaps an hour he was passing the re-assembled cartridges back through the palisade.

“Time for another load?” he asked.

“Nope,” the girl said. “Tomorrow night.”

“Good kid.”

She giggled. “It’s going to be a hell of a big bang, ain’t it, Charles?”

XIV

“Leave the fire alone,” Charles said sharply to Kennedy.

The little man was going to douse it for the night.

There was a flash of terrified sense: “They beat you. If the fire’s on after dark they beat you. Fire and dark are equal and opposite.” He began to smile. “Fire is the negative of dark. You just change the sign, in effect rotate it through 180 degrees. But to rotate it through 180 degrees you have to first rotate it through one degree. And to rotate it through one degree you first have to rotate it through half a degree.” He was beaming now, having forgotten all about the fire. Charles banked it with utmost care, heaping a couple of flat stones for a chimney that would preserve the life of one glowing coal invisibly.

He stretched out on the sand, one hand on the little heap beneath which five pounds of smokeless powder was buried. Kennedy continued to drone out his power-series happily.

Through the chinks in the palisade a man’s profile showed against the twilight. “Shut up,” he said.

Kennedy shivering, rolled over and muttered to himself.

The spearman laughed and went on.

Charles hardly saw him. His whole mind was concentrated on the spark beneath the improvised chimney.

He had left such a spark seven nights running. Only twice had it lived more than an hour. Tonight—tonight, it had to last. Tonight was the last night of the witch-girl’s monthly courses, and during them she lost—or thought she lost, which was the same thing—the power of the goddess.

Primitive aborigines, he jeered silently at himself. A life time wasn’t long enough to learn the intricacies of their culture—as occasional executions among them for violating magical law proved to the hilt. His first crude notion—
blowing the palisade apart and running like hell—was replaced by a complex escape plan hammered out in detail between him and Martha.

Martha assured him that the witch girl could track him through the dark by the power of the goddess except for four days a month—and he believed it. Martha herself laid a matter-of-fact claim to keener second sight than her sister because of her virginity. With Martha to guide him through the night and the witch-girl’s power disabled, they’d get a day’s head start. His hand strayed to a pebble under which jerked venison was hidden and ready.

“But Martha. Are you sure you’re not—not kidding yourself? Are you sure?”

He felt her grin on the other side of the palisade. “You’re sure wishing Uncle Frank was here so you could ask him about it, don’t you, Charles?”

He sure was. He wiped his brow, suddenly clammy.

Kennedy couldn’t come along. One, he wasn’t responsible.

Two, he might have to be Charles’ cover-story. They weren’t too dissimilar in build, age, or coloring. Charles had a beard by now that sufficiently obscured his features, and two years absence should have softened recollections of Kennedy. Interrogated, Charles could take refuge in an imitation of Kennedy’s lunacy.

“Charles, the one thing I don’t get is this Lee dame. She got a spell on her? You don’t want to mess with that.”

“Listen, Martha, we’ve got to mess with her. It isn’t a spell

—exactly. Anyway I know how to take it off and then she’ll be on our side.”

“Can I set off the explosion? If you let me set off the explosion, I’ll quit my bitching.”

“We’ll see,” he said.

She chuckled very faintly in the dark. “Okay,” she told him. “If I can’t, I can’t.”

He thought of being married to a woman who could spot your smallest lie or reservation, and shuddered.

Kennedy was snoring by now and twilight was deepening into blackness. There was a quarter-moon, obscured by over-cast. He hitched along the sand and peered through a
chink at a tiny noise. It was the small scuffling feet of a woods-rat racing through the grass from one morsel of food to the next. It never reached it. There was a soft rush of wings as a great dark owl plummeted to earth and struck talons into the brown fur. The rat squealed its life away while the owl lofted silently to a tree branch where it stood on one leg, swaying drunkenly and staring with huge yellow eyes.

As sudden as that, it’ll be, Charles thought abruptly weighted with despair. A half-crazy kid and yours truly trying to outsmart and out-Tarzan these wild men. If only the little dope would let me take the jeep! But the jeep was out. She rationalized her retention of the power even after handling iron by persuading herself that she was only acting for Charles; there was some obscure precedent in a long, memorized poem which served her as a text-book of magic. But riding in the jeep wasout.

By now she should be stringing magic vines across some of the huts and trails. “They’ll see ‘em when they get torches and it’ll scare ‘em. Of course I don’t know how to do it right, but they don’t know that. It’ll slow ‘em down. If she comes out of her house—and maybe she won’t—she’ll know they don’t matter and send the men after us. But we’ll be on our way. Charles, you sure I can’t set off the explosion? Yeah, I guess you are. Maybe I can set off one when we get to New Portsmouth?”

“If I can possibly arrange it.”

She sighed: “I guess that’ll have to do.”

It was too silent; he couldn’t bear it. With feverish haste he uncovered the caches of powder and meat. Under the sand was a fat clayey soil. He dug up hands-full of it, wet it with the only liquid available and worked it into paste. He felt his way to the logs decided on for blasting, dug out a hole at their bases in the clay. After five careful trips from the powder cache to the hole, the mine was filled. He covered it with clay and laid on a roof of flat stones from
the hearth. The spark of fire still glowed, and he nursed it with twigs.

She was there, whispering: “Charles?”

“Right here. Everything set?”

“All set. Let’s have that explosion.”

He took the remaining powder and with minute care, laid a train across the stockade to the mine. He crouched into a ball and flipped a burning twig onto the black line that crossed the white sand floor.

The blast seemed to wake up the world. Kennedy charged out of sleep, screaming, and a million birds woke with a squawk. Charles was conscious more of the choking reek than the noise as he scooped up the jerked venison and rushed through the ragged gap in the wall. A hand caught his—a small hand.

“You’re groggy,” Martha’s voice said, sounding far away.

“Come on—fast. Man, that was a great ex-plosion!”

She towed him through the woods and underbrush—fast.

As long as he hung on to her he didn’t stumble or run into a tree once. Irrationally embarrassed by his dependence on a child, he tried letting go for a short time—very short—and was quickly battered into changing his mind. He thought dizzily of the spearmen trying to follow through the dark and could almost laugh again.

* * * *

Their trek to the coast was marked by desperate speed.

For twenty-four hours, they stopped only to gnaw at their rations or snatch a drink at a stream. Charles kept moving because it was unendurable to let a ten-year-old girl exceed him in stamina. Both of them paid terribly for the murderous pace they kept. The child’s face became skull-like and her eyes red; her lips dried and cracked. He gasped at her as they pulled their way up a bramble-covered 45-degree slope: “How do you do it? Isn’t this ever going to end?”

“Ends soon,” she croaked at him. “You know we dodged

‘em three times?”

He could only shake his head.

She stared at him with burning red eyes. “This ain’t hard,” she croaked. “You do this with a gut-full of poison, that’s hard.”

“Did you?”

She grinned crookedly and chanted something he did not understand:

“Nine moons times thirteen is the daughter’s age When she drinks the death-cup.

Three leagues times three she must race and rage Down hills and up—”

She added matter-of-factly: “Last year. Prove I have the power of the goddess. Run, climb, with your guts falling out. This year, starve for a week and run down a deer of seven points.”

He had lost track of days and nights when they stood on the brow of a hill at dawn and looked over the sea. The girl gasped: “’Sall right now.She wouldn’t let them go on. She’s a bitch, but she’s no fool.” The child fell in her tracks.

Charles, too tired for panic, slept too.

* * * *

Charles woke with a wonderful smell in his nostrils. He followed it hungrily down the reverse slope of the hill to a grotto.

Martha was crouched over a fire on which rocks were heating. Beside it was a bark pot smeared with clay. As he watched, she lifted a red-hot rock with two green sticks and rolled it into the pot. It boiled up and continued to boil for an astonishing number of minutes. That was the source of the smell.

“Breakfast?” he asked unbelievingly.

“Rabbit stew,” she said. “Plenty of runways, plenty of bark, plenty of green branches. I made snares. Two tough
old bucks cooking in there for an hour.”

They chewed the meat from the bones in silence. She said at last: “We can’t settle down here. Too near to the coast.

And if we move further inland, there’s her. And others. I been thinking.” She spat a string of tough meat out.

“There’s England. Work our way around the coast. Make a raft or steal a canoe and cross the water. Then we could settle down. You can’t have me for three times thirteen moons yet or I’d lose the power. But I guess we can wait. I heard about England and the English. They have no hearts left. We can take as many slaves as we want. They cry a lot but they don’t fight. And none of their women has the power.” She looked up anxiously. “You wouldn’t want one of their women, would you? Not if you could have somebody with the power just by waiting for her?”

He looked down the hill and said slowly: “You know that’s not what I had in mind, Martha. I have my own place with people far away. I want to get back there. I thought—I thought you’d like it too.” Her face twisted. He couldn’t bear to go on, not in words. “Look into my mind, Martha,”

he said. “Maybe you’ll see what it means to me.”

She stared long and deep. At last she rose, her face inscrutable, and spat into the fire. “Think I saved you for that?” she asked. “And forher? Not me. Save yourself from now on, mister. I’m going to beat my way south around the coast. England for me, and I don’t want any part of you.”

She strode off down the hill, gaunt and ragged, but with arrogance in her swinging, space-eating gait. Charles sat looking after her, stupefied, until she had melted into the underbrush. “Think I saved you for that? And for her?”

She’d made some kind of mistake. He got up stiffly and ran after her, but he could not pick up an inch of her woods-wise trail. Charles slowly climbed to the grotto again and sat in its shelter.

He spent the morning trying to concoct simple springs out of bark strips and whippy branches. He got nowhere. The
branches broke or wouldn’t bend far enough. The bark shredded, or wouldn’t hold a knot. Without metal, he couldn’t shape the trigger to fit the bow so that it would be both sensitive and reliable.

At noon he drank enormously from a spring and looked morosely for plants that might be edible. He decided on something with a bulbous, onion-like root. For a couple of hours after that he propped rocks on sticks here and there.

When he stepped back and surveyed them, he decided that any rabbit he caught with them would be, even for a rabbit, feeble-minded. He could think of nothing else to do.

First he felt a slight intestinal qualm and then a far from slight nausea. Then the root he had eaten took over with drastic thoroughness. He collapsed, retching, and only after the first spasms had passed was he able to crawl to the grotto. The shelter it offered was mostly psychological, but he had need of that. Under the ancient, mossy stones, he raved with delirium until dark.

Sometimes he was back in Syndic Territory, Charles Orsino of the two-goal handicap and the flashing smile.

Sometimes he was back in the stinking blockhouse with Kennedy spinning interminable, excruciatingly boring strands of iridescent logic. Sometimes he was back in the psychology laboratory with the pendulum beating, the light blinking, the bell ringing and sense-impressions flooding him and drowning him with lies. Sometimes he raced in panic down the streets of New Portsmouth with sweatered Guardsmen pounding after him, their knives flashing fire.

But at last he was in the grotto again, with Martha sponging his head and cursing him in a low, fluent undertone for being seven times seven kinds of fool.

She said tartly as recognition came into his eyes: “Yes, for the fifth time, I’m back. I should be making my way to England and a band of my own, but I’m back and I don’t know why. I heard you in pain and I thought it served you
right for not knowing deathroot when you see it, but I turned around and came back.”

“Don’t go,” he said hoarsely.

She held a bark cup to his lips and made him choke down some nauseating brew. “Don’t worry,” she told him bitterly.

“I won’t go. I’ll do everything you want, which shows that I’m as big a fool as you are, or bigger because I know better. I’ll help you find her and take the spell off her. And may the goddess help me because I can’t help myself.”

* * * *

“…things like sawed tree-trunks, shells you call them…a pile of them…he looks at them and he thinks they’re going bad and they ought to be used soon…under a wooden roof they are…a thin man with death on his face and hate in his heart…he wears blue and gold…he sticks the gold, you call a coat’s wrist the cuff, he sticks the cuff under the nose of a fellow and yells his hate out and the fellow feels ready to strangle on blood…it’s about a boat that sank…this fellow, he’s a fat little man and he kills and kills, he’d kill the man if he could.…”

A picket boat steamed by the coast twice a day, north after dawn and south before sunset. They had to watch out for it; it swept the coast with powerful glasses.

“…it’s the man with the bellyache again but now he’s sleepy…he’s cursing the skipper…sure there’s nothing on the coast to trouble us…eight good men aboard and that one bastard of a skipper.…”

Sometimes it jumped erratically, like an optical lever disturbed by the weight of a hair.

“…board over the door painted with a circle, a zig-zag on its side, an up-and-down line…they call it office of intelligent navels…the lumber camp…machine goes chug-rip, chug-rip…and the place where they cut metal like wood on machines that spin around…a deathly-sick little fellow loaded down and chained…fell on his face, he can’t get up,
his bowels are water, his muscles are stiff, like dry branches and he’s afraid…they curse him, they beat him, they take him to a machine that spins…they…they—they—”

She sat bolt upright, screaming. Her eyes didn’t see Charles. He drew back one hand and slammed it across her cheek in a slap that reverberated like a pistol shot. Her head rocked to the blow and her eyes snapped back from infinity-focus.

She never told Charles what they had done to the sick slave in the machine shop, and he never asked her.

Without writing equipment, for crutches, Charles doubted profoundly that he’d be able to hang onto any of the material she supplied. He surprised himself; his memory developed with exercise.

The shadowy ranks of the New Portsmouth personnel became solider daily in his mind; the chronically-fatigued ordnance-man whose mainspring was to get by with the smallest possible effort; the sex-obsessed little man in Intelligence who lived only for the brothels where he selected older women—women who looked like his mother; the human weasel in BuShips who was impotent in bed and a lacerating tyrant in the office; the admiral who knew he was dying and hated his juniors proportionately to their youth and health.

And—

“…this woman of yours…she ain’t at home there…she ain’t at…at home…anywhere.…the fat man, the one that kills, he’s talking to her but she isn’t…yes she is…no she isn’t—she’s answering him, talking about over-the-sea.…”

“Lee Falcaro,” Charles whispered. “Lee Bennet.”

The trance-frozen face didn’t change; the eerie whisper went on without interruption: “…Lee Bennet on her lips, Lee Falcaro down deep in her guts…and the face of Charles Orsino down there too.…”

An unexpected pang went through him.

He sorted and classified endlessly what he had learned.

He formed and rejected a dozen plans. At last there was one he could not reject.

XV

Commander Grinnel was officer of the day, and sore as a boil about it. O.N.I. wasn’t supposed to catch the duty. You risked your life on cloak-and-dagger missions; let the shore-bound fancy dans do the drudgery. But there he was, nevertheless, in the guard house office with a .45 on his hip, the interminable night stretching before him, and the ten-man main guard snoring away outside.

He eased his bad military conscience by reflecting that there wasn’t anything to guard, that patrolling the shore establishment was just worn out tradition. The ships and boats had their own watch. At the very furthest stretch of the imagination, a tarzan might sneak into town and try to steal some ammo. Well, if he got caught he got caught. And if he didn’t, who’d know the difference with the accounting as sloppy as it was here? They did things differently in Iceland.

* * * *

They crept through the midnight dark of New Portsmouth’s outskirts. As before, she led with her small hand. Lights flared on a wharf where, perhaps, a boat was being serviced. A slave screamed somewhere under the lash or worse.

“Here’s the doss house,” Martha whispered. It was smack between paydays—part of the plan—and the house was dark except for the hopefully-lit parlor. They ducked down the alley that skirted it and around the back of Bachelor Officer Quarters. The sentry, if he were going his rounds at all, would be at the other end of his post when they passed

—part of the plan.

Lee Falcaro was quartered alone in a locked room of the O.N.I. building. Martha had, from seventy miles away,
frequently watched the lock being opened and closed.

They dove under the building’s crumbling porch two minutes before a late crowd of drinkers roared down the street and emerged when they were safely gone. There was a charge of quarters, a little yeoman, snoozing under a dim light in the O.N.I. building’s lobby.

“Anybody else?” Charles whispered edgily.

“No. Just her. She’s asleep. Dreaming about—never mind.

Come on Charles. He’s out.”

The little yeoman didn’t stir as they passed him and crept up the stairs. Lee Falcaro’s room was part of the third-floor attic, finished off specially. You reached it by a ladder from a second-floor one-man office.

The lock was an eight-button piccolo—very rare in New Portsmouth and presumably loot from the mainland.

Charles’ fingers flew over it: 1-7-5-4-, 2-2-7-3-, 8-2-6-6- and it flipped open silently.

But the door squeaked.

“She’s waking up!” Martha hissed in the dark. “She’ll yell!”

Charles reached the bed in two strides and clamped his hand over Lee Falcaro-Bennet’s mouth. Only a feeble

“mmm!” came out, but the girl thrashed violently in his grip.

“Shut up, lady!” Martha whispered. “Nobody’s going to rape you.”

There was an astonished “mmm?” and she subsided, trembling.

“Go ahead,” Martha told him. “She won’t yell.”

He took his hand away nervously. “We’ve come to administer the oath of citizenship,” he said.

The girl answered in the querulous voice that was hardly hers: “You picked a strange time for it. Who are you?

What’s all the whispering for?”

He improvised. “I’m Commander Lister. Just in from Iceland aboard atom sub Taft. They didn’t tell you in case it
got turned down, but I was sent for authorization to give you citizenship. You know how unusual it is for a woman.”

“Who’s this child? And why did you get me up in the dead of night?”

He dipped deeply into Martha’s probings of the past week. “Citizenship’ll make the Guard Intelligence gang think twice before they try to grab you again. Naturally they’d try to block us if we administered the oath in public.

Ready?”

“Dramatic,” she sneered. “Oh, I suppose so. Get it over with.”

“Do you, Lee Bennet, solemnly renounce all allegiances previously held by you and pledge your allegiance to the North American Government?”

“I do,” she said.

There was a choked little cry from Martha. “Hell’s fire,”

she said. “Like breaking a leg!”

“What are you talking about, little girl?” Lee asked, coldly alert.

“It’s all right,” Charles said wearily. “Don’t you know my voice? I’m Orsino. You turned me in back there because they don’t give, citizenship to women and so your de-conditioning didn’t get triggered off. I managed to break for the woods. A bunch of natives got me. I busted loose with the help of Martha here. Among her other talents, the kid’s a mind reader. I remember the triggering shocked me out of a year’s growth; how do you feel?”

Lee was silent, but Martha answered in a voice half puzzled and half contemptuous: “She feels fine, but she’s crying.”

“Am not,” Lee Falcaro gulped.

Charles turned from her, embarrassed. In a voice that strove to be normal, he whispered to Martha: “What about the boat?”

“Still there,” she said.

Lee Falcaro said tremulously: “Wh-wh-what boat?”

“Martha’s staked out a reactor-driven patrol speedboat at a wharf. One guard aboard. She—watched it in operation and I have some small-boat time. I really think we can grab it. If we get a good head-start, they don’t have anything based here that’ll catch up with it. If we get a break on the weather, their planes won’t be able to pick us up.”

Lee Falcaro stood up, dashing tears from her eyes. “Then let’s go,” she said evenly.

“How’s the C.Q.—that man downstairs, Martha?”

“Still sleepin’. The way’s as clear now as it’ll ever be.”

They closed the door behind them and Charles worked the lock. The Charge of Quarters looked as though he couldn’t be roused by anything less than an earthquake as they passed—but Martha stumbled on one of the rotting steps after they were outside the building.

“Patrick and Bridget rot my clumsy feet off!” she whispered. “He’s awake.”

“Under the porch,” Charles said. They crawled into the dank space between porch floor and ground. Martha kept up a scarcely-audible volleyfire of maledictions aimed at herself.

When they stopped abruptly Charles knew it was bad.

Martha held up her hand for silence, and Charles imagined in the dark that he could see the strained and eerie look of her face. After a pause she whispered: “He’s using the—what do you call it? You talk and somebody hears you far away? A prowler he says to them. A wild man from the woods. The bitches bastard must have seen you in your handsome suit of skin and dirt, Charles. Oh, we’re for it! May my toe that stumbled grow the size of a boulder!

May my cursed eyes that didn’t see the step fall out!”

They huddled down in the darkness and Charles took Lee Falcaro’s hand reassuringly. It was cold. A moment later his other hand was taken, with grim possessiveness, by the child.

Martha whispered: “The fat little man. The man who kills, Charles.”

He nodded. He thought he had recognized Grinnel from her picture.

“And ten men waking up. Charles, do you remember the way to the wharf?”

“Sure,” he said. “But we’re net going to get separated.”

“They’re mean, mad men,” she said. “Bloody-minded. And the little man is the worst.”

They heard the stomping feet and a babble of voices, and Commander Grinnel’s clear, fat-man’s tenor: “Keep it quiet, men. He may still be in the area.” The feet thundered over their heads on the porch.

In the barest of whispers Martha said: “The man that slept tells them there was only one, and he didn’t see what he was like except for the bare skin and the long hair. And the fat man says they’ll find him and—and—and says they’ll find him.” Her hand clutched Charles’ desperately and then dropped it as the feet thudded overhead again.

Grinnel was saying: “Half of you head up the street and half down. Check the alleys, check open window—hell, I don’t have to tell you. If we don’t find the bastard on the first run we’ll have to wake up the whole Guard Battalion and patrol the whole base with them all the goddam night, so keep your eyes open. Take off.”

“Remember the way to the wharf, Charles,” Martha said.

“Good-bye lady. Take care of him. Take good care of him.”

She wrenched her hand away and darted out from under the porch.

Lee muttered some agonized monosyllable. Charles started out after the child instinctively and then collapsed weakly back onto the dirt. They heard the rest.

“Hey, you—it’s him, by God! Get him! Get him!”

“Here he is, down here! Head him off!”

“Over there!” Grinnel yelled. “Head him off! Head him—
good work!”

“For God’s sake. It’s a girl.”

“Those goddam yeomen and their goddam prowlers.”

Grinnel: “Where are you from, kid?”

“That’s no kid from the base, commander. Look at her!”

“I just was, sarge. Looks good to me, don’t it to you?”

Grinnel, tolerant, fatherly, amused: “Now, men, have your fun but keep it quiet.”

“Don’t be afraid, kid—” There was an animal howl from Martha’s throat that made Lee Falcaro shake hysterically and Charles grind his fingernails into his palms.

Grinnel: “Sergeant, you’d better tie your shirt around her head and take her into the O.N.I. building.”

“Why, commander! And let that lousy little yeoman in on it?”

Grinnel, amused, a good Joe, a man’s man: “That’s up to you, men. Just keep it quiet.”

“Why, commander, sometimes I like to make a little noise

—”

“Ow!” a man yelled. There was a scuffle of feet and babbling voices. “Get her, you damn fool!” “She bit my hand—” “There she goes—” and a single emphatic shot.

Grinnel’s voice said into the silence that followed: “That’s that, men.”

“Did you have to shoot, Commander?” an aggrieved Guardsman said.

“Don’t blame me, fellow. Blame the guy that let her go.”

“God-dammit, she bit me—”

Somebody said as though he didn’t mean it: “We ought to take her someplace.”

“The hell with that. Let ‘em get her in the morning.”

“Them as wants her.” A cackle of harsh laughter.

Grinnel, tolerantly: “Back to the guardhouse, men. And keep it quiet.”

They scuffled off and there was silence again for long minutes. Charles said at last: “We’ll go down to the wharf.”

They crawled out and looked for a moment from the shelter of the building at the bundle lying in the road.

Lee muttered: “Grinnel.”

“Shut up,” Charles said. He led her down deserted alleys and around empty corners, strictly according to plan.

The speedboat was a twenty-foot craft at Wharf Eighteen, bobbing on the water safely removed from other moored boats and ships. Lee Falcaro let out a small, smothered shriek when she saw a uniformed sailor sitting in the cockpit, apparently staring directly at them.

“It’s all right,” Charles said. “He’s a drunk. He’s always out cold by this time of night.” Smoothly Charles found the rope locker, cut lengths with the sailor’s own knife and bound and gagged him. The man’s eyes opened, weary, glazed and red while this was going on and closed again.

“Help me lug him ashore,” Charles said. Lee Falcaro took the sailor’s legs and they eased him onto the wharf.

They went back into the cockpit. “This is deep water,”

Charles said, “so you’ll have no trouble with pilotage. You can read a compass and charts. There’s an automatic dead reckoner. My advice is just to pull the moderator rods out quarter-speed, point the thing west, pull the rods out as far as they’ll go—and relax. Either they’ll overtake you or they won’t.”

She was beginning to get the drift. She said nervously:

“You’re talking as though you’re not coming along.”

“I’m not,” he said, playing the lock of the arms rack. The bar fell aside and he pulled a .45 pistol from its clamp. He thought back and remembered where the boat’s diminutive magazine was located, broke the feeble lock and found a box of short, fat, heavy little cartridges. He began to snap them into the pistol’s magazine.

“What do you think you’re up to?” Lee Falcaro demanded.

“Appointment with Commander Grinnel,” he said. He slid the heavy magazine into the pistol’s grip and worked the slide to jack a cartridge into the chamber.

“Shall I cast off for you?” he asked.

“Don’t be a fool,” she said. “You sound like a revival of a Mickey Spillane comedy. You can’t bring her back to life and you’ve got a job to do for the Syndic.”

“You do it,” he said, and snapped another of the blunt, fat, little cartridges into the magazine.

She cast off, reached for the moderator-rod control and pulled it hard.

“Gee,” he gasped, “you’ll sink us!” and dashed for the controls. You had seconds before the worm-gears turned, the cadmium rods withdrew from their slots, the reactor seethed and sent boiling metal cycling through the turbine

—

He slammed down manual levers that threw off the fore and aft mooring lines, spun the wheel, bracing himself, and saw Lee Falcaro go down to the deck in a tangle, the .45
flying from her hand and skidding across the knurled plastic planking. But by then the turbine was screaming an alarm to the whole base and they were cutting white water through the buoy-marked gap in the harbor net.

Lee Falcaro got to her feet. “I’m not proud of myself,” she said to him. “But she told me to take care of you.”

He said grimly: “We could have gone straight to the wharf without that little layover to pick you up. Take the wheel.”

“Charles, I—”

He snarled at her.

“Take the wheel.”

She did, and he went aft to stare through the darkness.

The harbor lights were twinkling pin-points; then his eyes misted so he could not see them at all. He didn’t give a damn if a dozen corvettes were already slicing the bay in pursuit. He had failed.

XVI

It was a dank fog-shrouded morning. Sometime during the night the quill of the dead reckoner had traced its fine red
line over the 30th meridian. Roughly half-way, Charles Orsino thought, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. But the line was straight as a string for the last four hours of their run. The damn girl must have fallen asleep on watch. He glared at her in the bow and broke open a ration. Blandly oblivious to the glare, she said: “Good morning.”

Charles swallowed a mouthful of chocolate, half-chewed, and choked on it. He reached hastily for water and found the tall plastic column of the ion-exchange apparatus empty. “Damn it,” he snarled, “why didn’t you refill this thing when you emptied it? And why didn’t you zig-zag overnight? You’re utterly irresponsible.” He hurled the bucket overside, hauled it up and slopped seawater into the apparatus. Now there’d be a good twenty minutes before a man-sized drink accumulated.

“Just a minute,” she told him steadily. “Let’s straighten this out. I haven’t had any water on the night watch so I didn’t have any occasion to refill the tube. You must have taken the last of the water with your dinner. And as for the zig-zag, you said we should run a straightaway now and then to mix it up. I decided that last night was as good a time as any.”

He took a minute drink from the reservoir, stalling. There was something—yes; he had meant to refill the apparatus after his dinner ration. And he had told her to give it a few hours of straightaway some night.…

He said formally: “You’re quite right on both counts. I apologize.” He bit into a ration.

“That’s not good enough,” she said. “I’m not going to have you tell me you’re sorry and then go scowling and sulking about the boat. In fact I don’t like your behavior at all.”

He said, enormously angry: “Oh, you don’t do you?” and hated her, the world and himself for the stupid inadequacy of the comeback.

“No. I don’t. I’m seriously worried. I’m afraid the conditioning you got didn’t fall away completely when they
swore you in. You’ve been acting irrationally and inconsistently.”

“What about you?” he snapped. “You got conditioned too.”

“That’s right,” she said. “That’s another reason why you’re worrying me. I find impulses in myself that have no business there. I simply seem to do a better job of controlling them than you’re doing. For instance: we’ve been quarreling and at cross-purposes ever since you and Martha picked me up. That couldn’t be unless I were contributing to the friction.”

The wheel was fixed; she took a step or two aft and said professorially: “I’ve never had trouble getting along with people. I’ve had differences, of course, and at times I’ve allowed myself displays of temper when it was necessary to assert myself. But I find that you upset me; that for some reason or other your opinion on a matter is important to me, that if it differs with mine there should be a reconciliation.”

He put down the ration and said wonderingly: “Do you know, that’s the way I feel about you? And you think it’s the conditioning or—or something?” He took a couple of steps forward, hesitantly.

“Yes,” she said in a rather tremulous voice. “The conditioning or something. For instance, you’re inhibited.

You haven’t made an indecent proposition to me, not even as a matter of courtesy. Not that I care, of course, but—” In stepping aft, she tripped over the water bucket and went down to the deck with a faint scream.

He said: “Here, let me help you.” He picked her up and didn’t let go.

“Thanks,” she said faintly. “The conditioning technique can’t be called faulty, but it has inherent limitations.…” She trailed off and he kissed her. She kissed back and said more faintly still: “Or it might be the drugs we used.… Oh, Charles, what took you so long?”

He said, brooding: “You’re way out of my class, you know.

I’m just a bagman for the New York police. I wouldn’t even be that if it weren’t for Uncle Frank, and you’re a Falcaro.

It’s just barely thinkable that I could make a pass at you. I guess that held me off and I didn’t want to admit it so I got mad at you instead. Hell, I could have swum back to the base and made a damned fool of myself trying to find Grinnel, but down inside I knew better. The kid’s gone.”

“We’ll make a psychologist of you yet,” she said.

“Psychologist? Why? You’re joking.”

“No. It’s not a joke. You’ll like psychology, darling. You can’t go on playing polo forever, you know.”

Darling! What was he getting into? Old man Gilby was four-goal at sixty, wasn’t he? Good God, was he hooked into marriage at twenty-three? Was she married already? Did she know or care whether he was? Had she been promiscuous? Would she continue to be? He’d never know; that was the one thing you never asked; your only comfort, if you needed comfort, was that she could never dream of asking you. What went on here? Let me out!

It went through his mind in a single panicky flash and then he said: “The hell with it,” and kissed her again.

She wanted to know: “The hell with what, darling?”

“Everything. Tell me about psychology. I can’t go on playing polo forever.”

It was an hour before she got around to telling him about psychology: “The neglect has been criminal—and inexplicable. For about a century it’s been assumed that psychology is a dead fallacy. Why?”

“All right,” he said amiably, playing with a lock of her hair.

“Why?”

“Lieberman,” she said. “Lieberman of Johns-Hopkins. He was one of the old-line topological psychology men—don’t let the lingo throw you, Charles; it’s just the name of a system. He wrote an attack on the mengenlehre psychology school—point-sets of emotions, class-inclusions of reactions
and so on. He blasted them to bits by proving that their constructs didn’t correspond to the emotions and reactions of random-sampled populations. And then came the pay-off: he tried the same acid test on his own school’s constructs and found out that they didn’t correspond either. It didn’t frighten him; he was a scientist. He published, and then the jig was up. Everybody, from full professors to undergraduate students went down the roster of the schools
of
psychology
and
wrecked
them
so
comprehensively that the field was as dead as palmistry in twenty years. The miracle is that it hadn’t happened before.

The flaws were so glaring! Textbooks of the older kind solemnly described syndromes, psychoses, neuroses that simply couldn’t be found in the real world! And that’s the way it was all the way down the line.”

“So where does that leave us?” Charles demanded. “Is it or isn’t it a science?”

“It is,” she said simply. “Lieberman and his followers went too far. It became a kind of hysteria. The experimenters must have been too eager. They misread results, they misinterpreted statistics, they misunderstood the claims of a school and knocked down not its true claims but straw-man claims they had set up themselves.”

“But—psychology!”

Charles
protested,
obscurely
embarrassed at the thought that man’s mind was subject to scientific study—not because he knew the first thing about it, but because everybody knew psychology was phony.

She shrugged. “I can’t help it. We were doing physiology of the sensory organs, trying to settle the oldie about focusing the eye, and I got to grubbing around the pre-Lieberman texts looking for light in the darkness. Some of it sounded so—not sensible, but positive that I ran off one of Lieberman’s population checks. And the old boy had been dead wrong. Mengenlehre constructs correspond quite nicely to the actual way people’s minds work. I kept checking and the schools that were destroyed as hopelessly
fallacious a century ago checked out, some closely and some not so closely, as good descriptions of the way the mind works. Some have predictive value. I used mengenlehre psychology algorithms to compute the conditioning on you and me, including the trigger release.

It worked. You see, Charles? We’re on the rim of something tremendous!”

“When did this Lieberman flourish?”

“I don’t have the exact dates in my head. The breakup of the schools corresponded roughly with the lifetime of John G. Falcaro.”

That pin-pointed it rather well. John G. succeeded Rafael, who succeeded Amadeo Falcaro, first leader of the Syndic in revolt. Under John G., the hard-won freedom was enjoyed, the bulging store-houses were joyously emptied, craft union rules went joyously out the window and buildersworked, the dollar went to an all-time high and there was an all-time number of dollars in circulation. It had been an exhuberant time still fondly remembered; just the time for over-enthusiastic rebels against a fusty scholasticism to joyously smash old ways of thought without too much exercise of the conscience. It all checked out.

She started and he got to his feet. A hardly-noticed discomfort was becoming acute; the speedboat was pitching and rolling quite seriously, for the first time since their escape. “Dirty weather coming up,” he said. “We’ve been too damned lucky so far.” He thought, but didn’t remark, that there was much to worry about in the fact that there seemed to have been no pursuit. The meager resources of the North American Navy wouldn’t be spent on chasing a single minor craft—not if the weather could be counted on to finish her off.

“I thought we were unsinkable?”

“In a way. Seal the boat and she’s unsinkable the way a corked bottle is. But the boat’s made up of a lot of bits and
pieces that go together just so. Pound her for a few hours with waves and the bits and pieces give way. She doesn’t sink, but she doesn’t steam or steer either. I wish the Syndic had a fleet on the Atlantic.”

“Sorry,” she said. “The nearest fleet I know of is Mob ore boats on the great lakes and they aren’t likely to pick us up.”

The sea-search radar pinged and they flew to the screen.

“Something at 273 degrees, about eight miles,” he said. “It can’t be pursuit. They couldn’t have any reason at all to circle around us and come at us from ahead.” He strained his eyes into the west and thought he could see a black speck on the gray.

Lee Falcaro tried a pair of binoculars and complained:

“These things won’t work.”

“Not on a rolling, pitching platform they won’t—not with an optical lever eight miles long. I don’t suppose this boat would have a gyro-stabilized signal glass.” He spun the wheel to 180; they staggered and clung as the bow whipped about, searched and steadied on the new course.

The mounting waves slammed them broadside-to and the rolling increased. They hardly noticed; their eyes were on the radarscope. Fogged as it was with sea return, they nevertheless could be sure after several minutes that the object had changed course to 135. Charles made a flying guess at her speed, read their own speed off and scribbled for a moment.

He said nothing, but spun the wheel to 225 and went back to the radarscope. The object changed course to 145.

Charles scribbled again and said at last, flatly: “They’re running collision courses on us. Automatically computed, I suppose, from a radar. We’re through.”

He spun the wheel to 180 again, and studied the crawling green spark on the radarscope. “This way we give ‘em the longest run for their money and can pray for a miracle. The only way we can use our speed to outrun them is to turn
around and head back into Government Territory—which isn’t what we want. Relax, Lee. Maybe if the weather thickens they’ll lose us—no; not with radar.”

They sat together on a bunk, wordlessly, for hours while the spray dashed higher and the boat shivered to hammering waves. Briefly they saw the pursuer, three miles off, low, black and ugly, before fog closed in again.

At nightfall there was the close, triumphant roar of a big reaction turbine and a light stabbed through the fog, flooding the boat with blue-white radiance. A cliff-like black hull loomed alongside as a bull-horn roared at them: “Cut your engines and come about into the wind.”

Lee Falcaro read white-painted letters on the black hull:

“Hon. James J. Regan, Chicago.” She turned to Charles and said wonderingly: “It’s an ore boat. From the Mob great lakes fleet.”

XVII

“Here?” Charles demanded. “Here?”

“No possible mistake,” she said, stunned. “When you’re a Falcaro you travel. I’ve seen ‘em in Duluth, I’ve seen ‘em in Quebec, I’ve seen ‘em in Buffalo.”

The bull-horn voice roared again, dead in the shroud of fog; “Come into the wind and cut your engines or we’ll put a shell into you.”

Charles turned the wheel and wound in the moderator rod; the boat pitched like a splinter on the waves. There was a muffled double explosion and two grapnels crunched into the plastic hull, bow and stern. As the boat steadied, sharing the inertia of the ore ship, a dark figure leaped from the blue-white eye of the searchlight to their deck.

And another. And another.

“Hello, Jim,” Lee Falcaro said almost inaudibly. “Haven’t met since Las Vegas, have we?”

The first boarder studied her cooly. He was built for football or any other form of mayhem. He ignored Charles
completely. “Lee Falcaro as advised. Do you still think twenty reds means a black is bound to come up? You always were a fool, Lee. And now you’re in real trouble.”

“What’s going on, mister?” Charles snapped. “We’re Syndics and I presume you’re Mobsters. Don’t you recognize the treaty?”

The boarder turned to Charles inquiringly. “Some confusion,” he said. “Max Wyman? Charles Orsino? Or just some wild man from outback?”

“Orsino,” Charles said formally. “Second cousin of Edward Falcaro, under the guardianship of Francis W. Taylor.”

The boarder bowed slightly. “James Regan IV,” he said.

“No need to list my connections. It would take too long and I feel no need to justify myself to a small-time dago chisler.

Watch him gentlemen!”

Charles found his arms pinned by Regan’s two companions. There was a gun muzzle in his ribs.

Regan shouted to the ship and a ladder was let down. Lee Falcaro and Charles climbed it with guns at their backs. He said to her: “Who is that lunatic?” It did not even occur to him that the young man was who he claimed to be—the son of the Mob Territory opposite number of Edward Falcaro.

“He’s Regan,” she said. “And I don’t know who’s the lunatic, him or me. Charles, I’m sorry, terribly sorry, I got you into this.”

He managed to smile. “I volunteered,” he said.

“Enough talk,” Regan said, following them onto the deck.

Dull-eyed sailors watched them incuriously, and there were a couple of anvil-jawed men with a stance and swagger Charles had come to know. Guardsmen—he would have staked his life on it. Guardsmen of the North American Government Navy—aboard a Mob Territory ship and acting as if they were passengers or high-rated crewmen.

Regan smirked: “I’m on the horns of a dilemma. There are no accomodations that are quite right for you. There are storage compartments which are worse than you deserve
and there are passenger quarters which are too good for you. I’m afraid it will have to be one of the compartments.

Your consolation will be that it’s only a short run to Chicago.”

Chicago—headquarters for Mob Territory. The ore ship had been on a return trip to Chicago when alerted somehow by the Navy to intercept the fugitives. Why?

“Down there,” one of the men gestured briskly with a gun.

They climbed down a ladder into a dark, oily cavern fitfully lit by a flash in Regan’s hand.

“Make yourselves comfortable,” Regan told them. “If you get a headache, don’t worry. We were carrying some avgas on the outward run.” The flash winked out and a door clanged on them.

“I can’t believe it,” Charles said. “That’s a top Mob man?

Couldn’t you be mistaken?” He groped in the dark and found her. The place did reek of gasoline.

She clung to him and said: “Hold me, Charles.… Yes that’s Jimmy Regan.

“That’s what will become top man in the Mob. Jimmy’s a charmer at a Las Vegas Hotel. Jimmy’s a gourmet when he orders at the Pump Room and he’s trying to overawe you.

Jimmy plays polo too, but he’s crippled three of his own team-mates because he’s not very good at it. I kept telling myself whenever I ran into him that he was just an accident, the Mob could survive him. But his father acts—
funny. There’s something with them, there’s some—

“They roll out the carpet when you show up but the people around them are afraid of them. There’s a story I never believed—but I believe it now. What would happen if my uncle pulled out a pistol and began screaming and shot a waiter: Jimmy’s father did it, they tell me. And nothing happened except that the waiter was dragged away and everybody said it was a good thing Mr. Regan saw him reach for his gun and shot him first. Only the waiter didn’t have any gun.

“I saw Jimmy last three years ago. I haven’t been in Mob Territory since. I didn’t like it there. Now I know why. Give Mob Territory enough time and it’ll be like New Portsmouth. Something went wrong with them. We have the Treaty of Las Vegas and a hundred years of peace and there aren’t many people going back and forth between Syndic and Mob except for a few high-ups like me who have to circulate. Manners. So you pay duty calls and shut your eyes to what they’re really like.

“This is what they’re like. This dark, damp stinking compartment. And my uncle—and all the Falcaros—and you

—and I—we aren’t like them. Are we? Are we?” Her fingers bit into his arms. She was shaking.

“Easy,” he soothed her. “Easy, easy. We’re all right. We’ll be all right. I think I’ve got it figured out. This must be some private gun-running Jimmy’s gone in for. Loaded an ore boat with avgas and ammo and ran it up the Seaway. If anybody in Syndic Territory gave a damn they thought it was a load of ore for New Orleans via the Atlantic and the Gulf. But Jimmy ran his load to Ireland or Iceland, H.Q. A little private flier of his. He wouldn’t dare harm us. There’s the Treaty and you’re a Falcaro.”

“Treaty,” she said. “I tell you they’re all in it. Now that I’ve seen the Government in action I understand what I saw in Mob Territory. They’ve gone rotten, that’s all. They’ve gone rotten. The way he treated you, because he thought you didn’t have his rank! Sometimes my uncle’s high-handed, sometimes he tells a person off, sometimes he lets him know he’s top man in the Syndic and doesn’t propose to let anybody teach him how to suck eggs. But the spirit’s different. In the Syndic it’s parent to child. In the Mob it’s master to slave. Not based on age, not based on achievement, but based on the accident of birth. You tell me ‘You’re a Falcaro’ and that packs weight. Why? Not because I was born a Falcaro but because they let me stay a Falcaro. If I hadn’t been brainy and quick, they’d have
adopted me out before I was ten. They don’t do that in Mob Territory. Whatever chance sends a Regan is a Regan then and forever. Even if it’s a paranoid constitutional inferior like Jimmy’s father. Even if it’s a giggling pervert like Jimmy.

“God, Charles, I’m scared.

“At last I know these people and I’m scared. You’d have to see Chicago to know why. The lakefront palaces, finer than anything in New York. Regan Memorial Plaza, finer than Scratch Sheet Square—great gilded marble figures, a hundred running yards of heroic frieze. But the hovels you see only by chance! Gray brick towers dating from the Third Fire! The children with faces like weasels, the men with faces like hogs, the women with figures like beer barrels and all of them glaring at you when you drive past as if they could cut your throat with joy. I never understood the look in their eyes until now, and you’ll never begin to understand what I’m talking about until you see their eyes.…”

Charles revolted against the idea. It was too gross to go down. It didn’t square with his acquired picture of life in North America and therefore Lee Falcaro must be somehow mistaken or hysterical. “There,” he murmured, stroking her hair. “We’ll be all right. We’ll be all right.” He tried to soothe her.

She twisted out of his arms and raged: “I won’t be humored. They’re mad, I tell you. Dick Reiner was right.

We’ve got to wipe out the Government. But Frank Taylor was right too. We’ve got to blast the Mob before they blast us. They’ve died and decayed into something too horrible to bear. If we let them stay on the continent, with us their stink will infect us and poison us to death. We’ve got to do something. We’ve got to do something.”

“What?”

It stopped her cold. After a minute she uttered a shaky laugh. “The fat, sloppy, happy Syndic,” she said, “sitting
around while the wolves overseas and the maniacs across the Mississippi are waiting to jump. Yes—do what?”

Charles Orsino was not good at arguments or indeed at any abstract thinking. He knew it. He knew the virtues that had commended him to F. W. Taylor were his energy and an off-hand talent for getting along with people. But something rang terribly false in Lee’s words.

“That kind of thinking doesn’t get you anywhere, Lee,” he said slowly. “I didn’t absorb much from Uncle Frank, but I did absorb this: you run into trouble if you make up stories about the world and then act as if they’re true. The Syndic isn’t somebody sitting around. The Government isn’t wolves. The Mobsters aren’t maniacs. And they aren’t waiting to jump on the Syndic. The Syndic isn’t anything that’s jumpable. It’s some people and their morale and credit.”

“Faith is a beautiful thing,” Lee Falcaro said bitterly.

“Where’d you get yours?”

“From the people I knew and worked with. Numbers-runners, bookies, sluts. Decent citizens.”

“And what about the scared and unhappy ones in Riveredge? That sow of a woman in the D.A.R. who smuggled me aboard a coast raider? The neurotics and psychotics I found more and more of when I invalidated the Lieberman findings? Charles, the North American Government didn’t scare me especially. But the thought that they’re lined up with a continental power does. It scares me damnably because it’ll be three against one.

Against the Syndic, the Mob, the Government—and our own unbalanced citizens.”

Uncle Frank never let that word “citizens” pass without a tirade. “We are not a government!” he always yelled. “We are not a government! We must not think like a government! We must not think in terms of duties and receipts and disbursements. We must think in terms of the old loyalties that bound the Syndic together!” Uncle Frank
was sedentary, but he had roused himself once to the point of wrecking a bright young man’s newly installed bookkeeping system for the Medical Center. He had used a cane, most enthusiastically, and then bellowed: “The next wise guy who tries to sneak punch-cards into this joint will get them down his throat! What the hell do we need punch-cards for? Either there’s room enough and doctors enough for the patients or there isn’t. If there is, we take care of them. If there isn’t, we put ‘em in an ambulance and take them someplace else. And if I hear one goddammed word about ‘efficiency’—” he glared the rest and strode out, puffing and leaning on Charles’ arm. “Efficiency,” he growled in the corridor. “Every so often a wise guy comes to me whimpering that people are getting away with murder, collections are ten per cent below what they ought to be, the Falcaro Fund’s being milked because fifteen per cent of the dough goes to people who aren’t in need at all, eight per cent of the people getting old-age pensions aren’t really past sixty. Get efficient, these people tell me. Save money by triple-checking collections. Save money by tightening up the Fund rules. Save money by a nice big vital-statistics system so we can check on pensioners. Yeah!

Have people who might be working check on collections instead, and make enemies to boot whenever we catch somebody short. Make the Fund a grudging Scrooge instead of an open-handed sugar-daddy—and let people worry about their chances of making the Fund instead of knowing it’ll take care of them if they’re caught short. Set up a vital statistics system from birth to death, with numbers and finger-prints and house registration and maybe the gas-chamber if you forget to report a change of address. You know what’s wrong with the wise guys, Charles? Constipation. And they want to constipate the universe.” Charles remembered his uncle restored to chuckling good humor by the time he had finished
embroidering his spur-of-the-moment theory with elaborate scatological details.

“The Syndic will stand,” he said to Lee Falcaro, thinking of his uncle who knew what he was doing, thinking of Edward Falcaro who did the right thing without knowing why, thinking of his good friends in the 101st Precinct, the roaring happy crowds in Scratch Sheet Square, the good-hearted men of Riveredge Breakdown Station 26 who had borne with his sullenness and intolerance simply because that was the way things were and that was the way you acted. “I don’t know what the Mob’s up to, and I got a shock from the Government, and I don’t deny that we have a few miserable people who can’t seem to be helped. But you’ve seen too much of the Mob and Government and our abnormals. Maybe you don’t know as much as you should about our ordinary people. Anyway, all we can do is wait.”

“Yes,” she said. “All we can do is wait. Until Chicago we have each other.”

XVIII

They were too sick with gasoline fumes to count the passing hours or days. Food was brought to them from time to time, but it tasted like avgas. They could not think for the sick headaches that pounded incessantly behind their eyes. When Lee developed vomiting spasms that would not stop, Charles Orsino pounded on the bulkhead with his fists and yelled, his voice thunderous in the metal compartment, for an hour.

Somebody came at last—Regan. The light stabbed Charles’ eyes when he opened the door. “Trouble?” Regan asked, smirking.

“Miss Falcaro may be dying,” Charles said. His own throat felt as though it had been gone over with a cobbler’s rasp.

“I don’t have to tell you your life won’t be worth a dime if she dies and it gets back to Syndic Territory. She’s got to be moved and she’s got to have medical attention.”

“Death threat from the dago?” Regan was amused. “I have it on your own testimony that the Syndic is merely morale and people and credit—not a formidable organization. Yes, there was a mike in here. One reason for your discomfort.

You’ll be gratified to learn that I thought most of your conversation decidedly dull. However, the lady will be of no use to us dead and we’re now in the Seaway entering Lake Michigan. I suppose it can’t do any harm to move you two.

Pick her up, will you? I’ll let you lead the way—and I’ll remind you that I may not, as the lady said, be a four-goal polo player but I am a high expert with the handgun. Get moving.”

Charles did not think he could pick his own feet up, but the thought of pleading weakness to Regan was unbearable. He could try. Staggering, he got Lee Falcaro over his shoulder and through the door. Regan courteously stood aside and murmured: “Straight ahead and up the ramp. I’m giving you my own cabin. We’ll be docking soon enough; I’ll make out.”

Charles dropped her onto a sybaritic bed in a small but lavishly-appointed cabin. Regan whistled up a deckhand and a ship’s officer of some sort, who arrived with a medicine chest. “Do what you can for her, mister,” he told the officer. And to the deckhand: “Just watch them. They aren’t to touch anything. If they give you trouble, you’re free to punch them around a bit.” He left, whistling.

The officer fussed unhappily over the medicine chest and stalled by sponging off Lee Falcaro’s face and throat. The deckhand watched impassively. He was a six-footer, and he hadn’t spent days inhaling casing-head fumes. The trip-hammer pounding behind Charles’s eyes seemed to be worsening with the fresher air. He collapsed into a seat and croaked, with shut eyes: “While you’re trying to figure out the vomiting, can I have a handful of aspirins?”

“Eh? Nothing was said about you. You were in Number Three with her? I suppose it’ll be all right. Here.” He
poured a dozen tablets into Charles’ hand. “Get him some water, you.” The deckhand brought a glass of water from the adjoining lavatory and Charles washed down some of the tablets. The officer was reading a booklet, worry written on his face. “Do you know any medicine?” he finally asked.

The hard-outlined, kidney-shaped ache was beginning to diffuse through Charles’ head, more general now and less excruciating. He felt deliciously sleepy, but roused himself to answer: “Some athletic trainer stuff. I don’t know—
morphine? Curare?”

The officer ruffled through the booklet. “Nothing about vomiting,” he said. “But it says curare for muscular cramp and I guess that’s what’s going on. A lipoid suspension to release it slowly into the bloodstream and give the irritation time to subside. Anyway, I can’t kill her if I watch the dose.…”

Charles, through half-opened eyes, saw Lee Falcaro’s arm reach behind the officer’s back to his medicine chest. The deckhand’s eyes were turning to the bed—Charles heaved himself to his feet, skyrockets going off again through his head, and started for the lavatory. The deckhand grabbed his arm. “Rest, mister! Where do you think you’re going?”

“Another glass of water—”

“I’ll get it. You heard my orders.”

Charles subsided. When he dared to look again, Lee’s arm lay alongside her body and the officer was triple-checking dosages in his booklet against a pressurized hypodermic spray. The officer sighed and addressed Lee: “You won’t even feel this. Relax.” He read his setting on the spray again, checked it again against the booklet. He touched the syringe to the skin of Lee’s arm and thumbed open the valve. It hissed for a moment and Charles knew submicroscopic particles of the medication had been blasted under Lee’s skin too fast for nerves to register the shock.

His glass of water came and he gulped it greedily. The officer packed the pressurized syringe away, folded the chest and said to both of them, rather vaguely: “That should do it. If, uh, if anything happens—or if it doesn’t work—call me and I’ll try something else. Morphine, maybe.”

He left and Charles slumped in the chair, the pain ebbing and sleep beginning to flow over him. Not yet, he told himself. She hooked something from the chest. He said to the deckhand: “Can I clean the lady and myself up?”

“Go ahead, mister. You can use it. Just don’t try anything.”

The man lounged in the door-frame of the lavatory alternately studying Charles at the wash-basin and Lee on the bed. Charles took off a heavy layer of oily grease from himself and then took washing tissues to the bed. Lee Falcaro’s spasms were tapering off. As he washed her, she managed a smile and an unmistakable wink.

“You folks married?” the deckhand asked.

“No,” Charles said. Weakly she held up her right arm for the washing tissue. As he scrubbed the hand, he felt a small cylinder smoothly transferred from her palm to his. He slid it into a pocket and finished the job.

The officer popped in again with a carton of milk. “Any better, miss?” he asked.

“Yes,” she whispered.

“Good. Try to drink this.” Immensely set up by his success in treatment, he hovered over her for a quarter of an hour getting the milk down a sip at a time. It stayed down. He left trailing a favorable prognosis. Meanwhile, Charles had covertly examined Lee’s booty: a pressurized syringe labeled morphine sulfate sol. It was full and ready. He cracked off the protective cap and waited his chance.

It came when Lee grimaced at him and called the deckhand in a feeble murmur. She continued to murmur so indistinctly that he bent over trying to catch the words.

Charles leaned forward and emptied the syringe at one
inch range into the taut seat of the deckhand’s pants. He scratched absently and said to Lee: “You’ll have to talk up, lady.” Then he giggled, looked bewildered and collapsed on the floor, staring, coked to the eyebrows.

Lee painfully sat up on the bed. “Porthole,” she said.

Charles went to it and struggled with the locking lugs. It opened—and an alarm bell began to clang through the ship.

Now he saw the hair-fine, broken wire. An alarm trip-wire.

Feet thundered outside and the glutinous voice of Jimmy Regan was heard: “Wait, you damn fools! You in there—is everything all right? Did they try to pull something?”

Charles kept silent and shook his head at the girl. He picked up a chair and stood by the door. The glutinous voice again, in a mumble that didn’t carry through—and the door sprang open. Charles brought the chair down in a murderous chop, conscious only that it seemed curiously light. There was an impact and the head fell.

It was Regan, with a drawn gun. It had been Regan. His skull was smashed before he knew it. Charles felt as though he had all the time in the world. He picked up the gun to a confused roar like a slowed-down sound track and emptied it into the corridor. It had been a full automatic, but the fifteen shots seemed as well-spaced as a ceremonial salute.

Regan, in his vanity, wore two guns. Charles scooped up the other and said to Lee: “Come on.”

He knew she was following as he raced down the cleared corridor and down the ramp, back to the compartment in which they had been locked. Red danger lights burned on the walls. Charles flipped the pistol to semi-automatic as they passed a red-painted bulkhead with valves and gages sprouting from it. He turned and fired three deliberate shots into it. The last was drowned out by a dull roar as gasoline fumes exploded. Pipe fittings and fragments of plate whizzed about them like bullets as they raced on.

Somebody ahead loomed, yelling querulously: “What the hell was that, Mac? What blew?”

“Where’s the reactor room?” Charles demanded, jamming the pistol into his chest. The man gulped and pointed.

“Take me there. Fast.”

“Now look, Mac—”

Charles told him in a few incisive details where and how he was going to be shot. The man went white and led them down the corridor and into the reactor room. Three white-coated men with the aloof look of reactor specialists stared at them as they bulled into the spotless chamber.

The oldest sniffed: “And what, may I ask, are you crewmen doing in—”

Lee slammed the door behind them and said: “Sound the radiation alarm.”

“Certainly not! You must be the couple we—”

“Sound the radiation alarm.” She picked up a pair of dividers from the plot board and approached the technician with murder on her face. He gaped until she poised the needle points before his eyes and repeated: “Sound the radiation alarm.” Nobody in the room, including Charles, had the slightest doubt that the points would sink into the technician’s eyeballs if he refused.

“Do what she says, Will,” he mumbled, his eyes crossing on the dividers. “For God’s sake, do what she says. She’s crazy.”

One of the men moved, very cautiously, watching Charles and the gun, to a red handle and pulled it down. A ferro-concrete barrier rose to wall off the chamber and the sine-curve wail of a standard radioactivity warning began to howl mournfully through the ship.

“Dump the reactor metal,” Charles said. His eyes searched for the exit, and found it—a red-painted breakaway panel, standard for a hot lab.

A technician wailed: “We can’t do that! We can’t do that!

A million bucks of thorium with a hundred years of life in it

—have a heart, mister! They’ll crucify us!”

“They can dredge for it,” Charles said. “Dump the metal.”

“Dump the metal,” Lee said. She hadn’t moved.

The senior technician’s eyes were still on the bright needle points. He was crying silently. “Dump it,” he said.

“Okay, chief. Your responsibility, remember.”

“Dump it!” wailed the senior.

The technician did something technical at the control board. After a moment the steady rumbling of the turbines ceased and the ship’s deck began to wallow underfoot.

“Hit the panel, Lee,” Charles said. She did, running. He followed her through the oval port. It was like an open-bottomed diving bell welded to the hull. There were large, luminous cleats for pulling yourself down through the water, under the rim of the bell. He dropped the pistol into the water, breathed deeply a couple of times and began to climb down. There was no sign of Lee.

He kicked up through the dark water on a long slant away from the ship. It might be worse. With a fire and a hot-lab alarm and a dead chief aboard, the crew would have things on their mind besides looking for bobbing heads.

He broke the surface and treaded water to make a minimum target. He did not turn to the ship. His dark hair would be less visible than his white face. And if he was going to get a burst of machine-gun bullets through either, he didn’t want to know about it. Ahead he saw Lee’s blonde hair spread on the water for a moment and then it vanished. He breathed hugely, ducked and swam under water toward it.

When he rose next a sheet of flame was lightening the sky and the oily reek of burning hydrocarbons tainted the air.

He dove again, and this time caught up with Lee. Her face was bone-white and her eyes blank. Where she was drawing her strength from he could not guess. Behind them the ship sent up an oily plume and the sine-curve wail of the radioactivity warning could be faintly heard. Before them a dim shore stretched.

He gripped her naked arm, roughened by the March waters of Lake Michigan, bent it around his neck and struck off for the shore. His lungs were bursting in his chest and the world was turning gray-black before his burning eyes. He heaved his tired arm through the water as though each stroke would be his last, but the last stroke, by some miracle, never was the last.

XIX

It hadn’t been easy to get time off from the oil-painting factory. Ken Oliver was a little late when he slid into the aseptic-smelling waiting room of the Michigan City Medical Center. A parabolic mike in the ceiling trained itself on the heat he radiated and followed him across the floor to a chair. A canned voice said: “State your business, please.”

He started a little and said in the general direction of the mike: “I’m Ken Oliver. A figure man in the Blue Department, Picasso Oils and Etching Corporation. Dr.

Latham sent me here for—what do you call it?—a biopsy.”

“Thank you, please be seated.”

He smiled because he was seated already and picked up a magazine, the current copy of the Illinois Sporting News, familiarly known as the Green Sheet. Everybody in Mob Territory read it. The fingers of the blind spelled out its optimism and its selections at Hawthorne in Braille. If you were not only blind but fingerless, there was a talking edition that read itself aloud to you from tape.

He riffled through the past performances and selections to the articles. This month’s lead was—Thank God I am Dying of Throat Cancer.

He leaned back in the chair dizzily, the waiting room becoming gray mist around him. No, he thought. No. It couldn’t be that. All it could be was a little sore on the back of his throat—no more than that. Just a little sore on the back of his throat. He’d been a fool to go to Latham. The fees were outrageous and he was behind, always a little
behind, on his bills. But cancer—so much of it around—and the drugs didn’t seem to help any more.… But Latham had almost promised him it was non-malignant.

“Mr. Oliver,” the loudspeaker said, “please go to Dr.

Riordan’s office, Number Ten.”

Riordan was younger than he. That was supposed to be bad in a general practitioner, good in a specialist. And Riordan was a specialist—pathology. A sour-faced young specialist.

“Good morning. Sit here. Open your mouth. Wider than that, and relax. Relax; your glottis is locked.”

Oliver couldn’t protest around the plastic-and-alcohol taste of the tongue depressor. There was a sudden coldness and a metallic snickthat startled him greatly; then Riordan took the splint out of his mouth and ignored him as he summoned somebody over his desk set. A young man, even younger than Riordan, came in. “Freeze, section and stain this right away,” the pathologist said, handing him a forceps from which a small blob dangled. “Have them send up the Rotino charts, three hundred to nine hundred inclusive.”

He began to fill out charts, still ignoring Oliver, who sat and sweated bullets for ten minutes. Then he left and was back in five minutes more.

“You’ve got it,” he said shortly. “It’s operable and you won’t lose much tissue.” He scribbled on a sheet of paper and handed it to Oliver. The painter numbly read: “…

anterior…epithelioma…metastases…giant cells.…”

Riordan was talking again: “Give this to Latham. It’s my report. Have him line up a surgeon. As to the operation, I say the sooner the better unless you care to lose your larynx. That will be fifty dollars.”

“Fifty dollars,” the painter said blankly. “But Dr. Latham told me—” He trailed off and got out his check book. Only thirty-two in the account, but he would deposit his paycheck today which would bring it up. It was after three
so his check wouldn’t go in today—he wrote out the slip slowly and carefully.

Riordan took it, read it suspiciously, put it away and said:

“Good day, Mr. Oliver.”

Oliver wandered from the Medical Center into the business heart of the art colony. The Van Gogh Works on the left must have snagged the big order from Mexico—
their chimneys were going full blast and the reek of linseed oil and turps was strong in the air. But the poor beggars on the line at Rembrandts Ltd. across the square were out of luck. They’d been laid off for a month now, with no sign of a work call yet. Somebody jostled him off the sidewalk, somebody in a great hurry. Oliver sighed. The place was getting more like Chicago every day. He sometimes thought he had made art his line not because he had any special talent but because artists were relatively easy-going people, not so quick to pop you in the nose, not such aggressive drunks when they were drunks.

Quit the stalling, a thin, cold voice inside him said. Get over to Latham. The man said “The sooner the better.”

He went over to Latham whose waiting room was crowded with irascible women. After an hour, he got to see the old man and hand him the slip.

Latham said: “Don’t worry about a thing. Riordan’s a good man. If he says it’s operable, it’s operable. Now we want Finsen to do the whittling. With Finsen operating, you won’t have to worry about a thing. He’s a good man. His fee’s fifteen hundred.”

“Oh, my God!” Oliver gulped.

“What’s the matter—haven’t you got it?”

To his surprise and terror, Oliver found himself giving Dr.

Latham a hysterical stump speech about how he didn’t have it and who did have it and how could anybody get ahead with the way prices were shooting up and everybody gouged you every time you turned around and yes, that went for doctors too and if you did get a couple of bucks in
your pocket the salesmen heard about it and battered at you until you put down an installment on some piece of junk you didn’t want to get them out of your hair and what the hell kind of world was this anyway.

Latham listened, smiling and nodding, with, as Oliver finally realized, his hearing aid turned off. His voice ran down and Latham said briskly: “All right, then. You just come around when you’ve arranged the financial details and I’ll contact Finsen. He’s a good man; you won’t have to worry about a thing. And remember: the sooner, the better.”

Oliver slumped out of the office and went straight to the Mob Building, office of the Regan Benevolent Fund. An acid-voiced woman there turned him down indignantly:

“You should be ashamed of yourself trying to draw on the Fund when there are people in actual want who can’t be accommodated! No, I don’t want to hear any more about it if you please. There are others waiting.”

Waiting for what? The same treatment?

Oliver realized with a shock that he hadn’t phoned his foreman as promised, and it was four minutes to five. He did a dance of agonized impatience outside a telephone booth occupied by a fat woman. She noticed him, pursed her lips, hung up—and stayed in the booth. She began a slow search of her hand-bag, found coins and slowly dialed a new number. She gave him a malevolent grin as he walked away, crushed. He had a good job record, but that was no way to keep it good. One black mark, another black mark, and one day—bingo.

General Advances was open, of course. Through its window you could see handsome young men and sleek young women just waiting to help you, whatever the fiscal jam. He went in and was whisked to a booth where a big-bosomed honey-voiced blonde oozed sympathy over him.

He walked out with a check for fifteen hundred dollars after signing countless papers, with the creamy hand of the
girl on his to help guide the pen. What was printed on the papers, God and General Advances alone knew. There were men on the line who told him with resignation that they had been paying off to G.A. for the better part of their lives.

There were men who said bitterly that G.A. was owned by the Regan Benevolent Fund, which must be a lie.

The street was full of people—strangers who didn’t look like your run-of-the-mill artist. Muscle men, with the Chicago style and if anybody got one in the gut, too goddamned bad about it. They were peering into faces as they passed.

He was frightened. He stepped onto the slidewalk and hurried home, hoping for temporary peace there. But there was no peace for his frayed nerves. The apartment house door opened obediently when he told it: “Regan,” but the elevator stood stupidly still when he said: “Seventh Floor.”

He spat bitterly and precisely: “Sev-enth Floor.” The doors closed on him with a faintly derisive, pneumatic moan and he was whisked up to the eighth floor. He walked down wearily and said: “Cobalt blue” to his own door after a furtive look up and down the hall. It worked and he went to his phone to flash Latham, but didn’t. Oliver sank instead into a dun-colored pneumatic chair, his 250-dollar Hawthorne Electric Stepsaver door mike following him with its mindless snout. He punched a button on the chair and the 600-dollar hi-fi selected a random tape. A long, pure melodic trumpet line filled the room. It died for two beats and than the strings and woodwinds picked it up and tossed it—

Oliver snapped off the music, sweat starting from his brow. It was the Gershwin Lost Symphony, and he remembered how Gershwin had died. There had been a little nodule in his brain as there was a little nodule in Oliver’s throat.

Time, the Great Kidder. The years drifted by. Suddenly you were middle-aged, running to the medics for this and
that. Suddenly they told you to have your throat whittled out or die disgustingly. And what did you have to show for it? A number, a travel pass, a payment book from General Advance, a bunch of junk you never wanted, a job that was a heavier ball and chain than any convict ever wore in the barbarous days of Government. Was this what Regan and Falcaro had bled for?

He defrosted some hamburger, fried it and ate it and then went mechanically down to the tavern. He didn’t like to drink every night, but you had to be one of the boys, or word would get back to the plant and you might be on your way to another black mark. They were racing under the lights at Hawthorne too, and he’d be expected to put a couple of bucks down. He never seemed to win. Nobody he knew ever seemed to win. Not at the horses, not at the craps table, not at the numbers.

He stood outside the neon-bright saloon for a long moment, and then turned and walked into the darkness away from town, possessed by impulses he did not understand or want to understand. He had only a vague hope that standing on the Dunes and looking out across the dark lake might somehow soothe him.

In half an hour he had reached the deciduous forest, then the pine, then the scrubby brushes, then the grasses, then the bare white sand. And lying in it he found two people: a man so hard and dark he seemed to be carved from oak and a woman so white and gaunt she seemed to be carved from ivory.

He turned shyly from the woman.

“Are you all right?” he asked the man. “Is there anything I can do?”

The man opened red-rimmed eyes. “Better leave us alone,” he said. “We’d only get you into trouble.”

Oliver laughed hysterically. “Trouble?” he said. “Don’t think of it.”

The man seemed to be measuring him with his eyes, and said at last: “You’d better go and not talk about us. We’re enemies of the Mob.”

Oliver said after a pause: “So am I. Don’t go away. I’ll be back with some clothes and food for you and the lady. Then I can help you to my place. I’m an enemy of the Mob too. I just never knew it until now.”

He started off and then turned. “You won’t go away? I mean it. I want to help you. I can’t seem to help myself, but perhaps there’s something—”

The man said tiredly: “We won’t go away.”

Oliver hurried off. There was something mingled with the scent of the pine forest tonight. He was half-way home before he identified it: oil smoke.

XX

Lee swore and said: “I can get up if I want to.”

“You’ll stay in bed whether you want to or not,” Charles told her. “You’re a sick woman.”

“I’m a very bad-tempered woman and that means I’m convalescent. Ask anybody.”

“I’ll go right out into the street and do that, darling.”

She got out of bed and wrapped Oliver’s dressing gown around her. “I’m hungry again,” she said.

“He’ll be back soon. You’ve left nothing but some frozen—
worms, looks like. Shall I defrost them?”

“Please don’t trouble. I can wait.”

“Window!” he snapped.

She ducked back and swore again, this time at herself.

“Sorry,” she said. “Which will do us a whole hell of a lot of good if somebody saw me and started wondering.”

Oliver came in with packages. Lee kissed him and he grinned shyly. “Trout,” he whispered. She grabbed the packages and flew to the kitchenette.

“The way to Lee Falcaro’s heart,” Charles mused. “How’s your throat, Ken?”

“No pain, today,” Oliver whispered. “Latham says I can talk as much as I like. And I’ve got things to talk about.” He opened his coat and hauled out a flat package that had been stuffed under his belt. “Stolen from the factory.

Brushes, pens, tubes of ink, drawing instruments. My friends, you are going to return to Syndic Territory in style, with passes and permits galore.”

Lee returned. “Trout’s frying,” she said. “I heard that about the passes. Are you sure you can fake them?”

His face fell. “Eight years at the Chicago Art Institute,” he whispered. “Three years at Original Reproductions, Inc.

Eleven years at Picasso Oils and Etchings, where I am now third figure man in the Blue Department. I really think I deserve your confidence.”

“Ken, we trust and love you. If it weren’t for the difference in your ages I’d marry you and Charles. Now what about the Chicagoans? Hold it—the fish!”

Dinner was served and cleared away before they could get more out of Oliver. His throat wasn’t ready for more than one job at a time. He told them at last: “Things are quieting down. There are still some strangers in town and the road patrols are still acting very hard-boiled. But nobody’s been pulled in today. Somebody told me on the line that the whole business is a lot of foolishness. He said the ship must have been damaged by somebody’s stupidity and Regan must have been killed in a brawl—everybody knows he was half crazy, like his father. So my friend figures they made up the story about two wild Europeans to cover up a mess.

I said I thought there was a lot in what he said.” Oliver laughed silently.

“Good man!” Charles tried not to act over-eager. “When do you think you can start on the passes, Ken?”

Oliver’s face dropped a little. “Tonight,” he whispered. “I don’t suppose the first couple of tries will be any good so—
let’s go.”

Lee put her hand on his shoulder. “We’ll miss you too,”

she said. “But don’t ever forget this: we’re coming back.

Hell won’t stop us. We’re coming back.”

Oliver was arranging stolen instruments on the table.

“You have a big order,” he whispered sadly. “I guess you aren’t afraid of it because you’ve always been rich and strong. Anything you want to do you think you can do. But those Government people? And after them the Mob? Maybe it would be better if you just let things take their course, Lee. I’ve found out a person can be happy even here.”

“We’re coming back,” Lee said.

Oliver took out his own Michigan City-Chicago travel permit. As always, the sight of it made Charles wince.

Americans under such a yoke! Oliver whispered: “I got a good long look today at a Michigan City Buffalo permit. The foreman’s. He buys turps from Carolina at Buffalo. I sketched it from memory as soon as I got by myself. I don’t swear to it, not yet, but I have the sketch to practice from and I can get a few more looks later.”

He pinned down the drawing paper, licked a ruling pen and filled it, and began to copy the border of his own pass.

“I don’t suppose there’s anything I can do?” Lee asked.

“You can turn on the audio,” Oliver whispered. “They have it going all the time at the shop. I don’t feel right working unless there’s some music driving me out of my mind.”

Lee turned on the big Hawthorne Electric set with a wave of her hand; imbecillic music filled the air and Oliver grunted and settled down.

Lee and Charles listened, fingers entwined, to half an hour of slushy ballads while Oliver worked. The news period announcer came on with some anesthetic trial verdicts, sports results and society notes about which Regan had gone where. Then—

“The local Mobsters of Michigan City, Indiana, today welcomed Maurice Regan to their town. Mr. Regan will assume direction of efforts to apprehend the two European
savages who murdered James Regan IV last month aboard the ore boat Hon. John Regan in waters off Michigan City.

You probably remember that the Europeans did some damage to the vessel’s reactor room before they fled from the ship. How they boarded the ship and their present whereabouts are mysteries—but they probably won’t be mysteries long. Maurice Regan is little-known to the public, but he has built an enviable record in the administration of the Chicago Police Department. Mr. Regan on taking charge of the case, said this: ‘We know by traces found on the Dunes that they got away. We know from the logs of highway patrols that they didn’t get out of the Michigan City area. The only way to close the books on this matter fast is to cover the city with a fine-tooth comb. Naturally and unfortunately this will mean inconvenience to many citizens. I hope they will bear with the inconveniences gladly for the sake of confining those two savages in a place where they can no longer be a menace. I have methods of my own and there may be complaints.

Reasonable suggestions will be needed, but with crackpots I have no patience.’”

The radio began to spew more sports results. Oliver turned and waved at it to be silent. “I don’t like that,” he whispered. “I never heard of this Regan in the Chicago Police.”

“They said he wasn’t in the public eye.”

“I wasn’t the public. I did some posters for the police and I knew who was who. And that bit at the end. I’ve heard things like it before. The Mob doesn’t often admit it’s in the wrong, you know. When they try to disarm criticism in advance…this Regan must be a rough fellow.”

Charles and Lee Falcaro looked at each other in sudden fear. “We don’t want to hurry you, Ken,” she said. “But it looks as though you’d better do a rush job.”

Nodding, Oliver bent over the table. “Maybe a week,” he said hopefully. With the finest pen he traced the curlicues
an engraving lathe had evolved to make the passes foolproof. Odd, he thought—the lives of these two hanging by such a weak thing as the twisted thread of color that feeds from pen to paper. And, as an afterthought—I suppose mine does too.

* * * *

Oliver came back the next day to work with concentrated fury, barely stopping to eat and not stopping to talk. Lee got it out of him, but not easily. After being trapped in a half dozen contradictions about feeling well and having a headache, about his throat being sore and the pain having gone, he put down his pen and whispered steadily: “I didn’t want you to worry friends. But it looks bad. There is a new crowd in town. Twenty couples have been pulled in by them

—couples to prove who they were. Maybe fifty people have been pulled in for questioning—what do you know about this, what do you know about that. And they’ve begun house searches. Anybody you don’t like, you tell the new Regan about him. Say he’s sheltering Europeans. And his people pull them in. Why, everybody wants to know, are they pulling in couples who are obviously American if they’re looking for Europeans? And, everybody says, they’ve never seen anything like it. Now—I think I’d better get back to work.”

“Yes,” Lee said. “I think you had.”

Charles was at the window, peering around the drawn blind. “Look at that,” he said to Lee. She came over. A big man on the street below was walking, very methodically down the street.

“I will bet you,” Charles said, “that he’ll be back this way in ten minutes or so—and so on through the night.”

“I won’t take the bet,” she said. “He’s a sentry, all right.

The Mob’s learning from their friends across the water.

Learning too damned much. They must be all over town.”

They watched at the window and the sentry was back in ten minutes. On his fifth tour he stopped a young couple going down the street studied their faces, drew a gun on them and blew a whistle. A patrol came and took them away; the girl was hysterical. At two in the morning, the sentry was relieved by another, just as big and just as dangerous looking. At two in the morning they were still watching and Oliver was still hunched over the table tracing exquisite filigree of color.

* * * *

In five days, virtually without sleep, Oliver finished two Michigan City-Buffalo travel permits. The apartment house next door was hit by raiders while the ink dried; Charles and Lee Falcaro stood waiting grotesquely armed with kitchen knives. But it must have been a tip rather than part of the search plan crawling nearer to their end of town. The raiders did not hit their building.

Oliver had bought clothes according to Lee’s instructions

—including two men’s suits, Oliver’s size. One she let out for Charles; the other she took in for herself. She instructed Charles minutely in how he was to behave, on the outside.

First he roared with incredulous laughter; Lee, wise, in psychology assured him that she was perfectly serious.

Oliver, puzzled by his naivete, assured him that such things were not uncommon—not at least in Mob Territory. Charles then roared with indignation and Lee roared him down. His last broken protest was: “But what’ll I do if somebody takes me up on it?”

She shrugged, washing her hands of the matter, and went on trimming and dying her hair.

It was morning when she kissed Oliver good-bye, said to Charles: “See you at the station. Don’t say good-bye,” and walked from the apartment, a dark-haired boy with a slight limp. Charles watched her down the street. A cop turned to look after her and then went on his way.

Half an hour later Charles shook hands with Oliver and went out.

Oliver didn’t go to work that day. He sat all day at the table, drawing endless slow sketches of Lee Falcaro’s head.

Time the Great Kidder, he thought. He opens the door that shows you in the next room tables of goodies, colorful and tasty, men and women around the tables pleasantly surprised to see you, beckoning to you to join the feast. We have roast beef if you’re serious, we have caviar if you’re experimental, we have baked alaska if you’re frivolous—
join the feast; try a little bit of everything. So you start toward the door.

Time, the Great Kidder, pulls the rug from under your feet and slams the door while the guests at the feast laugh their heads off at your painful but superficial injuries.

Oliver slowly drew Lee’s head for the fifteenth time and wished he dared to turn on the audio for the news. Perhaps he thought, the next voice you hear will be the cops at the door.

XXI

Charles walked down the street and ran immediately into a challenge from a police sergeant.

“Where you from, mister?” the cop demanded, balanced and ready to draw.

Charles gulped and let Lee Falcaro’s drilling take over.

“Oh, around, sergeant. I’m from around here.”

“What’re you so nervous about?”

“Why, sergeant, you’re such an exciting type, really. Did anybody ever tell you you look well in uniform?”

The cop glared at him and said: “If I wasn’t in uniform, I’d hang one on you sister. And if the force wasn’t all out hunting the lunatics, that killed Mr. Regan I’d pull you in for spitting on the sidewalk. Get to hell off my beat and stay off. I’m not forgetting your face.”

Charles scurried on. It had worked.

It worked once more with a uniformed policeman. One of the Chicago plain-clothes imports was the third and last.

He socked Charles in the jaw and sent him on his way with a kick in the rear. He had been thoroughly warned that it would probably happen: “Count on them to over-react.

That’s the key to it. You’ll make them so eager to assert their own virility, that it’ll temporarily bury their primary mission. It’s quite likely that one or more pokes will be taken at you. All you can do is take them. If you get—when you get through, they’ll be cheap at the price.”

The sock in the jaw hadn’t been very expert. The kick in the pants was negligible, considering the fact that it had propelled him through the gate of the Michigan City Transport Terminal.

By the big terminal clock the Chicago-Buffalo Express was due in fifteen minutes. Its gleaming single rail, as tall as a man crossed the far end of the concourse. Most of the fifty-odd people in the station were probably Buffalo-bound…

safe geldings who could be trusted to visit Syndic Territory, off the leash and return obediently. Well-dressed, of course, and many past middle-age, with a stake in the Mob Territory stronger than hope of freedom. One youngster, though—oh. It was Lee, leaning, slack-jawed, against a pillar and reading the Green Sheet.

Who were the cops in the crowd? The thickset man with restless eyes, of course. The saintly-looking guy who kept moving and glancing into faces.

Charles went to the newsstand and put a coin in the slot for The Mob—A Short History, by the same Arrowsmith Hunde who had brightened and misinformed his youth.

Nothing to it, he thought. Train comes in, put your money in the turnstile, show your permit to the turnstile’s eye, get aboard and that-is-that. Unless the money is phony, or the pass is phony in which case the turnstile locks and all hell breaks loose. His money was just dandy, but the permit now

—there hadn’t been any way to test it against a turnstile’s
template, or time to do it if there had been a way. Was the probability of boarding two to one?

The probability abruptly dropped to zero as a round little man flanked by two huge men entered the station.

Commander Grinnel.

The picture puzzle fell into a whole as the two plainclothesmen circulating in the station eyed Grinnel and nodded to him. The big one absent-mindedly made a gesture that was the start of a police salute.

Grinnel was Maurice Regan—the Maurice Regan mysteriously unknown to Oliver, who knew the Chicago police. Grinnel was a bit of a lend-lease from the North American Navy, called in because of his unique knowledge of Charles Orsino and Lee Falcaro, their faces, voices and behavior. Grinnel was the expert in combing the city without any nonsense about rights and mouthpieces.

Grinnel was the expert who could set up a military interior guard of the city. Grinnel was the specialist temporarily invested with the rank of a Regan so he could do his job.

The round little man with the halo of hair walked briskly to the turnstile and there stood at a military parade rest with a look of resignation on his face.

How hard on me it is, he seemed to be saying, that I have such dull damn duty. How hard that an officer of my brilliance must do sentry-go for every train to Syndic Territory.

The slack-jawed youth who was Lee Falcaro looked at him over her Green Sheet and nodded before dipping into the Tia Juana past performances again. She knew.

Passengers were beginning to line up at the turnstile, smoothing out their money and fiddling with their permits.

In a minute he and Lee Falcaro would have to join the line or stand conspicuously on the emptying floor. The thing was dead for twenty-four hours now, until the next train—
and then Grinnel headed across the floor looking very impersonal. The look of a man going to the men’s room.

The station cops and Grinnel’s two bruisers drifted together at the turnstile and began to chat.

Charles followed Grinnel, wearing the same impersonal look, and entered the room almost on his heels.

Grinnel saw him in a wash-bowl mirror; simultaneously he half turned, opened his mouth to yell and whipped his hand into his coat. A single round-house right from Charles crunched into the soft side of his neck. He fell with his head twisted at an odd angle. Blood began to run from the corner of his mouth onto his shirt.

“Remember Martha?” Charles whispered down at the body. “That was for murder.” He looked around the tiled room. There was a mop closet with the door ajar, and Grinnel’s flabby body fitted in it.

Charles walked from the washroom to the line of passengers across the floor. It seemed to go on for miles.

Lee Falcaro was no longer lounging against the past. He spotted her in line, still slack-jawed, still gaping over the magazine. The monorail began to sing shrilly with the vibration of the train braking a mile away, and the turnstile

“unlocked” light went on.

There was the usual number of fumblers, the usual number of “please unfold your currency” flashes. Lee carried through to the end with her slovenly pose. For her the sign said: “incorrect denominations.” Behind her a man snarled: “for Christ’s sake, kid, we’re all waiting on you!”

The cops only half noticed; they were talking. When Charles got to the turnstile one of the cops was saying:

“Maybe it’s something he ate. How’d you like somebody to barge in—”

The rest was lost in the clicking of the turnstile that let him through.

* * * *

He settled in a very pneumatic chair as the train accelerated evenly to a speed of three hundred and fifty

miles per hour. A sign in the car said that the next stop was Buffalo. And there was Lee, lurching up the aisle against the acceleration. She spotted him, tossed the Green Sheet in the Air and fell into his lap.

“Disgusting!” snarled a man across the aisle. “Simply disgusting!”

“You haven’t seen anything yet,” Lee told him, and kissed Charles on the mouth.

The man choked: “I shall certainly report this to the authorities when we arrive in Buffalo!”

“Mmm,” said Lee, preoccupied. “Do that, mister. Do that.”

XXII

“I didn’t like his reaction,” Charles told her in the anteroom of F. W. Taylor’s office. “I didn’t talk to him long on the phone, but I don’t like his reaction at all. He seemed to think I was exaggerating. Or all wet. Or a punk kid.”

“I can assure him you’re not that,” Lee Falcaro said warmly. “Call on me any time.”

He gave her a worried smile. The door opened then and they went in.

Uncle Frank looked up. “We’d just about written you two off,” he said. “What’s it like?”

“Bad,” Charles said. “Worse than anything you’ve imagined. There’s an underground, all right, and they are practicing assassination.”

“Too bad,” the old man said. “We’ll have to shake up the bodyguard organization. Make ‘em de rigeur at all hours, screen ‘em and see that they really know how to shoot. I hate to meddle, but we can’t have the Government knocking our people off.”

“It’s worse than that,” Lee said. “There’s a tie-up between the Government and the Mob. We got away from Ireland aboard a speed boat and we were picked up by a Mob lakes ore ship. It had been running gasoline and ammunition to the Government. Jimmy Regan was in charge of the deal.

We jumped into Lake Michigan and made our way back here. We were in Mob Territory—down among the small-timers—long enough to establish that the Mob and Government are hand in glove. One of these day’s they’re going to jump us.”

“Ah,” Taylor said softly. “I’ve thought so for a long time.”

Charles burst out: “Then for God’s sake, Uncle Frank, why haven’t you done anything? You don’t know what it’s like out there. The Government’s a nightmare. They have slaves. And the Mob’s not much better. Numbers!

Restrictions! Permits! Passes! And they don’t call it that, but they have taxes!”

“They’re mad,” Lee said. “Quite mad. And I’m talking technically. Neurotics and psychotics swarm in the streets of Mob Territory. The Government, naturally—but the Mob was a shock. We’ve got to get ready, Mr. Taylor. Every psychotic or severe neurotic in Syndic Territory is a potential agent of theirs.”

“Don’t just check off the Government, darling,” Charles said tensely. “They’ve got to be smashed. They’re no good to themselves or anybody else. Life’s a burden there if only they knew it. And they’re holding down the natives by horrible cruelty.”

Taylor leaned back and asked: “What do you recommend?”

Charles said: “A fighting fleet and an army.”

Lee said: “Mass diagnosis of the unstable. Screening of severe cases and treatment where it’s indicated. Riveredge must be a plague-spot of agents.”

Taylor shook his head and told them: “It won’t do.”

Charles was aghast. “It won’t do? Uncle Frank, what the hell do you mean, it won’t do? Didn’t we make it clear?

They want to invade us and loot us and subject us!”

“It won’t do,” Taylor said. “I choose the devil we know. A fighting fleet is out. We’ll arm our merchant vessels and
hope for the best. A full-time army is out. We’ll get together some-kind of militia. And a roundup of the unstable is out.”

“Why?” Lee demanded. “My people have worked out perfectly effective techniques—”

“Let me talk, please. I have a feeling that it won’t be any good, but hear me out.

“I’ll take your black art first, Lee. As you know, I have played with history. To a historian, your work has been very interesting. The sequence was this: study of abnormal psychology collapsed under Lieberman’s findings, study of abnormal psychology revived by you when you invalidated Lieberman’s findings. I suggest that Lieberman and his followers were correct—and that you were correct. I suggest that what changed was the makeup of the population. That would mean that before Lieberman there were plenty of neurotics and psychotics to study, that in Lieberman’s time there were so few that earlier generalizations were invalidated, and that now—in our time, Lee—neurotics and psychotics are among us again in increasingly ample numbers.”

The girl opened her mouth, shut it again and thoughtfully studied her nails.

“I will not tolerate,” Taylor went on, “a roundup or a registration, or mass treatment or any such violation of the Syndic’s spirit.”

Charles exploded: “Damn it, this is a matter of life or death to the Syndic!”

“No, Charles. Nothing can be a matter of life or death to the Syndic. When anything becomes a matter of life or death to the Syndic, the Syndic is already dead, its morale, is already disintegrated, its credit already gone. What is left is not the Syndic but the Syndic’s dead shell. I am not placed so that I can say objectively now whether the Syndic is dead or alive. I fear it is dying. The rising tide of neurotics is a symptom. The suggestion from you two, who should be imbued with the old happy-go-lucky, we-can’t-
miss esprit of the Syndic that we cower behind mercenaries instead of trusting the people who made us—that’s another symptom. Dick Reiner’s rise to influence on a policy of driving the Government from the seas is another symptom.

“I mentioned the devil we know as my choice. That’s the status quo, even though I have reason to fear it’s crumbling beneath our feet. If it is, it may last out our time. We’ll shore it up with armed merchantmen and a militia. If the people are with us now as they always have been, that’ll do it. The devil we don’t know is what we’ll become if we radically dislocate Syndic life and attitudes.

“I can’t back a fighting fleet. I can’t back a regular army. I can’t back any restrictive measure on the freedom of anybody but an apprehended criminal. Read history. It has taught me not to meddle, it has taught me that no man should think himself clever enough or good enough to dare it. That is the lesson history teaches us.

“Who can know what he’s doing when he doesn’t even know why he does it? Bless the bright Cromagnon for inventing the bow and damn him for inventing missile warfare. Bless the stubby little Sumerians for miracles in gold and lapis lazuli and damn them for burying a dead queen’s hand-maidens living in her tomb. Bless Shih Hwang-Ti for building the Great Wall between northern barbarism and southern culture, and damn him for burning every book in China. Bless King Minos for the ease of Cnossian flush toilets and damn him for his yearly tribute of Greek sacrificial victims. Bless Pharaoh for peace and damn him for slavery. Bless the Greeks for restricting population so the well-fed few could kindle a watch-tower in the west, and damn the prostitution and sodomy and wars of colonization by which they did it. Bless the Romans for their strength to smash down every wall that hemmed their building genius, and damn them for their weakness that never broke the bloody grip of Etruscan savagery on their minds. Bless the Jews who discovered the fatherhood of

God and damn them who limited it to the survivors of a surgical operation. Bless the Christians who abolished the surgical preliminaries and damn them who substituted a thousand cerebral quibbles. Bless Justinian for the Code of Law and damn him for his countless treacheries that were the prototype of the wretched Byzantine millenium. Bless the churchmen for teaching and preaching, and damn, them for drawing a line beyond which they could only teach and preach in peril of the stake.

“Bless the navigators who, opened the new world to famine-ridden Europe, and damn them for syphillis. Bless the red-skins who bred maize, the great preserver of life and damn them for breeding maize the great destroyer of topsoil. Bless the Virginia planters for the solace of tobacco and damn them for the red gullies they left where forests had stood. Bless the obstetricians with forceps who eased the agony of labor and damn them for bringing countless monsters into the world to reproduce their kind. Bless the Point Four boys who slew the malaria mosquitoes of Ceylon and damn them for letting more Sinhalese be born then five Ceylons could feed.

“Who knows what he is doing, why he does it or what the consequences will be?

“Let the social scientists play with their theories if they like; I’m fond of poetry myself. The fact is that they have not so far solved what I call the two-billion-body problem.

With brilliant hindsight some of them tell us that more than a dozen civilizations have gone down into the darkness before us. I see no reason why ours should not go down into the darkness with them, nor do I see any reason why we should not meanwhile enjoy ourselves collecting sense-impressions to be remembered with pleasure in old age.

No; I will not agitate for extermination of the Government and hegemony over the Mob. Such a policy would automatically, inevitably and immediately entail many, many violent deaths and painful wounds. The wrong kind of
sense-impressions. I shall, with fear and trembling, recommend the raising of a militia—a purely defensive, extremely sloppy militia—and pray that it will not Involve us in a war of aggression.”

He looked at the two of them and shrugged. “Lee, so stern, Charles so grim,” he said. “I suppose you’re dedicated now.” He looked at the desk.

He thought: I have a faint desire to take the pistol from my desk and shoot you both. I have a nervous feeling that you’re about to embark on a crusade to awaken Syndic Territory to its perils. You think the fate of civilization hinges on you. You’re right, of course. The fate of civilization hinges on every one of us at any given moment.

We are all components in the two-billion-body problem.

Somehow for a century we’ve achieved in Syndic Territory for almost everybody the civil liberties, peace of mind and living standards that were enjoyed by the middle classes before 1914—plus longer life, better health, a more generous morality, increased command over nature; minus the servant problem and certain superstitions. A handful of wonderfully pleasant decades. When you look back over history you wonder who in his right mind could ask for more. And you wonder who would dare to presume to tamper with it.

He studied the earnest young faces. There was so much that he might say—but he shrugged again.

“Bless you,” he said. “Gather ye sense impression while ye may. Some like pointer readings, some like friction on the mucous membranes. Now go about your business; I have work to do.”

He didn’t really. When he was alone he leaned back and laughed and laughed.

Win, lose or draw, those two would go far and enjoy themselves mightily along the way. Which was what counted.

OceanofPDF.com

AFTER BONESTELL, by Jay Lake How many times can a man wake up in a lifetime?

It occurs to me that question could stand some rephrasing. At the least, to account for certain values of

“man” and “lifetime.”

Damn, I hate questions. Every time I instantiate, I seem to come online with a question or ten.

I’ve got eyes again. That’s nice. It has been aeon or two since optical sensors were in fashion. Someone—the Voldrani?—had been towing the Earth extremely long distances at Newtonian speeds. That takes a while, to put it mildly. Even stars eventually notice something that happens that slowly. Not a lot to see sailing between the spiral arms without a primary to light your days, not without some big arrays.

My eyes tell me there’s light. Meaning, widespread electromagnetic radiation between 380 and 780 ångströms.

I haven’t had a koniocortex in over a gigayear, measured by my 238U clock, but there’s still something comforting about a sky full of blue light. Even if it is strangely sourceless. There’s still a monkey screaming in the trees, somewhere deep in the simulation which is my consciousness.

Someone’s knocking, too. I don’t wake up just to put out the cat. I don’t seem to have any virtual data streams or neutrino matrices or any of my other billenial gear at the moment, so I use my eyes to look around.

Amazingly, they do.

I see rocks, and slush, and a blue sky with scattered clouds. This could be Montana, if Montana weren’t lost to plate tectonics and the crustal deformations of an Earth in tow longer than the life cycle of a Type K red giant. Not just rocks, buttes even. Mesas. I reach for a whole library
of the geology of the dynamic planet so long dead beneath my feet before I realize the network is missing.

Not dormant or silent.

Missing.

And by all the gods of ancient days, I have feet.

Then the planet says, “Hello.”

#

I walk. I am ankle-deep in the slush, which isn’t really snow. Not as some portion of my biological memory understands. It’s white, but it has the consistency of talcum powder. It’s chilly, but not nearly cold enough. I’m pretty sure walking naked in the snow of my childhood would have turned my feet blue. Not to mention the rest of me.

And the air is warm.

Already I am doubting the miracle. Maybe I just think it’s warm. This air could be supercooled helium, but if this body were adapted to it…

I shake the thought off as unworthy.

The planet whines after me like a dog with separation anxiety, but I ignore it. Earth and I have been bedmates for well over a billion years and she’s never spoken to me once.

I don’t need to answer her now.

Instead I experiment with kicking the slush, tossing it, spreading the powder like chaff on the desultory wind which seems to have sprung up at my thought. The clouds overhead seem almost painted onto the sky, but the air is moving.

For a moment I stop on some bare rock and contemplate the marvel that is my feet. Long, bony toes, as if evolution were part way through changing its mind about whether I should walk on the ground or spend my life in the trees.

Tiny hairs spiraling from the knuckle joints of my toes, save the littlest one which is clean and smooth as a baby’s thighs. The metatarsals are a subtle texture under the thin skin that tops them. At my merest thought, the toes clench and the skin ripples.

Then the weird, warm snow blows sticky smooth across me and I realize none of this is possible. It never was. Just for starters, my feet have been gone almost since time began.

The planet takes that moment to try again. “I know you can hear us,” it says petulantly.

“Of course I can. You brought me back.”

“No…” There is a silence which is somehow filled with the heaviness of thought. Then, in a voice so small it is barely more than the chattering of the wind: “We had believed you brought us back.”

I walk again, feeling the sheer joy of the interplay of bone, muscle and skin, the trick of balance which we bipeds must master simply to rise to our feet, the sense of heaviness and limits and borders which a body brings to a mind. “I never left.” That sounded rude, abrupt, even to me. “I’ve been sleeping.”

“Sleeping?”

“Sleeping,” I say confidently. “The long sleep, on the wrong side of dreams.” The phrase is dredged out of a hazy recollection of some orientation lecture, back when I still had the feet I was born with.

Strangely, I think I can remember being born as well.

Now the planet is plaintive. “Have we also been sleeping?”

Somehow I’d always thought that if Earth had a voice, it would be some majestic Gaian alto that could shatter mountains and force seeds into blossom. Not the whimperings of a tired child.

“Yes,” I say, taking pity now. “We’ve both been sleeping.”

“I don’t remember being awake before.”

“I don’t remember you ei—”

I stop, my voice arrested by the sheer magnitude of the sight which has appeared as I’ve continued to walk. A shift of perspective, maybe, or perhaps it sprang full blown into being before my reconstituted eyes, but there is now a
planet in the sky. A gas giant, to be specific, Saturn as seen from Titan.

Except this is no more Saturn than I am on Titan.

(In that moment I know the Earth is real beneath my feet, even if the feet themselves are some new veil of illusion.) This giant is the dream of a thousand artists of my childhood, men like Bonestell and Paul and Wu and Eggleton, huge and gravid with pulsing storm bands that promise wind whales and aerial cities and lead-foil airships with deathly lances of coruscating viridian energy rays. Its rings are gorgeous, exaggerated, so massive that a dozen Earths would have died to make such a circle in the sky.

They gleam like the wreckage of a million million gilded warships, banding the gas giant in some plighting of troth with encroaching universe.

I suddenly feel protective toward my sullen, frightened planet. This world is parent to the whining child that is my Earth.

Adoptive parent, the forced love of gravity and mass, but still, here we are.

“Oh,” I say.

“Didn’t you know?” asks the Earth, whispering in the whippet whine of the snow.

“How could I? Taken in your scale, I am a point of awareness at best.” Though there is a certain subtle thrill to being back in my body, or some body, I am greatly missing my networks and my instruments. That is the real me, now after all this time.

I wonder where I am.

“It frightens us.”

“It should,” I say without thinking, a certain reflexive humor getting in the way of my better judgment. I try for the save. “What do you suppose it wants?” The question didn’t seem as stupid as it might under other circumstances.

Earth is slow in answering. “We think it might be hungry.”

* * * *

I climb one of the little mesas, as if a dozen yards of altitude would bring me meaningfully closer to the giant in the sky. Shouldn’t it be moving, I wonder? Another piece of fakery. I try talking to the not-Saturn for a while.

Cronus, I realize he should be named.

I call him that name as well. “Cronus, why have you remade us?” It seems inconceivable that some casual agency awakened me once more, instantiated in this idiotically limited body, while also giving Earth a voice of its own after five and half billion years of silence.

He is silent. They? Earth seems to be incorrigibly plural, and I am disinclined to embark on a course of therapy in that regard. Still, there is something singular about that vasty presence pinned unmoving in our pale blue sky.

Eventually I tire of the game and find myself falling prey to the vagaries of embodiment. Fatigue, and hunger. I’m not certain if they’re just the hard death of old habits or real needs, but I feel them all the same.

“Earth,” I say.

“Yes?”

“Do you have any food?”

There is a plate of waxy pears beside me, unnoticed before.

“Ah.” So I am dreaming, or dying. Sad, that, because I was beginning to like this place. At least a little. If nothing else, it explained the strange snow.

“We don’t think you’re dying,” the planet tells me.

“Because we don’t think we’re dying.”

“Then where are we?”

“Wherever the Voldrani meant to take us.”

Cronus rumbles, something sad and slow like my grandfather mumbling in his sleep.

“We’ve fallen deeper into the dream,” I tell the planets, both of them. Cronus may not be listening, but if I can hear him, by the logic of this place he can hear me.

“What dream?” the planet asks me. My planet. Or perhaps I belong to it.

“The oldest one, of faraway places and distant horizons and the sky another color than the one a man was born under it. The first hairy man who rode a log down the river had that dream, and by God we had it when I was a kid. You and I, my planetary friend, we’ve gone after Bonestell.”

“It took long enough,” muttered the Earth.

“Yet here we are.” I sit, and admire the view. I realize it was worth the wait.

OceanofPDF.com

THE JEWELS OF APTOR, by Samuel R. Delany (Part 1)

The waves flung up against the purple glow
of double sleeplessness. Along the piers
the ships return; but sailing I would go
through double rings of fire, double fears.

So therefore let your bright vaults heave the night about with ropes of wind and points of light, and say, as all the rolling stars go, “I
have stood my feet on rock and seen the sky.”

—These are the opening lines from The Galactica, by the one-armed poet Geo, the epic of the conflicts of Leptar and Aptor.

PROLOGUE

Afterwards, she was taken down to the sea.

She didn’t feel too well, so she sat on a rock down where the sand was wet and scrunched her bare toes in and out of the cool surface.

She turned away, looked toward the water, and hunched her shoulders a little. “I think it was awful,” she said. “I think it was pretty terrible. Why did you show it to me? He was just a little boy. What reason could they have possibly had for doing that to him?”

“It was just a film,” he said. “We showed it to you so you would learn.”

“But it was a film of something that really happened.”

“It happened several years ago, several hundred miles away.”

“But it did happen; you used a tight beam to spy on them, and when the image came in on the vision screen, you made a film of it, and—But why did you show it to me?”

“What have we been teaching you?”

But she couldn’t think, and only had the picture in her mind, vivid movements, scarlets, and bright agony. “He was just a child,” she said. “He couldn’t have been more than eleven or twelve.”

“You are just a child,” he said. “You are not sixteen yet.”

“What was I supposed to learn?”

“Look around you,” he said. “You should see something.”

But the picture in her mind was still too vivid, too bright.

“You should be able to learn it right here on this beach, in the trees back there, in the rocks, in the bleached shells around your feet. You do see it; you just don’t recognize it.”

Suddenly he changed his tone. “Actually you’re a very fine student. You learn quickly. Do you remember anything about telepathy? You studied it months ago.”

“‘By a method similar to radio broadcast and reception,’”

she recited, “‘the synapse patterns of conscious thoughts are read from one cranial cortex and duplicated in another, resulting in similar sensual impressions experienced—’”

Suddenly she broke off. “But I can’t do it, so it doesn’t help me any!”

“What about history, then?” he said. “You did extremely well during the examination. What good does knowing about all the happenings in the world before and after the Great Fire do you?”

“Well, it’s…” she started. “It’s just interesting.”

“The film you saw,” he said, “was, in a way, history. That is, it happened in the past.”

“But it was so—” Again she stopped. “—horrible!”

“Does history fascinate you because it’s just interesting?”

he asked. “Or does it do something else? Don’t you ever want to know what the reason is behind some of the things these people do in the pages of the books?”

“Yes, I want to know the reasons,” she said. “Like I want to know the reason they nailed that man to the oaken cross.

I want to know why they did that to him.”

“A good question,” he mused. “Which reminds me, at about the same time as they were nailing him to that cross, it was decided in China that the forces of the universe were to be represented by a circle, half black, half white. But to remind themselves that there was no pure force, no purely unique reason, they put a spot of white paint in the black half and a spot of black paint in the white. Isn’t that interesting?”

She looked at him and wondered how he had gotten from one to the other. But he was going on.

“And do you remember the goldsmith, the lover, how he recorded in his autobiography that at age four, he and his father saw the Fabulous Salamander on their hearth by the fire; and his father suddenly smacked the boy ten feet across the room into a rack of kettles, saying something to the effect that little Cellini was too young to remember the incident unless some pain accompanied it.”

“I remember that story,” she said. “And I remember that Cellini said that he wasn’t sure if the smack was the reason he remembered the Salamander, or the Salamander the reason he remembered the smack.”

“Yes, yes!” he cried. “That’s it. The reason, the reasons…

Don’t you see the pattern?”

“Only I don’t know what a Salamander is,” she told him.

“Well, it’s like the blue lizards that sing outside your window sometimes,” he explained. “Only it isn’t blue, and it doesn’t sing.”

“Then why should anyone want to remember it?” she grinned. It was an attempt to annoy him, but he was not looking at her, and was talking of something else.

“And the painter,” he was saying, “he was a friend of Cellini, you remember, in Florence. He was painting a picture of “La Gioconda.” As a matter of fact, he had to take time from the already crumbling picture of “The Last Supper” of the man who was nailed to the cross of oak to paint her. And he put a smile on her face of which men
asked for centuries, ‘What is the reason she smiles so strangely?’ Yes, the reason, don’t you see? Just look around.”

“What about the Great Fire?” she asked. “When they dropped flames from the skies and the harbors boiled, that was reasonless. That was like what they did to that boy.”

“Oh no,” he said to her. “Not reasonless. True, when the Great Fire came, people all over the earth screamed, ‘Why?

Why? How can man do this to man? What is the reason?’

But just look around you, right here. On this beach.”

“I guess I can’t see it yet,” she said. “I can just see what they did to him, and it was awful.”

“Well,” said the man in the dark robe, “perhaps when you stop seeing what they did so vividly, you will start seeing why they did it. I think it’s time for us to go back now.”

As she slid off the rock and started walking beside him, barefooted in the sand, she asked, “That boy—I wasn’t sure, he was all tied up, but he had four arms, didn’t he?”

“He did.”

“You know, I can’t just go around saying it was awful. I think I’m going to write a poem. Or make something. Or both. I’ve got to get it out of my head.”

“That wouldn’t be a bad idea,” he mumbled as they approached the trees in front of the river. “Not at all.”

And several days later, and several hundred miles away…

CHAPTER I

Waves flung themselves at the blue evening. Low light burned on the wet hulks of ships that slipped by mossy pilings into the docks as water sloshed at the rotten stone embankment of the city.

Gangplanks, chained from wooden pullies, scraped into place on concrete blocks, and the crew, after the slow captain and the tall mate, descended raffishly along the wooden boards which sagged with the pounding of bare feet. In bawling groups, pairs, or singly they howled into
the narrow waterfront streets, into the yellow light from open inn doors, the purple shadowed portals leading to dim rooms full of blue smoke and stench of burnt poppies.

The captain, with eyes the color of sea under fog, touched his sword hilt with his fist and said quietly to the mate,

“Well, they’re gone. We better start collecting new sailors for the ten we lost at Aptor. Ten good men, Jordde. I’m sick when I think of the bone and broken meat they became.”

“Ten for the dead,” sneered the mate, “and twenty for the living we’ll never see again. Any sailor that would want to continue this trip with us is insane. We’ll do well if we only lose that many.” He was a tall, wire bound man, which made the green tunic he wore look baggy.

“I’ll never forgive her for ordering us to that monstrous island,” said the captain.

“I wouldn’t speak too loudly,” mumbled the mate. “Yours isn’t to forgive her. Besides, she went with them, and was in as much danger as they were. It’s only luck she came back.”

Suddenly the captain asked, “Do you believe the sailor’s stories of magic they tell of her?”

“Why, sir?” asked the mate. “Do you?”

“No, I don’t,” said the captain with a certainty that came too quickly. “Still, with three survivors out of thirteen, that she should be among them, with hardly a robe torn.”

“Perhaps they wouldn’t touch a woman,” suggested the mate, Jordde.

“Perhaps,” said the captain.

“And she’s been strange,” continued Jordde, “ever since then. She walks at night. I’ve seen her going by the rails, looking from the sea-fire to the stars, and then back.”

“Ten good men,” mused the captain. “Hacked up, torn in bits. I wouldn’t have believed that much barbarity in the world, if I hadn’t seen that arm, floating on the water. It gives me chills now, the way the men ran to the rail to see,
pointed at it. And it just raised itself up, like a beckoning, a signal, and then sank in a wash of foam and green water.”

“Well,” said the mate, “we have men to get.”

“I wonder if she’ll come ashore?”

“She’ll come if she wants, Captain. Her doing is no concern of yours. Your job is the ship and to do what she says.”

“I have more of a job than that,” and he looked back at his still craft.

The mate touched the captain’s shoulder. “If you’re going to speak things like that, speak them softly, and only to me.”

“I have more of a job than that,” the captain repeated.

Then, suddenly, he started away, and the mate was following him down the darkening dockside street.

* * * *

The dock was still for a moment. Then a barrel toppled from a pile of barrels, and a figure moved like a bird’s shadow across the opening between mounds of cargo set about the pier.

At the same time two men approached down a narrow street filled with the day’s last light. The bigger one threw a great shadow that aped his gesticulating arms behind him on the greenish faces of the buildings. Bare feet like halved hams, shins bound with thongs and pelts, he waved one hand in explanation, while he rubbed the back of the other on his short, mahogany beard.

“You’re going to ship out, eh friend? You think they’ll take your rhymes and jingles instead of muscles and rope pulling?”

The smaller, in a white tunic looped with a thick leather belt, laughed beneath his friend’s rantings. “Fifteen minutes ago you thought it was a fine idea; said it would make me a man.”

“Oh, it’s a life to make,” his hand went up, “and it’s a life to break men,” and it fell.

The slighter one pushed back black hair from his forehead, stopped, and looked at the ships. “You still haven’t told me why no ship has taken you on in the past three months,” he said absently, following the rope rigging against the sky like black knife slashes on blue silk. “A year ago I’d never see you in for more than three days at once.”

The gesticulating arm suddenly encircled the smaller man’s waist and lifted a leather pouch from the wide belt.

“Are you sure, friend Geo,” began the giant, “that we couldn’t use up some of this silver on wine before we go. If you want to do this right, then right is how it should be done. When you sign up on a ship you’re supposed to be broke and a little tight. It shows that you’re capable of getting along without the inconvenience of money and can hold your liquor, too.”

“Urson, get your paw off that.” Geo snatched the purse away.

“Now here,” countered Urson, reaching for it once more,

“you don’t have to grab.”

“Look, I’ve kept you drunk five nights now, and it’s time to sober up. And suppose they don’t take us, who’s going—”

But Urson, the idea having taken the glow of a game, made another swipe with his big hand.

Geo leapt back with the purse. “Now cut that out,” he began; but in leaping, his feet struck the fallen barrel, and he fell backwards to the wet cobbles. The pouch splattered away, jingling.

Both of them scrambled.

Then the bird’s shadow moved in the opening between the cargo piles, a slight figure bounded forward, swept the purse up with one hand, pushed himself away from the pile of cargo with another, and there were two more fists pumping at his side as he ran.

“What the devil,” began Urson, and then, “What the devil!”

“Hey you,” called Geo, lurching to his feet. “Come back!”

And Urson had already loped a couple of steps after the fleeting mutant, now halfway down the block.

Suddenly, from behind them, like a wine-glass stem snapping, only twenty times as loud, a voice called, “Stop, little thief. Stop.”

The running form stopped as though it had hit a wall.

“Come back, now! Come back!”

The figure turned, and docilely started back, the movements so lithe and swift a moment ago, now mechanical.

“It’s just a kid,” Urson said.

He was a dark-haired boy, naked except for a ragged breech. He approached staring fixedly beyond them toward the boats. And he had four arms.

Now they turned and looked also.

She stood at the base of the ship’s gangplank, against what sun still washed the horizon. One hand held something close at her throat, and wind, caught in a veil, held the purple gauze against the red swath at the world’s edge, and then dropped it.

The boy, like an automaton, approached her.

“Give that to me, little thief,” she said.

He handed her the purse. She took it, and then suddenly dropped her other hand from her neck. The moment she did so, the boy staggered backwards, turned, and ran straight into Urson, who said, “Ooof,” and then, “God damn little spider.”

The boy struggled to get away like a hydra in furious silence. But Urson held. “You stick around… Owww!… to get yourself thrashed.… There.” The boy got turned, his back to the giant; one arm locked across his neck, and the other hand, holding all four wrists, lifted up hard enough so
that the body shook like wires jerked taut, but he was still silent.

Now the woman came across the dock. “This belongs to you, gentlemen?” she asked, extending the purse.

“Thank you, ma’am,” grunted Urson, reaching forward.

“I’ll take it, ma’am,” said Geo, intercepting. Then he recited:

“Shadows melt in light of sacred laughter.

Hands and houses shall be one hereafter.

“Many thanks,” he added.

Beneath the veil, on her shadowed face, her eyebrows raised. “You have been schooled in courtly rites?” She observed him. “Are you perhaps a student at the university?”

Geo smiled. “I was, until a short time ago. But funds are low and I have to get through the summer somehow. I’m going to sea.”

“Honorable, but perhaps foolish.”

“I am a poet, ma’am; they say poets are fools. Besides, my friend here says the sea will make a man of me. To be a good poet, one must be a good man.”

“More honorable, less foolish. What sort of a man is your friend?”

“My name is Urson,” said the giant, stepping up. “I’ve been the best hand on any ship I’ve sailed on.”

“Urson?” said the woman, musing. “The Bear? I thought bears did not like water. Except polar bears. It makes them mad. I believe there was an old spell, in antiquity, for taming angry bears.… ”

“Calmly brother bear,” Geo began to recite.

“calm the winter sleep.

Fire shall not harm,
water not alarm.

While the current grows,
amber honey flaws,
golden salmon leap.”

“Hey,” said Urson. “I’m not a bear.”

“Your name means bear,” Geo said. Then to the lady, “You see, I have been well trained.”

“I’m afraid I have not,” she replied. “Poetry and rituals were a hobby of a year’s passing interest when I was younger. But that was all.” Now she looked down at the boy whom Urson still held. “You two look alike. Dark eyes, dark hair.” She laughed. “Are there other things in common between poets and thieves?”

“Well,” complained Urson with a jerk of his chin, “this one here won’t spare a few silvers for a drink of good wine to wet his best friend’s throat, and that’s a sort of thievery, if you ask me.”

“I did not ask,” said the woman, quietly.

Urson huffed.

“Little thief,” the woman said. “Little four arms. What is your name?”

Silence, and the dark eyes narrowed.

“I can make you tell me,” and she raised her hand to her throat again.

Now the eyes opened wide, and the boy pushed back against Urson’s belly.

Geo reached toward the boy’s neck where a ceramic disk hung from a leather thong. Glazed on the white enamel was a wriggle of black with a small dot of green for an eye at one end. “This will do for a name,” Geo said. “No need to harm him. Snake is his symbol; Snake shall be his name.”

“Little Snake,” she said, dropping her threatening hand,

“how good a thief are you?” She looked at Urson. “Let him go.”

“And miss thrashing his backside?” objected Urson.

“He will not run away.”

Urson released him, and four hands came from behind the boy’s back and began massaging one another’s wrists. But the dark eyes watched her until she repeated, “How good a thief are you?”

With only a second’s indecision, he reached into his clout and drew out what seemed another leather thong similar to the one around his neck. He held up the fist from which it dangled, and the fingers opened slowly to a cage.

“What is it?” Urson asked, peering over Snake’s shoulder.

The woman gazed forward, then suddenly stood straight.

“You…” she began.

Snake’s fist closed like a sea-polyp.

“You are a fine thief, indeed.”

“What is it?” Urson asked. “I didn’t see anything.”

“Show them,” she said.

Snake opened his hand, and on the dirty palm, in coiled leather, held by a clumsy wire cage, was a milky sphere the size of a man’s eye, lucent through the shadow.

“A very fine thief indeed,” repeated the woman in a low voice tautened strangely from its previous brittle clarity.

She had pulled her veil aside now, and Geo saw, where her hand had again raised to her throat, the tips of her slim fingers held an identical jewel, only this one in a platinum claw, hung from a wrought gold chain.

Her eyes, unveiled, black as obsidian, raised to meet Geo’s. A slight smile lifted her pale mouth and then fell again. “No,” she said. “Not quite so clever as I thought. At first I believed he had taken mine. But clever enough.

Clever enough. You, schooled in the antiquity of Leptar’s rituals, are you clever enough to tell me what these baubles mean?”

Geo shook his head.

A breath passed her pale mouth now, and though her eyes still fixed his, she seemed to draw away, blown into some past shadow by her own sigh. “No,” she said. “It has all
been lost, or destroyed by the old priests and priestesses, the old poets.

“Freeze the drop in the hand
and break the earth with singing.

Hail the height of a man
and also the height of a woman.

The eyes have imprisoned a vision…”

She spoke the lines almost reverently. “Do you recognize any of this? Can you tell me where they are from?”

“Only one stanza of it,” said Geo. “And that in a slightly different form.” He recited:

“Burn the grain speck in the hand
and batter the stars with singing.

Hail the height of a man,
and also the height of a woman.”

“Well,” said the woman. “You have done better than all the priests and priestesses of Leptar. What about this fragment? Where is it from?”

“It is a stanza of the discarded rituals of the Goddess Argo, the ones banned and destroyed five hundred years ago. The rest of the poem is completely lost,” explained Geo. “I found that stanza when I peeled away the binding paper of an ancient tome that I found in the Antiquity Collection in the Temple Library at Acedia. Apparently a page from an even older book had been used in the binding of this one. I assume these are fragments of the rituals before Leptar purged her litanies. I know at least my variant stanza belongs to that period. Perhaps you have received a misquoted rendition; for I will vouch for the authenticity of mine.”

“No,” she said, almost regretfully. “Mine is the authentic version. So, you too, are not that clever.” She turned back to the boy. “But I have need of a good thief. Will you come with me? And you, poet, I have need of one who thinks so
meticulously and who delves into places where even my priests and priestesses do not go. Will you come with me?”

“Where are we going?”

“Aboard that ship,” she said, smiling toward the vessel.

“That’s a good boat,” said Urson. “I’d be proud to sail on her, Geo.”

“The captain is in my service,” the woman told Geo. “He will take you on. Perhaps you will get a chance to see the world, and become the man you wish to be.”

Geo saw that Urson was beginning to look uneasy, and said, “My friend goes on whatever ship I do. This we’ve promised each other. Besides, he is a good sailor, while I have no knowledge of the sea.”

“On our last journey,” the woman explained, “we lost men.

I do not think your friend will have trouble getting a berth.”

“Then we’ll be honored to come,” said Geo. “Under whose service shall we be, then, for we still don’t know who you are?”

Now the veil fell across her face again. “I am a high priestess of the Goddess Argo. Now, who are you?”

“My name is Geo,” Geo told her.

“Of the Earth, then, your name,” she said. “And you, Urson, the bear. And Lamio, the little Snake. I welcome you aboard our ship.”

Just then, from down the street, came the captain and the mate, Jordde. They emerged from the diagonal of shadow that lanced over the cobbles, slowly, heavily. The captain squinted out across the ships toward the horizon, the copper light filling his deepening wrinkles and burnishing the planes of flesh around his gray eyes. As they approached, the priestess turned to them. “Captain, I have three men as a token replacement at least for the ones my folly helped lose.”

Urson, Geo, and Snake looked at each other, and then toward the captain.

Jordde looked at all three.

“You seem strong,” the captain said to Urson, “a sea-bred man. But this one,” and he looked at Snake now, “one of the Strange Ones.… ”

“They’re bad luck on a ship,” interrupted the mate. “Most ships won’t take them at all, ma’am. This one’s just a boy, and for all his spindles there, couldn’t haul rope or reef sails. Ma’am, he’d be no good to us at all. And we’ve had too much bad luck already.”

“He’s not for rope pulling,” laughed the priestess. “The little Snake is my guest. The others you can put to ship’s work. I know you are short of men. But I have my own plans for this one.”

“As you say, ma’am,” said the captain.

“But Priestess,” began Jordde.

“As you say,” repeated the captain, and the mate stepped back, quieted. The captain turned to Geo now. “And who are you?” he asked.

“I’m Geo, before and still a poet. But I’ll do what work you set me, sir.”

“And you?” Jordde asked Urson.

“I’m a good sea-son of the waves, can stand triple watch without flagging, and I believe I’m already hired.” He looked to the captain.

“But what do they call you?” Jordde asked. “You have a familiar look, like one I’ve had under me before.”

“They call me the handsome sailor, the fastest rope reeler, the quickest line hauler, the speediest sheaf reefer.… ”

“Your name, man, your name,” Jordde demanded.

“Some call me Urson.”

“That’s the name I knew you by before! Do you think I’d sail with you again, when I myself put it in black and white and sent it to every captain and mate in the dock? For three months now you’ve had no berth, and if you had none for three hundred years it would be too soon.”

Jordde turned to the captain now. “He’s a troublemaker, sir, a fight-starter. Though he’s as wild as waves and with
the strength of mizzen spars, spirit in a man is one thing, and a fight or two the same; but good sailor though he be, I’ve sworn not to have him on ship with me, sir. He’s nearly murdered half a dozen men and probably has murdered half a dozen more. No mate who knows the men of this harbor will take him on.”

The Priestess of Argo laughed. “Captain, take him.” Now she looked at Geo. “The words for calming the angry bear have been recited before him. Now, Geo, we will see how good a poet you are, and if the spell works.” At last she turned toward Urson. “Have you ever killed a man.”

Urson was silent a moment. “I have.”

“Had you told me that,” said the Priestess, “I would have chosen you first. I have need of you also. Captain, you must take him. If he is a good sailor, then we cannot spare him. I will channel what special talents he may have. Geo, since you said the spell, and are his friend, I charge you with his control. Also, I wish to talk with you, poet, student of rituals. Come, you all may stay on board ship tonight.”

CHAPTER II

An oil lamp leaked yellow light on the wooden walls of the ship’s forecastle. Geo wrinkled his nose, then shrugged.

“Well,” said Urson, “this is a pleasant enough hole.” He climbed one of the tiers of bunked beds and pounded the ticking with the flat of his hand. “Here, I’ll take this one.

Little wriggly arms, you look like you have a strong stomach, so you take the middle. And Geo, sling yourself down in the bottom there.” He clumped to the floor again.

“The lower down you are,” he explained, “the better you sleep, because of the rocking. Well, what do you think of your first forecastle, Geo?”

The poet was silent. As he turned his head, double pins of light struck yellow dots in his dark eyes, and then went out as he turned from the lamp.

“I put you in the bottom because a little rough weather can unseat your belly pretty fast if you’re up near the ceiling and not used to it,” Urson expanded, dropping his hand heavily on Geo’s shoulder. “I told you I’d look out for you, didn’t I, friend?”

But Geo turned away and seemed to examine something else.

Urson looked at Snake now, who was watching him from against one wall. Urson’s glance was puzzled. Snake’s only silent.

“Hey.” Urson spoke to Geo once more. “Let’s you and me take a run around this ship and see what’s tied down where. A good sailor does that first thing—unless he’s too drunk. But that lets the captain and the mate know he’s got an alert eye out, and sometimes he can learn something that will ease some back-bending later on. What do you say?”

“Not now, Urson,” interrupted Geo. “You go.”

“And would you please tell me why my company suddenly isn’t good enough for you. This sudden silence is a bilgy way to treat somebody who’s sworn himself to see that you make the best first voyage that a man could have. Why, I think…”

“When did you kill a man?” Geo suddenly turned.

The giant stood still, his hands twisting into double knots of bone and muscle. Then they opened. “Maybe it was a year ago,” he said softly. “And maybe it was a year, two months, and five days, on a Thursday morning at eight o’clock in the brig of a heaving ship. Which would make it about five days and ten hours.”

“How could you kill a man?” Geo asked. “How could you go for a year and not tell me about it, and then admit it to a stranger just like that? You were my friend, we’ve slept under the same blanket, drank from the same wineskin. But what sort of a person are you?”

“And what sort of a person are you?” said the giant. “A nosy bastard that I’d break in seven pieces if…” he heaved in a breadth. “If I hadn’t promised I’d make no trouble. I’ve never broken a promise to anyone, alive or dead.” The fists formed, relaxed again.

Suddenly he raised one hand, flung it away, and spat on the floor. Then he turned toward the steps to the door.

Then the noise hit them. They both turned toward Snake.

The boy’s black eyes darted under twin spots of light from the lamp, to Urson, to Geo, then back.

The noise came again, quieter this time, and recognizable as the word Help, only it was no sound, but like the fading hum of a tuning fork inside their skulls, immediate, yet fuzzy.

…You…help…me…together… came the words once more, indistinct and blurring into one another.

“Hey,” Urson said, “is that you?”

…Do…not…angry… came the words.

“We’re not angry,” Geo said. “What are you doing?”

I…thinking… were the words that seemed to generate from the boy now.

“What sort of a way to think is that if everyone can hear it?” demanded Urson.

Snake tried to explain. Not…everyone… Just…you… You…

think…I…hear… came the sound again. I…think… You…

hear.

“I know we hear,” Urson said. “It’s just like you were talking.”

“That’s not what he means,” Geo said. “He means he hears what we think just like we hear him. Is that right, Snake?”

When…you…think…loud…I…hear.

“I may just have been doing some pretty loud thinking,”

Urson said. “And if I thought something I wasn’t supposed to, well, I apologize.”

Snake didn’t seem interested in the apology, but asked again, You…help…me…together.

“What sort of help do you want?” Geo asked.

“And what sort of trouble are you in that you need help out of it?” added Urson.

You…don’t…have…good…minds, Snake said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Urson asked. “Our minds are as good as any in Leptar. You heard the way the priestess talked to my friend the poet, here.”

“I think he means we don’t hear very well,” said Geo.

Snake nodded.

“Oh,” Urson said. “Well, then you’ll just have to go slow and be patient with us.”

Snake shook his head. Get…hoarse…when…shout…so…

loud. Suddenly he went over to the bunks. You…hear…

better…see…too if…sleep.

“Sleep is sort of far from me,” Urson said, rubbing his beard with the back of his wrist.

“Me too,” Geo admitted. “Can’t you tell us something more?”

Sleep, Snake said.

“What about talking like an ordinary human being?”

suggested Urson, still somewhat perplexed.

Once…speak, Snake told them.

“You say you could speak once?” asked Geo. “What happened?”

Here the boy opened his mouth and pointed.

Geo stepped forward, held the boy’s chin in his hand and examined the face and peered into the mouth. “By the Goddess!” he exclaimed.

“What is it?” Urson asked.

Geo came away now, his face lined in a sickly frown. “His tongue has been hacked out,” he told the giant. “And not too neatly, either.”

“Who on the seven seas and six continents did a thing like that to you, boy?” Urson demanded.

Snake shook his head.

“Now come on, Snake,” he urged. “You can’t keep secrets like that from friends and expect them to rescue you from I don’t know what. Now who was it hacked your voice away?”

What…man…you…kill… came the sound.

Urson stopped, and then he laughed. “All right,” he said.

“I see.” His voice rose once more. “But if you can hear thoughts, you know the man already. And you know the reason. And this is what we’d find out of you, and only for help and friendship’s sake.”

You…know…the…man, Snake said.

Geo and Urson exchanged puzzled frowns.

Sleep, said Snake. You…sleep…now.

“Maybe we ought to try,” said Geo, “and find out what’s going on.” He crossed to his bunk and slipped in. Urson followed and hoisted himself onto the upper berth, dangling his feet against the wooden support. “It’s going to be a long time before sleep gets to me tonight,” he said.

“You know the rituals and about magic. Aren’t the Strange Ones some sort of magic?”

“The only mention of them in rituals says that they are ashes of the Great Fire. The Great Fire was back before the purges, the ones I spoke to the priestess about, so I don’t know anything more about them.”

“Sailors have stories of the Great Fire,” Urson said. “They say the sea boiled, great birds spat fire from the sky, and beasts rose up from the waves and destroyed the harbors.

But what were the purges you mentioned?”

“About five hundred years ago,” Geo explained, “all the rituals of the Goddess Argo were destroyed. A completely new set were initiated into the temple practices. All references to them were destroyed also, and with them, much of Leptar’s history. Stories have it that the rituals and incantations were too powerful. But this is just a guess, and most priests are very uncomfortable about speculating.”

“That was after the Great Fire?” Urson asked.

“Nearly a thousand years after,” Geo said.

“It must have been a Great Fire indeed if ashes from it are still falling from the wombs of healthy women.” He looked down at Snake. “Is it true that a drop of your blood in vinegar will cure gout? If one of you kisses a female baby, will she have only girl children?” He laughed.

“You know those are only tales,” Geo said.

“There used to be a one with two heads that sat outside the Blue Tavern and spun a top all day. It was an idiot, though. But the dwarfs and the legless ones that wheel about the city and do tricks, they are clever. But strange, and quiet, usually.”

“You oaf,” chided Geo, “you could be one too. How many men do you know who reach your size and strength by normal means?”

“You’re a crazy liar,” said Urson. Then he scrunched his eyebrows together in thought, and at last shrugged. “Well anyway, I never heard of one who could hear what you thought. It would make me uncomfortable walking down the street.” He looked down at Snake between his legs.

“Can you all do that?”

Snake, from the middle bunk, shook his head. Urson stretched out on his back, but then suddenly looked over the edge of the berth toward Geo. “Hey, Geo, what about those little baubles she had. Do you know what they are?”

“No, I don’t,” Geo said. “But she was concerned over them enough.” He looked up over the bunk bottom between himself and Urson. “Snake, will you give me another look at that thing?”

Snake held out the thong and the jewel.

“Where did you get it?” Urson asked. “Oh, never mind. I guess we learn that when we go to sleep.”

Geo reached for it, but Snake’s one hand closed and three others sprang around it. “I wasn’t going to take it,”

explained Geo. “I just wanted to see.”

Suddenly the door of the forecastle opened, and the tall mate was silhouetted against the brighter light behind him.

“Poet,” he called. “She wants to see you.” Then he was gone.

Geo looked at the other two, shrugged, and then swung off the berth, made his way up the steps and into the hall.

On deck it was completely dark. As he walked, a door before him opened and a blade of illumination sliced the deck. He jumped.

“Come in,” summoned the Priestess of Argo, and he turned into a windowless cabin and stopped one step beyond the threshold. The walls rippled tapestries, lucent green, scarlet. Golden braziers perched on tapering legged tripods beneath plumes of pale blue smoke that lent thin incense in the room, pierced faintly but cleanly into his nostrils like knives. Light lashed the polished wooden newels of a great bed on which sat swirls of silk, damasked satin, brocade. A huge desk, cornered with wooden eagles, was spread with papers, meticulous instruments of cartography, sextants, rules, compasses, and great shabby books were piled on one corner. Above, from the beamed ceiling, hung by thick chains, swayed a branching candelabra of oil cups, some in the hands of demons, the mouths of monkeys, burning in the bellies of nymphs, or between the horns of satyrs’ heads—red, clear green, or yellow-white.

“Come in,” repeated the priestess. “Close the door.”

Geo obeyed.

She walked behind her desk, sat down, and folded her hands in front of her veiled face. “What do you know of the real world, outside Leptar?”

“That there is much water, some land, and mostly ignorance.”

“What tales have you heard from your bear friend, Urson?

He is a traveled man and should know some of what there is of the earth.”

“The stories of sailors,” said Geo, “are menageries of beasts that no one has ever seen, of lands for which no maps exist, and of peoples whom no man has met.”

She smiled. “Since I boarded this ship I have heard many tales from sailors, and I have learned more from them than from all my priests. You, on the docks there, this evening, have been the only man to give me another scrap of the puzzle except a few drunken seamen, misremembering old fantasies.” She paused. “What do you know of the jewels you saw tonight?”

“Nothing, ma’am.”

“A common thief hiding on the docks had one; I, a priestess of Argo, possess another; and if you had one, you would probably exchange it for a kiss with some tavern maid. What do you know of the god Hama?”

“I know of no such god.”

“You,” she said, “who can spout all the rituals and incantations of the white goddess Argo, you do not even know the name of the dark god Hama. What do you know of the Island of Aptor?”

“Nothing, ma’am.”

“This boat has been to Aptor once and now will return again. Ask your ignorant friend the Bear to tell you tales of Aptor; and blind, wise poet, you will laugh, and probably he will, too. But I will tell you: his tales, his legends, and his fantasies are not a tithe of the truth, not a tithe. Perhaps you will be no help after all. I am thinking of dismissing you.”

“But, ma’am…” Geo began.

The priestess looked up, having been about to begin some work.

Geo regained himself. “Ma’am, what can you tell me about these things? You have scattered only crumbs. I have extensive knowledge of incantation, poetry, magic, and I know these concern your problem. Give me what information you have, and I will be able to render mine in
full. I am familiar with many sailors’ tales. True, none of Aptor, or Hama, but I may be able to collate fragments. I have learned the legends and jargon of thieves through a broad life; this is more than your priests have, I’ll wager. I have had teachers who were afraid to touch books I have opened. And I fear no secret you might hold.”

“No, you are not afraid,” admitted the priestess. “You are honorable, and foolish—and a poet. I hope the first and last will wipe out the middle one in time. Nevertheless, I will tell you some.” She stood up now, and drew out a map.

“Here is Leptar,” she pointed to one island. Then her finger moved over water to another. “This is Aptor. Now you know as much about it as any ordinary person in Leptar might. Aptor is a barbaric land, uncivilized. Yet they occasionally show some insidious organization. Tell me, what legends of the Great Fire have you heard?”

“I know that beasts are supposed to have come from the sea and destroyed the world’s harbors, and that birds spat fire from the sky.”

“The older sailors,” said the priestess, “will tell you that these were beasts and birds of Aptor. Of course, there is fifteen hundred years of retelling and distortion in a tradition never written down, and perhaps Aptor has simply become a synonym for everything evil, but these stories still give you some idea. Chronicles, which only three or four people have had access to, tell me that once five hundred years ago, the forces of Aptor actually attempted to invade Leptar. The references to it are vague. I do not know how far it went nor how successful it was, but its methods were insidious and very unlike any invasion you may have read of in history. So unlike, that records of it were destroyed, and no mention of it is made in the histories given to school children.

“Only recently have I had a chance to learn how strange and inhuman they were. And I have good reason to believe that the forces of Aptor are congealing once more, a
sluggish but huge amoeba of horror. Once fully awake, once launched, it will be irrevocable. Tendrils have reached into us for the past few years, probed, and then withdrawn before they were recognized. Sometimes they dealt catastrophic blows to the center of Leptar’s government and religion. All this has been assiduously kept from the people. I have been sent to clear perhaps just one more veil from our ignorance. And if you can help me in that, you are welcome.”

“What of the jewels, and of Hama?” inquired Geo. “Is he a god of Aptor under whom these forces are being marshaled? And are these jewels sacred to him in some way?”

“Both are true, and both are not true enough,” replied the priestess.

“And one more thing. You say the last attempted invasion by Aptor into Leptar was five hundred years ago? It was five hundred years ago that the religion of Argo in Leptar purged all her rituals and instituted new ones. Was there some connection between the invasion and the purge?”

“I am sure of it,” declared the priestess. “But I do not know what it is. However, let me now tell you the story of the jewels. The one I wear at my neck was captured, somehow, from Aptor during that first invasion. That we captured it may well be the reason that we are still a free nation today. Since then it has been guarded carefully in the temple of the Goddess Argo, its secrets well protected, along with those few chronicles which mention the invasion, which ended, incidentally, only a month before the purges. Then, about a year ago, a small hoard of horror reached our shore from Aptor. I cannot describe it. I did not see any of what transpired. But they made their way inland, and managed to kidnap Argo herself.”

“You mean Argo incarnate? The highest priestess?”

“Yes. Each generation, as you know, the youngest daughter of the past generation’s highest priestess is
chosen as the living incarnation of the white Goddess Argo.

She is reared and taught by the wisest priests and priestesses. Her youngest daughter, when she dies, becomes Argo. At any rate, she was kidnaped. One of the assailants was hacked down; instantly it decayed, rotted on the floor of the convent corridor. But from the putrescent mass of flesh, we salvaged a second jewel from Aptor. And before it died, it was heard to utter the lines I quoted to you before. So, I have been sent then, to find what I can of the enemy, and to rescue or to find the fate of my sister.”

“I will do whatever I can,” said Geo, “to help save Leptar and to discover the whereabouts of your sister priestess.”

“More than my sister priestess,” said the woman softly,

“my sister in blood. I am the other daughter of the last Argo: that is why this task fell to me. And until she is found dead, or returned alive…” here she rose from her bench,

“…I am the White Goddess Argo Incarnate.”

Geo dropped his eyes as Argo lifted her veil. Once more that evening she held forth the jewel. “There are three of these,” she said. “Hama’s sign is a black disk with three white eyes. Each eye represents a jewel. With the first invasion, they probably carried all three jewels, for they are the center of their power. Without them, they would have been turned back immediately. With them, they thought themselves invincible. But we captured one, and very soon unlocked its secrets. I have no guards with me. With this jewel I need none. I am as safe as I would be with an army, and capable of nearly as much destruction. When they came to kidnap my sister a year ago, I am convinced they carried both of their remaining jewels, thinking that we had either lost, or did not know the power of the first. Anyway, they reasoned, they had two to our one. But now, we have two, and they are left with only one. Through some complete carelessness, your little thief stole one from me as I was about to board when we first departed two months ago. Today he probably recognized me and intended to
exact some fee for its return. But now, he will be put to a true thief’s task. He must steal for me the third and final jewel from Hama for me. Then we shall have Aptor, and be rid of their evil.”

“And where is this third jewel?” asked Geo.

“Perhaps,” said the woman, “perhaps it is lodged in the forehead of the statue of the dark god Hama that sits in the guarded palace somewhere in the center of the jungles of Aptor. Do you think your thief will find himself challenged enough?”

“I think so,” answered Geo.

“Somewhere in that same palace is my sister, or her remains. You are to find them, and if she is alive, bring her back with you.”

“And what of the jewels?” asked Geo. “When will you show us their power so that we may use them to penetrate the palace of Hama?”

“I will show you their power,” said Argo, smiling. With one hand she held up the map over which she had spoken. With the other she tapped the white jewel with her pale fingernail. The map suddenly blackened at one edge, and then flared. Argo walked to a brazier and deposited the flaming paper. Then she turned again to Geo. “I can fog the brain of a single person, as I did with Snake; or I can bewilder a hundred men. As easily as I can fire a dried, worn map, I can raze a city.”

“With those to help,” smiled Geo, “I think we have a fair chance to reach this Hama, and return.”

But the smile with which she answered his was strange, and then suddenly it was completely gone. “Do you think,”

she said, “that I would put such temptation in your hands?

You might be captured, and if so, then the jewels would be in the hands of Aptor once more.”

“But with them we would be so powerful.… ”

“They have been captured once; we cannot take the chance that they be captured again. If you reach the
palace, if you can steal the third jewel, if my sister is alive, and if you can rescue her, then she will know how to employ its power to manipulate your escape. However, if you and your friends do not accomplish all these things, the trip will be useless; and so perhaps death would be better than a return to watch the wrath of Argo in her dying struggle, for you would feel it more horribly than even the most malicious torture of Aptor’s evil.”

Geo did not speak.

“Why do you look so strangely?” asked Argo. “You have your poetry, your spells, your scholarship. Don’t you believe in their power? Go back to your berth, and send the thief to me.” The last words were a sharp order, and Geo turned from the room into the night’s darkness.

CHAPTER III

Geo walked down into the forecastle, still deserted except for Urson and Snake. “Well?” asked Urson, sitting up on the edge of his berth. “What did she tell you?”

“Why aren’t you asleep?” Geo said heavily. He touched Snake on the shoulder. “She wants to see you now.”

Snake stood up, started for the door, but then turned around.

“What is it?” Geo asked.

Snake dug into his clout again and pulled out the thong with the jewel. He walked over to Geo, hesitated, and then placed the thong around the older boy’s neck.

“You want me to keep it for you?” Geo asked.

But Snake turned around and was gone.

“I wonder what they do?” said Urson. “Or did you find out.

Come on, Geo, give up what she told you.”

“Did Snake say anything to you while I was gone?”

“Not a peep,” answered Urson. “I came no nearer sleep than I came to the moon. Now come on, what’s this about?”

Geo told him.

When he finished, Urson said, “You’re crazy. Both you and her.”

“I don’t think so,” Geo said. He concluded his story by recounting Argo’s demonstration of the jewel’s power.

Urson fingered the stone on Geo’s chest. “All that in this little thing? Tell me, do you think you can figure out how it works?”

“I don’t know if I want to,” Geo said. “It doesn’t sound right.”

“You’re damn straight it doesn’t sound right,” Urson reiterated. “What’s the point of sending us in there with no protection to do something that would be crazy with a whole army. What’s she got against us?”

“I don’t think she has anything against us,” Geo said.

“Urson, what stories do you know about Aptor? She said you might be able to tell me something.”

“I know that no one trades with it, everyone curses by it, and the rest is a lot of rubbish not worth saying.”

“What rubbish?”

“Believe me, it’s just bilge water,” insisted Urson. “Do you think you could figure out that little stone there, if you had long enough, I mean? She said that the priests five hundred years ago could, and she seems to think you’re as smart as some of them. I wouldn’t doubt if you could work it.”

“You tell me some stories first,” said Geo.

“Oh, they talk about cannibals, women who drink blood, things neither man nor animal, and cities inhabited only by death. Sailors avoid it, save to curse by.”

“Do you know anything more than that?”

“There’s nothing more to know,” shrugged Urson.

“She said the stories you’d tell would not be one tenth of the truth.”

“She must have meant that there wasn’t even a tenth part of the truth in them. And I’m sure she’s right. You just misunderstood.”

“No, I heard her correctly,” Geo assured him.

“Then I just don’t believe it. There are half a dozen things that don’t match up in all this. First, how that little four-armed fellow happened to be at the pier after two months just when she was coming in. And to have the jewel still, not have traded it, or sold it already.… ”

“Maybe,” suggested Geo, “he read her mind too, when he first stole it, the same way he read ours.”

“And if he did, maybe he knows how to work the things. I say let’s find out when he comes back. And I wonder who cut his tongue out. Strange one or not, that makes me sick,” said the big man.

“About that,” Geo started. “Don’t you remember? He said you knew the man it was.”

“I know many men,” said Urson, “but which one of the many I know is it?”

“You really don’t know?” Geo asked, quietly.

“You say that in a strange way,” Urson said, frowning.

“I’ll say the same thing he said,” went on Geo. “What man did you kill?”

Urson looked at his hands for a moment, stretched the fingers, turned them over in his lap like meat he was examining. Then, without looking up, he said, “It was a long time ago, friend, but the closeness of it shivers in my eyes.

I should have told you, yes. But it comes to me, sometimes, not like a memory, but something I can feel, as hard as metal, taste as sharp as salt, and the wind brings back my voice, his words, so clearly that I shake like a mirror where the figure on the inside pounds his fists on the fists of the man outside, each one trying to break free.

“We were reefing sails in a flesh-blistering rain, when it began. His name was Cat. The two of us were the two biggest men aboard, and that we had been put on the reefing team together meant that this was an important job and one to be done well and right. Water washed our eyes, our hands slipped on wet ropes. It was no wonder my cloth suddenly flung away from me in a gust, billowing down in
the rain, flapping against half a dozen ropes and breaking two small stays. ‘You clumsy thing’ bawled the mate from the deck. ‘What sort of fish-fingered sailor, are you?’

“And through the rain I heard Cat laugh from his own spar. ‘That’s the way luck goes,’ he cried, catching at his own cloth that threatened to pull loose. I pulled mine in and bound her tight. The competition that goes rightly between two fine sailors drove a seed of fury into my flesh that should have bloomed as a curse or a returned jibe, but the rain rained too hard, and the wind was too strong; so I bound my sail with silence.

“I was last down, of course, and with only a few lads below on deck, when I saw why my sail had come loose. A worn mast ring had broken, caused a main rope to fly and my canvas to come tumbling. But the ring also had held the nearly broken aft mast together, and in the wind, a split twice the length of my arm pulled open and snapped to again and again like a child’s noise clapper. There was a rope near, and inch thick line coiled on a spike. Holding myself to a rat line by not much more than my toes, I secured the rope and bound the base of the broken pole.

Each time it snapped to, I looped it once around and pulled the wet line tight. They call this whipping a mast, and I whipped it till the collar of rope was three feet long to the top of the cleft and she couldn’t snap any more. Then I hung the broken ring on a peg near by so I could point it out to the ship’s smith and get him to replace the rope with a metal band.

“That evening at mess, with the day’s incidents out of my mind and hot soup in my mouth, I was laughing over some sailor’s tale about another sailor and another sailor’s woman, when the mate strode into the hall. ‘Hey, you sea scoundrels,’ he bellowed. There was silence. ‘Which of you bound up that broken mast aft?’

“I was about to call out, ‘Aye, it was me,’ when another man beat me by bawling, ‘It was the Big Sailor, sir!’ That
was a name both Cat and I were often hailed by.

“‘Well,’ snarled the mate, ‘the captain says that such good thinking in times so hard as these should be rewarded.

He’s seen the job and approved.’ He took a gold coin from his pocket and tossed it on the table in front of Cat. ‘There you go, Big Sailor. But I think it’s as much as any man should do.’ And then he turned and clomped from the mess hall. A cheer went up for Cat as he pocketed the coin; I couldn’t see his face.

“The anger in me started now, but without direction.

Should it go to the sailor who’d called out the name of the hero? Naw, for he had been down on deck, and through rain and darkness probably he could not have told me from my rival anyway at that distance. At Cat? But he was already getting up to leave the table. And the first mate, the same first mate of this ship here, friend, that we’re on now, he was out stomping somewhere on deck.

“Perhaps it was this that caused my anger to break out the next morning when we were in calmer weather. A careless salt jarred me in a passage way, and suddenly I was all fists and fire. We scuffled, we banged, we cursed, we rolled. In fact, we rolled right under the feet of the mate who was coming down the steps at the time. He sent a boot into us and eight different curses, and when he recognized me, he sneered, ‘Oh, the clumsy one.’

“Now I’d had a fiery record before. Fights on ship are a breach few captains will allow. This was my third, and one too many. And the mate, prompted by his own opinion of me, got the captain to order me flogged.

“So, like a carcass to be sliced and bid on, I was lead out before the assembled sailors at the next sunrise and bound to the main mast. I thought my wrath went all toward the first mate now. But black turned white in my head, into something that I could bite into, when he flung the whip to Cat and cried, ‘Here, Big Sailor, you’ve done your ship one good turn. Now rub sleep off your face and do it another. I
want ten stripes on that one’s back deep enough to count easily with a finger dipped in salt.’

“They fell, and I didn’t breathe the whole time. Ten lashes is a whipping a man can recover from in a week. Most go down to their knees with the first one, if their rope is slack enough. I didn’t fall until they finally cut the ropes from my wrists. Nor was it till I heard a second gold coin rattle down on the deck from the first mate’s hand and the words to the crew, ‘See how a good sailor gets rich,’ that I made a sound. And it was lost in the cheer which sprung from the other men.

“Cat and one other lugged me to the brig. As I fell forward, hands scudding into straw, I heard Cat’s voice come, ‘Well, brother, that’s the way the luck goes.’

“Then the pain made me faint.

“A day later, when I could pull myself up to the window and look out on the back of the ship, we caught the worst storm I’d ever seen, and the slices in my back made it no easier on me. Pegs threatened to pull from their holes, boards to part themselves; one wave washed four men overboard; and while others ran to save them, another came and swept off six more. It had come so suddenly that not a sail had been raised, and now the remaining men were swarming to the ratlines.

“From my place at the brig’s window I saw it start to go and I howled like an animal, tried to pull the bars away. But legs passed my window running, and none stopped. I screamed at them, and I screamed again. The ship’s smith had not yet gotten to fix my makeshift repair on the aft mast with another metal band. Nor, with my anger, had I yet even pointed it out to him as I had intended. It didn’t hold a quarter of an hour. When it gave there was a snap like thunder. Under the tugging of half furled sails, ropes popped like threads. Men were whipped off like drops of water shaken from a wet hand. The mast raked across the sky above me like a claw, and then fell against the high
mizzen, snapping more ropes and scraping men from their perches as you’d scrape ants from a tree.

“The crew’s number was halved, and when somehow we crawled from under the sheets of rain, one mast fallen and one more ruined, the broken bodies with still some life numbered eleven. A ship’s infirmary holds ten, and the overflow goes to the brig. The choice of who became my mate was between the man most likely to live, figuring that he could take the harder situation more easily than the others, and the man most likely to die, figuring that it would probably make no difference to some one that far gone. The choice was made, the latter choice, and the next morning they carried Cat in and laid him beside me on the straw while I slept. His spine had been crushed at the pelvis and a spar had pierced his side with a hole big enough to put your hand into.

“When he came to, all he did was cry—not with the agonized howls I had given the day before when I watched the mast topple, but with a little sound that escaped from clenched teeth, like a child who doesn’t want to show the pain. It didn’t stop for hours, and such a soft sound, it burned into my gut and my tongue deeper than any animal wailing would.

“The next dawn stretched copper foil across the window and reddish light fell on the straw, the board floor, and the filthy, crumpled blanket they had laid him in. The crying had stopped and was replaced now by a gasped breath, sharp every few seconds, irregular, loud. I thought he must be unconscious, but when I kneeled to look, his eyes were opened and he stared straight into my face. ‘You…’ he said to me with the next gasp. ‘It hurts… You…’

“‘Be still,’ I said. ‘Here, be still.’

“The next word I thought I heard was water, but there wasn’t any in the cell. I should have realized that the ship’s supplies had probably gone for the most part overboard.

But by now, hungry and thirsty myself, I could see it as
nothing less than a stupendous joke when one slice of bread and a single tin cup of water were finally brought and embarrassedly and silently handed in to us about seven that morning.

“Nevertheless, I opened his mouth and tried to pour some of it down his throat. They say a man’s mouth and tongue turn black from fever and thirst after a while. It’s not true.

The color is the deep purple of rotten, shriveled meat. And every taste bud on the dead flesh was tipped with that white stuff that gets in your mouth when your bowels are upset. He couldn’t swallow the water. It just dribbled over the side of his mouth that was scabbed with purple crust.

“He blinked his eyes and once more got out, ‘You… you please…’ and then he began to cry again.

“‘What is it?’ I asked.

“Suddenly he began to struggle and got his hand into the breast of his torn tunic and pulled out a fist. He held it out toward me and said, ‘Please…please…’

“The fingers opened and I saw three gold coins, two of whose histories suddenly leapt into my mind like stories of living men.

“I moved back as if burned; then I leaned forward again.

‘What do you want?’ I asked.

“‘Please…’ he said, moving his hand toward me. ‘Kill…

kill…’ and then he was crying once more. ‘It hurts so bad…’

“I got up. I walked across to the other side of the cell. I came back. Then I broke his neck with my knee and my two hands.

“I took my pay up. Later I ate the bread and drank the rest of the water. Then I went to sleep. They took him away without question. And two days later, when the next food came, I realized, sort of absently, that without all of that first bread and water I would have starved to death. They finally let me out because they needed the muscle, what was left of it. And the only thing I sometimes think about, the only thing I let myself think about, is whether or not I
earned my pay. I guess two of them were mine anyway. But sometimes I take them out and look at them, and wonder where he got the third one from.”

Urson put his hand in his tunic and brought out three gold coins. “Never been able to spend them, though,” he said.

He tossed the little pile into the air, and then whipped them back into his fist again, and laughed. “Never was able to spend them on anything.”

“I’m sorry,” Geo said after a moment.

Urson looked up. “Why? I guess these are my jewels, huh?

Maybe everyone has theirs some place. You think it was old Cat, maybe, sometimes when I was in the brig, perhaps, earning that third coin, slicing out that little four-armed monster’s tongue? Somehow I doubt it.”

“Look, I said I was sorry, Urson.”

“I know,” Urson said. “I know. I guess I’ve met a hell full of people in my short, wet life, and it could be any one of them.” He sighed. “Though I wish I knew which. But I don’t think that’s the answer.” He lifted his hand to his mouth now and gnawed at his thumb nail. “I hope that kid doesn’t get as nervous as I do,” he laughed. “He’ll have such a hell of a lot of nails to bite.”

Then their skulls nearly split apart.

“Hey,” said Geo, “that’s Snake.”

“And he’s in trouble too,” said Urson. He leaped onto the floor and started up the passageway. Geo came after him.

“Let me go first,” Geo said, “I know where he is.”

They reached the deck, raced along the side of the cabins, until they reached the door.

“Move,” ordered Urson. Then he rammed against the door and it flew open.

Inside, behind her desk, Argo whirled, her hand on her jewel. “What is the…”

But the moment her concentration turned, Snake, who had been immobile against the opposite wall, suddenly vaulted across the table toward Geo. Geo grabbed the boy
to steady him, and immediately one of Snake’s hands was at Geo’s chest where the jewel hung.

“You fools!” hissed Argo. “Don’t you understand? He’s a spy for Aptor.”

There was a sudden silence.

Then Argo said, “Close the door.”

Urson closed it. Snake still held Geo and the jewel.

“Well,” she said. “It is too late now.”

“What do you mean?” asked Geo.

“That had you not come blundering in, one more of Aptor’s spies would have yielded up his secrets and then been reduced to ashes.” She breathed deeply. “But he has his jewel now, and I have mine. Well, little thief, there’s a stalemate. The forces are balanced now.” She looked at Geo. “How do you think he came so easily by the jewel?

How do you think he knew when I would be at the shore?

Oh, he’s a clever one, with all the intelligence of Aptor working behind him. He probably even had you planted without your knowing it to interrupt us at just that time.”

“No, he…” began Urson.

“We were walking by your door,” Geo interrupted, “when we heard a noise and thought there might be trouble.”

“Your concern may have cost us all our lives.”

“If he’s a spy, I gather that means he knows how this thing works,” said Geo. “Let Urson and I take him…”

“Take him anywhere you wish!” hissed Argo. “Get out!”

Just then the door opened. “I heard a sound, Priestess Argo, and I thought you might be in danger.” It was the first mate.

The Goddess Incarnate breathed deeply. “I am in no danger,” she said evenly. “Will you please leave me alone, all of you.”

“What’s the Snake doing here?” Jordde suddenly asked, seeing Geo still holding the boy.

“I said, leave me!”

Geo turned, away from Jordde, and stepped past him onto the deck, and Urson followed him. Ten steps farther on, he glanced back, and seeing that Jordde had emerged from the cabin and was walking in the other direction, he set Snake down on his feet. “All right, Little One. March!”

In the passage to the forecastle, Urson asked, “Hey, what’s going on?”

“Well, for one thing, our little friend here is no spy,” said Geo.

“How do you know?” asked Urson.

“Because she doesn’t know he can read minds.”

“How do you mean?” Urson asked.

“First of all, I was beginning to think something was wrong when I came back from talking to the priestess. You were too, and it lay in the same vein you were talking about. Why would our task be completely useless unless we accomplished all parts of her mission? Wouldn’t there be some value in just returning her sister, the rightful head of Leptar, to her former position? And I’m sure her sister may well have collected some useful information that could be used against Aptor, so that would be some value even if we didn’t find the jewel. It doesn’t sound too sisterly a thing to me to forsake the young priestess if there is no jewel in it for her. And her tone, the way she refers to the jewel ashers. There’s an old saying, from before the Great Fire even: Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. And I think she has not a little of the un-goddess-like desire for power first, peace afterwards.”

“But that doesn’t mean this one isn’t an Aptor spy,” said Urson.

“Wait a minute. I’m getting there. At first I thought he was too. The idea occurred to me first when I was talking to the priestess and she first mentioned that there were spies from Aptor. The coincidence of his appearance, that he had even managed to steal the jewel in the first place, that he would present it to her the way he did; all this hinted
something so strange, that spy was the first thing I thought of, and I’m sure it was the first thing she thought as well.

And she especially would think this if she did not know that Snake could read minds and broadcast mentally, because ignorance of his telepathy removes the one other possible explanation of the coincidences. But, Urson, why did he leave the jewel with us before he went to see her?”

“Because he thought she was going to try and take it away from him.”

“Exactly. When she told me to send him up to her, I was fairly sure that was the main reason she wanted him. But if he was a spy, and knew how to work the jewel, then why not take it with him, present himself to Argo with the jewel, showing himself as an equal force, and then come calmly back, leaving her in silence and us still on his side, especially since he would be revealing to her something of which she was nine-tenths aware of already, and would watch him no more carefully than she would were it not confirmed.”

“All right,” said Urson, “why not?”

“Because he was not a spy, and didn’t know how to work the jewel. Yes, he had felt its power once. Perhaps he was going to pretend he had it hidden on his person. But he did not want her to get her hands on it for reasons that were strong, but not selfish.

“Here, Snake,” said Geo. “You know how to work the jewel now, don’t you; but you learned from Argo just now.”

The boy nodded.

“Here, then, why don’t you take it?” Geo lifted the jewel from his neck and held it out to him.

Snake drew back and shook his head violently.

Urson looked puzzled.

“Snake has seen into human minds, Urson. He’s seen things directly which the rest of us only learn from a sort of second hand observation. He knows that the power of this
little bead is more dangerous to the mind of the person who wields it than it is to the cities it may destroy.”

“Well,” said Urson, “as long as she thinks he’s a spy, at least we’ll have one of them little beads and someone who knows how to use it. I mean if we have to.”

“I don’t think she thinks he’s a spy any more, Urson.”

“Huh?”

“I give her credit for being able to reason at least as well as I can. Once she found out he had no jewel on him, she knew that he was as innocent as you and I are. But her only thought was to get it in any way she could. When we came in, just when she was going to put Snake under the jewel’s control, guilt made her leap backwards to her first and seemingly logical accusation for our benefit. Evil likes to cloak itself as good.”

They stepped down into the forecastle. By now a handful of sailors had come into the room, mostly drunk and snoring on berths around the walls. One had wrapped himself completely up in a blanket in the middle berth of the tier that Urson had chosen for the three. “Well,” said Urson to Snake, “it looks like you’ll have to move.”

Snake scrambled to the top bunk.

“Now look, that one was mine.”

Snake motioned him up.

“Huh? Two of us in one of those?” demanded Urson.

“Look, if you want someone to keep warm against, go down and sleep with Geo there. It’s more room and you won’t get squashed against the wall. I’m a thrasher when I sleep.”

Snake didn’t move.

“Maybe you better do what he says,” Geo said. “I have an idea that…”

“You’ve got another idea now?” asked Urson, “Oh, damn, I’m too tired to argue.” He vaulted up to the top bunk.

“Now move over and be very small.” He stretched out, and Snake’s slight body was completely hidden. “Hey, get your
elbows out of there,” Geo heard Urson mutter before there was only a gentle thundering of his snore.

* * * *

Silver mist suffused the deck of the ship and wet lines glowed a phosphorescent silver; the sky was pale as ice; pricks of stars dotted over the whole bowl. The sea, once green, seemed bleached to blowing clouds of white powder.

The door of a cabin opened and white veils flung forward from the form of Argo who emerged like silver from the bone-colored door. The whole movement of the scene made it look like a picture imagination fastens in the slow ripplings of gauze under breeze. One dark spot was at her throat, pulsing darkly, like a heart, like a black flame. She walked to the railing, peered over. In the white washing a skeletal hand appeared. It raised on a beckoning arm, then fell forward in the water. Another arm raised now, a few feet away, beckoning, gesturing. Then three at once; then two more.

A voice as pale as the vision spoke “I am coming. We sail in a hour. The mate has been ordered to put the ship out before dawn. You must tell me now, creatures of the water.”

Two glowing arms raised up, and then an almost featureless face. Chest high in the water, it listed backwards and sank again.

“Are you of Aptor or Leptar?” spoke the apparitional figure of Argo again in the thinned voice. “Are your allegiances to Argo or Hama? I have followed thus far. You must tell me before I follow farther.”

There was a whirling of sound which seemed to be the wind attempting to say, “The sea…the sea…the sea…”

But Argo did not hear, for she turned away and walked from the rail, back to her cabin.

Now the scene moved, turned toward the door of the forecastle. It opened, moved through the hall, the walls, more like polished steel than weathered wood, and went
on. In the forecastle, the yellow oil lamp seemed a white flaring of magnesium.

The movement stopped in front of a tier of three berths; on the bottom one lay a young man with a starved, pallid face. His mop of hair was bleached white. On his chest was a pulsing darkness, a black flame, a dark heart, shimmering with the indistinctness of absolute shadow. On the top bunk a great form like a bloated corpse lay. One huge arm hung over the bunk, flabbed, puffy, without muscle.

In the center berth was an anonymous bundle of blankets completely covering the figure inside. On this the scene fixed, drew closer…and the paleness suddenly faded before darkness, into shadow, into nothing.

* * * *

Geo sat up and knuckled his eyes.

The dark forecastle was relieved by the yellow glow of the lamp. The gaunt mate stood across the room. “Hey, you,”

he was saying to a man in one of the bunks, “up and out.

We’re sailing.”

The figure roused itself from the tangle of bedding.

The mate moved to another. “Up, you dog face. Up, you fish fodder. We’re sailing.” Turning around, he saw Geo watching him. “And what’s wrong with you?” he demanded.

“We’re sailing, didn’t you hear? Naw, you go back to sleep.

Your turn will come, but we need experienced ones now.”

He grinned briefly, and then went on to one more. “Eh, you stink like an old wine cask. Raise yourself out of your fumes. We’re sailing!”

OceanofPDF.com

THE JEWELS OF APTOR, by Samuel R. Delany (Part 2)

CHAPTER IV

“That dream,” Geo said to Urson a moment after the mate left. Urson looked down from his bunk.

“You had it too?”

Both turned to Snake.

“I guess that was your doing, eh?” Urson said.

Snake scrambled down from the upper bunk.

“Did you go wandering around the deck last night and do some spying?” Geo asked.

By now most of the other sailors had risen, and one suddenly stepped between Urson and Geo. “’Scuse me, mate,” he said and shook the figure in the second berth.

“Hey, Whitey, come on. You can’t be that soused from last night. Get up or you’ll miss mess.” The young sailor shook the figure again. “Hey, Whitey.” The figure in the blankets was unresponsive. The sailor gave him one more good shake, and as he rolled over, the blanket fell away from the blond head. The eyes were wide and dull, the mouth half open. “Hey, Whitey,” the black sailor said again, and then he stepped back, slowly.

* * * *

Mist enveloped the ship three hours out from port. Urson was called for duty right after breakfast, but no one bothered either Snake or Geo that first morning. Snake would slip off somewhere and Geo would be left to wander the ship alone. He was walking beneath the dories when the heavy slap of bare feet on the wet deck materialized in Urson. “Hey,” greeted his friend. “What are you doing under here?”

“Nothing much,” Geo said.

Urson was carrying a coil of rope about his shoulder. Now he slung it down into his hand and leaned against the
support shaft and looked out toward the fog. “It’s a bad beginning this trip has had,” he said. “What few sailors I’ve talked to don’t like it at all.”

“Urson,” said Geo, “have you any idea what actually happened this morning?”

“Maybe I have and maybe I haven’t,” Urson said. “What ones have you?”

“Do you remember the dream?” he asked.

Urson scrunched his shoulders as if suddenly cold. “I do,”

he said.

“It was like we were seeing through somebody else’s eyes, almost.”

“Our little four-armed friend sees things in a strange way if that’s the case.”

“Urson, that wasn’t Snake’s eyes we saw through. I asked him, just before he went off exploring the ship. It was somebody else. All he did was get the pictures and relay them into our minds. And what was the last thing you saw?”

“As a matter of fact,” Urson said, turning, “I think he was looking at poor Whitey’s bunk.”

“And who was supposed to be sleeping in poor Whitey’s bunk?”

“Snake?”

“Exactly. Do you think perhaps White was killed?”

“Could be, I guess. But how, and why, and who?”

“Somebody who wanted Snake killed. Maybe the same person who cut his tongue out a year and a half ago.”

“I thought we decided that we didn’t know who that was.”

“A man you know, Urson,” Geo said. “What man on this ship have you sailed with before?”

“Don’t you think I’ve been looking?” Urson asked.

“There’s not a familiar face on deck, other than maybe one I’ve seen in a dockside bar, but never one whose name I’ve known.”

“Think, Urson, who on this ship you’ve sailed with before,” Geo asked again, more intently.

Suddenly Urson turned. “You mean the mate?”

“That’s just who I mean,” said Geo.

“And you think he tried to kill Snake. Why didn’t Snake tell us?”

“Because he thought if we knew, we’d get in trouble with it. And he may be right.”

“How come?” asked Urson.

“Look, we know something is fishy about Argo. The more I think about it, the less I can put my hands on it. But if something is fishy about the mate too, then perhaps he’s in cahoots with her. What about when he came into Argo’s cabin last night when we were there?”

“Maybe he was just doing what we said we were; walking by when he heard a noise. If it was his eyes we were seeing through, then he sees things awfully funny, then.”

“Maybe he’s a strange one too, like Snake who ‘hears’

things funny. Not all strangeness shows,” Geo reminded him.

“You could be right,” said Urson. “You could be right.” He stood up from where he had leaned against a lifeboat support. “Well, you think some more friend, and I’ll listen.

I’ll see you later.” He hauled up his rope again and started off in the mist.

Geo decided to search for Snake. A ladder led to the upper deck, and climbing it, he saw across the deck a tall, fog-shrouded figure. He paused, and then started forward.

“Hello,” he said.

The captain turned from the railing and looked at him.

“Good morning sir,” Geo said. “I thought you might be the mate.”

The captain was silent for a while, and then said, “Good morning. What do you want?”

“I didn’t mean to disturb you if you were…”

“No disturbance,” said the captain.

“How long will it take us to get to Aptor?”

“Another three weeks. Shorter if this wind keeps up.”

“I see,” said Geo. “Have you any idea of the geography of Aptor?”

“The mate is the only one on board that has ever set foot on Aptor and come off it alive. Except Priestess Argo.”

“The mate, sir? When?”

“On a previous voyage he was wrecked there. He made a raft and drifted into the open sea where he had the good fortune to be picked up by a ship.”

“Then he will lead whatever party goes to the place?”

“Not him,” said the captain. “He’s sworn never to set foot on the place again. Don’t even ask him to talk about it.

Imagine what sort of a place it must be if probable death on the open sea is better than struggling on its land. No, he’ll pilot us through the bay to the river’s estuary, but other than that, he will have nothing to do with the place.

“Two other men we had on board who’d been there and returned. They went with the Priestess Argo in a boat of thirteen. Ten were dismembered and the pieces of their bodies were thrown in the water. Two survived to row the Priestess back to the boat. One was the sailor who died in the forecastle this morning. Not half an hour ago, I received news that the other one went overboard from the rigging and was lost in the sea. This is not a good trip. Men are not to be lost like coins in a game. Life is too valuable.”

“I see,” said Geo. “Thank you for your information and time, sir.”

“You are welcome,” the captain said. Then he turned away.

Geo descended the ladder again and walked slowly forward. Something touched him on the shoulder and he whirled.

“Snake, God damn it, don’t do that!”

The boy looked embarrassed.

“I didn’t mean to yell,” Geo said, putting his arm around the boy’s shoulder. “Come on, though. What did you find?

I’ll trade you what I know for what you do.”

You…sleep, came from Snake.

“I’m sorry, friend,” laughed Geo. “But I couldn’t take a nap now if you paid me. Now tell me, whose eyes were we seeing through last night? The captain’s?”

Snake shook his head.

“The mate’s?”

Snake nodded.

“I thought so. Now, did he want to kill…wait a minute,”

said Geo. “Can the mate read minds, too? Is that why you’re keeping things from us?”

Snake shrugged.

“Come on now,” Geo said. “Do a little yelling and explain.”

Don’t…know, Snake thought out loud. Can…see…what…

he…sees…hear…what…he…hears.

But…no…hear…

thoughts…

“I see. Look, take a chance that he can’t read minds and tell me, did he kill the man in the bed you should have been in.”

Snake paused for a minute. Then nodded.

“Do you think he was trying to kill you?”

Snake nodded again.

“Did you know that the man killed this morning in your place was one of the two men who came back from Aptor with the Priestess?”

Snake looked surprised.

“And that the other one drowned this morning, fell overboard, and was lost?”

Snake nearly jumped.

“What is it?”

Look…for…him…all…morning.

He…not…dead…hear…

thoughts…dim…low.

“Who’s not dead?” Geo asked. “Which one?”

Second…man.

“Did you find him?” Geo asked.

Can’t…find, Snake said. But…alive…I…know.

“One other question,” Geo raised the jewel from where it hung against his chest. “How do you work this silly thing?”

Think…through…it, said Snake.

Geo frowned. “What do you mean? Can you tell me how it works?”

You…have…no…words, Snake said. Radio…electricity…

diode…

“Radio, electricity, diode?” repeated Geo, the sounds coming unfamiliarly to his tongue. “What are they?”

Snake shrugged.

* * * *

Geo got a chance to report his findings to Urson that evening and the big man was puzzled.

“Can you add anything?” Geo asked.

“All I’ve had a chance to do is work,” grumbled Urson.

They were standing by the edge of the rail beyond which the mist steeped thickly, making sky and water indistinguishable and grave. “Hey, Four-arms,” Urson suddenly asked. “What are you looking at?”

Snake stared at the water but said nothing.

“Maybe he’s listening to something,” suggested Geo.

“You’d think there were better things to eavesdrop on than fishes,” said Urson. “I guess Argo’s given special orders that you two get no work. Some people! Let’s go eat.” As they started toward the convergence of sailors at the entrance of the mess hall, Urson said, “Oh, guess what?” He turned to Geo and picked up the jewel from the boy’s chest. “All you people are going around with such finery, I took my coins to the smithy and had him put chains on them. Now I’ll strut with the best of you.” He laughed, and then went through the narrow way, crowding with the other sailors into the wide hall.

* * * *

For two weeks, nights without dreams left them early, and the boat rolled from beneath the fog. Dawn was gray, but clear; then, by one breakfast time the ragged slip of Aptor’s beach hemmed the horizon.

On the wheel deck the sailors clustered to the rail, and before them rocks struck like broken teeth from the water.

Urson, in his new, triple neckchain, joined Snake and Geo at the rail. “Whew,” he said. “Getting through them is going to be fun.”

Suddenly heads turned. Behind them now, Argo’s dark veils, bloated with the breeze, filled about her as she mounted the steps to the wheel deck. The sailors moved away from her. Then, one hand on a stay rope, she stared across the gray water to the dark tongue of land.

From the wheel the captain spoke, “Jordde, disperse the men and take over the wheel.”

“Aye, sir,” said the mate. “You, you, and you to the tops.”

He pointed among the men. “You also, and you. Hey, didn’t you hear me?”

“Me, sir?” Geo turned around.

“Yes, you, up to the top spar there.”

“You can’t send him up,” Urson called out. “He’s never been topside at all before. It’s too choppy for any lad’s first time up. He doesn’t even know…”

“And who asked you?” demanded the mate.

“Nobody asked me, sir,” said Urson, “but—”

“Then you get below before I have you brigged for insubordination and fine you your three gold baubles. Don’t you think I recognize dead man’s gold?”

“Now look here,” Urson roared.

Geo glanced from Argo to the captain. The bewilderment that flooded the face of the Priestess shocked him.

Jordde suddenly seized up a marlin pin, raised it, and shouted at Urson, “Get down below before I break your skull open.”

Urson’s fists sprang up.

“Calmly, brother bear,” Geo began.

“In a bitch’s ass,” snarled Urson and swung his huge arm forward. Something leaped on Jordde from behind—Snake!

The marlin pin veered inches away from Urson’s shoulder.

The flung fist sunk into the mate’s stomach and he reeled forward, passing Urson, with Snake still clawing at his back. He reached the rail, bent double over it, and Snake’s legs flipped up. When Jordde rose, he was free of encumbrance.

Geo rushed to the edge and saw Snake’s head emerge in the churning water. Behind him, Urson yelled, “Look out!”

Jordde’s marlin made an inch of splinters in the length of wood against which he had been leaning.

“Not him!” cried Argo. “No, no! Not him!”

But Jordde had seized Geo’s shoulder and whirled him back against the rail. Geo saw Urson grab a loose rope behind them and suddenly swing forward, intending to knock Jordde away with his feet. But suddenly Argo moved in the way of his flying body, turned, saw him, and raised her hands to push him aside so that he swung wide of them and landed on the railing a yard from where they struggled.

Geo’s feet slipped on the wet boards, and he felt his body suddenly hurled backwards onto the air. Then his back slapped water. As he broke surface, Urson, still on the rail called to him, “Hang on, friend Geo, I’m coming!” Urson’s arms swung back, and then forward as he dove into the sea.

Now Geo could see only Argo and Jordde at the rail. But they were struggling. Urson and Snake were near him in the water. The last thing he saw was Jordde suddenly wrest something from Argo’s neck and then fling it out into the sea. The Priestess’ hands reached for the flying jewel, followed its arc as she screamed toward the water.

Then hands were at his body. Geo turned in the water as Snake disappeared from beside him and Urson suddenly cried out. Hands were pulling him down.

Roughness of sand beneath one of his sides and the flare of sun on the other. His eyes were hot and his lids were orange over them. Then there was a breeze. He opened his eyes, and shut them quick, because of the light. Then he turned over, thought about pillows and stiff new sheets.

Reaching out, he grabbed sand.

He opened his eyes and pushed himself up from the beach with both hands spread in warm, soft crumblings. Over there were rocks, and thick vegetation behind them. He swayed to his knees, the sand grating under his kneecaps.

He looked at his arm in the sun, flecked with grains. Then he touched his chest.

His hand came to one bead, moved on, and came to another! He looked down. Both the chain with the platinum claw and the thong with the wire cage hung around his neck. Bewildered, he heaved to his feet, and immediately sat down again as the beach went red with the wash of blood behind his eyeballs. He got up again, slowly.

Carefully Geo started down the beach, looking toward the land. When he turned to look at the water, he stopped.

At the horizon, beyond the rocks, was a boat with lowered sails. So they hadn’t left yet. He swung his eyes back to the beach: fifty feet away was another figure lying in the sun.

He ran forward, now, the sand splashing around his feet, sinking under his toes, so that it was like the slow motion running of dreams. Ten feet from the figure he stopped.

It was a young black, very dark, skin the color of richly humused soil. The long skull was shaved. Like Geo, he was almost naked. There was a clot of seaweed at his wrist, and the soles of his feet and one up-turned palm were grayish and shriveled.

Geo frowned and stood for a full minute. He looked up and down the beach once more. There was no one else. Just then the man’s arm shifted across the sand.

Immediately Geo fell to his knees beside the figure, rolled him over and lifted his head. The eyes opened, squinted in
the light, and the man said, “Who are you?”

“My name is Geo.”

The man sat up, and caught himself from falling forward by jamming his hands into the sand. He shook his head, and then looked up at Geo again. “Yes,” he said. “I remember you. What happened? Did we founder? Did the ship go down?”

“Remember me from where?” Geo asked.

“From the ship. You were on the ship, weren’t you?”

“I was on the ship,” Geo said. “And I got thrown overboard by that damned first mate in a fight. But nothing happened to the ship. It’s still out there, you can see it.” Suddenly Geo stopped. Then he said, “You’re the guy who discovered Whitey’s body that morning!”

“That’s right.” He shook his head again. “My name is Iimmi.” Now he looked out to the horizon. “I see them,” he said. “There’s the ship. But where are we?”

“On the beach of Aptor,” Geo told him.

Iimmi screwed his face up into a mask of dark horror.

“No,” he said softly. “We couldn’t be. We were days away from her.… ”

“How did you fall in?”

“It was blowing up a little,” Iimmi explained. “I was in the rig when suddenly something struck me from behind and I went toppling. In all the mist, they didn’t see me, and the current was too strong for me, and…” He looked around.

“You’ve been on this beach once before, haven’t you?”

Geo asked.

“Once,” said Iimmi. “Yes, once.”

“Do you realize how long you’ve been in the water?” Geo asked.

Iimmi looked up.

“Over two weeks,” Geo said. “Come on, see if you can walk. I’ve got a lot of things to explain, if I can, and we’ve got some hunting to do.”

Iimmi steadied himself once more, and together they started up the beach.

“What are you looking for?” Iimmi asked.

“Friends,” Geo said.

Two hundred feet up, the rocks and torpid vegetation came down to the water, cutting off the beach. Scrambling over boulders and through vines, they emerged on a rock embankment that dropped fifteen feet into the wide estuary of a ribbon of water that wound back into the jungle.

Twenty feet further, the bank dropped to the river’s surface, and they both fell flat at the edge of a wet table of rock and sucked in cool liquid, watching blue stones and the white and red pebbles shivering six feet below clear ripples.

There was a sound. Both sprang back from the water, turned, and crouched on the rock.

“Hey,” Urson said, through leaves. “I was wondering when I’d find you.”

Light through branches lay on the gold coins hung against his hairy chest. “Have you seen Snake?”

“I was hoping he was with you,” said Geo. “Oh, Urson, this is Iimmi, the other sailor who died two weeks ago.”

Both Iimmi and Urson looked puzzled. “Have a drink of water,” Geo said, “and I’ll explain as best I can.”

“Don’t mind if I do,” said Urson.

While the bear man lay down to drink, Geo began the story of Aptor and Leptar for Iimmi. When he finished, Iimmi asked, “You mean those fish things in the water carried us here? Whose side are they on?”

“Apparently Argo isn’t sure either,” Geo said. “Perhaps they’re neutral.”

“And the mate?” asked Iimmi. “You think he pushed me overboard after he killed Whitey?”

“I thought you said he was trying to kill Snake,” said Urson, who had finished drinking.

“He was,” explained Geo. “He wanted to get rid of all three. Probably Snake first, and then Whitey and Iimmi. He wasn’t counting on our fishy friends, though. I think it was just luck that it was Whitey he got rather than Snake. If he can’t read minds, which I’m pretty sure he can’t, he probably overheard you assigning the bunks for us to sleep in, Urson. When he found out he had killed Whitey instead, it just urged him to get Iimmi out of the way more quickly.”

“I could easily have been pushed,” Iimmi agreed. “But I still don’t see why.”

“If there is a spy from Aptor on the ship, then Jordde is it,” said Geo. “The captain told me he had been to Aptor once before. It must have been then that he was enjoined into their forces. Iimmi, both you and Whitey had also been on Aptor’s shore, if only for a few hours. There must be something that Jordde learned from the island that he was afraid you might learn, something you might see.

Something dangerous, dangerous for Aptor, something you might see just from being on the beach. Probably it was something you wouldn’t even recognize, something you’d maybe not see the significance of until much later. But probably something very obvious.”

Now Urson spoke. “What did happen when you were on Aptor? How were those ten men killed?”

Though the sun was warm, Iimmi shivered. He waited for a moment, and then he began. “We took a skiff out from the ship and managed to get through the rocks somehow. It was evening when we started and the moon, I remember, had risen just above the horizon, though the sky was still deep blue. ‘This light of the full moon is propitious to the White Goddess Argo,’ she said from her place at the bow of the boat. By the time we landed, the sky was black behind her, and the beach was all silvered by the light, up and down. Whitey and I were left to guard the skiff at the water’s edge, and sitting on the gunwales, shoulders
hunched in the slight chill, we watched the others go up the beach, five and five, with Argo behind them.

“Suddenly there was a scream, and the first man fell.

They came from the air like vultures. The moon was overhead by now, and a cloud of them darkened the white disk with their wings. They scurried after the fleeing men, over the sand. All we could really make out was a dark battling against the silver. There were swords raised in the white light, screams, and howls that nearly sent us back into the ocean. But Argo and a handful of those men left began to run toward the boat. They followed them down to the edge of the water, loping behind them, half flying, half running, hacking one after another down with swords. I saw one man fall forward and his head roll from his body while blood squirted ten feet along the sand, crimson under the moon. One actually caught at her veils, but she screamed and slipped from it into the water now, and climbed back into the boat, panting. You would think a woman would collapse, but no. She stood in the bow while we rowed our arms off. They would not come over the water, apparently, and somehow we managed to get the skiff back to the ship without foundering against the rocks.”

“Our aquatic friends may have had something to do with that,” said Geo. “Iimmi, you say her veils were pulled off.

Tell me, do you remember if she were wearing any jewelry or not?”

“She certainly wasn’t,” Iimmi said. “She stood there in only her dark robe, her throat as bare as ivory.”

“She wasn’t going to bring the jewel to Aptor where those monsters could get their hands on it again,” said Urson.

“But Geo, if Jordde’s the spy, why did he throw the jewel in the sea?”

“Whatever reason he had,” said Geo, “our friends have given it to me now.”

“You said Argo didn’t know whose side these sea creatures were on, Leptar’s or Aptor’s,” said Iimmi. “But perhaps Jordde knows, and that’s why he threw it to them.”

He paused for a moment. “Friend, I think you have made an error; you tell me you are a poet, and it is a poet’s error.

The hinge in your argument that Snake is no spy is that Argo must have dubious motives to send you on such an impossible task, without protection, saying that it would be meaningful only if all its goals were accomplished. You reasoned, how could an honest woman place the life of her sister below the value of a jewel…”

“Not just her sister,” interrupted Geo, “but the Goddess Argo Incarnate.”

“Be patient,” said Iimmi. “Only if she wished to make permanent her temporary condition, you thought, could she set such an impossible task. There may be some truth in what you say. But she herself would not bring the jewel to the shores of Aptor, though it was for her own protection.

Thanks to you, all three jewels are now in Aptor, and if any part of her story is true, Leptar is now in more danger than it has been in five hundred years. You have the jewels, two of them, and you cannot use them. Where is your friend Snake who can? Both Snake and Jordde could easily be spies and the enmity between them feigned, so that while you focused on one, you could be misled by the other. You say he can move into men’s minds? Perhaps he clouded yours.”

They sat silent for the lapsing of a minute.

“Argo may be torn by many things,” continued Iimmi. “But you, in watching some, may have been deluded by others.”

Light from the river quivered on the undersides of leaves.

Urson spoke now. “I think his story is better than yours, Geo.”

“Then what shall we do now?” asked Geo, softly.

“Do what the Goddess requests as best we can,” said Iimmi. “Find the Temple of Hama, secure the stone, rescue
the young Goddess, and die before we let the jewels fall into hands of Aptor.”

“From the way you describe this place,” muttered Urson,

“that may not be far off.”

“Still,” mused Geo, “there are things that don’t mesh. Like why were you saved too, Iimmi? Why were we brought here at all? And why did Jordde want to kill you and the other sailor?”

“Perhaps,” said Iimmi, “the god Hama has a strange sense of humor and we shall be allowed to carry the jewels up to the temple door before we are slaughtered, dropping them at his feet.” He smiled. “Then again, perhaps your theory is the correct one, Geo, and I am the spy, sent to sway your reason.”

Urson and Geo glanced at each other.

“There are an infinite number of theories for every set of facts,” said the Negro. “Rule number one: assume the simplest; that includes all the known conditions to be true until more conditions arise for which your theory no longer holds. Rule number two: then, and not until, change it.”

“Then we go on into the jungle,” Geo said.

“I guess we do,” said Urson.

“Since we’ve got this job, we’ve got to trust ourselves and do it right. Let’s see if we can put one more of those things around your neck before we’re through.” He pointed to the two jewels hanging at Geo’s chest. Then he laughed. “One more and you’ll be all the way up to me,” and he rattled his own triple necklace.

CHAPTER V

Light lowered in the sky as they walked beside the river, keeping close to the rocky edge and brushing away vines that strung into the water from hanging limbs. Urson broke down a branch as thick as his wrist and as tall as himself and smote the water with it, playfully. “That should put a welt on anyone’s head who wants to bother us.” He raised
the stick from the water and drops ran along the bark, moving sparks at the ends of dark lines.

“We’ll have to turn into the woods for food soon,” said Iimmi, “unless we wait for animals who come down to drink.”

Urson tugged at another branch, and it twisted loose from fibrous white pulp. “Here,” he handed it to Iimmi. “I’ll have one for you in a moment, Geo.”

“And maybe we could explore a little, before it gets dark,”

Geo suggested.

Urson handed him the third staff. “There’s not much here I want to see,” he muttered.

“Well, we can’t sleep on the bank. We’ve got to find a place hidden in the trees.”

“Can you see what that is through there?” Iimmi asked.

“Where?” asked Geo. “Huh…?” Through the thick growth was a rising shadow. “A rock or a cliff?” he suggested.

“Maybe,” mused Urson, “but it’s awfully regular.”

Geo started off into the underbrush, and the others followed. Their goal was further and larger than it had looked from the river. Once they passed across a section of ten or twelve stones, rectangular and side by side, like paving. Small trees had pushed up between some of them, but for thirty feet, before the edge sank beneath the soft jungle floor it was easier going. Suddenly the growth became thin again and they were at the edge of a relatively clear area. Before them loomed the ruins of a great building. Six girders cleared the highest wall, implying an original height of eighteen or twenty stories. One wall was completely sheared away and fragments of it chunked the ground. The revealed dark caves of broken rooms and cubicles suggested an injured granite hive. They approached slowly.

To one side a great metal cylinder lay askew a heap of rubbish. A flat blade of metal transversed it, one side twisting into the ground where skeletal girders shown
beneath ripped plating. A row of windows like dark eyes lined the body, and a door gaped in an idiotic oval halfway along its length.

Fascinated, they turned toward the injured wreck. As they neared, a sound came from inside the door. They stopped, and their staves leapt a protective inch from the ground. In the shadow of the door, ten feet from the ground, another shadow moved, resolving itself into an animal head, long, muzzled, gray. Then they could see the forelegs. It looked like an immense dog, and it was carrying a smaller animal, obviously dead, in its mouth. It saw them, watched them, was still.

“Dinner,” Urson said softly. “Come on.” They moved forward again. Then they stopped.

Suddenly the beast sprang from the doorway. Shadow and distance had made them completely underestimate its size.

Along the sprung arc flowed a canine body nearly five feet long. Urson struck up at it and knocked it from its flight with his stick. As it fell, Iimmi and Geo were upon it with theirs, clubbing its chest and head. For six blows it staggered and could not gain its feet. Then, as it threatened to heave to standing, Urson rushed forward and brought his stave straight down on the chest: bones snapped and tore through the brown pelt, only to have their blue sheen covered a moment later by a well of blood.

It howled, kicked its hind feet at the stake with which Urson held it to the ground, and then stretched out its limbs and quivered. The front legs stretched, and stretched, while the torso seemed to pull in on itself, shrinking in the death agonies. The long mouth, which had dropped its prey, gaped open as the head flopped from side to side, the pink tongue lolling, shrinking.

“My God,” said Geo.

The sharp muzzle blunted now and the claws in the padded paw stretched, opened into human fingers and a thumb. The hairlessness of the under-belly had spread to
the entire carcass. Hind legs lengthened, joints reversed themselves, and bare knees bent as human feet dragged themselves through fragments of brown leaves over the ground and a human thigh gave a final contraction, stilled, and then one leg fell out straight again. A shaggy, black-haired man lay still on the ground, his chest caved and bloody. In one last throw, he flung his hands up to grasp the stake and pull it from his chest, but too weak, they slipped down as his lips curled back from his mouth revealing a row of perfectly white, blunt teeth.

Urson stepped back, and then back again. The stave fell, pulled loose with a sucking explosion from the ruined mess of lung. The bear man had raised his hand to his own chest and seized his triple, gold token. “In the name of the Goddess,” he finally said.

Iimmi walked forward now, picked up the carcass of the smaller animal that had been dropped, and turned away.

“Well,” he said, “I guess dinner isn’t going to be as big as we thought.”

“I guess not,” Geo said.

They walked back to the ruined building, away from the corpse.

“Hey, Urson,” Geo said at last to the big man who was still holding his coins, “Snap out of it. What’s the matter?”

“The only man I’ve ever seen whose body was that broken in that way,” he said slowly, “was one whose side struck into by a ship’s spar.”

* * * *

They decided to settle that evening at the corner of one of the building’s ruined walls. They produced fire with a rock against a section of slightly rusted girder. And after much sawing on a jagged metal blade protruding from a pile of rubble, they managed to quarter the animal and rip most of the pelt from its red body. With thin branches to hold the meat, they did a passable job of roasting. Although partially

burned, partially raw, and without seasoning, they ate it, and their hunger ceased. As they sat huddled by the wall, ripping red juicy fibers from the last bones with their teeth, night swelled through the jungle, imprisoning them in the shell of orange flicking from their fire.

“Shall we leave it going?” asked Urson.

“Fire keeps animals away,” Iimmi said.

On leaves piled together now they stretched out by the wall of the broken building. There was quiet—an insect hum, no un-namable chitterings, except for the comforting rush of the river’s water.

Geo was first to awake, his eyes filled with silver. The entire clearing had been flooded by white light from the huge disk of the moon that sat on the rim of the trees.

Iimmi and Urson beside him looked uncomfortably corpse-like, and he was about to reach over and touch Iimmi’s outstretched arm when there was a noise behind him, like beaten cloth. He jerked his head around, and was staring at the gray wall by which they had camped. He looked up at the spreading plane that tore off raggedly against the night. Fatigue had washed into something unpleasant and hard in his belly that had little to do with tiredness. He stretched his arm in the leaves once more and put his cheek down on the cool flesh of his shoulder.

The beating sound came again and continued for a few seconds. He rolled his face up and stared at the sky.

Something crossed on the moon. It seemed to expand a moment, spread its wings, and draw them in again.

He reached out, his arm over the leaves like thunder, and grabbed Iimmi’s black shoulder. Iimmi grunted, started, then rolled over on his back, and opened his eyes. Geo saw the black chest drop with expelled breath, the only recognition given. A few seconds later the chest rose again.

Iimmi turned his face to Geo and raised his finger to his lips. Then he turned his face back up to the night. Three more times the flapping sounded behind them, behind the
wall, Geo realized. Once he glanced down again and saw that Iimmi had raised his arm and put it over his eyes.

They passed years that way. Then a flock suddenly leapt from the wall. Some of them fell twenty feet before their wings filled with air and they rose again. They circled wider and before they returned, another flock dropped off into the night.

As they fell this time, Geo suddenly grabbed Iimmi’s arm and pulled it down from his eyes. The figures dropped through the dark like kites, sixty feet above them, forty feet, thirty; then there was a thin, piercing shriek. Iimmi was up on his feet in a second, and Geo beside him, their staffs in hand.

“Here it comes,” breathed Iimmi. He kicked at Urson, but the big man was already on his knees, and then feet. The wings beat insistently and darkly before them as they stood against the wall. The figures flew toward them and at the terrifying distance of five feet, reversed. “I don’t think they can get in at the wall,” said Iimmi.

“I hope the hell they can’t,” Urson said.

The figures dropped to the ground, black wings crumpling to their bodies in the moonlight. In the growing hoard of shadow in front of them, light snagged on a metal blade.

Then two of the creatures detached from the others and hurled themselves forward, swords arcing suddenly above their heads.

They swung their staffs as hard as they could, catching both beasts on the chest. They fell backwards in a sudden expansion of rubbery wings, as though they had stumbled into billowing dark canvas.

Three more now leapt over the fallen ones, shrieking. As they came, Urson looked up and jammed his staff into the belly of a fourth monster who was about to fall on them from above. One got past Iimmi’s whistling staff and Geo had to stop swinging and grab a furry arm. He pulled it to the side, overbalancing the huge, sailed creature. It
dropped its sword as it lay for a moment, struggling on its back. Geo grabbed the blade and brought it straight from the ground up into the gut of another of the creatures who spread open its wings and staggered back. He wrested the blade free, and then turned it down into the body of the fallen one; it made a thick sound like a crushed sponge. As the blade came out again and he hacked into a shadow on his left, a voice suddenly sounded, but inside his head.

The…jewels…

“Snake!” bawled Geo. “Where the hell are you?” He was still holding his staff, and now he flung it forward, spear-like, into the face of an advancing beast. Struck, it opened up like a black parachute, knocking away three of its companions, before it fell.

In the view, cleared for an instant, Geo saw a slight, spidery form, dart from the jungle edge into the clearing.

With his free hand Geo ripped the jewels from his neck and flung the confused handful of thong and chain over the heads of the shrieking beasts. The beads made a double eye in the light at the top of their arc before they fell on the leaves beyond. Snake picked them up and held them above his head.

Fire leapt from the boy’s hands in a double bolt that converged in the center of the dark bodies. A red flair silhouetted the jagged edge of a wing. A wing flamed, waved flame, and the burning beast tried to take air before it fell, splashing fire about it. Orange light caught sharp on brown faces chiseled with shadow, caught in the terrified red bead of an eye or along double fangs behind dark lips.

Burning wings withered on the ground; dead leaves had sparked now, and whips of light ran on the clearing floor.

The beasts retreated and the three men stood against the wall, panting.

“Watch out!” Iimmi suddenly called.

Snake looked up as the great wings tented over him, hiding him momentarily. Red flared beneath them, and
suddenly the beasts fell away, their sails sweeping over the dead leaves, moved by wind or life, Geo couldn’t tell. Dark flappings rose on the moon, grew further away, and were gone.

Away from the wall, they saw the fire had blown up against the wall and was dying. They ran quickly toward the edge of the forest. “Snake,” said Geo when they stopped. “This is Iimmi, this is Snake. We told you about him.”

Iimmi extended his hand. “Glad to meet you.”

“Look,” said Geo, “he can read your mind, so if you still think he’s a spy…”

Iimmi grinned. “Remember the general rule? If he is a spy, it’s going to get much too complicated trying to figure why he saved us like that.”

Urson scratched his head. “If it’s a choice between Snake and nothing, we better take Snake. Hey, Four Arms, I owe you a thrashing.” He paused, then laughed. “I hope some day I get a chance to give it to you.”

“Where have you been, anyway?” Geo asked. He put his hand on the boy’s shoulder. “You’re wet.”

“Our water friends again?” suggested Urson.

“Probably,” said Geo.

Snake now held one hand toward Geo.

“What’s that? Oh, you don’t want to keep them?”

Snake shook his head.

“All right,” said Geo. He took one jewel and put it around his neck.

Geo took the wrought chain with the platinum claw from his neck and hung it around Iimmi’s. The white eye shown on his dark chest in the moonlight. Now Snake beckoned them to follow him back across the clearing. They came, stopping to pick up swords from the shriveled darknesses on the ground about the clearing. As they passed around the edge of the broken building, Geo looked for the corpse they had left there, but it was gone.

“Where are we going?” asked Urson.

Snake only motioned them onward. They neared the broken cylinder and Snake scrambled up the rubble under the dark hole through which the man-wolf had leaped earlier that evening.

At the door, Snake turned and lifted the jewel from Geo’s neck, and held it aloft. The jewel glowed now, with a blue-green light that seeped into the corners and crevices of the ruined entrance. Shreds of cloth hung at the windows, most of which were broken. Twigs and rubbish littered the metal floor. They walked between double seats toward a door at the far end. Effaced signs still hung on the walls.

N .. SM .. K .. G

The door at the end was ajar, and Snake opened it all the way. Something scuttered through a cracked window. The jewel’s light showed two seats broken from their fixtures.

Vines covered the front window in which only a few splinters of glass hung on the rim. Draped in rotten fabric, a few metal rings about wrists and ankles, two skeletons with silver helmets had fallen from the seats. Snake pointed to a row of smashed glass disks in front of the broken seats.

Radio… they heard in their minds.

Now he reached down into the mess on the floor and dislodged a chunk of rusted metal. Gun, he said, showing it to Geo.

The three men examined it. “What’s it good for?” asked Urson.

Snake shrugged.

“Are there any electricities, or diodes around?” asked Geo, remembering the words from before.

Snake shrugged again.

“Why did you want to show us all this?” Geo asked.

The boy only turned and started back toward the door.

When they were standing in the oval entrance, about to
climb down, Iimmi pointed to the ruins of the building ahead of them. “Do you know what that building was called?”

Barracks, Snake said.

“I know that word,” said Geo.

“So do I,” said Iimmi. “It means a place where they used to keep soldiers all together. It’s from one of the old languages.”

“Where to now?” Urson asked Snake.

The boy climbed back down into the clearing and they followed him into the denser wood where only pearls of light scattered through the trees. They emerged at a broad ribbon of silver, the river, broken by rocks.

“We were right the first time,” Geo said. “We should have stayed here.”

The sound of rippling, sloshing, the full whisper of leaves and foliage along the edges of the forest—these accompanied them as they lay down on the dried moss behind the larger rocks. And with the heaviness of release on them, they dropped, like stones down a well, the bright pool of sleep.

* * * *

The bright pool of silver grew and spread and wrinkled into the familiar shapes of mast, the rail of the deck, and the whiteness of the sea beyond the ship. The scene moved down the deck, until another gaunt figure approached from the other direction. The features, though strangely distorted by whiteness and pulled to grotesquerie, were recognizable as those of the captain as he drew near.

“Oh, mate,” said the captain.

Silence, while the mate gave an answer they couldn’t hear.

“Yes,” answered the captain. “I wonder what she wants, too.” His voice was hollow, etiolated like a flower grown in
darkness. The captain turned and knocked on Argo’s cabin door. It opened, and they stepped in.

The hand that opened the door for them was thin as winter twigs. The walls of the room seemed draped in spider webs and hangings insubstantial as layered dust.

The great desk seemed spindly, grotesque, and the papers on top of it were tissue thin, threatening to scutter and crumble with a breath. The chandelier above gave more languishing white smoke than light, and the arms, branches, and complexed array of oil cups looked like a convocation of spiders.

Argo spoke in a pale white voice that sounded like the whisper of thin fingers tearing webs.

“So,” she said. “We will stay at least another seven days.”

“But why?” asked the captain.

“I have received a sign from the sea.”

“I do not wish to question your authority, Priestess,”

began the captain.

“Then do not,” interrupted Argo.

“My mate has raised the objection that…”

“Your mate has raised his hand to me once,” stated the Priestess. “It is only in my benevolence…” Here she paused, and her voice became more unsure, “…that I do not destroy him where he stands.” Beneath, her veil, a face could be made out that might have belonged to a dried skull.

“But,” began the captain.

“We wait here by the island of Aptor another seven days,”

commanded Argo. She looked away from the captain now, in a direction that must have been straight into the eyes of the mate. From behind the veil, hate welled like living liquid from the seemingly empty sockets. They turned to go, and once more on deck, they stopped to watch the sea.

Near the indistinct horizon, a sharp tongue of land outlined itself with mountains. The cliffs were chalky on one side, then streaked with red and blue clays on the other. There
was a reddish glow beyond one mountain, like the shimmering of a volcano. And dark as most of it was, it was a distinct darkness, backed with purple, or broken by the warm, differing grays of individual rocks. Even through the night, at this distance, beyond the silver crescent of the beach, the jungle looked rich, green even in the darkness, redolently full and quiveringly heavy with life.

* * * *

And then the thin screams…

CHAPTER VI

Geo rolled over and out of sleep, stones and moss beneath his shoulder. He grabbed his sword and was on his feet instantly. Iimmi was also standing with raised blade. The river sloshed coldly behind them.

The thin screaming came again, like a hot wire drawn down the gelid morning. Snake and Urson were also up, now. The sounds came from the direction of the ruined barracks. Geo started forward, cautiously, curiosity drawing him toward the sound, fear sending him from the relatively unprotected bank and into the woods. The others followed him.

Abruptly they reached the edge of the forest’s wall, beyond which was the clear space before the broken building. They crouched now, behind the trees, watching, fascinated.

Between ape and man, it hovered at the edge of the forest in the shadow. It was Snake’s height, but more of Urson’s build. An animal pelt wrapped its middle and went over its shoulder, clothing it more fully than either of the four humans were clothed. Thick-footed, great-handed, it loped four steps into the clearing, uttered its piercing shriek, and fell on a hunk of flesh that last night’s beasts had dropped from the sky. Its head rocked back and forth as it tore at its food. Once it raised its head and a sliver of flesh shook from its teeth before the face dropped again to devour.

They watched the huge fingers upon broad flat palms, tipped with bronze-colored claws, convulse again and again, reflexively, into the gray, fibrous meat while the fanged mouth ripped.

Whether it was a shift of breeze, or a final reflex, Geo couldn’t tell, but one of the membranous sails raised darkly and beat about the oblivious animal that fed on its corpse.

“Come on,” Urson said. “Let’s go.”

A thin scream sounded behind them, and they whirled.

It crouched apishly, the bronze-clawed fingers opened and closed like breathing, and the shaggy head was knotted with dirt and twigs. The breath hissed from the faintly moving, full lips.

Urson reached for his sword, but Iimmi saw him and whispered, “No, don’t.”

The Negro extended his hand and moved slowly forward.

The hulking form took a step back, and mewed.

Geo suddenly caught the idea. Coming up beside Iimmi, he made a quick series of snaps with his fingers and said in a coaxing, baby voice. “Come, come, come.” He laughed softly to Urson back over his shoulder. “It won’t hurt us,”

he said.

“If we don’t hurt it,” added Iimmi. “It’s some sort of necrophage.”

“A what?” asked Urson.

“It only eats dead things,” Geo explained. “They’re mentioned in some of the old legends. Apparently, after the Great Fire, so the story goes, there were more of these things around than anything else. In Leptar, though, they became extinct.”

“Come here, cutie,” said Iimmi. “Nice little, sweet little, pretty little thing.”

It mewed again, bowed its head, came over and rubbed against Iimmi’s hip. “Smells like hell,” the Negro observed, scratching behind its ear. “Watch out there, big boy!” The
beast gave a particularly affectionate rub that almost upset Iimmi’s balance.

“Leave your pet alone,” said Urson, “and let’s get going.”

Geo patted the ape-like skull. “So long, beautiful,” he said.

They turned toward the river again.

As they emerged on the rocky bank, Geo said, “Well, at least we know we have seven days to get to the Temple of Hama and out again.”

“What do you mean?” asked Iimmi.

“Don’t you remember the dream, back on the ship?”

“Who was thinking that?” asked Iimmi.

“Jordde, the first mate.”

“He makes everybody look dead. I thought I was having a nightmare. I could hardly recognize the captain.”

“You see one reason for believing he’s a spy?”

“Because of the way he sees things?” Again he smiled. “A poet’s reason, I’m afraid. But I see.”

The thin shriek sounded behind them, and they turned to see the hulking form crouched on the rocks above them.

“Uh-oh,” said Urson, “there’s your cute friend.”

“I hope we haven’t picked up a tag-a-long for the rest of the trip,” said Geo.

It loped down over the rocks and stopped just before them.

“What’s it got?” Iimmi asked.

“I can’t tell,” said Geo.

Reaching into the bib of its animal skin, it brought out a gray hunk of meat and held it toward them.

Iimmi laughed. “Breakfast,” he said.

“That!” demanded Urson.

“Can you suggest anything better?” Geo asked. He took the meat from the beast’s claws. “Thanks, gorgeous.”

It turned, looked back, and bounded up the bank and into the forest again.

With fire from the jewels, and wooden spits from the woods, they soon had the meat crackling and brown and
the grease bubbling down its sides and hissing onto the hot stones they had used to rim the flame. Urson sat apart, sniffed, and then moved closer, and finally scratched his big fingers through his hairy stomach and said, “Damn it, I’m hungry.” They made room for him at the fire without comment.

Sun struck the tops of the trees for the first time that morning and a moment later splashed copper in concentric curves on the water by the rock’s edge, staining it further with dull gold.

“You seem to know your way around awfully well. Have you ever been on Aptor before?” Iimmi asked Snake suddenly.

Snake paused for a moment. Then he nodded, slowly.

They were all silent now.

Finally Geo asked, “What made you ask that?”

“Something in your first theory,” Iimmi said. “I’ve been thinking it for some time, and I guess you knew I was thinking it too, Four Arms. You thought Jordde wanted to get rid of me, Whitey, and Snake, and that it was just an accident that he caught Whitey first instead of Snake. You thought he wanted to get rid of Whitey and me because of something we’d seen, or might have seen, when we were on Aptor with Argo. I just thought perhaps he wanted to get rid of Snake for the same reason. Which meant he might have been on Aptor before, too.”

“Jordde was on Aptor before,” said Urson. “You said that’s when he became a spy for them.”

They all turned to Snake who stood quietly.

“I don’t think we ought to ask him any more questions,”

said Iimmi. “The answers aren’t going to do us any good, and no matter what we find out, we’ve got a job to do, and seven, no—six and a half days to do it in.”

Snake quietly handed the metal chain with the pendant jewel back to Iimmi. The dark man put it around his neck once more and they turned up the river.

* * * *

By twelve, the sun had parched the sky. Once they stopped to swim and cool themselves. Chill water gave before reaching arms and lowered faces. They even dove in search of their aquatic helpers, but grubbed the pebbly bottom of the river with blind fingers instead, coming up with dripping twigs and smooth wet stones. Soon, they were in a splashing match, of which it is fair to say, Snake won—hands down.

Hunger thrust its sharp finger into their abdomens once more, only a mile on. “Maybe we should have saved some of that stuff from breakfast,” muttered Urson.

Iimmi suddenly broke away from the bank toward the forest.

“Come on,” he said. “Let’s get some food.”

The building they suddenly came upon had tongues of moss licking twenty to fifty feet up the loosely mortared stones. A hundred yards from the water, the jungle came right to its edges. The whole edifice had sunk a bit to one side in the boggy soil. It was a far more stolid and primitive structure than the barracks. They scraped and hacked in front of the entrance where two great columns of stone, six feet across at the base, rose fifty feet to a supported arch.

The stones of the building were rough and unfinished.

“It’s a temple,” Geo suddenly said.

And again they fell back to work. What spots of light spilled through the twisted net of jungle stopped at the total shadow beneath the great arch. A line of blackness up one side of the basalt door showed that it was ajar. Now they mounted the steps, moving aside a fallen branch which chattered leaves at them. Geo, Iimmi, then Snake, and at last Urson, squeezed through the door.

Ceiling blocks had fallen from the high vault so that three shafts of sun struck through the continual shift of dust to the littered floor.

“Do you think it’s Hama’s temple?” Urson asked. His voice came back in the stone room, small and hollow.

“I doubt it,” said Iimmi. “At least not the one we’re supposed to find.”

“Maybe it’s an abandoned one,” said Geo, “and we can find out something useful from it.”

Something large and dark suddenly flapped through a far shaft of sun. They stepped back. After a moment of silence, Geo handed his jewel to Snake. “Make some light in here,”

he said.

The blue green glow flowed from the up-raised jewel in Snake’s hand. As the light flared, and flared brighter, they saw that the flapping had come from a medium-sized bird that was perched harmlessly on an arch that ran between two columns. It ducked its head at them, cawed harshly, and then flapped from its perch and out one of the apertures in the ceiling, the sound of its wings still thrumming in echo seconds after it was gone.

There were doors between the columns, and one far wall had not withstood time’s sledge. A gaping rent was nearly blocked with vines except for a dim, green-tinted shimmer that broke in here and there through the uneven foliage.

Behind a twisted metal rail and raised on steps of stone, the ruins of a huge statue sat. Carved from black rock, it represented a man seated cross-legged on a dais. An arm and shoulder had broken off and lay in pieces on the altar steps. The hand, its fingers as thick as Urson’s thigh, lay just behind the altar rail. The head was completely missing.

Both the hand still on the statue and the one in front of them on the steps looked as though they had once held something, but whatever it was had been removed.

Iimmi was moving along the rail to where a set of stone boxes were placed like foot stones along the side of the altar. “Here, Snake,” he called. “Bring a light over here.”

Snake obeyed, and with Geo’s and Urson’s help, he loosened one of the lids.

“What’s in there?” Urson asked.

“Books,” said Iimmi, lifting out one dusty volume. Geo peered over his shoulder while the dark fingers turned the pages. “Old rituals,” Iimmi said. “Look here,” and he pointed to one of them. “You can still read them.”

“Let me see,” Geo said. “You know I studied with Eadnu at the University of Olcse Olwnh.”

Iimmi looked up and laughed. “I thought some of your ideas sounded familiar. I was a pupil of Welis.”

“You were at Olcse Olwnh too?” Geo asked.

“Um-hm,” said Iimmi turning the pages. “I signed aboard this ship as a summer job. If I’d known where we’d end up, I don’t think I’d have gone, though.”

Stomach pangs were forgotten.

“These rituals are not at all like those of the Goddess,”

Iimmi observed.

“Apparently not,” agreed Geo. “Wait!” Iimmi had been turning pages at random. “Look there!” Geo pointed.

“What is it?” Iimmi asked.

“The lines,” Geo said. “The ones Argo recited.” He read out loud:

“Forked in the heart of the dark oak
the circlet of his sash
rimmed where the eye of Hama broke
with fire, smoke, and ash.

“Freeze the drop in the hand
and break the earth with singing.

Hail the height of a man
and also the height of a woman.

“The eyes have imprisoned a vision.

The ash tree dribbles with blood.

Thrust from the gates of the prison
smear the yew tree with mud.”

“It’s the other version of the poem I found in the pre-purge rituals of Argo. I wonder if there were any more poems in the old rituals of Leptar that parallel those of Aptor and Hama?”

“Probably,” Iimmi said. “Especially if the first invasion from Aptor took place just before, and probably caused, the purges.”

“What about food?” Urson suddenly asked from where he now sat on the altar steps. “You two scholars have the rest of time to argue. But we may starve before you can enjoy the leisure.”

“He’s right,” said Iimmi. “Besides, we have to get going.”

“Would you two consider it an imposition to set your minds to procuring us some food?” Urson asked.

“Wait a minute,” Iimmi said. “Here’s a section on the burial of the dead. Yes, I thought so.” He read out loud now:

“Sink the bright dead with misgiving
from the half-light of the living…”

“What does that mean?” asked Urson.

“It means that the dead are buried with all the accoutrements of the living. That means that they put food in the graves.”

“Over here,” cried Iimmi. With Snake following, they came to the row of sealed doors behind the columns along the wall. Iimmi looked at the inscription. “Tombs,” he reported. He turned the handles, a double set of rings, which he twisted in opposite directions. “In an old, uncared-for temple like this, the lock mechanisms must have rusted by now if they’re at all like the ancient tombs of Leptar.”

“Have you studied the ancient tombs?” asked Geo excitedly. “Professor Eadnu always considered them a waste of time.”

“That’s all Welis ever talked about,” laughed Iimmi.

“Here, Urson, you set your back to this a moment.”

Grumbling, Urson came forward, took the rings, and twisted. One snapped off in his hand. The other gave, with a crumbling sound inside the door.

“I think that does it,” Iimmi said.

They all helped pull now, and suddenly the door gave an inch, and then, on the next tug, swung free.

Snake proceeded them into the tiny stone cell.

On a rock table, lying on its side, was a bald, shriveled, sexless body. Around the floor were a few sealed jars, heaps of parchment, and a few piles of ornaments.

Iimmi moved among the jars. “This one has grain,” he said. “Give me a hand.” Geo helped him lug the big pottery vessel to the door.

Suddenly a thin shriek scarred the dusty air, and both boys stumbled. The jar hit the ground, split, and grain heaped over the floor. The shriek came again.

Geo saw, there on the edge of the broken wall across the temple from them five of the ape-like figures crouched before the thickly shingled leaves, just visible in the uneven light. One leapt from the wall now and ran wailing across the littered temple floor, straight for the door of the tomb.

Two others followed, and then two others. More had mounted the broken ridge of stone.

Only a greenish rectangle of light fell through the tomb’s door as the loping forms burst into the room, one, and then its two companions. Claws and teeth closed on the shriveled skin. The body rolled beneath the ripping hands and mouths, for one arm swept into the air above their lowered heads and humped backs. It fell on the edge of the rock table, broke at the mid-forearm, and the skeletal hand fell to the floor, shattering like china, into a dozen pieces.

They backed to the temple door. Then they turned and ran down the temple steps. The sunlight on the broad rocks touched them; they became still, breathed deeply. They
walked quietly. Hunger returned slowly after that, and occasionally one would look aside into the faces of the others in attempt to identify the horror that still pulsed behind their eyes.

CHAPTER VII

It was Urson who first pointed it out. “Look at the far bank,” he said.

Across from them, they could make out an obviously man-made stone embankment.

A few hundred feet further on, Iimmi sighted the spires above the trees, still across the river from them. They could figure nothing for an explanation, till suddenly the trees ceased on the opposite bank and the buildings and towers of a great city broke the sky. Elevated highways looped tower after tower, many of them broken, their ends dangling colossaly to the streets. The docks of the city just across from them were completely deserted.

It was Geo who suggested, “Perhaps Hama’s temple is in there. After all, Argo’s largest temple is in Leptar’s biggest city.”

“And what city in Leptar is that big?” breathed Urson, awfully.

“How do we get across?” asked Iimmi.

But Snake had already started down to the water.

“I guess we follow him,” said Geo, climbing down over the rocks.

Snake dove into the water. Iimmi, Geo, and Urson followed. Before he had taken two strokes, Geo felt familiar hands suddenly grasp his body from below. This time he did not fight, and there was a sudden sense of speed, of sinking through consciousness.

Then he was bobbing up through chill water with the rising embankment of stones to one side and the broad river to the other. He switched from skulling into a crawl now, wondering how to scale the stones when he saw the
rusted metal ladder leading into the water. He caught hold of the sides and pulled himself up.

Snake came up now, and then Urson. And, at last Iimmi joined them on the broad ridge of concrete that walled the flowing river. Together now on the wharf, they turned to the city.

Near them, piles of debris lay between two taller buildings. After a few minutes’ walk the building walls had reached canyon size. “Now, how are you going to go about looking for the temple?” Urson asked.

“Maybe we can take a look from the top of one of these buildings,” Geo suggested.

They turned toward a random building. A slab of metal had torn away from the wall, and stepping through, they found themselves in a huge hollow room. Dim light came from a number of white tubes set around the wall. Only a quarter of them were lit, and one was flickering. Hung from the center of the room was a metal sign which read: NEW EDISON ELECTRIC COMPANY
and beneath it, in smaller letters:

“Light Down The Ages”

One of the huge cylinders, across the floor, was buzzing.

As they mounted a spiral staircase to the next floor the great room turned about them, sinking. At last they stepped up into a dark corridor. A red light glowed at the end which said: EXIT.

Doors outlined themselves along the hall in a red haze.

Geo moved to one at random and opened it. Natural light fell in on them as the others came to see. They entered a room whose outer wall was torn away. The floor broke off irregularly over thrusting girders.

“What could have happened to it?” Urson asked.

“See,” Iimmi explained. “That roadway must have crashed into the wall and knocked it away.”

A twenty-foot ribbon of road veered into the room at an insane angle. The railing was twisted, but there were the stalks of street lights still intact along the edges.

“Do you think we could climb that?” asked Geo. “It doesn’t look too steep.”

“For what?” Urson wanted to know.

“To get some place high enough to see if there’s anything that looks like a temple.”

“Oh,” said Urson in a reconciled voice.

In general the walk was in good shape. Occasional sections of railing had twisted away, but the road itself mounted surely between the sheering faces of the buildings on either side of them through advancing sunset.

It branched before them and they went left. It branched again and again they avoided the right-handed road. A sign, half the length of a three masted ship, hung lopsidedly above them on a building to one side.

WMTH

The Hub Of World News,

Communication, & Entertainment

As they rounded the corner of the building, Snake suddenly stopped and put his hand to his head.

“What is it?” asked Geo.

Snake took a step backward. Then he pointed to WMTH.

It…hurts.

“What hurts?” asked Iimmi.

Snake pointed to the building again.

“Is there someone in there thinking too loud?”

Thinking…machine, Snake said. Radio…

“A radio is a thinking machine and there’s one in there that’s hurting your head?” interpreted Iimmi, tentatively, and with a question mark.

Snake nodded.

“How come the one he showed us before didn’t hurt him?”

Urson wanted to know.

Iimmi looked up at the imposing housing of WMTH.

“Maybe this one’s a lot bigger.”

“Look,” Geo said to Snake, “you stay here, and if we see anything, we’ll come back and report, all right?”

“Maybe it stops later on,” Urson said, “and if he ran forward, he could get out the other side. It may just stop after a hundred feet or so.”

“Why so anxious?” asked Iimmi.

“The jewels,” said Urson. “Who’s going to get us out of trouble if we should meet up with anything else?”

They were silent then. Their shadows faded over the pavement as the yellow tinge in the sky turned blue. “I guess it’s up to Snake,” Geo said. “Do you think you can make it?”

Snake paused for a moment, then shook his head.

“Well,” Geo said to the others, “come on then.”

Around them was a sudden click, and lights flickered all along the edges of the road.

“Come on,” Geo said again, and once more they started, passing the lights which wheeled double and triple shadows about them over the road and the opposite railing.

When they reached the next turn off that led to a still higher ramp, Geo looked back. Snake’s miniature figure sat on the edge of the road’s railing, his feet on the lower rung, one pair of arms folded, one pair of elbows on his knees.

The light above him.

“Keep track of the turns,” said Geo.

“I’m keeping,” Iimmi assured him.

“By the time we get to the top of whatever we’re trying to get to the top of,” rumbled Urson, “we won’t be able to see anything. It’ll be too dark.”

“Then let’s hurry,” Geo admonished.

Sunset stained one side of the towers copper while blue shadows hugged the other. By way of a plastic-domed stairway, they mounted another eighty feet to a broader highway where they could look down on the band of lights
which was the one they had just left. They were beginning to clear the roofs of the lower buildings now.

On this road fewer lights were working. They were just about to enter a dark section when a figure appeared in silhouette at the other end.

They stopped, but the figure was suddenly gone. A little farther, Geo suddenly halted and said, “There!”

Two hundred feet ahead of them, what may have been a naked woman rose from the ground, and began to walk backwards until she disappeared into the next dark length of road.

“Do you think she was running away from us?” Iimmi asked.

Urson reached out and touched Iimmi’s jewel. “I wish we have some more light around here.”

“Yeah,” Iimmi agreed. They continued.

The skeleton lay at the twilight edge of the next stretch of functioning lights. The rib cage marked sharp lines on the pavement with shadow from the lamps’ glare.

“Do we turn back now?” Urson asked.

“A skeleton can’t hurt you,” Iimmi said.

“But what about the live one we saw?” countered Urson.

“…and here she comes now,” Geo whispered in a cynical stage voice.

In fact two figures approached them through the shadow.

As Urson, Geo and Iimmi moved closer, one stopped, and then the other a few steps before the first. Then they dropped. Geo couldn’t tell if they fell, or lay down quickly on the roadway. But they seemed to have disappeared.

“Go on?” asked Urson.

“Go on,” said Geo.

Pause. “Go on,” from Geo.

Two more skeletons lay on the road where the figures had disappeared a minute before. “They don’t seem dangerous,” Geo said. “But what do they do? Die every time they see us?”

“Hey,” Iimmi said. “What’s that? Listen.”

It was a sickly liquid sound, like mud dropping into itself.

Something was falling from the sky. No, not the sky, but from the roadway that crossed fifty feet above them.

Looking down again, they saw that a blob of something was growing on the pavement ten feet from them.

“Come on,” Geo said, and they skirted the mess dripping from above them, and continued up the road, passing four more skeletons. The sound behind them turned into a wet sloshing. Turning, they saw it emerge into the light—
shapeless and jelly-green under the white flare. Impaling its membrane on the skeletons, the mass flowed around them, faster, covering them, molding to them. There was a final surge, a shrinking, and its shapelessness contracted into limbs, a head, feet. The naked man-thing pushed itself to its knees and then stood straight, the flesh by now opaque. Eye sockets caved into the face. A mouth ripped apart on the skull, and the chest began to move with a wet steamy sound in irregular gasps.

It began to walk toward them, raising its hands from its sides. Then, behind it in the darkness, they saw more coming.

“Damn,” said Urson. “What do they…?”

“One, or both, of two things,” Iimmi answered, backing away. “More meat, or more bones.”

“Whoops,” Geo said. “Look back there!”

They whirled and saw seven more figures standing quietly behind them, while the ones in front advanced.

A covered flight of stairs had its entrance nearby, leading to the next level of highway. They ducked into it and fled up the steps. Geo glanced back once; one of the forms had reached the entrance and had started to climb. He was also, he realized, high enough to get some idea of the city, which stretched, beyond the transparent covering of the steps, away in a web of lighted roadways, rising, looping, descending. Two glows caught him: one, beyond the river, a
red haze that flickered behind the trees and was reflected on the water itself. The other was within the city itself, orange white, nested among the buildings.

He turned back up the steps. A gurgling sound neared them as they reached the top entrance. Geo had only gotten half clear of the entrance when he yelled, “Yikes,”

and then, “Duck!”

They slipped from the doorway and nearly fell, avoiding a mass of jelly the size of a two-story house which flopped against the entrance. They edged by its pulsing, transparent sides. The lamp light pierced into it a yard, and once a skull swirled toward the surface and then sank again.

Suddenly it sucked away from the entrance and shivered ponderously toward them. Something was happening at the front. Figures, three or four of them, were detaching themselves from the mother mass and preceding it.

They turned and ran along the road, plunging suddenly into an extended darkened section. A moment later there was a glow in front of them and suddenly Urson yelled,

“Watch it!”

Abruptly the road sheered off in front of them; they halted, and then approached the edge slowly. The surface of the road tore away and the girders descended, webbing toward the ruined stump of a building from which the orange-white glow rose. The glow came from the heart of the edifice. “What do you think it is?” asked Geo.

“I don’t know,” said Iimmi.

They looked, and in the shadow, numberless figures were marching after them. Suddenly the figures fell to the ground, and flesh rolled forward from bone, congealed, and rose quiveringly into the edge of the light.

Iimmi started out first on the skeletal, twisted structure that descended to the glowing pit. “You’re crazy,” Geo said.

The thing flopped forward another yard with a sick sound.

“Hurry up,” Geo added. With Urson in the middle, they
started out along the twenty-inch wide girder. Lit from beneath, their bodies were in the shadow of the girder.

Only their outstretched arms burned in the pale orange light as they balanced themselves.

Before them, faintly legible on the broken building into which they were descending was the sign: ATOMIC

ENERGY FOR THE BETTERMENT OF MAN

It was flanked by two purple trefoils. The beam twisted sideways, and then dropped. Iimmi made the turn, dropped to his knees and hands, and then started to let himself down the four feet to the next small section of concrete.

Once he saw something, let out a low whistle, but continued to lower himself to the straightened girder.

Urson made the turn next, while Geo knelt in front of him.

When Urson saw what Iimmi had seen, his hand shot to Geo’s chest and grabbed the jewel. Geo took his wrist.

“That won’t help us now,” he said.

Urson expelled a breath, and then continued down, slowly.

Quickly Geo turned to drop now.

The entire beam structure over which they had just come was coated with a trembling thickness of the stuff. Globs dripped from the steel shafts, glowing in the light from below, quivering, smoking, splashing off into the darkness.

Here and there something half human would rise either to look around or to pull the collective mass further on, but then it would fall back and dissolve. It bulged forward, smoking now, bits of it shriveling off and falling away. Geo was about to descend, but suddenly he called, “Wait a minute.” The others stayed still.

It wasn’t making progress. It rolled to a certain point in the pale, sherbert-colored light, globbed up, smoked, and fell away. And smoked. And dripped.

“Can’t it get any farther?” Urson asked.

“It doesn’t look it,” said Geo.

A skeleton stood up, flesh-covered in the orange light. It tottered, its surface steaming, and then fell with a sucking
noise, down into the hundreds of feet of shadow. Geo was holding tight onto the girder in front of him.

The pale light fell cleanly over his hand, wrist, and midway up his forearm.

What happened now made him squeeze until sweat came: the entire Gargantuan mass, which had only extended tentacles till now, pulsed to the edge of the jagged road, draped itself over the web of girders, and flung itself forward on the spindly metal threads. It careened toward them, and the three jerked themselves back.

Then it stopped, quivering. It boiled, it burned, it writhed, sinking, smoking through the spaces in the naked girder work. It tried to crawl backwards. Human figures leaped from its mass toward the edge of the road, missed, and plummetted like smoking bullets. It hurled a great pseudopod back toward the safety of the road; it fell short, flopped downward, and the whole mass shook beneath the smoke that rose from it. It pulled free of the support, tentacles sliding across steel, whipping into the air. Then it dropped into the shadows, breaking into a half dozen pieces before they lost sight of it below.

Geo released his hand. “My arm hurts,” he said, shaking it.

They climbed up to the road again, carefully. “Any ideas what happened?” asked Iimmi.

“What ever it was, I’m glad it did,” said Urson.

Something clattered before them in the darkness.

“What was that?” asked Urson, stopping.

“My foot hit something,” Geo said.

“What was it?” asked Urson.

“Never mind,” said Geo. “Come on.”

Fifteen minutes brought them to the stairway that went to the lower highway. Iimmi’s memory proved good, and for an hour they went quickly, Iimmi making no hesitation it turnings.

“God,” Geo said, rubbing his forearm with his other hand.

“I must have pulled hell out of it back there. It hurts like the devil.”

Urson looked at his hand and rubbed them together.

“My hands feel sort of funny too,” Iimmi said. “Like they’ve been wind-burned.”

“Wind-burned nothing,” said Geo. “This hurts.”

Twenty minutes later, Iimmi said, “Well, this should be about it.”

“Hey,” said Urson. “There’s Snake.” As they ran forward, now, the boy jumped off the rail, grabbed their shoulders, and grinned. Then he began to tug them forward.

“You lucky little so and so,” said Urson. “I wish you’d been with us.”

“He probably was, in spirit, if not in body,” Geo laughed.

Snake nodded.

“What are you pulling for?” Urson asked. “Say, if you’re going to get headaches like that, you’d better teach us what to do with them beads there.” He pointed to the jewel at Iimmi’s and Geo’s necks.

Snake nodded and tugged forward again.

“He wants us to hurry,” Geo said. “We better get going.”

The road finally tore completely away, and four feet below them, over the twisted rail, was the mouth of a street that led into the waterfront. Snake, Iimmi and then Urson vaulted over. Urson shook his hands painfully when he landed.

“Give me a hand, will you?” Geo asked. “My arm is really shot.” Urson helped his friend over.

Almost as though it had been in wait, thick liquid gurgling sounded behind them. Like a wounded thing it emerged from behind the broken highway, bulging up into the light which shone on the ripples in its shriveled membrane.

“Run it!” bawled Urson, and they took off down the street.

In the moonlight, the ruined piers spread along the
waterfront to either side of them, some even slanting into the silvered water.

Turning once, they saw it bloat the entrance of the street, fill it, and then pour across the broken stones, slipping across the rubble of the smashed wharf.

When Geo hit water, he was aware of two things immediately as the hands reached for his body. First, the thong was yanked from around his neck. Second, pain seared his arm as if the bones and ligaments were suddenly replaced by white-hot cords of steel, and every vein and capillary had become part of a webbing of red fire.

It was a long time before consciousness. Once he was lifted. And when he opened his eyes, the white moon was moving incredibly fast above him toward the dark shapes of leaves. Was he being carried? And his arm hurt. There was more drowsy half consciousness, and once a great deal of pain. When he opened his mouth to scream, however, darkness flowed in, swathed his tongue, and he swallowed the darkness down into his body and into his head, and called it sleep—

* * * *

A spool of copper wire unrolled over the black tile floor.

Scoop it up quick. Damn, let me get out of here. I run past the black columns, glimpsing the cavernous room, and the black statue at the other end, huge, and rising into shadows. Men in dark robes are walking around. (Not only could they see, this time; they could hear the thinking.) Just don’t feel up to praying this afternoon. I am before the door, and above it, a black disk with three white eyes on it.

Through the door, up black stone steps. Wonder if anyone will be up there now. Just my luck I’ll find the Old Man himself. Another door with a black circle above it. Push it open slowly, cool on my hands. A man is standing inside, looking into a large screen of glass. Figures moving on it.

Can’t make them out, he’s in the way. Oh, there’s another one.

“I don’t know whether to call it success or failure,” one says.

“The jewels are…safe or lost?”

“What do you call it?” the first one asks. “I don’t know any more.” He sighs. “I don’t think I’ve taken my eyes off this thing for more than two hours since they got to the beach.

Every mile they’ve come closer has made my blood run colder.”

“What do we report to Hama Incarnate?”

“It would be silly to say anything now. We just don’t know.”

“Well,” says the other, “at least we can do something with the City of New Hope since they got rid of that super-amoeba.”

“Are you sure they really got it?”

“After the burning it received over that naked atom pile?

It was all it could do to get to the waterfront. It’s just about fried up and blown away already.”

“And how safe would you call them?” the other asks.

“Right now? I wouldn’t call them anything.”

Something glitters on the table by the door. Yes, there it is. In the pile of strange equipment is a U-shaped scrap of metal. Just what I need. Hot damn, adhesive tape too.

Quick, there, before they see. Fine. Now, let the door close, real slow. Ooops. It clicked. Now come on, look innocent, in case they come out. I hope the Old Man isn’t watching.

Guess they’re not coming. And down the stairs again, the black stone walls moving past. Out another door, into the garden, dark flowers, purple, deep red, some with blue in them, and big stone urns. Some priests are coming down the path. Ooops again, there’s old Dunderhead. He’ll want me inside praying. Duck down behind that urn. Here we go.

What’ll I do if he catches me? Really sir, I have nothing under my choir robe. Peek out.

Very, very small sigh of relief, now. Can’t afford to be too loud around here. They’re gone. Let’s examine the loot. The black stone urn has one handle above. It’s about eight feet tall. One, two, three: jump, and…hold…on…and…pull. And try to get to the top. There we go. Cold stone between my toes. And over the edge, where it’s filled with dirt. Pant.

Pant. Pant.

Should be just over here, if I remember right. Dig, dig, dig. Damp earth feels good in your hands. Ow! my finger.

There it is. A brown paper bag under granules of black earth. Lift it out. Is it all there? Open it up, peer in. Down at the bottom, beyond the folds of the edges where the top had been twisted tightly together, are the tiny scraps of copper, a few long pieces of dark metal, a piece of board, some brads. To this my grubby little hand adds the spool of copper wire and the U-shaped scrap of metal. Now, slip it into my robe and—once you get up here, how the hell do you get down? I always forget. Turn around, climb over the edge, like this, and let yourself down. Damn, my robe’s caught on the handle.

And drop.

Skinned my shin again. Some day I’ll learn.

Now let’s see if we can figure this thing out. Gotta crouch down and get to work. Here we go. Open the bag, and turn the contents out in the lap of the dark-colored robe, grubby hands poking.

The U-shaped metal, the copper wire, fine. Hold the end of the wire to the metal, and maneuver the spool around the end of the wire to the metal, and maneuver the spool around the end of the rod. Around. And around. And around. Here we go round the mulberry bush, the mulberry bush, the mulberry bush. Here we go round the mulberry bush; I’ll have me a coil by the morning.

Suddenly a harsh voice in the distance: “And what do you think you’re doing?”

Dunderhead rides again. “Nothing, sir,” as metal and scraps and wires fly frantically into the paper bag.

The voice: “All novices under twenty must report to afternoon services without fail!”

“Yes, sir. Coming right along, sir.” Paper bag jammed equally frantically into the folds of my robe. Not a moment’s peace. Not a moment’s! Through the garden with lowered eyes, past a dour-looking priest with a small paunch. There are mirrors along the vestibule, huge slabs of glass that rise thirty feet, reflecting the blue and yellow light back and forth from the colored windows of the temple. In the mirror I see pass: a dour-looking priest, proceeded by a smaller figure with short red hair and a spray of freckles over a flattish nose. And as we pass into prayer, there is the maddening, almost inaudible jingling of metal scraps, muffled by the dark robe.

* * * *

Geo woke up, and almost everything was white.

CHAPTER VIII

The pale woman with the tiny eyes rose from over him.

Her hair dropped like white silk threads over her shoulders. “You are awake?” she asked. “Do you understand me?”

“Am I at—at Hama’s temple?” he asked, the remnants of the dream still blowing in at the edges of his mind, like shredding cloth. “My friends, where are they?”

The woman laughed. “Your friends are all right. You came out the worst.” Another laugh. “You ask if this is Hama’s temple? But you can see, can you not? You have eyes. Don’t you recognize the color of the White Goddess Argo?”

Geo looked around the room. It was white marble, and there was no direct source of light. The walls simply glowed.

“My friends.… ” Geo said again.

“They are fine. We were able to completely restore their flesh to health. They must have exposed their hands to the direct beam of the radiation for only a few seconds. But the whole first half of your arm had apparently lain in the deadly rays for some minutes. You were not as lucky as they.”

Another thought rushed Geo’s mind now. “The jewels…”

he started to say, but instead of sounding the words, he reached to his throat with both hands. One fell on his naked chest. And there was something very wrong with the other.

He sat up in the bed quickly, and looked down. “My arm,”

he said.

Swathed in white bandages, the limb ended some foot and a half short of where it should have.

“My arm…?” he asked again, with a child’s bewilderment.

“What happened to my arm?”

“I tried to tell you,” the woman said, softly. “We had to amputate half of your arm. If we had not, you would have died.”

“My arm,” Geo said again, and lay back in the bed.

“It is difficult,” the woman said. “It is only a little consolation, I know, but we are blind here. What burned your arm away, took our sight from us when it was much stronger, generations ago. We learned how to battle many of its effects, and had we not rescued you from the river, all of you would have died. You are men who know the religion of Argo, and adhere to it. This another of your party has told us. Be thankful then that you have come under the wing of the Mother Goddess again, for this is a hostile country.” She paused. “Do you wish to talk?”

Geo shook his head.

“I hear the sheets rustle,” the woman said, smiling,

“which means you either shook or nodded your head. I know from my study of the old customs that one means

‘yes’ and the other ‘no.’ But you must have patience with us
who cannot see. We are not used to your people. Do you wish to talk?” she repeated.

“Oh,” said Geo. “No. No, I don’t.”

“Very well,” the woman said. She rose, still smiling. “I will return later.” She walked to a wall in which a door slipped open, and then it closed again, behind her.

He lay still on the bed for a long time. Then he turned over on his stomach. Once he brought the stump under his chest and held the clean bandages in his other hand. Very quickly he let go, and stretched the limb sideways, as far as possible away from him. That didn’t work either, so he moved it back down to his side, and let it lay by him under the white sheet.

After a long while, he got up, sat on the edge of the bed, and looked around the room. It was completely bare, with neither windows nor visible doors. He went to the spot through which she had exited, but could find not seam or crack. His tunic, he saw, had been washed, pressed, and laid on the foot of the bed. He slipped it over his head, fumbling with only one arm. Getting the belt together started out to be a problem, but he hooked the buckle around one finger and maneuvered the strap through with the other. He adjusted his leather purse, now empty, on his side. Then he saw that the sword was gone.

An unreal feeling, white like the walls of the room, was beginning to fill him up like a pale mixture of milk and water. He walked around the edge of the room once more, looking for some break.

There was a sound behind him and the tiny-eyed woman in her white robe stood in a triangular doorway. “You’re dressed,” she smiled. “Good. Are you too tired to come with me? You will eat and see your friends if you feel well enough. Or, I can have the food brought.”

“I’ll come,” Geo said.

She turned, and he followed her into a hall of the same luminous substance. Her heels touched the back of her
white robe with each step, but she was silent. His own bare feet on the cool stones seemed louder than those of the blind woman before him. Suddenly he was in a larger room, with benches. It was a chapel, obviously of Argo because of the altar at the far end, but its detail was strange.

Everything was arranged with the white simplicity that one would expect of a people to whom visual adornment meant nothing. He sat down on a bench as the woman said, “Wait here.” She disappeared down another hall.

Suddenly the woman returned from the other hallway, followed by Snake. Geo and the four-armed boy looked at each other, silently, as the woman disappeared again. A wish, like a living thing, suddenly writhed into a knot in Geo’s stomach, that the boy would say something. He himself could not.

Again she returned, this time with Urson. The big man stepped into the chapel, saw Geo, and exclaimed, “Friend, what happened?” He came to him quickly and placed his warm hands on Geo’s shoulders. “What…” he began, and shook his head.

Geo grinned suddenly, and patted his stump with his good hand. “I guess jelly-belly got something from me after all.”

Urson held his own forearm next to Geo’s and compared them. There was paleness in both. “I guess none of us got out completely all right. I woke up once while they were taking the scabs off. It was pretty bad, and I went to sleep again fast.”

Iimmi came in now. “Well, I was wondering…” He stopped, and let out a low whistle. “I guess it really got you, brother.” His own arms looked as though they had been dipped in bleach up to the mid forearms.

“How did this happen?” Urson asked.

“When we were back doing our tightrope act on those damn girders,” explained Iimmi, “our bodies were in the shadow of the girders and the rays only got to our arms.

I’ve got something you’ll be interested in too, Geo.”

“Just tell me where the hell we are,” Urson said.

“We’re in a monastery sacred to Argo,” Iimmi told him.

“It’s across the river from the City of New Hope, which is where we were.”

“That name sounds familiar; in the…” began Urson. Snake gave him a quick glance, and he stopped, and then frowned.

“We knew of your presence in the City of New Hope,”

explained the blind Priestess, “and we found you by the riverside after you swam across. You managed to cling to life long enough for us to get you back to the monastery and apply what art we could to sooth the burns from the deadly fire.”

Geo suddenly saw that there was no jewel around Iimmi’s neck either. He could almost feel the hands ripping it from his neck in the water. Iimmi must have made the same discovery, because his pale hand raised to his own chest.

The Priestess beckoned and started down another hall, and again they followed. They arrived at an even larger room, this one set with white marble benches and long white tables. “This is the main dining room of the monastery,” their guide explained. “One table has been set up for you. You will not eat with the other priestesses, of course.”

“Why not?” asked Iimmi.

Surprise flowed across the blind face. “You are men,” she told them, matter of factly. Then she led them to a table where wine, meat, and bowls piled with strange fruit were placed. As they sat down, she disappeared once more.

Geo reached for a knife. For a moment there was silence at the table as the nub of the arm jutted over food. “I guess I just have to learn,” he said after the pause.

Halfway through the meal, Urson said, “What about the jewels? Did the Priestess take them from you?”

“They came off in the water,” said Iimmi.

Geo nodded corroboration.

“Well, now we really have a problem,” said Urson. “Here we are, at a temple of Argo’s where we could return the jewels and maybe even get back to the Priestess on the ship, and out of the silly mess, and the jewels are gone.”

“I guess that also means our river friends are working for Hama,” said Geo.

“Well,” Iimmi said, “Hama’s got his jewel then, and we’re out of the way. Perhaps he delivered us into Argo’s hands as a reward for bringing them this far?”

“Since we would have died anyway,” said Geo, “I guess he was doing us a favor.”

“And you know what that means,” Iimmi said, looking at Snake now.

“Huh?” asked Urson. Then he said, “Oh, let the boy speak for himself. All right, Four Arms, are you or are you not a spy for Hama?”

A pained expression came over Snake’s face, and he shook his head not in denial but bewilderment. Suddenly he got up from the table, and ran from the room. Urson looked at the others. “Now don’t tell me I hurt his feelings by asking.”

“You didn’t,” said Iimmi, “but I may have. I keep on forgetting that he can read minds.”

“What do you mean?” Urson asked.

“Just when you asked him that, a lot of things came together in my mind that would be pretty vicious for him if any of it were true.”

“Huh?” asked Urson.

“I think I know what you mean,” said Geo.

“I still—”

“It means that he is a spy,” explained Iimmi, “and among other things, he was probably lying about the radio back at the city. And that cost Geo his arm.”

“Why the—” began Urson, and then looked down the hall where Snake had disappeared.

They didn’t eat much more. When they got up, Urson felt sleepy and was shown back to his room.

“May I show my friend what you showed me?” Iimmi asked the Priestess when she returned. “He is also a student of rituals.”

“Of course you may,” smiled the Priestess.

A door opened and they entered another room similar to the one in which Geo had awakened. As she was about to leave, Iimmi asked, “Wait. Can you tell us how to leave the room ourselves?”

“Why would you want to leave?” she asked.

“For exercise,” offered Geo, “and to observe the working of the monastery. Believe us, we are true students of Argo’s religion.”

“Simply press the wall with your hand, level at your waist, and the door will open. But you must not wander about the monastery. Rites which are not for your eyes are being carried out. Not for your eyes,” she repeated. “Strange, this is a phrase that has never left our language. Suddenly, confronted by people who can see, it makes me feel somehow…” she paused. “Well, that is how to leave the room.”

She stepped out, and the door closed behind her.

“Here,” said Iimmi, “this is what I wanted to show you.”

On his bed were a pile of books, old, but legible. Geo flipped through a few pages. Suddenly he looked up at Iimmi.

“Hey, what are they doing with printed books?”

“Question number one,” said Iimmi. “Now, for question number two. Look here.” He reached over Geo’s shoulder and hastened him to one page.

“Why it’s the…” began Geo.

“You’re darn right it is,” said Iimmi.

HYMN TO THE GODDESS ARGO

Forked in the eye of the bright ash
there the heart of Argo broke and the hand of the goddess would dash
through the head of flame, and the smoke.

Burn the grain speck in the hand
and batter the stars with singing.

Hail the height of a man,
and also the height of a woman.

The eyes have imprisoned a vision,
the ash-tree dribbles with blood.

Thrust from the gates of the prison,
smear the yew-tree with mud.

“That must be the full version of the poem I found the missing stanza to back in the library at Leptar.”

“As I was saying,” said Iimmi, “Question number two: what is the relation between the rituals of Hama and the old rituals of Argo. Apparently this particular branch of the religion of the Goddess underwent no purge. And no one at Olcse Olwnh was supposed to know about them.”

“I wonder why?” Geo asked.

“That is question number three.”

“How did you get a hold of them?”

“Well,” said Iimmi, “I sort of suspected they might be here. So I just asked for them. And I think I’ve got some answers to those questions.”

“Fine. Go ahead.”

“We’ll start from three, go back to one, and then on to two. Nice and orderly,” said Iimmi. “Why wasn’t anybody supposed to know about the rituals? Simply because they were so similar to the rituals of Hama. You remember some of the others we found in the abandoned temple? If you don’t, you can refresh your memory right here. The two sets of rituals run almost parallel, except for a name changed here, a color switched from black to white, a switch in the vegetative symbolism. I guess what happened
was that when Hama’s forces invaded Leptar five hundred years ago, it didn’t take Leptar long to find out the similarity. From the looks of the City of New Hope, I think it’s safe to assume that at one time or another, say five hundred years ago, Aptor’s civilization was far higher than Leptar’s, and probably wouldn’t have had too hard a time beating her in an invasion. So when Leptar captured the first jewel, and somehow did manage to repel Aptor, the priests of Leptar assumed that the safest way to avoid infiltration by Hama and Aptor again would be to make the rituals of the two as different as possible from the ones of their enemy, Hama.

“The ghouls, the bats, they parallel the stories I’ve heard other sailors tell too closely to be accidents. How many people do you think have been shipwrecked on Aptor and gotten far enough into the place to see what we’ve seen, and then gotten off again to tell about it?”

“I can think of two,” said Geo.

“Huh?” said Iimmi.

“Snake and Jordde,” answered Geo. “Remember that Argo said there had been spies from Aptor before. And Jordde is definitely one, and I guess so is Snake.”

“True enough,” said Iimmi. “I guess that fits into Rule Number One.” He got up from the bed. “Come on. Let’s take a walk. I want to see some sunlight.” They went to the wall. Geo pressed it and a triangular panel slipped back.

When they had rounded four or five turns of hallway, Geo said, “I hope you can remember where we’ve been.”

“I’ve got a more or less perfect memory for directions,”

Iimmi said.

Suddenly the passage opened onto steps, and they were looking out upon a huge, unrelieved white chamber. Down a set of thirty marble steps priestesses filed below them in rows, their heads fixed blindly forward.

At the far end was a raised dais with a mammoth statue of a kneeling woman, sculptured of the same effulgent, agate
material. “Where do these women come from?” whispered Geo. “And where do they keep the men?”

Iimmi shrugged.

Suddenly, the figure of the blind Priestess was beside them.

“Excuse me, ma’am,” Iimmi said, sensing her disapproval of their presence, “we didn’t mean to be disrespectful, but we are creatures who are used to natural day and night. We are used to fresh air, green things. This underground whiteness is oppressive to us and makes us restless. Is there any way that you could show us a way into the open?”

“There is not,” returned the blind Priestess quietly and motioned them to follow her from the chamber. “Besides, night is coming on and you are not creatures who relish darkness.”

“The night air and the quiet of evening is refreshing to us,” countered Iimmi.

“What do you know of the night,” answered the priestess with faint cynicism in her low voice. Now they reached the chapel where the friends had first met after their rescue.

“What can you tell us about the Dark God Hama?” Geo asked.

The blind Priestess shrugged, and sat down on one of the benches. “There is little to say. Today he is a fiction, he does not exist. There is only Argo, the One White Goddess.”

“But we’ve heard—” Geo began.

“You were at his abandoned temple,” said the Priestess.

“You saw yourselves. That is all that is left of Hama. Ghouls prey on the dust of his dead saints. Perhaps, somewhere behind the burning mountain a few of his disciples are left.

But Hama is dead in Aptor. You have seen the remains of his city, the City of New Hope. You have also been the first ones to go in and return in nearly five hundred years.”

“Is that how long the city has been in ruin?” asked Geo.

“It is.”

“What can you tell us about the city?” Iimmi said.

The Priestess sighed again. “There was a time,” she began, “generations ago, when Hama was a high God in Aptor. He had many temples, monasteries, and convents devoted to him. We had few. Except for these religious sanctuaries, the land was barbaric, wild, uninhabitable for the most part. There had once been cities in Aptor, but these had been destroyed even earlier by the Great Fire. All that we had was a fantastic record of an unbelievable time before the rain of flame of tremendous power, vast science, and a towering, though degenerate, civilization. These records were extensive, and entirely housed within the monasteries. Outside the monasteries, there was only chaos, where half the children were born dead, and the other half deformed. And with the monstrous races that sprang up over the island now as a reminder to us, we declared that the magic contained in these chronicles was evil, and must never be released to the world again. But the priests of Hama, decided to use the information in these chronicles, spread it to the people, and declared they would not commit the same mistakes that had brought the Great Fire. They opened the books, and the City of New Hope grew on the far shore of the river. They made giant machines that flew through the air. They constructed immense boats which could sink into the sea and emerge hundreds of miles away in another harbor in another land.

They even harnessed for beneficial use the fire metal, uranium, which had brought such terror to the world before and had brought down the flames.”

“But they made the same mistake as the people before the Great Fire made?” suggested Iimmi.

“Not exactly,” said the Priestess. “That is, they were not so stupid as to misuse the fire metal which ravaged the world so harshly before. History is cyclic, not repetitive. A new power was discovered that dwarfed the significance of the fire metal. It could do all that the fire metal could do, and more efficiently: destroy cities, or warm chilly huts in
winter; but, it could also work on men’s minds. They say, that before the Great Fire, men wandered the streets of the cities terrified that flames would descend on them any moment and destroy them. They panicked, bought flimsy useless contraptions to guard themselves from the fire.

Geo, Iimmi, have you any idea how terrifying it would be to know that while walking the streets, at any moment, your mind might be snatched from you, raped, violated, and left broken in your own skull?

“Only three of these instruments were constructed. But the moment their existence was made known by a few fantastic demonstrations, the City of New Hope began the swerve down the arc of its own self-destruction. It lasted for a year, and ended with the broken wreck you escaped from last night. During that year invasions were launched on the backward nations across the sea with whom months before there had been friendly trade. Civil wars broke out and internal struggles caused the invasions to fall back to the homeland. The instruments were hopelessly lost, but not before the bird machines had even dropped bombs on the City of New Hope itself. The house of the fire metal was broken open to release its death once more. For a hundred years after the end, say our records, the city flamed with light from the destroyed power house. During the first hundred years more and more of our number were born blind because of the sinking fire in the city. At last we moved underground, but it was too late.” She rose from her seat. “And so you see, Hama destroyed himself. Today, loyal to Argo, are all the beasts of the air, of the land…and of the water.”

“What about the—the three instruments?” Geo asked.

“What happened to them?”

The blind Priestess turned to him. “Your guess,” she said, smiling, “is as good as mine.” She turned again and glided softly from the room.

When she left, Iimmi said, “Something is fishy.”

“But what is it?” said Geo.

“Well, for one thing,” said Iimmi, “we know there is a Hama. From the dream I would say that it’s just about the size and organization of this place.”

“Just how big is this place anyway?” Geo asked.

“Want to do some more exploring?”

“Sure,” he answered. “Do you think she does know about Hama but was just pretending?”

“Could be,” said Iimmi. They started off down another corridor. “That bit about going into men’s minds with the jewels,” Iimmi went on. “It gives me the creeps.”

“It’s a creepy thing to watch,” said Geo. “Argo used it on Snake the first time we saw her. It just turns you into an automaton.”

“Then it really is our jewels she was talking about.”

Stairs cut a white tunnel into the wall before them, and they mounted upward, coming finally to another corridor.

They turned down it and for the first time saw recognizable doors in the wall. “Hey,” said Iimmi, “maybe one of these goes outside.”

“Fine,” said Geo. “This place is beginning to get me.” He pushed open a door and stepped in. Except for the flowing white walls, it duplicated in miniature the basement of the New Edison building. Twin dynamos whirred and the walls were laced with pipes.

“Nothing in here,” said Iimmi.

They tried a door across the hall now. In this one sat a white porcelain table and floor to ceiling cases of glittering instruments. “I bet this is the room your arm came off in,”

Iimmi said.

“Probably,” replied Geo.

They came out and continued even farther. In the next room the glow was dimmer, and there was dust on the walls. Iimmi ran his finger over it and looked at the gray crescent left on the bleached flesh.

Two huge screens leaned out from the face of a metal machine. A few dials and a glass meter hung beneath each two yard rounded-rectangle of opaque glass. In front of each was a stand which held something like a set of binoculars and what looked like a pair of ear muffs.

“I bet this place hasn’t been used since before these girls went blind,” said Geo.

“It looks it,” Iimmi said. He stepped up to one of the screens, the one with the fewer dials on it, and turned a switch.

“What did you do that for?” Geo asked.

“Why not?” said Iimmi. Suddenly a flickering of colored lights ran over the screen, swellings of blue, green, shiny scarlets. They blinked. “That’s the first color I’ve seen since I’ve been here,” Iimmi said. The colors grayed, dimmed, congealed into forms, and in a moment they were looking at a bare white room in which stood two barefoot young men. One was a dark Negro with pale hands. The other had an unruly shock of black hair and only one arm.

“Hey,” gestured Iimmi, and the figure on the screen gestured too. “That’s us.” He walked forward and the corresponding figure advanced on the screen. He flicked a dial and the figures exploded into colors and then focused again. “What’s that?” asked Iimmi.

In a room stood three of the blind women. On one wall was a smaller screen similar to the one in their own room.

The women, of course, were oblivious to the picture on it, but it was the picture on the screen that had stopped Geo.

It was a face. A man’s face.

One of the women had on an ear muff apparatus and was talking into a small metal rod which she carried with her as she paced.

“But the picture! Don’t you recognize him?” demanded Geo.

“It’s Jordde!” exclaimed Iimmi. “They must have gotten in contact with our ship and are arranging to send us back.”

“I wish I could hear what they’re saying,” said Geo.

Iimmi looked around and then picked up the metal ear muffs from the stand in front of the screen. “That’s what she seems to be listening through,” said Iimmi, referring to the Priestess in the picture. “Try them. Go on.” He helped Geo fit them over his ears. “Hear anything?”

Geo listened.

“Yes, of course,” the Priestess was saying.

“She is set upon staying in the harbor for three more days, to wait out the week,” reported Jordde. “I am sure she will not remain any longer. She is still bewildered by me, and the men have become uneasy and may well mutiny if she stays longer.”

“We will dispose of the prisoners this evening. There is no chance of their returning,” stated the Priestess.

“Detain them for three days, and I do not care what you do with them,” said Jordde. “She does not have the jewels, she does not know my—our power; she will be sure to leave at the end of the week.”

“It’s a pity we have no jewels for all our trouble,” said the Priestess. “But at least all three are back in Aptor, and potentially within our grasp.”

Jordde laughed. “And Hama never seems to be able to keep hold of them for more then ten minutes before they slip from him again.”

“Yours is not to judge either Hama or Argo,” stated the Priestess. “You are kept on by us only to do your job. Do it, report, and do not trouble either us or yourself with opinions. They are not appreciated.”

“Yes, mistress,” returned Jordde.

“Then farewell until next report.” She flipped a switch and the picture on the little screen went gray.

Geo turned from the big screen now, and was just about to remove the hearing apparatus when he heard the Priestess say, “Go, prepare the prisoners for the sacrifice of the rising moon. They have seen enough.” The woman left the
room, Geo finished removing the phones, and Iimmi looked at him.

“What’s the matter?”

Geo turned the switch that darkened the screen.

“When are they coming to get us?” Iimmi asked excitedly.

“Right now, probably,” Geo said. Then, as best he could, he repeated the conversation he had overheard to Iimmi, whose expression grew more and more bewildered as Geo went on.

At the end the bewilderment suddenly flared into frayed indignation. “Why?” demanded Iimmi. “Why should we be sacrificed? What is it we’ve seen too much of, what is it we know? This is the second time it’s come close to getting me killed, and I wish to hell I knew what I was supposed to know?”

“We’ve got to find Urson and get out of here,” said Geo.

“Hey, what’s wrong?”

The indignation had turned into something else. Now Iimmi stood with his eyes shut tight and his face screwed up. Suddenly he relaxed. “I just thought out a message as loud as I could for Snake to get up here and to bring Urson if he’s anywhere around.”

“But Snake’s a spy for…”

“…for Hama,” said Iimmi. “And you know something? I don’t care.” He closed his eyes again. After a few moments, he opened them. “Well, if he’s coming, he’s coming. Let’s get going.”

“But why…?” began Geo, following Iimmi out the door.

“Because I have a poet’s feeling that some fancy mind reading may come in handy.”

They hurried down the hall, found the stairs, ducked down, and ran along the lower hall. Rounding a second corner, they emerged into the little chapel simultaneously with Urson and Snake.

“I guess I got through,” said Iimmi. “Which way do we go?”

“Gentlemen, gentlemen,” came a voice from behind them.

Snake took off down one of the passages, and they followed, Urson looking particularly bewildered.

The Priestess glided behind them, calling softly, “Please, my friends, come back. Return with me.”

“Find out from her how the hell to get out of this place!”

Iimmi bawled up to Snake. The four-armed boy suddenly darted up a flight of stairs, turned a corner, and darted up another. They came out on a hall and followed Snake to the end.

All four of the boy’s hands flew at the door handle, turning it carefully, this way, and back.

Two, three seconds.

Geo glanced back and saw the Priestess mount the top of the stairs and begin to come toward them. She seemed to float, her white robes flaring out from her, brushing at the walls.

The door came open, they broke through leaves, and were momentarily standing in a huge field of grass, surrounded by woods. The night was fully lit by the moon.

As they ran through the silver-washed grass, Geo turned to look behind him. The blind Priestess had slowed, her white face turned to the moon. Her hands went to her throat, she unclasped her robe, and the first layer fell away behind her. As she came on, the second layer began to unfold, wet, deathly white, spreading, growing to her arms, articulating itself along the white spines; then, with a horribly familiar shriek, she leapt from the ground and soared upward, her white wings hammering the air.

They fled.

And other dark forms were shadowing the moon. The priestesses across the field joined her aloft in the moon-bleached sky. She overtook the running figures, turned above them, and swooped. The moon lanced white along bared fangs. The night breeze touched pale furry breasts,
filled the bellying wings. Only the tiny, darting, blind eyes were red, rubied in a whirl of white.

They crashed into the protective bushes where the winged things could not follow. Branches raked his face as he ran behind the sound the others made. Once he thought he had lost them, but a second later he bumped against Iimmi, who had stopped behind Snake and Urson, in the darkness.

Above the trees was a sound like beaten cloth, diminishing, growing, but constant as once more they began to trod through the tangled darkness.

“What the hell…” Iimmi finally breathed softly, after a minute of walking.

“You know it’s beginning to make sense,” Geo said, his hand on Iimmi’s shoulder. “Remember that man-wolf we met, and that blob in the city? The only thing we’ve met on this place that can’t change shape is the ghouls. I think most animals on this island undergo some sort of metamorphosis.”

“What about those first flying things we met?” whispered Urson. “They didn’t change into anything.”

“We have probably just been guests of the female of the species,” said Geo.

“You mean those others could have changed into men too if they wanted?” Urson asked.

“If they wanted,” answered Geo.

In front of them now appeared faint shiftings of silver light. Five minutes later, they were crouching at the edge of the forest, looking down over the rocks at the white shimmerings over the river.

“Into the water?” Geo asked.

Snake shook his head. Wait…came the familiar sound in their heads.

Suddenly a hand raised from the water. Wet and green, it stood a foot or so from the shore in the silver ripples. The chain and the leather thong dangled down the wrist, and swaying there were two bright beads of light.

Iimmi and Geo froze. Urson said, “The jewels.… ”

Suddenly, crouched low like an animal, the big man sprang onto the rocks and ran toward the river’s edge.

Three shadows, one white, two dark, converged above him, cutting the moonlight away from him. If he saw them, he did not stop.

Iimmi and Geo stood up from their crouched positions.

Urson reached the shore, threw himself along the rock, and swiped at the hand. Instantly he was covered by flailing wings. The membranous sails splashed in the water. Two seconds later, Urson rolled from beneath the layers of membrane that still struggled half on land and half in the water. He started forward up the rocks. He slipped, regained his footing, and then came on, nearly falling into Geo’s and Iimmi’s waiting arms.

“The jewels,” Urson breathed.

The struggle continued a minute longer on the water.

Something was holding them down, twisting at them. Then suddenly, the creatures stilled, and like great leaves, the three forms drifted apart, caught quietly in the current, and floated away from the rocks.

Then two more forms bobbed to the surface, faces down, rocking gently, backs slicked wet and green, shiny under the moonlight.

“But those were the ones who—” Geo began. “Are they dead?” His face suddenly hurt a little, with something like the pain of verging tears.

Snake nodded.

“Are you sure?” asked Iimmi. His voice came slowly.

Their…thoughts…have…stopped, Snake said.

Crouched down in front of them, Urson opened his great hands. The globes blazed even in the dim light through the leaves, and the chain and the wet thong hung over his palm to the ground. “I have them,” he said, “…the jewels!”

CHAPTER IX

Snake reached down, picked the beads up from Urson’s hand. The sound of wings had stopped.

“Where do we go now?” Urson asked.

“Follow the general rule, I guess,” said Iimmi. “Since we know Hama does have a temple somewhere, we try to find it, get the third jewel, and rescue Argo Incarnate. Then get back to the ship.”

“In three days?” asked Urson. They had related the rest of what they had found to him by now. “Well, where do we start looking?”

“The Priestess said something about a band of Hama’s disciples behind the fire mountain. That must mean the volcano we saw from the steps in the City of New Hope.”

Iimmi turned to Snake. “Did you read her mind enough to know if she was telling the truth?”

Snake nodded.

Iimmi paused for a moment. “Well, since the river is that way, we should head,” he turned and pointed, “…in that direction.”

They fixed their stride now and started through the moon-brushed foliage.

“I still don’t understand what was going on back at the monastery,” Geo said. “Were they really priestesses of Argo? And what was Jordde doing?”

“I’d say yes on the first question, and guess that Jordde was a spy for them for an answer to the second.”

“But what about Argo—I mean Argo on the ship?” asked Geo. “And what about Snake here?”

“Argo on the ship apparently doesn’t know about Argo on Aptor,” said Iimmi. “That’s what Jordde meant when he reported to the priestesses that she was bewildered. She probably thinks just like we did, that he’s Hama’s spy. And this one here,” he gestured to Snake, “I don’t know. I just don’t know.”

In the distance was a red glow in which they could make out the faint lines of the volcano’s cone. Snake made lights
with the jewels, and once more they began to pick their way over the terrain, barer and barer of vegetation. The earth became cindery and the air bore the acrid smell of old ashes.

Soon the rim of the crater hung close above them.

Iimmi gazed up at the red haze above them. “I wonder what it’s like to look into that thing in the middle of the night?” Twenty feet later Snake’s light struck a lava cliff that sheered up into the darkness. Going on beside it, they found a ledge that made an eighteen-inch footpath diagonally up the face.

“We’re not going to climb that in the dark, are we?” asked Geo.

“Better than in the light,” said Urson. “This way you can’t see how far you have to fall.”

Thirty feet on, instead of petering out and forcing them to go back, the lip of rock broadened into a level stretch of ground and again they could go straight forward toward the red light above them.

“This is changeable country,” Urson muttered.

“Men change into animals,” said Geo, “jungles turn to mountains.” He reached around and felt the stub of his arm in the dark. “I’ve changed too, I guess.”

Iimmi recited:

“Change is neither merciful nor just.

They say Leonard of Vinci put his trust
in faulty paints: Christ’s Supper turned to dust.”

“What’s that from?” Geo asked.

“That’s one of my bits of original research,” Iimmi explained. “It comes from a poem dating back before the Great Fire.”

“Who was Leonard of Vinci?” Geo asked.

“An artist, another poet or painter, I suppose,” said Iimmi.

“But I’m not really sure.”

“Who’s Christ?” Urson asked.

“Another god.”

* * * *

There were more rocks now, and Geo had to brace his stub against the walls of fissures and hoist himself up with his good hand. The igneous structures were sharp in his palm.

Through the night the glowing rim dropped toward them.

With it came a breeze that pushed sulfa powder through their hair and made the edges of their nostrils sting.

The earth became scaley and rotten under their feet.

Fatigue tied tiny knots high in their guts so that their stomachs hung like stones.

“I didn’t realize how big the crater was,” Iimmi said. The red glow cut off at the bottom and took up a quarter of the sky.

“Maybe it’ll erupt on us,” Urson muttered. He added, “I’m thirsty.”

They climbed on. Once Urson looked back and saw Geo had stopped some twenty feet behind them at a niche in the ledge. He turned around and dropped back himself. There was sweat on the boy’s up-turned face as the big man came toward him. He could see it in the red haze from the rim.

“Here,” Urson said. “Give me a hand.”

“I can’t,” Geo said softly, “or I’ll fall.”

Urson reached down, now, caught the boy around the chest, and hoisted him over the cropping of rock. “Take it easy,” Urson instructed. “You don’t have to race with anybody.” Together they made their way after the others.

Iimmi and Snake cleared the crater rim first; then Urson and Geo joined them on the pitted ledge. Together they looked into the volcano as red and yellow light fell over their chests and faces.

Gold dribbled the internal slope. Tongues of red rock lapped the sides, and the swirling white basin belched brown blobs of smoke which rose up the far rocks and
spilled over the brim a radion away. Light leapt in wavering pylons of blue flame, then sank back into the pit. Winding trails of light webbed the crater’s walls, and at places ebon cavities jeweled among the light.

Wind fingered the watchers’ hair.

* * * *

Iimmi saw her first, two hundred feet along the rim. Her drapes, died red and orange in the flame, blew about her as she walked toward them. Iimmi pointed to her, and the others looked up.

As she neared, Geo saw that though she stood very straight, she was old. Her short white hair snapped at the side of her head in the warm breeze. Firelight and shadow fell deeply into the wrinkles of her face. As she approached them, light running like liquid down the side of her winded robe, she smiled and held out her hand.

“Who are you?” Geo suddenly asked.

“Shadows melt in light of sacred laughter,

Hands and houses shall be one hereafter.”

recited the woman in a calm, low voice.

She paused. “I am Argo Incarnate, of Leptar.”

“But I thought…” Iimmi started.

“What did you think?” inquired the elderly woman, gently.

“Nothing,” said Iimmi.

“He thought you were a lot younger,” Urson said. “We’re supposed to take you home.” Suddenly he pointed in to the volcano. “Say, this isn’t any of that funny light like back in the city that burned our hands, only this time it made you old?”

She glanced at the pool of light. “This is natural fire,” she assured them, “a severed artery of the earth’s burning blood. But wounds are natural enough.”

Geo shifted his feet and rubbed his stump.

“We were supposed to take the younger sister of the present Argo Incarnate and return with her to Leptar,”

Iimmi explained.

“There are many Argos,” smiled the woman. “The Goddess has many faces. You have seen quite a few since you arrived in this land.”

“I guess we have,” Urson said.

“Are you a prisoner of Hama?” asked Iimmi.

“I am with Hama,” said the woman.

“We are supposed to secure the third jewel and bring it back to the ship. We don’t have much time.… ”

“Yes,” said Argo.

“Hey, what about that nest of vampires down there,”

Urson said, thumbing viciously toward the black behind them. “They said they worshiped Argo. What have you got to do with them? I don’t trust anything on this place very much.”

“The nature of the Goddess is change,” said the woman, looking sadly toward the slope, “from birth, through life, to death,” she looked back up at them, “to birth again. As I said, Argo has many faces. You must be very tired.”

“Yes,” said Geo.

“Then come with me. Please.” She turned, and began to walk back along the rim. Snake and Iimmi started after her, and then came Geo and Urson.

“I don’t like any of this,” the big man whispered to Geo as they came along. “Argo doesn’t mean the same thing in this land like she means on Leptar. There’s nothing but more evil to come out of this. She’s leading us into a trap, I tell you. I say the best thing to do is take the jewels we have, turn around, and get the hell out of here. I tell you, Geo.… ”

“Urson,” Geo said.

“Huh?” the big man asked.

“Urson, I’m very tired.”

They walked silently for a few steps more. Then Urson heaved up a half disgusted breath, and put his arm around

Geo’s shoulder. “Come on,” he grunted, supporting Geo against his own great form as they progressed along the rocky ledge, following the new Argo.

At last she turned down a trail that dropped into the crater. “Walk carefully here,” she said as they turned into the huge pit.

“Something is not right,” Urson said softly. “It’s a trap I tell you. How does that thing go? I could use it now. Calmly brother bear…”

“Calm the winter sleep,

Fire shall not harm,”

continued Geo.

“Says who,” mumbled Urson glancing into the bowl of flame. Geo went on:

“water not alarm.

While the current grows,
amber honey flows,
golden salmon leap.”

“Like I once said before,” mused Urson, “In a…”

“In here,” came the voice of Argo. They turned into the dark mouth of one of the caves which pocked the crater’s inside wall. “No,” she said to Snake, who was about to use the jewels for illumination. “They have been used too much already.”

With a small stick taken from a pocket in her robe, she struck a flame against the rock, then raised it to an ornate, branching candelabra that hung from the stone ceiling by brass chains. Flame leapt from cast oil cup to oil cup, from the hand of a demon to a monkey’s mouth, from a nymph’s belly to the horns of a satyr’s head. Chemicals in the cups caused each flame to burn a different color; green, red, blue, and orange white light filled the small chapel and played across the tops of the benches. On the altar sitting on one side of the room were two statues of equal height: a
man sitting, and a woman kneeling. Iimmi looked at the altar. Geo and Urson stared at the candelabra.

“What is it?” Iimmi asked when he saw where their eyes were fixed.

“There’s one of those things in Argo’s cabin on board the ship,” Geo said. “And look over there. Where did we see one of those before?” It was a machine with an opaque glass screen, identical to the one in the monastery of Argo.

“Sit down,” Argo said. “Sit down.”

They sank to the benches; the climb, once halted, knotting their calves and the low muscles on their backs.

“Hama has allowed you the privilege of a chapel even in captivity,” commented Iimmi, “but I see you have to share your altar with him.”

“But I am Hama’s mother,” smiled Argo.

Geo and Urson frowned.

“The rituals say that Argo is the mother of all things, the begetter and bearer of all life. I am the mother of all gods as well.”

“Those blind women down in the ground,” asked Urson,

“they aren’t really your priestesses, are they? They wanted to kill us. I bet they were really dupes of Hama.”

“It isn’t so simple,” replied Argo. “They are really worshipers of Argo, but as I said, I have many faces. Death as well as life is my province. The dwellers in that convent from which you escaped are a—how shall I say, a degenerate branch of the religion. They were truly blinded by the fall of the City of New Hope. To them, Argo is only death, the dominator of men. For not only is Argo the mother of Hama, she is his wife and daughter.”

“Then it’s like we figured,” said Iimmi. “Jordde isn’t a spy for Hama. He’s working for the renegade priestesses of Argo.”

“Yes,” returned Argo, “except that renegade is perhaps the wrong word. They believe that their way is correct, and a respect for belief is essential to the understanding of

Man. And it is through understanding that the mysteries that still remain in your mind will be solved.”

“Then they must be responsible for all that was going on in Leptar, only somehow blaming it on Hama,” said Iimmi.

“They were probably just after the jewels, too. You don’t look like a prisoner. That must be the whole thing. You’re here in league with Hama to prevent the priestesses of Argo from taking over Leptar.”

“Nothing could be simpler,” said the Goddess.

“Unfortunately you are wrong in nearly every other point.”

“But then why did Jordde throw the jewel after us when he tore it from Argo’s—I mean the other Argo’s throat?”

“When he snatched the jewel from around my daughter’s neck,” added Argo, “he threw it to the creatures of the sea because he knew they would take it back to Aptor. With it once again in the island, the priestesses would have a better chance of getting it; my daughter, acting Argo Incarnate in my absence and her sister’s, does not know that what she is fighting is another face of Argo. As far as she is concerned, all her efforts are against the mischief Hama has caused, and truly caused, in Leptar. This ignorance is far greater than you imagine, for beyond these blind creatures is a far greater enemy that she must vanquish.”

“Hama…?” began Iimmi.

“Greater than Hama,” said old Argo. “It is herself. It is hard for me to watch her and not occasionally call out a word of guidance. With the science here in Aptor it would not be difficult. But I must refrain. I suppose she has actually done well. But there is so much more to do. She has directed you well, and assigned your tasks properly.

And until now you have carried them out well.”

“She said we were to steal the final jewel from Hama and return with you to the ship,” said Geo. “Can you help us with either of these things?”

“The moment I compliment you,” laughed Argo, “you completely confuse your mission. Once the jewel is stolen, whom are you supposed to take back to Leptar?”

“Argo Incarnate,” Urson said.

“You said that Argo back in the ship was your daughter,”

said Geo, “but she said you were her younger sister.”

“She said nothing of the sort,” Argo corrected. “I have two daughters. You have already met one. Now you must rescue the other. When my youngest daughter was…

kidnaped here to Aptor, I was already here, waiting for her.

Look.”

She turned a dial beneath the screen and lights flickered over the glass until they formed a sleeping figure. She had short red hair, a splash of freckles over a blunt nose, and her hand lay curled in a loose fist near her mouth. A white sheet covered the gentle push of adolescent breasts, and on the table beside her bed was a contraption made of a U-shaped piece of metal mounted on a board, an incomplete coil of wire, and a few more bits of metal, all sitting on top of a crumpled paper bag.

“That is my youngest daughter,” Argo said, switching off the picture. “She is the one you must take back to the ship.”

“How shall we steal the jewel?” asked Geo.

Argo turned to Snake. “I believe that was your task.” Then she looked around at the other three. “You will need rest.

After that you can see about the jewel and my daughter.

Come with me, now. Pallets have been set up for you in the far room where you may sleep.” She rose and led them to a further chamber. The blankets over the loose boughs seemed to pull them down. Argo pointed to a trickle of water that ran from a basin carved in the rock wall. “This stream is pure. You may drink from it.” She pointed to a cloth sack in the corner. “There is fruit in there if you become hungry.”

“Sleep!” said Urson, jammed his two fists in the air, and yawned.

As they settled, Argo said, “Poet?”

“Yes?” answered Geo.

“I know you are the tiredest, but I must talk to you alone for a moment or two.”

As Geo raised himself, Urson stood up too. “Look,” he said to Argo, “he needs the rest more than any of us. If you want to question him about rituals and spells, take Iimmi. He knows just as much as Geo.”

“I need a poet,” smiled Argo, “not a student. I need one who has suffered as he has. Come.”

“Wait,” Urson said. He picked the jewel from Geo’s chest where Snake had returned it when they entered the chapel.

“You better leave this with me.”

Geo frowned.

“It still may be a trap,” said Urson.

“Leave it with him,” suggested Argo, “if it eases him.”

Geo let the great hand lift the thong from his neck.

“Now come with me,” said Argo.

They left the room and walked back through the chapel to the door. Argo stood in the entrance, looking down at the molten rock. The light sifted through her robe, leaving the darker outline of her body. Without turning, she began to speak. “The fire is a splendid symbol for life, do you agree?”

“And for death,” said Geo. “One of Aptor’s fires burned my arm away.”

“Yes,” she turned now. “You and Snake have had the hardest time. Both of you have left your flesh to rot in Aptor. I guess that gives you a closeness to the land.” She paused. “You know, he had a great deal more pain than you.

Do you know how he lost his tongue? I watched it all from this same screen inside the chapel, and could not help.

They jammed their knuckles in his jaws and when the mouth came open, Jordde caught the red flesh with pincers
that closed all the way through, and stretched it out as far as it would go. Then he looped the tongue with a thin wire, and then he threw a switch. You do not know what electricity is, do you?”

“I have heard the word.”

“Let me just say that when a great deal of it is passed through a thin wire, the wire becomes very hot, white hot.

And the white hot loop was tautened until the rope of muscle seared away and just the roasted stump was left.

But the child had fainted already. I wonder if the young can really bear more pain than older people.”

“Jordde and the blind priestess did that to him?”

“Jordde and some men on the boat that picked up the two of them from the raft on which they had left Aptor.”

“Who is Jordde?” Geo asked. “Urson knew him before this as a first mate. But Urson’s story told me nothing.”

“I know the story,” Argo said, “and it tells you something, but something you would perhaps rather not know.” She sighed. “Poet, how well do you know yourself?”

“What do you mean?” Geo asked.

“How well do you know the workings of a man, how he manages to function? That is what you will sing of if your songs are to become great.”

“I still don’t…”

“I have a question for you, a poetic riddle. Will you try to answer it?”

“If you will answer a not too poetic riddle for me.”

“Will you do your best to answer mine?” Argo asked.

“Yes.”

“Then I will do my best to answer yours. What is your question?”

“Who is Jordde and why is he doing what he’s doing?”

“He was at one time,” Argo explained, “a very promising novice for the priesthood of Argo in Leptar, as well as a scholar of myths and rituals like Iimmi and yourself. He also took to the sea to learn of the world, but his boat was
wrecked, and he and a few others were cast on Aptor’s shore. They strove with Aptor’s terrors as you did, and many succumbed. Two, however, a four-armed cabin boy whom you call Snake, and Jordde were each exposed to the forces of Argo and Hama as you have been. One, in his strangeness, could see into men’s minds. The other could not. Silently, one swore allegiance to one force, while one swore allegiance to the other. The second part of your question was why. Perhaps if you can answer my riddle, you can answer that part yourself. I do know that they were the only two who escaped. I do know that Snake would not tell Jordde his choice, and that Jordde tried to convince the child to follow him. When they were rescued, I know that the argument continued, and that Snake held back with childish tenacity both his decision and his ability to read minds, even under the hot wire and the pincers. The hot wire, incidentally, was something Jordde brought with him from the blind priestesses, according to him, to help the people of Leptar with. It could have been a great use. But recently all he has done with the electricity is construct a larger weapon with it. However, Jordde became a staunch first mate in a year’s time. Snake became a waterfront thief. Both waited. Then, when the opportunity arose, both acted. Why? Perhaps you can tell me, poet.”

“Thank you for telling me what you know,” Geo said.

“What is your question?”

She glanced at the flame through the door once more and then recited:

“By the dark chamber sits its twin,
where the body’s floods begin;
and the two are twinned again,
turning out and turning in.

“In the bright chamber runs the line
of the division, silver, fine,
diminishing along the lanes
of memory to an inward sign.

“Fear floods in the turning room;

Love breaks in the burning dome.”

“It is not one that I have heard before,” Geo said. “I’m not even sure I know what the question is. I’m familiar with neither its diction nor style.”

“I doubted very much that you would recognize it,” smiled Argo.

“Is it part of the pre-purge rituals of Argo?”

“It was written by my youngest daughter,” Argo said. “The question is, can you explain it?”

“Oh,” said Geo. “I didn’t realize.… ” He paused. “By the dark chamber sits its twin, moving in and out; and that’s where the floods of the body begin. And it’s twinned again.

The heart?” he suggested. “The four-chambered human heart? That’s where the body’s flood begins.”

“I think that will do for part of the answer.”

“The bright chamber,” mused Geo. “The burning dome.

The human mind, I guess. The line of division, running down the lane of memory—I’m not sure.”

“You seem to be doing fairly well.”

“Could it refer to something like ‘the two sides of every question’?” Geo asked. “Or something similar?”

“It could,” Argo said, “though I must confess I hadn’t thought of it in that way. But it is the last two lines that puzzle me.”

“Fear floods in the turning room,” repeated Geo; “Love breaks in the burning dome. I guess that’s the mind and the heart again. You usually think of love with the heart, and fear with the mind. Maybe she meant that they both, the heart and the mind, have control over both love and fear.”

“Perhaps she did,” Argo smiled. “You must ask her—when you rescue her from the clutches of Hama.”

Before turning back to the room with his companions, he looked once more out at the fires of the volcano. Light
whirled white and red. Blue tongues licked at black rock siding. He turned away now and went back into the darkness.

CHAPTER X

Dawn light lay a-slant the crater’s ridge. Argo pointed down the opposite slope. A black temple was visible at the bottom among trees and lawns. “There is Hama’s temple,”

Argo said. “You have your task. Good luck.”

They started down the incline of cinders. It took them an hour to reach the first trees that surrounded the dark buildings and the great gardens. Entering on the first lip of grass, they heard a sudden cluster of notes from one of the trees.

“A bird,” Iimmi said. “I haven’t heard one of those since I left Leptar.”

Suddenly, bright blue and the length of a man’s forefinger, a lizard ran halfway down the trunk of the tree. It’s sapphire belly heaved in the early light with indrawn breath; then it opened its red mouth, its throat warbled, and there was another burst of music.

“Oh well,” said Iimmi. “I was close.”

They walked further, until Iimmi mused, “I wonder why you always think things are going to turn out like you expect.”

“Because when something sounds like that,” declared Urson, “it usually is a bird!” Suddenly he gave a little shiver. “Lizards,” he said.

“It was a pretty lizard,” said Iimmi.

“Going around expecting things to be what they seem can get you in trouble—especially on this island,” Geo commented.

The angle at which they walked made one of the clumps of tree before them seem to fall apart. A man standing in the center raised his hand and said briskly, “Stop!”

They stopped.

He wore dark robes, and his short white hair made a close helmet above his brown face.

Urson’s hand was on his sword. Snake stood with his feet wide, his hands out from his sides.

“Who are you?” the dark man declared.

“Who are you?” Urson parried.

“I am Hama Incarnate.”

They were silent. Finally Geo said, “We are travelers in Aptor. We don’t mean any harm.”

As the man moved forward, splotches of light from the trees slipped across his robe. “Come with me,” Hama said.

He turned and proceeded among the trees. They followed.

They passed into the temple garden. It was early enough in the morning so that the sunlight lapped pink tongues over the giant black urns that sat along the edges of the path. Now they passed into the temple.

As they passed, Hama turned, looked at the jewels on Iimmi’s and Geo’s necks, and then looked up at the gazing eye of the statue at the end of the altar. He made no other sign, but turned again and continued. “The morning rites have not yet started,” he said. “They will begin in a half an hour. By then I hope to have divined your purpose in coming here.”

At the other side of the stairway they mounted a stairway, and then entered a door above which was a black circle dotted with three eyes. Just as they were about to go in, Geo looked around, frowned, and caught Iimmi’s eye.

“Snake?” he mouthed.

Iimmi looked around and shrugged.

The man turned and faced them, apparently unaware of Snake’s departure. As he closed the door, now, he said,

“You have come to oppose the forces of Aptor, am I right?

You come to steal the jewel of Hama. You have come to kidnap the Incarnate Argo. Is that not your purpose. Keep your hand off your sword, Urson! I can kill you in a moment. You are defenseless.”

* * * *

“Damn! I’m sleepy.” She rolled over and cuddled the pillow. Then she opened her eyes, one at a time, and lay watching the nearly completed motor of metal bars and copper wire that sat on the table beside her bed. She stood up.

Then she collapsed on the bed and jammed her feet under the covers again. With thirty feet of one and a half inch brass pipe, she mused sleepily, I could carry heat from the main hot-water line under the floor which I would estimate to be about the proper surface area to keep these stones warm; let me see, thirty feet of one and a half inch pipe have a surface area of 22/7 times 3/2 times 30 which is 990
divided by 7 which is… Then she caught herself. Damn, you’re thinking this to avoid thinking about getting up. She opened her eyes once more, put feet on the stone, and held them there while she scratched vigorously at her uneven mop of red hair.

She looked at the clock. “Yikes!” she said softly, and ran out the door, and slammed it behind her—almost. She whirled around, caught it on her palms before it banged shut, and then closed it with gingerly care the final centimeter and a half of the arc. Are you trying to get caught? she asked herself as she tiptoed to the next door.

She opened it and looked in. Dunderhead looks cute when he’s asleep, she thought. There was a cord on the floor that ran from under the table by the priest’s bed, over the stones, carefully following the zigzag of the crevices between them, and at last the end lay in the corner of the door sill. You really couldn’t see it if you weren’t looking for it, which had more or less been the idea when she had put it there last night before the priests had come back from vespers. The far end was tied in a knot of her own invention to the electric plug of his alarm clock. Dunderhead had an annoying habit of re-setting his clock every evening making sure that the red second hand was still sweeping away the
minutes. (In her plans for this morning she had catalogued his every habitual action, and had observed this one for three nights running, hanging upside down from the bulky stone portcullis above and outside his window.) Tugging on the string, she saw it leap from the crevices into a straight line and then lift from the floor as she drew it tauter, and then go slack as the plug blipped quietly onto the floor.

Next she pulled the string again until the slack left and raised her end a few inches from the floor. With her free hand now she gave the string a small twit and watched the vibration run up and down the string twice. The knot’s invention was an ingenuous one. At the vibration, two opposed loops shook away from a third, and a four millimeter length of rubber band that had been sewn in tautened and released a fourth loop from around a small length of number four gauge wire with a holding tonsure of three quarters of a gram, and the opposing vibration returning up the thread loosed a similar apparatus on the other side of the plug. The knot fell away, and she wound it quickly around her hand. She stood up, closed the door, and the oiled lock was perfectly silent. The door knob was just the slightest bit greasy, she noted. Careless.

Back in her room, it was standing on the table. Sunlight from the high window fell red across the board. It was very early in the morning. She took the parts of the motor up in her hands. “I guess we try you out today? No?” She answered herself, “Yes.” Finally she put the parts in the paper bag, strode out of the room, and slammed the…

whirled around and caught it once more. “Gnnnnnnn,” she said. “Do you want to get caught?” For the second time she answered herself, “Yes. And remember that too. Or you’ll never get through it.”

As she walked down the hall, she heard through one of the windows the chirp of a blue lizard from the garden.

“The sound I wanted to hear,” she smiled to herself. “A good sign.”

Turning into the temple, she started down the side aisle.

The great black columns passed before her. Something moved between the columns along the other side, swift and indistinct as a bird’s shadow. At least she thought she saw something. “Remember,” she reminded herself, “you have guilt feelings about this whole thing, and you could very easily be manufacturing delusions to scare yourself out of going through with it.” She went on, passed two more columns, and saw it again. “Or,” she went on with her monologue, “you could be purposefully ignoring the very obvious fact that there is somebody over there who is going to see you. So watch it.” There were mirrors somewhere in the temple, but they weren’t on the opposite wall, so she couldn’t be seeing herself. In fact the mirrors were out in the vestibule through which she had come and maybe this other person had come, so maybe it was seeing her as a reflection of…“Unscramble that syntax,” she told herself.

“You think like that and you’ll never make it.”

But there was somebody, with no clothes on (for all practical purposes) sneaking between the pillars. And he had four arms. That made her start to think of something else, but the thought as it arrowed into the past, suddenly got deflected, turned completely about, and jammed into her brain again, because he was staring directly at her.

If he starts walking toward me, she thought, I’m going to be scared out of my ears. So I better start walking toward him. Besides, I want to see what he looks like. She started out from the columns. Glancing quickly both ways, she saw that the temple was deserted save for them.

He’s a kid, she thought, three quarters of the way across.

My age, she added, and again a foreign thought attempted to intrude itself on her but never made it, because he was coming toward her now. At last he stopped before her, silent, muscles like tight wire under the brown skin, black
hair massing low on his forehead, his eyes deep beneath the black shrub of brows.

She gulped and asked him, “What are you doing here? Do you know somebody could catch you in here and get mad as hell? I know I couldn’t possibly have, but I think I’ve seen you before some place; if somebody comes along, they might even think you were trying to steal Hama’s eye.” I shouldn’t have said that, she thought, because he moved funny. “You better get out of here because everybody will be up here in a half an hour for morning services.”

At that news, he suddenly darted forward, passed her, and sprinted down toward the altar.

“Hey!” she called and ran after him.

Snake vaulted over the brass altar rail.

“Wait a minute,” she called, catching up. “Wait, will you!”

Snake turned as she slung her leg across the brass bar.

“Look, I realize I gave away my hand. But that was only guilt feelings. You gave yours away too, though. And if you don’t think you’ve got guilt feelings, boy, you’re crazy.”

Snake frowned, tilted his head, and then grinned.

“So we’ll help each other see,” she said. “You want it too, don’t you.” She pointed up to the head of the statue towering above them. “So let’s co-operate. I’ll get it for a little while. Then you can have it.” He was listening, she saw, so she guessed her strategy was working. Play it by ear now, she thought. “We’ll help each other. Shake on it, huh?” She stuck out her hand.

All four hands reached forward.

Whoops, she thought, I hope he’s not offended.

But the four hands grasped hers, and she added her second to the juncture. “All right,” she said. “Come on. Now I had all this figured out last night. And we don’t have much time. Let’s go around…” But he walked over to where the stalks of wheat spired from the altar base up through Hama’s fist, and grabbed a stalk with the three hands, and hand, over hand, over hand, began to hoist himself up to
where the first broad sheets of metal leaves leaned out to form a small platform. At first his dirty feet swung out frog-like, but then he caught the stem with his toes and at last hoisted himself to the front and looked down at her.

“I can’t climb up there,” she said, “I don’t have your elevation power.”

Snake looked down and shrugged.

“Oh damn,” she said. “I’ll do it my way.” She ran across the altar to the great foot of the statue. Sitting cross-legged, Hama’s foot was on his side. Using the ridges made by the toes as steps, she clammered up to the dark bulge of the deity’s godlike bunion. She made her way across the ankle, up the slanting shin, back down the black thigh, until she stood at the crevice where the leg and torso met.

Out beyond the great knee, Snake regarded her from his perch in the groin of yellow leaf. They were about equal height.

“Yoo-hoo,” she waved. “Meet you at the clavicle.” Then she stuck her tongue out. The bulges in the belly of the god made a treacherous ledge along which she inched until she arrived at the cavernous naval, leaving wet handprints on the black stone.

The god’s belly button from this intimate distance revealed itself as a circular door about five feet in diameter and controlled by a combination lock. She missed the first number twice, dried her hands off, and began again.

According to the plans in the main safe of the temple (on which she had first practiced combination breaking) there was a ladder behind this door which led up into the statue.

She remembered it clearly; and saved her life by doing so.

Because when she caught the second number, reversed the direction and felt the telltale click of the third, she pulled on the handle and was almost pushed from the ledge by the swinging circular door. She grabbed at a handle that she hardly saw on the door’s inside, just as the stone slipped from beneath her feet. Then she was hanging five
feet out in the air over the sacred groin some fifty feet below.

The first thing she tried, after closing her eyes and mumbling a few laws of motion, was to swing the door to.

When she swung out, however, the door swung closed; and when she swung in, the door swung opened. After a while, she just hung. She gave small thanks that she had dried her hands. When her arms began to ache, she wished that she hadn’t, because then it would be over by now. She went over what she knew about taking judo falls.

Then the door swung closed, and someone grabbed her around the waist. She didn’t open her eyes, but felt her body pressed against the tilting stone. Her arms fell tingling to her sides. The ligaments flamed with pain. Then the pain dulled to throbbing, and she opened her eyes.

“How the hell did you get down here?” she asked Snake.

With his help she staggered through the open door and stopped to rub her arms. “How did you know about the ladder?”

They were standing in the shaft now, with the ladder beside them running up into the darkness.

He looked at her with a puzzled expression.

“What is it?” she asked. “Oh, I’ll be able to climb up there, never you worry. Hey, can you speak?”

Snake shook his head.

“Oh,” she said. Something started at the edge of her mind again, a picture of something unpleasant. Snake had started up the ladder, which he had come down so quickly a minute ago. She glanced out the door, saw that the temple was empty, pulled the door to, and followed.

They ascended into complete darkness. Her arms were beginning to ache again, just slightly. She reached up for the next rung, and found it in its proper place. Then the next. And then again the next.

She started counting steps now, and when seventy-four, seventy-five, and seventy-six dropped below her, there was
a missing rung. She reached above it, but there was none.

She ran her hand up the edge of the ladder and found that it suddenly curved into the wall. “Hey, you,” she said in the darkness.

Something touched her waist. “Gnnnnnggggg,” she said.

“Don’t do that.” It touched her on the leg, took hold of her ankle, and pulled. “Watch out,” she said.

It pulled again. She raised her foot, and it was tugged sideways a good foot and a half and set on solid flooring.

Then a hand (her foot was not released) took her arm, and another held her waist, and tugged. She stiffened for one instant before she remembered the number of limbs her companion had. Then she came off the ladder, sideways into the dark, afraid to put her other foot down lest she step headlong into the seventy-five foot plus shaft.

But he tugged again, and in losing her balance, her foot came down on cool, solid stone. Holding her arm now, he led her along the tunnel. They passed into a steep incline.

Now down the upper arm, she recalled.

“I feel like Eurydice,” she said aloud.

You…funny… an echoing voice sounded in her skull.

“Hey,” she said. “What was that?” But the voice was silent. The wall turned abruptly and the floor leveled out.

They were in a section of the passage now that corresponded roughly to the statue’s radial artery. At the wrist, there was a light. They mounted a stairway, came out a trap door, and found themselves standing high in the temple. Below them the great room spread, vastly deep, and still empty. Beside them, the stems of the bronze wheat stalks rose up through the fist and spired another fifty feet before breaking into clusters of golden grain and leaves.

Across from them, over the dark curve of Gargantuan chest, in the statue’s other hand, the shaft of the scythe leaned away into shadow.

“Look,” she said. “You follow me now.” She started back along the top of the forearm and then began the tedious
climb over the rippling biceps, till at last they reached the broad shoulder. They walked across the hollow above the collar bone until they stood just below the great scooping shell of the ear.

She took the paper bag she had stuffed into her belt, tied one end of the string around the neck, and then, holding the other, she heaved the bag up and over the ear. She got the other end of the string, knotted it as high as she could reach, and gave it a tug. “I hope this works,” she said. “I had it all figured out yesterday. The tensile strength of this stuff is about two hundred and fifty pounds, which ought to do for you and me.” She planted her foot on the swell of the neck tendon, and in seven leaps she made it to the lobe of the ear. She swung around into the hollow, using the frontal wing as a pivot. Crouching in the hollow trumpet, she looked down at Snake. “Come up,” she said. “Hurry up.”

Snake joined her a moment later.

The ear was hollow, too. It led back into a cylindrical chamber which went up through the head of the god. The architect who had designed the statue had conveniently left the god’s lid flipped. They climbed the ladder and emerged amid the tangle of pipes which represented the hair of the god. They made their way forward through the mass of pipes to where the forehead sloped dangerously forward.

They could see the foreshortened nose and the rim of the statue’s middle eye above that. There wasn’t much of anything after that for the next thousand feet until the base of the altar. “Now you can really be some help,” she told him. “Hold on to my wrist and let me down. I’ll get the jewel.”

They grabbed wrists, and Snake’s three other hands, as well as the joints of his knees, locked around the base of five pipes that sprouted around them.

Slowly she slid forward, until her free hand slipped on the stone and she dropped the length of their two arms and swung just above the statue’s nose. The eye opened in front
of her. The lid arced above her, and the white of either side of the ebony iris shone faintly in the half darkness. At the center of the iris, in a small hollow, sitting on the top of a metal support, was the jewel.

She reached her free hand toward it as she swung.

From somewhere a gong suddenly sounded. Light flooded over her. Looking up, she saw white sockets of light shining down into her own eyes. Panicking, she almost released Snake’s wrist. But a voice in her head (hers or someone else’s, she couldn’t tell) rang out. Hold…on…damn…it…

Then she grabbed the jewel. The metal shaft in which the jewel had stood was not steady, and tilted as her hand came away from it. The tilting must have set off some clockwork mechanism, because the great eyelid was slowly lowering over the ivory and ebony eye. She swung again at the end of the rope of bone and flesh; half blinded by the lights above her, she looked over her shoulder, into the temple below. There was singing, the beginning of a processional hymn. The morning rites had started!

Light glinted on the stone limbs of the god. Figures were pouring into the temple. They must have seen her, but the hymn, sonorous and gigantic, rose like flood water, and she suddenly thought that if she fell, she would drown in the sound of it.

Snake was pulling her up. Stone against her arm, against her cheek. She clenched her other fist tightly at her side.

Another hand came down and helped pull her. Then another. Then she was lying among the metal pipes, and he was loosening her fingers from his wrist. He tugged her to her feet, and for a moment she was looking out over the now filled temple.

Nervous energy contracted coldly along her body, and the sudden sight of the great drop filled her eyes and her head, and she staggered. Snake caught her and at last helped her back to the ladder. “We’ve got it,” she said to him before they started down. She breathed deeply. Then she checked
in her palm to see if it was still there; it was, and again she looked out over the people below. Light on the up-turned faces made them look like scattered pearls on the dark floor. An exaltation suddenly burst in her shoulders, flooded her legs and arms and for a moment washed the pain away.

Snake, with one hand on her shoulder, was grinning also.

“We’ve got it!” she said again.

They went down the ladder into the statue’s skull. Snake preceded her out the hollow ear. He reached around, caught the cord, and let himself down to the shoulder.

She hesitated for a moment, then put the jewel in her mouth, and followed him. Standing beside him once more, she removed it, and then rubbed her shoulders. “Boy, am I going to have some Charley horse by tomorrow,” she said.

“Do me a favor and untie my bag for me?”

Snake untied the parcel from the end of the cord, and together now they climbed down the bicep and back over the forearm to the trap door in the wrist.

She glanced down at the faces of the worshipers just before they disappeared into the tunnel. Snake was taking the jewel from her hand. She let him have it, and watched him raise it up above his head.

Immediately, when he raised the jewel, the pearls of faces went out like extinguished flames as heads bent all through the temple.

“That’s the ticket,” grinned Argo. “Come on.” But Snake did not go into the tunnel. Instead he walked around the fist, took hold of one of the bronze wheat stems, and slid down through an opening between the thumb and forefinger. “That way?” asked Argo. “Oh well, I guess so.

You know I’m going to write an epic about this.”

But Snake had already gone. She followed him, clutching her feet around a great bunch of stems. He was waiting for her at the plateau of leaves, and nestled there, they gazed out once more at the fascinated congregation.

Again Snake held aloft the jewel, and again heads bowed.

The hymn began to repeat itself, the individual words lost in the sonority of the hall. They started down the last length of stems now, coming quickly. When they stood at last on the base, she put her hand on his shoulder and looked across the brass altar rail. The congregation pressed close, although she did not recognize an individual face. Yet a mass of people stood there, enormous and familiar. As Snake started forward, holding up the jewel, the people fell back from the rail. Snake climbed over the altar rail, and then helped her over.

Her shoulders were beginning to hurt now, and the enormity of the theft ran chills up and down, up and down her spine. The black marble altar step as she put her foot down was awfully cold.

They started forward again, and the last note of the hymn echoed to silence, filling the hall with the roaring quiet of the hushed breathing of hundreds.

Simultaneously, both she and Snake got the urge to look back at the great diminishing height of Hama behind them.

All three eyes were shut firmly now. A quiet composed of the rustling of a hundred dark robes upon another hundred hissed about them as they started forward again.

There was a spotlight on them, she suddenly realized.

That was why the people, hovering back from the circular effulgence over the floor around them seemed so dim. Her heart had become a pulse at the bottom of her tongue.

They kept on going forward, into the shadowed faces, into the parting sea of dark cloaks and hoods.

Then the last of the figures stepped aside from the temple door, and she could see the sunlight out in the garden. They stood still for a moment, Snake holding high the jewel; then they burst forward, out through the door and down over the bright steps.

Instantly the hymn began again behind them, as if their departure had been a signal. The music flooded after them,
and when they reached the bottom step, they both whirled, crouching like animals, expecting the congregation to come welling darkly out after them. But there was only the music, flowing into the light, washing around them, a transparent river, a sea.

“Freeze the drop in the hand,
and break the earth with singing.

Hail the height of a man,
and also the height of a woman.”

Over the music came a brittle chirping from the trees.

Fixed with fear, they watched the temple door as the hymn progressed. Then Snake suddenly stood up straight and grinned.

She scratched her red hair, shifted her weight, and looked at Snake. “I guess they’re not coming,” she said, sounding almost disappointed. Then she giggled. “Well, I guess we got it.”

* * * *

“Don’t move,” repeated Hama Incarnate.

“Now look—” began Urson.

“You are perfectly safe,” the god continued, “unless you do anything foolish. You have shown great wisdom.

Continue to show it. I have a lot to explain to you.”

“Like what?” asked Geo.

“I’ll start with the lizards,” smiled the god.

“The what?” asked Iimmi.

“The singing lizards,” said Hama. “You walked through a grove of trees just a few minutes ago. You had just been through a series of happenings that was probably the most frightening in your life. Suddenly you heard a singing in the trees. What was it?”

“I thought it was a bird,” Iimmi said.

“But why a bird?” asked the god.

“Because that’s what a bird sounds like,” stated Urson impatiently. “Who needs an old lizard singing to them on a morning like this?”

“Your second point is much better than your first,” said the god. “You do not need a lizard, but you did need a bird.

A bird means spring, life, good luck, cheerfulness. You think of a bird singing and you think of thoughts that men have been thinking for thousands upon thousands of years.

Poets have written of it in every language, Catullus in Latin, Keats in English, Li Po in Chinese, Darnel X24 in New English. You expected a bird because after what you had been through, you needed to hear a bird. Lizards run from under wet rocks, scurry over gravestones. A lizard is not what you needed.”

“So what do lizards have to do with why we’re here?”

demanded Urson.

“Why are you here?” repeated the god, subtly changing Urson’s question. “There are many reasons, I am sure. You tell me some of them.”

“You have done wrongs to Argo—at least to Argo of Leptar,” Geo explained. “We have come to undo them. You have kidnaped the young Argo, as well as her mother apparently. We have come to take her back. You have misused the jewels. We have come to take the last one from you.”

Hama smiled. “Only a poet could see the wisdom in such honesty. I thought I might have to wheedle to get that much out of you.”

“I guess it was pretty certain that you knew that much already,” Geo said.

“True,” answered Hama. Then his tone changed. “Do you know how the jewels work?”

They shook their heads.

“They are basically very simple mechanical contrivances which are difficult in execution, but simple in concept. I will explain. Human thoughts, it was discovered after the Great

Fire during the first glorious years of the City of New Hope, did not produce waves similar to radio waves, but the electrical synapse pattern, it was found, can be read by radio waves, in the same way a mine detector reads the existence of metal.”

“Radio?” Geo said.

“That’s right,” Hama said. “Oh, I forgot, you don’t know anything about that at all. Well, I can’t go through the whole thing now. Suffice it to say that each of the jewels contains a carefully honed crystal which is constantly sending out beams which can read these thought patterns.

Also the crystal acts like a magnifying glass or a mirror, and reflects and magnifies the energy from the brain into heat or light or any other kind of electromagnetic radiation

—there I go again—so that you can send great bolts of heat with them, as you have seen done.

“But the actual workings of them are not important. And their ability to send heat out is only their secondary power.

Their primary importance is that they can be used to penetrate the mind. Now we come to the lizards.”

“Wait a minute,” Geo said. “Before we get to the lizards.

Do you mean go into minds like Snake does?” Suddenly he remembered that the boy was not there.

But the god went on. “Like Snake,” he said. “But different.

Snake was born with the ability to transmute the brain patterns of his thoughts to others; in that he has a power something like the jewels, but nowhere as strong. But with the jewels, you can jam a person’s thoughts.… ”

“Just go into his mind and stop him from thinking?” asked Iimmi.

“No,” said the god. “Conscious thought is too powerful.

Otherwise, you would stop thinking every time Snake spoke to you. It works another way. How many reasons does a man have for any single action?”

They looked at him uncomprehendingly.

“Why, for example, does a man pull his hand from a fire?”

“Because it hurts,” said Urson. “Why else?”

“Yes, why else?” asked Hama.

“I think I see what you mean,” said Iimmi. “He also pulls it out because he knows that outside the fire his hand isn’t going to hurt. Like the bird, I mean the lizard. One reason we reacted like we did was because it sounded like a bird.

The other reason was because we wanted to hear a bird just then. The man pulls his hand out because the fire hurts, and because he wants it not to hurt.”

“In other words,” Geo summarized, “there are at least two reasons for everything.”

“Exactly,” explained Hama. “And notice that one of these reasons is unconscious. But with the jewel, you can jam the unconscious reason; so that if a man has his hand in a fire, you can jam his unconscious reason of wanting it to stop hurting. Completely bewildered, and in no less pain, he will stand there until his wrist is a smoking nub.”

Geo reached over and felt his severed arm.

“Dictators during the entire history of this planet have used similar techniques. By not letting the people of their country know what conditions existed outside their boundaries, they could get the people to fight to stay in those conditions. It was the old adage, convince a slave that he’s free, and he will fight to maintain his slavery. Why does a poet sing? Because he likes music; and because silence frightens him. Why does a thief steal? To get the goods from his victim; also to prove that his victim cannot get him.”

“That’s how Argo got Snake back,” Geo said to Urson. “I see now. He was just thinking of running away, and she jammed his desire not to get caught; so he had nothing to direct him in which direction to run. So he ran where she told him, straight back to her.”

“That’s right,” Hama said. “But something else was learned when these jewels were invented. Or rather a lesson which history should have taught us thousands of
years ago was finally driven home. No man can wield absolute power over other men and still retain his own mind. For no matter how good his intentions are when he takes up the power, his alternate reason is that freedom, the freedom of the people and ultimately his own, terrifies him. Only a man afraid of freedom would want this power, would conceive of wielding it. And that fear of freedom will turn him into a slave of this power. For this reason, the jewels are evil. That is why we have summoned you to steal them from us.”

“To steal them from you?” asked Geo. “Why couldn’t you have simply destroyed them when you had them.”

“We have already been infected,” smiled the god. “We are a small band here on Aptor. To reach the state of organization, to collect the scattered scientific knowledge of the times before the Great Fire, was not easy. Too often the jewels have been used, and abused, and now we cannot destroy it. We would have to destroy ourselves first. We kidnaped Argo and left you the second jewel, hoping that you would come after the third and last one. Now you have come, and now the jewel is being stolen.”

“Snake?” asked Geo.

“That’s right,” replied Hama.

“But I thought he was your spy,” Geo said.

“That he is our spy is his unconscious reason for his actions,” explained Hama. “He is aware only that he is working against the evil he has seen in Jordde. Spy is too harsh a word for him. Say, rather, little thief. He became a spy for us quite unwittingly when he was on the island as a child with Jordde. I have explained something to you of how the mind works. We have machines that can duplicate what Snake does in a similar way that the jewels work. This is how the blind priestesses contacted Jordde and made him their spy. This is how we reached Snake. But he never saw us, never even really talked to us. It was mainly because of
something he saw, something he saw when he first got here.”

“Wait a minute,” Iimmi said. “Jordde wanted to kill me, and did kill Whitey because of something we might have seen. I bet this was the same thing. Now, what was it?”

Hama smiled. “My telling you would do no good. Perhaps you can find out from Snake, or my daughter, Argo Incarnate.”

“But what do we do now?” Geo interrupted. “Take the jewels back to Argo, I mean Argo on the ship? She’s already used the jewels to control minds, at least Snake’s, so that means she’s infected, too.”

“Once you guessed the reason for her infection,” said Hama. “We have been watching you on our screens since you landed. Do you remember what the reason was?”

“Do you mean her being jealous of her sister?” Geo asked.

“Yes. On one side her motives were truly patriotic for Leptar. On the other hand they were selfish ones of power seeking. But without the selfish ones, she would have never gotten so far as she did. You must bring young Argo back and give the infection a chance to work itself out.”

“But what about the jewels?” asked Geo. “All three of them will be together. Isn’t that a huge temptation?”

“Someone must meet this temptation, and overcome it,”

said Hama. “You do not know how much danger they are in while they are here on Aptor. Even if the final danger is only delayed, that delay will make it safer to bring them to Leptar.”

Suddenly Hama turned to the screens and pushed a switch to on position. The opaque glass was filled with a picture of the interior of the temple. On the huge statue, a spotlight was following two microscopic figures over the statue’s shoulder. They were climbing over the statue’s elbow.

Hama increased the size. It was two people, not bugs, climbing down the gigantic sculptured figure. They made
their way along the statue’s forearm now, to the golden stalks of wheat in the god’s black fist. One, and then the other began to shimmy down the stems. They arrived at the base and climbed over the rail. The screen enlarged again.

“It’s Snake,” said Geo.

“And he’s got the jewel,” Urson added.

“That’s Argo with him,” Iimmi put in. “I mean—one of the Argos.” They clustered around the screen, watching the congregation give way before the two fearful children. The red-haired girl in the short white tunic was holding onto Snake’s shoulder.

Suddenly Hama turned the picture off, and they looked away from the screen now, puzzled. “So you see,” said the god, “the jewel has already been stolen. For the sake of Argo, and of Hama, carry the jewels back to Leptar. Young Argo will help you. Though her mother and I are pained to see her go, she is as prepared for the journey as you are, if not more. Will you do it?”

“I will,” Iimmi said.

“Me too,” said Geo.

“I guess so,” Urson said.

“Good,” smiled Hama. “Then come with me.” He turned from the screen and walked through the door. They followed him down the long stairway, past the stone walls, into the hall, and along the back of the church. He walked slowly, and smiled like a man who had waited long for something finally arrived. They turned out of the temple and descended the bright steps.

“I wonder where the kids are?” Urson asked.

But Hama led them on, across the broad garden to where the great black urns sat in a row close to a wall of shrubbery. A woman—old Argo—suddenly joined them. She had apparently been waiting for them. She gave them a silent smile of recognition, and they continued across the garden path.

* * * *

Light fell through the shrubbery across her white tunic and Snake’s bare back as they crouched over the contraption of coils and metal. She twisted two pieces of wire together in a final connection as Snake placed the jewel on an improvised thermocouple. Then they bent over it and both concentrated their thoughts on the bead. The thermocouple glowed red, and electricity jumped in the copper veins, turning the metal bone into a magnet. The armature tugged once around its pivot, and then tugged around once more. Finally it was whipping around steadily, the brushes on its shaft reversing the magnetic poles with each half circle of the arc. It gained speed until it whirred into an invisible copper haze between them. “Hey,” she breathed, “look at it go, will you! Just look at it go.” And the young thieves crouched over the humming motor, oblivious to the eyes of the elder gods that smiled at them from the edge of the green shift of shadow and sunlight, by the side of the marble urn.

CHAPTER XI

Under the trees, she raised up on tiptoe and kissed the balding forehead of a tall, dark-robed priest. “Dunderhead,”

she said, “I think you’re cute.” Then she blinked very rapidly and knuckled beneath her eye. “Oh,” she added, remembering, “I was making yogurt in the biology laboratory yesterday. There’s two gallons of it fermenting under the tarantula cage. Remember to take it out. And take care of the hamsters. Please don’t forget the hamsters.”

Finally, they started once more around the slope of the volcano, and the temple and grove fell black and green away behind them.

“Two days to get to the ship,” said Geo, squinting at the pale sky.

“Perhaps we had better put the jewels together,” said Urson. “Keep them out of harm’s way, since we know their power.”

“What do you mean?” Iimmi asked.

Urson took Geo’s leather purse from his belt. Then he took the jewel from Geo’s neck and dropped it in the purse.

Then he held the purse out for Iimmi to do the same.

“I guess it can’t hurt,” Iimmi said, dropping his chain into the pouch.

“Here’s mine too,” Argo said. Urson pulled the purse string closed and tucked the pouch in at his waist.

“Well,” said Geo, “I guess we head for the river, so we can get back to your sister and Jordde.”

“Jordde?” asked Argo. “Who’s he?”

“He’s a spy for the blind priestesses. He’s also the one who cut Snake’s tongue out.”

“Cut his—?” Suddenly she stopped. “That’s right: four arms, his tongue—I remember now, in the film!”

“In the what?” asked Iimmi. “What do you remember?”

Argo turned to Snake. “I remember where I saw you before!”

“You know Snake?” Urson asked.

“No, I never met him. But about a month ago I saw a movie of what happened. It was horrible what they did to him.”

“What’s a movie?” asked Iimmi.

“Huh?” said Argo. “Oh, it’s sort of like the vision screens, only you can see things that happened in the past. Anyway, Dunderhead showed me this film about a month ago. Then he took me down to the beach and said I should have seen something there, because of what I’d learned.”

“See something?” Iimmi almost yelled. “What was it?” He took her shoulder and shook it. “What was it you were supposed to see?”

“Why…?” began the girl, startled.

“Because a friend of mine was murdered and I almost was too because of something we saw on that beach. Only I don’t know what it was.”

“But…” began Argo. “But I don’t either. I couldn’t see it, so Dunderhead took me back to the temple.”

“Snake?” Geo asked. “Do you know what they were supposed to see? Or why Argo was taken to see it after she was shown what happened to you?”

The boy shrugged.

Iimmi turned on Snake. “Do you know, or are you just not telling? Come on now. That’s the only reason I stuck with this so far, and I want to know what’s going on!”

Snake shook his head.

“I want to know why I was nearly killed,” shouted the Negro. “You know and I want you to tell me!” Iimmi raised his hand.

Snake screamed. The sound tore over the distended vocal cords. Then he whirled and ran.

Urson caught him and brought the boy crashing down among leaves. “No you don’t,” the giant growled. “You’re not going to get away from me this time. You won’t get away from me again.”

“Watch it,” said Argo. “You’re hurting him. Urson, let go!”

“Hey, ease up,” said Iimmi. “Snake, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to yell. But I do want you to tell me. Very much.”

Urson let the boy up, still mumbling, “Well, he’s not going to get away again.”

“When did he get away from you the first time?” Geo said, coming over to the boy. “Let him go. Look, Snake, do you know what there was about the beach that was so important?”

Snake nodded.

“Can you tell?”

Now the boy shook his head and glanced at Urson.

“You don’t have to be afraid of him,” Geo said, puzzled.

“Urson won’t hurt you.”

But Snake shook his head again.

“Well,” said Geo, “we can’t make you. Let’s get going.”

“I bet I could make him,” the giant mumbled.

“No,” said Argo. “I don’t think you could. I watched the last time somebody tried. And I don’t think you could.”

Late morning flopped over hotly in the sky and turned into afternoon. The jungle became damp, and bright insects plunged like tiny knives of blue or scarlet through leaves.

Wet foliage brushed against their chests, faces, and shoulders.

“Why would they show you a film of something awful before taking you to the beach.” Iimmi asked.

“Maybe it was supposed to have made me more receptive to what we saw,” said Argo.

“If horror makes you receptive to what ever it was,” said Iimmi, “I should have been about as receptive as possible.”

“What do you mean?” asked Geo.

“I just watched ten guys get hacked to pieces all over the sand, remember?”

They walked silently for a time.

“We’ll come out at the head of the river. It’s a huge marsh that drains off into the main channel,” said Argo presently.

Late afternoon darkened quickly.

“I was wondering about something,” Geo said, after a little while.

“What?” asked Argo.

“Hama said that once the jewels had been used to control minds, the person who used them was infected—”

“Rather the infection was already there,” corrected Argo.

“That just brought it out.”

“Yes,” said Geo. “Anyway, Hama also said that he was infected. When did he have to use the jewels?”

“Lots of times,” Argo said. “Too many. The last time was when I was kidnaped. He used the jewel to control pieces of that thing you all killed in the City of New Hope to come and kidnap me and then leave the jewel in Leptar.”

“A piece of that monster?” Geo exclaimed. “No wonder it decayed so rapidly when it was killed.”

“Huh?” asked Iimmi.

“Argo, I mean your sister, told me they had managed to kill one of the kidnapers, and it melted the moment it died.”

“We couldn’t control the whole mass,” she explained. “It really doesn’t have a mind. But, like everything alive, it has, or had, the double impulse.”

“But what did kidnaping you accomplish, anyway?” Iimmi asked.

Argo grinned. “It brought you here. And now you’re taking the jewels away.”

“Is that all?” asked Iimmi.

“Well,” said Argo, “Isn’t that enough?” She paused for an instant. “You know I wrote a poem about all this once, the double impulse and everything.”

Geo recited:

“By the dark chamber sits its twin,
where the body’s floods begin,
and the two are twinned again,
turning out and turning in.”

“How did you know?” she asked.

“The dark chamber is Hama’s temple,” Geo said. “Am I right?”

“And it’s twin is Argo’s,” she went on. “They should be twins, really. And then the twins again are the children. The force of age in each one opposed to the young force. See?”

“I see,” Geo smiled. “And the body’s floods, turning in and out?”

“That’s sort of everything man does, his going and coming, his great ideas, his achievements, his little ideas too. It all comes from the interplay of those four forces.”

“Four?” said Urson. “I thought it was just two.”

“But it’s thousands,” Argo explained.

The air was drenching. The leaves had been shiny before.

Now they dripped water on the loose ground. Pale light lapsed through the branches, shimmered, reflected from leaf to the wet underside of leaf. The ground became mud.

Twice they heard a sloshing a few feet away, and then the scuttling of an unseen animal. “I hope I don’t step on something that decides to take a chunk out of my foot.”

“I’m pretty good at first aid,” Argo said. “It’s getting chilly,” she added.

Just then Geo slipped and sank knee-deep in a muddy pool. Urson raced to the edge of the quicksand bog and grabbed Geo by his good arm. He pulled till Geo emerged, coated to the thigh with gray mud.

“You all right?” Urson asked. “You sure you’re all right?”

Geo nodded, rubbing the stump of his arm with his good hand. “I’m all right,” he said. The trees had almost completely given out. Geo suddenly saw the whole swamp sinking in front of him. He splashed a step backwards, but Urson caught his shoulder. The swamp wasn’t sinking, though. But ripples had begun to appear over the water, spreading, crossing, webbing the whole surface with a net of tiny waves.

Then they began to rise up. Green backs broke the surface, wet and slippery. They were standing now, torrents cascading their green faces, green chests. Three of them, now a fourth. Four more, and then more, and then many more. They stood, now, these naked, green, mottled bodies.

Geo felt a sudden tugging in his head, at his mind.

Looking around he saw that the others felt it too.

“Them…” Urson started.

“They’re the ones who carried us…” Geo began. The tug came again, and they stepped forward.

Iimmi put his hand on his head. “They want us to go with them.… ” And suddenly they were going forward, slipping into the familiar state of half-consciousness which had
come when they had crossed the river, to the City of New Hope, or when they had first fallen into the sea.

Wet hands fell on their bodies as they were guided through the swamp. They were being carried through deeper water. Now they were walking over dry land where the vegetation was thicker, and slimy boulders caught shards of sunset on their wet flanks, blood leaking on the gray, the wet gray, and the green.

Through a rip in the arras of vegetation, they saw the moon push through the clouds, staining them silver. A rock rose in silhouette against the moon. On the rock a naked man stood, staring at the white disk. White highlighted one side of his body. As they passed, he howled (or anyway, opened his mouth and threw his head back. But their ears were full of night and could not hear.) and dropped to all fours. A breeze blew momentarily in the sudden plume of his tail, in the scraggly hair of the under-belly, and light lay white on the points of his ears, his lengthened muzzle, his thinned hind legs. The animal turned its head once, and then scampered down the rock and into the darkness as a curtain of trees swung across the opened sky.

Eyes of flame whipped ahead of them as water swirled their knees once more. Then the water went down and sand washed back under the soles of their feet on the dark beach. The beating of the sea, the rush of the river, and the odor of the wet leaves that fingered their cheeks, prodded their shins, and slapped against their bellies as they moved forward, all this fell away. Red eyes wavered into flaming tongues, and the tongues showed themselves housed in the mouths of a dozen caves.

Light flickered on the wet rocks and they entered the largest one. Their eyes suddenly focused once more. Foam washed back and forth over the sand floor, and black chains of weeds, caught in crevices on the rock, lengthened over the sand with the inrush of water. Webbed hands released them.

Brown rocks rose around in the firelight. They raised their eyes to where the Old One sat. The long spines were strung with shrunken membrane. His eyes, gray and indistinct, were close to the surface of his broad nostriled face. A film of water trickled over the rock where he sat. Others stood about him, on various levels of the rock.

The tugging left them, and they glanced at one another now. Outside the cave it was raining hard. Geo saw that Argo’s hair had wet to dark auburn and hugged her head now, making little streaks down her neck.

Suddenly a voice boomed at them, like an echo, more than the reverberation that the cave would give. “Carriers of the jewels,” it began, and suddenly Geo realized that it was the same hollowness that accompanied Snake’s soundless messages. “We have brought you here to give a warning.

We are the oldest forms of intelligence on this planet,”

continued the Old One from the throne. “We have watched from the delta of the Nile the rise of the pyramids; we have seen the murder of Caesar from the banks of the Tiber. We watched the Spanish Armada destroyed by English, and we followed Man’s great metal fish through the ocean before the Great Fire. We have never aligned ourselves with either Argo or Hama, but rise in the sexless swell of the ocean. We can warn you, as we have warned man before. As before, some will listen, some will not. Your minds are your own, now. That I pledge you. Now, I warn you; cast the jewels into the sea.

“Nothing is ever lost in the sea, and when the evil has been washed from them with time and brine, they will be returned to man. For then time and brine will have washed away his imperfections also.

“No living intelligence is free from their infection, nothing with the double impulse of life. But we are old, and can hold them for a million years before we will be so infected as you are. Your young race is too condensed in its living to
tolerate such power at its fingers now. Again I say: cast these into the sea.

“The knowledge which man needs to alleviate hunger and pain from the world of men is contained in two monasteries on this island. Both have the science to put the jewels to use, to the good use which is possible with them. Both have been infected. In Leptar, however, where you carry these jewels, there is no way at all to utilize them for anything but evil. There will only be the temptation to destroy.”

“What about me?” Argo suddenly piped up. “I can teach them all sorts of things in Leptar.” She took one of Snake’s hands. “We used one for our motor.”

“You will find something else to make your motor turn,”

came the voice. “You still have to see something that you have not yet seen?”

“At the beach?” demanded Iimmi.

“Yes,” nodded the Old One, with something like a sigh, “at the beach. We have a science that allows us to do things which to you seem impossibilities, as when we carried you in the sea for weeks without your body decaying. We can enter your mind as Snake does. And we can do much else.

We have a wisdom which far surpasses even Argo’s and Hama’s on Aptor. Will you then cast the jewels into the sea and trust them with us?”

Here Urson interrupted. “How can we give you the jewels?” he said. “How can we be sure you’re not going to use them against Argo and Hama once you get them. You say nobody is impervious to them. And we’ve only got your say so on how long it would take you to fall victim. You can already influence minds. That’s how you got us here. And according to Hama, that’s what corrupts. And you’ve already done it.”

“Besides,” Geo said. “There’s something else. We’ve nearly messed this thing up a dozen times trying to figure out motives and counter motives. And it always comes back to the same thing: we’ve got a job to do, and we ought to do
it. We’re suppose to return Argo and the jewels to the ship, and that’s what we’re doing.”

“He’s right,” said Iimmi. “It’s the general rule again. Act on the simplest theory that holds all the information.”

The Old One sighed again. “Once, fifteen hundred years ago, a man who was to maneuver one of the metal birds walked and pondered by the sea. He had been given a job to do. We tried to warn him, as we tried to warn you. But he jammed his hands into the pockets of his khaki uniform, and uttered to the waves the words you just uttered, and the warning was shut out of his mind. He scrambled up over the dunes on the beach, never taking his hands out of his pockets. The next morning, at five o’clock, when the sun slanted red across the air field, he climbed into his metal bird, took off, flew for some time over the sea, looking down on the water like crinkled foil under the heightening sun, until he reached land again. Then he did his job: he pressed a button which released two shards of fire metal in a housing of cobalt. The land flamed. The sea boiled in the harbors. And two weeks later he was also dead. That which burned your arm away, poet, burned away his whole face, boiled his lungs in his chest and his brain in his skull.”

There was a pause. And then, “Yes, we can control minds.

We could have relieved the tiredness, immobilized the fear, the terror, immobilized all his unconscious reasons for doing what he did, just as man can now do with the jewels.

But had we, we would have also immobilized the—the honor which he clung to. Yes, we can control minds, but we do not.” Now the voice swelled. “But never, since that day on the shore before the Great Fire, has the temptation to do so been as great as now.” Again the voice returned to normal. “Perhaps,” and there was almost humor in it now,

“the temptation is too great, even for us. Perhaps we have reached the place where the jewels would push us just across the line where we have never before gone, make us
do those things that we have never done. You have heard our warning now. The choice, I swear to you, is yours.”

They stood silent in the high cave, the fire on their faces weaving brightness and shadow. Geo turned to look at the rain-blurred darkness outside the cave’s entrance.

“Out there is the sea,” said the voice again. “Your decision quickly. The tide is coming in.… ”

It was snatched from their minds before they could articulate it. Two children saw a bright motor turning in the shadow. Geo and Iimmi saw the temples of Argo in Leptar.

Then there was something darker. And for a moment, they all saw all the pictures at once.

A wave splashed across the floor, like twisted glass before the rock on which the fire stood. Then it flopped wetly across the burning driftwood which hissed into darkness.

Charred sticks turned, glowing in the water, and were extinguished.

Rain was buffeting them; hands held them once more, pulling them into the warm sea, the darkness, and then nothing.…

Snake was thinking again, and this time through the captain’s eyes.

The cabin door burst open in the rain. Wind whipped her wet veils about her in the door as lightning made them transparent, blackening her body’s outline. Jordde rose from his seat. She closed the door on thunder.

“I have received the signal from the sea,” she said.

“Tomorrow you pilot the ship into the estuary.”

The captain’s voice: “But Priestess Argo, I cannot take the ship into Aptor. We already have lost ten men; I cannot sacrifice…”

“And the storm,” smiled Jordde. “If it is like this tomorrow, how can I take her through the rocks?”

Her nostrils flared as her lips compressed to a chalky line.

She was regarding Jordde.

The captain’s thoughts: What is between them, this confused tension. It upsets me deeply, and I am tired.

“You will pilot the boat to shore tomorrow,” Argo nearly hissed. “They have returned, with the jewels!”

The captain’s thoughts: They speak to each other in a code I don’t understand. I am so tired, now. I have to protect my ship, my men, that is my job, my responsibility.

But Argo turned to the captain. “I hired you to obey me. I order you to pilot this ship to Aptor’s shore tomorrow morning.”

The captain’s thoughts; Yes, yes. The fatigue and the unknowing. But I must fulfill, must complete. “Jordde,” he began.

“Yes, captain,” answered the mate, anticipating. “If the weather is permitting, sir, I will take the ship as close as I can get.” He smiled now, a thin curve over his face, and turned toward Argo.

CHAPTER XII

Roughness of sand beneath one of his sides, and the flare of the sun on the other. His eyes were hot and his lids were orange over them. He turned over, and reached out to dig his fingers into the sand. Only one hand closed; then he remembered. Opening his eyes, he rolled to his knees. The sand grated under his knee caps. Looking out toward the water, he saw that the sun hung only seeming inches above the horizon. Then he saw the ship.

From its course, he gathered it was heading toward the estuary of the river down the beach. He began to run toward where the rocks and vegetation cut off the end of the beach. The sand under his feet was cool.

A moment later he saw Iimmi’s dark figure come from the jungle. He was heading for the same place. Geo hailed him, and panting, they joined each other. Then, together they continued toward the rocks.

As they broke through the first sheet of foliage, they bumped into the red-haired girl who stood, knuckling her eyes in the shadow of the broad palm fronds. When she recognized them, she joined them silently. Finally they reached the outcropping of rock a few hundred feet up the river bank.

The rain had swelled the river’s mouth to tremendous violence. It vomited surges of brown water into the ocean, frothed against rocks, and boiled opaquely below them. It was nearly half again as wide as Geo remembered it.

Although the sky was clear, beyond the brown bile of the river, the sea snarled viciously and bared white teeth in the sun. It took another fifteen minutes for the boat to maneuver through the granite spikes toward the rocky embankment a hundred yards away.

Glancing down into the turbulence, Argo breathed, “Gee.”

But that was the only human sound against the water’s roaring.

The boat’s prow doffed in the swell, and then at last her plank swung out and bumped unsteadily on the rocky bank.

Figures were gathering on deck.

“Hey,” Argo said, pointing toward one. “That’s Sis!”

“Where the hell are Snake and Urson?” Iimmi asked.

“That’s Snake down there,” Geo said. “Look!” He pointed with his nub.

They could see Snake crouched near the gangplank itself.

He was behind a ledge of rock, invisible to the people on the ship, apparently, but plain to Geo and his companions.

“Watch it,” Geo said. “I’m going down there. You stay here.” He ducked off through the vines, keeping in sight of the rocks’ edge and the boiling foam. The ship grew before him, and at last he reached a sheltered rise, just ten feet above the nest of rock in which the four-armed boy was crouching.

Geo looked out at the boat. Jordde stood at the head of the gangplank. The eighteen feet of board was unsteady
with the roll of the ship. Jordde held something like a black whip in his hand, only the end went to a box-like contraption strapped to his back. With the lash raised, he stepped onto the shifting plank.

Geo wondered what the whip contrivance was. The answer came with the hollow sound of Snake’s thoughts.

That…is…machine…he…use…to…cut…tongue…with…

only…on…whip…now…not…wire… So Snake knew he was just behind him. As he was trying to figure exactly the implications of what Snake had said, suddenly, with the speed of a bird’s shadow, Snake leaped from his hiding place and landed on the shore end of the plank. He recovered from his crouch, and rushed down the plank toward Jordde, apparently intending to knock him from the board.

Jordde raised the lash and it fell across the boy’s shoulder.

It didn’t land hard; it just dropped. But Snake suddenly reeled, and went down on one knee, grabbing the sides of the plank. Geo was close enough to hear the boy scream.

“I cut your tongue out once with this thing,” Jordde said, matter of factly. “Now I’m going to cut the rest of you to pieces.” He adjusted a control at his belt and raised the lash again.

Geo leapt for the plank. He faced Jordde over the crouching boy, he wondered how wise it had been. Then he had to stop wondering and try to duck the falling lash. He couldn’t.

It landed with only the weight of gravity, brushing his cheek, then dropping across his shoulder and down his back. He screamed; the whole side of his face seemed seared away, and an inch crevice burned into his shoulder and back the length it touched him. He bit into white fire, trying not to leap aside into the foaming chasm between rocks and boat. As the lash rasped over his shoulder, sweat flooded his eyes. His good arm, which held the edge of the plank, was shaking like a plucked string on a loose guitar.

Snake lunged back against him, almost knocking him over.

When Geo blinked the tears out of his eyes, he saw two bright welts over Snake’s shoulder. He also saw that Jordde had stepped out upon the plank and was smiling.

When the line fell again, he wasn’t sure just what happened. He leaned in one direction, and suddenly Snake was a dive of legs in the other. Now Snake was just four sets of fingers on the edge of the plank. Geo screamed again and shook.

Two sets of fingers disappeared from one side of the board and reappeared on the other. As Jordde raised the lash a fourth time to rid the plank of this last one-armed nuisance, the fingers worked rapidly forward toward Jordde’s feet, until suddenly an arm raised from beneath the plank, grabbed Jordde’s foot, and tugged. The lash fell far from Geo who was still trembling, trying to move backwards off the unsteady plank, and keep from vomiting at the same time.

Jordde tripped, but turned in time to grab the edge of the ship’s gate and steady himself. At the same time, one leg, and then another, came up the other side of the plank, and then Snake rolled to a crouching position on the board’s top.

Geo got his feet under him now, and stumbled backwards, off the plank, and then sat down hard a few feet back on the rocks. He clutched his good arm across his stomach, and without lowering his eyes, leaned forward to cool his back.

Jordde, half-seated on the board now, lashed the whip sideways. Snake leaped a foot from the plank as the line swung beneath his feet. All four arms went spidering out to regain equilibrium. The whip struck the side of the boat, left a burn along the hull, and came swinging back again.

Snake leapt once more and made it.

Suddenly there was a shadow over him, and Geo saw Urson stride up to the end of the plank. His back to Geo, he
crouched bear-like at the plank’s head. “All right, now try someone a little bigger than you. Come on, kid, get off there. I want my turn.” Urson’s sword was drawn.

Snake turned, grabbed at something on Urson, but the big man knocked him away as he leapt diagonally onto the shore. Urson laughed over his shoulder. “You don’t want the ones around my neck,” he called back. “Here, keep these for me.” He tossed the leather purse from his belt back to the shore. Snake landed just as Jordde flung the lash out again. Urson must have caught the line across his chest, because they saw his back suddenly stiffen. Then he leapt forward and came down with his sword so hard that had Jordde still been there, his leg would have come off.

Jordde leapt back onto the edge of the ship, and the sword sliced three inches into the plank. As Urson tried to pull the blade out once more, Jordde sent his whip singing again. It wrapped Urson’s mid-section like a black serpent, and it didn’t come loose.

Urson howled. He flung his sword forward, which probably only by accident thwunked seventeen inches through Jordde’s abdomen. He bent forward, grabbed the line with both hands, and tugged backwards, screaming.

Jordde took two steps onto the plank, his mouth open, his eyes closed, and fell over the side.

Urson heaved backwards, and toppled from the other side. For a moment they hung with the whip between them over the board. The ship heaved, rolled to. The plank swiveled, came loose; and with the board on top of them, they crashed into the water.

Geo and Snake were at the rocks’ edge. Iimmi and Argo were coming up behind them.

Below them, limbs and board bobbed through the foam once. The line had somehow looped around Urson’s neck, and the plank had turned up almost on end. Then they went under again.

With nothing between it and the rock wall of shore, the boat began to roll in. With each swell, it came in six feet, and then leaned out three. Then it came back another six.

It took four swells, the time of four very deep breaths, until the side of the boat was grating up against the rocks. Geo could hear the plank splintering down in the water. But the sound of the water blanketed anything else that was breaking down there.

Geo took two steps backwards, clutched at his stubbed arm, and threw up.

Somebody, the captain, was calling, “Get her away from the rocks. Away from the rocks, before she goes to pieces!”

Iimmi took Geo’s arm. “Come on, boy,” he said, and managed to haul him onto the ship. Argo and Snake leapt on behind them, as the boat floundered away from the shore.

Geo leaned against the rail. Below him the water turned on itself in the rocks, thrashed along the river’s side, and then, as he raised his eyes, stretched out along the bright blade of the beach. The long sand that rimmed the island dropped away from them, a stately and austere arc gathering in its curve all the sun’s glare, and throwing it back on wave, and on wave. His back hurt, his stomach was shriveled and shaken like an old man’s palsied fist, his arm was gone, and Urson.…

And then Argo said, “Look at the beach!”

Geo flung his eyes up and tried in one moment to envelop whatever he saw, whatever it would be. Beneath the roar was a tide of quiet. The sand along the naked crescent was dull at depressions, mirror bright at rises. At the jungle’s edge, leaves and fronds sped multi-textured rippling along the foliage. Each single fragment in that green carpet hung up in the sun was one leaf, he reflected, with two sides, and an entire system of skeleton and veins, as his hand and arm had been. And maybe one day would drop off, too. He looked from rock to rock now. Each was different, shaped
and lined distinctly, but losing detail as the ship floated out, as the memory of his entire adventure was losing detail.

That one there was like a bull’s head half submerged; those two flat ones together on the sand looked like the stretched wings of eagles. The waves, measured and magnificent, followed one another onto the sand, like the varying, never duplicated rhythm of a good poem, peaceful, ordered, and calm. He tried to pour the chaos of Urson drowning from his mind onto the water. It flowed into each glass-green wave’s trough in which it rode, suddenly quiet, up to the beach. He spread the pain in his own body over the web of foam and green shimmering, and was surprised because it fit easily, hung there well, quieted, very much quieted.

Somewhere at the foot of his brain, an understanding was beginning to effloresce with the sea’s water, under the sun.

Geo turned away from the rail, and with the wet deck slipping under his bare feet, he walked toward the forecastle. He released his broken limb, and his hand hung at his side.

* * * *

When Snake came down that evening, Geo was lying on his back in the bunk, following the grain of the wood on the bottom of the bed above his. He had his good arm behind his neck now. Snake touched his shoulder.

“What is it?” Geo asked, turning on his side and sitting out from under the bunk.

Snake held out the leather purse to Geo.

“Huh?” Geo asked. “Didn’t you give them to Argo yet?”

Snake nodded.

“Well, why didn’t she take them. Look, I don’t want to see them again.”

Snake pushed the purse toward him again, and added, Look…

Geo took the purse, opened the draw string, and turned the contents out in his hand: there were three chains, on
each of which was a gold coin fastened by a hole near the edge. Geo frowned. “How come these are in here?” he asked. “I thought—where are the jewels?”

In…ocean, Snake said. Urson…switched…them.

“What are you talking about?” demanded Geo. “What is it?”

Don’t…want…tell…you…

“I don’t care what you want, you little thief.” Geo grabbed him by the shoulder. “Tell me!”

Know…from…back…with…blind…priestesses,

Snake
explained rapidly. He…ask…me…how…to…use…jewels…

when…you…and…Iimmi…exploring…and…after…that…

no…listen…to…thoughts…bad…thoughts…bad…

“But he—” Geo started. “He saved your life!”

But…what…is…reason, Snake said. At…end…

“You saw his thoughts at the end?” asked Geo. “What did he think?”

You…sleep…please, Snake said. Lot…of…hate…lot…of…

bad…hate… There was a pause in the voice in his head…

and…love…

Geo began to cry. A bubble of sound in the back of his throat burst, and he turned onto the pillow and tried to bite through the sound with his teeth, the tiredness, the fear, for Urson, for his arm, and the change which hurt. His whole body ached, his back hurt in two sharp lines, and he couldn’t stop crying.

* * * *

Iimmi, who had now decided to take the bunk above Geo, came back a few minutes after mess. Geo had just awakened.

Geo laughed. “I found out what it was we saw on the beach that made us so dangerous.”

“How?” asked Iimmi. “When? What was it?”

“Same time you did,” Geo said. “I just looked. And then Snake explained the details of it to me later.”

“When?” Iimmi repeated.

“I just took a nap, and he went through the whole thing with me.”

“Then what was it you saw, we saw?”

“Well, first of all; do you remember what Jordde was before he was shipwrecked on Aptor?”

“Didn’t Argo say he was studying to be a priest. Old Argo, I mean.”

“Right,” said Geo. “Now, do you remember what my theory was about what we saw?”

“Did you have a theory?” Iimmi asked.

“About horror and pain making you receptive to whatever it was.”

“Oh, that,” Iimmi said. “I remember. Yes.”

“I was also right about that. Now add to all this some theory from Hama’s lecture on the double impulse of life. It wasn’t a thing we saw, it was a situation, or rather an experience we had. Also, it didn’t have to be on the beach.

It could have happened anywhere. Man, and his constantly diametric motivations, is always trying to reconcile opposites. In fact, you can say that an action is a reconciliation of the duality of his motivation. Now, take all that we’ve been through, the confusion, the pain, the disorder; then reconcile that with the great order obvious in something like the sea, with its rhythm, its tides and waves, its overpowering calm, or the ordering of cells in a leaf, or a constellation of stars. If you can do it, something happens to you: you grow. You become a bigger person, able to understand, or reconcile, more.”

“All right,” said Iimmi.

“And that’s what we saw, or the experience we had when we looked at the beach from the ship this morning; chaos caught in order, the order defining chaos.”

“All right again,” Iimmi said. “And I’ll even assume that Jordde knew that the two impulses of this experience were one—something terrible and confused, like seeing ten men
hacked to pieces by vampires, or seeing a film of a little boy getting his tongue pulled out, or coming through what we came through since we landed on Aptor; and two—
something calm and ordered, like the beach and the sea.

Now, why would he want to kill someone simply because they might have gone through what amounts, I guess, to the basic religious experience?”

“You picked just the right word,” Geo smiled. “Now, Jordde was a novice in the not too liberal religion of Argo.

Jordde and Snake had been through nearly as much on Aptor as we had. And they survived. And they also emerged from that jungle of horror onto that great arcing rhythm of waves and sand. And they went through just what you and I and Argo went through. Little Argo, I mean. And it was just at that point when the blind priestesses of Argo made contact with Jordde. They did so by means of those vision screens we saw them with, which can receive sound and pictures from just about any place, but can also project, at least sound, to just about anywhere too. In other words, right in the middle of this religious, or mystic, or whatever you want to call it, experience, a voice materialized out of thin air that claimed to the voice of The Goddess. Have you any idea what this did to his mind?”

“I imagine it took all the real significance out of the whole thing,” Iimmi said. “It would for me.”

“It did,” said Geo. “Jordde wasn’t what you’d call stable before that. If anything, this made him more so. It also stopped his mental functioning from working in the normal way. And Snake who was reading his mind at the time, suddenly saw himself watching the terrifying sealing up process of an active and competent, if not healthy, mind. He saw it again in Urson. It’s apparently a pretty stiff thing to watch. That’s why he stopped reading Urson’s thoughts.

The idea of stealing the jewels for himself was slowly eating away Urson’s balance, the understanding, the ability to reconcile disparities, like the incident with the blue
lizard, things like that, all of which were signs we didn’t get. Snake contacted Hama by telepathy, almost accidentally. And Hama was something to hold onto for the boy.”

“Still, why did Jordde want to kill anybody who had experienced this, voice of God and all?”

“Because Jordde had by now managed to do what a static mind always does. The situation, the beach, the whole thing suddenly meant for him the revelation of a concrete God.

Now, he knew that Snake had contacted something also, something which the blind priestesses told him was thoroughly evil, an enemy, a devil. On the raft, on the boat, he religiously tried to ‘convert’ Snake, till at last, in evangelical fury, he cut the boy’s tongue out with the electric generator and the hot wire which the blind priestesses had given him before he left. Why did he want to get rid of anybody who had seen his beach, a sacred place to him by now? One, because the devils were too strong and he didn’t want anybody else possessed by them; Snake had been too much trouble resisting conversion. And two, because he was jealous that someone else might have that moment of exaltation and hear the voice of The Goddess also.”

“In other words,” summarized Iimmi, “he thought what happened to him and Snake was something supernatural, actually connected with the beach itself, and didn’t want it to happen to anybody else.”

“That’s right,” said Geo, lying back in his bunk. “Which is sort of understandable. They didn’t come in contact with any of the technology of Aptor, and so it might well have seemed that way.”

Iimmi leaned back also. “Yeah,” he said. “I can see how the same thing almost—almost might have happened to me.

If everything had been the same.”

Geo closed his eyes. Snake came down and took the top bunk; and when he slept, Snake told him of Urson, of his
last thoughts, and surprisingly, things he mostly knew.

* * * *

Emerging from the forecastle the next morning, he felt bright sunlight slice across his face. He had to squint, and when he did so, he saw her sitting cross-legged on the stretched canvas topping of a suspended lifeboat.

“Hi, up there,” he called.

“Hello,” she called down. “How are you feeling?”

Geo shrugged.

Argo slipped her feet over the gunwale and with paper bag in hand, dropped to the deck. She bobbed up next to his shoulder, grinned, and said, “Hey, come on back with me. I want to show you something.”

“Sure.” He followed her.

Suddenly she looked serious. “Your arm is worrying you.

Why?”

Geo shrugged. “You don’t feel like a whole person. I guess you’re not really a whole person.”

“Don’t be silly,” said Argo. “Besides, maybe Snake will let you have one of his. How are the medical facilities in Leptar?”

“I don’t think they’re up to anything like that.”

“We did grafting of limbs back in Aptor,” Argo said. “A most interesting way we got around the antibody problem, too. You see—”

“But that was back in Aptor,” Geo said. “This is the real world we’re going into now.”

“Maybe I can get a doctor from the temple to come over,”

she shrugged. “And then, maybe I won’t be able to.”

“It’s a pleasant thought,” Geo said.

When they reached the back of the ship, Argo took out a contraption from the paper bag. “I salvaged this in my tunic. Hope I dried it off well enough last night.”

“It’s your motor,” Geo said.

“Um-hm,” said Argo. She put it on a low set of lockers by the cabin’s back wall.

“How are you going to work it?” he asked. “It’s got to have that stuff, electricity.”

“There is more than one way to shoe a centipede,” Argo assured him. She reached behind the locker and pulled up a strange gizmo of glass and wire. “I got the lens from Sis,”

she explained. “She’s awfully nice, really. She says I can have my own laboratory all to myself. And I said she could have all the politics, which I think was wise of me, considering. Don’t you?” She bent over the contraption.

“Now, this lens here focuses the sunlight—isn’t it a beautiful day—on these thermocouples. I got the extra metal from the ship’s smith. He’s sweet. Hey, we’re going to have to compare poems from now on. I mean I’m sure you’re going to write a whole handful about all of this. I certainly am. Anyway, you connect it up here.”

She fastened two wires to two other wires, adjusted the lens, and the tips of the thermocouple glowed red. The armature tugged once around its pivot, and then tugged around once more. Geo glanced up and saw Snake and Iimmi standing above them, looking over the rail on the cabin’s roof. They grinned at each other, and then Geo looked back at the motor. It whipped around steadily, gaining speed until it whirred into an invisible copper haze.

“Look at that thing go,” breathed Argo. “Will you just look at that thing go!”

OceanofPDF.com

THE MISSISSIPPI SAUCER, by Frank Belknap Long

Jimmy watched the Natchez Belle draw near, a shining eagerness in his stare. He stood on the deck of the shantyboat, his toes sticking out of his socks, his heart knocking against his ribs. Straight down the river the big packet boat came, purpling the water with its shadow, its smokestacks belching soot.

Jimmy had a wild talent for collecting things. He knew exactly how to infuriate the captains without sticking out his neck. Up and down the Father of Waters, from the bayous of Louisiana to the Great Sandy other little shantyboat boys envied Jimmy and tried hard to imitate him.

But Jimmy had a very special gift, a genius for pantomime.

He’d wait until there was a glimmer of red flame on the river and small objects stood out with a startling clarity.

Then he’d go into his act.

Nothing upset the captains quite so much as Jimmy’s habit of holding a big, croaking bullfrog up by its legs as the riverboats went steaming past. It was a surefire way of reminding the captains that men and frogs were brothers under the skin. The puffed-out throat of the frog told the captains exactly what Jimmy thought of their cheek.

Jimmy refrained from making faces, or sticking out his tongue at the grinning roustabouts. It was the frog that did the trick.

In the still dawn things came sailing Jimmy’s way, hurled by captains with a twinkle of repressed merriment dancing in eyes that were kindlier and more tolerant than Jimmy dreamed.

Just because shantyboat folk had no right to insult the riverboats Jimmy had collected forty empty tobacco tins, a
down-at-heels shoe, a Sears Roebuck catalogue and―more rolled up newspapers than Jimmy could ever read.

Jimmy could read, of course. No matter how badly Uncle Al needed a new pair of shoes, Jimmy’s education came first. So Jimmy had spent six winters ashore in a first-class grammar school, his books paid for out of Uncle Al’s “New Orleans” money.

Uncle Al, blowing on a vinegar jug and making sweet music, the holes in his socks much bigger than the holes in Jimmy’s socks. Uncle Al shaking his head and saying sadly,

“Some day, young fella, I ain’t gonna sit here harmonizing.

No siree! I’m gonna buy myself a brand new store suit, trade in this here jig jug for a big round banjo, and hie myself off to the Mardi Gras. Ain’t too old thataway to git a little fun out of life, young fella!”

Poor old Uncle Al. The money he’d saved up for the Mardi Gras never seemed to stretch far enough. There was enough kindness in him to stretch like a rainbow over the bayous and the river forests of sweet, rustling pine for as far as the eye could see. Enough kindness to wrap all of Jimmy’s life in a glow, and the life of Jimmy’s sister as well.

Jimmy’s parents had died of winter pneumonia too soon to appreciate Uncle Al. But up and down the river everyone knew that Uncle Al was a great man.

Enemies? Well, sure, all great men made enemies, didn’t they?

The Harmon brothers were downright sinful about carrying their feuding meanness right up to the doorstep of Uncle Al, if it could be said that a man living in a shantyboat had a doorstep.

Uncle Al made big catches and the Harmon brothers never seemed to have any luck. So, long before Jimmy was old enough to understand how corrosive envy could be the Harmon brothers had started feuding with Uncle Al.

“Jimmy, here comes the Natchez Belle! Uncle Al says for you to get him a newspaper. The newspaper you got him
yesterday he couldn’t read no-ways. It was soaking wet!”

Jimmy turned to glower at his sister. Up and down the river Pigtail Anne was known as a tomboy, but she wasn’t―no-ways. She was Jimmy’s little sister. That meant Jimmy was the man in the family, and wore the pants, and nothing Pigtail said or did could change that for one minute.

“Don’t yell at me!” Jimmy complained. “How can I get Captain Simmons mad if you get me mad first? Have a heart, will you?”

But Pigtail Anne refused to budge. Even when the Natchez Belle loomed so close to the shantyboat that it blotted out the sky she continued to crowd her brother, preventing him from holding up the frog and making Captain Simmons squirm.

But Jimmy got the newspaper anyway. Captain Simmons had a keen insight into tomboy psychology, and from the bridge of the Natchez Belle he could see that Pigtail was making life miserable for Jimmy.

True―Jimmy had no respect for packet boats and deserved a good trouncing. But what a scrapper the lad was! Never let it be said that in a struggle between the sexes the men of the river did not stand shoulder to shoulder.

The paper came sailing over the shining brown water like a white-bellied buffalo cat shot from a sling.

Pigtail grabbed it before Jimmy could give her a shove.

Calmly she unwrapped it, her chin tilted in bellicose defiance.

As the Natchez Belle dwindled around a lazy, cypress-shadowed bend Pigtail Anne became a superior being, wrapped in a cosmopolitan aura. A wide-eyed little girl on a swaying deck, the great outside world rushing straight toward her from all directions.

Pigtail could take that world in her stride. She liked the fashion page best, but she was not above clicking her
tongue at everything in the paper.

“Kidnap plot linked to airliner crash killing fifty,” she read.

“Red Sox blank Yanks! Congress sits today, vowing vengeance! Million dollar heiress elopes with a clerk! Court lets dog pick owner! Girl of eight kills her brother in accidental shooting!”

“I ought to push your face right down in the mud,” Jimmy muttered.

“Don’t you dare! I’ve a right to see what’s going on in the world!”

“You said the paper was for Uncle Al!”

“It is―when I get finished with it.”

Jimmy started to take hold of his sister’s wrist and pry the paper from her clasp. Only started―for as Pigtail wriggled back sunlight fell on a shadowed part of the paper which drew Jimmy’s gaze as sunlight draws dew.

Exciting wasn’t the word for the headline. It seemed to blaze out of the page at Jimmy as he stared, his chin nudging Pigtail’s shoulder.

NEW FLYING MONSTER REPORTED

BLAZING GULF STATE SKIES

Jimmy snatched the paper and backed away from Pigtail, his eyes glued to the headline.

He was kind to his sister, however. He read the news item aloud, if an account so startling could be called an item. To Jimmy it seemed more like a dazzling burst of light in the sky.

“A New Orleans resident reported today that he saw a big bright object ‘roundish like a disk’ flying north, against the wind. ‘It was all lighted up from inside!’ the observer stated. ‘As far as I could tell there were no signs of life aboard the thing. It was much bigger than any of the flying saucers previously reported!’”

“People keep seeing them!” Jimmy muttered, after a pause. “Nobody knows where they come from! Saucers
flying through the sky, high up at night. In the daytime, too!

Maybe we’re being watched, Pigtail!”

“Watched? Jimmy, what do you mean? What you talking about?”

Jimmy stared at his sister, the paper jiggling in his clasp.

“It’s way over your head, Pigtail!” he said sympathetically.

“I’ll prove it! What’s a planet?”

“A star in the sky, you dope!” Pigtail almost screamed.

“Wait’ll Uncle Al hears what a meanie you are. If I wasn’t your sister you wouldn’t dare grab a paper that doesn’t belong to you.”

Jimmy refused to be enraged. “A planet’s not a star, Pigtail,” he said patiently. “A star’s a big ball of fire like the sun. A planet is small and cool, like the Earth. Some of the planets may even have people on them. Not people like us, but people all the same. Maybe we’re just frogs to them!”

“You’re crazy, Jimmy! Crazy, crazy, you hear?”

Jimmy started to reply, then shut his mouth tight. Big waves were nothing new in the wake of steamboats, but the shantyboat wasn’t just riding a swell. It was swaying and rocking like a floating barrel in the kind of blow Shantyboaters dreaded worse than the thought of dying.

Jimmy knew that a big blow could come up fast. Straight down from the sky in gusts, from all directions, banging against the boat like a drunken roustabout, slamming doors, tearing away mooring planks.

* * * *

The river could rise fast too. Under the lashing of a hurricane blowing up from the gulf the river could lift a shantyboat right out of the water, and smash it to smithereens against a tree.

But now the blow was coming from just one part of the sky. A funnel of wind was churning the river into a white froth and raising big swells directly offshore. But the river wasn’t rising and the sun was shining in a clear sky.

Jimmy knew a dangerous floodwater storm when he saw one. The sky had to be dark with rain, and you had to feel scared, in fear of drowning.

Jimmy was scared, all right. That part of it rang true. But a hollow, sick feeling in his chest couldn’t mean anything by itself, he told himself fiercely.

Pigtail Anne saw the disk before Jimmy did. She screamed and pointed skyward, her twin braids standing straight out in the wind like the ropes on a bale of cotton, when smokestacks collapse and a savage howling sends the river ghosts scurrying for cover.

Straight down out of the sky the disk swooped, a huge, spinning shape as flat as a buckwheat cake swimming in a golden haze of butterfat.

But the disk didn’t remind Jimmy of a buckwheat cake. It made him think instead of a slowly turning wheel in the pilot house of a rotting old riverboat, a big, ghostly wheel manned by a steersman a century dead, his eye sockets filled with flickering swamp lights.

It made Jimmy want to run and hide. Almost it made him want to cling to his sister, content to let her wear the pants if only he could be spared the horror.

For there was something so chilling about the downsweeping disk that Jimmy’s heart began leaping like a vinegar jug bobbing about in the wake of a capsizing fishboat.

Lower and lower the disk swept, trailing plumes of white smoke, lashing the water with a fearful blow. Straight down over the cypress wilderness that fringed the opposite bank, and then out across the river with a long-drawn whistling sound, louder than the air-sucking death gasps of a thousand buffalo cats.

Jimmy didn’t see the disk strike the shining broad shoulders of the Father of Waters, for the bend around which the Natchez Belle had steamed so proudly hid the sky monster from view. But Jimmy did see the waterspout,
spiraling skyward like the atom bomb explosion he’d goggled at in the pages of an old Life magazine, all smudged now with oily thumbprints.

Just a roaring for an instant―and a big white mushroom shooting straight up into the sky. Then, slowly, the mushroom decayed and fell back, and an awful stillness settled down over the river.

* * * *

The stillness was broken by a shrill cry from Pigtail Anne.

“It was a flying saucer! Jimmy, we’ve seen one! We’ve seen one! We’ve―”

“Shut your mouth, Pigtail!”

Jimmy shaded his eyes and stared out across the river, his chest a throbbing ache.

He was still staring when a door creaked behind him.

Jimmy trembled. A tingling fear went through him, for he found it hard to realize that the disk had swept around the bend out of sight. To his overheated imagination it continued to fill all of the sky above him, overshadowing the shantyboat, making every sound a threat.

Sucking the still air deep into his lungs, Jimmy swung about.

Uncle Al was standing on the deck in a little pool of sunlight, his gaunt, hollow-cheeked face set in harsh lines.

Uncle Al was shading his eyes too. But he was staring up the river, not down.

“Trouble, young fella,” he grunted. “Sure as I’m a-standin’

here. A barrelful o’ trouble―headin’ straight for us!”

Jimmy gulped and gestured wildly toward the bend. “It came down over there, Uncle Al!” he got out. “Pigtail saw it, too! A big, flying―”

“The Harmons are a-comin’, young fella,” Uncle Al drawled, silencing Jimmy with a wave of his hand.

“Yesterday I rowed over a Harmon jug line without meanin’

to. Now Jed Harmon’s tellin’ everybody I stole his fish!”

Very calmly Uncle Al cut himself a slice of the strongest tobacco on the river and packed it carefully in his pipe, wadding it down with his thumb.

He started to put the pipe between his teeth, then thought better of it.

“I can bone-feel the Harmon boat a-comin’, young fella,”

he said, using the pipe to gesture with. “Smooth and quiet over the river like a moccasin snake.”

Jimmy turned pale. He forgot about the disk and the mushrooming water spout. When he shut his eyes he saw only a red haze overhanging the river, and a shantyboat nosing out of the cypresses, its windows spitting death.

* * * *

Jimmy knew that the Harmons had waited a long time for an excuse. The Harmons were law-respecting river rats with sharp teeth. Feuding wasn’t lawful, but murder could be made lawful by whittling down a lie until it looked as sharp as the truth.

The Harmon brothers would do their whittling down with double-barreled shotguns. It was easy enough to make murder look like a lawful crime if you could point to a body covered by a blanket and say, “We caught him stealing our fish! He was a-goin’ to kill us―so we got him first.”

No one would think of lifting the blanket and asking Uncle Al about it. A man lying stiff and still under a blanket could no more make himself heard than a river cat frozen in the ice.

“Git inside, young ‘uns. Here they come!”

Jimmy’s heart skipped a beat. Down the river in the sunlight a shantyboat was drifting. Jimmy could see the Harmon brothers crouching on the deck, their faces livid with hate, sunlight glinting on their arm-cradled shotguns.

The Harmon brothers were not in the least alike. Jed Harmon was tall and gaunt, his right cheek puckered by a knife scar, his cruel, thin-lipped mouth snagged by his
teeth. Joe Harmon was small and stout, a little round man with bushy eyebrows and the flabby face of a cottonmouth snake.

“Go inside, Pigtail,” Jimmy said, calmly. “I’m a-going to stay and fight!”

Uncle Al grabbed Jimmy’s arm and swung him around.

“You heard what I said, young fella. Now git!”

“I want to stay here and fight with you, Uncle Al,” Jimmy said.

“Have you got a gun? Do you want to be blown apart, young fella?”

“I’m not scared, Uncle Al,” Jimmy pleaded. “You might get wounded. I know how to shoot straight, Uncle Al. If you get hurt I’ll go right on fighting!”

“No you won’t, young fella! Take Pigtail inside. You hear me? You want me to take you across my knee and beat the livin’ stuffings out of you?”

Silence.

Deep in his uncle’s face Jimmy saw an anger he couldn’t buck. Grabbing Pigtail Anne by the arm, he propelled her across the deck and into the dismal front room of the shantyboat.

The instant he released her she glared at him and stamped her foot. “If Uncle Al gets shot it’ll be your fault,”

she said cruelly. Then Pigtail’s anger really flared up.

“The Harmons wouldn’t dare shoot us ‘cause we’re children!”

For an instant brief as a dropped heartbeat Jimmy stared at his sister with unconcealed admiration.

“You can be right smart when you’ve got nothing else on your mind, Pigtail,” he said. “If they kill me they’ll hang sure as shooting!”

Jimmy was out in the sunlight again before Pigtail could make a grab for him.

Out on the deck and running along the deck toward Uncle Al. He was still running when the first blast came.

It didn’t sound like a shotgun blast. The deck shook and a big swirl of smoke floated straight toward Jimmy, half blinding him and blotting Uncle Al from view.

When the smoke cleared Jimmy could see the Harmon shantyboat. It was less than thirty feet away now, drifting straight past and rocking with the tide like a topheavy flatbarge.

On the deck Jed Harmon was crouching down, his gaunt face split in a triumphant smirk. Beside him Joe Harmon stood quivering like a mound of jelly, a stick of dynamite in his hand, his flabby face looking almost gentle in the slanting sunlight.

There was a little square box at Jed Harmon’s feet. As Joe pitched Jed reached into the box for another dynamite stick. Jed was passing the sticks along to his brother, depending on wad dynamite to silence Uncle Al forever.

Wildly Jimmy told himself that the guns had been just a trick to mix Uncle Al up, and keep him from shooting until they had him where they wanted him.

Uncle Al was shooting now, his face as grim as death. His big heavy gun was leaping about like mad, almost hurling him to the deck.

Jimmy saw the second dynamite stick spinning through the air, but he never saw it come down. All he could see was the smoke and the shantyboat rocking, and another terrible splintering crash as he went plunging into the river from the end of a rising plank, a sob strangling in his throat.

Jimmy struggled up from the river with the long leg-thrusts of a terrified bullfrog, his head a throbbing ache. As he swam shoreward he could see the cypresses on the opposite bank, dark against the sun, and something that looked like the roof of a house with water washing over it.

Then, with mud sucking at his heels, Jimmy was clinging to a slippery bank and staring out across the river, shading his eyes against the glare.

Jimmy thought, “I’m dreaming! I’ll wake up and see Uncle Joe blowing on a vinegar jug. I’ll see Pigtail, too. Uncle Al will be sitting on the deck, taking it easy!”

But Uncle Al wasn’t sitting on the deck. There was no deck for Uncle Al to sit upon. Just the top of the shantyboat, sinking lower and lower, and Uncle Al swimming.

Uncle Al had his arm around Pigtail, and Jimmy could see Pigtail’s white face bobbing up and down as Uncle Al breasted the tide with his strong right arm.

Closer to the bend was the Harmon shantyboat. The Harmons were using their shotguns now, blasting fiercely away at Uncle Al and Pigtail. Jimmy could see the smoke curling up from the leaping guns and the water jumping up and down in little spurts all about Uncle Al.

There was an awful hollow agony in Jimmy’s chest as he stared, a fear that was partly a soundless screaming and partly a vision of Uncle Al sinking down through the dark water and turning it red.

It was strange, though. Something was happening to Jimmy, nibbling away at the outer edges of the fear like a big, hungry river cat. Making the fear seem less swollen and awful, shredding it away in little flakes.

There was a white core of anger in Jimmy which seemed suddenly to blaze up.

He shut his eyes tight.

In his mind’s gaze Jimmy saw himself holding the Harmon brothers up by their long, mottled legs. The Harmon brothers were frogs. Not friendly, good natured frogs like Uncle Al, but snake frogs. Cottonmouth frogs.

All flannel red were their mouths, and they had long evil fangs which dripped poison in the sunlight. But Jimmy wasn’t afraid of them no-ways. Not any more. He had too firm a grip on their legs.

“Don’t let anything happen to Uncle Al and Pigtail!”

Jimmy whispered, as though he were talking to himself.

No―not exactly to himself. To someone like himself, only larger. Very close to Jimmy, but larger, more powerful.

“Catch them before they harm Uncle Al! Hurry! Hurry!”

There was a strange lifting sensation in Jimmy’s chest now. As though he could shake the river if he tried hard enough, tilt it, send it swirling in great thunderous white surges clear down to Lake Pontchartrain.

* * * *

But Jimmy didn’t want to tilt the river. Not with Uncle Al on it and Pigtail, and all those people in New Orleans who would disappear right off the streets. They were frogs too, maybe, but good frogs. Not like the Harmon brothers.

Jimmy had a funny picture of himself much younger than he was. Jimmy saw himself as a great husky baby, standing in the middle of the river and blowing on it with all his might. The waves rose and rose, and Jimmy’s cheeks swelled out and the river kept getting angrier.

No―he must fight that.

“Save Uncle Al!” he whispered fiercely. “Just save him―and Pigtail!”

It began to happen the instant Jimmy opened his eyes.

Around the bend in the sunlight came a great spinning disk, wrapped in a fiery glow.

Straight toward the Harmon shantyboat the disk swept, water spurting up all about it, its bottom fifty feet wide.

There was no collision. Only a brightness for one awful instant where the shantyboat was twisting and turning in the current, a brightness that outshone the rising sun.

Just like a camera flashbulb going off, but bigger, brighter.

So big and bright that Jimmy could see the faces of the Harmon brothers fifty times as large as life, shriveling and disappearing in a magnifying burst of flame high above the cypress trees. Just as though a giant in the sky had trained a big burning glass on the Harmon brothers and whipped it back quick.

Whipped it straight up, so that the faces would grow huge before dissolving as a warning to all snakes. There was an evil anguish in the dissolving faces which made Jimmy’s blood run cold. Then the disk was alone in the middle of the river, spinning around and around, the shantyboat swallowed up.

And Uncle Al was still swimming, fearfully close to it.

The net came swirling out of the disk over Uncle Al like a great, dew-drenched gossamer web. It enmeshed him as he swam, so gently that he hardly seemed to struggle or even to be aware of what was happening to him.

Pigtail didn’t resist, either. She simply stopped thrashing in Uncle Al’s arms, as though a great wonder had come upon her.

Slowly Uncle Al and Pigtail were drawn into the disk.

Jimmy could see Uncle Al reclining in the web, with Pigtail in the crook of his arm, his long, angular body as quiet as a butterfly in its deep winter sleep inside a swaying glass cocoon.

Uncle Al and Pigtail, being drawn together into the disk as Jimmy stared, a dull pounding in his chest. After a moment the pounding subsided and a silence settled down over the river.

Jimmy sucked in his breath. The voices began quietly, as though they had been waiting for a long time to speak to Jimmy deep inside his head, and didn’t want to frighten him in any way.

“Take it easy, Jimmy! Stay where you are. We’re just going to have a friendly little talk with Uncle Al.”

“A t-talk?” Jimmy heard himself stammering.

“We knew we’d find you where life flows simply and serenely, Jimmy. Your parents took care of that before they left you with Uncle Al.

“You see, Jimmy, we wanted you to study the Earth people on a great, wide flowing river, far from the cruel, twisted places. To grow up with them, Jimmy―and to understand
them. Especially the Uncle Als. For Uncle Al is unspoiled, Jimmy. If there’s any hope at all for Earth as we guide and watch it, that hope burns most brightly in the Uncle Als!”

The voice paused, then went on quickly. “You see, Jimmy, you’re not human in the same way that your sister is human―or Uncle Al. But you’re still young enough to feel human, and we want you to feel human, Jimmy.”

“W―Who are you?” Jimmy gasped.

“We are the Shining Ones, Jimmy! For wide wastes of years we have cruised Earth’s skies, almost unnoticed by the Earth people. When darkness wraps the Earth in a great, spinning shroud we hide our ships close to the cities, and glide through the silent streets in search of our young.

You see, Jimmy, we must watch and protect the young of our race until sturdiness comes upon them, and they are ready for the Great Change.”

For an instant there was a strange, humming sound deep inside Jimmy’s head, like the drowsy murmur of bees in a dew-drenched clover patch. Then the voice droned on. “The Earth people are frightened by our ships now, for their cruel wars have put a great fear of death in their hearts.

They watch the skies with sharper eyes, and their minds have groped closer to the truth.

“To the Earth people our ships are no longer the fireballs of mysterious legend, haunted will-o’-the-wisps, marsh flickerings and the even more illusive distortions of the sick in mind. It is a long bold step from fireballs to flying saucers, Jimmy. A day will come when the Earth people will be wise enough to put aside fear. Then we can show ourselves to them as we really are, and help them openly.”

The voice seemed to take more complete possession of Jimmy’s thoughts then, growing louder and more eager, echoing through his mind with the persuasiveness of muted chimes.

“Jimmy, close your eyes tight. We’re going to take you across wide gulfs of space to the bright and shining land of
your birth.”

Jimmy obeyed.

It was a city, and yet it wasn’t like New York or Chicago or any of the other cities Jimmy had seen illustrations of in the newspapers and picture magazines.

The buildings were white and domed and shining, and they seemed to tower straight up into the sky. There were streets, too, weaving in and out between the domes like rainbow-colored spider webs in a forest of mushrooms.

* * * *

There were no people in the city, but down the aerial streets shining objects swirled with the swift easy gliding of flat stones skimming an edge of running water.

Then as Jimmy stared into the depths of the strange glow behind his eyelids the city dwindled and fell away, and he saw a huge circular disk looming in a wilderness of shadows. Straight toward the disk a shining object moved, bearing aloft on filaments of flame a much smaller object that struggled and mewed and reached out little white arms.

Closer and closer the shining object came, until Jimmy could see that it was carrying a human infant that stared straight at Jimmy out of wide, dark eyes. But before he could get a really good look at the shining object it pierced the shadows and passed into the disk.

There was a sudden, blinding burst of light, and the disk was gone.

Jimmy opened his eyes.

“You were once like that baby, Jimmy!” the voice said.

“You were carried by your parents into a waiting ship, and then out across wide gulfs of space to Earth.

“You see, Jimmy, our race was once entirely human. But as we grew to maturity we left the warm little worlds where our infancy was spent, and boldly sought the stars,
shedding our humanness as sunlight sheds the dew, or a bright, soaring moth of the night its ugly pupa case.

“We grew great and wise, Jimmy, but not quite wise enough to shed our human heritage of love and joy and heartbreak. In our childhood we must return to the scenes of our past, to take root again in familiar soil, to grow in power and wisdom slowly and sturdily, like a seed dropped back into the loam which nourished the great flowering mother plant.

“Or like the eel of Earth’s seas, Jimmy, that must be spawned in the depths of the great cold ocean, and swim slowly back to the bright highlands and the shining rivers of Earth. Young eels do not resemble their parents, Jimmy.

They’re white and thin and transparent and have to struggle hard to survive and grow up.

“Jimmy, you were planted here by your parents to grow wise and strong. Deep in your mind you knew that we had come to seek you out, for we are all born human, and are bound one to another by that knowledge, and that secret trust.

“You knew that we would watch over you and see that no harm would come to you. You called out to us, Jimmy, with all the strength of your mind and heart. Your Uncle Al was in danger and you sensed our nearness.

“It was partly your knowledge that saved him, Jimmy. But it took courage too, and a willingness to believe that you were more than human, and armed with the great proud strength and wisdom of the Shining Ones.”

The voice grew suddenly gentle, like a caressing wind.

“You’re not old enough yet to go home, Jimmy! Or wise enough. We’ll take you home when the time comes. Now we just want to have a talk with Uncle Al, to find out how you’re getting along.”

Jimmy looked down into the river and then up into the sky.

Deep down under the dark, swirling water he could see life taking shape in a thousand forms. Caddis flies building
bright, shining new nests, and dragonfly nymphs crawling up toward the sunlight, and pollywogs growing sturdy hindlimbs to conquer the land.

But there were cottonmouths down there too, with death behind their fangs, and no love for the life that was crawling upward. When Jimmy looked up into the sky he could see all the blazing stars of space, with cottonmouths on every planet of every sun.

Uncle Al was like a bright caddis fly building a fine new nest, thatched with kindness, denying himself bright little Mardi Gras pleasures so that Jimmy could go to school and grow wiser than Uncle Al.

“That’s right, Jimmy. You’re growing up―we can see that!

Uncle Al says he told you to bide from the cottonmouths.

But you were ready to give your life for your sister and Uncle Al.”

“Shucks, it was nothing!” Jimmy heard himself protesting.

“Uncle Al doesn’t think so. And neither do we!”

* * * *

A long silence while the river mists seemed to weave a bright cocoon of radiance about Jimmy clinging to the bank, and the great circular disk that had swallowed up Uncle Al.

Then the voices began again. “No reason why Uncle Al shouldn’t have a little fun out of life, Jimmy. Gold’s easy to make and we’ll make some right now. A big lump of gold in Uncle Al’s hand won’t hurt him in any way.”

“Whenever he gets any spending money he gives it away!”

Jimmy gulped.

“I know, Jimmy. But he’ll listen to you. Tell him you want to go to New Orleans, too!”

Jimmy looked up quickly then. In his heart was something of the wonder he’d felt when he’d seen his first riverboat and waited for he knew not what. Something of the wonder
that must have come to men seeking magic in the sky, the rainmakers of ancient tribes and of days long vanished.

Only to Jimmy the wonder came now with a white burst of remembrance and recognition.

It was as though he could sense something of himself in the two towering spheres that rose straight up out of the water behind the disk. Still and white and beautiful they were, like bubbles floating on a rainbow sea with all the stars of space behind them.

Staring at them, Jimmy saw himself as he would be, and knew himself for what he was. It was not a glory to be long endured.

“Now you must forget again, Jimmy! Forget as Uncle Al will forget―until we come for you. Be a little shantyboat boy! You are safe on the wide bosom of the Father of Waters. Your parents planted you in a rich and kindly loam, and in all the finite universes you will find no cosier nook, for life flows here with a diversity that is infinite and―Pigtail! She gets on your nerves at times, doesn’t she, Jimmy?”

“She sure does,” Jimmy admitted.

“Be patient with her, Jimmy. She’s the only human sister you’ll ever have on Earth.”

“I―I’ll try!” Jimmy muttered.

* * * *

Uncle Al and Pigtail came out of the disk in an amazingly simple way. They just seemed to float out, in the glimmering web. Then, suddenly, there wasn’t any disk on the river at all―just a dull flickering where the sky had opened like a great, blazing furnace to swallow it up.

“I was just swimmin’ along with Pigtail, not worryin’ too much, ‘cause there’s no sense in worryin’ when death is starin’ you in the face,” Uncle Al muttered, a few minutes later.

Uncle Al sat on the riverbank beside Jimmy, staring down at his palm, his vision misted a little by a furious blinking.

“It’s gold, Uncle Al!” Pigtail shrilled. “A big lump of solid gold―”

“I just felt my hand get heavy and there it was, young fella, nestling there in my palm!”

Jimmy didn’t seem to be able to say anything.

“High school books don’t cost no more than grammar school books, young fella,” Uncle Al said, his face a sudden shining. “Next winter you’ll be a-goin’ to high school, sure as I’m a-sittin’ here!”

For a moment the sunlight seemed to blaze so brightly about Uncle Al that Jimmy couldn’t even see the holes in his socks.

Then Uncle Al made a wry face. “Someday, young fella, when your books are all paid for, I’m gonna buy myself a brand new store suit, and hie myself off to the Mardi Gras.

Ain’t too old thataway to git a little fun out of life, young fella!”

OceanofPDF.com

MEMBERSHIP DRIVE, by Murray F.

Yaco

Thirty million miles out, Keeter began monitoring the planet’s radio and television networks. He kept the vigil for two sleepless days and nights, then turned off the receivers and began a systematic study of the notes he had taken on English idioms and irregular verbs.

Twelve hours later, convinced that there would be no language difficulty, he left the control room, went into his cabin and fell into bed. He remained there for sixteen hours.

When he awoke, he walked to a locker at the end of his cabin, opened the door and carefully selected clothing from a wardrobe that was astonishing both for its size and variety. For headdress, he selected a helmet that was not too different in design from the “space helmets” he had viewed on a number of television programs. It would disappoint no one, Keeter reflected happily, as he took a deep breath and blew an almost imperceptible film of dust from the helmet’s iridescent finish.

Trousers and blouse were a little more of a problem, but finally he compromised on items of a distinct military cut; both were black and unembellished, providing, he hoped, an ascetic, spiritual tone to temper the military aura.

Boots were no problem at all. The black and silver pair he wore every day were, by happy coincidence, a synthesis of the cowboy and military footgear styling he had observed hour after weary hour on the pick-up panel in the control room.

He placed the helmet carefully on his head, took time to make sure that it did not hide too great a portion of his impressively high forehead, and then walked leisurely to the control room.

In the control room he checked the relative position of two green lights on the navigation panel, shut off the main drives, clicked the viewscreen up to maximum magnification and took over the manual controls. A little less than two hours later, at 11:30 A.M. Eastern Standard Time, he landed smoothly and quietly near the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C.

Watching from a port in the airlock, Keeter was impressed with the restraint of the reception committee. Obviously, the entire city had been alerted several hours before his arrival. Now, only orderly files of military equipment could be seen on the city’s streets, converging cautiously toward the gleaming white hull and its lone occupant.

He opened the airlock and stepped out on a small platform which held him a full hundred feet above the grass covered park. He watched as an armored vehicle approached within shouting distance, then stopped. Telling himself that it was now or never, he raised both arms to the sky, a gesture which spoke eloquently, he hoped, of peace, friendship and trust.

Later that afternoon, behind locked doors and sitting somewhere near the middle of an enormous conference table, Keeter nonchalantly confessed to an excited gathering of public officials that he had landed on the planet by accident. It was not, he implied, a very happy accident.

“I didn’t know where the hell I was,” he explained carelessly, in excellent English that awesomely contained the suggestion of a midwestern twang. “Some kind of trouble with the ship’s computor—if you know what a computor is.” He suppressed a yawn with the back of his hand and continued. “Anyway, the thing will repair itself by morning and I’ll get out of your hair. Too bad I had to land in a populated area and stir up so much fuss, but from the ship this place looked more like an abandoned rock quarry
than a city. Now, if it’s okay with you, I’ll get back to the ship and—”

A senator, Filmore by name, at the opposite end of the table jumped to his feet. “You mean you had no intention of contacting us? My God, man, don’t you realize what this means to us? For the first time, we have proof that we’re not alone in the universe! You can’t just—”

Keeter called for silence with an impatient wave of his hand. “Come, come, gentlemen. You’re not the only other humanoid race in the galaxy. We don’t have time to call on every undeveloped race we happen to run across. Besides, I never did like playing the role of ‘the mysterious alien who appears unannounced from outer space.’ Primitives always require so much explanation.”

“Primitives!” exploded the senator. “Why, of all the impudent—”

The senator was quieted by a colleague who placed his hand over the offended man’s mouth.

The presiding officer at the meeting, a General Beemish, arose and addressed the visitor. “We realize that from your point of view this planet has not exactly achieved the cultural or technological level of your, er, homeland—”

“You said a mouthful,” agreed Keeter, who was now cleaning his nails with the pin attached to a United Nations emblem that somebody had stuck to his tunic earlier in the day.

“Look,” said the general, gamely trying again. “We’re not quite as unsophisticated as you seem to think. There are three billion persons on this planet—persons who are well fed, reasonably well educated, persons who owe allegiance to only one government. We’re making great strides technologically, too. Within a decade, we’ll be established on the moon—our satellite. Why, even our school children are space-minded.”

“Sure,” said Keeter, who had turned in his chair and was now staring out the window. “Nice little place you got here.

Say, is there a bathroom around this place. I gotta—”

Someone showed the visitor to a bathroom where to everyone’s astonishment he proceeded to remove his clothes and leisurely shower. The meeting was adjourned for thirty minutes. When he had finished his shower, he dressed, walked back into the conference room, waved a cheery good-bye, and before anyone realized what was happening, he had unlocked the door from the inside and closed it behind him.

For a full thirty seconds, no one said anything. Then suddenly someone managed to gasp, “My God, what’ll we do?”

“There’s nothing we can do,” said General Beemish. There were tears in his eyes.

Keeter walked all the way back to the ship. It took him an hour and forty minutes. Long enough, he hoped, for someone to have scooted ahead and notified the military personnel guarding the area to keep hands off.

No one attempted to stop him. He boarded the ship, made himself something to eat, walked to a stock room and pocketed a defective transistor from an unemptied disposal tube in a corner. Five minutes later he reappeared on the platform outside of the airlock. Fifteen minutes later he was delivered in a military staff car to the conference room he had left barely two hours before.

Everyone was transfigured by his reappearance. Beemish looked especially radiant as Keeter sat down at the table, pulled the transistor from his pocket, and stated his business quickly.

“Look, it’s probably no use asking, but I need a repair part for that damned computor. Something’s wrong with the automatic repair circuits, and I don’t feel like staying up all night to find the trouble.” He held the transistor toward them at arm’s length. “Frankly, I don’t think you’ll have much luck reproducing it, but I thought I’d ask anyway—”

“May I see it?” asked Beemish, leaning forward and eagerly stretching out a hand.

Keeter seemed to hesitate for a minute, then shrugged his shoulders and dropped the transistor into the general’s sweating palm.

Three persons got up from the table and crowded around Beemish, trying to get a look at the alien product.

“Well,” said Keeter. “What do you think? If it’s too far advanced for you, don’t hesitate to say so. I’ll just get back to the ship and start working.”

“Not at all, not at all,” said a small, white haired man who had finally wrested the transistor from Beemish. He squinted at the thing through a pocket magnifier. “We’ll have it for you by morning, I’m quite sure.”

“I’m not quite so sure,” said Keeter, yawning, “but I need the sleep anyway. See you here at eight in the morning.”

He yawned again, got up from the table and walked out once more through the door.

* * * *

When Keeter reappeared in the morning, Beemish ushered him into the conference room with a hearty clap on the back. When everyone was seated, he pulled a small jewel box from a pocket and handed it ceremoniously to Keeter.

“I already ate breakfast,” said Keeter, setting the box on the table.

“No, no, no,” groaned Beemish. “That’s not food—open it up!”

Keeter lifted the box to eye level, squinted at it suspiciously for a moment, then sniffed it. “You’re sure—”

“Yes, yes,” shouted a dozen impatient voices, “open it, open it up!”

Keeter shrugged and opened the box. Twelve tiny, identical transistors lay gleaming on a bed of black velvet.

“Well?” said Beemish, eagerly.

“Hm-m,” answered Keeter.

“What do you mean, hm-m,” asked Beemish nervously.

“I mean it’s a silly damn way to pack transistors.”

“But—”

“But they look like they’ll do the job,” said Keeter, snapping the lid closed.

The sighs of relief were heard in the corridor.

Keeter pushed his chair back from the table and stood up.

“I realize that I’ve put you all to a lot of trouble, and I’d like to offer some kind of payment for your services, but frankly, gentlemen, I don’t know how I can—”

“Oh, you can, you can,” interrupted Beemish excitedly.

“What I mean to say is that if you really want to, you can.”

“How?”

“Why, er, you could provide us with a small amount of information.” Beemish looked definitely nervous.

“Be more specific, general.” Keeter was beginning to look grim.

“Well, we were thinking—I mean, it would be nice if you’d agree to have a friendly chat with some of our people. For instance, an hour or so with our physicists, then maybe a half hour with a few sociologists, and perhaps the same amount of time with the senator’s committee—”

Keeter closed his eyes and sighed. “Okay, okay, boys, but let’s make it quick. Also, let’s keep it to twenty minutes for each inquisition. Come on, when do we start? Now?”

* * * *

The scientists were the first—and the easiest. He gave them just enough information to whet their appetites, just enough to plant the suggestion that it took a great deal of tolerance and patience on his part to hold an interview with such backward people.

“Gentlemen, I’d love to explain the principle of the neutrino drive, but frankly, I don’t know where to begin.

You—you just don’t have the mathematics for it.” He didn’t bother to add that neither did he.

“Yes, of course, I’m sure I understand what you’re getting at. My God, why shouldn’t I? Even a child could understand those equations.”

“You call that a representation of the mass-energy constant? No offense, old man, but I’m afraid you’re going to have to start all over again. Invention doesn’t take the place of research, you know.”

The social scientists were next:

“As I explained a moment ago, we are heterosexual and live an organized community life, but not in any cultural context that could be explained by the term. You might say that our cultural continuum (although the term for us is quite meaningless) is a function of an intricately structured social organism, with institutional coordinates that are largely internalized. Do you follow me gentlemen?”

They certainly did not.

But the senator’s committee, as usual, got the information it wanted.

* * * *

Senator Humper: Now, young man, you claim that your base is on one of three inhabited planets of Aldebaran. You also claim that in the known universe there are twelve hundred or more inhabited worlds, all welded together in a kind of super United Nations. Did you or did you not state as much?

Keeter: Uh-huh.

Humper: Well, now it appears that we’re getting some place. Tell us, how does each planet manage to qualify for—
er—membership in this organization?

Keeter: Why, they have to pass the test, of course.

Humper: Test? What test?

Keeter: The Brxll-Hawkre-Gaal test. We administer it to anybody who seems to be qualified.

Humper: Er—tell us, young man, just exactly what sort of test is this? An intelligence test?

Keeter: Yes, you might call it that, although it has a number of sections. Actually, Gaal has divided it into three parts.

Humper: I see. Well, what kind of parts?

Keeter: Well, let’s see. First there’s the fuel test.

Humper: Fuel test?

Keeter: Let me explain, all very simple really. Let’s take the case of a planet that seems to be qualified for Federation membership in every respect but one. They don’t have interstellar flight. Now—since membership imposes duties requiring commercial, diplomatic and scientific intercourse between member worlds, the applicant must be able, within a comparatively short time, to engineer its own transportation. Follow me?

Humper: Yes. Yes, go on.

Keeter: Well, since the biggest technological stumbling block for most planets in such a situation is the development of the necessary fuel, we’ll help them along.

In other words, we give them the fuel test; we supply a sample quantity of Z-67As—our standard thermonuclear power source. If the applicant, working with the sample, is able to reproduce the fuel in quantity, then that’s it.

They’ve passed that portion of the test, and at the same time have developed the means for interstellar flight.

Follow me?

Humper: Yes, of course. Now how about the second part of the test?

Keeter: Oh, yes, that’s the weapons section.

Humper: I’m sorry, I’m afraid I didn’t hear you. I thought you said weapons.

Keeter: I did. You see, it’s a matter of self defense. There are a number of primitive worlds that have developed interstellar flight, but have not achieved the cultural and social levels that would qualify them for membership. As a
result, they become rather nasty about this exclusion, and devote themselves to warring against any Federation ship that comes within range. You’d call them pirates, I think.

Anyway, the Federation Patrol keeps them pretty well in hand, but occasionally, the Blues—that’s our nickname for them since all their ships are blue—do manage to waylay a ship or raid a Federation planet. So naturally, every ship must carry suitable armament; the standard equipment is an R-37ax computor missile—even more complicated for an applicant to manufacture than the reactor fuel. Therefore we provide a sample missile along with our blessings. The rest is up to the applicant.

Humper: And the last part of the test?

Keeter: Oh, that’s genetic. We require a specimen, a woman from the applicant’s world. She’s taken to a Federation
laboratory,
evaluated
genetically,
physiologically, psychologically. Our people are able to extrapolate the future racial—and to some degree cultural

—development of the entire planet after about two weeks works. Needless to say, the entire process of testing is painless; the subject is made as comfortable as possible.

And after the test period, the specimen is returned as quickly as possible to her home world.

Humper: Well, now, don’t you think—after what you’ve seen of us—that we might possibly qualify, at least qualify to take the test? I’m sure you’ll be surprised—

Keeter: Oh, no you don’t! I’ve fulfilled whatever obligation I had by answering your questions. That was the agreement, remember? Information in exchange for the transistors. Now, gentlemen, if you’ll excuse me—

* * * *

Keeter allowed himself to be delivered back to the ship in a staff car. Beemish and several others were on hand to see him off. He shook hands all around—a custom which amused him immensely, since the same act meant

something tremendously different in most other parts of the universe.

Inside, he walked to his cabin, stripped off his clothes, showered, ate, dressed again. Going into the control room, he checked a number of detectors, found no evidence that any Blues were hunting for him, left the control room, and walked back to a supply room.

Here, he selected a plastic vacuum solenoid from a rack, hefted it in one hand for a moment, then deliberately let it drop to the floor. He picked it up, squinted at it, then walked out to the airlock.

* * * *

General Beemish was delighted. Everyone was delighted.

“No trouble at all,” said Beemish, who had already made a phone call that had galvanized two thousand scientists and technicians into action. “We’ll have it for you in no time.”

“I certainly hope so,” said Keeter. Some of the flippancy had left him, and it was apparent that this new bid for assistance was causing him considerable embarrassment—
for a short time, anyway.

“Yes sir,” said Beemish, grinning. “Glad to be of help, in fact, we’re flattered that you’d let us, primitive as we are, help at all. We primitives don’t often have an opportunity to do this sort of thing, you know.” Beemish believed in rubbing while the rubbing was good.

The solenoids, forty in all, were delivered the following morning. They were packaged in a small black box lined with velvet. This time Keeter made no comment about the packaging. Instead, he rose from his chair in the conference room, tucked the box under an arm, and addressed the group. “Gentlemen, I’d like you to know just how much I appreciate this favor. Evidently, I misjudged your level of technology, and for this I apologize. I don’t know how I can repay you for this latest favor, but if you’d like, I’ll be glad to formally submit your planet’s application
for Federation Membership as soon as I return to Aldebaran.”

“When
will
that
be?”

asked

Senator

Humper
unceremoniously.

“Oh, about ten of your years, at a guess.”

“Ten years! My God, man. Can’t you do something sooner?”

“Well—I suppose, I could administer the first two parts of the test myself. Why, yes, I suppose I could drop off your samples and your specimen at the Federation branch laboratory in Andromeda—.”

“Wonderful!” shouted Beemish. “When do we begin?”

* * * *

He was genuinely awed when three weeks later they began loading enormous quantities of Z-67As into his ship.

He did not check the stuff, but had no doubts that it was, atom for atom, identical to the sample of fuel he had given them.

The R37Ax computor missiles arrived the same afternoon.

There were four hundred of them. He selected one at random and had it taken into the ship’s laboratory. Here, he ran a number of routine tests.

The missile was not identical to the sample! They had made a number of improvements in the circuitry. Keeter reflected grimly that a race such as this would probably be able to deduce a launching and firing system for the thing, would probably have the planet ringed with launching stations within weeks. If the Blues had picked up a trace of him, he reflected, they would be atomized before they got within half a million miles of the planet.

The specimen for genetics, which he had almost forgotten about, arrived an hour before he was scheduled to depart.

He was stunned again. She was undoubtedly the most attractive woman Keeter had ever set eyes on.

“Oh, I’m so excited,” said the young lady, in a voice slightly suggestive of the virgin on the way to the sacrifice.

“I’m excited, too,” said Keeter honestly.

* * * *

In the control room, Keeter set a course for Arcturus. He then tripped a lever which fed a month’s supply of the earthmen’s fuel into the ship’s almost empty reaction chambers. Another lever fed 50 computor missiles into 50

completely empty launching racks.

He checked the detectors, but found no trace of the blue ships of the Federation Patrol. Keeter allowed himself the luxury of a sigh. It was a long way to Arcturus, a long, lonely way—even for a hardened pirate, he reflected sadly.

Then he remembered that that was why he had asked for the girl.

OceanofPDF.com

CANCER WORLD, by Harry Warner, Jr.

“We won the Patagonian trust case,” Greg Marson’s jubilant tones filled the apartment—the hall in which he stood, the automatic kitchen in the rear, the living quarters, bedroom and nursery in between.

But no one replied. Greg let his bulging, expensive briefcase slip to the floor, strode through the empty hall, poked his head into the kitchen, then entered the nursery.

Dennis dashed to his father on two-year-old legs, and baby Phyllis gurgled twice in her pen. Greg wrinkled his nose in puzzlement, then punched the babyviewer.

“You can cut service,” he told the girl whose blonde head appeared on the screen.

She nodded, counted on her fingers, and said: “That will be seven hours of viewing. No extras. The children behaved beautifully.”

The screen darkened. Greg stared foolishly at it, then turned to Dennis.

“Where’d your mother go?”

Dennis smiled vaguely, and began to tinker with his molecule builder. Phyllis gurgled again.

Greg looked at the remains of the lunch that had hopped automatically from its can at noon, and the lowered reservoir of milk in the baby’s feeder. Dora obviously hadn’t been there since morning, and she didn’t like to trust the babyview service so long. It was Wednesday, and bridge club was Tuesday. They’d subscribed to the telebuying service, so Dora hadn’t gone shopping for months. The new baby wasn’t due for five months, so a hurry-up trip to a doctor was unlikely.…

The front door screeched, its bad hinge audible in the nursery, and Greg relaxed. “I’m back here, Dora,” he called, and headed for the hall, closing the nursery door behind him.

Greg saw the policeman before he saw Dora. She was being lead toward the living room sofa, her face white, her coat soiled.

“What’s wrong?” Greg rushed forward.

“You’re Marson? Relax. Your wife just got excited for a minute. Lots of them try what she did. We won’t hold it against her.”

Dora pressed close to Greg, her head pushing against his chest, her body trembling. Reproachfully, the policeman was saying:

“You should have stayed home on her check day. If she could have reached you when she heard the news—” He brushed invisible specks from his spotless uniform and walked out of the apartment.

Greg led his wife to the sofa and sank down beside her.

Check day. He stared at her with disbelief.

“I’m sorry,” she said in a whisper, not looking at him. “You never could remember anniversaries or dates, and I didn’t want to worry you.” She started to quiver again.

“How bad is it?” Greg fought for words, blinking to try to drive away the haze before his eyes.

“It isn’t serious at all,” she said, raising her head and looking at him for the first time. “They said that the operation will take only a few minutes. They said cancer wouldn’t ever be dangerous if they always found it as quickly as this time. We—I’m really very lucky, they said.”

“But you should have told me that this was your check day. I was worried about the Patagonian case, and I just—”

Then Greg stared straight at his wife, trying to pierce the strangeness that covered her eyes. He realized in a flood of terror the full implications of this day.

“Dora—do they let you have the child if you’re pregnant when they find cancer? I don’t remember.…”

* * * *

She sat erect and pushed the hair away from her eyes, suddenly the stronger of the two. “Of course, I can have the child,” she said. “And please don’t worry about today. I was silly, and fainted when they brought in the report, and when I came to I tried to pretend that I’d suffered amnesia.

It was foolish because they could have identified me from their records, but they told me that lots of women get the same idea, so maybe I’m not so terrible after all.”

Dennis wailed from the nursery and Phyllis’ thin cry joined his. “They’re lonely,” Dora said. “I’ll go and see—”

“Wait. You didn’t make a decision?”

“Of course I did.” She smiled palely. “I reserved passage.”

“But you can’t go away! What would I do without you and the kids?”

“Don’t shout so. You’ll frighten them. And stop thinking about yourself. You know I’d be willing to undergo sterilization. But we can’t inflict it on the kids when they’re still too young to decide for themselves.”

“I’ll find some way out. There must be someone who’d be willing to be bought—”

“Don’t talk that way,” she tried to laugh. “After all, you’ve always said you’d like to have the children see another planet.”

Greg sat down again and covered his face with his hands.

“Don’t say that, Dora. Sure, I’d like to take my family to Venus if they ever opened it up for colonization. But that’s a fine planet. Mars is hell, and the law says I can’t go with you or the kids.”

“That’s exactly right. The law says that we’re breeding a cancer-free race of humans on Earth by sending to Mars all the people who prove to be susceptible.”

Greg shook his head. “That plan wasn’t set up just to breed out cancer prones. It was partly to keep Earth from starvation when overpopulation became an impossible problem. It isn’t really a moral issue. Look, you can
probably cancel your passage, and we can arrange sterilization. The kids will approve when they grow up.”

Now it was Dora who held Greg close. “I don’t want to leave you,” she said desperately, “but there’s nothing else to do. You know the Carstairs, and the Andresens. The same thing happened to both of those girls. They talked it over with their husbands and decided on sterilization, and the Andresens broke up the next year and Mrs. Carstairs is in a mental home.…”

Greg was silent for a moment. Then he looked at her.

“When do you leave?”

The children wailed again. “I won’t be here next Wednesday,” she arose and walked unsteadily toward the nursery.

* * * *

Greg drove the next morning through narrow streets and backed his car into a parking space close to his destination.

He sat for a moment, frowning at the antiquated, dirty buildings, half-residential, half-business. Then he left the car and walked up the half-dozen uneven stone steps to Modern Laboratories.

Behind the small front office, Modern Laboratories contained an array of testtubes, some sluggish guinea pigs, and dusty bottles. A man who Greg knew must be Dr.

Haskett stood in front of the bottles and looked dubiously at him.

“My contact told me to say that I need altitude shots,”

Greg said. “He also told me to say that I’ve heard of your success in transplantations.”

“Sit down.”

Greg found a stool, and looked unhappily at the grimy fingernails of Dr. Haskett which were now tapping the sink’s edge. “Did your friend explain how much it will cost?”

“The check’s written.” Greg handed it over. “It’s dated ahead. I can stop payment if you don’t do what you promise. And secrecy is important. My wife doesn’t know what I’m doing.”

“Marta,” Dr. Haskett called. A girl from the front office came into the laboratory, and in bored fashion pulled a soiled white robe over her street dress.

“Lie down here.” Dr. Haskett shoved two tables together to provide a large, flat surface, and Marta shoved home the lock on the single door leading out of the room. “But sign this release, first. And undress. You prefer intravenous anaesthesia, I suppose?”

“There’s not much risk?” Greg asked, his perspiring fingers slipping as he tried to unknot his tie. “Not much risk that you’ll fail to make good…a good transplantation?”

“I guarantee that part of it,” Dr. Haskett said, opening a case and withdrawing instruments. “The only risk lies in the danger that it will grow too fast in six months.”

“I won’t give it a chance. My wife gets sent to Mars next week. I’m going to ask for a special check and get myself sent aboard the same ship with her. I know the right people.”

Marta laughed openly. Dr. Haskett shot a glare in her direction, then looked calculatingly at Greg.

“You’re talking like a child,” he said. “If I implant cancerous tissue in your body, you can’t submit to a check for at least six months. The examiners would find the scars of the operation. There are laws against what you want me to do for you.”

Greg stared at the tie he had finally pulled loose. “But I can’t wait six months,” he said helplessly. “If Dora gets sent to Mars alone, you know what will happen as well as I do.

Deported people are automatically divorced from their husbands and wives on Earth. They have to marry again as soon as possible on Mars. The women need someone to
support them and their kids, the men need the women to run the houses up there.…”

The woman straightened her face with an effort, took off the white robe, and tossed it on the floor. Then she unlocked the door and returned to her office. Dr. Haskett turned his back on Greg, saying, “I’m afraid there’s nothing I can do for you, sir.”

* * * *

Greg drove from the rundown district faster than the law allowed. Did the ordinary man on the street submit calmly when this happened to his wife or did he have contacts that Greg had never known?

Still, it seemed unlikely that many persons could escape the law. Every nation on Earth cooperated to send cancerous persons to Mars, not only to breed the disease out of Earth, but to relieve the tremendous pressure of a growing population. The effort was succeeding, even though it was taking much of Earth’s resources to send the people and supplies to Mars, even though the project had delayed the opening of colonization on a real paradise planet, Venus.

Pulling into the apartment’s parking cell, Greg rode the elevator to his floor.

The apartment was dark and silent. A single lamp glowed faintly on the living room desk, and then he saw the note beside the viewphone.

“I didn’t exactly lie about the date of my passage,” the note said, “but I misled you. The children and I went at noon today. It’s the best way. We couldn’t stand the torture of a week, so I asked for immediate passage. Try to smuggle through a message to the children and me later on, but don’t try to do anything more dangerous. I pray that someday the laws will change and we’ll see each other again.” There were a few more lines of writing, but they had been carefully scratched out. Dora’s signature, barely
recognizable in its shakiness, was at the bottom of the paper.…

* * * *

The smoke in the tavern was too thick to permit easy breathing. But Greg had been choking somewhere deep inside before he had wandered into the place. He placed his glass carefully over the well in the counter, pressed the stud at the edge of the counter, and watched the mixed drink squirt up through the patent bottom of the glass.

There was a slight click as the bottom tightened automatically, the price appeared on the inset beside the stud, and Greg drank. Then he put down the glass, aware that the man beside him was studying him intently.

“There comes a time,” the man said carefully, “when the fingers refuse to clench the glass with sufficient resistance.

At that point, you begin to pass out.” The stranger raised his glass with only slight effort, and watched Greg apply time and thought to the same procedure.

“You remind me of the way some doctors talk,” Greg said.

“I never forget a patient,” the stranger said, peering intently at Greg, “and you aren’t one of mine, even though you’re not quite sober enough to look natural. But people tell me that all doctors act somewhat alike, even when they aren’t very good doctors.” He drained his glass with one gulp.

“My wife was sent to Mars,” Greg blurted the words out.

He turned to the stranger.

“There must be some way I can bring her back!”

“Don’t proposition me, fellow,” the strange doctor said, blinking but keeping his eyes boring into Greg’s face.

“You’re talking to the wrong person, if you want one of those little operations.”

Greg shook his head. “I thought of that. I went to one doctor. He told me the scar wouldn’t heal for six months.…

She’ll be married again by that time.”

The stranger pursed his lips thoughtfully for a moment.

Then he looked away from Greg and began to speak lowly, as if he were talking to himself.

“I’ve run across other people in your situation. Space freighters go close to Mars’ surface and parachute equipment down. The passenger ships stay further away and send people down in little auxiliary ships. I’ve never heard of anyone smuggling himself to Mars, you understand, but if you tried to—”

“What I want is a freighter that actually will land on Mars.”

“You won’t find any,” the doctor said. “It takes too much fuel to take off again. This way, they can carry twice as much load, by just circling the planet close to the surface.”

He stopped, looked at Greg quizzically. “Funny thing about cancer—you study it since you learned the bad news? No?

Well, the cure is something like the disease these days.

Cancer is caused by cells that are harmful to the other cells in the body and grow too fast. So we’re deporting people who might be harmful to other people by propagating the disease. Then there’s metastasis.”

“What’s that?”

“Metastasis—the migration of cancer cells. They move from one part of the body to the other.”

“Like we’re moving people to Mars?” Greg laughed tiredly and started to get up.

“Take it easy, bud.” A hand was on Greg’s shoulder, and the doctor’s voice was in his ear. “We’ve all got troubles.

Look up this guy, if you really want to do something about the wife and kids.” A hand slipped a card into Greg’s pocket.

* * * *

“What can you do?” The recruiting officer eyed Greg suspiciously.

“Anything.” Greg spoke slowly, his eyes on the officer. “A fellow gave me this card, and told me I could get work on a freighter at this address.”

The man glanced at the card and shrugged. “Sign this.”

He shoved a dogeared form toward Greg. The table shook slightly as a spaceship blasted off. Greg signed, glancing over the form.

“This isn’t a contract,” he said, handing it back. “It’s just a release for you in case something happens to a crew member.”

“So we aren’t running pleasure trips or slumming expeditions for rich guys. You were born yesterday if you don’t know the freighters are a little dangerous. We don’t know how much money we’ll make out of a trip until we’ve made it. So we can’t settle on any pay now.”

“Get me onto the surface of the planet and you get my services free the whole trip out,” Greg said. “Isn’t that fair enough?”

“So you want to hop out before the return trip?” The agent’s face darkened. “Just when you’ve started to learn something useful aboardship?” A man standing at the door started to move slowly toward them.

“I’ve changed my mind.” Greg got up, turned, and suddenly an arm encircled his throat. He twisted fiercely, uselessly, while the recruiting officer pulled a cloth-covered tube from the desk drawer. The word shanghai flashed into Greg’s mind, an instant before the lead pipe smashed down against his skull.

* * * *

Someone was shaking Greg, trying to dislodge his consciousness from the black, cramped niche into which it was wedged. The hand at his shoulder gripped hard, shook roughly, and a voice was bellowing into Greg’s ears. Greg moved a hand, experimentally. Instantly he was jerked upright.

“Time to get to work,” the voice rumbled loudly. “Let’s get this show on the road. My name’s Moore. What’s yours?”

Greg poked with stiff fingers at his eyes. Light blinded him. He was in a small room that might have been an overgrown closet. He sat on the lower half of a two-tier bunk. There was a webbing of ropes at the other side, and a couple of small lockers around the other sides. The hand that had been shaking him belonged to a giant blond fellow who might have been in his forties.

“Feel better?” The blond giant steadied Greg in a sitting position.

“What’s this all about?” Greg felt for the lump on his head.

“Well, they haven’t told me about you,” the fellow grinned, “but I can guess. When someone starts to ask about a berth on a freighter, they figure that he’s either a potential crew member or a spy. Either way, they figure they’d better take him aboard. I got took just the same way, ten years ago. I’m not sorry now. It’s a pretty good life.”

“Look, I’ve got some money.” Greg struggled to his feet.

“Who can I see to get out of here?”

“Too late,” Moore said. “We’ve blasted off. You’ve been out cold for two days. Don’t you feel the ship?”

Greg sat down again, and suddenly he felt better. After all wasn’t he on his way to Mars, where he had wanted to go all along? He could worry about smuggling himself onto the planet later, when they started to toss out the cargo.…

Moore introduced him to his duties in the hours that followed, and later joined him in their tiny cabin.

“You’ll have to take the upper bunk as soon as you feel better,” Moore warned. “I got seniority, you know.”

“Maybe I won’t be around long. How do you go about skipping ship at delivery point?”

“It can be done if you’ve got the money,” Moore said.

“They run these boats to make money and they aren’t particular about where the money comes from. They never
are sure what sort of a price they can get for the refrigeration equipment and dehumidifiers and stuff.”

“Refrigeration—dehumidifiers?” Greg stared at Moore.

“Are they crazy? Mars is the last place in the world to dispose of stuff like that!”

“Mars? Who said anything about Mars, bud?” Moore looked at him curiously. “They need that stuff on Venus, because it gets hot and damp there in the summer time.

We’re going to Venus, my friend!”

The words stunned Greg’s mind. “But my wife and kids were sent to Mars, and if I’m heading for Venus it’ll be too late—”

“But you ought to have known that these birds only go to Venus—” Moore began. Greg didn’t give him a chance to finish, rising abruptly and running from the cabin.

All the fear, worry and despair that he had felt since Dora’s check day transmuted magically into an alloy of anger and hatred against any authority.

He searched for the officers’ quarters, his feet stamping loudly against the metal flooring, the noise thrusting new aches into his head, the aches in his head increasing his fury.

Hopelessly lost after a moment, he opened one door and caught a glimpse of inferno and the insulation-clad men who tended the propulsion units. Twice he blundered into the space between the outer and inner hulls on the wrong side of the ship. One panel in the wall that looked like a door proved to be the lid for a viewer that gave a fantastically beautiful image of the stars and planets outside the ship. He had wandered into a storeroom when a voice came from behind him:

“Getting thirsty again?”

“Where’s the captain?” Greg yelled back. The man who had called to him straightened from behind a row of boxes.

“Last time I saw you, you were more interested in drinks than in the captain.”

* * * *

Greg looked hard at muscular fingers, and the ghost image of a bar back on Earth materialized for an instant in the stockroom around the man. It was the doctor who had given him instructions on how to find the freighter recruiting office!

“So you’re the one who had me shanghaied to Venus!”

Greg sprang at the man, fists flying.

The doctor ducked. Greg sprawled clumsily at the opposite wall, thrown off balance by the slighter gravity maintained in the ship. He started to rise, then dropped to his knees as knife-like pain shot through his ankle. The doctor stood over him with that strange half-smile.

“You shouldn’t be angry. You wanted transportation, didn’t you?” He kneeled to look at Greg’s ankle and the pain conquered Greg’s impulse to smash a fist into his face.

“Exactly what I wanted,” Greg answered bitterly. “Of course I wanted to get shanghaied on a freight headed for Venus while my family’s on Mars!”

“I think it’s just a sprain, not a break,” the doctor said, running a finger over the swelling ankle. “But we’d better take a picture. Come on.” He hoisted Greg to a standing position with unexpected strength, and walked him out of the storeroom to his cabin. Medical equipment lined the room.

“Did it ever occur to you that someday you’re going to get the lawbooks thrown at you?” Greg asked, quietly but with hatred. “They stopped tolerating this sort of thing centuries ago.”

The doctor laughed. “Fine talk from a man who tried to smuggle himself on Mars.”

“You don’t have any proof. I don’t even know your name.”

“It’s Coleridge. You can put doctor in front of it, too. I really did study and get a diploma. Then I decided I could have more fun out in space than in some stuffy office back on Earth. Maybe you’d enjoy this sort of life, too, if you
haven’t congealed completely.” He sat Greg before a small X-ray machine.

“I’ve always wanted to spend the rest of my life fighting dinosaurs on Venus while my family is on Mars and my career is on Earth.” Greg said acidly.

“You know very well there aren’t any dinosaurs on Venus,”

Coleridge replied mildly. “It’s practically perfect as a planet, with a few gadgets to keep things dry and cool.” He looked straight at Greg. “You know it’s the most desirable planet in the system but they’ve discouraged emigration because they need the spaceships to handle the cancer colonies on Mars. It’s only tramp freighters like this that can get away with trips to Venus.” He pulled the film from its fixing bath and squinted at it. “Not a sign of a fracture.”

* * * *

Greg began to wonder what Coleridge was leading up to.

Everything he said appeared to be a case of diverting attention from Greg’s problem by talking about Venus’

merits. He decided to play along until he found out.

“You think I could find something to keep myself occupied on Venus?”

“Sure, they need smart men, and you can tell the employment agencies that your wife and kids are on the way.”

Greg stared at him, feeling the torment return.

Coleridge grinned. “Haven’t you ever put two and two together about the population figures?”

“You mean there’s a chance for my family to get from Mars to Venus?”

“Look. You remember that they started to send people from Earth to Mars a century ago, because the population had overgrown Earth. Emigration has gone on all that time, millions of people have been sent to Mars, and once they get there they have children and raise families just as they would do on Earth. Now, if you weren’t a lawyer, always
splitting hairs and quibbling, you’d have guessed long ago what other intelligent people sooner or later realize. Mars is smaller than Earth, only part of it is warm enough for Earthmen—so Mars got overpopulated, too, a few years back.

“Remember what I told you in the bar about metastasis? I thought you’d catch on then, when I tried to draw an analogy about migrating cancer cells and migrating people.

“They’ve been afraid to tell people on Earth the real situation, because Venus has been held up for so long as the second Eden where we’ll all live as soon as the cancer problem is licked. But actually, they’ve had to ship new arrivals on Mars off to Venus in recent years, because there’s no more room on Mars. I suppose they’ll break the news to Earth some of these days, formally. If you were closer to the grapevine, you probably would have heard the rumor long ago.”

Greg sat there gaping at Coleridge. Finally he asked, in humbled tones: “If Venus is such a paradise, how come you don’t drop off there and stay there yourself?”

“Well,” the doctor said, beginning to put away his equipment, “I’ve been thinking of it, but I wanted to save up some money first, and this seemed to be about the best way to do it. It’s a little more humane than the way some doctors do, implanting cancer conditions into people who have to undergo operations to get themselves deported. Of course, it’s a little more uncertain.

“For instance,” he said, eyeing Greg sharply, “now that you have that bum ankle, I could probably tell the captain that you’ll be no good as a crew member, and I could have you dumped overboard when we begin to circle Venus. That way you wouldn’t have done a thing illegal and you’d have a clean slate to meet your family a few days later.”

Greg rubbed the lump on his head, gingerly flexed his sore ankle, remembered the emotions of the past three or four days, and then reached for his check book.

“I think I’m beginning to understand,” Greg smiled. “Got a pen?”

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EGOCENTRIC ORBIT, by John Cory Near the end of his fifteenth orbit, as Greenland slipped by noiselessly below, he made the routine measurements that tested the operation of his space capsule and checked the automatic instruments which would transmit their stored data to Earth on his next pass over Control.

Everything normal; all mechanical devices were operating perfectly.

This information didn’t surprise him, in fact, he really didn’t even think about it. The previous orbits and the long simulated flights on Earth during training had made such checks routine and perfect results expected. The capsules were developed by exhaustive testing both on the ground and as empty satellites before entrusting them to carry animals and then the first human.

He returned to contemplation of the panorama passing below and above, although as he noted idly, above and below had lost some of their usual meaning. Since his capsule, like all heavenly bodies, was stable in position with respect to the entire universe and, thanks to Sir Isaac Newton and his laws, never changed, the Earth and the stars alternated over his head during each orbit. “Up” now meant whatever was in the direction of his head. He remembered that even during his initial orbit when the Earth first appeared overhead he accepted the fact as normal. He wondered if the other two had accepted it as easily.

For there had been two men hurled into orbit before he ventured into space. Two others who had also passed the rigorous three-year training period and were selected on the basis of over-all performance to precede him. He had known them both well and wondered again what had happened on their flights. Of course, they had both returned, depending upon what your definition of return was. The capsules in which they had ventured beyond

Earth had returned them living. But this was to be expected, for even the considerable hazards of descent through the atmosphere and the terrible heating which occurred were successfully surmounted by the capsule.

Naturally, it had not been expected that the satellites would have to be brought down by command from the ground. But this, too, was part of the careful planning—
radio control of the retro-rockets that move the satellite out of orbit by reducing its velocity. Of course, ground control was to be used only if the astronaut failed to ignite the retro-rockets himself. He remembered everyone’s surprise and relief when the first capsule was recovered and its occupant found to be alive. They had assumed that in spite of all precautions he was dead because he had not fired the rockets on the fiftieth orbit and it was necessary to bring him down on the sixty-fifth.

Recovery alive only partially solved the mystery, for the rescuers and all others were met by a haughty, stony silence from the occupant. Batteries of tests confirmed an early diagnosis: complete and utter withdrawal; absolute refusal to communicate. Therapy was unsuccessful.

* * * *

The second attempt was similar in most respects, except that command return was made on the thirty-first orbit after the astronaut’s failure to de-orbit at the end of the thirtieth. His incoherent babble of moons, stars, and worlds was no more helpful than the first.

Test after test confirmed that no obvious organic damage had been incurred by exposure outside of the Earth’s protective atmosphere. Biopsy of even selected brain tissues seemed to show that microscopic cellular changes due to prolonged weightlessness or primary cosmic-ray bombardment, which had been suggested by some authorities, were unimportant. Somewhat reluctantly, it was decided to repeat the experiment a third time.

The launching was uneventful. He was sent into space with the precision he expected. The experience was exhilarating and, although he had anticipated each event in advance, he could not possibly have foreseen the overpowering feeling that came over him. Weightlessness he had experienced for brief periods during training, but nothing could match the heady impression of continuous freedom from gravity.

Earth passing overhead was also to be expected from the simple laws of celestial mechanics but his feeling as he watched it now was inexpressible. It occurred to him that perhaps this was indeed why he was here, because he could appreciate such experiences best. He had been told the stars would be bright, unblinking, and an infinitude in extent, but could mere descriptions or photographs convey the true seeing?

On his twenty-first orbit he completed his overseeing the entire surface of the planet in daylight. He had seen more of Earth than anyone able to tell about it, but only he had the true feeling of it. The continents were clearly visible, as were the oceans and both polar ice caps. The shapes were familiar but in only a remote way. A vague indistinctness borne of distance served to modify the outlines and he alone was seeing and understanding. On the dark side of the planet large cities were marked by indistinct light areas which paled to insignificance compared to the stars and his sun.

He speculated about the others who had only briefly experienced these sights. Undoubtedly they weren’t as capable of fully grasping or appreciating any of these things as he was. It was quite clear that no one else but he could encompass the towering feeling of power and importance generated by being alone in the Universe.

At the end of the twenty-fifth orbit he disabled the radio control of the retro-rockets and sat back with satisfaction to await the next circuit of his Earth around Him.

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ABOUT THE AUTHORS

FORREST J ACKERMAN (1916 – 2008) was the world’s most famous collector of science fiction books and movie memorabilia, editor of Famous Monsters of Filmland and other books and magazines, and for over seven decades one of science fiction’s staunchest spokesmen and promoters. He wrote a small number of science fiction short stories.

* * * *

NEAL ASHER lives sometimes in England, sometimes in Crete and mostly at a keyboard. He climbed the writing ladder up through the small presses, publishing short stories, novellas and collections over many years, until finally having his first major book, Gridlinked, published in 2000 by Macmillan, who have since published sixteen of his books and whose schedule is now two years behind him.

These books have been translated into 12 languages and some have appeared in America from Tor. 2013 marks a return to his other US publisher, Night Shade Books, who produced Prador Moon and Shadow of the Scorpion and will be bringing out his Owner trilogy—The Departure, Zero Point & Jupiter War, respectively in February, May & September. For more information check out:

http://freespace.virgin.net/n.asher/
http://theskinner.blogspot.com/

* * * *

REGINALD BRETNOR (born Alfred Reginald Kahn; 1911

– 1992) was a science fiction author who flourished between the 1950s and 1980s. Most of his fiction was in short story form, and usually featured a whimsical story line or ironic plot twist. He also wrote on military theory and public affairs, and edited some of the earliest books to consider SF from a literary theory and criticism perspective.

* * * *

HANNES BOK, pseudonym for Wayne Francis Woodard (July 2, 1914 – April 11, 1964), was an American artist and illustrator, as well as an amateur astrologer and writer of fantasy fiction and poetry. He painted nearly 150 covers for various science fiction, fantasy, and detective fiction magazines, as well as contributing hundreds of black and white interior illustrations. Bok’s work graced the pages of calendars and early fanzines, as well as dust jackets from specialty book publishers like Arkham House, Shasta, and Fantasy Press. His paintings achieved a luminous quality through the use of an arduous glazing process, which was learned from his mentor, Maxfield Parrish. Bok was the first artist to win a Hugo Award.

* * * *

RAY BRADBURY (1920 – 2012) was an American fantasy, science fiction, horror and mystery fiction writer. Best known for his dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 (1953) and for the science fiction and horror stories gathered together as The Martian Chronicles (1950) and The Illustrated Man (1951), Bradbury was one of the most celebrated 20th-century American writers. Many of Bradbury’s works have been adapted into comic books, television shows and films.

* * * *

ADAM-TROY CASTRO is a science fiction, fantasy, and horror writer living in Miami, FL. He has more than ninety stories to his credit and has been nominated for numerous awards, including the Hugo, Nebula, and Stoker. These stories include four Spider-Man novels, including the Sinister Six trilogy, and stories involving characters of Andrea Cort, Ernst Vossoff, and Karl Nimmitz. Castro is also known for his Gustav Gloom series of middle-school novels and has also authored a reference book on The Amazing Race.

* * * *

SIR ARTHUR CHARLES CLARKE, CBE, FRAS, Sri Lankabhimanya, (16 December 1917 – 19 March 2008) was a British science fiction author, inventor, and futurist, famous for his short stories and novels, among them 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), and as a host and commentator in the British television series Mysterious World. For many years, Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and Clarke were known as the “Big Three” of science fiction.

* * * *

PHILIP K. DICK (1928 – 1982) was an American novelist, short story writer and essayist whose published work is almost entirely in the science fiction genre. Dick explored sociological, political and metaphysical themes in novels

dominated
by
monopolistic
corporations,
authoritarian governments, and altered states. In his later works Dick’s thematic focus strongly reflected his personal interest in metaphysics and theology. He often drew upon his own life experiences in addressing the nature of drug abuse, paranoia, schizophrenia, and transcendental experiences in novels such as A Scanner Darkly and VALIS.

* * * *

NANCY KRESS is the author of 31 books, most recently Flash Point (Viking, 2912), a YA about a future reality show.

Her work has won four Nebulas, two Hugos, a Sturgeon, and the John W. Campbell Memorial award. She frequently teaches writing at various venues around the country and abroad. Kress lives in Seattle with her husband, SF writer Jack Skillingstead, and Cosette, the world’s most spoiled toy poodle.

* * * *

HENRY KUTTNER (1915 – 1958) was an American author of science fiction, fantasy and horror. He was born in Los Angeles, California in 1915 and grew up in relative poverty following the death of his father. As a young man he worked for the literary agency of his uncle, Laurence

D’Orsay, in Los Angeles before selling his first story, “The Graveyard Rats,” to Weird Tales in early 1936.

* * * *

JAY LAKE is a science fiction and fantasy writer. In 2003

he was a quarterly first place winner in the Writers of the Future contest. In 2004 he won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in Science Fiction. He lives in Portland, Oregon and works as a product manager for a voice services company.

Lake’s writings have appeared in numerous publications, including Postscripts, Realms of Fantasy, Interzone, Strange Horizons, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Nemonymous, and the Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. He is an editor for the “Polyphony” anthology series from Wheatland Press, and was also a contributor to the Internet Review of Science Fiction.

* * * *

FRANK BELKNAP LONG (1901 – 1994) was a prolific American writer of horror fiction, fantasy, science fiction, poetry, gothic romance, comic books, and non-fiction.

Though his writing career spanned seven decades, he is best known for his horror and science fiction short stories, including early contributions to the Cthulhu Mythos.

During his life, Long received the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement (at the 1978 World Fantasy Convention), the Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement (in 1987, from the Horror Writers Association), and the First Fandom Hall of Fame Award (1977).

* * * *

JERRY OLTION (born 1957) is a science fiction author from Eugene, Oregon, known for numerous novels and short stories, including books in the Star Trek series. He is a member of the Wordos writers’ group and also writes under the pen name “Ryan Hughes.”

* * * *

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.”

* * * *

JERRY SOHL (1913 - 2002) was an American scriptwriter for The Twilight Zone (as a ghostwriter for Charles Beaumont), Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Outer Limits, Star Trek and other shows. He also wrote novels, feature film scripts, and the nonfiction works Underhanded Chess and Underhanded Bridge.

* * * *

Mary A. Turzillo is an American science fiction writer noted primarily for short stories. She won the Nebula Award for Best Novelette in 2000 for her story “Mars is No Place for Children,” (published originally in Science Fiction Age), and her story “Pride,” (published originally in Fast Forward 1), was a Nebula award finalist for best short story of 2007. Her first novel, An Old Fashioned Martian Girl was serialized in Analog magazine in 2004.

She was formerly a professor of English at Kent State University, where she wrote articles and several books of science fiction criticism under the name Mary T. Brizzi, including Reader’s Guide to Anne McCaffrey and Reader’s Guide to Philip Jose Farmer. She attended the Clarion Workshop in 1985, and she founded the Cajun Sushi Hamsters writing workshop in Cleveland, OH.

* * * *

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.

* * * *

CYRIL M. KORNBLUTH (1923 – 1958) was an American science fiction author and a notable member of the Futurians. He used a variety of pen-names, including Cecil Corwin, S. D. Gottesman, Edward J. Bellin, Kenneth Falconer, Walter C. Davies, Simon Eisner, Jordan Park, Arthur Cooke, Paul Dennis Lavond and Scott Mariner. The

“M” in Kornbluth’s name may have been in tribute to his wife, Mary Byers; Kornbluth’s colleague and collaborator Frederik Pohl confirmed Kornbluth’s lack of any actual middle name in at least one interview.

* * * *

SAMUEL R. DELANY, JR. is an American author, professor and literary critic. His work includes a number of

novels, many in the science fiction genre, as well as memoir, criticism, and essays on sexuality and society.

* * * *

HOWARD WALDROP writes about his and A. A.

JACKSON IV’s story: “The new stuff in my life is The Moone World, forthcoming from Small Beer Press (and Easton Press), and The Search for Tom Purdue (forthcoming from Subterranean). Al’s getting more and more respect as an astro-physicist. Among other things, he was the guy who trained the astronauts on the shuttle simulator, and had to teach them to keep their hands off the stick, unless something went wrong. He put a command in the readouts that said, ‘Bite the Biscuit’ so they’d klnow when it was real.”

* * * *

HARRY WARNER, JR. Harry Warner, Jr. (December 19, 1922 – February 17, 2003) was an American journalist. He spent 40 years working for the Hagerstown, Maryland, Herald-Mail. He was also an important science fiction fan and historian of fandom, known for his non-fiction books All Our Yesterdays and A Wealth of Fable.

* * * *

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. His most recent book is Mind Candy, a collection of essays on pulp culture. His most recent fiction book is Tales of Ethshar, a collection of short stories set in the same universe as The Misenchanted Sword and many of his finest fantasy novels.

* * * *

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.

OceanofPDF.com

Document Outline

- COPYRIGHT INFO
- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
- A NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHER

- OUT OF ALL THEM BRIGHT STARS, by Nancy Kress

- THE HANGING STRANGER, by Philip K. Dick
- WALKING JOHN AND BIRD, by Neal Asher
- THE SYMPHONIC ABDUCTION, by Hannes Bok

- THE NINE BILLION NAMES OF GOD, by Arthur C. Clarke

- HILLARY ORBITS VENUS, by Pamela Sargent

- MAYBE JUST A LITTLE ONE, by Reginald Bretnor

- THE ULTROOM ERROR, by Jerry Sohl

- REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS TO COME, by Lawrence Watt-Evans

- THE ASTRONAUT FROM WYOMING, by Adam-Troy Castro & Jerry Oltion

- PRIDE, by Mary A. Turzillo

- CAT AND MOUSE, by Ralph Williams

- THE RECORD, by Forrest J Ackerman and Ray Bradbury

- THE NEW REALITY, by Reginald Bretnor
- WHAT HATH ME? by Henry Kuttner
- BRIDGE OF SILENCE, by George Zebrowski

- SUN’S UP, by A.A. Jackson IV and Howard Waldrop

- CONSIGNMENT, by Alan E. Nourse
- THE SYNDIC, by C.M. Kornbluth (Part 1)
- THE SYNDIC, by C. M. Kornbluth (Part II)
- AFTER BONESTELL, by Jay Lake

- THE JEWELS OF APTOR, by Samuel R. Delany (Part 1)

- THE JEWELS OF APTOR, by Samuel R. Delany (Part 2)

- THE MISSISSIPPI SAUCER, by Frank Belknap Long

- MEMBERSHIP DRIVE, by Murray F. Yaco
- CANCER WORLD, by Harry Warner, Jr.
- EGOCENTRIC ORBIT, by John Cory
- ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Table of Contents

- COPYRIGHT INFO
- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
- A NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHER

- OUT OF ALL THEM BRIGHT STARS, by Nancy Kress

- THE HANGING STRANGER, by Philip K. Dick
- WALKING JOHN AND BIRD, by Neal Asher
- THE SYMPHONIC ABDUCTION, by Hannes Bok

- THE NINE BILLION NAMES OF GOD, by Arthur C. Clarke

- HILLARY ORBITS VENUS, by Pamela Sargent

- MAYBE JUST A LITTLE ONE, by Reginald Bretnor

- THE ULTROOM ERROR, by Jerry Sohl

- REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS TO COME, by Lawrence Watt-Evans

- THE ASTRONAUT FROM WYOMING, by Adam-Troy Castro & Jerry Oltion

- PRIDE, by Mary A. Turzillo

- CAT AND MOUSE, by Ralph Williams

- THE RECORD, by Forrest J Ackerman and Ray Bradbury

- THE NEW REALITY, by Reginald Bretnor
- WHAT HATH ME? by Henry Kuttner
- BRIDGE OF SILENCE, by George Zebrowski

- SUN’S UP, by A.A. Jackson IV and Howard Waldrop

- CONSIGNMENT, by Alan E. Nourse
- THE SYNDIC, by C.M. Kornbluth (Part 1)
- THE SYNDIC, by C. M. Kornbluth (Part II)
- AFTER BONESTELL, by Jay Lake

- THE JEWELS OF APTOR, by Samuel R. Delany (Part 1)

- THE JEWELS OF APTOR, by Samuel R. Delany (Part 2)

- THE MISSISSIPPI SAUCER, by Frank Belknap Long

- MEMBERSHIP DRIVE, by Murray F. Yaco
- CANCER WORLD, by Harry Warner, Jr.
- EGOCENTRIC ORBIT, by John Cory
- ABOUT THE AUTHORS