The Frank Belknap Long Science Fiction Novel MEGAPACK: 4 Great Novels
Author: Frank Belknap Long
Date: 2016-03-19 00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Fiction; Adventure; Pulp; General; Action; Sci-Fi; Science Fiction
Description: Frank Belknap Long (1901-1994) -- one of the early masters of fantasy and science fiction, friend of (and collaborator with) H.P. Lovecraft -- produced hundreds of novels, short stories, and poems throughout his long and distinguished career. From fantasy and horror in Weird Tales to action-adventure science fiction in Planet Stories and Thrilling Wonder Stories to more "nuts and bolts" science fiction in Astounding Stories, and also work in the romance and mystery fields, his career spanned 7 decades and was filled with remarkable achievements. He received the World Fantasy Award for Life Ach
Publisher: Wildside Press
Rights: Copyright © 2016 by Wildside Press LLC. All rights reserved

Contents

COPYRIGHT INFO

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHER

The MEGAPACK® Ebook Series

SPACE STATION 1

MARS IS MY DESTINATION

THE THREE FACES OF TIME

SURVIVAL WORLD

COPYRIGHT INFO

The Frank Belknap Long Science Fiction Novel MEGAPACK® is copyright © 2016 by Wildside Press, LLC. All rights reserved.

* * * *

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

* * * *

Space Station 1 was originally published in 1957.

Mars Is My Destination was originally published in 1962.

The Three Faces of Time is copyright © 1969 by Frank Belknap Long. Reprinted by permission.

Survival World is copyright © 1972 by Frank Belknap Long. Reprinted by permission.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book has been prepared and published with the kind permission and assistance of Lily Doty, Mansfield M. Doty, and the family of Frank Belknap Long.

A NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHER

Frank Belknap (1901-1994)—one of the early masters of fantasy and science fiction, friend of (and collaborator with) H.P. Lovecraft—produced hundreds of novels, short stories, and poems throughout his long and distinguished career. From fantasy and horror in Weird Tales to action-adventure science fiction in Planet Stories and Thrilling Wonder Stories to more “nuts and bolts” science fiction in Astounding Stories, and also work in the romance and mystery fields, his career spanned 7 decades and was filled with remarkable achievements.

He 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 of America, and the First Fandom Hall of Fame Award in 1977.

This collection assembles 4 of his best science fiction novels:

Space Station 1

Mars Is My Destination

The Three Faces of Time

Survival World

Enjoy!

—John Betancourt

Publisher, Wildside Press LLC
www.wildsidepress.com

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SPACE STATION 1

Originally published in 1957.

1

It was a life-and-death struggle—cruel, remorseless, one-sided. Corriston was breathing heavily. He was in total darkness, dodging the blows of a killer. His adversary was as lithe as a cat, muscular and dangerous. He had a knife and he was using it, slashing at Corriston when Corriston came close, then leaping back and lashing out with a hard-knuckled fist.

Corriston could hear the swish of the man’s heels as he pivoted, could judge almost with split-second timing when the next blow would come. He was bleeding from a cut on his right shoulder, and there was a tumultuous throbbing at his temples, an ache in his groin.

The fact that he had no weapon put him at a terrifying disadvantage. He had been close to death before, but never in so confined a space or in such close proximity to a man who had certainly killed once and would not hesitate to kill again.

His determination to survive was pitted against what appeared to be sheer brute strength fortified by cunning and a far-above-average agility. He began slowly to retreat, backing away until a massive steel girder stopped him. He was battling dizziness now and his heart had begun a furious pounding.

He found himself slipping sideways along the girder, running his hands over its smooth, cold surface. To his sweating palms the surface seemed as chill as the lid of a coffin, but he refused to believe that it could trap him irretrievably. The girder had to end somewhere.

The killer was coming close again, his shoes making a scraping sound in the darkness, his breathing just barely audible. Corriston edged still further along the girder. Inch by inch he moved parallel to it, fighting off his dizziness, making a desperate effort to keep from falling. The wetness on his shoulder was unnerving, the absence of pain incredible. How seriously could a man be stabbed without feeling any pain at all? He didn’t know. But at least his shoulder wasn’t paralyzed. He could move his arm freely, flex the muscles of his back.

How unbelievably cruel it was that a ship could move through space with the stability of a completely stationary object. How unbelievably cruel at this moment, when the slightest lurch might have saved him.

The girder was stationary and immense, and in his tormented inward vision he saw it as a strand in a gigantic steel cobweb, symbolizing the grandeur of what man could accomplish by routine compulsion alone.

In frozen helplessness Corriston tried to bring his thoughts into closer accord with reality, to view his peril in a saner light. But what was happening to him was as hard to relate to immediate reality as a line half remembered from a play. See how the blood of Caesar followed it, as if rushing out of doors to be resolved if Brutus so unkindly knocked or no.…

But the killer wasn’t Brutus. He was unknown and invisible and if there had been any Brutuslike nobility in him, it hardly seemed likely that he would have chosen for his first victim a wealthy girl’s too talkative bodyguard and for his second Corriston himself.

The killer was within arm’s reach again when the barrier that had trapped Corriston fell away abruptly. He reeled back, swayed dizzily, and experienced such wild elation that he cried out in unreasoning triumph. Swiftly he retreated backwards, not fully realizing that no real respite had been granted him. He was free only to recoil a few steps, to crouch and weave about. Almost instantly the killer was closing in again, and this time there was no escape.

Another metal girder stopped Corriston in midretreat, cutting across his shoulders like a sharp-angled priming rod, jolting and sobering him.

For an eternity now he could do nothing but wait. An eternity as brief as a dropped heartbeat and as long as the cycle of renewal and rebirth of worlds in the flaming vastness of space. Everything became impersonal suddenly: the darkness of the ships’ between-deck storage compartment; the Space Station toward which the ship was traveling; the Martian deserts he had dreamed about as a boy.

The killer spoke then, for the first time. His voice rang out in the darkness, harsh with contempt and rage. It was in some respects a surprising voice, the voice of an educated man. But it was also a voice that had in it an accent that Corriston had heard before in verbal documentaries and hundreds of newsreels; in clinical case histories, microfilm recorded, in penal institutions, on governing bodies, and wherever men were in a position to destroy others—or perhaps themselves. It was the voice of an unloved, unwanted man.

The voice said: “You’re done for, my friend. I don’t know what the Ramsey girl told you, but you came looking for me, and it’s too late now for any kind of compromise.”

“I wasn’t looking for a deal,” Corriston said. “If it’s any satisfaction to you, Miss Ramsey told me nothing. But I saw a man killed; and I couldn’t find her afterwards. I think you know what happened to her. Knife me, if you can. I’ll go down fighting.”

“That’s easy to say. Maybe you didn’t come looking for me. But you know too much now to go on living. Unless you—wait a minute! You mentioned a deal. If you’re lying about the Ramsey girl and will tell me where she is, I might not kill you.”

“I wasn’t lying,” Corriston said.

“Hell…you’re really asking for it.”

“I’m afraid I am.”

“It won’t be a pleasant way to die.”

“Any way is unpleasant. But I’m not dead yet. Killing me may not be as easy as you think.”

“It will be easy enough. This time you won’t get past me.”

Corriston knew that the conversation was about to end unless something unexpected happened. And he didn’t think there was much chance of that. Had he been clasping a metal tool, he would have swung hard enough to kill with it. But he wasn’t clasping anything. He was crouching low, and suddenly he leapt straight forward into the darkness.

His head collided with a bony knee and his hands went swiftly out and around invisible ankles. He tightened his grip, half expecting the knife to descend and bury itself in his back. But it didn’t. The other had been taken so completely by surprise that he simply went backwards, suddenly, and with a strangled oath.

Instantly Corriston was on top of him. He shifted his grip, releasing both of the struggling man’s ankles and remorselessly seizing his wrists. He raised his right knee and brought it savagely downward, again and again and again. A cry of pain echoed through the darkness. The killer, crying out in torment, tried to twist free.

For an instant the outcome remained uncertain, a see-saw contest of strength. Then Corriston had the knife and the struggle was over.

Corriston made a mistake then of relaxing a little. Instantly, the killer rolled sideways, broke Corriston’s grip, and was on his feet. He did not attempt to retaliate in any way. He simply disappeared into the darkness, breathing so loudly that Corriston could tell when the distance between them had dwindled to the vanishing point.

Corriston sat very still in the darkness, holding on tightly to the knife. His triumph had been unexpected and complete. It had been close to miraculous. Strange that he should be aware of that and yet feel only a dark horror growing in his mind. Strange that he should remember so quickly again the horror of a man gasping out his life with a thorned barb protruding from his side.

It had begun a half-hour earlier in the general passenger cabin. It had begun with a wonder and a rejoicing.

Tremendous and glittering, the Space Station had come floating up out of the Big Dark like a golden bubble on an onrushing tidal wave. It had hovered for an instant in the precise center of the viewscreen, its steep, climbing trail shedding radiance in all directions. Then it had descended vertically until it almost filled the lower half of the screen, and finally was lost to view in a wilderness of space.

When it appeared for the second time, it was larger still and its shadow was a swiftly widening crescent blotting out the nearer stars.

“There it is!” someone whispered.

It had been unreasonably quiet in the general passenger cabin, and for a moment no other sound was audible. Then the whisper was caught up and amplified by a dozen awestruck voices. It became a murmur of amazement and of wonder, and as it increased in volume, the screen seemed to glow with an almost unbelievable brightness.

Everyone was aware of the brightness. But how much of it was subjective no one knew or cared. To a man in the larger darkness of space, a dead sea bottom on Mars, or a moon-landing ship wrapped in eternal darkness on a lonely peak in the Lunar Apennines may glow with a noonday splendor.

“They said a space station that size could never be built,” David Corriston said, leaning abruptly forward in his chair. “They quoted reams of statistics: height above the center of the Earth in kilometers, orbital velocity, relation of mass to maneuverability. The experts had a field day. They went far out on a limb to convince anyone who would listen that a station weighing thousands of tons would never get past the blueprint stage. But the men who built it had enough pride and confidence in human skill to achieve the impossible.”

The girl at Corriston’s side looked startled for an instant, as though the ironclad assurance of so young a man was as much of a surprise as his unexpected nearness, and somehow even more disquieting older.

She was certainly somewhat older than he was—about three or four years. She was an exceptionally pretty girl, her fair hair fluffed out from under a blue beret, her ship’s lounge jacket a youth-accentuating miracle of casual tailoring that would have looked well on a woman of any age. She had the kind of eyes Corriston liked best of all in a woman: longlashed, observant, and bright with glints of humor.

She had the kind of mouth he liked too—a mouth which suggested that she could be, by turns, capricious, level-headed, and audaciously friendly with strangers without in any way inviting familiarity. There was a certain paradoxical timidity in her gaze too. It was manifesting itself now in an obvious reluctance to be startled too abruptly by space engineering talk from a young man who had taken her companionability for granted and who was obviously given to snap judgments.

She brushed back the hair on her right temple, her brown eyes upraised to study Corriston more closely.

He hoped that she would realize upon reflection that she was behaving foolishly. He had taken a certain liberty in talking to her as he would have talked to an old acquaintance in a long-awaited meeting of minds. On the big screen a space station that couldn’t be built was sweeping in toward the ship with eighty-five years of unparallelled scientific progress behind it.

First had come the Earth satellites, eight of them in their neat little orbits. They had used low-energy fuels, had kept close to the Earth, and no one had seriously expected them to do more than record weather information and relay radio signals. For fifteen years they could be seen with small telescopes and even with the unaided eye on bright, cloudless nights in both hemispheres.

First had come these small, relatively unimportant artificial moons and then, on a night in October 1972, the first space platform had been launched. Soon the sky above the Earth was swarming with radar warning platforms, a dozen men to operate them, and carrier-based jets equipped with formidable atomic warheads.

Nevertheless, how could anyone have known that in another twenty years interplanetary space flight would become a war-averting reality? How could anyone have known that by the year 2007 there would be human settlements on Mars and by the year 2022 the actual transportation to Mars of city-building materials?

2

Corriston was beginning to feel uncomfortable. He wished that the girl would say something instead of just continuing to stare at him. She seemed to be interested in his uniform. She appeared to be gazing at him interrogatively, as if she wanted to know more about him before promising anything.

He wondered what her unconscious purpose was. Did she see in him the quiet, determined type who was all set to accomplish something important. Or was she regretting he wasn’t the hard-living, cynical type who had been everywhere and done everything?

Well, one way to find out was to be himself: a man average in every way, but with a hard core of idealism in his nature, a creative mind and enough independence and self-assurance to give a good account of himself in any struggle which brought his central beliefs under fire or placed them in long-range jeopardy.

And so Corriston suddenly found himself talking about the Station again.

“Not many people have grasped the importance of it yet,” he said. “One station will service our needs, instead of fifty-seven, one tremendous central terminal and re-fueling depot for all of the ships. Do you realize what that could mean?”

Abruptly there was a startling warmth in the girl’s eyes, an unmistakable look of interest and encouragement.

“Just what could it mean?” she asked.

“Any kind of steady growth across the years leads to centralization, to bigness. And that bigness becomes time-hallowed and magnified out of all proportion to its original significance. The Space Station is no exception. It started with the primitive Earth satellites and branched out into fifty-seven larger stations. Now it’s tremendous, a single central station that can impose its influence in ship clearance matters with an almost unanswerable finality.”

A shadow had come into the girl’s eyes. “But not completely without checks and balances. The Earth Federation can challenge its supremacy at any point.”

“Yes, and I’m glad that the challenge remains a factor to be reckoned with. As matters stand now the Station’s prestige can’t be implemented with what might well become the iron hand of an intolerable tyranny. As matters stand, the Station is actually a big step forward. People once talked of centralization as if it were some kind of indecent human bogey. It isn’t at all. It’s simply a fluid means to an end, a necessary commitment if a society is to achieve greatness. If the authority behind the Station respects scientific truth and human dignity—if it remains empirically minded—I shall serve it to the best of my ability. No one knows for sure whether what is good outbalances what is bad in any human institution, or any human being. A man can only give the best of himself to what he believes in.”

“Sorry to interrupt,” an amused voice said, “but the captain wants you to join him in a last-minute celebration: a toast, a press photograph—that sort of nonsense. A six hour trip, and he hasn’t even been introduced to you. But if you don’t appear at his table in ten minutes he’ll throw the book at me.”

Corriston looked up in surprise at the big man confronting them. He had approached so unobtrusively that for an instant Corriston was angry; but only for an instant. When he took careful stock of the fellow his resentment evaporated. There was a cordiality about him which could not have been counterfeited. It reached from the breadth of his smile to his gray eyes puckered in amusement. He was really big physically, in a wholly genial and relaxed way, and his voice was that of a man who could walk up to a bar, pay a bill and leave an everlasting impression of hearty good nature behind him.

“Well, young lady?” he asked.

“I’m not particularly keen about the idea, Jim, but if the captain has actually iced the champagne, it would be a shame to disappoint him.”

Corriston was aware that his companion was getting to her feet. The interruption had been unexpected, but much to his surprise he found himself accepting it without rancor. If he lost her for a few moments he could quickly enough find her again; and somehow he felt convinced that the big man was not a torch-carrying admirer.

“I’ll have to stop off in the ladies’ lounge first,” she said. She had opened her vanity case and was making a swift inventory of its contents. “Two shades of lipstick, but no powder! Oh, well.”

She smiled at the big man and then at Corriston, gesturing slightly as she did so.

“We’ve just been discussing the Station,” she said. “This gentleman hasn’t told me his name—”

“Lieutenant David Corriston,” Corriston said quickly. “My interest in the Station is tied in with my job. I’ve just been assigned to it in the very modest capacity of ship’s inspection officer, recruit status.”

The big man stared at Corriston more intently, his eyes kindling with a sudden increase of interest. “Say, I wonder if you could spare me a few minutes. When my friends ask me I’d like to be able to talk intelligently about the terrific headaches the research people must have experienced right from the start. The expenditure of fuel alone.…”

“See you in the Captain’s cabin, Jim,” the girl said.

She moved out from her chair, her expression slightly constrained. Was it just imagination, or had the big man’s immoderate expansiveness grated on her and brought a look of displeasure to her young face? Corriston couldn’t be sure, and his brow remained furrowed as he watched her cross the passenger cabin and disappear into the ladies’ lounge.

“I’m Jim Clakey,” the big man said.

Corriston reseated himself, a troubled indecision still apparent in his stare. Then gradually he found himself relaxing. He nodded up at the big man. “Sit down, Mr. Clakey,” he said. “Ask me anything you want. Security imposes some pretty rigid restrictions, but I’ll let you know when you start treading on classified ground.”

Clakey sat down and crossed his long legs. He was silent for a moment. Then he said: “You know who she is, of course.”

Corriston shook his head. “I’m afraid I haven’t the slightest idea.”

“She isn’t traveling under her real name only because her father is a very sensible and cautious man. You’d be cautious too, perhaps, if you were Stephen Ramsey.”

Clakey’s gaze had traveled to the ladies’ lounge, and for an instant he seemed unaware of Corriston’s incredulous stare.

“You mean I’ve actually been sitting here talking to Stephen Ramsey’s daughter?”

“That’s right,” Clakey said, turning to grin amiably at Corriston. “And now you’re talking to her personal bodyguard. I’m not surprised you didn’t recognize her, though; very few people do. She doesn’t like to have her picture taken. Her dad wouldn’t object to that kind of publicity particularly, but she’s even more cautious than he is.”

The door of the ladies’ lounge opened and two young women came out. They were laughing and talking with great animation and were quickly lost to view as other passengers changed their position in front of the viewscreen.

The door remained visible, however—a rectangle of shining whiteness only slightly encroached upon by dark blue drapes. Corriston found himself staring at it as his mind dwelt on the startling implications of Clakey’s almost unbelievable statement.

“Biggest man on Mars,” Clakey was saying. “Cornered uranium; froze out the original settlers. They’re threatening violence, but their hands are tied. Everything was done legally. Ramsey lives in a garrisoned fortress and they can’t get within twenty miles of him. He’s a damned scoundrel with tremendous vision and foresight.”

Corriston suddenly realized that he had made a serious psychological blunder in sizing up Clakey. The man was a blabbermouth. True, Corriston’s uniform was a character recommendation which might have justified candor to a moderate extent. But Clakey was talking outrageously out of turn. He was becoming confidential about matters he had no right to discuss with anyone on such short acquaintance. Corriston suddenly realized that Clakey was slightly drunk.

“Look here,” Corriston said. “You’re talking like a fool. Do you know what you’re saying?”

“Sure I know. Miss Ramsey is a golden girl. And I’m her bodyguard…important trust…sop to a man’s egoism.”

An astonishing thing happened then. Clakey fell silent and remained uncommunicative for five full minutes. Corriston had no desire to start him talking again. He was appalled and incredulous. He was debating the advisability of getting up with a frozen stare and a firm determination to take himself elsewhere when the crazy, loose-tongued fool leapt unexpectedly to his feet.

“She’s taking too long!” he exclaimed. “It just isn’t like her. She’d never keep the captain waiting.”

As he spoke, another woman came out of the ladies’ lounge. She was small, dark, very pretty, and she seemed a little embarrassed when she saw how intently Clakey was staring at her. Then a middle-aged woman came out, with a finely-modeled face, and a second, younger woman with haggard eyes and a sallow complexion who was in all respects the opposite of attractive.

“She’s been in there for fifteen minutes,” Clakey said, starting toward the lounge.

“It takes a good many women twice that long to apply makeup properly,” Corriston pointed out. “I just don’t see—”

“You don’t know her,” Clakey said, impatiently. “I may have to ask one of those women to go in after her.”

“But why? You can’t seriously believe she’s in any danger. We both saw her go into the lounge. She made the decision on the spur of the moment and no one could have known about it in advance. No one followed her in. You were sitting right here watching the door.”

But Clakey was already advancing across the cabin. He was reeling a little, and a dull flush had mounted to his cheekbones. He seemed genuinely alarmed. Corriston was about to follow him when something bright flashed through the air with a faint swishing sound.

A startled cry burst from Clakey’s lips. He clutched at his side, staggered, and half-swung about, a look of incredulous horror in his eyes.

Corriston’s mouth went dry. He stood very still, watching Clakey lose all control over his legs. The change in the stricken man’s expression was ghastly. His cheeks had gone dead white, and now, as Corriston stared, a spasm convulsed his features, twisting them into a horrible, unnatural caricature of a human face—a rigidly contorted mask with a blanched, wide-angled mouth and bulging eyes.

A passenger saw him and screamed. His knees had given way and his huge frame seemed to be coming apart at the joints. He straightened out on the deck, jerking his head spasmodically, propelling himself backwards by his elbows. Almost as if with conscious intent, his body arched itself, sank level with the floor, then arched itself again.

It was as though all of his muscles and nerves were protesting the violence that had been done to him, and were seeking by muscular contractions alone to dislodge the stiff, thorned horror protruding from his flesh.

He went limp and the barbed shaft ceased to quiver. Corriston had a nerve-shattering glimpse of a swiftly spreading redness just above Clakey’s right hipbone. The entire barb turned red, as if its feathery spines had acquired a sudden, unnatural affinity for human blood.

Corriston started forward, then changed his mind. Several passengers had moved quickly to Clakey’s side and were bending above him. Someone called out: “Get a doctor!”

Corriston turned abruptly and strode toward the ladies’ lounge. Brushing aside such scruples as he ordinarily would have entertained, he threw open the door and went inside.

He called out: “Miss Ramsey?” When he received no answer he searched the lounge thoroughly. There was no one there. He was thinking fast now, desperately fast. He hadn’t seen her come out and neither had Clakey. He’d seen four women come out: three young women and an elderly one. None of them faintly resembled the girl he’d been talking to.

The first young woman had emerged almost immediately. He remembered how intently Clakey had been watching the door. Clakey had sat down to discuss the Station with him, and in less than two minutes the first young lady had emerged. Then neither of them had taken their eyes from the door for five or six minutes. The second young lady had apparently known someone in the crowd. She had seemed annoyed by Clakey’s persistent stare and had disappeared quickly. The elderly woman had looked her age. Her walk, her carriage, the lines of her face had borne the unmistakable stamp of genteel aging, and the dignity inseparable from it. The last woman had been the drab creature.

Corriston had a poor memory for faces and he knew that he couldn’t count on recognizing any of them—except perhaps the elderly woman—if he saw them again.

It was good that he could smile, even at his own inanities. It relieved tension. Almost instantly the smile vanished. His aspect became that of a man in deadly danger on the brink of a hundred foot precipice, a man completely in the dark and yet grimly determined not to go over the edge or take a single step in the wrong direction.

Where, he asked himself, do women ordinarily go when they vanish into thin air? Wasn’t it pretty well established that ghosts were likely to follow the path of least resistance and fulfill obligations entered into in the flesh?

The captain’s cabin! The captain would be disappointed if she failed to appear at least briefly at his table; and she had promised to do so. It was a wild, premeditated assault on the rational, but putting the irrational aspect of it aside, it was also realistic and reasonable. If by some incredible miracle she had eluded Clakey’s vigilance and actually slipped from the lounge, she would almost certainly have gone straight to the captain’s cabin.

3

Corriston left the ladies’ lounge faster than he had entered it. He shut the door firmly and stood for an instant staring at the passengers who had gathered in an even tighter knot around Clakey and were making it difficult for an alarmed young ship’s doctor to get to him. He was quite sure in his own mind that Clakey would not need the assistance of a doctor.

Then he turned and headed for the captain’s cabin. Anyone could have gotten in. The door was ajar and there was no one guarding it. He threw the door wide and everything was just as he’d expected to find it: It was completely empty.

No guests at all to welcome Corriston to the big, empty cabin. Then he saw that there was another door opposite.

Corriston was getting scared, really scared. There was an odd, detached, whimsical feeling at the surface of his mind, but it cloaked something distinctly sinister. He had more than half-expected the captain to be absent from his cabin. But something about the silence and the emptiness chilled him to the core of his being.

With an effort he shook the feeling off. He didn’t know where the inner door led to. He hesitated for an instant, realizing that the mere existence of a second door could complicate his search to the point of futility. If it led to a second cabin—well and good. But if it didn’t.…

He strained his ears to catch the sound of voices. There were no voices. He could have simply crossed to the door and looked beyond it. But the state of his nerves, and an odd habit he had of being precise and cautious under tension, made him explore the other possibilities first.

The door might conceivably be a trap. A trap does not have to be contrived in advance with some clearly defined purpose in mind. Circumstances can take a door or a window and turn it into a trap. A glove or a weapon left lying about can be picked up by an innocent man and snare him most damnably by seeming to point up his guilt.

What purpose did the inner door serve? Did it open on a corridor leading back to the general passenger cabin? If it did, it wouldn’t be a trap; it would simply have “blind alley” stamped all over it.

Corriston suddenly realized that he was succumbing to a crazy kind of inaction. The door could lead almost anywhere, and if he had any sense at all he’d go through it fast.

Go through it he did, in six long strides. He’d been right about one thing—the blind alley part. He found himself, in not quite total darkness, in what was unquestionably an intership passageway. There was just light enough for him to make out the shadowy walls on both sides of him. Rather they were like metal bulkheads that gave off just enough reflected light for him to see by.

He wouldn’t have considered ten or twelve seconds spent with a pocket flash a waste of time. But he had no pocket flash. The best he could do was stretch out both of his arms to determine just how far apart the bulkheads were. They were less than six feet apart.

Well, no sense in measuring the walls. A girl he’d talked to and liked instantly had vanished in a dark world, and he knew now that there was more than mere liking in the way he felt about her. He didn’t dare ask himself how much more, not in so confined a space and with his chances of finding her again dwindling with every second that passed.

The passageway ended in a blank wall, less than forty feet from its beginning. Corriston saw the wall and was advancing toward it when he suddenly realized that the deck itself wasn’t continuous. In his path, and almost directly underfoot, a companionway entrance yawned, so unexpectedly close that another short step would have sent him plunging into it. He saw the faint light reflected on its circumference and halted just in time to avoid a possibly fatal fall.

He knelt and stared down into a spiraling web of darkness. He could see a faint glimmer of light on metal and knew that he was bending above either a circular staircase or a companionway ladder. It turned out to be a staircase. Down it he went, moving cautiously, holding on to the supporting guide rail as he descended deeper and deeper into the darkness.

The darkness became almost absolute when the stairs ended. For a moment, at least, what appeared to be utter blackness engulfed him. Then gradually his vision became more effective. He could make out the faint outlines of stationary objects, of depths beyond depths, of crisscrossing lines and angles.

In utter darkness the glint of metal often seemed to draw the eyes like a magnet, to make itself known even without illumination. But there seemed to be a faint glow far off somewhere. He couldn’t be sure, but light there should have been if—as he more than half-suspected—he was in one of the ship’s below-deck ballast or storage compartments.

The deck beneath his feet was straight and level and cluttered with no impediments. He moved forward warily, testing every step until a wall of metal stopped him. He halted abruptly, felt along the barrier and became aware that it was studded with small bolts and was just a little corrugated. Exhibit A: one supporting metal beam, rough and slightly uneven in texture. Abruptly he reached the end of it and found himself underway again, still moving cautiously to avoid unseen pitfalls. He had not progressed more than a dozen feet when he heard the scrape of footsteps other than his own, and someone moved up close to him and blocked his way in the darkness.

For an instant the wild thought went through his mind that the someone was the captain. But he had seen and talked with the Captain and that self-contained, blunt-spoken man wasn’t nearly as big physically as the path-blocker seemed to be.

The someone did not speak. But Corriston could sense the enmity flowing from him, the utter refusal to budge an inch, the determination to make his nearness a deadly threat in itself. Then the someone moved back a step. The far-off light could hardly have been an illusion, because for the barest instant Corriston could dimly make out the huge bulk of the man and the glint of the knife in his hand.

Two big men in the space of half an hour! The first had ceased to draw breath and the second was his killer. Corriston was suddenly sure of it. He knew it instinctively.

Then began the struggle which had almost robbed Corriston of his life, the cruel, one-sided, impossible-to-win struggle in total darkness.

And Corriston had won it.

* * * *

Now almost in disbelief, Corriston looked down at the knife he had taken from the loser, telling himself that it was impossible that so much could have happened in so short a time and that he could still be alive at the end of it.

The wound in his shoulder was no longer painless, but it had ceased to bleed profusely, and his exploring fingers convinced him that the knife had severed no more than a superficial ligament. He strained his ears in the sudden quiet, listening for a possible return of his adversary. He did not think that the defeated man would attempt a second attack. But there was no telling what he might or might not do. Probably he’d ascended the companionway by now and was mingling with the other passengers.

The final link in Corriston’s search had snapped. Even while battling for his life, he had felt close to the vanished girl. The man who had killed Clakey had been at least a link, a link that, short of Corriston’s total defeat, might have been seized upon with physical violence and made to yield up its secret.

Now Corriston found himself wondering if the defeated man had been telling the truth. Had the link been non-existent from the first? Was the killer as completely in the dark as he was as to the whereabouts of Ramsey’s daughter?

It was difficult to believe that the man had been lying. Despite his hatred and denials he had offered Corriston a deal: “Tell me where the girl is and I may not kill you.” The deal part had been a lie, of course. He would have gone on and attempted to kill Corriston anyway. But his plea for information, that tentative, cunning feeler in the dark had seemed genuine.

What had been the man’s purpose in killing Clakey? Why had Clakey been murdered in the general passenger cabin, in plain view of the other passengers? Because the killer had seen the girl go into the lounge and thought she was still there? And because he wanted free and instant access to her, with Clakey out of the way? It was the only answer that made sense.

The killer must have known that Clakey was in Ramsey’s employ and had been guarding Ramsey’s daughter. Why then had he been unable to take advantage of his crime in any way? Apparently neither he nor a possible confederate had succeeded in what almost certainly had been a pattern of violence directed at Ramsey through his daughter—a plan obviously worked out in advance, ready to be put into operation the instant a promising opportunity presented itself.

Into Corriston’s mind flashed an ugly picture of the girl pinioned by strong arms and with a handkerchief pressed to her face. She had ceased to struggle and was being spirited quickly away. The picture became even more intolerable when he saw her held captive in a cabin difficult to locate, at the mercy of men without compassion.

But for some reason he’d never cease to be thankful for, it hadn’t happened that way. Something had gone wrong with the plan, and the killer didn’t even know when and why and how she had vanished. Sharing Corriston’s frustration, he had been struggling simply to save himself, to keep Corriston from identifying and exposing him. The fury he’d displayed was not difficult to understand.

Corriston found himself becoming more confident again, less dominated by despair. The change in his mood surprised him but he seized upon it gratefully and started building on it. There was only one logical next move. He must find the captain quickly and enlist his help. He must take the master of the ship fully into his confidence. With every gift of persuasion at his command, he must make the captain see how the danger of Ramsey’s daughter was mounting and would continue to mount with every minute that she remained unfound.

He still felt dizzy, and his head was aching a little, but he moved quickly through the darkness, his faculties heightened by an intensity of purpose which enabled him to find the companionway without colliding with obstacles or taking a wrong turn. Up the stairway he climbed, still clutching the knife, prepared for a possible second encounter with its original owner.

An attempt to regain the knife by trickery and stealth would not have surprised him. In fact, it was not at all difficult for him to picture a silent form flattened against the stair-rail, waiting for just the right moment to come hurtling toward him out of the darkness. For a moment, as he ascended, the strain became almost unendurable. Then the darkness dissolved above him, and he was advancing toward the captain’s cabin through the narrow passageway which he had spanned with his arms spread wide.

He did not stop to span it this time. He emerged into the cabin and stood for an instant blinking in the sudden light. The cabin was still deserted. It was anybody’s guess where the captain had gone or when he would be returning, and Corriston decided not to wait. He walked to the door, opened it and stepped out into the general passenger cabin.

No one saw him immediately. There were several passengers fairly close to him, but they were being attentive for the moment to the words and gestures of a tall, dignified looking man with observant brown eyes, a ruddy complexion, and gold braid on his shoulders. The tall man was Captain John Sanders.

“I’d be a hypocrite and a liar if I said there was no justification for alarm,” Sanders was saying, in a voice loud enough to carry to where Corriston was standing. “Strict regulations prescribe that sort of thing. But it’s no way for a captain to keep the respect of his passengers.”

Corriston felt himself stepping forward before he even thought about it. But he halted abruptly when the captain said: “There’s a murderer on the loose aboard this ship. You may as well accept that fact right now. Each of you has to be on his guard. It’s only right and proper that you should keep your eyes and ears open, and stay worried. If you do, our chances of catching up with him before the ship berths should be reasonably good.”

The captain paused, then went on quickly: “We’ll get him eventually. You can be sure of that. He’ll never get past the inspection each of you will have to undergo when we reach the Station. But if we catch him before we reach the Station, you’ll be spared an investigative ordeal distinctly on the rugged side.”

Corriston was suddenly aware that he was being stared at. Everyone was staring at him.

“My God!” the Captain cried out, staring the hardest of all. “Where did you get that wound? Who attacked you? And what were you doing in my cabin?”

Corriston walked up to the Captain and said in a voice that trembled a little. “May I talk to you privately, sir? What I have to say won’t take long.”

“Why not?” Sanders demanded. “That uniform you’re wearing makes it mandatory. All right, come back into my cabin.”

They went back into the cabin. The captain shut the door and turned to face Corriston with a shocked concern in his stare.

“You’ve had it rough, Lieutenant. I can see that.”

“Plenty rough,” Corriston conceded. “But it’s not myself I’m worried about.”

“Did you know that a man has just been murdered?”

“I know,” Corriston said.

“With a poisoned barb. A Martian barb. It’s a plant found only on Mars. We have him stretched out on a table in the sick bay now. But he isn’t sick; he’s a corpse. Tell me something, Lieutenant, did you just tangle with the man who did it?”

“I think so,” Corriston said. “In fact, I’d stake my commission on it.”

“I see. Well, you’d better tell me about it. Tell me everything.”

Corriston told him.

The captain was silent for a long moment. Then he said, “But we’ve no Miss Ramsey on the passenger list. And I certainly didn’t invite her to drink a toast with me in my cabin. Are you sure of your facts, Lieutenant?”

Corriston’s jaw fell open. He stared at the captain in stunned disbelief. “Of course I’m sure. Why should I lie to you?”

“How should I know? It’s unfair to ask me that. If Ramsey’s daughter was on this ship, you can rest assured I’d have known about it. After all, Lieutenant—”

“But she was on board and you didn’t know. Isn’t that obvious? Look, she was traveling incognito. The trip to the Station takes only five hours. Perhaps in so short a trip—”

“No ‘perhaps’ about it. I’d have known.”

“But she is on board, I tell you. I talked to her. I talked to Clakey. Don’t make me go over the whole thing again. We’ve got to find her. Ramsey’s enemies would stop at nothing. I’m afraid to think of what they might do to his daughter!”

“Nothing will happen to his daughter. She’s on Earth right this minute in her father’s house, as safe as any girl that wealthy can ever be. Lieutenant, listen to me. I’ve got a great deal of respect for that uniform you’re wearing. Don’t make me lose it. When you come to me with a story like that—”

“All right. You don’t believe me. Will you check the passenger list, just to be sure?”

“I’ll do more than that, Lieutenant. I’ll assemble all of the passengers and check them off personally. I’ll give you an opportunity to look them over while I’m doing it. Later you can ask them as many questions as you wish. There’ll be a murderer among them, but that shouldn’t disturb you too much. You’ve already met. Perhaps you can identify him for us. Ask each of the men who made a non-existent Miss Ramsey disappear and the one who turns pale will be our man.”

Suddenly the captain reddened. “I’m sorry, Lieutenant, I didn’t mean to be sarcastic. But a murder on my ship naturally upsets me. I’ll be completely frank with you. There’s a very remote possibility that Miss Ramsey actually is on board without my knowledge. She hasn’t had much publicity. I believe I’ve only seen one photograph of her, one taken several years ago. But you’ve got to remember that a captain is usually the first to get wind of such things. It comes to him by a kind of grapevine. She’s a golden girl—actually the goldenest golden girl on Earth.”

4

Now Corriston was in a steel-walled cell and the captain’s voice seemed only a far-off echo sympathizing with him.

And it was an echo, for the captain was gone and he would probably never see him again. It was all very simple—that part of it—all very clear. The captain had faithfully kept his word. The captain hadn’t let him down. But any man can end up a prisoner when everyone disbelieves him and he has no way of proving that he is telling the truth.

It was hard to believe that a day and a night had passed, and that the Captain had kept his word and gone ahead with the roll call. It was even harder to believe that he, Corriston, was no longer on the ship, but in a sanity cell on the Space Station, and that the ship was traveling back toward Earth.

He shut his eyes, and the events of the past thirty hours unrolled before him with a nightmare clarity, and yet with all of the monstrous distortions which a nightmare must of necessity evoke.

Darkness and time and space. And closer at hand the frowns of forthright, honest men appalled by mental abnormality in a new recruit, an officer with a steel-lock determination to keep the truth securely guarded and safe from all distortion.

There had come the tap on his shoulder and a stern voice saying: “You’d better come with us, Lieutenant.” He had just told the captain the whole horrible story. He had not been believed.

“Tell me about it,” said the recruit in the bunk opposite Corriston. “It will help you to talk. Remember, we’re not prisoners. We mustn’t think of ourselves as prisoners. We can go out and exercise. We can walk around the Station for a half-hour or so. We’ve only got to promise we’ll come back and lock ourselves in. They trust us. It could happen to anyone.

“Space-shock. Not a fancy word at all. I’m getting over it; you’ve a certain distance to go. Or so they say. But we’re still in very much the same boat and talking always helps. Talk to me, Lieutenant, the way you did last night.”

Corriston looked at the pale youth opposite him. He had close-cropped hair and friendly blue eyes, and he seemed a likeable enough lad. He was Corriston’s junior by several years. But there was an aura of neuroticism about him that made Corriston uneasy. But hell, why shouldn’t he get it off his chest. Talking just might help.

“It’s true,” Corriston said. “Every word of it.”

“I believe you, Lieutenant. But quite obviously they didn’t. Why not strike a compromise. Say I’m one-tenth wrong in believing you and they’re nine-tenths right in not believing you. That means there may be some little quirk in what happened to you that doesn’t quite fit into the normal pattern. Put that down to space-shock—a mild case of it. I’m not saying you have it, but you could have it.”

The kid was grinning now, and Corriston had to like him.

“Okay,” he said. “You can believe this or not. The captain lined all of the passengers up and checked them off by their cabin numbers. I didn’t see her. Do you understand? She just wasn’t there! I thought I recognized two of the women who had come out of the ladies’ lounge, but I couldn’t even be sure of that. One of the two denied ever having stepped inside the lounge, and the other was vague about it.”

“I see.”

“The captain really sailed into me for a moment, lost his temper completely. ‘A fine officer you are, Lieutenant. It’s painful to be on the same ship with the kind of officers the training schools turn out when the Station finds itself short of personnel. Is the Station planning to trust ships’ clearance to hallucinated personnel? All right, you talked to a girl—some girl. She didn’t even tell you she was Ramsey’s daughter; Clakey told you. And he’s dead. Not only is he dead, he wasn’t listed on the passenger list as Clakey at all. His name was Henry Ewers. I don’t know what you believed, Lieutenant. I don’t care what you think you saw. You tangled with someone and he stabbed you. He was real enough…obviously the man who killed Ewers. But you let him get away, so even that isn’t too much to your credit.’”

“If I had been you,” the kid said, “I’ve had knocked him down.”

“No.” For the first time Corriston smiled. “To tell you the truth, the captain is a good guy. He’s one of those blunt, moody, terribly human individuals you encounter occasionally, men who speak their minds on all occasions and are instantly sorry they did. You have to like them even when they seem to insult you.”

“He made up for it then?”

“I’ll say he did. He knew that when we landed the officials would be breathing right down my neck. He wanted to give me every chance. So he kept the officials away from me until I’d convinced myself Ramsey’s daughter just couldn’t be on board.

“He let me look at every piece of luggage that was taken off the ship. He had some cargo to unload and he let me inspect that too, every crate. Most of the crates were too small to conceal a drugged and unconscious girl—or any girl for that matter. The ones that weren’t, he opened for me and let me look inside.

“He let me watch every passenger leave the ship. Then, when all of the passengers had left, he stationed officers in the three main passageways and I went through the ship from bow to stern. I went into every stateroom and into every intership compartment. No one could have kept just a little ahead of me or behind me, dodging back into a compartment the instant I’d vacated it. They would have been instantly spotted by one of the officers.

“The Captain wasn’t to blame at all for what happened later…when I tried to convince the commanding officers here that I was completely sane.”

“I see. He must have really liked you.”

“I guess he did. And I liked him.”

The kid nodded. “And the murderer’s still at large. That makes it rough for the sixty odd passengers they’re holding in quarantine. How long do you think they’ll hold them in the Big Cage?”

“As long as they can. They’ll keep them under close guard and increase their vigilance every time there’s a suspicious move in the cage. They’ll be screened perhaps a dozen times. But most of them are influential people. Most of them have booked passage on the Mars’ run liner that’s due here next week. They can’t hold them forever. They’d start pulling wires on Earth by short wave and there’d be a legislative uproar.

“Suppose they refuse to let them send messages?”

“They won’t refuse. I’m sure of that.”

The kid was thoughtful for a moment. Then he said: “Tell me more about Ramsey. Just what do you think is happening on Mars?”

“No one knows exactly what is happening,” Corriston said. “But to the best of my knowledge the overall picture is pretty ugly. The original settlers have their backs to the wall with a vengeance. Now there are armed guards at their throats. Ramsey has taken over. He has resorted to legal trickery to freeze them out.

“There are perhaps fifty important uranium claims on Mars and Ramsey has consolidated all of the holdings into a single major enterprise. To say that he’s cornered the market in uranium would be understating the case. He has taken possession by right of seizure, and the colonists can’t get to him. They’re living a hand-to-mouth existence while he lives in a heavily guarded stronghold behind three miles of electrified defenses.”

The kid nodded again. “Yes, that’s the picture when you unscramble it, I guess. But most of it is kept hidden from the general run of tourists.”

“Naturally. Ramsey has the power to keep it under wraps.”

“Do you think the colonists had anything to do with Clakey’s murder and Miss Ramsey’s disappearance? Or I guess I should say Henry Ewers’ murder.”

“Clakey, Ewers—his name doesn’t matter. I’m convinced that he was Miss Ramsey’s bodyguard.”

“But you haven’t answered my question.”

“I can’t answer it with any certainty. Did the colonists hire a killer and book passage for him on the ship? It’s difficult to believe that the kind of men who colonized Mars would resort to murder.”

“But there are a few scoundrels in every large group of men. And what if they became so desperate they felt they had to fight fire with fire?”

“Yes, I’d thought of that. It may be the answer.”

5

A half-hour later the kid was taken away and Corriston found himself completely alone. There are few events in human life more unnerving than the totally unexpected removal of a sympathetic listener when dark thoughts have taken possession of a man.

The kid wasn’t forcibly removed from the cell. He left without protesting and no rough hands were laid on him, no physical violence employed. But he was not at all eager to leave, and if the guards who came for him had eyed him less severely, his attitude might have been the opposite of complacent.

“Sorry, kid,” one of them said. “Your discharge has been postponed. Somebody on the psycho-staff wants to give you another test. I guess you didn’t interpret the ink blots right.”

He looked at Corriston and shook his head sympathetically. “It’s tough, I know. Once you’re here waiting to be released can wear you down. I shouldn’t be saying this, but it stands to reason it might even slow up your recovery a bit. It’s easy to blame the docs, but you’ve got to try to understand their side of it. They have to make sure.”

When the door clanged shut behind the kid, Corriston crossed to his cot, sat down, and cradled his head in his arms. The fact that he was still free to go outside and walk around the Station was no comfort at all. That kind of freedom could be worse than total confinement. He could never hope to escape from observation. The guards were under orders to watch him, and wherever he turned there’d be eyes boring into the back of his neck.

On Earth a man under surveillance could duck quickly into a side street, run and weave about, and emerge on a broad avenue in the midst of a crowd. He could walk calmly then for a block or two, and turn in at a bar. He could drown his troubles in drink.

There were bars on the Station, of course. But Corriston knew that if he tried to mingle with officers of his own rank on the upper levels, he’d quickly enough find himself drinking alone. He could picture the off-duty personnel edging quickly and resentfully away from him, as though he’d suddenly appeared in their midst with a big, yawning hole in his skull.

Suddenly utter weariness overcame Corriston. He loosened his belt, elevated his legs, and relaxed on the cot.

He was asleep almost before he could close his eyes. How long he slept he had no way of knowing. He only knew that he was awakened by a sound—the strangest sound a man could hear in space. It was as if a gnat or a mosquito had developed a sudden, avaricious liking for his blood-type and was determined to gorge itself to bursting at his expense.

The buzzing seemed to go on interminably as he hovered between sleeping and waking. On and on and on, with absolutely no letup. Then, abruptly, it ceased. There was a faint swishing sound and something solid thudded into the hardwood directly above him.

With a startled cry Corriston leapt from the cot, caught the iron edge of the bed-guard to keep from falling, and stared up in horror at the shining expanse of wall space overhead.

The cell was in almost total darkness. But from the barred window opposite, a faint glimmer of light penetrated in a diffuse arc, just enough light to enable him to make out the quivering stem of the barb.

It was a barb. This was so beyond any possibility of doubt. It had lodged in the hardwood scarcely a foot above his cot and it was still quivering.

Cold sweat broke out on Corriston’s palms as he realized how close death had come, and how almost miraculous had been his escape. Had he raised himself to slap at the “mosquito” the barb could just as easily have buried itself in his skull.

Corriston hesitated for an instant, his eyes on the barred window and the faint glow beyond. Then his gaze passed to the wall switch. He decided against switching on the light immediately. He stooped low and moved quickly to the window, taking care to keep his head well below the sill.

For a moment he listened, his every nerve alert. There was no stir of movement in the darkness beyond the sill, nothing at all to indicate that someone was crouching there.

Finally, with an almost foolhardy recklessness, he raised his head and stared out between the bars. He could see right across to the wall opposite. The wall was less than eight feet away, and the space between the wall and his cell appeared to be unoccupied. This did not surprise him.

It was utterly silly to think that a man intent on willful murder would have lingered for any great length of time in so narrow a space. After having shot his bolt, his immediate concern would have been to get away as quickly as possible.

No, definitely, the man was gone, and if he had more barbs to release he would choose another time and place.

Even then Corriston did not switch on the light. He had no particular desire to examine the wood-embedded barb in a bright light. He could see it clearly enough from where he stood. It was exactly like the barb which had sealed the lips of that blabbermouth Clakey.

Corriston went back to his cot and sat down. He told himself it would be highly dangerous to leave the cell and give the killer another chance. He had saved himself by refusing to slap a non-existent mosquito. But in the shadows of the Station there would be no mosquitoes—non-existent or otherwise. The killer would simply crouch in shadows, await his chance, and take careful aim.

What he had to do was find Miss Ramsey, and prove his sanity. If he stayed in the cell, the shadows would continue to deepen about him, would become intolerable, and perhaps even drive him to the verge of actual madness.

He had to convince the killer that he couldn’t be silenced easily and perhaps not at all.

Corriston stood up. He ran his hands down his body, taking pride in its muscular solidity, its remarkable integrity under strain. He still felt lithe and confident; his physical vitality was unimpaired.

He had really known all along that he would be leaving the cell. On Earth you could dodge into a narrow alley between tall buildings or lean on a stroller platform and be carried underground so fast that your pursuers would be left blank-faced. If he stayed alert he could do the same thing on the Station, even though there were no moving pavements to leap upon. Quite possibly he could even slip out unnoticed. They might not even be watching the cell door because he had behaved himself so well up to now. Psycho-cases were permitted to roam, but if they stayed in their cells precautions would naturally be relaxed in their favor.

Corriston now was about to develop a sudden, unanticipated impulse to roam. The fact that he was completely sane gave him an edge over the space-shocked recruits. There is nothing quite so terrifying to a man who doubts his own sanity than the thought that unseen eyes are keeping tabs on him. He feels guilty and acts guilty and almost invariably his caution deserts him.

Corriston was quite sure that he could carry it off, even if he felt eyes boring into his back the instant he left the cell. He’d simply bide his time and seize the first opportunity which presented itself.

Actually, it was easier than he’d imagined it could be. He simply opened the cell door, walked out; and there was no one in sight to observe him. So far, so good. The corridor outside was completely deserted, and when he reached the end of it there was still no one.

He turned left into a large, square reception room and crossed it without hurrying, his shoulders held straight. Photoelectric eyes? Yes, possibly, but he had no intention of letting the thought worry him. If he were being watched mechanically, there was nothing he could do about it and somehow he didn’t think that he had crossed any photoelectric beams. Certainly no doors had swung open or closed behind him, and photoelectric alarm system without visible manifestations could be dismissed as a not too likely possibility.

When Corriston emerged in the glass-encased, wide-view observation promenade on the Station’s Second Level, he was no longer alone. On all sides men and women jostled him, walking singly and in pairs, in uniform and in civilian clothes, or hurrying off in dun-gray, space-mechanic anonymity.

The promenade was crowded almost to capacity and yet the men and women seemed mere walking dots scattered at random beneath the immense structures of steel and glass which walled them in. A feeling of unreality came upon Corriston as he stared upward. He deliberately moderated his stride, as if fearful that a too rapid movement in any one direction might send him spinning out into space with a glass-shattering impetus which he would be powerless to control.

It was an illogical fear and yet he could not entirely throw it off, and he did not seriously try. It was not nearly as important as the possibility that he might be being followed. There was no one behind him who looked in the least suspicious, and no one in front of him either. But how could he be completely sure?

The answer was that he couldn’t. He had to trust his instincts, and so far they had given him every assurance that he was moving in a free, independent orbit of his own, completely unobserved.

And then, quite suddenly, he ceased to move at all.

Something quite startling was taking place throughout the length and breadth of the observation promenade. The men in uniform were exchanging alarmed glances and departing in haste. The civilians were crowding closer to the panes. They were collecting in awestruck groups of blinding light crisscrossed high above their heads.

They were all looking in one direction, but a few of them had been taken so completely by surprise that they stood motionless in the middle of the promenade. Corriston was one of the motionless ones, but his eyes were quick to seek out the nearest viewpane.

At first he thought that a gigantic meteor had appeared suddenly out of the stellar dark and was rushing straight toward the Station with a velocity so great as to be almost unimaginable.

Then he realized that it wasn’t a meteor. It was a spaceship. And it wasn’t rushing straight toward the Station. It had either bypassed or encircled the Station and passed beyond it, for it was now heading out into space again. He could see the long, bright trail left by its rocket jets, the diffuse incandescence in its wake.

6

An officer with two stripes on his shoulder was standing almost at Corriston’s elbow. He hadn’t turned to depart, and for some reason he seemed reluctant to do so. The space-ship’s erratic course seemed to absorb him to the exclusion of all else.

He started swearing under his breath. Then he saw Corriston and a strange look came into his face. He looked at Corriston steadily for a moment, then looked quickly away.

Corriston edged slowly away from him and joined the nearest group of civilians. They were all talking at once and it was hard to understand precisely what they were saying. But after a moment a few enlightening fragments of information greatly lessened his bewilderment.

“That freighter was preparing to land at the Station, but for some reason it couldn’t make contact. It never even began to decelerate.”

“How do you know?”

“I asked one of the officers—that gray-haired man over there. He was plenty worried. I guess that’s why he talked so freely. He’d had some kind of dispute with the captain, apparently. He told me that trouble developed aboard that freighter when it was eight or ten thousand miles away. An emergency message came through, but for some reason the captain kept it pretty much to himself.”

Watching the freighter’s hull blaze with friction as it went into a narrow orbit about Earth, Corriston tried hard to make himself believe that the particular manner of a spaceman’s departure was simply one, tragic aspect of a calculated risk, that men who lived dangerously could hardly expect to die peacefully in their beds. But it was a rationalization without substance. In an immediate and very real sense he was inside the freighter, enduring an eternity of torment, sharing the agonizing fate that was about to overtake the crew.

Nearer and nearer to Earth the freighter swept, completely encircling the planet like a runaway moon with an orbital velocity so great the eye could hardly follow it.

“It will blast out a meteor pit as wide as the Grand Canyon if it explodes on land,” someone at Corriston’s elbow said. “I wouldn’t care to be within a hundred miles of it.”

“Neither would I. It could wipe out a city, all right—any city within a radius of thirty miles. This is really something to watch!”

The freighter had encircled Earth twice and was now so close to its blue-green oceans and the dun-colored immensity of its continental land masses that it had almost disappeared from view. It had dwindled to a tiny, glowing pinpoint of radiance crossing the face of the planet, an erratically weaving firefly that had abandoned all hope of guiding itself by a light that was about to flare up with explosive violence and put an end to its life.

The freighter was invisible when the end came. It was invisible when it struck and rebounded and channeled a deep pit in a green valley on Earth. But the explosion which followed was seen by every man and woman on the Station’s wide-view promenade.

There were three tremendous flares, each opening and spreading outward like the sides of a funnel, each a livid burst of incandescence spiraling outward into space.

As seen from the Station the flares were not, of course, so tragically spectacular. They resembled more successive flashes of almost instantaneous brightness, flashes such as had many times been produced by the tilting of a heliograph on the rust-red plains of Mars under conditions of maximum visibility.

It takes an experienced eye to interpret such phenomena correctly, and among the spectators on the promenade there were a few, no doubt, who were not even quite sure that the freighter had exploded.

But Corriston had no doubts at all on that score. The full extent of the tragedy would be revealed later by radio communication from Earth.

There was a long silence before anyone spoke. The group around Corriston seemed paralyzed by shock, unable to express in words how blindly hopeful they had dared to be, or how fatalistic from the first. There were a few moist eyes among the women, an awkward, almost reverent shuffling of feet.

Then the young man at Corriston’s elbow cleared his throat and said in a barely audible whisper: “It didn’t come down in the sea.”

“I know,” Corriston said. “It came down in North America, close to the Canadian border.”

“In the United States?”

“Yes, I think so. We can’t be sure. It’s too much to hope there was no destruction of human life after an explosion of that magnitude.”

Corriston suddenly realized that he was behaving like a man who had taken complete leave of his wits. He was drawing more and more attention to himself when he should have been bending all of his efforts toward making himself as inconspicuous as possible.

Fortunately the agitation of everyone on the promenade was helping to remedy his blunder. His wisest course now was simply to recede as an individual, to move silently to the perimeter of the group and just as silently vanish.

He was confident that he could accomplish it. He began elbowing his way backwards until there were a dozen men and women in front of him. He let himself be observed briefly as a grim-lipped spectator who had taken such an emotional pounding that he could endure no more. Suddenly he saw his chance and took it. There was another small group of civilians close to the group he had joined, and he ducked quickly behind them, using their turned-away backs as a shield. He edged toward a paneled door on his right, his only concern for the moment being a comparatively simple one. He must get away from the crowded promenade as swiftly as possible.

He reached the door, swung the panel wide, and stepped into the long, brightly-lighted compartment beyond without a backward glance. Almost immediately he perceived that he had committed an act of folly. The compartment was a promenade cafeteria and it was crowded with an overflow of agitated men and women discussing the tragedy in heated terms.

Keep cool now. None of these people are interested in you. Keep cool and keep on walking. There’s another door and you can be through it in less than a minute, Corriston told himself.

There was a pretty waitress behind the long counter, and as he came abreast of her she smiled at him. For an instant he hesitated, eyed the stool opposite her, and fought off an incongruous but almost irresistible impulse to sit down. Quick warmth and sudden sympathy. Yes, he could do with a bit of both, Corriston thought.

It was sheer insanity, but he did sit down. He eased himself into the stool and ordered a cup of coffee.

“Something with it?” the waitress asked. “A sandwich, or—”

“No, no, I don’t think so,” Corriston said quickly. “Just the coffee.”

The waitress seemed in no hurry to depart. “It was pretty terrible what happened. Wasn’t it?”

“Did you see it?” Corriston asked.

“I saw most of it. I saw the ship go past the Station and start to explode. I saw that black wing, or whatever it was, drop off. Then someone started shouting in here and I came back. They say it crashed on Earth.”

“That’s right,” Corriston said, telling himself that he was a damned fool for wanting to look at her hair and hear her friendly woman’s voice when every passing second was adding to his danger.

“You saw it crash?”

Corriston nodded. “I just came from the promenade.”

“That was a crazy thing to ask you. How excited can you get? I saw you come through that door. You looked kind of pale.”

“I still feel that way,” Corriston said.

The waitress then said a surprising thing: “I wonder what it is about some men. You just have to look at them once and you know they’re the sort you’d like to be with when something terrible happens. You know what I mean?”

“Sure,” Corriston said. “Any port in a storm.”

The waitress smiled again. “I don’t mean that, exactly. Please don’t think I’m handing you a line. There’s just something…comfortable about you. You go all pale when something bad happens to other people. That’s good; I like that. It means you can feel for other people. You’re a gentle sort of guy, but I bet you can take care of yourself and anyone you care about. I just bet you can.”

The waitress flushed a little, as if afraid that she had said too much. She turned and walked slowly toward the coffee percolator at the far end of the counter.

He was glad now that he had ordered the coffee. The coffee would help too. He suddenly felt that he was under observation, that hostile eyes were watching him. But it was no more than just a feeling; and coffee and sympathy might drive it away.

How blindly, stupidly foolish could a guy be? Corriston thought. If he had any sense at all he wouldn’t wait for the coffee. He’d get up quickly and head for the door at the other end of the cafeteria. He’d either do that, or swing about abruptly and attempt to catch the silent watcher by surprise.

Corriston decided to wait for the coffee.

The waitress looked at him strangely when she returned. She set the coffee down before him and started to turn away, her eyes troubled. Then, suddenly, she seemed to change her mind. She leaned close to him and whispered: “You’d better leave by the promenade door. That man over there has been watching you. I know him very well. He’s a Security Guard.”

Corriston nodded and stared at her gratefully for a moment. He was more relieved than alarmed. It was far better to have a Security Guard watching him than a killer with a poisoned barb. He wasn’t exactly happy about it, but he was confident he could elude the agent.

The waitress’ eyes were suddenly warm and friendly again. “Space-shock?” she asked.

“So they claim,” Corriston said. “I happen to think they’re mistaken.”

He started sipping the coffee. It was hot but not steaming hot. He could have tossed it off like a jigger of rye but he had some quick thinking to do.

“Tell me,” he said. “Just where is that guard sitting?”

“At the other end of the counter,” the waitress replied, the anxiety coming back into her eyes. “He’s close to the door. You’d have to go past him. Maybe I’m wrong, but I think you want to get away from him. So you’d better go the way you came—by the promenade door.”

“That’s not too good an idea, I’m afraid,” Corriston said. “He’d follow me and get assistance on the promenade. What’s beyond the other door? Where does it lead to?”

“It opens on a corridor,” the waitress said quickly. “If you can get past him you might have a better chance that way. There’s nothing but a corridor with two side doors. One opens on an emergency stairway that goes down to the Master Sequence Selector compartments.”

She seemed to take pride in her knowledge. Due to a space-shocked guy’s difficulties, the Master Sequence Selector had become an important secret shared between them. Corriston wondered if she knew that the Selector functioned on thirty-two separate kinds of automatic controls.

If he ever got the chance, he’d come back and tell her exactly how grateful he was. Right at the moment one consideration alone dominated his thinking. If he could get past the guard he could hide out in an intricate maze of machinery. Even if they sent a dozen guards down to look for him it would take them some time to locate him. He could hide-out and gain a breathing spell.

The waitress had a very small hand. Abruptly Corriston clasped it and held it for an instant, his fingers exerting a firm, steady pressure. “Thanks,” he said.

Corriston swung about without glancing toward the end of the counter. He’d pass the guard quickly enough; there was no sense in alerting the man in advance. As for recognizing him, that would be no problem at all. You couldn’t mistake a Security Guard no matter what kind of clothes he wore.

Corriston took his time. He walked slowly, refusing to hurry. A man under surveillance should never hurry. He should be casual, completely at his ease, for there is no better way of keeping an observer guessing.

He kept parallel with the long counter, his shoulders swaying a little with the assurance of a man who knows exactly where he is going. Presently the entire length of the counter was behind him, and he was less than a yard from the door.

He hadn’t glanced once at the counter. He didn’t intend to now. One quick leap would carry him through the door and beyond it, and to hell with recognizing the guard. When it was touch and go and odd man out, you altered your plan as you went along.

He’d seen a girl disappear when everyone said it didn’t happen. Confined to a psycho-ward, he had simply walked out, eluded a killer, and watched a ship explode on the green hills of Earth. He’d survived all that, so how could one lone Security Guard stop him now?

He was preparing to leap, when something got in his way—a shadow—a shadow for an instant between himself and the door, and then a dark bulk stepping right into the shoes of the shadow and filling it out.

The Security Guard was not at all the kind of person he’d expected him to be. He was not a big ape, not even a muscular-looking man. He had simply seemed big for the instant he took to fill the place of his shadow. He was a man of average height, average build. He blocked the doorway without bluster, looking very calm and relaxed. Only his eyes were cold and accusing and dangerously narrowed as he surveyed Corriston from head to foot.

“I’m afraid you’ll have to go back to the ward now,” he said. “You picked a bad time to take a turn about the Station. Ordinarily you’d be privileged to do so. That’s part of the therapy. But you picked a very bad time.”

“I’m beginning to realize that,” Corriston said. “I couldn’t help it, though. I had no way of knowing that freighter was out of control. I’m afraid you’ve made a mistake, too, though. I’m not going back to the cell.”

Corriston had been watching the man’s right arm. Suddenly it went back and his fist started rising, started coming up fast at an angle that could have sent it crashing against Corriston’s jaw.

Corriston had no intention of letting that happen. He side-stepped quickly and delivered a smashing blow to the pit of the guard’s stomach. The blow was so solid that it doubled the guard up. His knees buckled and he started to fold.

Corriston didn’t take the folding for granted. A second blow caught the man squarely on the jaw and a third thudded into his rib section. For an instant he looked so dazed that Corriston felt sorry for him.

He was still half-doubled up when he sank to the floor and straightened out. He straightened out on his side first, and then rolled over on his back and stopped moving. His lips hung slackly, his eyes were wide and staring.

The look on his face gave Corriston a jolt. It was a very strange look. The fact that his features had become slack was not startling in itself, but there was something unnatural, unbelievable, about the way that muscular relaxation had overspread his entire countenance. His features were putty-gray and they seemed to have no clearly defined boundaries.

His nose, eyes, and forehead looked as if the ligaments which held them together had snapped from overstrain or had been severed by a surgeon’s scalpel…severed and allowed to go their separate ways without interference.

In fact, there was no real expression on the man’s face at all—no recognizably human expression—not even the stuporous look of a man knocked suddenly unconscious.

There was agitation now in the cafeteria, a hum of angry voices, a rising murmur that was coming dangerously close. Corriston shut his mind to it. He knelt at the guard’s side and swiftly unbuttoned the unconscious man’s heavy service jacket. He felt around under the jacket until he was satisfied that he could move on through the doorway with a clear conscience. The guard’s heart was beating firmly and steadily. There was a reassuring warmth under the jacket as well, a complete absence of clamminess.

Suddenly the guard groaned and started to roll over on his side again. Corriston didn’t wait for him to complete the movement. He arose quickly and was through the door in four long strides.

He preferred not to run. He was not so much fleeing as seeking a security he was entitled to, a reasonably safe port in a storm that was threatening to take away his freedom by blanketing him in a dark cloud of unjust suspicion and utter tyranny.

The corridor was as deserted as he’d hoped it would be. With no one to get in his way or sound an alarm, he had no difficulty at all in locating the emergency passageway which descended in a rail-guarded spiral to the Master Sequence Selector. He kept his right hand on the safety rail as he moved downward into the darkness. For the first time he felt extremely tired.

7

The drone of machinery in a high-vaulted, metal-walled compartment awakened Corriston. It was for the most part a steady, low, continuous sound. But occasionally it ceased to be a drone, in a strict sense, and became high-pitched. It became a shrill, almost intolerable whine, impinging unpleasantly on his eardrums and preventing him from going to sleep again.

For interminable minutes he lay stretched out at full length in the lidded, coffinlike rag bin into which he had crawled, a lethargic weariness enveloping him like a shroud. Above his head steel-blue surfaces crisscrossed, vibrating planes of metal and wire intricately folded back upon themselves.

After a moment, when the steady drone was well in the ascendency again, he sat up and stared about him. He had a throbbing headache and there was a dryness in his throat which made swallowing difficult.

He was certainly not an exceptional man in regard to such matters. During moments of crises he could remain fairly calm and self-possessed but the aftermath could be killing.

He felt now as if all of his nerves had been squeezed together in a vise. He looked at his wrist watch and was amazed to discover that he had slept for eight hours. If a search had been made for him, he had no reason to complain about his luck. He hadn’t even closed the lid of the bin. But perhaps the oil-stained waste he had drawn over himself had given them the idea that he was just more waste underneath.

Perhaps the guards didn’t give a damn whether they found him or not. It was quite possible. On a low official level a cynical desire for self-comfort could dominate the thinking of a man.

It was quite possible that the guards who had been sent down to search for him—or one of the guards, at least—had been angry at his superiors. Just a quick look and to hell with it—that must have been his attitude.

It made sense in another way. They wouldn’t suspect the bin because the bin was so conspicuous and obvious a hiding place. The Purloined Letter sort of thing. Crawl into an empty coffin at a funeral and no one will give you a second glance. All dead men look alike.

The Master Sequence Selector compartment was a coffin, too—a big, all-metal coffin arching above him and hemming him in. If he hoped to get out of it alive, he’d have to do more than just beat on the lid with his fists.

Almost instantly he was ashamed of his thoughts. He had been extremely lucky so far. The funeral was over, the sod firmly in place. They would not be likely to dig him up on suspicion, and he could stay buried until he starved to death.

The worst would be over when they found him. The thirst torment would be the worst, but if it became unbearable he would still have the choice of surrendering himself.

Quite possibly he would die of thirst. Quite possibly he could shout his lungs out and still remain trapped. If a search had been made and they had failed to find him, sullen anger might have tempted them to do an unthinkable thing. They might have locked the door of the compartment so that the corpse would have no opportunity of escaping prematurely and making them look like fools.

Corriston was just starting to climb out of the bin to investigate the truth or falseness of that utterly demoralizing possibility when he heard the sound. It was a very peculiar sound, three or four times repeated, and he heard it clearly above the low drone of the Selector’s automatic controls.

He stood up in the bin, straining his ears. It came again, louder this time. It was only a short distance away and it was a voice sound, unmistakably a voice sound.

He climbed out of the bin, grasped a metal rod that projected from one of the cross-beams, and descended cautiously to the base of the Selector. The droning increased for an instant, rising to a whine so high-pitched that he could no longer hear the voice.

He started moving around the edge of the Selector, keeping well within its shadow, watching shafts of dull light move backwards and forwards across the floor. He hardly expected anyone to leap out at him. The voice had not seemed quite that near; in fact, he was by no means sure that it had come from the compartment at all. But if not from the compartment, where?

He found out quickly enough. There was a square, windowlike grate a few feet from the Selector’s automatic control panel, set high up on the wall. A faint, steady glow came from it.

Corriston paused for an instant directly below the glow, measuring the distance from the floor to the aperture with his eyes. He strained his ears again, waiting for the whine to subside. It continued shrill, but suddenly he heard the voice again, heard it above the whine.

There was stark terror in the voice. It was despairing and desperate in its pleading, and it seemed to Corriston that he would remember it until he died. He thought he recognized the voice, but he couldn’t be sure.

It was perhaps merciful that he couldn’t, for the grate was at least ten feet above the floor and had he known beyond the faintest shadow of doubt that it was Helen Ramsey’s voice, his inability to reach her would have been fiendish torment.

He hoped only one thing—that he had to reach that voice in time.

First of all he had to stay calm. Even a calm man could not hope to scale a ten-foot wall with his bare hands, but an agitated man would have no chance at all. Something to stand on! A box—anything!

A box would help, a ladder would be better. But what were his chances of finding a ladder in the Selector compartment? Not good at all. Still, he could search for a ladder. Quickly now. No time to waste, but don’t lose your head. Take thirty seconds, a good long thirty seconds to look around for a metal ladder. There just might be one standing somewhere against the wall.

There was! Not one ladder, but two, leaning against the wall directly opposite the glimmering front section of the Selector.

It was amazing how desperation could change a man. In the great moments of danger and desperation small, neurotic concerns ceased to matter.

He was sure now. He had recognized the voice beyond any possibility of doubt. The ladder scraped against the wall and swayed a little, and for an instant he feared it might slide out from under him. He paused to make sure, and then went swiftly on up until his head was level with the grate.

He grasped the heavy grillwork with both hands and raised himself higher. He could see clearly through the grill into the compartment beyond now. The entire compartment was visible from where he stood. It was small and square and dimly lighted by an overhead lamp, and there was a paneled door leading into it.

Close to the door a man was standing. Corriston couldn’t see his face. He was half-turned away from the wall opposite him, and the girl who was struggling to escape from him was more than two-thirds concealed by his massive shoulders.

He was holding her in a tight, merciless grip. He had locked one hand on her wrist and was preventing her from moving either backwards or forwards. It was costing him no effort. He simply stood very straight and still while she struggled vainly to free herself.

Immense strength seemed to emanate from him, complete assurance and a coldly calculating kind of brutality which appeared to be slowly undermining her will to resist. Her struggles became less frantic second by slow second, and that she was about to stop struggling altogether was evident from the way her right arm had begun to dangle and her body to sag.

The man was holding her by the left wrist in a left-handed grip. He was cruelly twisting her wrist and suddenly she cried out again in pain and despairing helplessness.

The blood started mounting to Corriston’s temples. He began tugging at the grate with both hands, exerting all his strength in a desperate effort to dislodge it. It began to move a little, to become less firmly attached to the wall. He could feel it moving under his hands, rasping and creaking as it loosened inch by inch.

He was covered with sweat. Already in his mind he had killed the man, and Helen Ramsey was tight in his arms, happy and alive.

The man did not seem to hear the rasp of the grate coming loose. He neither turned nor raised his head. His free hand had gone out and across the girl’s face. But if he had struck her on the face, she gave no sign. She did not recoil as if from a blow and there was something strange about the movement. It was as if the man had reached out to tear something from the girl’s face—a veil or a mask.

His hand whipped back empty but his fingers were oddly twisted, as if he had clawed at something that had failed to come free.

Corriston pulled back his shoulders and his posture on the ladder grew more erect. He knew that his exertions might send the ladder toppling but it was a risk he had to take.

The grate was freely movable now. He could move it backwards and forwards, six or eight inches each way; but he still could not rip it completely free.

He kept on tugging, his neck cords bulging, the ladder swaying dangerously. The grate could be moved upward now, just a little. No, it was finally coming completely loose. He could move it in all directions and even push it outward at right angles to its base.

Twice he heard Helen Ramsey cry out again, and her screams became a goad that turned his wrists to steel. With a sudden, convulsive wrench he twisted the grate sideways. It came loose in his hands. It was so surprisingly light that an incongruous rage surged up in him. It was cruelly perverse, intolerable, that he should have been so long delayed by a thin sheet of metal that hardly seemed to have any weight at all.

He swung about on the ladder and let the grate drop. It struck the floor a few feet from the Selector and rebounded with a clang loud enough to wake the dead. The ladder swayed again, and he had to grab the edge of the aperture quickly and with both hands to keep himself from toppling.

He pulled himself forward through the aperture on his stomach, taking care not to dislodge the ladder. His temples were pounding and his palms sticky with sweat. He did not look down until he was completely through, dreading what he might see.

He passed a hand over his eyes. It was unbelievable, but he had to believe it. The man was gone and the girl was now alone in the compartment.

Had the man fled in sudden fear, knowing that Corriston would be consumed with a killing rage that would make him a more than dangerous adversary? Corriston didn’t think so. The man had looked quite capable of putting up a furious struggle. More likely he had disappeared to keep himself from being recognized, or because he had accomplished his purpose.

Blind, embittered anger again boiled up in Corriston. Had the man waited, he would have rejoiced and been less angry. He would have taken a calm, deep breath and slowly set about the almost pleasant task of killing him.

He felt cheated, outraged. Then his concern for Helen Ramsey made him forget his rage. Had she been felled with a blow, or had she simply fainted? He started down, then hesitated.

The ladder first. Before he descended it was necessary to make sure that the ladder would be in the same compartment with him, set firmly against the wall, directly under the aperture. If he were prevented from leaving the compartment by the corridor door, he might find himself needing the ladder. Without it he might be descending into a trap that could close with a clang and abruptly imprison him.

Getting down into the compartment was the worst part, just putting the ladder into place and not knowing how badly hurt she was.

What if she’s dead? he thought. What if he killed her with a single blow? He looked strong enough. He could have killed her. God, don’t let me think of that. I mustn’t think it.

His feet touched the floor. He let out his breath slowly, turned and crossed the floor to where she was lying. He went down on his knees and lifted her into his arms. She lay relaxed in his arms, face up, quiet, her lips slightly parted.

He looked down into her face, and for a moment his mind went numb, became still, so that there was no longer a whirling inside his head—only a chilling horror.

She seemed to have two faces. One was shrunken and almost torn away, a shredded fragment of a face. But enough of it remained for him to see the shriveled flesh of the cheeks, the puckered mouth, the white hair clinging to the temples. It was the face of an old woman but so fragmentary that it could not even have been called a half-face. And even though it had been almost ripped away, it seemed still to adhere firmly to the face to which it had been attached, and to blend with it, so that the features of both faces intermingled in a quite unnatural way.

Not quite, though; Helen Ramsey’s face was sharper, more distinct—all of the features stood out more clearly. And when Corriston’s stunned mind began to function normally again, he realized that the old woman’s face was—had to be—a plastic mask.

It took him only an instant to remove the ghastly thing from features which he could not bear to see defaced.

He had to pry it loose, but he did so very gently, exactly as a sculptor might have pried loose a life mask from the face of a recumbent model.

He held it in his hand and looked at it, and a little of the horror crept back into his mind.

It was the merest fragment, as he had thought. Thin, flexible, a tissue-structure of incomplete, aged features, and with an inner surface that was very rough and uneven, as if something had been torn from it.

He could have crumpled it up in his hand, but he did not do so. With a lack of foresight which he was later to regret—a lack which was to prove tragic—he simply flung it from him, as though its ugliness had unnerved him so that he could no longer endure the sight of it.

Helen Ramsey was a dead weight in his arms, and for a moment he feared that she had stopped breathing. So great was his fear, so paralyzing, that his hand on her pulse became rigid, and for a moment he could neither move nor think.

Then he felt the slow beat of her pulse and a great thankfulness came upon him.

He knew then that he must get help as quickly as possible. He eased her gently to the floor, walked to the door and locked it securely. Then he returned to her and took her into his arms again. He spent several minutes trying to revive her. But when she did not open her eyes, did not even stir in his arms, he knew that he could not wait any longer.

8

An inexorable kind of determination enabled Corriston to get to the Station’s central control compartment, and confront the commander, when the latter, absorbed by matters of the utmost urgency, had triple-guarded his privacy by stationing executive officers outside the door.

Commander Clement was a small man physically, with a strangely bland, almost cherubic face. But his face was dark with anger now—or possibly it was shock that he was experiencing—and the heightened color seemed to add to his dignity, making him look not merely forcibly determined, but almost formidable. His white uniform and the seven gold bars on each epaulet helped a good deal too. It was impossible to determine at a glance just how great was his inner strength, but Corriston knew that he could not have gotten where he was had he not possessed unalloyed resoluteness.

He was standing by a visual reference mechanism which looked almost exactly like a black stovepipe spiraling up from the deck. There was a speaking tube in his hand, and he was talking into it. He seemed completely unaware that he was no longer alone.

Had Corriston been less agitated he would have felt a little sorry for the officer who had admitted him. The officer had been so impressed by Corriston’s gravity and the earnestness with which he had pleaded his case that he had stepped forward and opened the door without question, assuming, no doubt, that Clement would look up instantly and see Corriston standing just inside the doorway.

Now the door had closed again, Clement hadn’t looked up, and the officer was going to be in trouble. But Corriston had no time and very little inclination to worry about that. What Commander Clement was saying into the speaking tube had a far stronger claim on his attention.

“It’s the worst thing that could have happened,” Clement was saying. “We can’t just brazen it out. It’s going to mean trouble, serious trouble. What’s that? How should I know what happened? When you’re carrying a certain kind of cargo a thousand things can go wrong. The ship went out of control, that’s all. The first radio message didn’t tell me anything. The captain was trying to cover up to save himself. He didn’t even want me to know.

“You bet it can happen again. We’ve got to be prepared for that, too. But right now—”

Commander Clement saw Corriston then. His expression didn’t change, but it seemed to Corriston that he paled slightly.

“That’s all for now,” he said, and returned the speaking tube to its cradle.

He looked steadily at Corriston for a moment. A glint of anger appeared in his eyes, and suddenly they were blazing.

“What do you mean by coming in here unannounced, Lieutenant?” he demanded. “I gave strict orders that no one was to be admitted. If I didn’t know you were suffering from severe space-shock.…”

“I’m sorry, sir,” Corriston said quickly. “It’s very urgent. I think I can convince you that I am not suffering from space-shock. I’ve found Miss Ramsey. She’s been badly hurt and needs immediate medical attention.”

The Commander looked as if a man he had thought sane was standing before him with a gun in his hand. Not Corriston, but some other, more violent man. For a moment longer he remained rigid and then his hand went out and tightened on Corriston’s arm.

“By heaven, if you’re lying to me!”

“I would have no reason to lie, sir. It proves I’m not a space-shock case. But that’s unimportant now. She’s safe for the moment. No one can get to her. I bolted the door on the inside. Unless—”

Corriston went pale. “No, there’s no danger. I drew the ladder up and returned it to the Selector compartment. Then I threw the lock on the emergency door.”

“Start at the beginning,” Clement said. “If she’s in danger well get to her. Take it easy now, and tell me exactly what happened.”

Corriston went over it fast. He said nothing about the mask. Let Clement find that out for himself.

Commander Clement walked to the door, threw it open and spoke to the executive officer who was stationed outside. The officer came into the control room.

“Stay with Lieutenant Corriston until I get back,” Clement said. “He’s not to leave. He understands that.”

He turned back to Corriston. “I’m afraid you’ll have to consider yourself still under guard, Lieutenant. I have only your word that you found Miss Ramsey. I believe you, but there are some regulations even I can’t waive.”

“It’s all right,” Corriston said. “I won’t attempt to leave. But please hurry, sir.”

Commander Clement hesitated, then said with a smile: “I knew about the guard you knocked out, Lieutenant. You’re a very hot-headed young man. That’s really a court-martial offense, but perhaps we can smooth it over if you’re telling the truth now. You were in the position of a man imprisoned for a crime he didn’t commit. If he can prove his innocence, the law is very lenient. He can escape and still get a full pardon, even a pardon with apologies. It’s a different matter, of course if he kills a guard to escape. You didn’t.”

Corriston was tempted to say, “I think perhaps I tried to, sir,” but thought better of it. He’d ask Clement later why the guards who had been sent down into the Selector compartment had failed to find him. It wasn’t important enough now to waste a second thought on, but just out of curiosity he would ask.

He didn’t have to. After Clement had departed the executive officer told him. “They made a pretty thorough search for you,” he said. “Or so they claimed. But they had been drinking heavily—every one of them. Maintaining discipline can be a terrible headache at times. There’s a lot of objectivity about the commander and he doesn’t try to crack down too hard. He knows what it means to be out here for months with nothing to break the monotony. Hell, if we could send for our wives more often it wouldn’t be so bad.”

Corriston’s palms were cold. He stood very still, wondering how long it would take the commander to return with the news he wanted to hear.

“The question is whether life is really worth living without a woman to talk to,” the executive officer went on. “Just to lie relaxed and watch a pretty girl move slowly around a room. It does something for you.”

Corriston wished the man would keep quiet. Under ordinary circumstances he could have sympathized heartily. He couldn’t now. There was only one girl he wanted to see walk around a room, and she might just as well have been at the opposite end of space.

She wasn’t walking around a room now. She was lying helplessly sprawled out, waiting for rescue to come. It had to come soon, it had to. The commander wouldn’t just go down alone after her. He’d be accompanied by a half-dozen executive officers who would know exactly how to bundle her into a stretcher and carry her to the sick bay.

But what if a killer just happened to be crouching in one of the corridors, waiting for the stretcher to pass? A killer with a poisoned barb.…

Corriston couldn’t stand still. He walked back and forth across the control room while the executive officer continued to talk. He paid no heed at all.

Corriston heard a footfall as he paced. He turned and saw that Commander Clement had returned. He was standing in the doorway with a strange look on his face.

Corriston felt bewildered, unable to quite believe that Clement was really back. It was like a dream that had suddenly turned real, a looking glass reversal with a strange quality of distortion about it.

It was real enough. Clement entered and shut the door behind him, very firmly and carefully, as if he wanted to make sure that Corriston would not attempt to escape.

He walked slowly forward, looking at the executive officer as if Corriston had no place at all in his thoughts.

“Everything he told me was a lie,” Clement said. “Everything. There was no girl. The compartment was locked; so was the emergency door leading down to the Selector. The ladder was standing against the wall in the Selector compartment. Miss Ramsey could not have been in the compartment—not at any time. There was nothing to indicate it. She just wasn’t there.”

Corriston moved toward him, his face white. “That’s a lie and you know it. What have you done with her? You’d better tell me. You can have me court-martialed, but you can’t stop me from talking. I can prove she was there. The grate—”

“The grate? What are you talking about? There was no ripped-out grate. The grate was in place. I feel very sorry for you, Lieutenant. But I can’t let sympathy stand in the way of my duty. In some respects you’re very rational. You can think logically and clearly…up to a point. But the shock weakness is there. It’s very serious when you start having actual hallucinations.”

The executive officer had drawn his gun. He was holding it rather loosely in his hand now, triggered and ready for any dangerous or suspicious move on Corriston’s part.

There was nothing in Clement’s gaze as he swung about to refute the dark mistrust that had come into the executive officer’s eyes. He seemed intent only on bolstering that mistrust by driving even deeper nails into Corriston’s coffin.

“I’m afraid we’ll have to continue to regard Lieutenant Corriston as dangerously unstable,” he said. “Keep your gun on him when you take him back to the Ward. Don’t relax your vigilance for an instant.”

“I won’t,” the executive officer promised.

“Good. You’re not going to make any further trouble for us, are you, Lieutenant?”

The question seemed to call for no answer and Corriston made none. He turned slowly and walked toward the door, despairingly aware that a man he had rather liked had fallen into step behind him and would shoot him dead if he so much as wavered.

Just as he reached the door Clement spoke again, giving the executive officer final instructions. “He must not be permitted to leave his cell. Make sure of that, Simms. Post a permanent guard at the door. He must be kept under constant surveillance. If he’s the self-destructive type, and I’m by no means sure he isn’t, he may attempt to kill himself.”

9

May attempt to kill himself. May attempt.… May attempt.… May attempt to kill himself. Corriston sat up on his cot, his mouth dry, his temples pounding.

Had Clement implanted the suggestion in his mind deliberately, with infinite cruelty and cunning? Was Clement really hoping that he would commit suicide? If he took his own life Clement would stand to gain a great deal.

But could Clement be that much of a scoundrel? Was he, in fact, a scoundrel at all?

Corriston knew that he could not afford to succumb to panic. Only by staying calm, by trying to reason it out logically, could he hope to get anywhere. Not at the truth, perhaps, but anywhere at all.

Start off with a supposition: The commander was everything that he pretended to be, an honest man with immense responsibilities which he could not delegate to anyone else. A forthright, hot-tempered, but completely sincere man. A little secretive, yes, but only because he took his responsibilities so seriously.

Start off by assuming that Clement was that kind of a man. What would he stand to gain if Corriston killed himself? The removal of one responsibility, at the very least. It was bad for morale if an officer had hallucinations that vitally concerned the Station itself. But a hallucination about the wealthiest girl on Earth wasn’t just run-of-the-mill. It could not only disturb every officer and enlisted man on the Station; it could have political repercussions on Earth.

Clement was already in trouble because of the freighter. The chances were a Congressional Investigating Committee would be coming out. They’d be sure to hear about Corriston. His story would be all over the Station, on everyone’s lips.

If Corriston took his own life the commander would be spared all that. He’d have nothing to answer for. The entire affair could be hushed up. Or could it?

Wait a minute, better give the whole problem another twirl. Even if the Commander was a completely honest man, he wouldn’t stand to gain too much. He might even find himself in more serious trouble. And look at it in another way: It was hard to believe that a hallucination concerning Helen Ramsey could be much more than a gadfly irritation. If the full truth came out, Clement could clear himself of all blame. Would a man of integrity suggest that a fellow-officer take his own life solely to remove a gadfly irritation? Or any irritation, for that matter?

It was inconceivable on the face of it. The first supposition was a contradiction in terms. It did not remain valid under close scrutiny and therefore it had to be rejected.

Supposition number two: Clement was in all respects the exact opposite of an honest man. Clement had something dark and damaging to conceal, was in more serious trouble than he’d allowed anyone to suspect. Clement had some reason for not wanting the truth about Ramsey’s daughter to come out.

What would he stand to gain if Corriston took himself out of the world? Unfortunately there were wide areas where any kind of speculation had to penetrate an almost absolute vacuum to get anywhere at all.

The situation on Mars? Was there some as yet undemonstratable link between Ramsey’s uranium holdings and the Station itself? Was Clement involved with Ramsey in some way? And was Ramsey’s daughter a vital link in the chain?

Had the accident to the freighter put an additional strain on the chain, a strain so great that Clement had been forced to take immediate, drastic action to protect himself?

Corriston tried to remember exactly what the Commander had said over the speaking tube. He had tried to listen intently, but he had been too agitated to make much sense out of the few brief sentences which he had overheard. Clement had been speaking in anger and not too coherently, and it had been a one-way conversation, with the replying voice completely silent, or, at the very least, inaudible. But one thing about the conversation had made a strong impression on him. Clement had not sounded like an honest man with nothing to conceal. On the contrary, he had sounded like a worried and guilty man.

Corriston shut his eyes and relaxed for a moment on his cot. It was an uneasy, tormenting kind of relaxation, because another thought had occurred to him.

What if Clement had not deliberately tried to plant a suicide suggestion in his mind at all? What if he had simply spoken with the malice of a not too kindly man appalled and enraged by a space-shock victim who had not only lied to him, but had given every evidence of being dangerously difficult to control.

It certainly made sense. There was nothing in the cell which might have enabled Corriston to take his own life, even had he been so inclined. Would not Clement have taken care to introduce into the cell some convenient, readily available weapon—a steel file, perhaps or even a small spool of wire?

A cold dream had begun to take possession of Corriston. Was it true then, could it possibly be true? Was he hallucinating? He had seen Helen Ramsey go into a ladies’ lounge and disappear. He had seen her a second time, and she had worn a mask. The mask was so strange that it would have made four men out of five question their own sanity. But he had knelt beside her and lifted her into his arms. He had felt the pulse at her wrist. Well? If after that she had disappeared again, was it not more of a black mark against him than if he had failed to touch her at all?

All hallucinations seem real to the insane. The realer they seem the more likely they are to be inescapably damning.

Could a warped mind hope to escape from such a dilemma? Was there any possible way of making sure? No, not if he had actually cracked up. But supposing he hadn’t. Suppose he had just passed for an instant over the borderline, as a result of strain, of abnormal circumstances, and was now completely rational again. In that case, proof would help. Proof could convince him that at least a part of what had happened had been real, that he had not been hallucinating continuously for days.

If he could prove conclusively that he had not been hallucinating when he had climbed through the grate, Helen Ramsey’s presence beyond the grate would be pretty well established. Even an insane man does not abandon all logic when he performs a complicated act. He is not likely to ascend a ten foot wall and climb through a grate in pursuit of a complete illusion.

Oh, it could happen.… Possibly it had happened many times in hospitals for the incurably insane. But somehow he could not believe that it had happened in his case. Right at this moment he was certainly not in an abnormal state of mind. How could he be when he was able to think so logically and consistently?

Being sane now, or at least having the firm conviction that he was sane, would enable him to retrace what had happened step by step. What he were to retrace it in reality…until he came to the grate? If the grate had been ripped out, the torment and uncertainty in his mind would vanish. He would be free then to move against Clement, to unmask and expose him for the scoundrel he was.

Free? The very thought was a mockery. He was free for twenty feet in either direction, free to shout and summon the guard. But beyond that.…

Corriston sat up straight. Free to summon the guard. Free to summon a man he had dropped to the floor with two quick, decisive and totally unexpected blows. But if he did summon the guard, what then? Could he be doubled up with cramps—the old prisoners’ dodge? “Get me to a doctor. I think I’m dying.”

Hell no, not that. It was mildewed even on the face of it. The guard wouldn’t be that much of a fool. He’d whip out a gun, and slash downward with it at the first suspicious move on the part of a man he hated.

Was there any other way? Perhaps there was…a quite simple way. Why couldn’t he simply ask the guard to step into the cell and request permission to talk to him? He would plead urgency, but do it very casually, arouse the man’s curiosity without antagonizing him too much. No need to be crafty, await some unlikely opportunity, or anything of the sort.

Simply overpower the man—straight off, without any fuss.

It had happened before, but that very fact would make the guard contemptuous, more than ever convinced that the first time he hadn’t really been taken by surprise at all. His pride would make him want to believe that. He was the kind of man who could rationalize a humiliating defeat and blot it completely from his memory.

It not only worked, it worked better than he could have dared hope. When he spoke a few words through the door, the guard became instantly curious. He unlocked the cell and came in, his eyes narrowed in anger…anger, but not suspicion. His gun remained on his hip as he walked up to Corriston and stood directly facing him, well within grappling range.

“Well, what do you want to talk to me about?” he demanded. “Better make it brief. I’m not supposed to talk to you at all.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Corriston said. “You’ve got no idea how depressing it is to be locked up in a narrow cell with absolutely no one to talk to.”

“You don’t like it, eh? Well, you brought it on yourself.”

Corriston caught the man about the waist and brought his right fist down three times on his curving back. Each blow was a powerful one, slanting downward toward the kidney.

Then Corriston hit the guard directly in the small of the back, with an even more punishing blow. The cumulative effect was instantaneous. The guard collapsed and sank down like a suddenly deflated balloon, the breath whistling from between his teeth.

Corriston watched him sink to the floor and straighten out. Forewarned as he was, he was still appalled by the almost instant, shocking change in the man’s expression. For the second time the guard’s features began to come apart. The entire upper portion of his face seemed to sink inward and broaden out, and the flowing began, the incredible refusal of his forehead and nose to remain in close proximity to his mouth.

One eye closed completely; the other remained open in a wide and almost pupilless stare. The chin receded and the lips became a puckered gray orifice that looked like some monstrous fungus growth sprouting from the middle of a gargoyle face. The individual features became paler and paler as they spread, and suddenly there seemed to be no color left in the face at all. It had turned completely waxen.

It was a horrifying thing to watch.

Corriston knelt, opened the man’s shirt and stared intently at the exposed throat, something he had not done the first time in the cafeteria. The first time he had simply knelt and searched under the shirt with his hand for a heartbeat which had surprised him by its steadiness. He was quite sure now that the heart was beating firmly and steadily.

Even the peculiar appearance of the throat did not alarm him. But it most certainly did interest him. Far down on the Security Guard’s throat, just above his breastbone, were a row of small hooks partly embedded in his flesh. The hooks were very tiny indeed, and their brightness was obscured by a thin film of sweat. Corriston removed the moisture with a quick flick of his thumb and continued to stare, as if he could not quite believe his eyes.

Finally he wedged his fingers under the base of the mask, and ripped it from the guard’s face.

Under the mask, the face had a perfectly natural look. The features were relaxed and vacuous, but there was no flowing, no unnatural distortion at all. And it was quite a different face—the face of a man who had worn a disguise and was now so completely a stranger to Corriston that he might just as well have been any one of the Station’s thirty-seven Security Guards.

Corriston could see where the hook attachments had gone into the flesh in at least thirty places on the man’s face: on his brow, his cheekbones, on both sides of his face clear down to the base of his neck. The tiny punctures made by the hooks were faintly rimmed with blood, perhaps because Corriston had torn the mask away too abruptly. Undoubtedly the skin had been anaesthetized, the hooks inserted skillfully by someone familiar with just what should be done to prevent scarring.

He hoped that the guard would not carry tiny scars on his face for the rest of his natural life. He arose and examined the mask. He had a complete false face.

The thing was ingenious beyond belief. It was no mere Halloween assemblage of papier-maché flimflammery, but an elaborate and flexible mask of very thin plastic, or possibly metal. A prosthetic mask—if one could use that term in connection with a mask. It was certainly more complex in structure than any prosthetic leg or arm he had ever seen on a handicapped man, or would ever be likely to see.

He had a pretty good idea as to how it worked. A general idea. Apparently when the hooks were attached to the muscular structure of the human face underneath, every aspect of the wearer’s face would be instantly controlled and altered to conform to the configuration of the false face. In that sense the mask could be said to actually mold itself to the wearer’s face and transform it into a completely new and different face.

And yet, in some subtle way, the emotions felt by the owner of the real face would be conveyed to the mask, so that it would express with different features very much the same kinds of emotion.

Ingenious was scarcely the word for it. It was a miracle of technological science, almost beyond belief. But he could not doubt the reality of what he saw, for he held the evidence in his hand. No hallucination could possibly be that real.

The way the mask’s surface coloration could change when the wearer’s emotions changed was perhaps the most amazing miracle of all. He had seen the guard’s color come and go, had watched him redden with anger and then grow pale.

It could only mean that there was some mechanically symbiotic, emotion-sensitive electronic coating or skin surface, or series of tubes on the inner surface of the mask, which could simulate actual blood flow much like a network of tiny heat regulators. This network would be so responsive to the slightest change in body temperature that the mask would alter its color the instant the wearer experienced fright or grew uncontrollably angry. What made it seem logical and even likely was the fact that caloric changes do occur in just such a fashion in the human body with every shift from anger to grief or from pain to shock.

There was nothing simple about the inner surface of the mask. It was a maze of complicated gadgetry concentrated in less than eight inches of space, perhaps thirty or forty separate mechanisms in all, some as tiny as the head of a pin, and others about one inch in width.

When the wearer became unconscious, the mask seemingly lost its integrity. The gadgets either stopped functioning or ceased to function properly and the false face became a dissolving, hideous caricature; that bore little or no resemblance to the human countenance in repose, or even to the human countenance convulsed with sudden shock.

How incredibly blind he had been in failing to suspect the existence of a mask when the guard’s face had grown unnatural and ghastly in the cafeteria. He had taken it for granted that it was the man himself who had changed.

Fortunately he was spared now from making the same mistake twice, and he took full advantage of the fact. He knelt again and began the by no means easy task of removing the uniform. He had to lift him up and turn him over twice and each time the man groaned and stirred a little. He seemed on the verge of coming to, but Corriston shut his mind to the possibility until the last of the man’s garments had been tossed in a pile on the floor.

He quickly took off his own uniform then, and carefully and methodically arrayed himself as a guard, taking care to leave the coat unbuttoned at the throat and even going so far as to draw on the heavy woolen socks and attach to his wrist the guard’s metal identification disk.

An audacious thought occurred to him, but he dismissed it at once. He could not attach the mask to his own face. It would have required the administrations of an expert, or, at the very least, someone familiar with the thing who knew exactly how it was supposed to be hooked into place. He had no way of knowing and he recoiled instinctively from the thought of hooks, however tiny, marring the skin on his face.

No, he’d have to get along without the mask. No one on the lower levels knew him by sight, with the one ugly exception of a killer he’d never seen clearly enough to recognize in return. And in the guard’s uniform he might even succeed in deceiving the killer if he moved quickly enough to give the man only a brief glimpse of him as he crossed the wide-view promenade.

10

Corriston stared down at the still unconscious guard, lying stretched out unclothed on the floor of the cell, then he turned, patting the guard’s gun which now nestled in its transferred holster on his angular, bony hip.

Well, there were perhaps even worse ways of ending up, and it was certainly a destiny almost universally shared.

He walked out through the open door of the cell without a backward glance.

He had changed his plans completely now. The complicated structure of the mask between his hands had so completely reassured him as to his complete sanity, that he was no longer under a compulsion to return to the Selector Compartment for additional proof.

All of the pieces were coming together and melting into a pattern that remained obscure only because there was still so much about it that he did not understand. He knew there was a killer loose on the Station, the same one who had been loose on the ship that had taken him to the Station. He knew about a poisoned barb that had killed one man and had barely missed killing Corriston himself.

Dismiss the killer for the moment. There was Helen Ramsey, the wealthiest girl on Earth. Think about Ramsey himself and what his wealth had done to Mars. Think about the colonists on Mars, men who had endured unimaginable hardships and privation to stake out uranium claims which Ramsey did not want them to have. Think about the freighter that had gone out of control.

Think about Clement. Think very hard about Clement. The tragedy had shaken him, had given him the look of a very guilty man. He had not wanted it to happen. He had been alarmed, appalled. Yes, think about Clement—that very secretive man.

The killer? You can’t get rid of him, can you? He keeps coming back into your mind. The killer had not tried to spare Helen Ramsey. He had killed her bodyguard and ripped a mask from her face. No attempt at protection there. But Clement could not have known about that. He had evidently been searching for Helen Ramsey himself. The news that she had been found had startled him, had given him a visible jolt.

Corriston did not think that the pattern would dissolve. A few of its features were becoming too clear now, the implications too inescapable. There was something going on that was ugly at the core of it, and the coming of the killer had simply brought it out into the open. Not too much into the open as yet perhaps, but the handwriting on the wall had at least become almost readable. Perhaps the accident to the freighter had also helped to bring it into the open. In some obscure way everything seemed to dovetail: Ramsey; the situation on Mars; Clement and the freighter; a twice disappearing Helen Ramsey; and an accusation of space-shock which was completely false and unjustified. Each seemed to hover just above the center of a very definite pattern.

And so did the masks! The masks in particular. Think, think hard about the masks and what the very existence of such masks on the Station implied.

The masks could only have been designed to cover the darkest deceit, to cover the most terrifying treachery.

How many officers and enlisted men on the Station were wearing masks? How many? And why? Was every officer on the Station wearing one? If the masks were thought necessary, if their employment had been made mandatory, there could be only one explanation.

Every officer and every enlisted man was masquerading. The Station was officered and manned by—a word he’d never liked from a dictionary of obsolete American slang came unbidden into his mind—Phonies!

The thought staggered him. For a moment he rejected it as inconceivable, outside the bounds of reason. But it remained on the perimeter of his consciousness and would not be dislodged. It came back and set itself down where its dominance over his mind could not be contested.

What else could it mean? Masks have only one purpose: to enable the wearer to avoid being recognized.

Quite obviously the phony officers could be wearing masks for only one reason: to conceal their real identities while they manned the Stations, carrying on the tasks of the men they had displaced.

Carrying on the tasks of the rightful officers, but with a difference. And that difference would almost certainly be criminal activity on a wide and daring scale.

The only question remaining to be answered was how high did that activity ascend? Did it ascend to the very top, to Commander Clement himself?

Fortunately, the violence of space is a controlled violence, and determined men can slip through it with tools and building materials. They can base themselves on zero-gravity construction rafts and take refuge in pressurized crevices, go floating along steel girders five hundred feet in length until there has been assembled the greatest of all miracles—a manned Space Station a thousand feet in diameter encircling Earth at a distance of fifteen hundred miles.

The Station had not been built in space, it had been built on Earth section by section. However, the final task of putting it together had been left to the floating men in their fishbowl helmets, the suicide brigade with their incredible vacuum equipment and remote control welding arms.

Fifty-seven sections had been built on Earth over a period of five years, thirty-four in the Eastern United States, the rest in scattered localities from Chicago to the Gold Coast. They had all been sent up by step rockets into the same narrow orbit around Earth. They were fifty-seven sections “crash landing” in a total vacuum, weightless and yet with sufficient mass and inertia to keep them in close proximity until the great task could get under way.

The assembled Station was cone-shaped, and it had been a colossal undertaking to keep it from developing stress defects over a third of its bulk during the early constructional stages. Under the guidance of experts, the problem had been solved, but at a tragic price.

Assembling the Station had cost the lives of fifty-three men, for there is no easy way to bring together, join, seal and make safe tons of metal and plastic, intricate machinery and equipment, plus a thousand-and-one small, incidental contrivances fifteen hundred miles above the emergency-alert systems and hospital facilities of Earth.

Some of the men who had lost their lives had been blown out of transport rocket tubes by mistake. Some had missed their footing too close to a welding operation that had been halted too late. Some had floated into capsules full of nitric oxygen gas under high pressure and had failed to veer away in time. Still others had tugged too strenuously at heavy girders and the slow, but crushing inertia of an enormous, backward-swinging beam in free fall had ripped their space suits asunder and fractured their spines.

There were five thousand ways of dying in space. But the sacrifice, the terror, the tragic toll seemed immeasurably remote now, for the roar of the incoming and outgoing ships made the Station a gigantic reality so completely in the present that it seemed to have no past.

Spinning always on its axis, substituting centrifugal force for the gravity tug of Earth, the Station was a complete world, a self-contained macrocosm so immense that the magnetic-shod mechanics who inspected it in relays, the passenger-carrying shuttle rockets from Earth that came and went, and even the thousand-foot ships that berthed for re-fueling and clearance seemed hardly to encroach at all on its vast central bulk.

And yet, it was something quite apart from the Station’s bigness which came under worldwide scrutiny when the freighter crashed and was splintered into fragments, channeling a fiery crater in the earth and causing the most disastrous accidental death toll in United States history.

The news was flashed to the four corners of the earth, and almost simultaneously a flight of United States military jets took off from the Lake Superior airport to explore the wreckage.

The first message from the flight commander, Lieutenant Colonel Hackett, came five hours later. It was tense, grim and it minced no words. “Wreckage radioactive. Main cargo uranium in a rough ore state. Explosion and subsequent intense radioactivity apparently caused by an auxiliary cargo of highly unstable uranium isotopes. If the freighter had berthed at the Station the dangerous character of its cargo could not have escaped detection. We have every reason to believe that it intended to berth at the Station. Its signals to the Station, before some undeterminable shipboard accident sent it out of control, confirm this. We must therefore assume complicity of a double nature: by the freighter’s commanding officer, Captain James Summerfield, and by someone in a position of high command on the Station.”

After that, there was no silencing the slow, relentless events on Earth.

A week after the tragedy, a U. S. Marine corporal stationed at Port Forrestal, Wisconsin, put through a late afternoon phono-view call to his wife. His face on the screen was haggard with strain, and he seemed not to want to meet his wife’s gaze.

“We’ve been ordered out into space,” he said.

“You mean they’re sending you out to take over the Station?”

“They’re sending out five thousand United States Marines,” the corporal said. “We all knew it was coming. We expected it when that Governmental Investigating Committee was turned back.”

“But it doesn’t make sense. I can’t understand it. Why should the Commander of the Station refuse to permit a Governmental Investigating Committee to land?”

“We don’t know. He must have something to conceal, and you can be pretty sure it’s an ugly something. When that freighter disaster got into every daily press conference of the high brass I knew this was coming. I felt it in my bones.”

“But what will happen if the Commander refuses to let even the Marines land? What will happen then?”

“We may have to open fire on the Station,” the corporal said. “If the Station is in criminal hands we’ll have no alternative.”

“You talk as if you were in command.”

“I guess every soldier talks like that when his life is in jeopardy. But I’m glad I’m not a five-star general. If I had to make a decision like that—”

* * * *

But it wasn’t a general who made the crucial decision. It was Admiral John Hayes, Commander of the Eighth Spatial Naval Division, acting on behalf of fifty-seven nations.

He stood in the bridge room of a United States naval cruiser of massive tonnage, staring out through a wide-view observation port at the Station’s glimmering immensity. The cruiser and the Station were moving at almost the same speed, fifteen thousand miles an hour. But now the cruiser was moving just a little faster than the Station, and Admiral Hayes was growing impatient.

Maneuvering into an orbital position almost directly abreast of the Station had been difficult. Commander Hayes’ nerves were badly frayed; and he was not a man who could endure too much frustration. He had signaled the Station twice and received no reply. During that time, both the Station and the Cruiser had completely encircled the Earth at an interval of just a little under two hours.

He turned suddenly from the viewport, his lips set in tight lines. He stared for an instant in silence at the young officer at his side, his mind groping for an argument which would completely justify what he had already decided he must do.

But Lieutenant Commander Kenneth Archer spoke first, saying quietly: “You have no choice, sir.”

Hayes’ features relaxed a little. It was good to know that he had support from a man whose judgment he respected. For an instant the awful aloneness which went with supreme command weighed less heavily upon him.

“It’s absolute defiance, open rebellion,” Hayes said. “I’m forced to assume that the Station is in criminal hands. We’ll never know, probably, just what happened on board that freighter. But we do know that accidents occur. For every thirty ships that berth securely, one meets with some kind of navigational mishap. The damage isn’t always irreparable. More often than not, in fact, it’s quite minor. Usually it means only a delay in berthing, a navigational shift, a circling back for another try. But apparently that freighter really had it. So it gave the show away. Commander Clement must be in league, hand in glove, with whoever is interested in smuggling unauthorized uranium shipments through to Earth for his own personal profit. And to hasten his immediate profit that someone apparently found it to his advantage to trigger a little of the shipment into highly fissionable material on Mars.”

“You know as well as I do who the someone is, sir,” Archer said.

“I guess we both know. But right now my only concern is with the Station. If they ignore my third order to stand by for boarding I’ll have to open fire. The Station’s stolen property just as long as it remains in criminal hands. You can’t get a desperate criminal to surrender your property unless you convince him his own life is in danger. I’ve got to try my best to convince Commander Clement I mean business without destroying the Station.”

“You’ll damage it to some extent, sir. How bad do you think it will be?”

“I don’t know. I don’t intend to launch an atomic warhead. But I can’t stop short of that if he stays stubborn. I’ve no way of knowing what his breaking point will be. But I do know that if he keeps control of the Station he’ll be in a position to wipe out New York or London.”

“But you’ll make your intentions unmistakably clear before you open fire, sir?”

“Yes,” Hayes said, wearily. “Yes…of course I will.”

11

Corriston took a deep breath and let it out slowly. So far luck had favored him. Now he felt as though he were walking through a deadly jungle where all the animals had suddenly turned friendly. The teeth they bared at him were smiling. The grins were their masks. But the commander didn’t pretend at all…whoever the commander really was!

And then that single question began to gnaw at Corriston like some rat feeding on his flesh: Where was the real Clement now? Was he alive? Was he accessible? Or was he dead?

Corriston’s mental processes were now governed by the most evanescent of impressions: the depth of the shadows on both sides of the corridor; his own shadow lengthening before him; the drone of machinery deep within the Station; the muffled beating of his own heart. Suddenly he was at the end of the corridor and approaching the main control room, his face as grim as death.

Violence he had determined upon, but it would be a very brief, a very effective kind of violence. It takes only a second to rip a mask from a man’s face.

Something was happening just outside the main control room door. The three executive officers guarding the door had moved eight or ten paces down the corridor, and the door itself was standing ajar. The executive officers had their backs turned to Corriston and were making no attempt to conceal their agitation. They were very pale, at least, one of them was. Two had their backs completely turned, but Corriston caught a brief glimpse of the third man’s profile, and it seemed completely drained of color, as if the mask had stopped mirroring emotion artificially and had allowed the wearer’s actual pallor to seep through.

Corriston glided quickly to the door, passed through it and shut it very quietly behind him.

The commander had his back turned too. He was standing before the viewport, staring out into space.

But the commander did seem dazed, did seem stunned. Corriston could tell by his posture, by the way he held his shoulders, by the utter rigidity of his neck.

Then he saw it, the long cylindrical hull touched by a pale glimmer of starlight, the circular, glowing ports, the massive, atomic-projectile launching turrets at its base. He saw it through the viewport, saw it past the commander’s stiffening shoulders—an American war cruiser of formidable tonnage and armed with sufficient fire power to shatter a small moon.

All right, let the Big Dark contain it for a moment, poised out there, ready for any contingency. Right at the moment a scoundrel must be unmasked in a very stark way. Whatever trouble he had brought upon himself, he must be made to face it now without the mask.

Corriston unholstered his gun and walked toward the commander across the deck. He came up behind him and thrust the gun into the small of his back.

“Turn around,” he ordered. “Don’t make any other move. Just turn slowly and face me. I want to take a good look at your face.”

If the commander was startled, he didn’t show it. Perhaps the war cruiser had dealt him such a crushing blow that he was no longer capable of experiencing shock. Or his control may have been extraordinary. Corriston had no way of knowing and it didn’t concern him too much.

He was chiefly interested in the commander’s eyes. He had never before seen eyes quite so piercing in their stare or narrowed in quite such an ugly way.

The commander spoke almost instantly and his voice had a steel-cold rasp. “Well?” he said.

Just a few words—just the shortest possible question he could have asked.

Corriston said: “You’re wearing a mask, aren’t you, commander?”

The impostor’s expression did not change, but his hand went instinctively to his throat.

“Remove your tie and unbutton your collar,” Corriston said.

The man made another quick gesture with his hand in the direction of his throat. But it seemed involuntary, protective, for he did not touch his collar.

Corriston shifted his weapon a little, moving the barrel upward until it pressed very firmly against the commander’s breastbone. He reached out and unbuttoned the commander’s collar with his free hand, very quickly and expertly.

He was staring at the tiny hooks at the base of the mask when something happened which made him regret that he had not followed his original intention of instantly ripping the mask from the man’s face.

The door opened and the three executive officers came into the control room. For an instant they seemed neither to see nor understand the situation. They must have seen Corriston, but the fact that he was wearing a guard’s uniform may have given them the idea that he had every right to be there. The gun was concealed from view and the commander was standing very quietly by the viewport and quite obviously incapable of making any move, simply because the slightest move would have endangered his life.

So the executive officers went right on talking for an instant, half to themselves and half to the commander, just as if Corriston had not been present at all.

“If that cruiser lands, Ramsey’s goose is cooked and ours is too,” a tall officer said. “The instant that freighter crashed I knew they’d find out quickly enough how the ships had been carrying smuggled uranium. I knew that under pressure, half of our captains would talk…and the crews, too. All the government would have to do is check and they’d find out that we’re Ramsey’s men, all of us. They might even now know about the masks.”

“Why not about the masks?” another officer joined in. “Ramsey paid for the research that went into them, didn’t he? Big tycoon…fingers in a dozen pies. When the secret’s out, and he puts them on the market, he’ll make important money out of it. But we’ll be in prison with just our own faces staring back at us from a steel wall.”

“Don’t worry about that. Ramsey won’t profit from the manufacture of masks. He won’t even profit from the false uranium clearance we gave him. If that cruiser is allowed to land he’ll be in prison with us.”

“Better think that over, Commander. You refused to let the Governmental Investigating Committee land. If a single soldier sets foot on the Station we’re done for. It’s not too late to do something about it. That cruiser can only berth by overtaking us. If we change our orbit fast and start blasting at them with our rear adjusting rockets they’ll have to keep their distance?”

“Aren’t you forgetting something? A single atomic warhead could blow the Station apart.”

“We’ve got to risk that. They’ll think a long time before they’ll go that far. The Station’s not expendible. If we change our orbit we can still make contact with the Mars ship that’s due to berth in an hour. We’ve got to get back to Mars and whatever protection Ramsey can give us. We’ll have his daughter with us. He’ll be so glad to see her he’ll go out on a limb to protect us.”

“He’d go out on a limb anyway; He’d have to in order to save himself. But sure, we’ll take the girl. No harm in that. He knows she’s here and will be expecting her. He’ll thank us for taking things so quickly in hand. If that crazy lieutenant had made his story public that cruiser would have been out there anyway—perhaps even sooner. They’d have wanted to know on Earth why anyone would want to harm Ramsey’s daughter, something we don’t know ourselves.”

Corriston decided then that he’d kept silent long enough. He returned his gun to its holster, and walked up to the three executive officers, completely ignoring the commander.

He heard the commander threaten him in a low tone, heard him say words which would have caused some men to pause in fear. But Corriston did not turn.

There was stunned disbelief in the eyes of the three men facing him. He spoke quickly, knowing that he had only a moment before the commander would see that he was seized and restrained. He had to make sure that the three would hear him out, that the commander would not be instantly obeyed. Perhaps he couldn’t make sure, but at least he could try.

“I’ll make a bargain with you,” he said. “I’ve done reckless things but I’m not a complete fool. You’re going to prevent that cruiser from berthing and I won’t be able to interfere. I’m just one man against several hundred. All three of you are armed. If I started shooting I’d get perhaps two of you—no more. Then you’d kill me. I haven’t even the advantage of surprise. I gave that up because I can’t believe you’re complete fools either.

“First, I want to see Helen Ramsey. I want you to let me talk to her. And when the Mars’ ship berths, I want to go to Mars with her. I’ve something to offer in return.”

One of the officers stared at him, tightened his lips and stared harder. “Good God!” he muttered. “Good God! A bargain. You must be out of your mind. What could you possibly offer? If you had a gun trained on us—”

“A witness in your defense,” Corriston said. “A witness who will stand up in court and swear that you did try to protect Helen Ramsey, that you saved her from a very great danger. You may think that you do not need a witness now, but before the year is out Ramsey will be on trial for his life. His wealth won’t save him. They know too much about him now. That freighter explosion killed too many people. The public outcry will be too great.

“If you stay on Mars you’ll be hunted down like wild animals. They’ll get you in the end and you know it. You’ll be brought back to Earth; you’ll stand trial.”

Corriston paused for the barest instant, knowing that the commander too was listening, knowing from the absence of sound and movement behind him that his words were being weighed. “I think you know that I would not break my word. I’ll stand up in court and defend you under oath. I’ll be speaking the simple truth. You did save Helen Ramsey from a very great danger; you probably saved her life. That is sure to weigh in your favor with any impartial judge and jury. You won’t get the death penalty; I can promise you that.”

It was the commander who spoke first. He said, very quietly. “He’s right, of course. Completely right.”

One of the officers nodded. “There’s no reason why we shouldn’t let him talk to the girl. We can decide later whether we like his offer.”

“We’re going to like it,” the commander said, coming around in front of Corriston. “He has more sense than I would have given him credit for.”

“So have you, commander,” Corriston said, and meant it.

The commander’s eyes were still hostile, unfriendly, but the cold rage had gone out of them.

“All right,” he said. “Let him see the girl now. Make sure a guard is stationed at the door. Keeping that cruiser from berthing won’t be easy. They’ll keep the Station under fire with small projectiles, even if they don’t attack us with atomic warheads. They’ll risk some damage just to throw a scare into us.”

The officer next to Corriston nudged his arm. “All right,” he said. “But remember this when you talk to her. She doesn’t know the truth about us. She doesn’t even know we’re wearing masks. We’d like it better if you didn’t say anything about it.”

“Whether she knows it or not isn’t too important,” Corriston said. “I suppose you wouldn’t care to tell me what you’ve done with Commander Clement and the other officers.”

“No, we wouldn’t care to tell you. Anything more?”

“I guess not,” Corriston said. “Take me to her.”

12

He was staring at her across a shadowed room, with the pale glimmer of a cabin viewport above her right shoulder, a very small port that looked like a full moon glimmering high in the sky through a sea of mist.

Her face was very white and she was staring back at him as if he had come suddenly out of nowhere.

She hesitated only an instant and then walked straight toward him, walked right up to him and touched him gently on the face.

“I’m so glad,” she said.

She drew back then and looked at him and smiled. “I was afraid you were in trouble because of me,” she said, “some terrible kind of trouble, and I couldn’t help you at all. I kept blaming myself for everything foolish that I had ever done, going way back to the day when I broke my first doll, deliberately and spitefully, because I was a very headstrong little girl.”

“I’m afraid I’ve always been pretty headstrong myself,” Corriston said. “But being a boy, I naturally couldn’t break dolls. I just wrecked the family’s peace of mind.”

“We all go through life with a great deal of foolish luggage,” she said. “And sometimes you have an impulse to just drop everything—and run away.”

“I can understand that,” Corriston said. “But did you have to run away quite so fast? It’s hard to believe it was for anybody’s good, including your own.”

“It might have been,” she said. “It might have been for my good and then later, partly for your good. Please don’t judge me too harshly before I’ve had a chance to tell you exactly what happened.”

He reached out for her and kissed her even as she came into his arms. He had expected her to be angry, to withdraw, but instead she encircled his strong back with a surprising fierceness. When he released her, her eyes were shining.

“I’m glad you did that…darling! Very glad. But we’re still in trouble.”

“I know that. But we’re in love, too. And you just promised to tell me what happened.”

“Well, I guess I just…just regressed.”

“You what?”

“Regressed. You know, like when I was a headstrong little brat of a child. We all do that at times. You’ll have to admit there was some excuse for me. You weren’t born in a house with a hundred rooms, with servants always coming and going, and outside gardens with big red and yellow flowers where you couldn’t even run and hide without being smothered, without being searched for and brought screaming and kicking back inside.

“You don’t know what it means to know you haven’t a father, only a stern, cold, black-coated man standing away off in the darkness somewhere and watching people bow down before him.

“You don’t know what it means to be told: ‘You’re Stephen Ramsey’s daughter. Behave. Behave. Behave!’”

“I scarcely ever saw my father. And when I did see him he was as cold as one of the slabs in the big mausoleum he took so much pride in, the big family mausoleum which only a Ramsey was permitted to visit. And yet I think he loved me in his own cold way. I think he still does.”

She fell silent for a moment and then an overpowering need to tell Corriston more seemed to come upon her.

“I was never allowed to see young men, not even to go for a ride in the park. Anyone of them might be a fortune seeker, because no young man, even if he is madly in love with a girl, can quite shut his eyes to wealth as one additional reason for loving her.

“So I never saw any young men. I wasn’t permitted to even go to a dance, or walk in the moonlight on a balcony. I wanted to go to dances, wanted at least one young man to kiss me damned hard.”

“Sure you did,” Corriston said. “I understand.”

“I’m going to stop right there, darling. I could tell you what it means to be free to travel, anywhere, anywhere in the world and to see all of the white and shining cities, and to be intoxicated by beauty, and to know at the same time that you are not free, can never hope to be free as other people are free.”

“And that’s why you ran away.”

“Yes, darling, yes, and because that bodyguard was a complete fool. He was just one of thirty bodyguards my father had hired to protect me, year after year. But he was the biggest fool of all. He drank too much and he talked too much. Finally I made up my mind that I would be better off if I went on to Mars alone. My father had told me I could come, the trip had been carefully planned down to the smallest detail. I was to travel incognito. I was to keep to myself until I arrived at the Station and no one was supposed to know I was even on the ship, not even the captain. I’m quite sure he didn’t know. I think the invitation to his cabin was a complete fabrication. In fact, I’m sure it was. I think Clakey—his real name was Ewers—was just drunk enough to make up a crazy story like that to get me away from you.

“But I didn’t want to get away from you, darling. I wanted to get away from him. I wanted to have a few days of complete freedom before I arrived on Mars, and perhaps after that for a day in the colony before I joined my father. I didn’t care how angry he’d be when he saw me without a bodyguard, alone, wonderfully, gloriously alone and free for the first time in my life. I didn’t want to be Helen Ramsey at all. I wanted to be somebody else and be completely free.

“So I went into the ladies room, darling, and I put on the strangest kind of mask.”

“Yes,” Corriston said. “I know.”

“You know about the mask?”

“Please go on,” Corriston said. “I’d rather you didn’t ask me how I know that your father can take pride in at least one constructive achievement. The masks are extraordinary. I’ve seen one.”

“But how? Where? I can’t believe it. I—”

“Please,” Corriston said. “It isn’t too important. I made a necessary promise that I wouldn’t tell you, not immediately. I’m asking you to trust me and go on.”

“Well, I secured one of those very unusual masks. From the Gresham-Ramsey Laboratories, before we left Earth. I could go there anytime I wanted to. All of the research technicians there are quite old. One of them, Thomas Webb, is really quite handsome. I might have fallen in love with him if he had been forty years younger. He showed me just how to adjust the mask. But when I went into the ladies’ lounge I had more than just a mask. I had a complete thin plastic change of clothing concealed under my dress. I didn’t remove my dress, only reversed my clothing so that the plastic dress covered the one I’d been wearing.”

Corriston said, “It was a very courageous thing for you to do.”

“I’m glad you think so, darling. Because when I came out of the lounge and saw Ewers killed, I wasn’t courageous at all. I became panic-stricken, terrified, beside myself with fear. I knew that my father had many dangerous enemies. I knew that I was in immediate, deadly danger. I had to go on with the disguise then. I had to go right on being somebody else. I couldn’t tell anyone. I couldn’t even tell you. I had to let you think that in some strange, bewildering way I had gone into the lounge and disappeared.

“I knew you wouldn’t really believe that, not for a moment. But I didn’t know what you’d think. I could have told you, I suppose, but I was afraid it would only make the danger greater, might transfer some of the danger to you. And I didn’t know you’d go straight to the captain and get yourself into trouble. There were rumors on the Station that you’d been confined, put under guard. But they were only rumors. I felt I had to see you, talk to you. I was half out of my mind with anxiety. I bribed one of the guards to let me out of the quarantine cage and went in search of you.

“I searched everywhere, followed passageways at random, got lost in a maze of machinery.”

“And someone followed you,” Corriston said. “He followed you and tore the mask from your face.”

She looked at him with wide, startled eyes. “How did you know?”

“I was there,” Corriston said. “You fainted and I took you into my arms—for the very first time. You didn’t know that, did you?”

“How could I have known? If what you say is true, I—”

Helen Ramsey did not complete what she had started to say. Had she done so she might not have been thrown so abruptly off-balance by the suddenly lurching deck; she would have moved closer to Corriston and could have seized hold of his shoulders for support.

She did not fall, but she nearly did, and the lurch sent her tottering all the way to the opposite wall. Corriston saw her collide with the wall and sink to her knees. At the same instant his own knees collapsed.

He was lying sprawled out on the deck, too startled and shaken to go immediately to her aid, when the second lurch came. It spun him about, and then he was sliding. He couldn’t seem to stop the sliding. He went all the way to the opposite wall too.

For a brief instant they were together again, locked in a desperate embrace, their legs higher than their heads. Then the deck righted itself and the bombardment began.

It was a terrifying thing to have to listen to, and Corriston preferred to listen to it on his feet. Slowly he arose and helped his companion up, holding her in so tight a grip that it seemed to them that they had been welded together and could never part.

He was glad that he could be completely sure of one thing. It wasn’t a nuclear bombardment—not yet. The cruiser was merely shelling the Station. When the cruiser launched an atomic warhead he’d know about it—rather, he wouldn’t know. The fact that he was still alive and aware of what was going on told him a great deal about the nature of the bombardment.

“What is it?” Helen Ramsey whispered. “Do you know?”

“We’re the catspaw in a naval attack,” Corriston said. “The commander took a very great risk.”

It was incredible, but right at the moment he felt himself to be in the scoundrel’s corner. He didn’t want the Station to be blown apart in the great empty spaces between the planets any more than the commander did.

When Corriston reached the viewport and stared out, the cruiser was following the Station far off to the side, in an obvious effort to outmaneuver it by maintaining a parallel rather than a directly pursuing course. But it was not escaping the swiftly turning Station’s stern rocket jets. Blinding bursts of incandescence spiraled toward it through the void, and once or twice scored direct hits.

He saw the cruiser shudder throughout its length, and then draw back, almost as if it were endowed with life and had nerves and arteries that could be ripped apart.

There were mechanical arteries that could easily enough be ripped. For an instant Corriston stared with a strange kind of detachment, freed from the terrible tension and uncertainty by his absolute absorption in the battle itself, freed from the almost mind-numbing sense of participating in a struggle that could end in utter disaster for Station and cruiser alike. He knew that if the cruiser maneuvered in too close, the puffs of flame from the Station’s jets could turn into superheated gases roaring through space, destroying everything in their path.

The Station, too, was only a pulsebeat from fiery annihilation. And a pulsebeat could be terrifyingly brief. But the decision had been made and there could be no turning back.

Aboard the cruiser the decision had certainly come from very high up. Corriston turned the thought slowly over in his mind, still in the grip of his strange detachment. Just what did “very high up” mean?

It meant—it had to mean—a conflict of personalities, the hot-headedness or stubbornness or glory-seeking that went with every decision made by strong-willed men.

Aboard the cruiser someone had acted. After consultation? On just an impulse? In blind rage because the Station had ignored a warning that had been repeated twice?

There was no way of knowing. But on the cruiser men were dying. That was important too. Just how reckless had the decision been?

In space, military science has never been an exact science. Sonic echoes alone can kill, and in a pressurized compartment blowups happen. Jet-supports can be placed at the best of all possible angles and still fly off into space. Compressed air shot out of pressure vents can turn bone and flesh into soft oozing jelly.

The cruiser was changing its course again. It had failed, in a maneuver, twice repeated, to draw close at almost right angles to the Station, and had taken terrible punishment from below, above and straight ahead.

But the cruiser was still firing. And Corriston not only saw the bursts of flame, he felt the blasts in his eardrums, his brain and the soles of his feet. And suddenly he saw flames darting out directly beneath him, and knew that the Station was on fire.

Corriston knew that at any moment he could be smashed back against a bone-crushing wall of metal; he could be pulverized, asphyxiated, driven mad. And the fear in him—the fear that he wouldn’t be able to control—would be a two-edged sword.

There was no pain more ghastly than the final burst of agony that came with a burst open nervous system. It was the most horrible way to die. But even dying that way wouldn’t be half as bad as watching the woman he loved die.

Almost as if aware of his thoughts, Helen spoke to him for the first time since he had crossed to the viewport.

“It’s very strange, darling. I’m calmer now than I have ever been. I guess it can happen if you love a man so very much that you know your life would have no meaning if anything should happen to him. It’s like facing up squarely to the fact that you no longer have any existence apart from him. I’ve done that, darling, and I’m not afraid.”

There was silence in the cabin for an instant. Then another shell exploded, and another, and another. Corriston felt light and dangerously dizzy. It was amazing that he had not been hurled to the floor, still more amazing that he could have remained for so long motionless in just one spot.

Then, abruptly, the bombardment ceased. There was no sound at all in the cabin, just a silence so absolute that the roaring in Corriston’s ears was like the sound made by an angry sea beating against vast stone cliffs in a world that had ceased to exist.

There were no longer any exploding white stars coming from the cruiser. It was dwindling into the blackness of space, giving up the battle, conceding defeat. It became thinner and thinner. Suddenly only the reef remained. Where the cruiser had been there stretched only empty space.

Corriston turned from the viewport. He crossed the cabin to the cot, swaying a little, but only from dizziness, and sat down and drew the girl on the cot close to him. He held her tightly, saying nothing.

13

Corriston was still sitting on the cot when the door opened and the commander and two executive officers came into the cabin.

He was not too surprised, for it had been somehow almost impossible for him to believe that the commander could have been killed. A scoundrel’s luck and a drunkard’s luck were often very much the same thing.

If the commander had succeeded in quickly putting out the fire he rated a medal, he was a man for all of that.

And apparently the commander had succeeded in putting out the fire, or he would not now be facing Corriston with a grimly urgent look on his mask.

Helen Ramsey was staring at him almost as if she were seeing him as he really was for the first time. Did she know that he was wearing a mask? There was no possible way she could know, he told himself, except by intuition. The masks were good. Having worn one herself she ought to know how good they were. She ought not even to suspect the commander unless—

Corriston had no time to finish the thought.

“Get up, both of you,” the commander said, gesturing with his braided right arm. “The Mars ship has just berthed. We’ve got to go aboard before there’s any question as to the obedience of the crew. The captain has been taken off, but we’re keeping some of the crew.”

“You—you put out the fire, Commander?”

“Naturally. I’m not quite the incompetent you think me, Lieutenant.”

“I’m quite sure of that, Commander,” Corriston said. “Do we take anything with us?”

“You’ll get all the extras you need on Mars,” the commander said. “Stephen Ramsey isn’t likely to want to see his daughter go about in rags.”

Corriston decided that the wisest thing he could do was to take the commander at his word in every important respect; for the moment, at any rate. There was the little matter of a killer still at large somewhere on the Station, and the quicker they were in space the safer Ramsey’s daughter would be. Not just in space as the Station was in space, but much further out in the Big Dark.

“All right, Commander,” he said. “Let’s get started.”

Getting started took very little time. A great thankfulness came upon Corriston when he saw the smooth dark hull of the Mars ship looming high above him, a thousand foot long cylinder of inky blackness against a glimmering wilderness of stars.

The ship was berthed securely beneath a towering network of telemetric aerials, on a completely circular launching platform that was like a saucer in reverse, with a contractable metal ramp leading up to the wide-open, brightly lighted boarding port at its base.

There were steps on the ramp, but Corriston knew that when the structure was drawn back into the ship it would collapse like a house of cards, folded back upon itself.

Helen Ramsey ascended first. Corriston made certain that she would by getting in the commander’s way with a convincing show of accidental clumsiness. He pretended to stumble as he began the ascent, to be all hands and feet.

The commander swore softly and Corriston was quite sure that he had not been deceived. But there was very little that he could do about it under the circumstances. He had to let Ramsey’s daughter climb the ramp first and she was almost at the top before Corriston started up.

Corriston was halfway to the top, and the commander and the impatient, tight-lipped executive officers were just starting up, when three tall figures emerged from the darkness at the base of the ramp.

The attack took place so quickly that it was over almost before it started. The commander and the executive officers didn’t have a chance. One of the emerging men had a gun, and he shot the commander in the stomach with it at almost point-blank range.

The commander sank down, clutching at his stomach, bent nearly double. Even from where Corriston was standing, he could see the blood trickling down his right leg. The terrible dark wetness directly over the wound was of course invisible, completely concealed by the commander’s tightly laced arms.

The startled, badly frightened officers turned and tried to get away. But they didn’t get far. The man who had shot the commander picked them off like clay pigeons, one by one, as they fled.

His two companions did not even seem to be armed. They just stood quietly watching the executive officers die. They died on the launching platform and on the smooth deck beyond, two of them simply dropping in their tracks, a third sprawling grotesquely, and the last staggering on for a few paces. There were four executive officers, and not one escaped. It was butchery, pure and simple, cruel, savage beyond belief.

Helen Ramsey was already on the ship, and there was no possible way for him to get her off.

The thought that he was himself in the deadliest kind of danger never even crossed his mind.

The killer returned his gun to its holster very slowly and deliberately, and then he took it out again. It was a very strange gesture, when every passing second must have been of vital importance to him, but it revealed something very unusual about the man. He evidently liked to feel that he had completed one job and packaged it to his entire satisfaction, before going on to another.

It was that more than anything else which jolted Corriston into complete awareness, and made it impossible for him to doubt the reality, the utter horror, of what had taken place. The killer had gestured to his companions, and he was coming up the ramp.

He came slowly up the ramp, and for the first time Corriston saw his face. It was not a face that he would ever forget or ever want to forget. It was the face of the man he had grappled with in the dark and seen once in the light. But now his features were turned away. It was exactly the kind of face which Corriston had pictured him as having, except that it was just a little uglier looking. The slant of the cheekbones even crueler, harsher, the eyes more venomously narrowed, the mouth an uglier gash.

“All right, Lieutenant,” he said, gesturing with the gun. “Go on ahead. Go on board. We’re going to need you to help pilot this ship to Mars.”

14

The silence in the chart room was like the hush that comes over a desert when hurricane winds have died down, or like the stillness of a rocky coast when waves have ceased to pound, and dangerous rocks stand out with all of their saw-edged teeth exposed.

It was extraordinary how, at the point of a gun, a man could think and act almost automatically, and postpone making any decision at all. It wasn’t cowardice; Corriston was quite sure of that. He felt only anger, deep, relentless, all-consuming. Sweat oozed in droplets from his brow, but it was the heat and the tension which made his skin stream with moisture. There was no immediate fear in him at all.

He’d kept fear at bay by refusing to let his mind leap ahead. Only the gun at his back mattered, and just why it should have mattered so much was the only thing that puzzled him.

It did not occur to him that what some men dread most is the fear of dying too abruptly, without foreknowledge and with just a second’s glimpse of something cold and deadly before the final blackout. A gun had that kind of power.

The man with the gun had asked Corriston a great many questions, urgently practical questions that dealt with cold statistics concerning zero-gravity, solar radiation, space drift and the length of time it would take to reach Mars if a single pilot took full advantage of the automatic controls and never allowed himself to become reckless.

Corriston had replied to the best of his ability and knowledge, and the other had accepted his answers with a quiet grunt of satisfaction. It was only after that, when the silence had lengthened almost unendurably between them, that the more personal questions came.

The killer jabbed the gun more firmly against Corriston’s spine and asked in a cold, flat voice: “Do you know who I am, Corriston? Have you any idea?”

Corriston stared out the viewport for a moment without replying, his face deathly pale. “I don’t know your name,” he said. “Probably that’s not too important. I do know that you’re a cold-blooded murderer, and that killing gives you pleasure. I am very tired. I wish you wouldn’t question me any more.”

“Do you think you can pilot this ship to Mars, tired as you are?”

Corriston nodded.

The pressure of the gun barrel diminished. “I am very glad—for your sake. I suppose I might as well tell you my name. It’s Henley, Richard Henley. We’ll be seeing a lot of each other before this trip is ended, but you’ll find that I’m not a particularly talkative man. When I have something important to say, though, I won’t leave you in any doubt as to what I want done. Right now I must warn you that I would just as soon kill you as not.”

“You’re lying,” Corriston said. “If you killed me now you’d never get to Mars. You need me and you know it.”

“Corriston.”

“Yes.”

“Don’t assume too much. There are practical advantages in keeping you alive but a wrong move on your part could outweigh them. I’d have a fair chance of getting to Mars without your help. I know more than you think about spatial navigation. And the automatic controls are far from unreliable. Without them it would take at least five men to pilot a ship this size to Mars. With their aid a single experienced pilot should be able to accomplish it. I’m pretty sure you’ve had enough officer training school to qualify as a pilot. A ship’s inspection officer has to be able to navigate a ship; I’ve checked on that. But you’re certainly no expert, and if you force my hand I’ll take my chance with the auto-controls and my own limited knowledge.”

“You’ll be taking a chance, all right,” Corriston said. “What would you do if the observation glass started showing small pits in the hull from a very large shower of micro-meteorites? Can the auto-controls stop those pits from spreading? I’ve seen a ship stippled all over in less than ten minutes. The meteor guards won’t deflect micro-meteorites, and you’ve got to alter your velocity and angle of drive and a lot of other things fast. And what happens when your instruments start showing light spectra peculiarities that can’t be measured in angstroms? Just a little oddity like that can force you to change your course, but the auto-pilot won’t know a thing about it.

“And when you hit the Martian atmosphere and start firing against the direction of motion, how much good do you think limited knowledge will do you? Remember, nearly all of the journey will have been made in free fall, and in free fall the auto-controls are fairly efficient. But the instant you hit the atmosphere the slightest miscalculation in the utilization of your fuel reserves can lead to absolute disaster. I don’t know what makes you tick, of course. You may get a distorted kind of pleasure from thinking of yourself as a man marked for death, the same kind of pleasure you get from killing people.”

There was silence for a moment. Then Henley drew in his breath sharply and said: “Are you threatening me, Corriston?”

“Just warning you,” Corriston said.

“I don’t take kindly to warnings, Corriston. If you’re not careful I’ll put a bullet right through you.”

“Do the men who hired you know how you operate, Henley?”

It was a stab in the dark, but it brought a quick, enraged reply. “How I operate is my own business. And I don’t like the word ‘hire.’ I’d advise you not to use it again. Ramsey’s uranium steal made every miner on Mars decide straight off that I was the right man to lead them. They’re all in back of me, but they don’t control me. I take orders from no one.”

“Maybe they wouldn’t be in back of you if they knew what a scoundrel you are,” Corriston said.

“You may think whatever you please. I don’t mind your calling me a scoundrel if it will ease your mind. Just don’t use the word ‘hire.’”

“I don’t see why you should object to it,” Corriston went on recklessly. “It protects you, in a way. It’s a good word to hide behind. If the colonists knew the truth about you, I don’t think you’d last very long.”

“I’ll last long enough to help you dig your own grave, Corriston, if you keep on with that line of talk. You’re the real lucky one. I missed killing you on the Station because my aim was bad. You were an unexpected complication and you were keeping me upset. I didn’t like it at all.”

“Go ahead. I knew too much. Was that it?”

“Partly. I didn’t know how much you knew or how much you’d guessed. But you were in a position to start a lot of high-powered stuff that could have interfered with my plans in a dozen ways. Now I happen to need you—to a limited extent. But I’m warning you again. Don’t trade on your luck. Don’t force me to kill you, Corriston.”

“Perhaps I won’t. Perhaps we can strike a compromise. As I see it, there’s no need for immediate violence. Suppose you take me just a little more fully into your confidence. It can do you no harm now; and there are a few things I’m still curious about.”

“All right, Corriston. What is it you’d like to know?”

“How did you manage to stay concealed on the Station when Ramsey’s officers were in full command? You had considerable freedom of movement, apparently, even if you had to move with caution.”

“We had everything planned in advance,” Henley said. “We got to one of Ramsey’s men with bribe money the miners raised, an executive officer named Stockton. We made it worth his while. We had a carefully worked out plan for smuggling Helen Ramsey off the shuttle ship and keeping her hidden until the Mars ship arrived. Stockton had everything prepared: a concealed compartment, food, made our problem more complicated. Stockton helped us get out of the quarantine cage and kept right on protecting us until we no longer needed him.”

“Then you must have known about the masks. You must have known before you arrived that Ramsey’s men were in complete control of the Station.”

“Sure we knew, long before Earth found out. We know exactly what had taken place. You’d be surprised what a few carefully placed bribes can do. We knew that Ramsey had laid himself wide open by substituting his own men for the Station’s commanding officers. We knew exactly how vulnerable he was.”

“I see,” Corriston said. “Ramsey was so vulnerable that any determined attack made upon him would have had a fair chance of succeeding. But you worked out a plan for striking at him in a wholly criminal way, through his daughter. Did the miners know that, Henley? Or did they just give you their backing in a general way? You probably seemed to them the kind of man who would go after Ramsey hammer and tongs.”

“Suppose we just say they knew I’d find a way to make Ramsey meet all of our demands.” Henley smiled thinly. “The details they left to me.” He paused an instant, then went on: “Right after Helen Ramsey disappeared, I did some hard thinking. It occurred to me that she might be wearing a mask too. So I watched all of the women in the quarantine cage and when one of them slipped out I followed her.”

“As simple as that!”

“It wasn’t simple. The girl’s disappearance on the shuttle ship had me completely baffled at first. It wasn’t until we reached the Station that the mask possibility occurred to me.”

“We talked about that once before, remember?”

“You were lucky then, Corriston. I tried very hard to kill you, simply because I thought you knew more about Helen Ramsey’s disappearance than you actually did. In that dark cargo compartment, with time running out on me, I couldn’t think very clearly. Anything more you’d like to know?”

“Yes. How many men did Ramsey succeed in substituting for the rightful officers? How many, beside the commander?”

“Eight, including the commander. His real name was Henry Hervet. Five were executive officers, two were security guards. They’re all dead now.”

Corriston’s mouth went dry. “Including the one who sold out and helped you?”

“Yes, Stockton was the first to die. He was dead before the others tried to board this ship. I made sure of that. He was too greedy for his own good.”

“You got back the money you gave him, I suppose.”

“Naturally. Money is of very little value to a dead man.”

Corriston had gone very pale. There was dread in his eyes when he asked: “And the real Commander Clement? What happened to him? Where is he now?”

“Stockton told me that after a mask was made of his face he was imprisoned somewhere on the Station,” Henley said. “Clement and seven others. Ramsey gave Hervet strict orders not to kill them. I don’t know where Clement is now, but I can make a pretty good guess. He has probably been released and is in full command of the Station again.”

Henley stood very still for a moment, very straight and still, and Corriston could feel the gun nudging the small of his back again.

“I may as well tell you now that I’m going to have to lock you in, Corriston,” Henley said. “When I turn the key on this room your sole responsibility will be right here with the controls. You’ll have to sleep and eat here, and I don’t intend to bring you any fancy meals. You’ll hear a knock on the door three times a day. You’ll get a tray with some food on it.

“You’ll have to decide for yourself how much sleep you can afford to take. And remember this: I’ll be keeping a careful check on every navigational move you make. Not a too accurate check, perhaps, but I’ll know enough. If you throw the ship off course I’ll find out about it, and I’ll want to know why. Be ready with your answers and make sure they carry weight. Any more questions, Corriston?”

Corriston shook his head. “No. The quicker you get out of here the better I’ll feel.”

“All right, I’ll leave you now. It’s naturally to my benefit to try to see things from your point of view. And just in case you’re worrying about Helen Ramsey—don’t. Nothing is going to happen to her, provided you stay in line. If you want me don’t hesitate to buzz. That’s what the intercom is for.”

Corriston looked around once when Henley was on his way to the door. The man hadn’t turned away from him. He was backing toward the door, his lips tight, his eyes mocking, coldly derisive.

“Did you think I’d give you a chance to catch me with my guard down, Corriston? If you did, you’re a bigger fool than I thought you. This gun stays with me, and it’s going to be centered on you every time I open this door. Remember that, Lieutenant.”

The journey to Mars was a long wait. It was a standing and a waiting, with a hundred corrective power maneuvers to be checked at every hour of the day and night. It was sleep without rest and rest without sleep, and it was a battle against dizziness and the despair which can come to a pilot when a panel starts flickering a red danger signal in the utter loneliness of interplanetary space.

The ship was never too hot, never too cold, for the temperature was kept stable by thermostat-controlled radiation shutters and the air was kept pure with the aid of carbon filters. But to Corriston the air conditioning system with all of its elaborate controls seemed only to point up and emphasize the lack of stability elsewhere, both inside and outside the ship.

There were so many things that could go wrong—tragically, dangerously, fatally wrong. For no reason at all, for instance, a recently inspected filter or gasket could go completely bad, and a “no juice” blow up threaten. Or a magnetic guidance tape could jam and stop recording, and the ship could deviate a hair’s breadth from its prescribed path and forget to swing completely back again.

Eventually a correction might be made, but if you failed to correct it in time, that one tiny deviation could spell disaster. With every day out there were more details to check, while obstacles mounted and it was impossible ever to quite catch up with what you had to do, and go on with complete confidence to the next task.

Worst of all, Corriston was denied all opportunity to see or speak to the woman he loved.

* * * *

The trip to Mars took fourteen days. And in all that time Corriston did not once see Helen Ramsey. He saw only Henley, heard only the deep drone of the engines, and at times, when he was close to despair, the dull, steady beating of his own heart.

The door to his prison would open and a tray of food would be pushed forward into the compartment. Then the door would close quietly again, and he would be alone.

In some respects he was imprisoned in a way that was almost too unbelievable for the human mind to grasp. The walls of his cell were the constellations, the barriers to his freedom space itself.

The chartroom was a cell too, but it had no real confining power over him. He could walk out of the chart room simply by unlocking the viewport and swinging it wide open. He could walk out into the larger prison of space—and die in five seconds with his lungs on fire.

On the thirteenth day Mars loomed out of the inscrutable darkness ahead like some great accusing eye that had fastened itself on the ship with a malignance all its own. It filled one-fifth of the viewport, rust-red over most of its surface, but also pale blue in patches, a blue which shaded off into a kaleidoscope of colors that seemed to hover chiefly like the shifting, almost hueless cloudiness of a hot summer haze.

On the morning of the fifteenth day, the ship, decelerating under sidethrusts from its powerful retardation rockets, cut off its engines and, free-coasting through a landing ellipse of seventy degrees, landed safely on Mars.

It landed in the open desert, twenty miles from Ramsey’s citadel, and eighty-seven miles from the first Martian colony. But Corriston received no praise at all for his navigational skill.

Five minutes after the engines ceased to throb a blow on the head felled him, a brutal blow from behind.

“Tie him up,” Henley said. “We’re not killing him, not just yet.”

“But I don’t see why—” a cold voice started to protest.

“Damn you, Stone, I know what I’m doing. Keep your thoughts to yourself.”

15

Corriston sat very straight and still in the darkness, his back against cold metal, his eyes on the distant glow of the heating lamp. He could see the lamp through a wide panel opening in the bulkhead directly opposite him. Wherever his eyes fell there was the glimmer of light on metal. But the warmth of the lamp would have left him close to freezing had it not been supplemented by the heating units inside his heavy clothing.

He didn’t know how he was going to free himself. His hands were securely handcuffed and the sharp metal was biting into his flesh. Turning and twisting about did him no good at all.

He didn’t know how he was going to free himself, but he refused to give up hope. There had to be a way.

You could begin on one of your captors, on a human being with a great deal to lose or gain. You could try to penetrate his armor, sound out his human weaknesses. Or you could set to work on the handcuffs at your wrists, struggling in an almost hopeless attempt to draw your hands through them in some way or get them unlocked without a key.

He decided to try the first way. He raised his voice. “Stone?” he called out. “Can you hear me?”

There ensued a silence. Then Stone’s voice came back loud and clear. “Sure, I can hear you. What do you want?”

“I’d like to talk to you,” Corriston said.

“About what?”

“About you. What are you getting out of this? You’ve nothing to lose by being frank with me. Henley would never believe anything I might say.”

“You’re right about that,” Stone said. “But why should I talk to you? I’ll tell you something that may surprise you. Keeping you alive was Henley’s idea. He figured we might need you. He figured that if Ramsey wouldn’t listen to us he might listen to you—a Space Station officer. He figured we might need you to convince Ramsey we’re not bluffing. Someone who knows we’re not bluffing. Someone who knows we’d kill his daughter before we gave him a third chance to make up his mind and hand over the dough.”

“A third chance? I thought—”

“You think too much, Corriston. I’ll spell it out for you. Henley is on his way now to give Ramsey his first chance. He may succeed or he may not. If he doesn’t succeed he’ll come back and take you to the fortress with him. That will be Ramsey’s second chance. He won’t get a third.”

“I see,” Corriston said. “But I asked you a question you didn’t answer. How much do you stand to get out of this? What is your split, your percentage? Don’t tell me; I’ll guess. Henley is promising you fifteen or twenty thousand dollars. But how much ransom do you think he’ll get from Ramsey? Two million, at least. Possibly twenty million. Does that kind of split satisfy you, Stone? Remember, when that ransom is paid, every law enforcement agency on Earth goes into operation. It starts off in a quiet suite of offices, with just one owl-faced little guy shuffling some papers.

“It starts off that way, but in the space of one hour you’re a man marked for destruction. The military goes into action. From Earth to Mars your photograph is televised. Ten thousand trained experts are thrown into the operation. You’ve suddenly become important, an accessory to the kidnapping of the wealthiest girl on Earth.

“How does that set with you, Stone? They’ll get you in the end. No, I’ll qualify that. They’ll get you unless Ramsey gives you a split of at least a million dollars. With a million dollars you’d have a one in five chance of covering your tracks, of hiding out indefinitely. But Ramsey won’t give you anything like that kind of a split. You know that as well as I do. He’ll have to cover his own tracks and he’ll need all of the two million—or twenty million—for himself. Or most of it.

“I’m not telling you anything you don’t know. Your real interest lies in preventing that kidnapping before it’s too late. He’s getting ready to double-cross you, Stone. It was in the back of his mind all the time. He’s looking out only for himself.”

“I don’t think so,” Stone said. “My split, since you brought the matter up, is half a million. He’s demanding six million in ransom. That’s twelve times what I’m getting and what Jim Saddler is getting. But I’ve no complaints. He organized and planned everything.

“I’ll be honest with you. That doesn’t mean a damn thing to me. I’m no good when it comes to taking a risk like that, but does that mean he’s better than I am? Do you think I’d string along with him if I believed that for a moment?

“Hell, no. I’m using him, don’t you see? I’m letting him take the big gamble, and I stay in the background…doing practically nothing. So if I clear a half million, what have I to complain about?”

“Nothing, I suppose,” Corriston said.

“You’re damned right. But I don’t think I like the way you said that. There’s something in your voice that I don’t like.”

“That’s too bad,” Corriston said.

“Maybe you think I don’t mean what I said. Is that it?”

Corriston tightened his lips. He could hear Stone’s footsteps coming toward him through the darkness. They were heavy steps, advancing slowly, with a slight shuffling sound. They paused twice and then came on again, and the silence between pauses seemed almost crushingly thick.

Corriston suddenly realized that he knew almost nothing about Stone. He had taken the man pretty much for granted, a killer’s accomplice without much personality, a sullen-faced scoundrel who was good at obeying orders and standing ready to silence anyone Henley disliked with a well-placed kick in the head.

But what if he did have personality after all? Suppose there were hidden depths in him, a hidden reservoir of malice which he kept concealed until he felt a mad impulse to start laughing or bragging or proving to someone he disliked that he was as potentially dangerous as Henley—perhaps even more dangerous. And suppose he decided to back up his boasting with a quick knife thrust or a gun blast at almost point-blank range?

It wasn’t a pleasant thought, and the flicker of a match between Stone’s cupped hands did nothing to dispel Corriston’s uneasiness. The small, bright flame brought Stone’s features into sharp relief for an instant. The lips had an ugly set to them, and the eyes were slitted, gleaming. He was making no effort to keep his hate from showing, and the instant the match went out he lit another.

He seemed to be advancing slowly on purpose, as if aware that his stealth and deliberation had begun to un-nerve Corriston. Corriston felt himself stiffening, moving more closely back against the wall. Breathing quickly, he told himself that he hadn’t much time, that he must be careful not to overreach himself.

There was another moment of silence, of stillness, while the shuffling ceased. Then Stone was very close in the darkness, his hands cupped about a third match, a mocking smile on his lips.

It was a blunder on his part. Before he could move again Corriston was upon him.

There are times when a handcuffed man is at a disadvantage in a furiously waged and uncertain struggle, but Corriston suffered no disadvantage. For ten minutes he had been reminding himself that a blow along the side of the neck, just under the jaw, could paralyze and even kill if it were delivered with sufficient force.

A sharp, flat-of-the-hand blow could do it. But handcuffs were better, and Corriston lashed out now with his manacled wrists upraised, so that the handcuffs grazed Stone’s neck twice lightly and then almost splintered his jawbone with a rotor-blade violence.

The blow not only stunned Stone, it lifted him clear of the deck. He staggered forward and fell heavily, his breath leaving his lungs in an agonizing sob.

Corriston leaned back against the wall again for an instant, breathing heavily. Then he knelt beside Stone and went through his pockets until he found the handcuff key. It was difficult. He had to do a lot of awkward fumbling with his fingers, and even with the key in his possession, getting the cuffs off was far from easy. But somehow he managed it, perhaps because he had unusually flexible fingers and knew that if he failed, Stone would see to it that he got no second chance this side of eternity.

He stood very straight and still in the darkness, his eyes focused on Stone’s white face. There was no need for him to strike a match. He had taken from Stone not only the key, but a small pocket flashlight which Stone had apparently preferred not to use.

There was something else he had taken from Stone—his gun. He held the weapon now, very firmly centered on Stone, while he waited for him to come to.

Ordinarily he wouldn’t have cared if Stone had never opened his eyes again; but now he had to wait and see. The ship was so large that to explore it compartment by compartment until he found the one in which Helen Ramsey was being held prisoner would be dangerously time-consuming. So, if Stone recovered consciousness within fifteen or twenty minutes and could tell him, so much the better.

If not, better wait and see. He waited, shifting his gun only a little from weariness as the minutes dragged on, wondering if he had not made a mistake in waiting at all.

Finally Stone stirred and groaned. Corriston bent and shook him by the shoulders. He took firm hold of his shoulders and shook him vigorously, feeling no pity for him at all.

He got the truth out of him by threatening him with violence, by threatening to kill him if he kept anything back. Stone kept nothing back. Just remembering the blow that had felled him, loosened his tongue. But the gun helped too, the gun wedged so closely against his ribs under his heart that he feared that if he breathed too heavily he would breathe his last.

“I won’t lie to you,” he said desperately, pleadingly. “You haven’t a chance. There’s a photoelectric alarm system outside the compartment, and Jim Saddler is sitting just inside the door. He has a gun trained on her. His orders are to shoot her dead if anyone so much as attempts to get inside that door.”

“Meaning me?”

“It means you, Lieutenant. I’m not lying; I swear it. You won’t stand a chance. Henley will be coming back in a few hours now. You’d better get out while you’re still in one piece.”

Corriston was tempted to hurl Stone back against the wall and shout at him: “It doesn’t matter whether I go out of here in one piece or dead on a stretcher. She’s the only thing I care about.”

But he caught himself just in time. Stone thought in the most primitive imaginable terms. You couldn’t go to a Stone Age man and say: “My own skin doesn’t mean a goddam thing to me. I’m in love. If she dies I die. Can’t you understand that? If she dies, my life will be over.”

He said instead: “All right. I guess it means I’ve got to get help.”

“You’ll never get help,” Stone said, summoning from some defiant depths within himself a little courage. “The colony is eighty-seven miles from here. You couldn’t cross the desert on foot. No one could cross it on foot, not when the temperature drops at night to fifty below. But you’d better not stay. He’d better head for Ramsey’s citadel. That’s your only chance. It’s only twenty miles from here.”

Let him think that, a voice within Corriston warned. Let him think that I’ll head for the citadel. Otherwise he may attempt to get word to Ramsey somehow. I can tie him up and leave him in a state of shock, but if he thinks I’m heading for the colony, even a state of shock may not stop him. Saddler may come down here looking for him. Once he’s freed, if he thinks I’m heading for the Colony.…

Corriston said: “Damn you, Stone, I ought to kill you. I ought to put a bullet through your heart right now. I don’t know why I can’t. It’s a weakness in me.”

“I’d kill you, Corriston, if I had the chance. But I’m glad you have that kind of a weakness.”

Corriston stared at him incredulously. “You’re certainly outspoken. You were pleading for your life a moment ago—going soft, as you’d put it. Now you’re talking realistically, analyzing your own motivations and mine.”

“I’m not quite as dumb as you think me, Corriston.”

“All right. Let’s say you’re not dumb. Few people are, when it comes to a matter of life or death. That’s beside the point right now. I’ve got to tie you up. Where can I find some rope?”

“It would be much simpler to lock me in a vacant compartment.”

“All right. Then I’ll lock you in one of the compartments. You can pick your own compartment. I’d advise you not to waste my time. Pick your own compartment and I’ll slide the bolt fast on the outside.”

Stone showed no disposition to put up an argument. Corriston kept the gun pressed into the small of his back and he seemed to realize that his life hung by a thread.

They found a compartment that was small and dark, and into it Stone walked at gunpoint, offering no protest, and answering the questions Corriston put to him readily enough.

“You’ll find all the equipment you need at the end of this passageway,” Stone said. “Activate the third door on your left. Anything else you’d like to know?”

Corriston shook his head. He walked out of the compartment backwards, keeping his gun trained on Stone until he was in the corridor. Then he swung the door shut and shot the bolt home.

He had no trouble at all in finding the equipment he knew he’d need, thanks to Stone’s generosity. Stone could afford to be generous, he reflected bitterly. The Henley combine still held all of the trump cards.

He cursed the time it took him to equip himself for a near-suicidal crossing of eighty-seven miles of Martian desert. He would travel on foot, after nightfall, and in freezing cold. The compartment in which he labored was a basal compartment, and set in the massive bulkhead, against which he leaned with his bootstraps still unlaced, was an airlock opening directly on the Martian plain.

He collected the smaller articles first, setting them down in a row on a long metal bench directly opposite the airlock: three compasses, each weighing perhaps twenty ounces; a cathode ray compass; a non-magnetic compass and a sun compass. The sun compass would perhaps prove the most valuable until darkness fell. The sun, shining down with brilliance from the clear Martian sky, could throw a directional kind of shadow, enabling a man on foot to take fairly accurate bearings without the use of sighting and viewing instruments.

To the compasses on the bench he added five map coordinates and a Lambert conformal projection chart.

Food concentrates came next: four shining aluminum cubes, four inches by four inches, which would go into the knapsack on his back. Then a canteen, already filled with sterilized water from the ship’s central water supply system.

Next, he took from the locker the right kind of clothing: a tubeflex inner suit with a warm lining and a heavy outer suit equipped with heat lamps.

Oxygen masks next—oxy-respirators, to be exact. One to attach to the face and one to hold in reserve as a spare. They covered only a third of the face, but that third had everything to do with a man’s staying alive and vigorous in the thin air of Mars. When night fell, and the cold descended, oxy-respirators were not enough. Then you had to pull down the entire front of your helmet and stagger on with your sight impaired, for in a cold that was almost beyond endurance, helmets had a way of clouding over from time to time.

The clouding over of the vision plate was not too important. It could be constantly wiped clean. But if his brain started “clouding over” too.…

He dismissed the possibility from his mind. He was clothed now, fully clothed, and ready to depart.

He started moving toward the airlock, feeling and looking like a giant beetle of the tropics, feeling awkward, cumbersome and insecure. His boots were weighted, and the bulge of the oxygen tank on his shoulder made him look almost hunchbacked in the cold light glimmer that turned the bulkhead into a mirroring surface as he advanced.

He manipulated the airlock and it opened with a slow, steady droning and then he was passing through it, still moving awkwardly.…

At last! He was out on the Martian desert in bright sunlight, staring up at the clear blue sky.

The first few miles were not difficult at all. He walked away from the ship with his shoulders held straight, the cumbersome feeling dissipated by the lightness of his stride in the incredibly light gravity.

The air pressure about him was less than seventy millimeters of mercury. The thought sprouted in his mind that he was the god Mercury striding along with winged shoes, and for the first five miles his weighted boots did seem to develop wings.

Then the temperature began slowly to drop. The sun sank lower. Its brightness diminished, and his cheeks began to tingle with the cold.

There was a slight wind blowing over the desert, raising dust flurries on the summits of the tallest dunes, causing the gray patches of crust lichen, which were scattered widely over the plain, to change color as their threadlike surfaces were ruffled by the breeze.

Far in the distance he could see a “canal,” one of those strange blue-green declivities in the terrain which looked from the air like an actual waterway, and had deceived—or bewildered—three generations of men.

Despite the increasing cold, Corriston did not moderate his stride. He let his thoughts dwell on the most imaginative of the canal speculations. It had been proven completely false, but its originality fascinated him. Long ago, the theory held, there had been volcanic activity on Mars. Great faults or fissures had opened up in the planet’s crust, and when the coming of spring thawed the polar ice caps, curtains of fog swirled equatorward, filling those natural crevices with swirling rivers of mist.

Corriston stopped walking for a moment, shifting the weight of his equipment slightly, easing a too heavy drag on his right shoulder. He made sure that the thin flexible tube which connected his oxygen mask with the small tank on his back was securely clipped into place at both ends, tested the harness buckle which supported supplies which were as necessary to him as breathing, and took a turn up and down the sand, stamping, shaking himself, to make absolutely certain that nothing vital had been jarred loose.

Then he was under way again, moving along at a steady pace over the rust-red desert, the ship now lost to view far behind him, his mind leaping ahead to the very great dangers which he was determined to face and overcome so long as one slender thread of hope remained.

16

It might have been almost any sleepy little town on Earth, picked at random from a train window—a dust bowl town with a prairie name: Hawk’s Valley, Buzzard’s Gulch, and the like. It might have been, but it wasn’t.

The buildings were thinner, of more precarious construction, and each had been built to house three or more families. They were at unusual angles on sloping ledges where the soil was firm enough to resist overnight erosion from winds of hurricane force, and in many places their prefabricated metal foundations were pierced and supported by shafts of solid rock.

Without modern technology at its most advanced, the town could never have been built. Yet in the streets of the town there was a village rudeness of construction which no pioneering effort could quite efface: a wide main street that gleamed red in the sunlight on which three caterpillar tractors stood stalled, their guard rails caked with yellow mud; a pool of stagnant black water with a wooden plank thrown haphazardly across it; a discarded fuel container upended against a half-rusted away metal cable, and the remnants of an hydraulic actuator overgrown with hardy lichens that had colored it yellow and ash gray. And here and there, projecting from the tumbled sand, were spiny cactus-like growths.

Yet it was not too small a town. Its inhabitants numbered eight thousand, two-thirds of them men. There were ninety-seven children. It was not too small a town, and now, in each of the houses, a new day was beginning.

At least thirty men and a few women had collected about the haggard-eyed desert straggler. Every one of them hung on his words. Every one of these people had been ruined by Ramsey’s rapacious greed. Their past accomplishments were destroyed; their futures were non-existent. They lived in a terrorized state, from hand-to-mouth, indifferent now to any more wrongdoing that could be visited upon them. The fires of their hatred for Ramsey gave them the basic energy to go on existing.

Out of grinding desperation they had turned to Henley, had given him a free hand, even when most, in their heart-of-hearts, knew he was a scoundrel. The fact was that he was the only man among them not so cowed as to be actively enraged against Ramsey. He promised that the mines would be given back to the people. And, having nothing, they believed everything.

They came from everywhere in the colony, and from every trade and profession. Who was this man? And was he friend or foe?

The crowd grew slowly. Despite the shouts and the sudden stir of excitement which had greeted the speaker on his arrival, there was no headlong rush to surround him. The colonists emerged from their lodgings and converged calmly upon the square, some having the look of tradesfolk concerned with a possible interruption of business, and others seemingly intent only on what the stranger might have to say.

It was unusually warm for so early an hour, the temperature well up in the mid-forties, and there was no need for the heat-generating inner garments, only for oxygen masks and heavy outdoor clothing and the careful avoidance of too much muscular exertion in the absence of weighted shoes.

This is madness, Corriston told himself. I am in no condition to convince these people, to make them understand. I should have rested first. Three hours’ sleep would have helped. I should have asked for food.

Corriston felt suddenly tongue-tied. Words were failing him when he needed them most. His speech became halting and confused. He had been talking for twenty minutes—twenty minutes at least—but suddenly he was quite sure that he hadn’t succeeded in convincing anyone that he was speaking only the simple truth.

He looked at the faces before him a little more intently and saw what he had not noticed before: everyone was waiting for him to go on; everyone seemed to be hanging on his words.

Had he misjudged them after all? Or had he misjudged his own capacity to be persuasive, to talk with conviction when his very life hung in the balance?

There could be no doubt on that score. His life did hang in the balance. They’d make short shift of him if they thought he was on Ramsey’s side.

“It isn’t Ramsey I’m concerned about,” he heard himself saying. “I’m pleading with you to face up to the truth about yourselves. You trusted Henley because you were desperate. You couldn’t put your trust in a weak or indecisive man. You needed a tool with a cutting edge. That I can understand. But you picked the wrong man. Henley doesn’t want to see justice done. He doesn’t want to help you at all. He wants to help himself at your expense, to help himself in a vicious, brutal way.”

“That’s a lie,” someone in the crowd said. “Henley’s a good man.”

Corriston freed himself from his dust-caked coat. He shrugged it off and let it drop to the sand. Then he straightened his oxygen mask and went on: “It’s not a lie. It’s the simple truth.”

He wondered why he had shrugged off his warmest garment. It was cold, he was shivering, and it had been a ridiculous thing to do. Had he intended it as a challenge? In a crazy, confused, subconscious way, was he offering to fight anyone who disagreed with him.

He suddenly realized that he was a little drunk. Not on alcohol, but on a slight excess of oxygen. He fingered the gauge on his mask, cutting down the tank inflow, cursing himself for his delay in doing so.

Had he convinced anyone? He looked at the faces about him and was astonished by their impassivity. Few of the men or women before him seemed either angry or disturbed. They just seemed to be quietly listening.

Suddenly he realized that he was completely in error. They were convinced, persuaded, almost completely on his side. Their silence was in itself revealing, just as the hush which precedes an avalanche can be convincing, or the stillness which precedes a storm at sea.

They were waiting for him to go on.

He talked for thirty more minutes and then there was a long silence, punctuated only by the harsh breathing of a few men who seemed to disagree.

17

Corriston knew that the few who disagreed were prepared to make trouble, but he was not prepared for the violence which ensued.

Fights broke out in the crowd, singly and in groups. The colonists with strong convictions took issue with the few who disagreed. And the few who disagreed had strong convictions, too.

Two men about the same in height were suddenly down on the ground raining fisticuffs at each other.

“Damn you, Reeves, I’ll break your jaw. From the first minute I saw Henley I knew he was a scoundrel.”

“Yeah, and who else but a scoundrel could hold his own with a rat like Ramsey. We can call the turn on him if he goes too far.”

There was an explosion of cursing and Corriston could see five more men fighting, moving backwards as they exchanged blows toward the periphery of the crowd.

There was nothing he could do to stop the fighting. He was close to exhaustion, hardly able to stand. He desperately needed food and rest—a long rest flat on his back.

Suddenly he realized that he had victory within his grasp. Most things worthwhile in life called for a decisive effort of will. He decided suddenly that he couldn’t just let the fighting go on. He had to take a firm stand himself, had to convince everyone that he was prepared to fight for his convictions.

He moved forward into the crowd. He grabbed one doubter by the shoulder, held fast to him for an instant, and then sent his fist crashing into the astonished man’s jaw.

The doubter folded in complete silence. Corriston stepped back from him and said in a voice loud enough to carry to the rim of the crowd: “I don’t care how many of you I have to take on. Every word I’ve said is the truth. If you can only settle it by killing me, you may as well start trying.”

There was a silence then. Even the sound of the breeze rustling the garments of the colonists, stirring little flurries of sand along the main street, seemed to become muted. Far off between the houses a clock struck the time. It seemed very loud in the stillness.

It amazed Corriston a little, even in his exhausted state, how determinedly a challenge like that could be accepted at face value. He was quite sure that he had won a victory; that nine-tenths of the colonists were on his side. But everyone remained silent, everyone drew back in tight-lipped silence while the issue was put to the test.

A tall man with a lean, lantern-jawed face approached Corriston and said: “I’m going to tell you exactly what I think. Henley isn’t an easy man to understand. He keeps his thoughts to himself and he may have had his own special reasons for pulling the wool over your eyes. He’s looking out for our best interests; I’m sure of that. But what good would it do me to knock you down to prove it?”

“No good at all,” Corriston said. “But try knocking me down if you want to.”

“I’m not going to try,” the lantern-jawed man said. “I think you’re lying. That’s all I have to say.”

Corriston watched him disappear in the crowd and shook his head. He felt like a man with a fly swatter in his hand. He had won a victory and yet if he failed to swat a few flies no one would believe that he was telling the truth.

Finally he got his chance. A thickset, dark-browed man with a trouble-seeking aspect came up and hurled insults at him in a markedly offensive way.

Corriston hit him three times. The first blow doubled him up, the second dropped him to his knees; the third flattened him out on the sand.

Corriston stepped back and surveyed the crowd. Their response now was overwhelmingly favorable.

It wasn’t a complete victory. There were still doubters, still arguments going on, still a hatred for Ramsey that overflowed and made a mockery of the few voices raised in his defense.

And Corriston was glad that not too many voices were raised in Ramsey’s defense. He had not come to plead Ramsey’s cause, and he wanted all of the colonists to know that. He only asked that a truce be declared, an end to the fierce, immediate hatreds, while a scoundrel was attacked by men who had been lied to, cheated and betrayed. He moved still further forward into the crowd, prepared to fight again if he had to, prepared to back up his arguments with the simple, primitive and direct use of his fists.

He swayed suddenly and realized that he was at the end of his endurance, and now would in all probability make a complete fool of himself. He would commit the unforgivable folly of issuing a challenge that he couldn’t back up.

He shook his head violently, trying to clear it, but his dizziness increased. The landscape about him began to pinwheel and he saw the streets of the colony through a wavering yellow mist. The store fronts danced, the rusting and discarded machinery on a side street began to move and come to life, to clatter and waltz about.

A woman moving toward him seemed to grow in height, her oxygen mask widening out, overspreading her face. For a moment she seemed like an impossible ballet figure in a danse macabre, pivoting about on her toes as a caterpillar tractor came rushing toward her through the thin air of Mars.

Then two colonists were supporting him, holding him tightly by the elbows, refusing to let him collapse. It was outrageous, because he wanted to collapse. He wanted to sink down, to let sleep wash over him, to forget all of his troubles in merciful oblivion.

But the two colonists were very stubborn. They refused to let him collapse. He only wanted to go to sleep, to forget all of his troubles, but the two colonists were like doctors in a hospital, very stern, very patient, and seemingly determined to keep him on his feet.

Somehow they must have failed. They must have failed because when he became fully conscious again he was lying between cool white sheets, and a woman in a white nurse’s uniform was bending over him. By straining his eyes he could see two men who looked like doctors standing just beyond her.

The two men appeared to be discussing him, but when he struggled to a sitting position and stared hard at them they came toward him with reassuring smiles, and one of them said: “Take it easy, now. You’re going to be all right.”

“I…i must have passed out,” he stammered. “I was ready to pass out before I started talking. Is this a hospital? I guess it is. I should have come here immediately. Forty hours in the desert and I arrive half-delirious and make a fool of myself.”

“Take it easy,” one of the doctors said. “You didn’t make a fool of yourself. Quite the contrary.”

Oh, brother, he thought. They’re lying to me to spare me, or something. “I have a vague recollection of not being able to stand, of talking my head off and then collapsing and making a complete fool of myself, of accomplishing nothing at all. I swung hard at two or three people. I knocked one man down, flat on his back. But that was a crazy thing to do. It’s no way to win the confidence or respect of anyone.”

“Look,” one of the doctors said, taking firm hold of his shoulder and shaking him gently. “Don’t go reproaching yourself. You’ve got nine-tenths of the colony behind you.”

“You mean—”

“Sure, you convinced almost everyone. And that was a miracle in itself, considering how close to collapse you were. You were running a high fever. You were dehydrated. Your skin was as dry as a parched lichen. Yet you stood there and convinced them. That’s the gospel truth.”

“They’ve chosen you as their leader,” the second doctor said. “They’re going after Henley before it’s too late. They feel exactly as you do about Ramsey’s daughter. Not about Ramsey perhaps—but about the kidnapping of a helpless girl. None of them have any liking for Henley now.”

18

Corriston walked out into the central square and stood there. For a moment no one said a word. One of the doctors was there with him. He’d had a sandwich and coffee before leaving the hospital and his nerves felt steady and his voice was pitched low.

“I don’t know a single one of these men, Dr. Tomlinson,” he said. “I spent a week in the colony four years ago, but I just don’t see anyone I recognize. I’m afraid you’ll have to introduce me around.”

It took a full hour to really get acquainted, to plan what had to be done, to check over the tractors, the ammunition supplies, the equipment of each and every man.

They had to cross eighty-seven miles of desert to a heavily guarded cave and then move on perhaps to Ramsey’s fortress. They had to be prepared for any eventuality.

The morale was good. Corriston could sense the grim determination in every man, the faith in their mission, the anger. It cheered him.

He walked around between the tractors, listening to stray bits of talk, getting better acquainted with everyone as the minutes sped by.

He took out his watch and looked at it and decided that time was running short.

Give each and every man twenty minutes, he thought. Then we get rolling. Thirty caterpillar tractors and two hundred and ten men. And in the ship are two men holed up—possibly three now—with all the portable fighting equipment of a two thousand ton spaceship at their disposal. And if Henley has returned—

Suddenly Corriston found himself sweating in the silence, despite the cold, despite the hoar frost that was beginning to collect on the rim of his oxygen mask. There was a split second of shouting from one of the tractors and then it started up, with a coughing and spitting that drowned out the human voices.

All along the wide, rust-red street other tractors came to life. In the thin air of Mars, in the pale sky, a single blue cloud hung suspended.

It was wispy thin, incredibly thin, a hollow mockery of a cloud. But the scene below would have been less remarkable had the sky remained cloudless, for then Mars would have seemed completely unlike Earth and the human drama less compelling.

There was something tremendous in the forward march of the tractors, in the clatter and the rising dust, the shouts of the men at the controls and the women who ran swift-footed along the sand to urge them to greater fortitude. The women knew that endurance would be needed, for twenty-first century weapons of warfare could destroy a hundred tractors and spatter the desert with blood before retaliation could become complete and justice be fully satisfied.

So the women did not weep or lament. They ran parallel with the tractors, urging their men onward, stifling their own inner fears in the greatness of the moment.

Corriston waited for the last tractor to come abreast of him before he leapt aboard it. There was the smell of acrid grease in the air, a smell of burning. The mechanical parts set up a dull rumbling, and as Corriston swung himself aboard, a voice said: “I’m Stanley Gregor. If I had any sense I wouldn’t take part in this. I came to Mars with the second expedition. I’m sixty-two years old but somehow today I feel young. There’s no longer any doubt in my mind that Henley is a scoundrel. Why we trusted him I don’t know. I’m here to do my part in rectifying an error.”

“Sure,” Corriston said, settling down at the side of a big, awkward-looking man with red hair. “Sure, I understand. Take it easy. We’re all in this together.”

“We’ve got eighty-seven miles of desert to cross. It’s going to be tough. Have you seen the fortress Ramsey built to protect himself?”

“No,” Corriston said.

“There are twenty-five square miles of fortified defenses—photoelectric eye installations. They spot you when you’re a half-mile away. Try to storm those installations even with a dozen armed tractors, and you’ll be pulverized into dust. Try to storm them on foot with the most formidable of energy weapons, and you’ll be electrocuted. You’ll hang suspended on barbed wire. Think that over, Lieutenant.”

“I’ve thought it over,” Corriston said. “We won’t have to storm the fortress unless they’ve taken Ramsey’s daughter there, or if Ramsey himself is in danger. And if he is in danger, he’ll welcome our help. We’re going to the ship first and there are only two men on the ship.”

“But they’ve got plenty of ammunition, haven’t they? They’ve got the ship’s military installations. Anyway you slice it, it’s a dangerous gamble.”

“I never thought it was anything else,” Corriston said.

19

Corriston woke up to the hum of human voices, the soft whisper of the wind, the gentle stirring of sand. He awoke to coldness and brightness, to sunlight that dazzled him with its brightness.

Corriston remembered then. Not everything at once, but just the first thing. There were no guideposts. That was always the first thing to remember when you woke up from a brief, twenty-minute sleep on Mars.

In islands scoured by trade winds and bright with blown sea spray a man does not talk of traveling east or west, and even familiar streets are no longer given names or marked by intersections. A man talks instead of walking into the wind, of setting his course by the north star, of moving straight into the teeth of the gale or huddling for shelter beneath a high chalk cliff where all directions converge in a hollow drumming that has neither beginning nor end. It was that way on Mars. It would always be that way, it could never change.

Just lie very still and listen, listen to the voices of men who are risking their lives to help you. Listen and be grateful; listen and be proud.

All at once Corriston realized that an amazing discussion was going on. They were discussing an eleven-year-old boy who had done an absolutely crazy thing. He had followed his father into the desert by concealing himself in one of the tractors, behind a liquid-fuel cylinder, and was now a member of the 210 man rescue team.

“Mars is no place for a kid. Dr. Drever ought to be ashamed of himself. If a man has children—well, Mars is simply no place for children.”

“That’s right. A boy of eleven needs companions his own age to help him over the growingpain hurdles. He needs a backyard to play in. When I was a kid I had a bike of my own, a bull terrier pup, a collection of butterflies, a stamp collection and a simply amazing talent for roughing up my clothes.

“Mars is the worst of all possible worlds for a kid like Freddy. We’re buoyed up by the bigness and the newness and the strangeness of everything. The mile-high granite cliffs don’t really belong to a planet smaller than Earth. But they’re here and we accept them. We pit our technical brilliance—or lack of it—against the rugged grandeur of the mountains and the plains and we can take even the sandstorms in our stride. But to bring a kid here—”

“Drever is a widower. He quite naturally didn’t want to put his son in an orphanage. Besides, there are thirteen other young kids in the Colony.”

“That doesn’t excuse it. There are plenty of childless single men.”

“How many of them could step into Drever’s shoes and grow to his stature as the first really great medical specialist on Mars? You’re forgetting the hell he had to go through just to pass the preliminary screening. It’s rugged for a man of his attainments. They not only insist that he be good; they want him to be the best.”

“That’s true enough, I suppose. And now that he’s here he probably couldn’t be replaced. Experience of a very special sort does things for a man. And to a man, if you like.”

“I’m simply stressing that Mars is simply not a place for a kid of Freddy’s age. When he goes roaming he gets his lungs choked with dust. He couldn’t ride a bike on Mars—if he had a bike. Worst of all, he has no kids of his own age to play with. And now he comes on a trip like this. Does he hope to rescue the Ramsey girl all by himself?”

Corriston got up then. The three men who had been discussing Dr. Drever’s son stood by the smoldering embers of a burnt out campfire. They were kindly looking men but a certain narrow-mindedness was stamped on the faces of at least two of them.

Corriston shrugged off his weariness and walked up to them. “Nonsense!” he said.

A startled look came into the eyes of the oldest, a grizzled scarecrow of a man whose beard descended almost to his waist. He was a Martian geologist, and a good one.

“Eh, Lieutenant. I was just going to ask you. Shouldn’t we get started?”

“We should and we will,” Corriston said. “But a good many men collapsed from the cold this morning. If we don’t arrive at that ship in force, we may live to regret it. Where’s Freddy? Have you seen him?”

The grizzled man raised his arm and pointed: “Over there,” he said. “His coming along was just about the craziest thing I ever heard of.”

Corriston walked across the churned up sand to where Freddy sat perched like a disconsolate gnome on a metal-rimmed food container shaped like an old-fashioned water barrel.

Dr. Drever’s son was almost twelve, but he was small for his age and Corriston had seen boys of nine who were much huskier looking.

Corriston had no way of knowing that on Earth, shoulder to shoulder with other schoolboys, Freddy had never thought of himself as particularly small. It was only on Mars, all alone with his father and other grownups, that he had felt even smaller than he actually was. He had felt like a dwarf child.

“Why did you do it, Freddy?” Corriston asked. “Your father is very upset and worried.”

Freddy looked up quickly and just as quickly lowered his eyes again.

“I had to come,” he said. “I had to.”

“But why?”

“I don’t know.”

“I see.”

Corriston stared at him for a long moment in silence. Then he said: “I think perhaps I understand, Freddy. Just suppose we say you succumbed to an impulse to roam. The exploring urge can be overwhelming in a boy of your age. It usually is. If you were on Earth right now you’d be dreaming about exploring the headwaters of the Amazon. You’d be dreaming about birds with bright, tropical plumage and butterflies as big as dinner plates.”

Freddy looked up again, not quite so quickly this time. There was wonder and admiration in his stare. “How did you know?” he gasped.

“I guess I was pretty much like you, Freddy—once,” Corriston said.

“Gee, thanks,” Freddy said.

“Thanks for what?”

“Thanks for understanding me, Lieutenant Corriston.”

Corriston walked out between the tractors and raised his voice so that everyone within earshot could hear him.

“We’re starting again in ten minutes,” he said. “Better have another cup of coffee all around.”

20

The sand had been blowing for forty minutes. It was a flying avalanche, a flailing mace. Even inside the tractors it set up an almost intolerable roaring in the eardrums, and when it struck the wind-guards head on the battered vehicles shook. For five or six seconds they would rumble on and then come to a jolting halt. Often they would start up again almost immediately but equally often they would remain stalled for several minutes, and at times there were more stalled tractors than moving ones across the entire line of advance.

The pelting never ceased, never let up even for a moment. Minute after minute the sand came sweeping down in red fury, tons upon tons of it, in great circular waves from high overhead and in jet velocity flurries close to the ground. In that assault of billions upon billions of spinning particles the brightly colored lichens which covered the Martian plains were uprooted, lifted high in the air, and carried for dozens of miles, flying carpets so small they scarcely could have supported the tiniest of elves.

For three hours the sandstorm continued to rage in fury, and then, abruptly, the wind died down, the last flurry subsided, and the colonists got under way again. And just for a change a few of them descended from the tractors and advanced on foot, keeping a little ahead of the swaying vehicles.

Dr. Drever, a tall, stooped man with graying temples but surprisingly youthful eyes accelerated his stride a little and fell in with the scarecrow geologist who was walking at Corriston’s side.

“We can’t be far from the ship now,” he said. “I wish there was some way I could send Freddy back. If I thought you could spare a tractor and one man to accompany him.…”

“Freddy will be all right,” Corriston said. “You don’t know what it means to a kid like Freddy to ride through a sandstorm in the company of grownups. He had to prove something to himself, and I think he’s done it.”

The stillness was almost unnatural now, and Corriston could see that most of the men were becoming uneasy about it. The desert seemed too bright and far too quiet. It was one of those mysterious, brooding silences that are a menace to start with. You think of unsuspected pitfalls, hidden traps. Imagination leaps ahead of reality and leaves an insidious kind of demoralization in its wake.

“I’m not surprised that all the animal life on Mars went underground,” the scarecrow geologist said, and it seemed a strange thing for him to have mentioned at that moment, when the stillness was so absolute and the thoughts of everyone should have been on the ship, which had to be very near now.

“Yes, and what a vicious, horrible kind of animal life it is,” Drever said, as if he too welcomed the opportunity to talk irrelevantly, perhaps to relieve his inner tension.

“They’re a very primitive form of life, really,” the geologist said. “They look like large gray snakes, but they’re actually more like worms. Worms with sucker disks instead of mouths. When once they’ve’ attached themselves it’s almost impossible to dislodge them. You’ve seen marine worms on Earth often enough, I’m sure. They come in all shapes, sizes and colors, but there are one or two species that look quite a bit like lamprenes in miniature. Lamprenes are usually about three feet in length. But some of the very old ones grow to eight feet or longer. Their natural prey is a small running lizard—the galaka—as you know.”

“All right,” Corriston said, a little of his raw-nerve exasperation returning. “Now I suppose you’re going to tell us exactly how they kill their prey.”

“I don’t have to tell you how they kill men,” Macklin said. “You know as much about that as I do. You’ve been on Mars before. You’ve seen at least a few of the victims. You know exactly how they come up under a man when he’s asleep, puncture his clothes and attach themselves. He doesn’t just get nipped; the lamprene can seldom be pulled off that quickly. And when two or three of them attack you, it can be pretty horrible. They’re more than just vampires; they sting. The poison is as deadly as aconite. It works a little slower, but almost immediately the victim starts to degenerate, his nerves first, and, then.…”

“All right, now I’ve heard an expert confirm it. I’d be grateful if you’ll just shut up.”

“Lieutenant, I told you—”

“Never mind, Doctor. I’m asking him to shut up.”

In silence they continued on, the tension between them increasing almost intolerably, their nerves becoming more and more frayed. And then, finally, it seemed to them that they could see the ship, and the great cliff wall surrounding it through the slight haziness left by the sandstorm and the vaguer haziness which distance imposes, could see the tumbled, flat slabs of rock that radiated out from it in all directions across the desert.

But it was hard to be sure it was really the ship. It was perhaps only one of the many desert mirages which were far more common on Mars than they were on Earth. A man who has once looked at the bright, scarred face of a cliff wall in the Martian sunlight will remember it even in his dreams and no mirages are really necessary. He is certain to see it a second and a third time, like an after-image so indelibly imprinted on the retina of the human eye that its recurrence becomes inevitable.

And yet, the running man could not have been a mirage. He was much nearer than the ship appeared to be, and he was falling and getting up and falling again in so frenzied a way that his movements bore the unmistakable stamp of reality.

Corriston came to an abrupt halt. For an instant he simply stared, watching the distant figure fall to the sand for the fourth time and drag himself forward over the sand, his shoulders heaving convulsively.

For an instant Corriston could not have moved if he had wanted to. The scarecrow and Drever were standing too close to him, so that the shoulders of the three men formed a compact unit, and their arms were in each other’s way to such an extent that no real freedom of movement was possible.

Corriston had almost to disentangle himself by sheer physical effort. Disentangle himself he finally did, turning completely about and shouting to the colonists behind him.

“Get to that man as quickly as possible!” he ordered. “There’s no time to be lost. Try to tear the lamprenes off him, but watch out for your hands. Don’t let them coil around you, watch out for the disks. Get them off if you can. If you can’t, bring him here. Carry him slung between you.”

Two men left the line of march and started off across the desert, walking very rapidly but not breaking into a run. Corriston had forgotten to warn them that running with their weighted shoes would be difficult, and would only delay them, and he was glad that they had thought of it themselves.

He turned back to the scarecrow, who was staring in white-lipped horror at what must have seemed to him an unbelievable occurrence—a man attacked by lamprenes when he had been talking about lamprenes only an instant before.

But Corriston knew that it was a common enough occurrence, not to be in any way coincidental. No one who slept in the desert for any length of time could hope to avoid an attack if he failed to take the necessary precautions. And even with precautions the death toll was high; almost as high, perhaps, as cobra fatalities in India.

Corriston turned abruptly, his lips white. “If a man is attacked by just one lamprene, and it’s pulled off quickly, how much chance has he?”

It was Drever who answered him. “Not much, I’m afraid. The poison gets into the blood stream and acts quickly. You can’t get it out with a suction disk the way you sometimes can with a snake bite. It’s a nerve poison and it spreads very fast. And there’s no way of neutralizing it, no serum injection that does any good. Of course, there have been a few recoveries.”

Corriston swung about and stared out across the desert again. The two colonists had reached the stricken man now and were attempting to tear the lamprene—or lamprenes—from his flesh. They were bending over him, and it was hard to tell for a moment whether they were succeeding or not. Then, abruptly, one of them rose and made a despairing gesture, unmistakable even from a distance of five hundred feet.

The next few minutes were like a nightmare that has no clear beginning or end. They brought the man back and laid him down on the sand. The man was Stone.

It was Drever who got the lamprene off. He did it with an electric torch, taking care to manipulate the jet of fire in such a way that it scorched only the head of the creature and not Stone’s exposed flesh.

Corriston bent then, and gripped Stone firmly by the shoulders and shook him until a look of desperate pleading came into his eyes. He forced himself not to feel pity, seeing in Stone’s closeness to death a threat that could have but one outcome if the man refused to speak at all.

“Where’s Helen Ramsey?” he demanded. “Where is she, Stone? We’re not likely to do anything more for you if you don’t tell us.”

“I—I don’t know,” Stone muttered. “Saddler…double-crossed Henley. I guess…he wanted her for himself. I don’t know where he’s taken her. I’m telling you the truth. You’ve got to believe me.”

“All right,” Corriston said, easing Stone back on the sand. “I believe you. Take it easy now. They’ve got the lamprene off.”

He stood very still, waiting for his heart to beat normally again, telling himself that Saddler had taken an almost suicidal risk in leaving the ship on foot with no certain refuge in mind. By taking along a helpless girl, he was making himself a target for the rage and relentless enmity of men who would never rest until they had tracked him down.

There could be no sanctuary for him anywhere. If he escaped Henley’s vengeance, the colonists would capture him in a matter of days. But Corriston wasn’t thinking in terms of days. He was thinking in terms of minutes, hours. He stared at the empty stretch of desert ahead, trying desperately to control the despair that was welling up inside him. How long a head start did Saddler have? Had he left the ship only a few minutes, or hours before?

He’d have to ask Stone one more question. Like a fool he’d put off asking it, dreading the thought of what Stone’s answer might be. But now he had no choice. He must ask, and risk knowing that pursuit could not be immediately undertaken by one man, that Saddler was miles away across the desert, hiding out in some remote and inaccessible cave and that tracking him down and putting a bullet through his heart would have to be a joint undertaking.

It was a cruelly frustrating possibility. It increased Corriston’s rage, his bitterness. The hate within him seemed suddenly violent enough to destroy anyone or anything. He preferred to go on alone, in relentless pursuit of Saddler and if it took days to track him down.…

It was Freddy’s voice that brought him back to reality, startling and sobering him. Freddy was coming toward him between the tractors, shouting at the top of his lungs.

21

Corriston couldn’t quite catch what the lad was shouting at first. Something about the dunes and the ship and footprints. Then he caught the name of Helen Ramsey and his mouth went dry and for an instant he couldn’t seem to breathe. Freddy was shouting that he had found Helen Ramsey.

Dr. Drever started and leapt quickly to his feet, his eyes darting with an understandable solicitude toward the small figure coming toward them across the sand. He moved quickly to place himself directly in front of Stone, as if fearing it would be bad for Freddy to see a man so close to death. Then the full significance of Freddy’s words seemed to dawn on him, and his solicitude for his son was replaced by a larger concern, a wider sympathy.

“You talk to him, Corriston,” he said. “You’ve been living through a short stretch of hell. If he’s really found her—”

Corriston needed no urging. He swayed a little forward, steadied himself and broke into a run, meeting Freddy almost midway between the nearest tractor and the hollow where Drever was crouching.

Freddy’s eyes seemed almost too large for so young a face, large and immensely serious. But along with the seriousness Corriston could sense something else, a taper glow of excitement burning bright.

Freddy had gone exploring. As he told Corriston about it, the words seemed to flow from him as if they had a mysterious life of their own, and were somehow reshaping Freddy, making him over into a grown man with a heavy stubble of beard and eyes that had looked on far places and a thousand brilliant suns.

Freddy had found Helen Ramsey by following her footprints in the sand. Corriston let Freddy tell it in his own words, shaken by doubts for a moment, but finally convinced that the lad couldn’t possibly be making any of it up.

“There wasn’t a footprint anywhere near the ship, Lieutenant Corriston. The sandstorm covered them over. I looked everywhere just to be sure. I mean there wasn’t any prints that could have been made by a woman leaving the ship with a man. The sand was trampled in a few places, because about ten minutes ago Mr. Macklin and two other men started looking too. But that was all.

“I remembered then that the sand sometimes stays nearly smooth close to very high dunes, even in a storm. There’s a—a windbreaking buffer zone where the dunes keep the sand from piling up. I asked Mr. Macklin about that once and he told me. I got to thinking that if I just wandered off I could be back again before anyone missed me.”

Freddy turned and gestured toward the ship. “You can see the dunes from here. Not the ones right behind the ship. Those two bigger ones over there…that sort of look like the humps on a camel. I guess nobody would have been crazy enough to go looking for prints that far away from the ship. But if I hadn’t done it I wouldn’t have found her. That’s for sure.”

Corriston said: “You’re so much the opposite of crazy, Freddy, that I’m afraid you’re trying to spare me. It’s hard to hurt someone you like, but I’ve got to have the truth.”

His hand tightened on Freddy’s shoulder. “Do you understand, Freddy? I must know. Don’t lie to spare me. Is she all right?”

Freddy looked up at him, troubled, uncertain. “I think she is. She’s lying down near the bottom of the dune, right where it slopes up again toward another dune. It’s like one, big, hollow dune. I didn’t see her move. I guess she must have fainted. He’s there, too, lying face down in the sand halfway up the dune, like he was hurt.…”

“All right,” Corriston said. “Now you’d better stay here with your father.”

“Can’t I go back with you? I was afraid to climb down to her alone. I was afraid he’d catch me and kill me, and then no one would ever know I’d found her. He’d be warned and try to get away—”

“It was the right thing to do, the level-headed thing,” Corriston said. “You couldn’t have used better judgment.”

“Then it’s all right if I go back with you?”

Corriston shook his head. “No, Freddy. I’d rather you didn’t. Don’t you understand? You’ve done more than your share. Now it’s my turn.”

Freddy tightened his lips and stared for a moment at the glitter of sunlight on the caterpillar tread of the nearest tractor. Finally he said, “All right, Lieutenant Corriston. If it’s an order.”

“It’s an order, Freddy.”

Corriston gave Freddy’s shoulder a pat. Then, after the briefest pause, he said: “There’s no substitute for the kind of fast-thinking resourcefulness you’ve just displayed, Freddy. In a dozen years you’ll be heading an expedition and it won’t be the kind that gets bogged down after the first thousand miles. You can take my word for that.”

He turned then and walked toward the ship. In a moment he had passed the ship and was moving out into the desert beyond, and Freddy wondered how a man could remain so calm in an affair of life and death such as this. It was just as well, perhaps, that he could not see Corriston’s face as he moved still further away from the ship into a loneliness of desert and sky.

* * * *

She was lying in a wind-scoured hollow beneath a seventy-foot dune, her head resting on one sharply-bent elbow, a look of utter exhaustion on her face. Her eyes were closed, and even from where he stood Corriston could see that she was breathing heavily. He could see the slight rise and fall of her bosom, the trembling vibration of her oxygen mask. She was completely alone.

He stood for an instant absolutely motionless on the summit of the dune, staring down at her, noticing in alarm the hollow contour of her cheeks on both sides of the oxygen mask, and the slight tinge of gray that had crept into her countenance. Then he started downward. Almost instantly the sand rose like an unsteady sea on all sides of him, and a warning signal sounded in his brain.

He could connect it with no cause. Beneath him stretched only the wind-scoured inner surface of the dune, dazzling his eyes with its brightness, mirroring the sunlight like a burning glass. For a moment the brightness deceived him, and he did not realize that there were shadowed hollows directly beneath him, dark fissures in the tumbled sand wide enough to conceal a crouching man. He did not even see the shadow creeping toward him over the sand. Only the dazzle for an instant and the gleam of sunlight on Helen Ramsey’s tousled hair.

Then, suddenly, he was aware of the danger, fully awake and aware. But realization came too late. Abruptly, without warning, a knife blade flashed in the sunlight and he felt an agonizing stab of pain just below his left kneecap.

A dark shape rose before him, and then dissolved into the shadows again, darting downward and sideways as it disappeared. Corriston threw himself backwards and froze into immobility, thrusting his elbows deep into the sand behind him, using that moment of surprise forced upon him by his assailant to lower his eyes and seek him out.

He saw Saddler’s face clearly for an instant, saw the gleaming knife and the hand holding it, and the wavering outline of the man’s crouching body three-fourths in shadow. He heard Saddler mutter: “I’m done for, Corriston. But I’ll get you first.”

It all seemed to happen in slow motion. Corriston’s hand went to his hip, but with a nightmare feeling of retardation and his fingers seemed to move without any assistance from the motor centers of his brain. Then even more slowly he was facing the hollow with the gun in his clasp, and the weapon was exploding into the shadows, filling the hollows and windy places with reverberating echoes of sound.

There was complete silence after that. No groans, no outcry—nothing but silence. It went on for so long that Corriston could not shake off a numbing sense of unreality. Surely only a dream could have had so violently unreal a beginning, so terrible an outcome. Then he looked down, and saw the blood on his leg where the knife had grazed it, and knew that it could not have been a dream.

He was still facing the hollow, with two bullets left in his gun. But he knew that he would not have to fire again. Saddler was lying on his back on the sand, his eyes wide open, his jaw hanging slack. There was a spreading red stain on his chest and a rim of blood around his lips. The wind which was blowing across the crest of the dune seemed suddenly to turn malevolent, striking out at the dead man with a sudden, downsweeping gust, ruffling his hair and making him seem to be still enveloped in violence.

Corriston felt his throat muscles contract. He forced himself to bend over and search for a heart beat he knew he wouldn’t find, remembering the other times when the outcome had been less fatal, when only a man’s face had changed.

As his palm rested for an instant above the dead man’s heart, the stirring of the sand immediately beneath him seemed to increase, to become a loud and continuous rustling sound that filled him with a vague sense of disquiet. He could not quite dismiss from his mind a feeling that he was still in danger, that in some strange, almost terrifying way Saddler was still a menace, and that the terrible reality of his death had not destroyed all of the hatred and savage violence which had forced Corriston to kill him in self-defense.

Suddenly Corriston realized that what he heard was not the wind stirring the sand at all, but something quite different. It was closer to him than the sloping rim of the dunes, and it was accompanied by movements directly under his hand, a sudden tightening of the dead man’s skin, a contraction more pronounced than could have been produced by the abrupt onset of rigor mortis, however freakishly violent or premature.

The rustling continued for perhaps ten more seconds. Then, abruptly, it stopped and the heads of two lamprenes came into view, moving slowly across Saddler’s unstirring flesh until their writhing mouth parts were less than two inches from Corriston’s outspread hand.

The sight of them brought an instant of terror, an awareness of peril so acute that Corriston’s breath caught in his throat. His hand whipped back and he leapt to his feet with a convulsive shudder.

It was suddenly very still on the dune again. Corriston stood for a moment with his body rigid, fearing to look downward, his mind filled with a growing sense of panic.

Had Helen Ramsey been attacked by lamprenes too? No, no, she was all right; she had to be. Everything confirmed it, her quietness, her steady breathing, the simple fact that her eyes had been closed and not opened wide in torment.

He descended the dune like a man ploughing in frantic haste through a snowdrift, sinking to his knees and floundering free again, lurching backward and sideways, sliding a third of the way.

She was all right when he got to her. He dropped down beside her and lifted her into his arms, and for an instant there was complete silence between them. She just looked at him, looked up into his face steadily and calmly, as if she could read his mind and had the good sense to realize there could be no more certain way of reassuring him. Then her arms tightened about him. “Darling,” she whispered. “Darling, darling.…”

Corriston started fumbling with his oxygen mask and suddenly he had it off. He held his breath and more slowly helped her free her lips so that he could kiss her. Their lips met and the kiss was longer and more intense than any they had ever before shared.

* * * *

A half hour later the tractors were in rumbling motion again, their destination Ramsey’s Citadel. And Corriston had a plan. He knew that it was riddled with risks and that he was perhaps quite mad to think that it might succeed. But the fact that Helen Ramsey was now completely safe and had dropped off into a brief, outwardly untroubled sleep at his side made him feel reckless to the point where a cautious, level-headed man like Drever could only stare at him and shake his head.

There was a swaying and a creaking all about them, the slow, steady rumble of caterpillar treads, and Drever had almost to shout to make himself heard. He stood directly opposite Corriston, supporting himself by a guard rail, and watching the desert through the weather-shield change color in the wake of the heavy vehicle’s heaving, churning, torpedo-shaped rear-end.

“Stone’s been unconscious now for an hour,” Drever said, dividing his gaze between Corriston, and the loosely strapped-in, sleeping girl at his side, both swaying with the swaying tractor. “We can’t count on getting any more information out of him. I can’t wake him up. Drugs would be dangerous. I don’t think he’ll live, but we can’t deliberately kill him to get him to talk.”

“I know that,” Corriston said.

“But he’s the only one who knows why Henley is staying so long at the Citadel. He should have been back hours ago. He left before you escaped from the ship. For all we know, he may be dead. Ramsey may have lost his head and had him shot, although that seems unlikely. Ramsey would go to any length to save his daughter. But we’ve no way of knowing whether he believed Henley’s story or not. Anything could have happened. Henley may have attacked Ramsey.”

“I’ve a feeling that he’s still at the Citadel,” Corriston said. “I’ll have to gamble on that—the one-in-five chance that for some reason the negotiations have been prolonged. He may be lying dead in the desert somewhere. He may have been attacked by lamprenes. As you say, anything could have happened. But when I make up my mind to do something I usually go through with it. It’s just a matter of plain common sense. You don’t toss aside a decision you’ve given a great deal of thought to just because the arguments against it are weighty, too.”

“I see. So you’re still determined to walk right up to the gate and tell them you’re Stone.”

“Why not? They’ve never laid eyes on Stone and they don’t know me from Adam. I won’t be wearing this uniform. I’ll tell them that Henley’s expecting me, that he left orders for me to join him if he failed to come back at a specified time. I’ll watch the guard’s face and change my story a little—if I have to—as I go along.”

“It’s a very long gamble. I hope you realize that.”

“It’s either that or no gamble at all. And we’ve got to gamble. We’re holding at least two high cards and a joker. Henley has had the ground shot right out from under him. He’s completely alone, and the only thing he has left to gamble with is his nearness to Ramsey, his ability to terrify Ramsey by making him believe that his daughter’s life is still in danger. Ramsey has to be told that Helen has been freed, has to be warned in time, before he does anything foolish.

“Don’t you see? With that threat hanging over him, Ramsey would never let us get within fifty yards of the Citadel, let alone walk through the gates. And if Henley finds out that we’ve got Helen, he’ll know that he has nothing left to gamble with except that desperate bluff. And he may doubt his ability to win with a bluff. That would be the worst tragedy of all. He may turn on Ramsey in blind rage, and kill him. He gets a horrible, pathological pleasure out of killing. I’ve told you how he went berserk on the Station.”

Drever nodded, and, quite suddenly and unexpectedly, the look of stubborn opposition was gone from his eyes.

“I guess you’re right, Lieutenant. You can’t always tell how the cards will fall.”

“You can never tell,” Corriston said. “And there are some games where the important moves can only be made by just one player, and he usually has to be something of a reckless fool.”

22

Corriston left the tractor a hundred and seventy yards from the gate, well hidden behind a hundred foot dune. The other tractors had come to a halt a much greater distance from the Citadel, and were spread out across the desert in a slightly uneven, double line.

He walked slowly forward across the rust-red sand, with a feeling in his bones that he was going to be lucky. Yet he knew that he’d have to be convincing, or he wouldn’t stand a chance. If there was more than one guard at the gate he might never get inside. With luck he might be able to convince two guards—even three—but never four or five, for you couldn’t forge words into persuasive enough weapons to disarm the suspicion of that many observant men. Not the kind of men who would be guarding Ramsey, at any rate.

The massiveness of the fortified gate shook his confidence a little as he drew near to it. It was at least fifty feet in height, a solid oblong of inches-thick steel with a desert-mirroring surface. He could see his own reflection as he advanced, but it did nothing to reassure him.

He knew what he’d have to do, of course. Walk right up to the gate and trust to luck that he could find some way of announcing his presence without getting himself killed. How did you gain entrance to an impregnable fortress? Surely there had to be some way by which a man could gain admittance without being instantly shot down as a hostile intruder.

He was surprised by the simplicity of the answer. There was no need for him to press a bell or a buzzer, to manipulate a mechanism of any sort. There was not even any need for him to proclaim his arrival by shouting.

The gate swung inward without a sound, and in the shadows cast by its moving bulk two figures silently materialized. They were guards, heavily armed, one tall with shaggy brows and piercing dark eyes, the other a wiry little man with reddish hair, his expression peculiarly bland and non-committal.

It was the little man who said: “All right, come inside. We’ve been expecting you.”

It was impossible, but true. There was nothing threatening in the way the words were uttered, just calm acceptance, just the matter-of-fact indifference of a man who has a duty to perform and doesn’t care what happens afterwards.

But it would have perhaps been better if Corriston had not moved so quickly forward, for almost instantly the second guard barred his passage and laid a firm hand on his arm.

“Hold on. Just a minute,” the tall guard said. “You’re Peter Stone, aren’t you?”

With a quick pretense of anger Corriston jerked his arm free and looked the guard up and down. “Naturally I’m Stone. Who in hell did you think I was.”

“Sorry,” the guard said, shrugging. “Don’t take it out on me. I just had to be sure.”

“Well, you’re sure now. I guess you know why I’m here.”

The guard nodded. “Ramsey just phoned down about you. Your friend is with him now. See that big gray building, the one on the left with the shuttered windows? There’s a guard stationed at the door, but he won’t stop you. He has his orders. Climb two flights of stairs and go down the long corridor on the third floor. Ramsey and your friend are in the last room on the left.”

Corriston drew a deep breath, wondering if the guard had noticed the tightening of his facial muscles. He turned away from the gate slowly, staring out over the interior of the fortress, letting his emotions of the moment take complete possession of him.

He had entered as if by magic a world apart, a small, shutin world of massive magnificence, of undreamed of material power and wealth. There were five buildings within the encircling wall of the fortress, each monumental in architectural sweep. Each was a citadel alone and apart, monuments to man’s creative genius erected by one man with a determination to make himself unique.

It was a folly almost beyond belief, a terrifying distortion of human creativeness that could lead only to ultimate disaster and defeat.

But greedy and cruel and ruthless as Ramsey undoubtedly was, there still burned in him a little of the spark that had created Athens in white marble. Had it not been so, he could not have even commissioned men of creative genius to transport to Mars the materials for such a project and have taken pleasure in its completion.

“Your friend got here two hours ago,” the tall guard said. “They’ve been talking ever since. He came down to the gate once and said we should let you in, you and another man. Saddler, I think his name was. I see he’s not with you.”

“No, Saddler is not with me,” Corriston said.

“What happened to him?”

“The big gray building with the shuttered windows, you said. If the guard tries to stop me, what do I say.”

“I told you he had his orders.”

Corriston looked up at the massive gate swinging shut behind him. For good or ill, he was completely trapped, completely at the mercy of the armed guards inside the citadel.

They hadn’t taken his gun away from him, but, nevertheless, he was trapped. What chance would one armed man have against seventy-five or a hundred guards? They were keeping out of sight, all but the two at the gate. But at any moment they could converge upon him and shoot him down. They could choose their own moment, precisely as a research medical man could choose his own moment to experiment upon a laboratory animal, knowing that the creature was safe in its cage and couldn’t possibly get away.

Corriston’s lips tightened and from a shadowed corner of his mind came a determination to brush all that aside, to ignore it completely. The guards at the gate might very well be telling the truth. It stood to reason that Ramsey would have remained secretive about his daughter. Kidnappers do not like to have their ransom demands discussed too openly. If Ramsey had been a complete fool he would have gone down to the gate and taken the guards completely into his confidence, but Corriston could not believe that Ramsey was that much of a fool.

In all probability Henley had threatened Ramsey and provoked him almost beyond endurance. There had arisen the questions of how the ransom was to be paid, the girl set free.

Damn it, Corriston thought, the thing for me to do now is to go straight toward that building and straight up the stairs to the third floor and straight down the corridor until I’m confronting Ramsey face to face. I’m Peter Stone. I’m one of the two men who helped Henley kidnap the girl and I’ve come to help Henley convince Ramsey. I’ve come to help him really put the screws on Ramsey. I can improvise from that point on.

He moved away from the guards without looking back. Within the citadel there was silence, stillness, the five massive buildings cutting a rampart of pure, fragile design across the sky. There was a strange kind of perfection about the interior of the citadel. It was akin, somehow, to the perfection of solitude and even the sky seemed hushed, expectant, remote from reality, as if awaiting the unfolding of some impossible event, some terrifying drama of violence and retribution that could take place nowhere else.

But Corriston’s reason told him that to believe any such thing would have been the height of folly. The sky inside the citadel was just as real, just as cloud-flecked and palely blue as the sky outside, and the notion that architecture or scenery of any kind could influence events was absolute nonsense. Things would happen exactly as he willed them to happen, provided nothing stood in the way of immediate drastic action and the kind of luck which had saved him at the gate continued to smile upon him.

The big gray building with the shuttered windows continued to occupy most of his attention, and he walked very resolutely toward it, his eyes on the glimmer of pale light which marked its wide doorway. He was still fifty feet away when he saw the guard, standing very quietly just inside the door with his hand on his gun holster.

Corriston’s lips tightened, but he did not moderate his stride. He had a reply ready if the guard challenged him. He preferred to believe that he would not be challenged, but he had no intention of taking anything for granted.

He continued on until he reached the doorway and then he stopped abruptly. He waited for the guard to say something, but the man did not speak at all. He simply stared quietly at Corriston for an instant, and then stepped quickly back into the shadows. Corriston went on past him, and advanced along the wide corridor that stretched before him.

The wide central staircase that circled up did not seem appropriate to a building that was not a residence and Corriston found himself wondering if Ramsey had turned the other four buildings into similarly unusual expressions of his own strong-willed orientation to reality.

The buildings had undoubtedly been designed as administrative units of an industrial empire—a beginning empire in a new world. An empire predatory, avaricious, merciless. Yet Ramsey had seemingly allowed his desire for a home to gain dominance here, had allowed the emotions common to all men to influence his taste in interior architecture in at least one of the buildings.

Chalk up that much to Ramsey’s credit. In that respect at least, he was superior to Henley. In that respect at least a man of good will could take sides, all apart from the personal issues involved. Henley was a predatory vulture on all counts, his talons constantly spread, constantly crimson-tipped. Ramsey was a vulture too, but in the depths of his mind he knew it. Part of the agony was shared by him, and in one desperate, despairing part of his personality he had tried to be creative.

Corriston ascended the staircase swiftly, casting one brief glance at some murals and then ignoring them. The second floor landing stretched away into shadows, bisected by a wide corridor dimly lighted by overhead lamps. The second floor had an administrative building aspect and so did the third floor, which seemed in all respects its exact duplicate.

Corriston’s excitement grew as he mounted the stairway. He felt like a man poised on the brink of a precipice with no assurance that he would not be hurled to his death; a man aware that tragedy would not strike him like a thunderbolt at any moment; and yet also like a man who thought and felt differently from the trapped and the desperately despairing.

He felt very confident, very sure of himself, and it seemed to him that there was no danger that he could not surmount, and deep within him there was something that exulted in the thought and kept him moving steadily upward.

The third floor was like the second, its long central corridor dwindling away into shadows. Down it he moved cautiously, remembering what the guard at the gate had said. The third floor, the last door on your left.

Ramsey was in conference. But it wasn’t a conference of industrial associates planning a division of spoils. Ramsey was talking to a killer under duress.

Corriston was half way down the corridor when he heard the shot. It rang out in the stillness with a terrible clarity, sending echoes reverberating throughout the building, stopping Corriston in his tracks.

For an instant the silence remained absolute, as if the shot had somehow silenced all life within the building. Even Corriston’s breathing was affected by it, so that for an instant he remained like a man horror-blasted into immobility, frozen, a statue with waxen features and widely dilated eyes.

Then, abruptly, he ceased to be a statue. He broke into a run, heading for the door from which the shot had come.

He came to the door and saw that it did not slide open on a panel. It was massive, with a knob jutting out from it, and when he grasped the knob it swung inward instantly and soundlessly and he found himself in a large, blank-walled room brightly illumed by three circular overhead lamps.

Ramsey was sitting stiff and straight before a desk that was cluttered with reference files, manuscripts in folders, pens, pencils and other writing materials. His face was drained of all color, and his eyes were wide and staring. He was looking directly at Corriston, and yet he did not seem to see Corriston.

He did not appear to be staring at anything in particular, that small, shrunken, unimpressive-looking little man with graying temples and a look of blank incomprehension in his eyes that chilled Corriston to the core of his being.

Shaking, wishing that the eyes would close or brighten with relief, or do anything but remain so stonily indifferent, Corriston moved closer to the desk.

He saw at once that Ramsey was close to death. He had been shot in the chest. There was a dull red stain on his chest, and even as Corriston stared it widened, a butterfly pattern of red, like a Rorschach seen through the eyes of a homicidally inclined psychotic.

Suddenly Ramsey moved. He caught hold of the desk edge, and swayed a little, but his eyes remained filmed, blankly staring.

Corriston was bending above him when a familiar voice said: “He’s done for. Nothing you can do for him. We had an argument and he lost his head. He just couldn’t see it my way. So I made a mistake and shot him. It was a mistake, all right. I lost my head. Now I’ve got nothing to lose by killing you.”

Corriston raised his eyes slowly. He had one chance in a hundred perhaps. He knew it; he sensed it. Henley had somehow managed to stay out of sight for an instant. The room was very large. There were shadows in it, and Henley had apparently flattened himself against the wall behind the desk, in deep shadow.

But now he was standing very straight and still behind the desk, ignoring the shuddering form of the man he had shot, little dark deathheads dancing in his eyes.

Henley’s nearness did not bother Corriston. Death at ten feet could be no more final than death at a hundred yards.

Only one thing bothered him. Events could move fast when you were close to a killer.

He didn’t intend to let them move fast. Not for him, at any rate. He let his eyes rest for an instant on the gun in Henley’s hand, his thoughts racing. He knew that he’d be as good as dead if he made a single concession.

Don’t let him know that the gun worries you. Pretend that the odds are even, even though he’s got the drop on you.

Corriston said: “How do you know he’s fatally wounded? The wound’s three inches below his heart. You’re taking a hell of a lot for granted. You just said you made a mistake in shooting him. If he’s rushed to a hospital that mistake may not be your last. You’ll have a chance to go to work on him again.”

Henley shook his head, his lips tightening. “Don’t be a fool. He’ll be dead in five minutes.”

“I’m not being a fool,” Corriston said. “What will you stand to gain by shooting me and letting him die? You’ve got his daughter, but a dead man won’t be able to ransom her.”

For a moment, nothing happened. Henley had made no attempt to draw his gun, and he did not draw it now. He stood very quietly staring at Corriston, breathing heavily, a strange, withdrawn look in his eyes.

Perhaps he was thinking over what Corriston had said. Corriston wondered about that for an instant, and then dismissed it from his mind. You did not take anything for granted when you were standing that close to a killer.

It was probably too late to save Ramsey. But for the first time he was standing very near to Henley with a weapon beneath his hand. If he drew his gun instantly and shot Henley through the heart Ramsey might have a chance. Otherwise.…

Somehow he couldn’t do it; not without giving the other some slight warning, not without whipping his hand to his gun with a vigor that was clear and unmistakable. In matters of crime a fair man is at a disadvantage. He can only deal with a murderer in one way.

He drew a split second ahead of Henley. He shot Henley three times, the gun blazing in his hands, and it did not seem important to him that Henley had also drawn his gun. A tight knot reached into his stomach as Henley’s gun blazed, but he kept right on firing.

Henley died missing him, not scoring at all. That was the incredible thing. Henley, an expert shot, a genius at massacre, had missed him clearly with five shots and now he was down on the floor, clutching at his stomach, dragging himself along, while beneath his fingers a dull red stain grew.

His eyes turned glassy suddenly. He tried twice to raise himself but he fell back each time. He did not speak at all. Blood from his punctured lungs flooded up into his mouth, and with a terrible, convulsive trembling of his entire body he rolled over on his side and lay still.

Corriston’s hands began to sweat beneath the hard, cold gun. He wanted to drop the weapon, to hurl it from him, but he couldn’t somehow. He had killed Saddler in immediate self-defense. This had been a little different—a new experience, a frightening experience and he had been forced to grit his teeth even in firing, and now that it was all over he was tormented inwardly in a way that left him badly shaken.

Henley was gone now. Dead and still and forever removed from a world he had contaminated. Henley had been warped and twisted largely by circumstances outside himself; nevertheless a deadly reptile has to be crushed when it is about to strike.

Corriston looked up from the limp form sprawled out on the floor, and for a moment the tight lines of his face relaxed a little. Henley was no longer a menace; the breath of life that had sustained him had expired so completely that he had become now a kind of hollow mockery of something monstrous and distorted that could never harm anyone again.

It was Ramsey who had to be considered now, Ramsey who was in peril.

The light in the room seemed somehow a little dimmer than it had been. He turned slowly back to Ramsey, and for a moment could not quite believe what he saw.

Ramsey’s face was changing. The hollows beneath his cheekbones were deeper than they had been, and his mouth had gone completely slack, and his eyes were uprolled in a quite ghastly way, so that only the whites showed.

Slowly as Corriston stared Ramsey’s features began to come apart. The familiar, hideous pattern began to repeat itself on Ramsey’s blanched features. The mouth widened until it turned into a shapeless, colorless gash in a face that was hardly recognizable. The nose widened and spread out, the chin receded, and the cheeks became a flattened expanse of wrinkled flesh that stubbornly refused to stop spreading.

Ramsey’s face became a pumpkin face, with slits for eyes and a hideous caricature of a mouth that seemed almost to pout as it expanded.

Suddenly Ramsey was no longer sitting upright before the desk. His body swayed and began to slump, tilting at first only a little sideways and then sliding completely from the chair to the floor.

Ramsey did not descend to the floor with violence. It was a slow, barely perceptible gliding motion of his entire body that carried him from an upright position to a prone one in less than thirty seconds. His body seemed to collapse inward upon itself, as if he had suddenly become too skeleton-thin for his clothes, as if so much vitality had been drained from him by the shot which had put an end to his life that he had given up all hope of maintaining his dignity in death.

But perhaps the man on the floor had no dignity to maintain. He wasn’t Ramsey. He was a hired substitute, an impostor, and quite obviously no man would undertake to play such a role without calculating all of the risks in advance. Perhaps he expected to die without dignity. Perhaps that was one of the risks which went with the bargain—the assumption that Ramsey might very well be killed in a violent fashion, and that anyone who stepped into Ramsey’s shoes and masqueraded as Ramsey might expect a similar fate.

Corriston felt a nerve begin to twitch violently in his cheek. Why had Ramsey kept Henley occupied in so strange a manner, talking to a nonentity, a stand-in, a double who could never bargain and come to terms unless Ramsey ordered him to do so? Had Ramsey been incapable of dealing with Henley directly, and had taken this means of complying with the ransom demands?

It seemed incredible on the face of it. Ramsey was quite obviously the kind of man who could live through any kind of private hell if he had to.

He’d have stood up to Henley no matter how great his inner torment. He’d have met the ransom demands or rejected them—and it was almost inconceivable that he would have rejected them—without for an instant losing his outward composure. And even inwardly he would have kept a tight rein on his emotions. He was not the kind of man who would hire someone else to protect him from anything that vitally concerned him, even with the masks so conveniently at hand.

Why then had he employed a double to bargain with Henley and keep him occupied for so long a time? It didn’t matter if Ramsey had made use of doubles in the past. Probably he had, in order to protect himself in dealings with the colonists when the advantages of deception would favor him. But he would never have done so under these present circumstances—when a criminal who would stop at nothing was holding his daughter under threat of death.

He would never have done so unless he had some very special reason that dominated his thinking to the exclusion of all else.

Suddenly Corriston had the answer. It came to him in a lightning-swift flash of intuition, which carried with it complete credibility. It was more than a guess. Somehow he was sure; he knew. A full minute before he heard the dull rumble of the tractors as they came through the gate, and went to the window and stared down, he knew.

He had the answer and yet what he saw eclipsed what he knew. It was a little like watching a rocket take off, hearing the roar and seeing the flames through all of its burning time, and seeing at the same time the men on the proving ground moving swiftly about, and the space-helmeted men at the controls of the rocket itself, each grimly intent on one particular task.

Ramsey was returning into the Citadel with armed guards on both sides of him, and his daughter was walking with her head erect at his side. Five colony tractors had followed him into the Citadel and two more were just coming through the gate, moving ponderously on their caterpillar treads because each tractor weighed two tons even in the light gravity of Mars.

Corriston did an almost unbelievable thing then. Standing quietly by the window he raised his right hand and saluted Ramsey in silent tribute to the man’s courage at the most threatening moment of his life.

What Ramsey had done in no way lessened his guilt. But Corriston would have just as readily repeated the salute in public, without caring what anyone might think. What Ramsey had done was as clear to him now as a series of moves on a chessboard laid out in advance, but hidden from the man who was to be outwitted and outplayed.

Ramsey had made use of a double to keep Henley occupied—no doubt with repeated, skillful evasions, a constant insistence that more proof be forthcoming, more details supplied. Perhaps a half-dozen conferences had taken place in all, extending over many hours. And while Henley was being encouraged to believe that Ramsey was being softened up and would accept all of his demands in the end, Ramsey had gone out into the desert alone, armed, furious, and determined to rescue his daughter if it cost him his life.

Or perhaps he hadn’t gone alone. Perhaps he had taken a dozen armed guards with him. Somehow it didn’t seem important, couldn’t take away Ramsey’s moment of victory. It was a moment of victory for Ramsey even though he hadn’t played a major role for long, even though he had found his daughter already rescued and safe on his return. And Corriston had been the one to move out into the center of the board and deliver the coup de grace. He had kept a restless killer immobilized while the play was under way, and that was victory enough for any man.

Corriston suddenly realized that neither Ramsey nor the Colonists had any way of knowing that Henley was dead. They had probably joined forces outside the Citadel for the sole purpose of rescuing him from the deadliest kind of danger. And he wasn’t helping them at all. In another minute they’d be trying to get to him with tear gas.

It didn’t make any kind of sense, but when Corriston went down the wide central staircase he wasn’t thinking about the colonists at all. He was wondering only how Helen Ramsey would look standing alone on a strange dark headland at midnight. Then the vision dissolved and another one took its place. She wasn’t on a headland any more.

She was standing at the door of a small, white cottage and there were a couple of kids beside her: a boy of about Freddy’s age, or maybe a little younger, and a little girl with golden curls, her hair like a crown.

He realized suddenly that it could never be a small, white cottage. There were no small white cottages on the Station, and never could be. But the Station would be all right for a married man with kids. The kids could come and visit him, and his wife could be with him about one-fourth of the time, both on the Station and on Earth.

What more could a happily married man ask, if the Station was so much a part of him that it was never wholly absent from his thoughts? He’d have to ask her, of course—at least a dozen times to make sure—that she really wanted that kind of man for a husband. But he knew what her answer would be even before the vision dissolved, and he was soon out in the central square between the five buildings, holding her tightly in his arms.

From the way she kissed him he knew that she must have endured an eternity of torment just from uncertainty, just from not knowing whether he was dead or alive. For an instant he could think of nothing else but the wonder of it, the absolute reassurance which she had brought to him with her closeness, her gratefulness, the intensity of her concern.

Across the square they could see the tractors, looking in the dazzling light like massive blocks of metal standing almost end to end. There was a great deal of movement and shouting between the buildings, and Corriston knew that in another half-minute they would no longer be alone together, that the closeness couldn’t last.

A change was coming over her face, and he was suddenly afraid for her, afraid that when she was told the full truth about her father just the pain of knowing might make her withdraw from him, even though it could never really come between them or separate them for long.

So there it was. He could see it in her eyes, the fear, the shadow, and because he had no way of knowing just how much she already knew he decided that only complete honesty could keep the shadow from lengthening.

His hands moved slowly up over her face, and he drew her chin up and said, very gently: “There’s something I’d like to say now, about your father. Without his help Henley would have finished what he started out to do. There are different ways of paying off a debt, and your father—”

She raised her hand as if to put a stop to his words. “Darling, I know he’s in serious trouble. Don’t try to spare me; there’s no need to. There will be a trial and we both know what the outcome will be. He’ll never walk out of the courtroom a free man. But he’s not afraid…and neither am I. These last few, terrible hours have changed him. He’s not ashamed now to admit that he loves me. All the hardness, the coldness, is gone.”

Something in her voice stilled the questions he wanted to ask. She seemed to sense what was in his mind, for she said quickly. “I don’t think father has any enemies now on Mars. He’s going to give the colonists back their land. Not because he has to, but because he wants to. They came to his assistance when they could have used the way he cheated and robbed them as an excuse for not helping him at all. There are few men who wouldn’t feel grateful, who wouldn’t be shaken by remorse. But I think it goes deeper than that. Even now I’m not completely sure, but I think he knows it’s the only way he can free himself from the prison he’s been building around himself since I was a little girl.”

She was silent for an instant, while the pain in her eyes seemed to deepen. Then she said, “I can’t leave him now, darling. Not right away. It would be too cruel a blow.”

Ahead now Corriston could see three of the colonists coming toward him. They were less than forty feet away. “I think I know how it is,” he said. “When you’ve been through too much, you just go dead inside. You can feel sympathy for someone very close, like your father. But that’s about all.…”

“Darling, that’s not what I mean. We’ll be apart, but just for a little while. It will be so short a time we won’t even miss it later on…two or three weeks, at most. And this time you won’t have to wonder about me at all.”

Corriston noticed then for the first time that her hair had been blown in all directions by the wind. He remembered how, on their first meeting, it had been disarranged in much the same way. She’d been wearing a beret then, and just the casual tilt of her hat had done the fluffing. But wind or no wind, he’d always like the way her hair looked, the gold in it, and the way it set off the great beauty of her face.

“I’d be more than unreasonable if I tried to pick flaws in a promise like that,” he said.

“You can never go home again,” someone had once said. You can never go home because people change and places change with them, and familiar scenes take on an aspect of strangeness as the old, well-loved landmarks fade.

But in space, the landmarks are as wide and deep as the gulfs between the stars, and it is not too difficult for a man to return to a steel-ribbed Gibraltar in space and experience again the emotions he felt when he first sighted it, and hear again the long thunder-roll of the ships berthing and taking off.

The ship which was bringing Corriston back had begun to loom up behind the telemetric aerials with her bow slanting forward. She had almost berthed, and, standing with his face half in shadow, Commander Clement watched the landing lights flashing on and off and wondered just what he would say to the young lieutenant he’d never met—the very famous lieutenant who would be emerging from the boarding port and descending the ramp any minute now.

He told himself that it ought to be something very simple and direct, accompanied by a friendly handclasp and a nod. “Welcome back, Lieutenant. Welcome back. I guess you know how I feel about the scoundrels who kept us from meeting the first time.”

Yes, just a few words and a friendly handclasp would be best. No salutes either given or returned. No stiff-necked salutes, and damn the regulations for once. It was truly a very great occasion.

MARS IS MY DESTINATION

Originally published in 1962.

1

I’d known for ten minutes that something terrible was going to happen. It was in the cards, building to a zero-count climax.

The spaceport bar was filled with a fresh, washed-clean smell, as if all the winds of space had been blowing through it. There was an autumn tang in the air as well, because it was open at both ends, and out beyond was New Chicago, with its parks and tall buildings, and the big inland sea that was Lake Michigan.

It was all right…if you just let your mind dwell on what was outside. Men and women with their shoulders held straight and a new lift to the way they felt and thought, because Earth wasn’t a closed-circuit any more. Kids in the parks pretending they were spacemen, bundled up in insulated jackets, having the time of their lives. A blue jay perched on a tree, the leaves turning red and yellow around it. A nurse in a starched white uniform pushing a perambulator, her red-gold hair whipped by the wind, a dreamy look in her eyes.

Nothing could spoil any part of that. It was there to stay and I breathed in deeply a couple of times, refusing to remember that in the turbulent, round-the-clock world of the spaceports, Death was an inveterate barhopper.

Then I did remember, because I had to. You can’t bury your head in the sand to shut out ugliness for long, unless you’re ostrich-minded and are willing to let your integrity go down the drain.

I didn’t know what time it was and I didn’t much care. I only knew that Death had come in late in the afternoon, and was hovering in stony silence at the far end of the bar.

He was there, all right, even if he had the same refractive index as the air around him and you could see right through him. The sixth-sense kind of awareness that everyone experiences at times—call it a premonition, if you wish—had started an alarm bell ringing in my mind.

It was still ringing when I raised my eyes, and knew for sure that all the furies that ever were had picked that particular time and place to hold open house.

I saw it begin to happen.

It began so suddenly it had the impact of a big, hard-knuckled fist crashing down on the spaceport bar, startling everyone, jolting even the solitary drinkers out of their private nightmares.

Actually the violence hadn’t quite reached that stage. But it was a safe bet that it would in another ten or twelve seconds. And when it did there was no chain or big double lock on Earth that could keep it from terminating in bloodshed.

The tipoff was the way it started, as if a fuse had been lit that would blow the place apart. Just two voices for an instant, raised in anger, one ringing out like a pistol shot. But I knew that something was dangerously wrong the instant I caught sight of the two men who were doing the arguing.

The one whose voice had made every glass on the long bar vibrate like a tuning fork was a blond giant, six-foot-four at least and built massive around the shoulders. His shirt was open at the throat and his chest was sweat-sheened and he had the kind of outsized ruggedness that made you feel it would have taken a heavy rock-crushing machine a full half hour to flatten him out.

The other was of average height and only looked small by contrast. He was more than holding his own, however, standing up to the Viking character defiantly. His weather-beaten face was as tight as a drum, and his hair was standing straight up, as though a charge of high-voltage electricity had passed right through him.

He just happened to have unusually bristly hair, I guess. But it gave him a very weird look indeed.

I don’t know why someone picked that critical moment to shout a warning, because everyone could see it was the kind of argument that couldn’t be stopped by anything short of strong-armed intervention. Advice at that point could be just as dangerous as pouring kerosene on the fuse, to make it burn faster.

But someone did yell out, at the top of his lungs. “Pipe down, you two! What do you think this is, a debating society?”

It could have turned into that, all right, the deadliest kind of debating society, with the stoned contingent taking sides for no sane reason. It could have started off as a free-for-all and ended with five or six of the heaviest drinkers lying prone, with bashed-in skulls.

The barkeep made a makeshift megaphone of his two hands and added to the confusion by shouting: “Get back in line or I’ll have you run right out of here. I’ll show you just how tough I can get. Every time something like this happens I get blamed for it. I’m goddam sick of being in the middle.”

“That’s telling them, John! Need any help?”

“No, stay where you are. I can handle it.”

I didn’t think he could, not even if he was split down the middle into two men twice his size. I didn’t think anyone could, because by this time I’d had a chance to take a long, steady, camera-eye look at the expression on the Viking character’s face.

I’d seen that expression before and I knew what it meant. The Viking character was having a virulent sour grapes reaction to something Average Size had said. It had really taken hold, like a smallpox vaccination that’s much too strong, and his inner torment had become just agonizing enough to send him into a towering rage.

Average Size had probably been boasting, telling everyone how lucky he was to be on the passenger list of the next Mars-bound rocket. And in a crowded spaceport bar, where Martian Colonization Board clearances are at a terrific premium, you don’t indulge in that kind of talk. Not unless you have a suicide complex and are dead set on leaving the earth without traveling out into space at all.

Now things were coming to a head so fast there was no time to cheat Death of his cue. He was starting to come right out into the open, scythe swinging, punctual to the dot. I was sure of it the instant I saw the gun gleaming in the Viking character’s hand and the smaller man recoiling from him, his eyes fastened on the weapon in stark terror.

Oh, you fool! I thought. Why did you provoke him? You should have expected this, you should have known. What good is a Mars clearance if you end up with a bullet in your spine?

For some strange reason the Viking character seemed in no hurry to blast. He seemed to be savoring the look of terror in Average Size’s eyes, letting his fury diminish by just a little, as if by allowing a tenth of it to escape through a steam-spigot safety valve he could make more sure of his aim. It made me wonder if I couldn’t still get to them in time.

The instant I realized there was still a chance I knew I’d have to try. I was in good physical trim and no man is an island when the sands are running out. I didn’t want to die, but neither did Average Size and there are obligations you can’t sidestep if you want to go on living with yourself.

I moved out from where I was standing and headed straight for the Viking character, keeping parallel with the long bar. I can’t recall ever having moved more rapidly, and I was well past the barkeep—he was blinking and standing motionless, as white as a sheet now—when the Viking character’s voice rang out for the second time.

“You think you’re better than the rest of us, don’t you? Sure you do. Why deny it? Who are you, who is anybody, to come in here and strut and put on airs? I’m going to let you have it, right now!”

The blast came then, sudden, deafening. They were standing so close to each other I thought for a minute the gun had misfired, for Average Size didn’t stiffen or sag or change his position in any way and his face was hidden by smoke from the blast.

I should have known better, for it was a big gun with a heavy charge, and when a man is half blown apart his body can become galvanized for an instant, just as if he hasn’t been hit at all. Sometimes he’ll be lifted up and hurled back twenty feet and sometimes he’ll just stand rigid, with the life going out of him in a rush, an instant before his knees give way and there’s a terrible, welling redness to make you realize how mistaken you were about the shot going wild.

The smoke thinned out fast enough, eddying away from him in little spirals. But one quick look at him sinking down, passing into eternity with his head lolling, was all I had time for. Pandemonium was breaking loose all around me, and my only thought was to make a mad dog killer pay for what he had done before someone got between us.

Mad dog killers enrage me beyond all reason. Given enough provocation almost any man can go berserk and commit murder. But the Viking character had let a provocation that merited no more than a rebuke rip his self-control to shreds.

The naked brutality of it sickened me. Something primitive and very dangerous—or perhaps it was something super-civilized—made me out to beat him into insensibility before he could kill again. I felt like a man confronting a poisonous snake, who knows he must stamp on it or blast off its head before it can sink its fangs in his flesh.

I was not alone in feeling that way. All around me there was an angry muttering, a cursing and a shouting. If I needed support, sturdy backing, I had it. But right at that moment I didn’t need it. An angry giant had come to life inside of me and we exchanged nods and understood each other.

There was a crash behind me, but I ignored it. What was harder to ignore was the barkeep straddling the bar and coming down flatfooted in the wake of two reeling drunks who were lunging for the killer with a crazy, wild look in their eyes. I didn’t want them to get to him ahead of me.

He hadn’t moved at all and had a frightened look on his face, as if the blast had jolted some sanity back into him and made him realize that you can’t gun a man down in a crowded bar without adjusting a noose to your own throat and giving fifty men a chance to draw it tight.

The gun he’d killed with might still have saved him, if he’d swung about and started shooting up the bar. But I didn’t give him a chance to recover.

I ploughed into him, wrenched the gun from him and sent him reeling back against the bar with a solidly delivered blow to the jaw, luckily aimed just right.

Then they were on him, five or six of them, and I couldn’t see him for a moment.

I held the gun tightly and looked at it. It was still warm and just the feel of it sent a shiver up my spine. A gun that has just been wrenched from the hand of a killer is unlike any other weapon. There’s blood on it, even if no laboratory test can bring it out.

I didn’t know I’d lost anything until I looked down and saw my wallet lying on the floor at my feet. The energy I’d put into the blow had not only sent a stab of pain up my wrist to my elbow. It had jarred something loose from my inner breast pocket that had a danger-potential, right at that moment, that could have turned the tide of rage that was sweeping the bar away from the killer and straight in my direction. Some of it anyway, splitting it down the middle, causing the drunks who were divided in their minds about what he had done to change sides abruptly.

In my wallet was a perforated card, all stippled with tiny dots down one side, and it said that I was on the passenger list of the next Mars-bound rocket, and that the Martian Colonization Board clearance was of a peculiar kind…very special.

The wallet had fallen open and the card was in plain view for anyone to read. It could be recognized by its color alone—a light shade of blue—and if anyone who felt the way the killer had done about Average Size had caught sight of it and made a grab for the wallet—

I was bending to pick it up when a voice whispered close to my ear. “Don’t let anyone see that card—if you want to stay in one piece. You’d better get out of here before they start asking questions. They won’t wait for the Spaceport Police to get here. Too many of them will be in trouble if they don’t find out fast where everyone stands. They’ll know how to go about it.”

I couldn’t believe it for a minute, because I hadn’t seen her come in. I’d noticed two women at the bar, but not this one—it would have been impossible for me to have failed to notice so slim a waist or hips so enchantingly rounded, or the honey-blonde hair piled high, or the wide, dark-lashed eyes that were staring at me out of a face that would have made a good many men with their lives at stake forget the meaning of danger.

Even if she’d been wedged in tightly between two male escorts at the bar, I’d have noticed a part of all that. Just one glimpse of the back of her head, with the indefinable, special quality that makes beauty like that perceptible at a glance, so that you know what the whole woman will look like when she turns, would have made so deep an impression on me that not even the violence I’d participated in a moment afterwards could have blotted it from my mind.

It left me speechless for an instant. I just snatched up the wallet, put it safely back in my pocket and returned her stare in complete silence.

“Better keep the gun,” she advised. “Your fingerprints are all over it now. You could clear yourself all right, considering who you are. But it would be much simpler just to toss it into Lake Michigan, especially if they decide to let him go and lie about who did the killing.”

I could have wiped the gun clean and tossed it on the floor, but I knew what was in her mind. You just don’t leave a murder weapon lying around in plain view when you’ve picked it up right after a killing. It can lead to all kinds of complications.

I nodded and stood up. “Thanks for the advice,” I said, finding my voice at last. “There are enough eye-witnesses here to convict him without this, if just a few of them have a conscience.”

“Don’t count on it,” she said. “They’re angry enough to kill him right now, because they don’t like to see anyone gunned down like that. But when they’ve had time to think it over—”

She was right, of course. There were six or seven men struggling with the killer now but there were others who weren’t. A fight had started near the middle of the bar and someone was shouting: “The ugly son deserved what he got! Every man who gets a Mars clearance now has to play along with the Colonization Board! He has to turn informer and help them set a trap for anyone who gets in their way. Just depriving us of our rights doesn’t satisfy them. They’re scheming to get the whole Mars Colony for themselves.”

It was the Big Lie—the charge that had done more damage to the Mars Colony than the shortages of food and desperately needed construction materials, and almost as much damage as the two major power conflicts and the transportation difficulties that never seemed to get solved.

I wanted to go right up to him and grab hold of him and hit him as hard as I’d hit the Viking character, because he was a killer too—a killer of the dream.

But the blonde who seemed to know all the answers and what was wise and sane and sensible was tugging at my arm and I couldn’t ignore the urgency in her voice.

“Time’s running out on you, Mr. Important Man. If they find out just who you are, you won’t have a chance of getting out of here alive. Every one of them will be clamoring for your blood. The pity of it, the terrible pity, is that most of them hate violence as much as you do. They hate what that wild beast just did. But the Big Lie has made them hate the Colonization Board even more. Do we go?”

It came as a surprise that she was leaving with me, and that was downright idiotic, in a way. With the place in an uproar, a killer still trying to break loose and a fight under way it would have been madness for her to stay, and the two other women had vanished without stopping to talk to anyone. But in moments of stress you can overlook the obvious and wonder about it afterward.

We had to move fast and we ran into trouble when two struggling drunks got in our way. I shouldered one aside and rammed an elbow into the stomach of the other and we reached the street without being stopped by anyone who didn’t want us to leave. The card was back in my pocket and not a single one of them had X-ray eyes.

In another minute or two someone would have probably remembered that I’d disarmed the Viking character and could have had a reason for the fast violent way I’d gone about it. Then I’d have been in for the kind of questioning the blonde had mentioned—a kangaroo court interrogation before the Spaceport Police could get there. And if my answers had failed to satisfy them they would have wasted no time in turning my pockets inside out.

I’d been spared all that, thanks to that same blonde. And—I didn’t even know her name!

2

We’d been talking for twenty minutes and I still didn’t know her name. She wasn’t being secretive or coy or holding out on me because she didn’t trust me as much as I trusted her. I just hadn’t gotten around to asking her, because we were both still talking about what had happened at the bar and it was so closely tied in with what was happening in New York and London and Paris and every big city on Earth—and on Mars as well—that it dwarfed our puny selves—extra-special as the blonde’s puny self happened to be from the male point of view.

I didn’t know whether she was Helen or Barbara, Anne or Ruth or Tanya. I just knew that she was beautiful and that we were sipping Martinis and looking out through a wide picture window at New Chicago’s lakeshore parklands enveloped in a twilight glow.

The restaurant was called the Blue Mandarin and it conformed in all respects to the picture that name conjures up—a diaphanous blue, oriental-ornate eating establishment with nothing to offer its patrons that was new, original, exciting, unique.

But there it was and there it would remain—until Lake Michigan froze solid. For the moment its artificial decor wasn’t important to either of us. Only the Big Lie and what it was doing to the Martian Colonization Project.

“My father was one of the first,” she said. “Do you know what it means, to stand in an empty, desolate waste, forty million miles from home, and realize you’re one of the chosen few—that a city will some day grow from the seeds you’ve planted and nourished with your life blood?”

“I think I do,” I said. “I hope I do.”

“He died,” she said, “when he was thirty years old, from a Martian virus they hadn’t discovered how to combat until two-thirds of the first two thousand colonists succumbed to it.”

“Why didn’t he take you with him?” I asked. “There were no passenger restrictions then. The Colonization Board had great difficulty in finding enough volunteers.”

“My mother refused to go,” she said. “I’m afraid…most women are more conservative than men. Father died alone, and five years later Mother married a man who didn’t want to be one of the first ten thousand—or the first sixty thousand. He had no problem. He wasn’t like the men we saw tonight.”

“If every man and woman on Earth wanted to go to Mars,” I said, “the Colonization Board would have no problem. A demand on so colossal a scale could not be met—in a century and a half. And laws would be passed to prevent the scheming that’s taking place everywhere, the hatred and the violence. The Big Lie would not be believed.”

“I know,” she said. “It’s when only twenty thousand can go and five million want to go that you have a problem. A little hope filters through, and the five million become envious and enraged.”

I looked at her. I was feeling the glow now, the warmth creeping through the cells of my brain, the recklessness that alcohol can generate in a man with a worry that looms as big as the Big Lie, to the part of himself that isn’t dedicated to combating the Lie. The ego-centered, demandingly human part, the woman-needing part, the old Adam that’s in all of us.

And suddenly I found myself thinking of Paris in the Spring, and the sparkling Burgundies of France and vineyards in the dawn and what it had meant to have a woman always at my side—or almost always—and in my bed as well.

New York, flag-draped for Autumn, London in a swirling fog, the old houses, the dreaming spires, anywhere on the round green Earth where there was laughter and music and a woman to share it with.…

All that had been mine for ten years. But now, like a fool, I wanted Mars as well. Mars was in my blood and I could no longer rest content with what I had.

Take it with me to Mars? And why not? It was no problem…when you didn’t have my problem. A quite simple problem, really. The woman I’d married wouldn’t go with me to Mars.

She seemed to sense that I was having some kind of inward struggle, and was feeling a decided glow at the same time, for she reached out suddenly and took firm hold of my hand.

“Something’s troubling you,” she said. “Why don’t you tell me about it while you’re feeling mellow. Considering the kind of world we’re living in, mellow is the best way to feel. It wears off quickly enough and next day you pay for it. But while it lasts, I believe in making the most of it. Don’t you?”

Should I tell her, dared I? I might have to pay for it with a vengeance, for she’d probably think me quite mad. And I still had some old-fashioned ideas about loyalty and happened to be in love with my wife.

It was crazy, it made no sense, but that’s the way it was.

I looked at the woman sitting opposite me and wondered how a man could be in love with one woman and find another so attractive that he’d been on the verge of coming right out and asking her if she’d go with him to Mars.

I looked at her blonde hair piled up high, and her pale beautiful face and wondered how it would be if I hadn’t been married to Joan at all.

I shut my eyes for a moment, thinking back, remembering the quarrel I’d had with my wife that morning, the quarrel I’d tried my best to forget over four straight whiskies at the spaceport bar late in the afternoon.

It was almost as if it was taking place again, right there at the table, with another woman sitting opposite me who could not hear Joan’s angry voice at all.

“I mean every word I’m saying, Ralph Graham. You either tell them you’re staying right here in New Chicago or I’m divorcing you. I won’t go to Mars with you—tomorrow or next year or five years from now. Is that plain?”

It was plain enough. To cushion the shock of it, and ease the pain a little I stared into the fireplace, seeing for an instant in the high-leaping flames a red desert landscape and a city that towered to the brittle stars…white, resplendent, swimming in a light that never was on sea or land.

All right, the first Earth colony on Mars wasn’t that kind of a city. It was rugged and sprawling and rowdy. It was filled with tumult and shouting, its prefabricated metal dwellings scoured and pitted by the harsh desert winds. But I liked it better that way.

I wanted to walk its crooked streets, to rejoice with its builders and creators, to be one of the first sixty thousand. With my mind and heart and blood and guts I wanted to be there before the cautious, solemn, over-serious people ruined it for the kind of man I was.

“I mean it, Ralph,” Joan said. “If you go—you’ll go alone. All of my friends are here, all of my roots. I won’t tear myself up by the roots even for you. Much as I love you, I just won’t.”

It was five in the morning, and we’d been arguing half the night. In two more hours daylight would come flooding into the apartment again, and I’d probably have the worst talk-marathon hangover of my life.

I suddenly decided to go out into the cool dawn without saying another word to her, slamming the door after me to make sure she’d realize just how angry she’d made me.

I wouldn’t even switch on the five A.M. news telecast or stop to take in the cat on my way out. Women and cats had a great deal in common, I told myself bitterly. They were arbitrary and stubborn and mysteriously intent on having their own way and keeping you guessing as to their real motives.

By heaven…if I had to go alone to Mars I’d go.

So I’d really hung one on, had gone out and made a round of the lakeside bars. All morning until noon and then I’d sobered up over coffee and a sandwich and started out again early in the afternoon. It just goes to show what a quarrel like that can do to a man’s nerves and peace of mind and all of his plans for the future, for I’m not even a moderately heavy drinker.

* * * *

Early morning bar traveling is barbarous, a lunatic-fringe pastime, and it was the first time in my life I’d resorted to it. But resort to it I did, and as the day wore on I gravitated from the lakeside taverns toward the spaceport in slow stages, and twice in five hours reached the stage where I couldn’t have passed the straight-line test. If I hadn’t sobered up a little at noon I’d have reached the big, dangerous bar as high as a man can get without falling flat on his face.

The Colonization Board hadn’t even tried to stop what goes on there around the clock, because there are explosive tensions and hard to uncover areas of criminality in a city as big as New Chicago it’s wise to provide a safety valve for—when Mars fever is running so high practically all of us are living in the shadow of a totally unpredictable kind of violence.

If anyone had asked me toward the middle of the afternoon what was drawing me, despite all of my better instincts, in the direction of death and violence I’d have come right out and told him.

I had Mars fever too. I hated the Big Lie and all of its ramifications, knew that every charge that was being hurled at the Colonization Board was untrue. But I knew exactly how all of the tormented, desperate men felt, the ones who fought the Big Lie and still had the fever and needed to be cradled in strangeness and vastness—needed space and a new frontier to keep from feeling strapped down, walled in, prisoners in a completely new kind of torture chamber.

The restlessness was growing because Man had lived too long in a closed-circuit that had almost destroyed him. The great barrier that was no longer there had brought the world to the brink of a universal holocaust, and just knowing that it had been shattered forever was enabling men and women everywhere to lead healthier lives, set their goals higher.

There was nothing wrong with that. Only—not one man or woman in fifty thousand would see with their own eyes the rust-red plains of Mars, and the play of light and shadow on a world covered over much of its surface with wide zones of abundant vegetation. Not one in fifty thousand would have a new world to rejoice in, after the long journey through interplanetary space. A world laden with springtime scents, in the wake of the crash and thunder of the polar ice caps dissolving.

Or possibly snow piled high on a sleeping landscape, with a thaw just starting, and the prints of small furry creatures on the white blanket of snow, for the first colonists had taken animals with them.

It would take another thirty years for newer, swifter rockets to be built and the supply problem to be brought under control and the colony to outgrow its birth pangs and its tumultuous adolescence and become a white and towering city, as huge as New Chicago.

And there were some who could not wait, for whom waiting was destructive to body and mind, a kind of living death too terrible to be sanely endured.

The fingers of the woman sitting opposite me were becoming restive, tightening a little on my hand. It seemed incredible to me that I could have gone off on that kind of thinking-back tangent when I was so close to paradise.

For paradise was there, seated directly across the table from me, in that crazy twilight hour, if I’d had the courage to seize it boldly—and if I hadn’t been still in love with Joan.

I could still make a stab at finding out for sure, I told myself, if I brushed aside all obstacles, if I refused to let my mind dwell on how I’d feel if something happened to Joan and I lost her forever. How could she have been so stubborn and foolish, when she was sophisticated enough to know that no man is insulated against temptation when he is lonely and despairing and paradise can be his for the taking, if he can kill just one part of himself and let the rest survive.

“What is it?” she asked. “You haven’t said a word for five minutes. I’m a good listener, you know. I always have been—perhaps too good a listener.”

It was the moment of truth, when I had to decide. Mars—and a woman too. Mars—and the big, important job, and the clatter and bright wonder of tremendous machines, with swiftly moving parts, whirring, blurring, dust and the stars of morning, and a woman like that in my arms.

I had to decide.

“What is it?” she asked. “Can’t you tell me?”

“Someday I’ll tell you,” I said. “But not now. I’ve a feeling we’ll meet again. Where and how and when I don’t know, because by this time tomorrow I’ll be on my way to Mars.”

A pained look came into her eyes and she quickly released my hand.

“But we’ve just started to get acquainted,” she protested. “You know nothing about me—or hardly anything. I thought—”

“It might be best not to know,” I said, and I think she must have realized then just how it was, must have read the truth in my eyes, for a faint flush suffused her face and she said quickly: “All right. If that’s the way it must be.”

I nodded and beckoned to the waiter, hoping she wouldn’t suspect how vulnerable I still was, how dangerously easy it would have been for me to alter my decision.

Ten minutes later I was alone again, with Lake Michigan glimmering at my back, and only the stars for company. And I still didn’t know her name.

3

It happened so suddenly it would have taken me completely by surprise, if the alarm bell hadn’t started ringing again in some shadowy corner of my mind. It wasn’t clamorous this time, but it was loud enough to make me straighten in alarm, with every nerve alert.

I was standing by a high wall of foliage, close to the lakeside and had just started to light a cigarette. All at once, directly overhead, there was a rustling sound that was hard to mistake, for I’d heard it many times before, and it had a peculiar quality which set it apart from all other sounds.

Something was moving through the shadows above me, rustling dry leaves, slithering down toward me with a dull, mechanical buzzing.

The buzzing stopped abruptly and there was a flash of brightness, a long-drawn whining sound. I braced myself, letting my arms swing loosely at my side.

With startling swiftness something long, glistening and snakelike descended upon me and wrapped itself around my right leg just above the knee. Before I could shake it loose it contracted into a tight knot and the whining turned into a shrill scream, prolonged, ghastly. It was quite unlike the scream of an animal. There was something metallic, rasping about it, as if more than animal ferocity was giving voice to its pent-up rage in a shrill mechanical monotone.

The constriction increased and an agonizing stab of pain lanced up my thigh. I raised my right arm and brought the edge of my hand down with an abrupt, chopping motion. I chopped downward three times, not at random, but with a calculated, deadly precision, for I knew that a misdirected blow could have cost me my life.

I was in danger only for an instant, and not a very long instant at that. The damage I’d done to it caused it to release its grip on my leg, shudder convulsively and drop to the ground.

Damaged where it was most vulnerable, it writhed along the ground with groping, disjointed movements of its entire body. Tiny fragments of shattered crystal glistened in its wake, and two long wires dangled from its cone-shaped head.

Its segmented body-case glowed with a blood-red sheen as it writhed across a flat gray stone on the edge of the lakeshore embankment, and reared up for an instant like an enormous, sightlessly groping worm. Then, abruptly, all the animation went out of it, and it flattened out and lay still. Both of the optical disks which had enabled it to move swiftly through the darkness had been smashed. I was no longer in any danger and it was very pleasant just to know that.

Very pleasant indeed.

An attempt had been made on my life. There could be no blinking the fact. That little mechanical horror, with its complex interior mechanisms, had been set upon me from a distance with all of its electronic circuits clicking by remote control.

From just how great a distance I had no way of knowing. But I didn’t think he’d be staying around, near enough for me to get my hands on him. Killers who made use of such gadgets usually kept their distance, and were very cautious.

But at least I knew now that I had a dangerous enemy, someone who wanted me dead. And there was nothing pleasant about that.

The human mind is a very strange instrument and it’s hard to predict just how profoundly you’ll be upset by an occurrence that’s difficult to dismiss with a shrug.

You can either turn morbid and brood about it, or rise superior to it and pigeon-hole it, at least for the moment. By a kind of miracle I was able to pigeon-hole it, to keep it from standing in the way of what I’d made up my mind to do before I’d heard the rustling in the foliage directly overhead.

I walked back and forth for a moment, resting most of my weight on my right leg, to make sure I could keep using it without limping and when I was satisfied a long walk wouldn’t be in the least painful I left the embankment with a feeling of relief and took the first turn on my left. I was pretty sure it would take me no more than twenty minutes to get back to the spaceport.

I knew that what I’d made up my mind to do wasn’t going to be easy. I had to find out exactly how important a job the Colonization Board had mapped out for me on Mars. She’d called me “Mr. Important Man” because—you don’t get a clearance stamped the way mine was unless there’s a big undertaking in store for you which has to be handled in just the right way. The walk gave me a chance to think about it. My leg didn’t trouble me at all and I was very grateful for that.… I stood for a moment just outside the spaceport’s railed-off, electronically-protected launching platforms, staring up at the three-hundred-foot passenger rockets gleaming with a dull metallic luster in the moonlight, their nose-cones pointing skyward.

The New Chicago Spaceport has and always will attract sightseers, because there’s no other rocket launching site on Earth that can compare with it. It’s not only the largest and the most elaborately equipped. It was built to last. Fifty years from now, in 2070, say, it was a safe bet the big Mars rockets would be taking off at four-hour intervals night and day. Now they took off only twice a month and there were fifty million people in the United States alone who would have given up comfort, leisure, a well-paying job and every joy they’d ever experienced or could hope to experience on Earth to be on one of those big sky ships.

As far back as I can remember I’d hated to force a showdown with people who trusted me and believed in me. And that went double for the Martian Colonization Board, whose members were doing everything possible to keep me informed. Secrecy sometimes has to be imposed, and if you try to crack an information clamp-down prematurely you deserve to be slapped down.

But now I had no choice. I had to find out if my trip could be postponed, if I could wait one more week—a month, even—to get Joan to see things my way. And that meant I had to find out just how big a job they had lined up for me.

I had no trouble getting in to see him. There was a guard at the main entrance of the Administration Building, and when I identified myself and the massive, double-doors swung inward I had to go through it a second time, and six more times in all before I reached his private office on the twentieth floor. But you couldn’t call it trouble, because all I had to do was take out my wallet and display the pale blue card that was only an incitement to violence in certain quarters.

In that massive, almost half-mile-long building, on every floor, there were guards who knew me and guards who had never set eyes on me before. But what that card stood for was treated with respect.

I’d known that building to hum with activity, to come to life with a roar. But now only one floor blazed with light and the rest of the building was as silent as a mausoleum.

It happens sometimes and when it does everyone is grateful—including the man I’d come to visit.

His private office was at the end of a long corridor in Section C 10 Y, and I knew I’d find him there, because a small circle of cold light had been glowing above the office listing board on the main floor. There was a name plate above the numbered listings—BROWN. His name wasn’t Brown, of course. Or Smith, or Jones. The “Brown” was just a safety precaution—the sign and seal of immense power being modest in a genuine way and for expediency’s sake as well.

No man without the kind of card I carried had ever gotten as far as that office listing board and I doubt if the most ingenious assassin would have cared to try. But it was just as well to be on the completely safe side.

A saluting guard stepped back and what was perhaps the narrowest, least impressive door in the entire building opened and closed and I found myself in his presence.

Unless you’re a Gobi desert dweller or live in the precise middle of the Sahara you’ve seen the blue-eyed, mild-mannered little man who was Jonathan Trilling on a hundred lighted screens. In all respects but one he is the kind of man most people would go right past on the street without a second glance.

The thing that made him really not like that at all was something you couldn’t pin down and analyze. If you tried, you’d get nowhere. But it was there, all right, an emanation you couldn’t mistake that stamped him for what he was, radiating out from him.

Equate immense simplicity with immense power and you might come up with a part of the answer. But not all of it.

The office was stripped of all non-essentials; a hermit’s cell couldn’t have been barer. And it seemed to please him when my eyes swept over the almost bare desk, with just an inkwell and a single sheet of paper on it, before coming to rest on his face.

I’m pretty sure he interpreted it as an indication that I was trying to catch him up on something he took pride in, and he admired me for it, and greeted me with a chuckle.

“Well, Ralph!” he said. “I didn’t expect to see you here tonight. I thought you’d be home wearing Joan’s patience ragged with the kind of last-minute preparations women never seem to understand. They like to think they never forget anything. But they do. They’re worse that way than we are, but just try getting them to admit it.”

There was only one chair in the office and he was occupying it. I hardly expected him to get up and wave me toward it, but that’s precisely what he did.

“Sit down, Ralph,” he said. “I sit too much. We all do here, I guess. Can’t be helped, but it doesn’t give a man of fifty-five much chance to get the exercise he ought to have, if he’s going to keep his weight down.”

“No—don’t get up for me, sir!” I said, then realized I was being unnecessarily formal.

The chair was empty and he expected me to take it. And I could see that he didn’t like the “sir.” He never had.

“Sit down, sit down. What is it, Ralph? Something worrying you? You’ll have plenty of time for that when you get to Mars. Why start now?”

I decided to come right out with it. I favored bluntness as much as he did, and there was nothing to be gained by talking around what I’d have to ask him before I left.

“There’s something I’d like to know,” I said. “Is the major part of my assignment still under wraps, or could you tell me more about it—even if you’d prefer not to?”

He looked at me steadily for a moment, his lips tightening a little. “Well—I certainly haven’t kept it a complete secret, Ralph. You’ll get full instructions in code later on. There’s naturally a reason for that. I shouldn’t have to go into it, because we’ve discussed it at great length right here in this office.”

“I realize that,” I said. “But could you see your way clear to telling me much more than you have, if I can convince you that it would help me solve a problem I can’t solve otherwise.”

His eyebrows went up a little at that. “What kind of problem, Ralph?”

“It’s as old as the hills,” I said. “The really ancient kind with fossils embedded in them. It goes right back to the Old Stone Age, and maybe a lot earlier. Joan doesn’t want to go to Mars. She’s very stubborn, very determined about it. If I can’t make her change her mind I’ll have to go alone. And I guess I don’t have to tell you what that would do to me. If I just had a little more time, another week or two—”

“So that’s it,” he said. “You want me to tell you that your assignment can be put off, that you’re not really needed on Mars. We’re just sending you there because we like to do whimsical things occasionally, to break the God-awful monotony of thinking about the problems the project is confronted with in a serious way.”

I was startled, because I’d never known him to indulge in deliberate irony before. He had all the intellectual equipment for it, but his mind just didn’t work that way.

Then I suddenly realized he was going to tell me everything I wanted to know and had just used that approach to make me a little angry and keep me alert and analytical, so that I wouldn’t underestimate the seriousness of what he was about to say.

“All right, Ralph,” he said. “I’ll risk angering a third of the Board. I’m going to tell you exactly why the Mars Colony is in trouble, and just how tremendous your task will be. You’ll be in the middle, Ralph, in the biggest clash of interests a new and growing society has ever known.

“A clash of interests can destroy any society, if they’re violent enough and have powerful enough backing and the population is divided in its loyalties and lacks firm and courageous leadership.

“That’s especially true if the society is on a pioneering level, with serious scarcities developing everywhere and with every man, to some extent at least, in fierce competition with his neighbors, all apart from the massive power monopolies that are in even fiercer competition among themselves.

“Don’t you see, Ralph, don’t you realize what that kind of cross-purpose distribution of power in a new and pioneering society can mean? When you have a three or four-way conflict, when everyone is bidding for what you’ve got and can’t afford to sell, or what you haven’t got but would like to sell, or what you can’t sell for what you’d like to get?”

He smiled suddenly, for the barest instant, and then the seriously concerned look which the smile had replaced came back into his eyes. “I didn’t intend that to sound facetious. It probably did, because it has a slightly humorous side to it, like most major tragedies. I’m just giving you the broad outlines now, the general situation. Frustration, bitterness, thousands of colonists who can be swayed one way or the other by corrupt pressures, self-interest, greedy power monopolies.”

“But there’s a more specific situation you have in mind, is that it?” I asked. “Everything you’ve just said is common knowledge.”

Trilling nodded. “Yes—but the general situation has to be underscored. It is the crucial factor in everything that is taking place on Mars. In a more stable, and highly developed society the raw power conflict of the two major power monopolies would not take so destructive a form.”

“Two?” I said. “I was under the impression—”

He waved my objection aside. “Oh, there are a dozen power combines. But only the two giants—Wendel Atomics and Endicott Fuel—have fought each other to a standstill and threaten the peace, and stability of the entire colony. I’m putting it too mildly. There’s an explosive potential in that conflict that could destroy the colony overnight.”

He tightened his lips and took a turn up and down the office, then came back to where I was sitting and gripped me by the shoulder. “Ralph, listen. This is vital. I’ll try to sum it up as briefly as possible. You know what it cost to set up atomic generators, turbines, transmission lines, and keep utilities no city can do without in operation right here in New Chicago, in just one small section of the city? How much more do you think it costs to do the same thing on Mars? The transportation of materials alone—Have you any idea how much the total expenditures come to?”

“I guess so,” I said. “I don’t like to think about it.”

“Who does? But we had to think about it. We had to give Wendel Atomics a thirty-year monopoly. No other power combine had sufficient monetary resources to undertake it. And we had to give Endicott Fuel the same kind of monopoly. They transport both atomic and liquid fuels at a cost that would turn your hair white.”

“And now you say they’re locked in a power conflict. But why? I should think Wendel Atomics would purchase all the fuel it needs directly from Endicott. And Endicott would—”

I paused, troubled.

“What would Endicott do, Ralph? It has no use for atomic generators. It isn’t geared to install them, even if it could somehow absorb the terrific expense of transporting them. And that, of course, would be impossible. No combine is wealthy enough to undertake that kind of two-pronged enterprise.”

“But it wouldn’t have to be a two-way exchange of commodities,” I said. “Not if Wendel continued to buy all of its fuel from Endicott. It would, of course, have a tendency to dwarf Endicott, make it the lesser of the two monopolies.”

“It would do more than that, Ralph. It could bankrupt Endicott. You see, Wendel Atomics suddenly decided it was paying Endicott too much for the fuel it used, and cut the price it was paying in half. And Endicott could barely meet expenses.”

“Good Lord,” I said.

“Naturally Wendel Atomics couldn’t get along without fuel,” Trilling said. “And it couldn’t transport fuel for its own exclusive use from Earth. The two-pronged enterprise factor again. So Endicott struck back by refusing to sell its fuel to Wendel.”

“A complete stalemate, you mean?”

“Not quite, Ralph. If it were, one side or the other would have to give in eventually. Endicott seized on the bright idea of selling atomic and liquid fuel directly to the Colonists. A wildcat kind of madness. The colonists buy the fuel on margin and wait for the price to skyrocket. And every so often it does, because Wendel has to keep its generators operating. It won’t buy from Endicott, but it has no choice but to buy from the colonists.

“Do you realize what such wild and dangerous wildcat speculation can do to a new, rough-and-tumble, frontier kind of society, Ralph? The colonists don’t know whether they’re rich or poor from one day to the next. And with all their desperate needs, their frustrations, their scrambling after scarce goods and services, their fierce competitiveness, they are at each other’s throats half of the time.”

“I’m beginning to get the picture,” I said.

“It’s a very ugly picture, Ralph. Wendel Atomics buys its fuel sporadically, cheats, steals, connives, beating the price down artificially and then sending it skyrocketing again. It has its own private police force. Translate—brutal roughnecks who know exactly how to keep the colonists in line and frighten them into selling when the fuel market sags and spending every cent they possess to buy more fuel on speculation when the price soars.

“Endicott doesn’t care what happens to the colonists. It’s out to make Wendel Atomics come to terms and has methods of its own to keep the colonists inflamed and reckless. The whole situation has even taken on a political cast. There are pro-Wendel colonists, who work hand in glove with the Wendel police and colonists who would willingly lay down their lives in defense of noble, altruistic Endicott. It’s the right of everyone to buy fuel on speculation, isn’t it?”

“I see,” I said. “And my job will be to step right into the middle of all that, and try to bring order out of chaos.”

Trilling didn’t say anything for a moment. He just looked at me, but his gaze was not unsympathetic.

“There’s something I’d like to have you hear, Ralph,” he said, when the silence had lengthened between us and become almost minute-long. “We have a new, round-the-clock recording to replace the one we’ve been transmitting at intervals, night and day, for five years. I won’t even ask you how many times you’ve heard it, because you travel around a lot and must have memorized it word for word. But this one is better, I think. At least, it appeals to me more. A hundred million people will hear it, starting tomorrow. It will be on every tele-screen.”

He bent over his desk and removed a miniature tape-recorder from the upper right hand drawer. He set it down on the desk and clicked it on.

“Just one passage I’d like you to listen to, Ralph. Not the whole recording. This is it—”

The voice that came from the tape was a very good reading voice, one of the best I’d ever heard. The man was probably a poet. But the words themselves interested me more.

“…so bright with promise has Man’s future become that all of the old animosities, the old hates, will soon seem alien to us and strange. A new world is in the making. Who can deny it? The colonization of Mars has fulfilled the deepest instincts of Man’s nature, and provided scope for a growth that is as natural to him as breathing.

“The desire to know more, to explore the unknown, to reach out toward constantly expanding horizons can only be satisfied by boldly accepting what the advance of modern science has brought within our grasp. The colonization of Mars is a tribute to Man’s stubborn refusal to be easily discouraged or to let mechanical difficulties, no matter how formidable, stand in his way. A tribute as well to his constructive genius, his daring and breadth of vision.”

Trilling clicked the tape recorder off, returned it to his desk, and turned to face me again.

“That, Ralph, is the dream,” he said. “You and I know what the reality is like. But the millions who will listen to that recording do not. They still believe—and hope.”

I was silent for a moment, not quite sure how he’d take what I was going to say. I went over it in my mind, searching for just the right words. It took me a full minute to find them, but he didn’t grow impatient.

“I’m not sure the Board is wise in putting out that kind of propaganda. Or any kind of propaganda. After all, we’re not trying to sell Mars to anyone. We’re doing something that has to be done—you might almost say we’re just trying, in a very earnest way, to plug up a gap in the biggest dam that was ever built, to keep the flood waters from carrying us all to destruction.”

“You’re wrong, Ralph,” he said. “It isn’t just propaganda. A dream always has to go striding on ahead of reality. It may seem strange to you, but the reality does not frighten or discourage me. Mars is a new world and on a new world there has to be—not one, but many beginnings.”

He paused an instant, then added: “That’s why we’re sending you to Mars, Ralph. There will have to be another beginning. It won’t show too much on the surface. No matter how successful you are, for the colony will remain what it is basically—an experiment in survival. All of a new world’s energy will remain, and the turbulence and the hard-to-endure disappointments. But you can help the Colonists go back, and feel the way they did when the first passenger rocket settled down on the red desert sand forty million miles from Earth and the Space Age took on a new dimension.”

4

There was only one small window in Trilling’s office. But I could see that the sky outside was still bright with stars, and the glimmer of the ceiling lamp made the metal surface above us seem to fall away and dissolve into a much wider expanse of star-studded space.

The ceiling-mirrored image of the lamp itself looked like the Sun, blazing in noonday brightness directly overhead and out beyond were galaxies and super-galaxies strung like beads on a wire across the great curve of the universe.

It was just an illusion, of course. You could see the same thing in the light-mirroring depths of a glass of wine, if you stared hard enough. But for an instant it seemed to bring bigness, vastness right into the room with us.

I was conscious of the silence again, lengthening, hanging heavy between us, as if we’d each said too much, or possibly…not quite enough.

Then Trilling bent and removed something else from his desk. I couldn’t see what it was until he set it down directly in front of me, because it was much smaller than the midget tape recorder and his hand covered it.

A flat metal box, wafer-thin, doesn’t provide much scope for speculation, and I was pretty sure that the object inside was a tiny metal precision instrument or a watch or a medal even before he said: “This should make Joan change her mind, Ralph!” and snapped the box open.

The insignia caught and held the light, a two-inch silver hawk with its wings outspread. The white lining of the box made it stand out, as if it were flying through fleecy clouds high in the sky, and symboling in its flight far more than just the elevation of one man to the highest command post the Martian Colonization Board had the authority to bestow.

The significance of that finely-wrought, seldom-worn silver bird was not lost on me. In the maze of a hundred legends, a hundred witness-confirmed stories of triumph and disappointment, of heroic progress and tragic back-tracking, it had remained an important link between Earthside expectations and what was actually taking place on Mars.

Only one man could wear it at any one time, and only four men had worn it since the establishment of the colony. All four were dead now, their gravestones a white gleaming on the red desert sand a few miles north of the colony.

“Well, Ralph?” Trilling said.

I tried hard to maintain my composure, to say just the right thing, because I’d lived long enough to know there are depths beyond depths to some emotions that can’t be put into words. Attempt to talk the way you feel, and you’re sure to sound a little ridiculous. I was only certain of one thing. No man could wear that insignia and not feel, resting upon his shoulders, a responsibility so tremendous that whatever pride he might take in it would have to be tempered by humility—if he wanted to go on wearing it for long.

Trilling seemed aware of what was passing through my mind, for he made it easy for me. He simply smiled, snapped the box shut with a briskness that was almost casual, and handed it to me.

“You’ve got real massive military prestige now, Ralph,” he said. “Right at the moment the Board would be gravely concerned if you wore that insignia in public. But there’s nothing to prevent you from wearing it in the privacy of your own home. Later on the Board may decide you can accomplish more by coming right out and letting the colonists know there’s a lion in the streets who intends to do more than just roar. A safe, protective kind of lion—dangerous only to over-ambitious men with destructive ideas.”

I started to reply but he waved me to silence. “Hold on, Ralph—let me finish. You won’t be wearing that insignia in public straight off. But I hope you’ll have enough good sense to make the best possible use of it to overcome the first really big obstacle in your path.”

He nodded. “It will be a kind of blackmail, in a way—morally reprehensible. You’ll be taking advantage of something it isn’t in a woman’s nature to resist. But you have no choice. You’ve got to go to Mars and if you went alone you’d be about as useful to us as a celibate kangaroo, all packaged and ready to be sent on a journey to the taxidermist.”

He seemed to realize it wouldn’t have to be quite that drastic, for he grimaced wryly. “All right, all right. You could go out and find another woman and I probably could talk the Board into being the opposite of stuffy about it. But I happen to know what kind of man you are, and how you feel about Joan. I could be wrong, but I’m pretty sure she’s the only woman in the world for you.”

There was nothing I could say to that. I had the insignia in my inner breast pocket, and I knew that there were few obstacles it couldn’t blast away on Earth or on Mars, if I kept remembering what it symbolized with Joan at my side.

I went out into the cool night again, past that long tremendous building with just one of its floors ablaze, past the big sky ships looming like sentinel ghosts on their launching pads, past winking lights and speeding cars and pedestrians walking slowly and something inside of me made me feel I’d undergone a kind of sea change, and could face whatever the future might hold without grabbing for a life-line that didn’t exist.

It was a good way to feel. A man had to sink or swim without having a life-line thrown to him—if he hoped to live long enough to change things around in an important way on Mars. He had to keep his head and breast the raging currents with the sturdiest kind of overhand strokes, or be drawn down into the undertow and battered senseless against the rocks that lined the shoreline.

The change must have shown a little on the surface, in the set of my jaw or just the way I was walking, because no less than three pedestrians turned to stare at me as I went striding past them on my way to the New Chicago Underground.

I was almost at the northern entrance of the big, tree-lined square directly opposite the Administration Building when it hit me—the memory-recall, the swift emergence from its cubby-hole deep in my mind of the narrow brush I’d had with Death and hadn’t even discussed with Trilling.

It had been a mistake not to discuss it, because it concerned the Board as much as it did me. Someone who knew about the insignia—or had made a shrewd guess as to just how big a job was awaiting me on Mars—had wanted me dead. The attempt on my life took on a much larger, more crucial dimension when viewed in that light.

There were three hundred million people in the United States, and if I’d been just a private citizen, with no more than my own safety at stake, I could have lost myself in that immense ocean of humanity for a week or a month and gained a brief respite. There are plenty of ways you can protect yourself against a surprise attempt on your life, if you have the time to take safety precautions. When there’s a would-be assassin at large who is dead set on measuring you for a coffin you have to work the problem out carefully, with a minimum of risk.

It takes skill and psychological insight, but it can be done. You’ve just got to remember that an assassin is never quite normal. Even when a socio-political motivation is the governing passion of his life you’re one jump ahead of him the instant you’ve figured out exactly how his mind works.

In fact, one of those safety precautions could have been protecting me as I crossed the square, if I hadn’t let my stubborn pride stand in the way. Why hadn’t I asked Trilling to provide me with armed protection?

Two alert bodyguards, trailing me on the street and down into the Underground and standing watch outside my apartment all night long—and staying fifty paces behind me until the Mars’ rocket zero-count ended and the big sky ship took off with a roar…would have given the Board the kind of reassurance they had a right to expect.

I started to turn back, then changed my mind abruptly. I’d taken just as great a risk by walking from the lakeside to the skyport right after the attack, hadn’t I? And I’d be in the Underground in another three or four minutes, with people around me and—

All right. It was an out-of-focus rationalization and nothing more—an attempt to find an excuse for not turning back. But when I do something reckless for complicated reasons, when I’ve forged ahead despite my better judgment, I’m usually just impulsive enough to carry the folly-ball all the way across the goal line.

It was the thing I’d have to guard most against on Mars, that damnable twisted pride and impulsiveness, that taking of too much for granted when I started to do something I knew was unwise, but had an overpowering urge to carry out anyway.

Every weaving shadow beneath the double row of trees that towered on both sides of me could have cloaked a crouching figure adjusting another small mechanical killer to the deadliest possible angle of flight. But I had another reason for not wanting to go back. Trilling might fall in with the armed guard idea but I doubted it like hell. I could picture him saying instead: “Ralph, even an armed car can be blown up. You’re staying under lock and key all night…right here in the Administration Building.”

I could even picture him saying much the same thing to Joan, her image bright enough on his office tele-screen to be visible from where I’d be standing: “He’s not coming home tonight, Joan. We’re sending an armored car to pick you up in the morning. Wait, hold on—I’ll let you talk to him!”

And I could almost hear her replying: “Don’t bother to send the car. I’m not going with him. Please don’t think too harshly of me, please try to understand. I just can’t—”

I started down the long boulevard on the far side of the square, still walking rapidly and feeling suddenly confident I’d been justified in not turning back. I could see the entrance to the Underground glimmering in the darkness a hundred feet ahead of me and there were people all around me walking in both directions. I wasn’t even troubled by the feeling that everyone gets at times—that something terrible and unexpected can happen right in the midst of a crowd, if only because the presence of many people exposes you to a dangerously wide range of unpredictable human emotions.

For the barest instant, when I crossed the narrow strip of pavement directly in front of the kiosk, fear tugged at my nerves and I felt myself growing tense. But I became calm again the moment I looked around and saw that the only pedestrian within thirty feet of me was a hurrying girl with a portfolio under her arm. When she saw how intently I was staring at her she frowned and a look of annoyance came into her eyes.

Oh, for God’s sake, I told myself, get rid of this nagging uncertainty, and stop behaving like a fool. If he intended to try again tonight I’d know by now. He’s missed a dozen very good chances, so something must be making him super-cautious, if he hasn’t keeled over just from the strain of watching me refuse to die. Killing’s never easy, even for a professional. It must be a little like being cut open, watching your own blood pouring out of you, because all violence inflicts a two-way trauma…severe enough at times to make even a mad slayer fling down his gun before going on a rampage of indiscriminate slaughter.

There were arguments I could have used to wrap it up even tighter—such as the way he’d be trapped and blasted down almost instantly if he launched another attack on me so close to the spaceport’s three interlocking, hyper-sensitive security alert systems.

But I didn’t even pause to weigh them, because right up to that minute I’d done very well, and the fear which had come upon me had been as brief as an autumnal flurry of wind when you’re coming around a tall building at breakneck speed.

* * * *

I let the girl dart past me, taking my time, and in another five seconds was descending into the big, brightly lighted cavern that was New Chicago’s intercity pride.

As every school kid knows, the New Chicago Underground is six years old, and is the largest, smoothest-running transportation system in the world. It cost seven billion dollars to build and has almost as many tracks and suburban off-shoots as station guards.

It interlocks, spirals outward in a half dozen directions and circles back upon itself. In a way, it’s like the serpent you see in bas-reliefs dating back three thousand years, in Babylonian and Pre-Dynastic Egyptian tombs, for instance, or on totem poles in the Northwest…a serpent that’s continually swallowing its own tail. It’s the oldest archeological art-form on Earth and is supposed to symbolize Eternal Life.

But to some people at least the New Chicago Underground symbolizes something far more gloomy. If you’re not careful to board just the right train you can get lost in its tomblike, spiraling immensity and feel as helpless as a wandering ghost or an experimental laboratory animal caught up in a blind maze. You can be carried fifty miles in the wrong direction and look out through the windows of a train traveling at half the speed of sound, and see a country landscape or the wide sweep of Lake Michigan five minutes after you’ve settled down in a comfortable chair and become absorbed in the news of the day on micro-film.

You’ll stare out and the section of the city where your home is located just won’t be sweeping past. You’ll have to get off at the next station, perhaps twenty or thirty miles further on, ride back, and board another train. It’s seldom quite as frustrating as that, but only because most of the riders have been conditioned to keep their wits about them through a nightmare kind of trial-and-error apprenticeship.

You’ve got to stay alert until you’ve boarded a train with just the right combination of numerals on its destination plate. It isn’t hard to do, unless you’re carrying a tiny silver hawk in a wafer-thin case, and your destination may be changed without warning and with unbelievable infamy by someone capable of great evil who would much prefer not to have you board a train at all.

I could almost picture him weaving in and out between the platform crowds—faceless so far, but quite possibly glassy-eyed with little waltzing death-heads in the depth of his pupils. An unknown human cipher intent on my destruction, refusing to be discouraged by the failure of a small mechanical killer to do the job for him.

If I’d had a strong reason to believe I actually was being followed, if he’d come right out into the open and I could have caught a glimpse of him, however brief, I’d have felt a subconscious relief that would have kept me on guard and confident. It would have given me an edge that not even the fact that I had no gun could have taken away from me.

It’s the unknown and unpredictable that’s unnerving, the realization that invisible eyes may be scrutinizing you from a distance and the brain behind them deciding that it would be a great mistake to let a failure of nerve or concern for the consequences interfere with what had to be done.

He wouldn’t be wanting me to wear that insignia ever—on Earth or on Mars—and just knowing that made me almost miss my train as it came rushing toward me.

The train was so crowded I had to stand, but I had no complaint on that score. In a seat, with people jamming the aisle in front of me, I’d have been wedged in even more securely. In a standing position I could edge forward and back and keep an eye on the passengers who were holding fast to the horizontal support rail on both sides of me.

5

There were twenty-five or thirty passengers wedged into the middle section of the train, all standing in slightly cramped postures and most of them unsmiling. I knew exactly how they felt. Not being able to get a seat in an off-hour in the evening can be irritating. But right at the moment there was no room in my mind for annoyance. A slow, hard-to-pin-down uneasiness was creeping over me again, as if a pendulum were swinging back and forth somewhere close to me, ticking out a warning in rhythm—and I couldn’t shut out the sound of it.

Just my over-strained nerves, of course. How could it have been anything else? I turned and looked at the man standing next to me. He was middle-aged, conservatively dressed, and had a square-jawed, rather handsome face, with a dusting of gray at his temples.

He was frowning slightly and his expression didn’t change when I broke the rule of silence which was customarily observed in the Underground.

“No reason for all the seats to be gone at this hour,” I said.

The crazy kind of over-exuberance mixed with peevishness that makes some people say things like that to total strangers a dozen times a day had always seemed inexcusable to me. But when you’re under tension you sometimes break all the habits of rational behavior you’ve imposed on yourself in small matters.

My excuse was that I simply wanted to test the firmness and steadiness of my own voice, to make sure that, deep down, I wasn’t nearly as apprehensive as I was beginning to feel.

“Yes, I know,” the gray-templed man agreed. “It burns me up a little too. But I guess it just can’t be helped at times. Operating an Underground this size must be an awful train-scheduling headache.”

“Headache or not,” I said. “There’s no excuse for it.”

He smiled abruptly, exposing large, white teeth and I noticed that there was something almost birdlike in the way his eyes lighted up. Small, black, very bright eyes they were, under short-lashed lids, and quite suddenly he made me think of a magpie alighting on a limb, taking off and alighting again, hardly able to restrain an impulse to chatter.

“What it boils down to,” he said, “is the old quarrel between a pedestrian and a man in a car. Neither can understand or sympathize with the other’s point of view. Fifteen million people ride this Underground every day and to them it’s a poor slob’s service at best. That’s because they feel themselves to be the victims, at the receiving end. But you’ve got to remember that safety precautions pose a problem. Avoiding accidents comes first and the New Chicago Transportation System, considering its colossal size, does pretty well in that respect.”

“People have been killed,” I said, and could have bitten my tongue out. Why let him even suspect that I was thinking about something that wasn’t tied in with his argument at all, why give him the slightest hint? The Underground’s accident record was good and couldn’t have justified such cynicism on my part. And just suppose he wasn’t the garrulous, middle-aged business man he appeared to be—

A very sinister game can start in just that way, with everything favoring the alerted party until he lets the other know that he’s on his guard and is having uneasy thoughts. That’s where the danger lies, in a subconscious betrayal, a slip of the tongue that will precipitate violence faster than it would ordinarily occur.

If a killer feels that he must move swiftly, before suspicion can become a certainty, the odds shift in his favor. He has the advantage of surprise. He becomes alerted too, and necessity acts as a goad—a kind of trigger-mechanism. He’ll act more quickly and decisively, without the careful planning that may prompt him to talk too much and give himself away.

He’ll take risks that are dangerous and could destroy him, strike with witnesses present and all escape routes blocked. If he has to, he’ll strike even in a crowded Underground train with the next station minutes away. And that kind of audacity sometimes pays off.

I told myself that I was imagining things, jumping to a completely unwarranted conclusion. The conversation of the man next to me was exactly what you’d expect from a magpie. He was carefully sidestepping all realistic appraisals of the Underground’s shortcomings, trying his best to look at the problem from all sides, even if it meant being shallow and over-optimistic. He was the citizen with a smiling face, the rather likeable guy—why should one hold it against him?—who was trying his best to be fair to everybody, even if he had to burst a blood-vessel doing it.

Realizing all that made me feel less tense and part of the nightmare feeling I’d been experiencing went away. But not quite all of it and when the train passed into an unlighted tunnel and the aisle went dark apprehension began to mount in me again.

What if he was putting on an act, and wasn’t the kind of man he appeared to be at all? What does a killer look like? Certainly age had nothing to do with it. He can be young or old—eighteen or seventy-five.

His appearance, his clothes? There were wild-eyed killers with “psycho” stamped all over them, and dignified, soberly-dressed men who looked no different from your next door neighbor and had criminal records a yard long, including, in all likelihood, a murder or two the Law would have a difficult time proving.

I didn’t have to speculate about it. I knew, because I’d done more than my share of social research. There was nothing to prevent a man of distinction from becoming a killer, if he had a secret life that was ugly and devious and a powerful enough motive.

But now he was talking again, despite the darkness, and I was listening with my nerves on edge. I was completely in the dark as to why something about him had set the alarm bells ringing but I was sure I could hear them, very faint and distant this time, but clearly enough. It was funny. Sometimes it meant something and sometimes it didn’t. I could feel that danger was hovering right at my elbow and in the end discover I’d been completely mistaken.

I hoped I was mistaken this time, but I knew there was a possibility—remote, perhaps, but dangerous to ignore—that the man who had set the small mechanical killer in motion by the Lakeside had followed me from the Administration Building into the Underground and was standing by my side.

“You take one of the really big power combines,” he was saying. “Like, say, Wendel Atomics. It has its defenders and detractors, and I daresay there are quite a few people who would be happy to see its Board of Directors behind bars. I’m not defending the Wendel monopoly, understand. If I was a Martian colonist I might feel quite differently about it. But you’ve got to remember that when you give the go-ahead signal for a project that big you’re asking fifty or a hundred key executives to do the impossible—or pretty close to the impossible.”

“The impossible?” I said, trying to sound no more than mildly interested, because I didn’t want him to suspect what a jolt his mention of Wendel Atomics had given me.

“Oh, yes,” he went on. “That’s what it boils down to. Every one of those men will be as human as you or I. They’ll react in highly individual ways to every problem that comes up, every frustration, every serious interference with their private lives. You’ve got to remember that a man’s private life is the most important thing in the world—to him personally. Every one of those fifty or a hundred men will have health worries, money worries, love life worries, every kind of worry you can think of. And on Mars worries can pile up.”

“So I’ve heard,” I said.

“Well, that’s all. That sums it up. I’m simply citing Wendel as an example of what the New Chicago Transportation System is up against. I’d say, in general, that most of the directors are doing their best, when the Old Adam in them isn’t in the driver’s seat, to keep the trains running on schedule.”

He stopped talking abruptly. I didn’t think anything of it for a moment, for a loquacious man will often pause in the middle of a conversation to wonder what kind of dent he’s been making on the party who’s doing most of the listening. But when a full minute passed and the darkness held, and he didn’t say a word, when I couldn’t even hear him breathing, I began to grow uneasy.

Reach out and touch him? Well, why not? It was the simplest, quickest way of finding out whether he was still at my side and he could hardly be offended if my hand grazed his elbow in a jostling motion that would seem accidental.

It was very strange. I didn’t think he was the man I’d feared he might be any longer, because of what he’d said, because he had brought Wendel Atomics into the conversation. If he’d had designs on my life giving his hand away like that would have been the height of folly. It would have been like giving me cards and spades, and a detailed history of his activities for the past five years.

It didn’t take any gifted reasoning to figure that out and I didn’t pride myself on it. Even a child could have done it. What disturbed me and kept me from feeling relieved was something quite different. The alarm bells were still ringing. They were still ringing.

Louder now and with a dirgelike persistence, as if I was already dead and buried. And neither a child nor a grown man could have figured that one out.

That’s why I felt I had to reach out and touch him, had to start him talking again…had to be sure he was still there at my side.

He was there, all right. He was there in the most alarming possible way, as a dead weight lurching against me, then swaying and screaming as I tried to straighten him up, and stop the terrible downward drag of his sagging body.

He was sinking lower and lower, clutching at my knees now, refusing to take advantage of the support I was offering him. I strained and tugged, but it was no use. He was too heavy to raise and I could hear the breath wheezing out of his throat and there could be no mistaking the weight of horror that was making him twist and writhe as he sagged—the deadliness of whatever it was that had struck at him in the darkness without making a sound.

He screamed again. It was the kind of agonized protest which could only have come from the throat of a man who hardly knew what was happening to him…a man with his terror heightened and made more acute by the awful, groping-in-the-dark realization that he was experiencing a torment he was powerless to explain.

There had to be an answer but I didn’t know what it was, and when the scream died away and the tugging stopped all I could hear for an instant was the steady droning of the train. Then there was another violent movement close to me and a harsh intake of breath.

My hand shot out, grazed something smooth that whipped away from me and caught hold of a wrist that was much thinner than a man’s wrist had any right to be.

Much softer too, velvety soft, and it tugged and jerked in a frantic effort to free itself, holding tight to the knife that it would have taken all of a woman’s strength to plunge deep into my heart.

But she could have done it, whoever she was, for there was a wiry strength in her—a strength so great that I had to twist her wrist cruelly before her fingers relaxed and the knife dropped to the floor of the train.

She gasped in pain—or was it fury?—and exerted all of her strength again in a desperate effort to break my grip. And this time luck was on her side. No, call it what it was. Luck may have figured, but most of it was plain blundering stupidity on my part. I was pretty sure I knew what her first, misdirected blow with the knife had done to the man I’d been talking to, and the thought so sickened and unnerved me that my fingers relaxed a little when the knife went clattering, and she took advantage of that to break free.

The passengers were crowding me now, pushing, shoving in alarm, and I knew it would be easy enough for her to force her way between them, still exerting all of her strength and get far enough away to be just one of the thirty terrified people when the train roared out into the light again. They’d all look disheveled, on the verge of panic and I wouldn’t have a chance of identifying her.

How could I have identified her with any certainty, even if she’d been the only one with a guilty stare? I hadn’t the least idea what she looked like. I only knew that she wasn’t old, was all woman in her lithe softness, the opposite of an Amazon despite her strength. The femininity which had emanated from her—how instantly it can make itself felt, how instinctively overwhelming it can be!—had made me feel like a brute for an instant, even though I’d known it was her life or mine and I would have been quite mad to spare her.

There were men I could think of, the opposite of brutes, who would have knocked her unconscious with a blow to the head. To spare a determined killer is potentially suicidal, but I doubted if I could have done that.

I was still doubting it an instant later, when the train emerged from the unlighted tunnel and the bright glare of the Underground lamps flooded the aisle, bringing the man she’d stabbed by accident into clear view.

I was sure by now that she’d stabbed him by accident in a try for me, but that wasn’t going to help him at all. He had flopped over on his back and was lying sprawled out in the middle of the aisle, and his eyes stared up at me, sightless and glazed.

There was no blood either on or beside him, but that only meant that he’d been stabbed in the back and there hadn’t been time for blood from the wound to stain the edge of his clothes and trickle out from beneath him across the aisle.

His face had the pallor of death and his lips were drawn back over the large white teeth I’d noticed when he’d been talking to me. Drawn back in a stiff, unnatural grin and I didn’t have to bend down and listen for a heartbeat I knew I wouldn’t hear to be completely sure that the words he’d spoken to me would be the last he’d ever speak on Earth.

Just the way his head lolled, back and forth with the rhythmic throbbings of the train, would have clinched it for me. And I couldn’t have bent down, because the other passengers were all staring at him too now, and elbowing me away from him to get a closer look, torn between morbid curiosity and stark terror.

I was too shaken, too sick at heart, to resent the elbowing. There was anger in me too, cold, uncompromising and right at that moment I could no longer even think of her as a woman.

* * * *

It was past midnight when I got home and let myself into the apartment. I was more shaken than I would have cared to admit to anyone who didn’t know me as well as Trilling did, because casual acquaintances can do you an injustice and judge the extent of your control by the way you happen to be looking at the moment.

I was quite sure that I was looking very bad, and however severely I’d been shaken up by what had happened I still had a fair measure of control over my emotions.

I hadn’t stayed in the train or on the platform to assist in the investigation, but I didn’t feel guilty about it. Trilling could square all that with the authorities easily enough and he wouldn’t have wanted me to talk to the police and have to identify myself. I was sure of that. My evidence would be taken down and turned over to the proper authorities in good time. The rule for me—the only rule I had a right to consider—was no entanglements.

I shut and locked the front door and almost called out: “It’s me, darling!” as I usually do when I come home late, because when Joan is alone in the apartment and hears a door opening and closing she gets angry when I just walk in unannounced. It’s part woman-curiosity, part fear, I guess—the thought that it could be a prowler and why should she be kept in suspense while I’m hanging up my hat and coat?

But this time something prevented me from calling out. Possibly the quarrel we’d had was still rankling a little deep in my mind and I wasn’t quite sure how she’d take the “Darling.”

My stubborn pride again. Or possibly it was just the feeling I had that the apartment was quieter than usual, that when you’re keyed up and alert enough to hear a pin drop and you hear nothing—just a stillness that’s a little on the weird side—your anxiety becomes too great to be relieved by calling out a cheery greeting.

I felt somehow that it would be wiser, and set better with the way I felt, if I just hung up my coat and walked into the living room without saying a word.

So I walked into the living room without saying a word and she was sitting right in the middle of it, on a straight-back chair with all of her bags packed and standing on the floor by the window, and with all of my bags packed and standing cheek-by-jowl with hers, and the three trunks that were going with me to Mars all sealed up and double-locked, and she wasn’t angry or shaking her head or looking at the luggage with scorn.

There was pride in her lustrous brown eyes and the adorable tilt of her chin, and a warmth and a tenderness, and she was smiling at me and nodding.

“Oh, darling,” she said. “Darling…darling…come here. Did you think I’d ever let you go to Mars without me? It was just talk—just stubborn, wild, crazy talk and it didn’t mean a thing.”

If you marry a woman like Joan and ever have a moment of doubt…well, it means you ought to have your head examined. But you’re twice as far removed from sanity if you throw away the check. For you can always be sure it will be redeemed eventually, in full measure and brimming over.

I didn’t even have to put on my uniform and attach the small silver hawk to it.

6

We were not the only passengers in the eight-cabined forward section of the big sky ship which had been assigned to us. But it had taken us almost a week to get acquainted. To get really acquainted, that is, so that we could relax and feel at ease and really enjoy one another’s company.

We were sitting in lounge chairs on the long promenade deck that ran parallel with all eight of the cabins, staring out through translucent crystal at a wide waste of stars.

Sitting in the first chair was a tall, sturdily built man of thirty-eight, with keen blue eyes and a dusting of gray at his temples. His name was Clifton Maddox and he was an electronic engineer. He had stories on tap that could turn your hair white, because he had been to Mars and back eight times.

Seated next to him, with her hand resting lightly on his arm, was a woman in her early twenties, with honey-blonde hair and eyes that held unfathomable glints and an enigmatical ingenuousness that could keep a man guessing in an exciting way. Her name was Helen Melton and she had eyes only for the man at her side. She had managed to make of the trip a continuous honeymoon, despite a few lovers’ quarrels and the stern exactions which her work as a medical laboratory technician had imposed on her.

I mention these two because they were fairly typical of the group as a whole. They were all unusual individuals, the kind of people you take a liking to straight off, when you meet them casually at a party and exchange a few words with them that you keep remembering for days.

Joan and I sat in the last two chairs on the promenade deck, a little apart from the others. Joan was deep in a book and a little weary of talking and I…was thinking about the robots.

The robots were a story in themselves—a story that could bear a great deal of re-telling. If right at that moment I’d had a son—a bright and eager lad of six or eight—I’d have set him on my knee and talked about the robots.

The five hundred passengers in the big sky ship were not alone in the long journey through interplanetary space. In the last years of the twentieth century, I’d have taken pains to make very clear to him, and in the early years of the twenty-first, a great new science had grown from an infant into a giant.

The science of cybernetics, of giant computers that could do much of Man’s thinking for him on a specialized technological level, had transformed the face of the Earth and was continuing to transform it at a steadily accelerating pace.

The rocket’s four giant computers were of the newest and most efficient type—humanoid in aspect, with conical heads, massive metal body-boxes, and three-jointed metal limbs which had all of Man’s flexible adaptability in the carrying out of complex and difficult tasks.

Robotlike and immense, they towered in the chart room with their six-digited metal hands on their metal knees, their electronic circuits clicking, their tiers of memory banks in constant motion, but otherwise outwardly indifferent to the human activity that was taking place around them.

Four metal giants in a metal rocket, functioning cooperatively with Man in the gulfs between the planets, might have made an imaginative fiction writer of an earlier age catch his breath and glory in the fulfillment of a prophecy. An H. G. Wells perhaps, or an Olaf Stapledon. But the reality was an even greater tribute to the human mind’s inventive brilliance than the Utopian dream had been.

The four giant computers were capable of solving problems too technical for the human mind to master without assistance, usually with astounding swiftness and always with the more-than-human accuracy of thinking machines whose prime function was to correlate without error the data supplied to them on punched metallic tapes, and to perform intricate mechanical tasks based upon that data.

The robots were tremendous, by any yardstick you might care to apply, and if I’d had a son—

I stopped thinking about the robots abruptly and sat very still, listening. A sound I’d heard a moment before had come again, much louder this time—a chill, unearthly screeching.

The chart room was just outside the eight-cabin section and I could hear the sound clearly. My nerves again, my over-stimulated imagination?

In space strange and unusual sounds are as common as pips on a radar screen. It was queer how quickly you got used to them. You had to walk around with your ears plugged up, in a sense, but the plugs didn’t have to be inserted. They were just natural growths inside your ears—invisible and without substance, but plugs notwithstanding. They produced a kind of psycho-somatic deafness which didn’t otherwise interfere with your hearing.

Just the very unusual sounds, the totally inexplicable raspings, dronings, creakings—usually of short duration—were blotted out.

You didn’t hear them unless something deep in your mind whispered: “This one is different. This is an emergency. Take heed!”

The screeching was very different. It was like nothing I’d ever heard before, on Earth or in space.

The others must have heard it too, for it had been too loud, the second time, to be ignored. But apparently that strange acceptance of strange noises in space which goes with the kind of deafness I’ve mentioned had only been shattered for me. The six men and women in the lounge chairs had looked a little startled for a moment and exchanged puzzled glances. Which meant, of course, that they had heard it despite the mental earplugs in some inner recess of their minds. But that didn’t prevent them from shrugging it off and resuming their conversation.

Joan also looked a trifle uneasy. She stopped reading just long enough to raise her eyes and frown, then became absorbed in the book again.

I got up quietly and pressed her wrist. “See you,” I said.

She shut the book abruptly and straightened in her chair. “Where are you going, Ralph?”

“Just stay right where you are, kitten,” I said. “I’ll be back in a moment.”

“That screeching noise,” she said. “I was wondering about it, Ralph. I guess you’d better see what’s causing it.”

So she’d been disturbed by it too, and ignoring it had taken a deliberate effort of will which I hadn’t realized she was exerting. It made me happy in an odd inner way, because it proved again what I’d always known…that we were very close and there were currents of understanding which flowed back and forth between us and I had a wife I could be proud of.

“It’s probably nothing,” I said, not wanting to alarm her. “But I might as well take a look. It seems to be coming from the chart room.”

“All right,” she said and squeezed my hand.

I had to open and shut two sliding panels and pass along a blank-walled passageway to get to the chart room. To my surprise the door was standing open. It’s usually kept locked, because there’s no section of the sky ship where a man who didn’t want anyone to suspect that he harbored within himself the most dangerous kind of destructive impulses could do more damage.

The shattering of a photo-electric eye or the ripping out of a single live connection in just one of the four cybernetic robots could have wrecked the rocket, and sent it spiraling down through the space gulfs in flaming ruin, depending on just how vital to the robot’s functioning the shattered part happened to be.

There was a security alert system which would have to be disconnected first, but anyone resourceful enough to get inside the chart room at all, without identification-disk proof that he had a right to be there, would have known precisely how to take care of the preliminary obstacles.

I didn’t waste any time in getting to that wide-open door, for my mind was racing on ahead of me like the most alerted kind of alarm system, its jaggling warning me that every second counted and that what I dreaded most might very well be true.

What I actually saw, when I reached the doorway and stood there looking in, took me completely by surprise. It wasn’t the way I’d pictured it at all. But it was just as unnerving, just as much of a threat to the safety of the ship and it startled me so I must have looked almost comic, standing there idiot-still. But there was nothing comic about what I saw.

The woman I’d almost asked to go to Mars with me was staring straight at me, her hair still piled up high, a look of terrified appeal in her eyes. She wasn’t alone. She was struggling furiously with a crewman I’d talked to a few times and neither liked nor disliked—a heavyset man with high cheekbones and pale blue eyes. He was gripping her savagely by the wrist and they were both backed up against one of the robot giants.

Suddenly as I stared her head went back and a convulsive trembling seized her. She began to scream.

7

It was a christ-awful moment—for her and for me. For her because she had no right to be in the Chart Room, or even on the ship, as far as I knew, and there was a look on the crewman’s face that chilled me to the core of my being. It went beyond the anger of a duty-obsessed man, outraged by her infringement of the regulations. It was a completely different kind of anger. There was a savage cruelty, a killing rage in his eyes, impossible to misinterpret.

It was just as awful a moment for me, because I wasn’t sure I could get to him before he broke her wrist or did something worse to her. I’d seen a woman kneed in the groin once, by just such an enraged human animal, and the memory of it had never left me. A strong man, turned maniacal, could kill with his hands in a matter of seconds. I’d seen that happen too, and the victim hadn’t been a woman, but a man as powerful as the killer.

I crossed the Chart Room in a running leap, grabbed him by the shoulders and swung him about, raining blows on him more or less at random. I just tried to hit him as hard as I could without caring much where the blows landed, so long as they resounded with a meaty smack where they would do the most good. My only aim was to stun and, if possible, cripple him in a terrible, punishing way, so that he’d release his grip on the wrist of the woman he’d been trying to hurt before she screamed again and her hand dangled with a sickening limpness, making me want to permanently demolish him in slow and painful stages.

For a moment I was only sure of one thing. My fist had smashed very solidly into his face at least twice and drawn blood. I could see the gleam of blood on his jaw as he reeled back, and I was almost sure I’d heard his nose crack. There was nothing wrong with that, but it didn’t satisfy me. I wanted to turn his face into quivering jelly. But most of all I was hoping, praying that she’d break free before I set about doing that, because a voice was screaming deep in my mind that if she couldn’t he might still be capable of injuring her cruelly.

She broke free. Just how I don’t know, because the punishment I’d dished out hadn’t stunned him. He could still have fractured her wrist, judging by the look of blazing fury he trained on me.

His determination to repay me in full probably explained it. He needed both of his hands free for that, because I could see that what he would have liked to do most was get a strangler’s grip on my throat.

The human windpipe doesn’t fracture easily, as every experienced medical examiner knows. It’s elastic and it gives, and post-mortem appearances prove that you can die by strangulation with your windpipe intact. But I have a horror of anything like that, and I didn’t intend to let his fingers come anywhere near my throat.

I smashed my fist into his groin twice, putting so much shoulder-to-elbow resilience into the blows that he bent almost double, wrapped his arms about his middle just above his groin and went staggering backwards.

They were below-the-belt beltings, but I didn’t give a damn about that. Manhandling a woman just because she hasn’t the strength of a male has always seemed to be just about the worst crime on the books. All right…attacking a child is worse but you certainly forfeit all right to Queensberry Rules consideration when you’re called to account for using your strength against anyone weaker than yourself, unless he or she has done something vicious and there’s a hell of a good justification for it.

I no longer wanted to permanently demolish him, now that she’d broken free. But I had no control over what happened. The deck of the Chart Room is all smooth metal, and the polishing preparation that’s used to keep it bright makes it almost as skid-slippery as a skating rink, if you happen to be thrown a little off-balance.

He was off-balance just enough to change his backward lurch from a stagger to a swaying, spinning glide that sent him crashing against the base of a robot giant.

Up to that instant the four robot giants had looked exactly alike. But a robot in motion looks quite different from a robot at rest, with its massive metal hands on its metal knees, and its gleaming central section in an upright position. The crash was followed by a splintering sound which continued for several seconds without stopping. There was a whirring as well, and a blinding flash of light came from the metal giant’s conical head. Almost instantly the robot was in motion, and the way it swayed as it raised its segmented right arm high into the air so alarmed me that I shouted a warning to the man I’d just finished trying to send to the sick bay for a stay of at least two weeks.

The jerky, erratic way the robot giant was swaying could only mean that the crash had damaged its internal gadgetry, and it had gone completely out of control. It was shaking and quivering all over and even its ponderous central section seemed to bulge a little, as if from hunger-bloat.

That, of course, was absurd. But it’s natural enough to think of a robot as human and take refuge in absurdity when you know that a cybernetic brain, encased in a functional body, can do just as much damage as a madman running amuck with a deadly weapon. Just as much…more…when it’s out of control.

You don’t want to face up to it squarely, you shrink from it, because some instinct tells you it would be dangerous to let the horror of it come sweeping into your mind too fast. So you take refuge in absurdity, you imagine things that are a little on the ludicrous side. A hunger-bloat, a maniacal glare in photo-electric eyes.

But when you’ve done that, you have to stand and watch the horror take place before your eyes and in the end you’ve gained nothing…because when anything as terrible as what I saw sears its way into your brain the memory of it will remain with you until you die.

The robot giant’s massive metal hand swept downward, descending on the head and shoulders of the man who’d crashed into it. It hurled him to the deck, and flattened him out with a hammer blow that crushed his skull, broke his ribs, and tore a deep gash in his back. A red stain spread over his ripped shirt. I shut my eyes, sickened. There was a screaming behind me. I swung dully about and went to her and held her head against my chest, stroking her hair, whispering soothing words into her ear. I could do that without endangering the safety of the sky ship, because the robot giant had ceased to move. With the descent of its hand all of the whirrings had ceased and it remained in a bent-over position, utterly rigid, its mace-like metal palm still resting on the unstirring crewman’s back.

I was quite sure that no jury on Earth would have held me criminally responsible for his death. It had been brought about by an accident I couldn’t have foreseen. Every man has the right to defend himself when he’s under attack, and not just my own life had been in danger. There was no doubt in my mind…not the slightest.… His rage had been homicidal and he would have killed me if I’d given him the chance.

Justifiable homicide. There could be no other verdict, if the insignia the Board had given me hadn’t conferred legal immunity when an accidental death stemmed from my right to stay alive and I had been forced to return to Earth and clear myself in court.

I felt no moral guilt, but still—I was badly shaken. I had been instrumental in causing his death, however unintentionally, and it’s always better if a man can live out his life without experiencing the deep sadness that goes with that kind of knowledge.

The only difference is—moral guilt never leaves you and grows worse with the years. But there are so many tragic sadnesses in life that they have a way of merging into one big, onrushing stream and when you measure that stream against a brighter one, the joy-stream, the scales seem to stay just about even, with the balance maybe just a little heavier on the joyful side.

Right at the moment there was another big, onrushing stream running parallel with the sadness. The sober-obligation stream. Or maybe duty-stream would be a better name for it. We spend at least a third of our lives immersed in it up to our necks and swimming against the toughest kind of currents. Sometimes I think we could do without it entirely.

What was it Baudelaire said about boredom? “But well you know that dainty monster, thou, hypocrite reader, fellow man, my brother.” You could practically say the same thing about duty.

But the stream is there, and if you just stay on the bank watching the other swimmers you won’t really have the right to plunge into the joy-stream with a clear conscience.

The first thing I had to do was get her out of the Chart Room before she collapsed. She was close to hysteria and I didn’t even want her to look at the body again. I was careful to stand between her and the robot, and when I guided her gently toward the door I kept my hand on the back of her head and kept her face pressed to my chest.

It was more difficult than it would have looked on a cinema screen—more awkward and less romantic, and that was the way I wanted it to be, because nothing could have been further from my mind at that moment than the romantic glow I’d felt when I had been sitting across a table from her in a lakeside tavern on Earth, and hadn’t fully realized that Joan was still the only really important woman in my life.

Oh, all right. You can’t have a head that beautiful nestling in the middle of your chest without feeling a certain…well, a quickening of your pulse, at least. It can happen even in the presence of death, when you’ve just been shaken to the depths in a ghastly way. Perhaps because of that.…

Sex and death. Don’t be morbid, Ralphie boy. Don’t turn the clock back and let the old Freudian catch-alls of a century ago confuse and mislead you. Half of all that has been made clearer because we know now what Man was like five million years ago when he was a very predatory ape.

Sure, sex and death are closely linked. Dawn man went hunting and slew a cave bear and threw it down before his mate, all bloody, with pride swelling in him and just the excitement of the hunt, the thrill and danger of it, made him want to make love in just as exciting a way.

But sex and life are even more closely linked, and in life there are loyalties to consider and one woman becomes more important to you than all the rest and you don’t need that kind of stimulation to enable you to make love to her in the most exciting possible way.

The old stirring is still there, the death-sex linkage, and it can hit you hard at times and you have to keep a tight grip on yourself to keep from succumbing to it. But you can do it if you try.

Of course I was being unfair to her. The sex-death linkage had no more relation to the glow I’d felt back in the lakeside tavern than it did now to her as an individual. I’d have felt the same stirring if I’d been guiding Joan out of the Chart Room with her head on my breast—more of a stirring because Joan was the one woman in the world for me.

What it really meant was that the woman with the hair piled up high on her head filled me with a two-way sense of guilt. The life-sex linkage was better than the death-sex linkage, and the one and only woman feeling better than the promiscuous amorousness which any beautiful woman can arouse in the male. And right at the moment she represented both of the more primitive aspects of sex.

But the dice had just fallen that way. It wasn’t her fault and now she was close to hysteria and needed reassurance and all the comfort I could give her.

As soon as we were out in the passageway I asked her to tell me who she was. Her name. So much had happened between us that it seemed unbelievable that I still didn’t know that much about her.

“I thought I told you right after we left the spaceport,” she said. “I thought you knew. It’s Helen…helen Barclay.”

So…the old wonder name, the magical name, the Topless Towers of Illium name. How often it seemed to go with her kind of woman. How could she have been Margaret or Janice or Barbara…attractive as those names were. Lilith perhaps…yes. Or Eva…because I’ve often felt that Eve must have been a woman of glamor, red-headed and with a temper a little on the fiery side, because how else could she have come down to us as Earth’s first legendary temptress? But otherwise… Helen, the glamor name that led the list.

Why was I letting my mind go off at such an absurd tangent, when right ahead of me the stern-obligation stream I’ve mentioned was widening out, filling with rapids, becoming a river which could have swallowed up the sky ship, or wrecked it…if I failed to take up a giant’s stance right in the middle of it. Wade in and thrust the waters aside, Ralphie boy. It’s your duty. Try to think of yourself as a giant.

What made it tough was…I didn’t feel at all like a giant. But what had just happened in the Chart Room couldn’t be ignored. A lot of questions would have to be asked fast, and if the explanations sounded like lies, if Helen Barclay refused to cooperate, some very drastic action might have to be taken. I hoped she didn’t have anything ugly to conceal. Just the thought was hateful to me, because I believed in her and trusted her. But the way I felt had nothing to do with an obligation I had no right to sidestep for as short a distance as the width of an electron-microscoped virus.

I was glad that I wouldn’t have to do the questioning. Not straight off, anyway—not until I knew much more than I did, and all of the big, vital questions had been answered with candor and I could go right on feeling the way I did about her with a clear conscience. I hoped to God it would be with candor. If someone is dying and you can do nothing to save him and what he’s done or hasn’t done is of no importance to anyone but himself…you don’t ply him with questions. But what she’d done or hadn’t done could send the sky ship down into the gulfs in flaming ruin, because all of the passengers are encased in a fragile kind of bubble and the slightest pinprick could puncture it.

The pinprick, for instance, of an Earthside conspirator, traveling along with the bubble out into space and awaiting just the right moment to insert the tiny, darkly gleaming point of the pin under the skin of the bubble.

And she wasn’t dying, but alive—and could, if she had nothing to conceal, have no trouble in convincing the commander of the sky ship that any such fear was groundless.

I had to take her straight to the Commander. Otherwise I’d have to take it up with someone of lesser authority and show him the insignia and question her myself in private. I couldn’t see any advantage to be gained by that. It would leave the corpse in the Chart Room entirely unexplained and the Commander would not take kindly to having anything as disturbing as that left lying around in a loose-end way for him to worry about.

It would mean, of course, that I would have to show him the insignia. That was the bad part, the one thing I wanted most to avoid. But I could see no effective way of avoiding it now, because he was, after all, in command of the sky ship and directly responsible for its safety. He had every right to be the first to question her, unless I chose to supplant that right with what the insignia represented. To do so would not have been wise for a dozen reasons, the chief one being that when a man is in a firm position to exercise reasonably high authority it’s always a mistake to go over his head unless you’re sure you can make a better job of it than he could, despite his specialized knowledge. I didn’t think for a moment I could come anywhere near equaling Commander Littlefield’s competence in guarding the safety of a Mars’ rocket…so to curtail his authority in a high-handed way would have been worse than inexcusable.

But I would still have to show him the insignia…or I would not be permitted to sit in on the questioning.

We were at the end of the passageway now and just by making a sharp left turn I could have taken her into the cabin section and introduced her to Joan. Perhaps, out of compassion, I should have done that…let her relax in a lounge chair and look out at the cool, untroubled stars, and regain a little more of her composure. Some of it was coming back, she wasn’t trembling quite so violently now, and women seem to know better than men how to ease shock-engendered agitation…especially when it’s another woman they have to soothe and sympathize with. I could trust Joan to handle it like an expert. “Of course, you poor darling. I know just how you feel. Ralph will know what to do. Don’t think about it. Just stay right here with us until Ralph comes back.”

It would have been the kind thing to do, all right and for an instant I hesitated and almost committed an act of madness.

When you’ve something to conceal, it’s much easier to avoid a thoughtless admission, a damaging slip of the tongue, when you’ve had time to collect your thoughts and decide in advance exactly how much of the truth it’s wise to reveal. She was too agitated now to guard against slips and our chances of getting at the truth would be much better. And like the short-on-brains, over-chivalrous lug I could be on rare occasions—I hoped they were rare—I’d almost torn it.

8

Unlike Jonathan Trilling, Commander Littlefield was the kind of man who was what he was in an uncomplicated way. You didn’t have to try to analyze why he impressed you as he did, because it was all there on display, right out in the open. He was big and robust looking, with a granite-firm jaw and the kind of features that take a long time to develop the lines of character that are etched into them, because a man who has his emotions well under control in his youth will pass into middle-age before you can tell from his expression just how much maturity and strength resides in him.

There are bland-faced lads who seem to have no lines of character at all in their countenances up to about the age of twenty-eight. But when you hear them talk you change your mind very quickly about them, and when they are forty-five the lines are all there, deeply-etched, and the mystery is explained. Commander Littlefield was that kind of man.

We had several very serious things to discuss, because five hours had passed since I’d sat facing him in the same chair and Helen Barclay had sat in another chair at right angles to a third chair, which he had drawn out from his desk and occupied for a full hour without a coffee break, his eyes searching her face as she talked. His stare was a kind of interrogation in itself, and it must have been hard for her to endure. I think it would have angered me a little, if I hadn’t suspected what was behind it.

Her story stood up very well and had the ring of truth and her eyes never wavered. But he was hoping they would, then he could detect in her eyes a flicker of hesitation, of evasiveness, which would give her away.

But he hadn’t. Her story had stood up almost too well…because the truth always has a few flaws and inconsistencies in it. Memory is never a perfect enough mirror to permit anyone to avoid contradictions when they are doing their best to tell nothing but the truth, even under oath.

But she hadn’t seemed to be lying, and in the end I think she convinced him completely, because toward the end he stopped looking at her as if every word she said was impressing him unfavorably.

And now she was in the sick bay, recovering from shock, and I was back again for another talk with the Commander.

He began by saying: “I don’t know just how I should address you, Mr. Graham—sir. That silver hawk gives you a Colonization Board clearance that’s a little on the special side…you’ll have to admit. The first man who wore it got a little angry when anyone addressed him as ‘General’ because that’s a strictly military title, and military titles haven’t been in common use for forty years. There’s not supposed to be any army anymore—on Earth or on Mars. But I’ve always sort of liked ‘General’ and that insignia is practically the equivalent of five stars.”

“I’m afraid I don’t like ‘General’ at all,” I said. “The title is…Ralph.”

“Well…suit yourself. Ralph. I’m a simple soldier at heart, I suppose—always will be, even though I hold the rank of Commander. You’re young enough to be my son, so that informal crap doesn’t go too much against the grain, if you’re that serious about it.”

“I’m serious about it,” I said. “And you’re not old enough to be my father. An older brother, perhaps. You can’t stretch it any further than that.”

“What do you mean I can’t? I’m an old man of forty-eight. Hair thinning, going a little to fat. My God, a Wendel Atomics or Endicott Fuel top executive couldn’t look any older, and they’ve got a head start on the rest of us. They start burning out at thirty-five.”

“There’s not an ounce of fat on you, as far as I can see,” I assured him.

“That’s going to handicap you on Mars, Ralph. Eyesight not what it should be in a five-star general. Look again, look closer. I’ve got a pot belly you’d notice, all right, if I didn’t exercise to keep it down.”

I’d skipped over his reference to Wendel Atomics and Endicott, maybe subconsciously, but it must have registered belatedly in a very pronounced way, because something in my expression turned him dead serious in an instant. No man ever speaks with complete levity about his age, but what there was of ironic amusement in his gray eyes vanished and his lips tightened.

“Well…suppose we go over what we’ve got,” he said. “I’ll be grateful for any ideas, any suggestions you may care to make. I’ve found out something that’s going to give you a jolt. It may even rock you back on your heels, depending on how easily you can be rocked. But it will keep…until we’ve discussed what she told us. What do you think of her story?”

“I believe it,” I said. I didn’t think it was necessary to elaborate.

“Well…I’m afraid I do too, more’s the pity. If I thought she was lying I’d have more of a lever to pry what we don’t know loose.”

There was a thin sheet of paper covered with very fine handwriting on his desk. He picked it up and ran his eyes over it.

“I sort of summarized what she told us,” he said. “But there’s no sense in your reading this. I can summarize it even more briefly by skipping two-thirds of what I have here.”

“You might as well,” I told him. “She talked and we listened for at least twenty minutes. Then we both questioned her. In a question-and-answer session like that the vital points are apt to get a little blurred.”

“Well, we know she did something no one has ever done before—stowed away on a Mars’ ship. I’d have said it couldn’t be done…and so would you, I’m sure, because you’re as familiar with the inspection routine as I am. You passed through it. No one could possibly get inside a Mars’ rocket without a Board clearance and a personal, ten-point identification check every step of the way. In other words, you can’t just ascend the launching pad, be whisked up to the passenger section and walk right in. There’s only one way you can get inside without passing the four inspection points, with machines X-raying you from head to toe.”

“I know,” I said. “It was a damn clever stunt.”

“It was more than a stunt. It was an achievement on the creative genius level. It took planning and foresight. And…luck. A great deal of luck. But that doesn’t detract from the brilliance of it. She found out that we were installing a new cybernetic robot, to replace one that had developed electronic fatigue and had to be removed for repairs and a long rest. And she knew that we wouldn’t X-ray a robot or subject it to any of the usual tests. It would just be wheeled right in.”

Littlefield paused an instant, then went on. “She knew there was plenty of room inside a cybernetic robot that large, between the tiers of memory banks and all the other gadgetry, for the carrying out of what she had in mind—a stowaway gamble that was almost sure to succeed. She provided for her comfort during the long trip in half-dozen ingenious ways, as we know, and made sure that the food concentrates she took along were high in essential proteins.

“She knew, of course, that she couldn’t stay inside the robot without coming out at all. She’d have to emerge occasionally, if only to ease the psychological strain. But she used good judgment and only emerged when she was absolutely sure that it would be safe.”

“But once she didn’t,” I said.

“Once she didn’t. Once she felt she couldn’t stand the tensions that were building up in her any longer and she took a chance and came out when she wasn’t sure the Chart Room would be deserted. You told me you thought it was never left unguarded. Well…that isn’t strictly true. There’s a built-in security alert system in all of the robots and we can risk leaving it unguarded for a few minutes, when every member of the crew is needed elsewhere, to take care of some particularly troublesome space headache. That’s what we call the small and seldom very serious emergencies which are always arising in a sky ship this large.”

“But if she heard someone moving about…she must have been crazy to emerge,” I said.

“That’s just it. She wasn’t sure she heard anyone. In fact, she was almost sure it would be safe to emerge. She’d learned to trust her instincts, and the silence was almost unbroken. Just once she thought she heard a slight sound, but she put it down to the tension that was building up in her. She felt she had to emerge.”

“And he caught her,” I said, nodding. “And was more enraged than he had any right to be. His fury was maniacal. If you’d seen the look on his face and the way he was twisting her wrist you’d have been sure as I was that he was quite capable of killing her. And that’s the most puzzling part of it. We can’t explain it—and neither can she. That’s the one part of her story I was afraid you wouldn’t believe.”

“I didn’t for a moment,” Littlefield said. “I was sure she was lying…until the look of bewilderment in her eyes convinced me she was telling the truth.”

“You didn’t want to talk about him until you’d examined the body,” I said. “I guess I got a little angry when you were so damned insistent on that point. I was just about to—well, use that silver bird to make you change your mind. That used to be called ‘pulling rank’ on someone you respect and who has every right to tell you off. Since you like to play soldier—and I mean that in a complimentary way—you’re free to go ahead and tell me off now, if you want to.”

“Hell no. You had every right to press me. I just felt a little guilty and ashamed, I guess—to think that I’d let a crewman come aboard this sky ship who had managed in some way to deceive the Board. I was pretty sure, even then, that his clearance papers must have been forged, but I wanted a chance to examine the body before I committed myself, one way or the other.”

“I guess I’d have done the same,” I said.

“Yes.… Well, I’d have gone right down to the Chart Room and examined the body before I listened to what she had to say…if you hadn’t given me some very sound advice. If we questioned her while she was in a keyed up state we’d have a better chance of getting at the truth.”

I’d almost tripped over that one myself, so I didn’t rate the compliment he was paying me. But it was too minor to make me feel conscience-bound to disillusion him.

“You saw me click the officer-section communicator on and talk into it for a minute or two,” he went on. “I ordered a double guard posted in the Chart Room, but I told them not to touch the body until I had a chance to get down there myself. It’s just as well I did, because something was found on the body I wouldn’t have wanted anyone else to see.”

He was smiling a little and I wondered why, until he exploded the bombshell—the thing he’d said would rock me back on my heels.

“He’d deceived the Board with a vengeance, apparently. There was a sealed envelope on him and when I tore it open there was a card in it. It wasn’t a Board clearance card. It was a Wendel Atomics private police card and it identified him as the kind of secret agent you’d trade in for a snake if you had to have something poisonous on board and were given a free choice in the matter. The Wendel police are little better than hired killers—although perhaps a few of them are generous-minded enough to feel that when you’ve beaten a man insensible it’s going a little too far to put a bullet in him as well. And the Wendel secret agents are the worst sadists of the lot. They’re hand-picked for shrewdness and when you get intelligence along with brutality there’s no refinement of cruelty that won’t be resorted to when the going gets rough.”

“Good God!” I said. “So that’s why—No…no. It doesn’t quite explain why just the sight of Helen Barclay emerging from the robot enraged him the way it did. Just the fact that there was a woman stowaway on Board shouldn’t have angered him at all. It wasn’t his headache, because he was merely masquerading as a crewman. Even a man who felt some responsibility in the matter would have only been a little angered.”

Littlefield nodded. “Don’t think that hasn’t occurred to me. If he’d never set eyes on her before, or had no idea who she was…it’s hard to see why he should have become enraged, as you say. That’s why I’ve gone to such lengths to make sure she was telling us the full truth when she explained why getting to Mars was so important to her.”

He didn’t have to read from the paper he was still holding to help me recall in detail everything she’d said during that part of the question-and-answer session. It had made too deep an impression on me. It had also struck a vital nerve, because it was tied in with my assignment. Not directly, because I could have completed my big job without so much as talking to her again. But she was going to Mars because of something that Wendel Atomics had done.

Wendel Atomics was the exposed nerve, because anything that had to do with the Martian power combines was of vital interest to me, if only on the general information level.

In her case it was a personal matter, just between Wendel and herself. A very small matter to Wendel but overwhelmingly important to her.

Her brother, an electronic engineer, was dying by inches in a Wendel laboratory. Slow, radio-active poisoning meant very little to Wendel Atomics apparently, when just one small human cog was afflicted with it and they still needed his services.

So she had used her own knowledge of electronics and a very great resourcefulness and a high I.Q. to stow away in a cybernetic robot and was on her way to Mars to see what a woman of courage, entirely alone, could do to save the life of the only brother she had.

She had tried to get a clearance from the Board and failed and that explained how she happened to be in the New Chicago spaceport bar when my own life had been in even more immediate danger…because slow, radio-active poisoning takes a long time to kill and if you can stop it in time there’s always a chance that the victim will recover.

“I’ve been checking up ever since you left,” Littlefield was saying. “I managed to get through to Earth on the needle frequencies and Trilling knows now that you showed me the silver bird. The code I used to tell him that was too complicated to be broken by the big-brained inhabitants of Alpha Centauri’s third planet, if—as seems unlikely—such a planet exists.”

“And you didn’t even tell me,” I said. “I suppose I should be burned up about it.”

“No, you shouldn’t be. I just saved you a lot of unnecessary explaining. You can talk to Trilling all you want to from here on in, but I’ve cushioned the shock for you, taken a little of the edge off the way he seemed to feel for a minute or two.”

“Well…all right,” I said. “Just what did you tell him.”

“I asked him to do what he could to confirm her story. So far everything she told us seems to check out. Of course, they haven’t been able to turn up too much, and she could still be lying. But we may get more on it later on. Don’t count on it, though. I may not even be able to contact Trilling again. The needle frequencies are as unreliable as hell, as you know.”

“But you just said I could talk to Trilling myself—”

“If we’re lucky. You can’t express yourself with precision when you’re as troubled as I am right now.”

I was troubled too…perhaps more than he was. But just trying to make that concern dwindle a little by turning all the knobs on and off kept me from thinking about it.

“Well…he could have recognized her,” I said. “There could have been a link there, since he was a Wendel secret agent and her brother works for Wendel. Maybe they sent him her brother’s photograph over the needle frequencies and said: ‘Look around for a girl who resembles this man and keep an eye on her. She’s one little girl we’re worried about.”

“Oh, sure, that could be it.”

“It wouldn’t sound quite so ludicrous, Commander, if it was her photograph they managed somehow to send him. Maybe they secured one from her brother without his knowing about it. But still—it wouldn’t make much sense. Why should they fear her enough to put a secret agent on her trail? One helpless woman forty million miles from Mars. He couldn’t have known she’d smuggle herself on board the rocket in a cybernetic robot…because his rage when he discovered her precluded that. And why would he make the trip if he was out to get her and, for all he knew to the contrary, she was still somewhere in New Chicago?”

“If he was trailing her he could have suspected she might be on board and may have been searching everywhere for her,” Littlefield pointed out. “That would even explain his rage when he finally got his hands on her, if we remember the kind of sadistic human animal he was. Frustration alone could produce a rage as violent as that in a Wendel agent—days and nights of fruitless searching. But…I agree with you that it doesn’t make sense otherwise. The stumbling block, as you say, is the difficulty in imagining how Wendel Atomics could possibly regard her as that serious a menace. Or fear her at all, for that matter.”

That was as far as we got. The officer-section communication instrument on Littlefield’s desk started buzzing and he swung about to pick it up, with an almost joyful eagerness.

I was sure that at any other time he’d have accepted that call with no visible display of emotion, just as a routine necessity. But when you’ve reached a stone wall in a discussion of vital importance and the odds against your making any further progress seem insurmountable, for the moment at least, practically any interruption will be as welcome as sunlight after a drenching rain or a peasoup fog. It’s certainly better than beating your head against stone.

He listened for perhaps ten seconds with the instrument pressed to his ear, with no pronounced change of expression. Then his face blanched and a look of horror came into his eyes.

He slammed the instrument down and headed for the door on the run, completely unmindful of his dignity. Then he seemed to remember that he owed me an explanation—a man of principle will usually take a second or two out for that even when his home is in flames—and turned a yard from the door to shout at me.

“Someone got the nose-cone panel open, climbed outside and is crawling along the airframe toward the jet section! He’s wearing magnetic boots and if I’m not mistaken he’s equipped with everything he needs to blow the rocket apart.”

When he saw the look on my face he added reassuringly. “We’ve still got a good chance of stopping him in time, because he just climbed out. But we’ll have to bring most of the airframe into sharp focus on the viewplate, and pinpoint his every movement.”

It came as such a shock to me that I felt I had a good chance of suffocating, just from the way my throat tightened up and my heart started pumping blood at twice its usual rate.

I’m not quite sure how I managed to follow him at a distance of not more than fifteen feet, down three intership ladders and along four branching passageways, without once stopping to get my breath back. I doubt if I could have done that anyway.

Right foot, then left, right left, right left, Ralphie boy, and don’t give up the ship. Never give up the ship when there’s a chance to save it. There’s nothing painful about being vaporized in space. Remember that, keep it firmly in mind. Nothing painful, nothing sad…just a quick end to all you’ve had.

I don’t know why I thought the Chart Room looked deserted, like a big, unoccupied mausoleum with tiers for coffins—dozens of coffins—running up both of its sides. No coffins yet, just the empty shelves, for burial time had not yet arrived. But how could the Chart Room have looked deserted, when it wasn’t at all?

There were a dozen officers standing in front of the big lighted screen and when we crossed the room to join them without announcing our arrival—well, that made fourteen.

I can’t even explain how I got the idea there was a chill in the air that seemed to wrap itself around me in moist, clinging folds, because no section of the sky ship was more comfortably heated.

I didn’t spend more than a minute or two trying to puzzle it out, because the “furious sick shapes of nightmare,” to quote from a poem I wasn’t sure I’d ever read, only disturb you when you give them more encouragement than they’re entitled to.

The only really important thing was that we could see him in bent light on the big screen—a tiny, spacesuited figure climbing along the airframe, laden down with something cumbersome that he kept pushing before him in a completely weightless way as he inched further and further toward the rocket’s stern.

All at once, I knew what was going to happen to him. I was as sure of it as I am that I have two big toes that point a little inward and that Joan sometimes tenderly jokes about.

Between Earth and Mars space isn’t empty. It hasn’t been empty for more than half a century, which is a pretty good record on the survival scale for man-made, mechanical implants. The early Sputniks didn’t last one-tenth as long.

I knew without waiting for Commander Littlefield to finish what he was saying to one of the officers and issue a command that the needle frequencies scattered throughout the void on all sides of us were the only composite weapon we could count on to save the sky ship and all the people between its decks who didn’t want to be vaporized. And that took in practically everyone on board.

Sure, I know. Everyone had thought that the millions of filament-thin wires which had been put into orbit around Earth in the seventh and eighth decades of the twentieth century and later into orbit around Mars and far out into interstellar space would only be used for purposes of communication. Project Needles, or, if you want to be strictly technical, Project West Ford.

God grant that they may some day be used in no other way. But when a man climbs out on the airframe of a sky ship, for the sole purpose of blowing it up—

There is only one way I can do justice to the speed with which it happened and the awful, mind-numbing finality of it. It is not something which should be recorded in a paragraph, a page, but in two sentences at most.

Commander Littlefield issued a command, and a light on the instrument panel blinked, and a million magnetized filaments converged, united and so united, converged again on the airframe of the sky ship. There was a blinding flash of light and the tiny human figure was gone.

The first words Commander Littlefield spoke, after that, were to me.

“Whoever he was, he must have wanted her dead pretty badly…to have been willing to blow up the sky ship and kill himself in the process.”

There was a strange look on his face and his gray eyes met mine with a question in them.

Then he spoke the question aloud. “Or was it you, Ralph, whom he had in mind?”

9

The clang of the opening port was still ringing in my ears when I walked out of the sky ship with Joan on my arm and looked down over the big metal corkscrew directly beneath me. I knew straight off I’d made a mistake. I should have looked up at the sky instead. I should have squared my shoulders, drawn the crisp, tangy air deep into my hangs and established rapport with Mars more gradually.

A delay of only a moment or two would have spared me the too sudden shock of finding myself three hundred feet in the air, dazzled by an unexpected brightness, and supported by nothing I’d have cared to trust my weight to on Earth.

We were standing on a thin strip of metal, a mere spiderweb tracery, and if I’d lost my balance and gone crashing through the guard rail there would have been no mountaineer’s rope to save me. What was worse, I’d have taken Joan with me.

The danger was illusionary, of course…solely in my mind. The underwriters go to a great deal of expense and trouble to make sure there will be no tragic accidents when the big risks have been left behind in space.

The guard rail was chest-high and sturdy enough, and no one had ever gone crashing through it. But you can’t reason with a feeling, and for an instant the yawning emptiness beneath me made me feel that I was already past the rail, twisting and turning, flailing the air in a three-hundred-foot plunge.

I was sure that Joan was experiencing the same kind of irrational giddiness, for she drew in her breath sharply and a shiver went through her. A fear of great heights is one phobia that is shared by practically everyone.

The big metal corkscrew beneath us was the landing frame into which the rocket had descended and we were standing high up on that enormous spiral, which curved down and outward like an immense silvery cocoon.

A figure of speech, sure. But not as wide of the mark as most of the images that flash across your mind when you’re keyed up abnormally and a lot of new colors, and sights and sounds rush in on you and upset all of your calculations as to how sober-minded you’re going to stay. Your grasp on reality slips a little, as if you were holding it right before your eyes like a book, and wearing glasses so strong that the print blurs. You’re in a fantasy world of your own creating, seeing things that can’t be blamed on whoever wrote the book. A fussy, unimaginative little guy, perhaps, who has spent most of his life within sight of his own doorstep and has never felt the great winds of space blowing cold upon him.

There’s a big, night-flying Sphinx moth with death-heads on each of its wings, and there were times when I’d thought of the Mars ship as not so different from that kind of moth. And now it was as if the sky ship had turned back into a caterpillar again, and spun a cocoon for itself, and was quietly reposing in the pupa stage, its rust-red end vanes folded back, its long length mottled and space-eroded where the atomic jets had seared it.

There was nothing wrong in giving my imagination carte-blanche to go into free fall like that, because when you’re standing on a dizzy height staring down at a new world forty million miles from Earth you’ve got to let the strangeness and bursting wonder of it…along with the dire forebodings…take firm hold of you. Otherwise you won’t feel yourself to be a part of it, won’t be equipped with what it takes to probe beneath the surface of things in a realistic way and feel like a native son even in the presence of the unknown.

Three hundred feet below me more activity was taking place than I had ever seen crowded into an area of equal size on Earth. Just as a guess, I’d have said that the spaceport’s disembarkation section was about six hundred feet square. But right at that moment I had no real stomach for guessing games—only a hollowness where my stomach was supposed to be.

Far below the disembarkation section was in high gear, and the clatter of it, the rushings to and fro, the grinding and screeching of giant cranes, and atomic tractors, and rising platforms crowded to capacity with specialized robots, most of them scissor-thin and all of them operated by remote control…would have half-deafened me if I’d been standing a hundred feet lower down.

Even from the top of the spiral the clamor had to be heard to be believed. But what astounded me most was the newness, brightness, sharply delineated aspect of everything within range of my vision. I could see clear to the edge of the spaceport, and the four other securely-berthed rockets stood out with a startling clarity, their nose cones gleaming in the bright Martian sunlight. The big lifting cranes stood out just as sharply, and although the zigzagging tractors looked like painted toys, red and blue and yellow, I would have sworn under oath that not one of them cast a shadow.

The twenty-five or thirty human midgets who were moving in all directions across the field, between machines that seemed too formidable to be trusted had the brittle, sheen-bright look of figures cut out of isinglass.

Another illusion, of course. There had to be shadows, because there was nothing on Mars that could have brought about that big a change in the laws of optics. But by the same token the length and density of shadows can be altered a bit by atmospheric conditions, making light interception turn playful. So I didn’t strain my eyes searching for deep purple halos around the human midges.

My only immediate concern was to reassure Joan in a calm and forceful way and escort her safely down to ground level, without letting her suspect that I shared her misgivings as to the stability of the spiral.

It was ridiculous on the face of it. But, as I’ve said, you can’t argue with a feeling that whispers that your remote, dawn age ancestors must have felt the same way when they climbed out on a limb overhanging a precipice, and felt the whole tree begin to sway and shake beneath them.

“Hold tight to the rail and don’t look down,” I cautioned. “There’s no real danger…because a first-rate welding job was done on this structure. Barring an earthquake, it should be just as safe a century from now.”

I shot a quick, concerned glance at her along with the warning. I guess I must have thought she’d be more shaken than she was, for she smiled when she saw the look of surprise in my eyes. It took me half a minute to realize that my guess as to how she’d be taking it hadn’t gone so wide of the mark. Her pallor gave her away.

“A century would be much too long to wait,” she breathed. “Another five minutes would be too long. If it’s going to collapse, I’d rather find out right now.”

I nodded and we started down. Several other passengers had emerged from the port and were looking up at the sky or downward as I’d done. Three men and a woman had emerged ahead of us and were almost at the base of the spiral. So far nothing had happened to them.

I’ve often toyed with the thought that there may be windows in the mind we can see out of sometimes—at oblique angles and around corners and without turning our heads. I could visualize the passengers who were descending behind us more clearly than you usually can in a mind’s eye picture. Each face was in sharp focus and there was no blurring of their images as they moved. It was as if I was staring straight up at them through a crystal-clear pane of glass.

In that astonishingly bright inner vision—why look up and back when I did not doubt its accuracy?—Commander Littlefield was wasting no time in setting a good example. He’d descended the spiral so many times that great height meant nothing to him. He’d be ascending and descending at least ten more times just in the next few hours. But this was his big moment. I could already picture him striding across the disembarkation section to the Administration Unit with his shoulders held straight, and announcing officially, with a ring of pride in his voice, that the trip had been completed in record time, and the rocket had been berthed successfully. He was descending now with a confident smile on his lips, his Mars’ legs buoyantly supporting him.

Behind him came the small group who had been closest to us in space. They were doing their best to stay calm, but there was a slight flicker of apprehension in their eyes. Our section had been the first to disembark, because Littlefield had agreed with me that it might have seemed a little strange if I’d been accorded that privilege and it had been denied to the others. Why give anyone who might have outwitted every screening precaution the idea that I might be a man apart, with so big a job awaiting me on Mars that getting started on it without delay was damned important to me. It was natural enough for one or two sections to be cleared fast and emerge with the Commander. But others would have to await their turn in line and quarantine checkups could drag along for hours.

“It’s funny how long it takes to get even a little lower when you’re this high up,” Joan said, her fingers tightening on my arm. “We’re not anything like as high as when we started. But nothing down below looks any larger.”

“We’re not a fourth of the way down, and the human eye is a very poor judge of distances,” I said, reassuringly. “It would be better if you let go of my arm and just kept your right hand on the rail. We sway more this way.”

“When you look down from the observation roof of the North-Western University Building you can see all of New Chicago, and practically half of Lake Michigan,” she complained breathlessly. “But it never made me feel as giddy as this.”

“You had a firmer support under you,” I said. “But not a safer one. There’s no danger at all. You can be absolutely sure of that. What could happen to us?”

It was one of those silly questions you sometimes ask when you want to reassure someone you’re a little concerned about. But a silly question can sometimes be answered in a totally unexpected way—suddenly, terribly and with explosive violence. It can be answered by a voice of thunder out of the sky, or a wild, savage cry in the night, or in a quieter way, but with just as terrifying an outcome. There are a hundred cataclysms of nature which can give the lie to what you thought was only a silliness.

No matter where you are or how secure you feel, never ask what could happen in a world where nothing is sure, where no one is ever completely safe. Death is death. From end to end of his big estate may be a lifetime’s journey for some men. But he can cover the distance with the speed of light, because Death is one space traveler—the only one—who knows exactly how to outdistance light.

Even if you’re alone in a steel-walled vault it’s a dangerous question to ask. It’s ten times as dangerous when you’re descending a swaying metal corkscrew forty million miles from Earth and there may be someone eighty feet above you who has failed twice as Death’s emissary and would be covered with shame if it happened again.

I felt hardly anything for an instant when the dart sliced deep into the soft flesh between my shoulder blades. I didn’t even know it was a dart and kept right on walking. It was as if a bee had stung me—a tired bee who couldn’t sting very hard. There was just a little stab of pain, a burning sensation that lasted less than a second.

I felt it, all right. But it didn’t startle me enough to stop me dead in my tracks. A thing like that seldom does, if you’re moving steadily forward. It takes a second or two after you’ve felt the pain for the implications to dawn on you.

When they did the pain was back, and this time it was excruciating. My whole shoulder was laced with fire, as if a red-hot iron had been laid against it. If right at that moment I’d smelled an odor of burning flesh I’d have been sure there could be no other explanation, despite its transparent absurdity.

Even then I kept right on walking. I staggered a little but I bit down hard on my underlip to avoid crying out. I didn’t want to alarm Joan until I was sure. It could still have been just a very severe muscular spasm—the kind of agonizing cramp that can hit you in the leg sometimes in the middle of the night, so that you awake out of a deep sleep bathed in cold sweat, and with your teeth chattering.

That was what seemed to be happening now. My teeth started chattering and I could feel sweat oozing out all over me. There was only one difference. The pain was in my shoulder, not my leg, and it wasn’t easing up the way spasm pain does after a minute or two. It couldn’t have gotten worse, because it had been excruciating from the beginning. But other things started getting worse fast. The burning sensation spread to my lungs and my throat muscles started constricting, so that every breath I drew was an agony.

I couldn’t pretend any longer, and I didn’t try to. I went down on my knees, clutching at my chest and swaying back against the rail. I suppose I must have groaned or made some sort of sound, because Joan swung about and was kneeling beside me in an instant, her face ashen.

I must have looked terrible, or all of the color would not have drained out of her face so fast, or her eyes gone quite so wide with alarm.

I made a half-hearted try at straightening up, but only succeeded in bringing my collapse closer to zero-count by sagging more heavily back against the rail.

“Darling, what is it? Tell me!” Her voice was demanding, wildly insistent. “Please…i’ve got to know. If it’s your heart—”

I shook my head. I went through a kind of little death just trying to get a few words out. “Something struck me…in the back. See…what it is. Feel around with your hand.”

“All right, darling. Just don’t move. No—you’ll have to lift yourself up a little more. Try, darling. Your back’s right against the rail.”

I did more than try. I helped her by gritting my teeth and flopping over on my stomach. But the pain that lanced through my chest made me almost black out for an instant.

There was a clamor above us now, and I thought I heard Littlefield’s voice raised in a shout, followed by a scream of terror. Possibly someone had seen me slump and jumped to the conclusion that the spiral was collapsing.

There was no chance of that, so I couldn’t have cared less how close to panic the people up above were. Right at the moment it didn’t concern me. I was only concerned with what Joan might find when her fingers started probing. If a bullet had ploughed into me and her fingers came away wetly red I’d know for sure whether it was as bad as I feared. It helps to know, when there’s a tormenting uncertainty in your mind along with the physical pain.

I could feel her hand fumbling with my shirt, getting it loosened. Then they were moving up, down and across my back. Cautiously, gently, with the nurselike competence which women usually manage to summon to their aid in an emergency, no matter how shaken they are.

After a moment her fingers stopped moving and she drew in her breath sharply.

Being in agony and on the verge of blacking out carries with it a penalty. You can’t always hear what someone close to you may be saying, even when it’s of life-and-death importance.

I caught a few words, however, just enough to know it was a dart before I lost consciousness. And her look told me what kind of dart it was.

Or maybe it wasn’t her look, just what I knew about darts in general. The kind of dart that’s in common use today as a weapon is quite unlike the primitive blowgun darts of South American Indians a century ago. Science, like everything else, progresses, especially in the field of weapons. The modern dart is just as simple, in a way, but you take it out of a wafer-thin metal case as you would a hypodermic needle and you fit the three parts very carefully together and you use a liquid propellant to blow it out of a very slender tube of gleaming metal. And there’s space in it for poison.

It’s handier, tidier than the small robot killers with their intricate internal gadgetry, even though it requires precision aiming and you’re much more likely to be observed while you’re taking aim, and be compelled to pay the customary penalty for murder.

I’d managed to roll back on my side, and lying then in agony, trying to catch what Joan was saying, sort of telescoped all that for me, so that it registered in my mind in a more rapid way than it does when you’re trying to explain it academically. Everything I knew about darts came sweeping into my mind, and I remembered something else that helped to explain the agony.

The modern dart changes shape the instant it enters a man’s body, opening up like a pair of six-bladed scissors, cutting, slashing, severing veins and muscles and nerve ganglions. And if it strikes an artery—

It doesn’t even have to be a poisoned dart to kill a man. The feathered part remains in the wound, only slightly embedded. But if you have any sense you resist an impulse to pull it out, because when you do that it’s very difficult to stop the bleeding. It’s a job for a skilled surgeon and Joan’s look told me that there was no time to be lost. The wisest thing I could do was to put my complete trust in Commander Littlefield. The quicker he got one of the passengers or a crewman to help him carry me down to ground level and bundle me into an ambulance the better my chances would be.

Joan seemed to be one jump ahead of me, for she leapt up quickly and started back up the spiral. She didn’t even press my hand in reassurance, but that was all right with me. I knew why she hadn’t. Every second counted, and she loved me too much to be anything but firmly practical about it.

I remember thinking, just before I blacked out, how adequate are the hospital facilities here? And what about the surgeons? Oh God, what if they are fifth-raters, what if the hospital is understaffed? What if they bungle it, but good?

When you black out and stay blacked out for a long period, questions like that lose most of their tormenting aspects. You may still feel emotionally disturbed by them, when the darkness lifts a little and you remember having asked yourself questions someone somewhere should have answered—if you’d only stayed around long enough to make a lot of friends and influence people and make them eager to oblige you in every possible way. But it isn’t too disturbing, because you can’t even remember what the questions were.

The trouble was…i didn’t stay blacked out. Not completely. I woke up at intervals and heard snatches of conversation and I even saw—the Mars Colony.

I saw quite a bit of the Colony before they eased me down in a hospital bed, and covered me with warm blankets and I blacked out again.

I saw the streets I’d traveled forty million miles to visit, and the people I’d come to make friends with, and the kids in their space helmets, looking precisely as they did on Earth. (What further frontier did they hope to explore…alpha Centauri or just one of the giant outer planets?) I saw the prefabricated metal buildings, four, eight and twenty stories high, with their slanting roofs, rust-red and verdigris-green blue in the early morning sunlight and the stores that were all glass and the strange looking supermarkets with their almost cathedral-like domes. And just for good measure, eight or ten bar-flanked streets with big parking lots where the bars gave way to barracks that straggled out into the desert and had a primitive, twentieth century, shanty-town look.

There were people everywhere, but when you’re propped up on a cot in a speeding ambulance you can’t tell whether the people who go flying past look just the way people do on Earth, or have a more robust, happier look. Or a more restless and discontented look. It’s even hard to tell whether young people or middle-aged people predominate, or just how many very old people there are. Or how many infants in arms, except that there did seem to be an exceptionally large number of children, either being wheeled or carried or toddling along in the wake of their parents, or playing games with the fierce competitiveness of twelve-year-olds in fenced-in sand lots which no one had taken the trouble to pave.

There were theaters too—places of amusement, anyway—which you could tell featured lively entertainment just from the gaudy blue and yellow posters on their facades.

That there were machines clattering past goes without saying. A tremendous amount of new construction was under way in every part of the Colony and if you just say “Mars” in a word association test one man or woman in three will come right back with “Machinery.”

There were pipes, too—huge and branching, big, shining metal tubes that arched above buildings and ran parallel with almost every street in the Colony. A tremendous brood of writhing snakes was what they reminded me of—the artificial kind that kids delight in scaring people with at birthday parties, all mottled over with the bronze sheen of copperheads, but looking more like boa constrictors in their tremendous girth.

Another kind of snake image flashed into my mind as I stared out through the windows of the ambulance at that interlocking power-fuel network. It came swimming right out of the history books I’d poured over in fascination when I was knee-high to a grasshopper. Sure, they were Diamond Back rattlesnakes and the Mars Colony was right out of the Old West of covered-wagon and gold-prospecting days.

Of course it wasn’t, because the twenty-first century technology had made it completely modern in some respects. But it was like the Old West in a good many other ways. It had the same rugged, mirage-bright pioneer look, as if the desert sands were blowing right into the heart of the colony, swirling about, filling the windy places and the sand lots where the kids were playing with a haze that could just as easily have been gold dust that some careless, giant-size prospector had spilled by accident when he’d brought it in from the hills for weighing.

Actually, there’s nothing on Earth or Mars that can completely shatter that cyclic aspect of history. There’s nothing so new that you can look at it and say, “There’s nothing of the past here. The break is complete and the past is gone forever and can never return again.”

It’s just not true. The past does return, shining brightly beneath the bold new pattern, the daring new way of life that Man likes to think he has chiseled from a block of marble that human hands have never touched or human eyes rested upon before.

There’s no such block of marble in all the universe of stars. Not really, because what Man can visualize he has already seen and it has become a part of his heritage and the past of that heritage goes flowing into it and he starts off with a veined monolith that is brimming over with human memory patterns, with not a few buried deep in the stone.

But I’ve forgotten to mention the most important aspect of everything I saw through the windows of that speeding ambulance. It was…the blurred aspect, the way everything kept changing shape and disappearing and pinwheeling at times. It wasn’t surprising, because the agony was still with me and I saw everything in fitful starts, in brief flashes, between bouts of blacking out and coming to and blacking out again. But what I did see I saw clearly, with the heightened awareness that often accompanies almost unbearable pain. When white-hot needles of pain are jabbing at your nerves a strange, almost blinding kind of illumination seems to sweep into the brain. But instead of blinding you it makes everything stand out with a startling clarity and you can think clearly too, and even speculate about what you’ve seen.

It’s as if you were caught up in a kind of sharper-than-life dream sequence, or sitting in a darkened theater watching events take place on a dazzlingly bright screen. You may be doubled up with pain, but you keep your eyes on the screen and very little that is happening to the actors and actresses on a dramatic level is lost on you. You even notice small details of background scenery that would escape your attention ordinarily, and exactly what kind of clothes the actresses are wearing. Light summer dresses with plunging necklines or tight-fitting, form-molded swim suits—things you can’t help noticing even when you’re doubled up with pain. It’s why most of us fight to stay alive, because Nature has made us that way to keep us from letting go of the one thing that makes us stay in the pitcher’s box when Death is batting a thousand.

Putting that much stress just on the engendering of life may be a trick and a snare, when Death has set so cruel a trap for the winners, but you seldom hear anyone complaining about it. It takes an awful lot of grief and despair and pain to make anyone angrily resent the sex snare, and take to eulogizing Death instead.

It wasn’t the reason everything I saw through the windows of the ambulance registered so sharply in fitful flashes, because I had that right at my side. Joan was holding my hand and squeezing it and I only had to turn my head to make me just about the toughest adversary Death ever had. But what I said about the lighted cinema screen still holds. What I did see, I saw with eyes that missed very little. And between the bouts of blacking out the snatches of conversation I overheard came to me just as distinctly.

Part of the time it was a woman’s voice I heard and I knew it had to be Joan’s voice, because there was no other woman in the ambulance with me. But she wasn’t talking to me. She was talking to one of the two men in white who were sitting opposite me. They seemed about a half-mile away most of the time, but occasionally the long bench they were sitting on floated a little closer.

The conversation, as I’ve said, came to me in snatches and it could hardly have been called a running dialogue. The continuity alone would have gotten a professional script writer fired, no matter how brilliant he was otherwise.

The only way I can whip it into shape is by recording it as if it were continuous, filling in the part I overheard between blackouts with what I didn’t hear—staying close enough to what was probably being said to keep the script writer on the job and eating.

I’m pretty sure this is a fairly accurate re-write.

Joan: What kind of a hospital is it? I’m sorry, I…i guess I shouldn’t have asked you that. You’re on the staff. No matter how frank you might want to be.…

Doctor Mile-Away: If I thought it wasn’t a good hospital I wouldn’t say so, naturally. But it happens to match up very well with the eight or ten you’d want him to be taken to Earthside, if you had a choice. The facilities are first-rate, completely up to date. There are four surgeons I’d trust my life to with equal confidence…and one of them happens to be my dad.

Joan: I hope to God he gets one of them.

Doctor: There are only four surgeons. We don’t get too many surgical cases in the Colony—not nearly as many as you might think. There’s as much violence here, perhaps, as there is in New Chicago but it takes a different form. We can’t keep atomic hand-guns out of criminal hands as easily as you can in New Chicago, because the lawless element in the Colony has more socio-political power and can get more weapons in that destructive category smuggled in. As you know, an atomic hand-gun has a very limited destructive potential, since there’s no fallout and it can only kill a man standing directly in its path. But when it does…there isn’t much margin left for surgery.

Joan: You mean criminals are in control here?

Doctor: Oh, it’s not quite that bad. Possibly about one colonist in twenty has dangerous criminal tendencies. The proportion is larger here only because it’s a new society, with a pioneering outlook. You might call it a wolf-eat-wolf society. On Earth the dog-eat-dog tendencies will probably never be completely eradicated but we’ve gone a long way in that respect just in the last half-century. Here we have further to go, because the dogs are still wolves.

Joan: Will you ever tame them? My husband may be dying right here; that doesn’t look so tame! I think your Mars Colony is a filthy jungle!

Doctor: I didn’t have much time to talk with Commander Littlefield. But from what he said I’m pretty sure you don’t really feel that way. I don’t know why you and your husband are here, but the Colonization Board seldom gives clearance to people who feel that way about the future of the Colony. In fact…i can’t remember ever having met a man or woman who managed to deceive the Board, because the screening is the opposite of superficial. They go into your past history, I understand, and give you psychological tests I’m not even sure I could pass, convinced as I am that the Colony is still Man’s best hope in a world where to stand still is always disastrous. There’s no other sane solution to the population problem, just to mention one of the fifty or sixty major problems we’ll have to solve or perish in in the next two centuries. I have my moments of doubt and cynicism.…

Joan: You should be having one right now. How would you feel if you were taking your wife to the hospital for an emergency operation and didn’t know whether she was going to live or die? Suppose it was your wife instead of my husband? We didn’t even have time to set foot in the Colony. If there’s that much danger before you even—

Doctor: Just hold on a minute. Let’s get this straightened out right now. It will make you feel better. No one in the Colony tried to kill your husband. That dart was aimed at him from above—by one of the passengers. They’re all being held for questioning and if the firing mechanism is found on one of them—

That, for me, was the end of the dialogue. But just before I blacked out for the last time I saw a sign high up over one of the buildings. It read: WENDEL ATOMICS.

And I went down into the darkness with that sign flashing in big illuminated letters right in the middle of the darkness. WENDEL ATOMICS. WENDEL. WENDEL ATOMICS. And in much smaller letters, which were not nearly as bright: Endicott Fuel.

The big letters growing larger, brighter…the small letters dwindling.

Just as I felt myself to be dwindling…as I passed deeper and deeper into the darkness.

10

“He’s a big man,” I heard a woman’s voice say. “It took every ounce of my strength to lift him. But he had to be moved to the edge of the bed, doctor. The sheets had to be changed.”

A whirling in my head, needles darting in and out. I had to strain my ears to catch what another voice was saying in reply. It was a man’s voice, but gruff, deep-throated and somehow less distinct than the first voice. Perhaps Gruff Voice was standing further from the bed. Or possibly he didn’t want me to hear what he was telling the nurse.

She had to be a nurse, because Gruff Voice wasn’t addressing her by name. He wasn’t calling her Miss Hadley or Miss Betty Anne Simpson-Cruickshank. He was saying “Nurse this,” and “Nurse that” and speaking with crisp authority, as if there was a gulf between a nurse and a doctor which even the kindliest, least hidebound of physicians had no right to ignore.

I rather liked his voice, gruff as it was. He spoke with the air of a man who knew his business, with a kind of restrained sympathy—the “no nonsense” approach. Too much calm self-assurance can be irritating, because it usually goes with the inflated egos of people who think very highly of themselves. But in a doctor you don’t object to that sort of thing so much.

“He’s waking up,” Gruff Voice was saying. “Just let him rest and don’t encourage him to talk. No more sedation—he won’t need it. Did you take his temperature, Nurse?”

“Just ten minutes ago, Doctor. It’s on the chart. I always—”

“Put it down immediately? Who do you think you’re kidding, Susan, my love? Once in awhile you put it off, when this kind of emergency case makes you wish you had a dozen pairs of hands. You put if off for fifteen or twenty minutes, when you’ve no reason to think some white-coated drum major is going to barge in unexpectedly, just to lean on you. Did you ever know me to lean, Susan—heavily or otherwise? You’re doing the best you can and it’s a very good ‘best.’ I wish we had more ‘bests’ like it.”

“I do feel…sort of wobbly, Roger. I deserve to be leaned on, because once you start feeling that way you’re no longer at peak efficiency and you become nervously over-scrupulous. That’s both good and bad, if you know what I mean.”

“What did you expect, Susan? I could have had a nurse in here to relieve you hours ago if you hadn’t been so stubborn. You’ve been worrying your cute blonde head off without stopping to rest for sixteen hours, and you never set eyes on the guy before this morning. What is there about some men—”

“It was touch and go, Roger. You said yourself that a little of the poison got into his blood. You told me a tenth of a cc would have been fatal.”

“That was when I first looked at the lab analysis and took the gloomiest possible view of his chances. I didn’t even know you heard me. Damn it all, Susan. Can’t a doctor think out loud without giving his most competent nurse a martyr complex? What is there about him? I’m asking you. If he wasn’t married I could perhaps understand it. I could at least make a stab at trying to figure it out. But you’ve seen his wife. A man with a wife as attractive as she is would have to be even more susceptible than I am to look twice at another woman. That’s just another way of saying it couldn’t happen.”

“I’ve had two long talks with her, Roger. She loves him so much that if anything happened to him I’m afraid to think what she might do. All alone on Mars, with no close relatives or friends to turn to for help and warmth and comfort. She’d need a lot of support, because there’s nothing shallow about her. She’s the intense type, very deep in her emotions. I’m that way myself.”

“You don’t have to tell me,” I could hear him saying. “You’re the empathy-plus type. It’s what makes a good many otherwise sensible women embrace the toughest profession on the list. Hard-boiled, unemotional women make good nurses too. But I prefer the kind of nurse you can’t help being. Only…a little moderation even in people who go all out can be a saving grace.”

“But don’t you see, Roger? It means I can identify with her. I know exactly how terrible the uncertainty must be for her, because if I loved a man that much and lost him I’d probably go right out and kill myself. If you want the full truth…there’s probably a little of the male-female absurdity mixed up in it too. It’s an absurdity in a situation like this, where it makes no sense. But just the fact that he’s a man and I’m a woman—”

“Talk like that will get you nowhere,” he said. “I’m too sure of you.”

There was a rustling sound and a sudden gasp and I was pretty sure I knew what it meant. He’d taken her into his arms and was kissing her. I don’t know why I didn’t open my eyes. I was fully awake now, aware of every movement in the room. But I just remained quiet and listened, grateful that the needles had stopped jabbing at my temples and my dizziness was practically gone.

Sometimes when you awake suddenly from a deep sleep your eyes feel glued shut, and it takes an effort just to open them. You let it ride for a moment, while you pull yourself together…especially if it’s a nightmare you’ve just awakened from. There’s a kind of pleasure in it.

He was talking again. “I’ve yet to meet a woman who doesn’t think that clinical self-analysis will keep a man guessing about her. But that kind of candor will get you nowhere with me, kiddo. I know you too well. Are you convinced?”

“Yes,” she said, with a meekness that surprised me.

He didn’t say anything for a moment, but I could hear him moving about and a metallic click, as if he were folding up his stethoscope or returning a hypodermic to its case.

A sound like that is always a little unnerving and an operating table and a long row of gleaming instruments flashed evanescently across my mind. I wondered how bad it was and if Martian hospitals were well-equipped, and had just the right facilities to take care of an emergency case requiring major surgery.

But he’d said I was out of danger, hadn’t he…that I didn’t even need more sedation? Sure he had. I’d been stabbed with a poisoned dart, but that didn’t mean I’d have to go on the operating table. They would never have let the dart stay inside me. If an operation had been needed, it would have been performed immediately.…

Perhaps it had. Well, to hell with it. I was out of danger now and beginning to mend and that was the only thing that counted. It had been touch and go, she’d said. And Joan loved me so much that.…

Hold on tight to that, Ralphie boy. It’s the best news you’ll ever hear, even though you knew it all along, were sure of it on the day you married her. What they didn’t know and would have to guess about was the feeling of oneness we had whenever we were together.

I let that ride too, sweet as it was to dwell upon, and thought about how mistaken I’d been about the doctor. He wasn’t the kind of guy I’d thought him. The “nurse this, nurse that” talk had been either a performance, put on for my benefit just in case I was a little more than semiconscious or—a routine, quickly-dropped formality.

The second supposition seemed the most likely. A kind of ritual they went through from habit, and because it’s more ethical to keep a doctor-nurse relationship on a formal plane when the patient is under clinical scrutiny. After that, they could relax and be human.

I had no complaint, because I liked both aspects of Gruff Voice’s personality. That I liked the nurse goes without saying, not only because of what she’d said about Joan, but because of a certain something.…

All right. Gruff Voice had said that he was susceptible beyond the average and so was I. A sweet soft woman bending over you, denying herself sleep just to make sure you’ll stay alive, doing her best to ease your pain, sort of…does things to you. It had nothing to do with the way I felt about Joan. It wasn’t actual disloyalty…didn’t come within a mile of disloyalty. It was just the man-woman absurdity she’d mentioned, only…it wasn’t an absurdity and never had been.

It may be a hard thing for a woman to understand, sometimes. But it’s never hard for a man to understand, if he’s honest with himself and knows just how powerful the mating impulse can be in human beings. Call it sex attraction if you want to, but when you’ve called it that it’s important to remember that the mating impulse is the basic, anthropological prime mover. Sex is simply its modus operandi. On Earth and on Mars, whenever a normal man and a normal woman are in close proximity, even for ten or twelve seconds, the mating impulse starts unwinding. On another planet of another star the modus operandi may not be sex as we know it, but something quite different, if you can imagine another way of choosing a mate, building a home, and filling it with healthy, happy children.

It’s a coiled-spring, trigger-mechanism kind of impulse and neither the man nor the woman have to be attracted to each other on the personality level, unless you want to be technical and regard the purely physical as an attribute of personality. They can be young or old, plain or good looking. Some attraction will be present, even under the most adverse circumstances. But when the woman is young and beautiful and the personality level warm and appealing you’ll be deceiving yourself if you think the impulse can be kept from arising just because you already have a mate you’re desperately in love with.

You can conquer the impulse if you try hard enough and your love for someone else is strong enough. That’s what is meant by loyalty. But you can’t keep the impulse from arising and it makes no sense at all to feel guilty about it.

The human brain is a resourceful instrument and there are a dozen ways of keeping a tight grip on your nerves when you wake up on a hospital cot and hear unfamiliar voices talking about you. I chose the way that was most natural to me. I concentrated on the scientific construct I’ve just summarized, letting my mind glide over, and play around with it for a minute or two and telling myself that I must thank the nurse for all that she had done for me. When Gruff Voice left there would be a glow, a brief moment of warmth between us that might have become a high-leaping flame if I hadn’t been in love with Joan and she hadn’t been carrying a torch for Gruff Voice.

I wasn’t even sure she was beautiful, but it seemed likely, because you can tell a great deal about a woman just from the sound of her voice. Even if she bent over and kissed me, her eyes shining a little because she’d helped me outdistance Death a yard from the finish line and was feeling grateful and thrilled about it…well, that would have been all right too. I didn’t think Joan or the man who had just taken her into his arms would have held that kind of kiss against us.

I had the feeling that Gruff Voice was a generous-minded, all right guy, and if an operation had been necessary to save my life he’d done his best to increase my chances with all of the surgical know-how at his command.

Just that thought made me decide to open my eyes and try to raise myself a little, because he had a right to know how grateful I felt.

He was just going through the door. I could see that he was tall, blond and rather sturdily built, but a wave of dizziness made me sink back against the pillows again before I could get a really good look at him. It’s hard to tell what a man looks like anyway, when he’s facing away from you, and you can only see his disappearing shoulders and the back of his head.

When I opened my eyes for the second time, a full minute later, the eyes that looked back at me were just as I’d pictured them. A deep, lustrous brown. Her face was very much as I’d pictured it too, except that I’d no way of knowing whether she was a blonde or a brunette. She looked a little like Joan. Her hair was done up in a different way, and her lips were a little fuller than Joan’s and her cheekbones not quite so prominent. Her nose, too, was a fraction of an inch shorter. But otherwise she could have passed for Joan’s sister. Not a twin sister, for the resemblance wasn’t anything like that pronounced. But it was close to the family likeness you see quite often in portraits of two sisters when one is smiling and the other looks seriously troubled.

It flashed across my mind that if they had been standing side by side, both wearing the same expression, the resemblance would have been considerably more striking.

It shouldn’t have surprised me too much, because of what she’d said to the doctor. Women who think and feel in much the same way are very likely to bear a family resemblance physically. It’s the sort of thing which makes an anthropologist shake his head in vigorous denial. But facts are facts and who was I to dispute them?

“Just lie quiet,” she whispered, patting me on the shoulder. “Dr. Crawford says you mustn’t try to talk. You’re going to be all right. I’m Miss Cherubin, your day nurse.”

She smiled, her eyes crinkling a little at the corners. “You should have a night nurse too, but I’ve been staying on in her place.”

Cherubin. An angel? No—cherubim was spelt with an “M.” And she wasn’t that young or quite as rosy-cheeked as cherubs are supposed to be.

What made it really tragic was my inability to reach out and touch her or ask her a single question, because right at that moment another wave of dizziness swept over me and I blacked out again.

11

Right at this point there has to be a shift in the way I’ve been recording events as they happened, because what happened next took place elsewhere, while I was flat on my back in the hospital. By “what happened next” I mean…to me and Joan personally and to Commander Littlefield and the Martian Colonization Board and everything I’d come to Mars to take cognizance of, and do my best to change for the better.

I know, I know. Ten million separate events are taking place all the time on Earth and on Mars and by no stretch of the imagination could they be thought of as an immediate part of this record. But when the threads all start to draw together and tighten about you in a destiny-altering way you have to keep the time-sequence in order and record developments as they take place. Otherwise when they become of immediate concern later on the entire picture will seem out of focus. The frame will start lengthening out and the people in the picture will be out-of-kelter also, and scattered all over the landscape. The only way you can keep them sharply in focus is to record what happens to them when it happens.

It shouldn’t be too difficult, because there’s a seeing eye that hovers over the Mars’ Colony day and night. The big Time-Space eye that records everything that takes place in the universe, so that nothing is ever really lost beyond re-capture. The past, the present and the future keep flickering, in a backward-forward way, across that immense retina, and some day a technique may be developed for running history off in reverse and you’ll see events that took place thousands of years ago as if they were happening today on a lighted screen.

So…let’s look through that Big Eye straight down at the Mars Colony, you and I together. And remember. In this particular instance we won’t need a history-reversing gimmick at all, because what we’ll see and hear is NOW. It starts as a two-person conversation:

“John, I’m frightened. What if the insulation isn’t absolutely foolproof? What if one of those Endicott Fuel containers isn’t shielded in just the right way? Suppose the radio-active stuff inside builds up to what the nuclear physicists call critical mass and there’s an atomic explosion? Blowups have happened…even in the Endicott Laboratories under the strictest kind of supervision.”

“Now look. There’s not the slightest danger. Do you think for one moment Endicott would take that big a risk—even though Wendel has the entire combine backed into a corner?”

“They’d take any kind of risk now, because they have no choice. John, if you were going to give me another baby you’d have given me fair warning. I could have steeled myself to endure the harshness and unfairness of it. But when you bring death home with you—”

The woman had been very pretty once. You could see that just by glancing at her. But now her face had a drawn, haggard look and her pallor was more than pronounced. It verged on grayness. Her hair was thinning and turning white and only her eyes remained lustrous, truly alive, as if all that remained of the woman she had once been had been drawn to a focus in the gaze she was training on her husband in desperate appeal.

“Why did you do it, John? You’re not just endangering your life and mine. If we didn’t have four children…maybe I wouldn’t be talking this way.”

“I told you I was forced into it, didn’t I? Wendel is calling Endicott’s bluff. We can no longer go on buying Endicott fuel cylinders openly on margin, hundreds of them and letting all of them stay in Wendel’s custody, because we don’t really own them at all. The price goes up or the price goes down and we sell out and buy again—and we’re supposed to own four-fifths of the Endicott Combine. But there’s not a single Colonist who owns the equivalent of four or five cylinders outright. I don’t own these six cylinders. But I had to bring them home with me.”

“I just don’t understand why. It’s too complicated for me. A nuclear explosion would be much easier for me to understand.”

“All right…i’ll go over it again. But try to listen more carefully this time. Before this big, cut-throat war started only one man suspected that one of the two competing combines might try to sell its fluid property to the Colonists on margin. They were supposed to cooperate, not compete, because it was thought that Wendel couldn’t possibly keep its nuclear generators operating without fuel. It can’t, of course, but only one man suspected that Endicott might refuse to be dwarfed by Wendel in a sharp-practice duel and fight to stay big and powerful by letting the Colonists buy and sell fuel on speculation. That would put the Colonists right in the middle, don’t you see?”

“Yes…i do,” the woman who had once been almost beautiful said. “Thank you for giving me credit for having that much intelligence. You seem to forget that I have a fairly good memory too. We’ve gone over this a hundred times.”

“Sure we have. But it doesn’t seem to have made too deep an impression on you. You can sum it all up by saying that on paper, from day to day, it’s the Colonists who now own the Endicott Combine, or most of it. So it’s the Colonists who are carrying the battle directly to Wendel, fighting for the right to go on wildcatting, to get rich overnight or end up pauperized. It’s wildcatting in a sense, just as it was when oil instead of atomic fuel was the big prize to be fought over Earthside. When a Colonist buys Endicott fuel cylinders on margin, it’s practically the same as if he were digging an oil well in his own backyard.”

“Go on, John,” the woman said wearily.

“There’s that much uncertainty in it, don’t you see? And he’s really doing it entirely single-handed and on his own, because he’s digging in what is practically a paper graveyard in some respects, unless he’s one of the lucky ones. Endicott keeps the fuel. It doesn’t go out of their hands. But Wendel still has to buy it directly from the Colonists, who are supposed to own it, and the price fluctuations keep Wendel from becoming all-powerful and Endicott from going under or being dwarfed.

“In the main, it’s the Colonists who have most to gain by keeping Endicott powerful and solvent…although the battle lines aren’t so tightly drawn that it doesn’t become profitable, at times, to go over to the Wendel side. There’s a lot of sniping between the lines.”

“I know all that, John.”

“Well, here’s what it all boils down to, what you didn’t seem to grasp. You asked me why I brought these six cylinders home. It’s because of the one man who did suspect, right from the first, and when the charters were drawn up, that a war of this kind might be waged. I can’t even tell you his name. He was probably a minor legal expert or auditor employed by the Board, who had shrewd prophetic gifts…enough foresight, at least…to insert in fine print in both of the charters a provision that Wendel is now using to call Endicott’s bluff.

“That provision doesn’t say that Endicott can’t sell some of their fluid assets on margin. But it sets a limit to that kind of speculative buying and selling. The same limit would apply to Wendel, but Wendel has no fluid assets to sell on margin, and it can’t very well break up its generators and big transmission lines and sell them to the Colonists piecemeal, even on margin. It wouldn’t look right, because you can’t pretend that a fragment of a pipe that is still being operated by a combine is a speculative commodity that has passed into other hands and is subject to day-to-day fluctuations.

“If you want to think of fluid assets as simply a share in a Combine’s profits, that’s another matter. But I’m not talking about that kind of fluid asset. Endicott has been selling to the Colonists in a literal sense—moveable fluid assets. And in fine print in the Endicott charter it says that Endicott can only sell about a third of its fuel cylinders on margin. The others have to be purchased outright and carried home and held by the purchaser until the price is right and he can dispose of them at a profit. Or sell at a loss, as property.”

“But you say you didn’t buy those cylinders outright. How could you have done that?” the woman protested. “Just one cylinder would cost—a third of a million dollars.”

“Naturally I didn’t buy them outright. I bought them on margin. But Wendel can’t prove that. Endicott is covering up for me and because I’ve brought them home and can slap my hand on the cool metal and tell Wendel to go to hell if they try to dispute my ownership—Endicott still has a chance to come out on top. Wendel is calling Endicott’s bluff, sure. But Endicott is countering with another bluff and they can make it stick. Their auditing department knows just how to do that. So every Colonist who wants to go on wildcatting now has to bring a few cylinders home, to make it look as if he’d bought them outright. Possession puts you nine-tenths on the winning side in any legal argument. You ought to know that!”

“Ought I? Just suppose I did. Would that stop me from becoming terrified, when I know exactly what could happen if the metal isn’t as cool as you hope it will be when you slap your hand on it, and the Wendel police stay cold-blooded about it, and wait around for the fissionable material inside to reach critical mass.”

“You know damn well it would take an awful lot of accidental jarring and jolting to trigger a fuel cylinder and make it blow up. It probably couldn’t happen, except in a laboratory where they’re careless about such things because of overconfidence.”

“Dinner’s on the table,” the woman said. “We may as well go back into the house while we’ve still got a home, and gather the children around us, and tell them a few more lies about what the future is going to be like in the Colony, now that one father in three will be bringing nuclear fuel cylinders home with him.”

The man—his name was John Lynton—nodded and they returned into the pre-fab. Lynton preceded his wife into the dwelling and the woman paused for an instant in the doorway to stare back at the long metal shed where the six cylinders were reposing…letting her gaze take in as well the double row of foot-high cactus plants which encircled the yard and the sun-reddened stretch of open desert beyond. Then she let the door swing shut behind her, and turned to face her four hungry children.

One thought alone sustained Grace Lynton at that moment. There had never been any need, so far, for the children to go to bed hungry. Their hunger was due solely to the demands of healthy young appetites when dinner was a little delayed and they had been playing strenuously in the yard all afternoon or going on exploring expeditions.

12

They were all downstairs now, waiting to be fed, hardy perennials like all children everywhere. Thomas with his shining morning face—it seemed to stay that way right up until bedtime—and Susan, seven, and still doll-wedded, and the twins, Hedy and Louise. Three girls and one boy, and Grace Lynton felt a little sorry for her son at times, until she remembered that a boy of thirteen isn’t troubled by too many girls in a family when he’s seven or eight years their senior. The girls were simply very young children to him and he was—well, right next door at least to being grown up.

“All right,” John Lynton said, seating himself at the head of the table. “Let’s fall to and see who gets through first.”

“Did you have a tough day, Dad?” Thomas asked, reaching for a knife and fork, and drawing a still steaming serving bowl toward him. His unruly hair was so blond it seemed almost white and there was a double row of freckles across the bridge of his nose.

The other three children were brunettes, with hair ranging in color from chestnut brown to jet black. Even the twins did not closely resemble each other, as non-identical twins so often fail to do.

“Don’t annoy your father with questions now, Thomas…please,” Grace Lynton said.

“Why not?” Lynton asked, frowning at his wife. “I did have a tough day and there’s no sense in soft-pedaling it. Sometimes I almost wish we hadn’t come to Mars. No matter how rigorous a Board screening is…there are some things it can’t tell you about yourself. Will you make a good father on a world without trees or grass, with no way of getting out into the green countryside and sitting down on the moss-covered bank of a trout stream, with your kid at your side and having a heart to heart talk with him in the cool shade of a big oak or cedar.”

“The stew’s good, Mom,” Thomas said. “Is it all right if I fill up my plate again?”

“Did I ever say you couldn’t, Thomas?” Grace Lynton snapped, unable to keep irritation out of her voice, despite her son’s compliment. “There’ll never be any food shortages in this house, if we have to sell all of the furniture.”

“Leave enough for me, Thomas,” Hedy Lynton said.

“Don’t worry, I will,” Thomas said. “But if you keep on eating the way you do you’ll grow up fat, and no man in the Colony will marry a fat woman when there are so many thin ones.”

“That’s very well put, Thomas,” Lynton said. “I have a brilliant son—practically a genius. But don’t let it go to your head, boy. Unless you’re in the electronic field or have some other technical specialty a straightforward, rugged he-man can do more for the Colony.”

“What kind of talk is that, John?” Grace Lynton demanded. “There’s nothing unmanly about a genius, in any field.”

“No, I suppose not. But I wouldn’t want him to be a poet or a painter. They just stand back and observe life and I’d like to see my son wade in fighting.”

The daylight outside had started fading before Lynton and his wife had returned indoors. But now the quickly-arriving Mars’ night was almost at hand, and the twilight had deepened outside and was giving way to complete darkness at the edge of the desert.

The two adults and four children seated about the table hadn’t once glanced toward the window, for the food and contentious conversation had absorbed all of their attention.

It was Thomas who saw the light first, flickering on and off close to the shed. He had always wanted, deep down, in a secret way that he had never dared to discuss with anyone, to be an artist and paint at least a hundred pictures that would show the people who looked at them exactly what life on Mars was like. And his father’s gaze, trained upon him in such a steady way, had made him squirm inwardly, as if his secret might at any moment be exposed. To avoid his father’s gaze he’d looked straight out the window and seen the strange light flickering on and off.

“Dad!” he said.

“What is it, son?”

“There’s a light moving around out in the yard, close to the shed.”

If Thomas had suddenly toppled over dead his father could not have leapt up from the table with more horror in his eyes.

“Why…why…good God! Wendel wouldn’t go that far! It would be an act of madness!”

“John, you don’t think—”

Thomas’ mother was on her feet too now, her face drained of all color, her eyes darting to the window and back to the tight-lipped, violently trembling man at the head of the table. John Lynton’s face had gone as white as her own.

For a minute Thomas thought that his father was going to rush right out into the yard and grab hold of the intruder, as fast as he’d leapt up from the table. Then he saw he’d guessed wrong about that.

Lynton crossed the room in five long strides, swung open the weapon locker and grabbed hold of a holstered hand-gun instead. He strapped the holster to his waist before whipping out the weapon and snapping off the safety mechanism.

He was starting for the door when Grace Lynton called out warningly: “John, don’t! John!”

He swung about, staring at her in consternation. “Don’t what? If they’ve tampered with those cylinders I’ll make sure they won’t live to blow up another man’s home—or half the Colony!”

“You can’t blast them down!” Her voice rose shrilly. “No, John! A hand-gun blast that close to a fuel cylinder would set off a chain reaction—”

“No, it won’t. The blast is channeled. Don’t be a fool, Grace. I know what I’m doing.”

“You’re the fool! You’ll get us all killed!”

“If they’ve tampered with just one of those cylinders we won’t have to worry about what a hand-gun blast will do. But they won’t save their own skins before the big blast hits us. That’s one thing I can make sure of.”

He turned and was gone. She started to follow him out into the yard, but became aware of how dangerous that would be just in time. If she followed her husband the children would almost certainly follow her, for she couldn’t order them to stay indoors and hope to be obeyed.

She rushed to the window and stared out, her face pressed to the pane.

She could feel Thomas pressing close to her—or was it Hedy or Susan? There was a heaviness in his body which made her almost sure it was Thomas. But that meant nothing, because she loved all of her children equally.

Suddenly she was sure it was Thomas, because he was speaking to her. “Take it easy, Mom! Dad’ll take care of whoever it is. He’s got a hand-gun to protect him.”

“Oh, I know he has!” she wanted to scream. “It will be a beautiful way of protecting us all…by sending us straight into eternity. God, dear God, don’t let him blast. Don’t—”

The blast came then, lighting up the darkness outside, making the windowpanes rattle. For an instant Grace Lynton could see her husband clearly, standing by the shed with a white flare spreading outward from his shoulders.

Then the flare dwindled and vanished and Grace Lynton had no way of knowing what had happened outside in the dark. She was sure of only one thing. She couldn’t stay inside the house with her husband moving about a few feet from fuel cylinders that might blow up at any moment, for there was at least a fifty percent likelihood that the intruder had accomplished what he’d come to do, before Thomas had seen the light bobbing about in the yard.

She had straightened and was hugging her son to her, just starting to turn, when John Lynton’s voice rang out sharply from the doorway.

“Grace! I blasted at him but he got away! Listen carefully. I’ve only a moment to talk.”

He was standing in the doorway with the hand-gun reholstered at his waist, its handle gleaming dully. His pallor was startling, for it went far beyond mere paleness, as if all the blood had been drawn from his face artificially, leaving the skin gray and shrunken.

“I can’t be sure, but I think…one of the cylinders has been triggered to blow up,” he went on quickly. “It isn’t heating up. There’d be no heat—just a faint vibration. When I put my hand on the metal I was almost sure I could feel a vibration. We’ve got just one chance of staying alive—and I’ll have to move fast. I’m going to take it to the Spaceport—I can get there in the conveyor truck in ten minutes—and have them dismantle it. They’ll know how. I don’t. I’ll take all six of the cylinders, to make sure.”

“John, no! It will blow up in the truck. I’m sure of it. We’d better all get out in the desert, as far away from it as we can. If we start right now and run—”

“We could go in the truck, Dad!” Thomas cried.

Lynton shook his head. “If just one cylinder blows up—it will take three miles of desert with it. If all six go…twenty miles of desert. There are at least six thousand Colonists within three or four miles of us. There are less than a thousand people at the Spaceport. Only one big sky ship is still unloading. Better a thousand deaths than six or seven thousand…if it blows up before they can dismantle it.”

“But John—Oh, God, I don’t know.”

“It’s the best way, the surest way. We can’t think only of ourselves. If I drove straight out into the desert with it and it blows up within twenty minutes the fallout would still kill several thousand Colonists. The Spaceport’s in the other direction, completely isolated. And I can get there in fifteen minutes…even if I’m stopped by the Wendel police and have to blast my way to it.”

“Why should they try to stop you? They’d die themselves—”

“Why did they send someone to trigger that bomb? They’ll take any risk now, because they know that Endicott’s new bluff could smash them. That cylinder is smaller than the first atomic bomb ever built—much smaller than the one that was dropped on Hiroshima—and if they have to explode a half-dozen of them in different parts of the Colony to demoralize the Colonists and discredit Endicott they’re prepared to do it, apparently. Even if it kills thirty thousand people. Or maybe they figured the one I’m taking to the Spaceport—and I am taking it there, Grace—would make the Colonists think twice about taking any more Endicott fuel cylinders home with them.”

“You’re right, John,” Grace Lynton said, with a firmness in her voice which surprised her. “We can’t think only of ourselves. Until you come back—every moment will be a living death. But—you must do it. There’s no other way.”

“I’ll be back,” Lynton said. “I—I love you, Grace.”

“And I love you, John—even though I’ve said cruel, cutting things at times. I love you very much.”

“Take care of yourself, Dad,” Thomas said.

“I will, son. Don’t worry. Just be the man of the family and keep the kids in line until I get back.”

13

I had no way of knowing how long I remained on the outer fringes of what was probably just a weakness-produced blackout before the outlines of the hospital room wavered back, becoming so clear again that I could see the foot of the bed, and a glass-topped table covered with small bottles and a roll of gauze bandage that looked about as big as a liquid fuel cylinder.

Someone who couldn’t have been the doctor was sitting in a chair by the bed, leaning a little forward, his eyes level with mine. I was more than startled. An ice-cold measuring worm came out at the base of my spine and started inching its way upward, bunching itself up and lengthening out again, the way measuring worms do when they’re trying to decide if you’re just the right fit for a human-style coffin.

I had a visitor whose face would have chilled a perfectly well man prepared to defend himself against violence at the drop of a hat. He was looking at me with a glacial animosity in his stare, as if he resented the fact that I was still alive and would do something about it if I gave him the slightest encouragement.

Even without encouragement I had the feeling that my life hung by a thread which could snap at any moment, so long as he remained that close to me with no one standing by to interfere if he lost control of himself.

He didn’t have a moronic or particularly brutal looking face. Intelligence of a high order had given his features a cast you couldn’t mistake. It was the kind of look that went with disciplined thinking—long years of it—and behavior that was based on intellectual discernment, however much that discernment had been abused during moments of uncontrollable rage. Uncontrollable rage, as every psychologist knows, can tie the reasoning part of any man’s mind into knots. Everything that was primitive in him seemed to be at the helm now, as if he bore me so much ill-will that he might be capable of trying to take my life with just his bare hands, if he happened to be unarmed. And I was far from sure of that.

His glacial gray eyes seemed to say: “I’ve got you exactly where I want you, chum. It won’t do you any good to shout for help. It stands to reason that if I could get in here to talk to you at a time like this, throwing my weight around a little further would be no problem at all. Five minutes of privacy will suit me fine. After all, how long will killing you take?”

He was a fairly big man, compactly built, with hands that looked strong enough to bend a steel bar, if he didn’t mind chancing a rush of blood to the head that might have been a little risky in a man his age.

I had no idea why he was sitting there, only that the alarm bells were ringing again. Only this time it wasn’t taking place in a crowded subway train in total darkness, or up near the top of a swaying spiral where an assassin’s aim could be a little less than sure. It was man to man, tete-a-tete, in a well-lighted hospital room.

I was flat on my back and weak as hell and Death was looking straight at me out of ice-blue eyes. I had only one straw to clutch at. The hospital room might just possibly be under surveillance and an act of violence that’s likely to boomerang can give an assassin pause.

His first words ripped that straw from me and crumpled it up, with such vigor I was sure I could hear a crunching sound.

“I’ve just a few questions to ask you,” he said, in a surprisingly mild tone. “We’ve made sure that there are no recording devices in this room. We always make a careful check as a matter of routine, when we’re forced to demand complete privacy during an interrogation of this sort. It’s something we’d prefer not to do, but there are times—”

He shrugged, as if he’d made the point clear enough and resented the necessity of making it any plainer.

“When the internal security of the Colony is endangered,” he went on impatiently, “we do not hesitate to invoke all of our authority. We have no choice. Too many people take it for granted that a privately owned combine is exceeding its authority when it undertakes police investigations not specifically authorized by its charter. They forget that such police powers are implicit in every charter which provides for the exercise of reasonable vigilance in the public domain. Safe-guarding the public, which Wendel Atomics serves, would not be possible if we did not exercise such authority.”

How true that was I didn’t have enough legal knowledge at my finger-tips to decide. But I was pretty sure it was a bald-faced lie. But just his use of the word “power” explained how he’d managed to get as close to me as he’d done, with no one within earshot to hear me if I burst my lungs shouting.

The kind of power the Board had given me the right to exercise superceded whatever display of authority Wendel Atomics had used to turn the hospital room into a prison cell. But who would know or make a move to save me—if the silver bird didn’t get a chance to flap its wings on my uniform until they were pumping embalming fluid into my veins and making plans to lower me, with a ceremonial flourish, into a desert grave?

“There are a few things Wendel Atomics has a right to know,” Glacial Stare was saying. “A legal right—make no mistake about that. I’d advise you not to lie to me. If you do—”

He shrugged again.

I said something then that surprised me, because I didn’t think right at the moment I had that much defiance on tap.

“Shove it!” I said.

He couldn’t have heard me, because he went on with no change of expression. “Commander Littlefield is within his rights in refusing to permit us to question him as to what took place on board the Mars’ rocket. We have no jurisdiction over such…irregularities in space. If we questioned just one of his officers, the Board would have every right to revoke our charter. But two of the officers have come to us and voluntarily submitted information which we cannot ignore. We believe that the internal security of the Colony is in danger and we intend to take steps to make sure that none of the questions we have a right to ask will remain unanswered.”

He was laying it on the line, all right, speaking with an almost surgical kind of precision, so that I couldn’t claim later—if I turned stubborn—that I’d failed to understand him. It’s funny how a man who’s holding all the cards will sometimes do that, just on the off-chance that you may have an ace up your sleeve and may use it to make trouble for him later on.

He must have been pretty sure I didn’t have a concealed ace, however, for he backed up what he was saying with the most dangerous kind of threat. Dangerous to him…if there had been a hidden listening device in the room and a tape with that threat on it had come to the attention of the Board.

“I hope, for your sake,” he said, “that you’ll keep nothing back. It is very unpleasant to sit in a Big-Image interrogation room and have part of your mind destroyed. The part you value most, that makes you what you are—destroyed, sliced away. Yes…sliced away is quite accurate, even though no instrument would be needed and not a hand would be laid on you. You can cut deep into the brain with vibrations alone. But nothing…physical ever takes place in the Big-Image interrogation room. No knife or vibrator, as you know. The destruction is brought about in a quite different way. But it’s just as drastic and irreversible as a prefrontal lobotomy.”

He stopped talking abruptly, looking past me at the opposite wall, as if he could already see the shadow of a broken and tormented man projected there. I could see it too, and I didn’t like to think that I was coming that close to sharing his thoughts. But it was useless to pretend that the man who was casting that shadow might not turn out to be me.

So they had them on Mars, too, with the Wendel police on hand to make sure that the big screen with its multiple sound tracks and the smoothly operating projector were kept carefully hidden from the law. Big-Image interrogation rooms—a cruel vestige of the brain-washing techniques that had so outraged world opinion in the middle decades of the twentieth century that they had been castigated and outlawed by the United Nations, the World Court and every responsible Governmental agency on Earth.

But the criminal mind has very little respect for world opinion or restrictions on brutal practices that are very difficult to enforce. Big-Image interrogation had begun as a police investigation procedure, which made it easy for the wrong kind of police force to resort to it and claim historic precedent and moral justification as a cover-up if their activities ever came to light.

I was sure that Glacial Stare had mentioned it solely to turn the screw as far as it would go, hoping I’d turn pale and answer his questions in a completely cooperative way. I was sure that if I did he’d stop threatening me immediately, listen with attentive ear to what I had to say and apologize for letting me think, even for a moment, that it was just a part of my mind he’d been planning to destroy. Why should he want to upset me that way, when the only thing he’d had in mind from the start was to persuade me to talk and then relieve me of all anxiety by killing me?

He wasn’t giving me credit for having the kind of brain it would have been worth taking the trouble to destroy, even in part, but there was nothing to be gained by reminding him of that.

You don’t have to be a professional historian or even a data-collecting research specialist in the police procedure field to pinpoint the origin of Big-Image interrogation in the middle years of the twentieth century.

Three out of five well-informed people can tell you exactly how it began, if you jog them into remembering by showing them a micro-film recording of what took place during just one of those interrogations sixty or seventy years ago.

My memory didn’t need to be jogged. I’d examined too many micro-film recordings made even earlier than that—so many years before I was born that the grooves have to be altered if you want to run them off in the projectors that were in common use at the turn of the century, because they ante-date even those old-style machines.

As early as 1965 someone had discovered and pointed out that the cinema was no longer just an entertainment medium. Everyone at the time, I suppose, had made that discovery already, in a private sort of way, but an entire society can have a blind spot and go right on clinging to established patterns of thought, if only because people in general are a little reluctant to discuss openly anything that threatens to overturn the apple cart.

At any rate, about 1965 someone whose name has not come down to us—quite possibly he was a drama critic, that most curious of breeds—had pointed out that the cinema had become a potentially mind-shattering instrument of torture, which could be used to brain-wash a spectator until he became a hopeless psychotic, incapable of distinguishing reality from illusion. Schizophrenic or manic depressive, take your pick.

It was the bigger-than-life illusion that could do that—the strange, often terrifying sense of being caught up in some super-reality that had no real existence in time or space, in the ordinary way that time-and-space manifests itself to us in everyday life.

The cinema became potentially that kind of torture medium the instant the first of the twenty-million-dollar spectacles in full color appeared on the screen.

We know what that kind of illusion can do today and when we watch a screen spectacle that distorts reality for three or four hours by making everything seem fifty or a hundred times as large as life…we make sure that we are entering a theater that is Government supervised and not a Big-Image interrogation room presided over by a sadist in police uniform.

Everyone knows how it is today, and stays on guard, perpetually alert. But back in the twentieth century the danger wasn’t clearly understood, and that lack of understanding was taken advantage of by the brain-washers in uniform to exact confessions at a terrible price.

Everyone is familiar with the disorientation I’m talking about. Even the old stage plays and the earlier black-and-white movies and not a few books could bring it about to some extent, when you left the theater or closed the book, and passed from a world of dramatically heightened illusion into the drabness of everyday life.

But the big screen spectacles in full color, with electronic sound effects, make the world of illusion and the world of sober reality seem as far apart as two contradictory constructs in symbolic logic. When you look at that kind of motion picture you get the illusion that all of the events on the screen, even the intimate, two-person closeups, are taking place on a gigantic scale.

The sharpness and brightness of everything, the brilliance of the colorama, the dramatic selectivity which makes each scene burn its way into your brain as a titan encounter in a world of giants is so overwhelming that when you emerge from the theater after watching such a film the world of reality seems small, stunted, anaemic by contrast.

You look at the men and women walking past you on the street and they seem to have nothing in common with the men and women you’ve just seen on the screen. That quiet little guy puffing on a cigarette and returning your stunned stare with a perplexed frown may be the director of a big power combine, with just as much lightning at his finger-tips. But he seems like a pygmy. It would be impossible to visualize him as a helmeted giant stripped to the waist, breasting wild seas at the helm of a Viking ship or a spacesuited giant in a colorama with a present-day background.

In the big screen spectacles all of the men seem gigantic, with tremendous, muscular torsos. Even the little guys look like titan figures, fifty or a hundred times as large as they seem outside the theater. And the women—with the possible exception of the very feminine ones with overwhelming sex appeal—look like Amazons.

You can’t even equate the violence you encounter in everyday life with the violence that takes place in a big screen spectacle. After you’ve watched the spectacle kind of violence for three or four hours an army equipped with the most formidable of modern weapons, closing in on a half-bombed out city would look infinitely less formidable—toy soldiers in a kindergarten world which the big-image, colorama giants could topple and scatter just by inflating their cheeks and blowing on them.

Even the Big Mushroom, which we’ve miraculously managed to keep from blowing Earth apart for almost a century now, looks fifty times as destructive when you see it on the screen, spiraling skyward as the crowning spectacle of a sound-color, fifty-million-dollar Armageddon.

But remember this. It doesn’t cost anything like that much to put four or five giants from that kind of motion picture on a screen in a Big-Image interrogation room. The cost, in fact, is negligible, because just one scene can be repeated over and over. You’re seated all alone in the middle of what looks like a medieval torture chamber—if you leave out the racks and thumbscrews and iron maidens and just think of such a chamber as a blank-walled, cell-like horror—and on the screen, fifty or a hundred times lifesize, are the lads who have been given the task of cutting you down to size.

You’re still very much a part of the puny world outside the theater you’ve lived in most of your life. You know it, you feel it…you can’t escape from it. When a big screen production has been designed solely to entertain you, you can identify yourself with the giants to some extent. You become a part of the illusion. But how can you identify with four or five brutish looking lads with no resemblance to yourself, with a look on their faces which says they hate your guts and are out for blood and won’t be satisfied until they’ve brain-washed you.

Oh, it looks easy. Resistance, laughing in their faces, should be no problem at all, because you know damn well it’s nothing but an illusion.

But just how long do you think you can go on believing that those Neanderthaler types with five-pronged metal whip-lashes dangling from their wrists aren’t flesh-and-blood tormentors?

All right, you still think it should be easy. All I can say is…just sit for five hours in a Big-Image interrogation room and try staying sane. Go ahead, insist on being granted that privilege. It might be a little difficult to come as close to it as I was right at that moment, flat on my back in a hospital bed with Glacial Stare reminding me just how terrible it could be. But you never know until you try. On Mars bringing that about shouldn’t be too difficult…with Wendel Atomics determined to build up a reputation for ruthlessness to protect its interests in the war it was waging with Endicott Fuel and all of the colonists who were being forced to wildcat in a commodity field so explosive that it could turn them into killers of the dream and blow them apart for good measure.

But let’s go back to the Big-Image interrogation room for a moment. You’re sitting there, staring up at the Neanderthaler-type giants and they’re staring down at you. Their eyes are slitted and they’re stripped to the waist and there is a fine sheen of sweat on their chests. There is nothing trim or athletic looking about them. They’re heavyset, almost muscle-bound, with the outsize, very ugly-looking kind of physical massiveness you see in some wrestlers, but hardly ever in a professional boxer even in the heavyweight class.

“Well, pal!” one of them says, winking at you.

“I have an idea he’d like to high-hat us,” another chimes in, winking also, but at Muscle Bound Number One instead of at you.

“We’ll have to do something about that,” Muscle Bound Number Three insists.

“Oh, we will…we will. But we ought to give him a little time to get better acquainted with us. Maybe we can soften him up a little just by talking to him. What do you say?”

“Sure, why not? You see a guy flat on his face, with his skull bashed in, and you start feeling sorry for him. Right off, that’s bad. It keeps you from really setting to work on him.”

At first you can laugh, almost, because who ever heard of a screen giant stepping out from the screen and slashing you across the chest with a five-pronged metal whiplash? But if you know what’s coming you don’t feel much like laughing, even at first.

Because…it goes on and on and on. It builds up and there’s no way you can shut it out, because they inject a drug just under your eyelids which forces you to keep your eyes open. You can’t close them no matter how hard you try. And you can’t turn your head aside, because you’re strapped to the seat and there’s a clamp at the back of your head that prevents you from moving it.

It goes on and on, and after a while the giants are no longer on the screen, but right in the interrogation room with you. One of them is raising and lowering his arm, bringing the whiplash down on your bare shoulders.… You can feel the thongs cutting into your flesh, and not even screaming will put a stop to it, because you can’t put a stop to an illusion that is ripping your mind apart and letting all of the sanity drain out of you.

It’s the hundred-times-bigger-than-life gimmick that does it, although that slang-neat little word doesn’t begin to do justice to what a Big-Image interrogation can do to you. They’re big, big, BIG, with all the brutishness blown up, and showing on their faces. And they seem to be leaning out from the screen before they emerge from it and you can hear the whiplash swishing through the air and the sound of it is magnified too, and just the whiplash alone seems large enough to rip the hide off a mastodon.

Worst of all, that hundred-times-bigger-than-life illusion doesn’t depend on size alone, as I’ve pointed out. It depends on the over-all magnification of reality that takes place in a big screen spectacle, the disorientation that makes the real world seem to shrivel into insignificance.

It seldom takes longer than five hours to complete the brain-washing. You pass through three stages. At the end of an hour—or two, at most—when the torment becomes almost unbearable you start to hallucinate a little, but you’re still sane enough to answer most of the questions they ask you. Then you become so hopelessly psychotic that your answers can no longer be relied on. But they’re satisfied, they’ve got what they wanted from you when they started the interrogation.

Without wasting any more time they go on to the third stage. They calm you down and “cure” you with the mental-torture equivalent of a prefrontal lobotomy. They do that to make sure you’ll lose the part of your mind that can resent what’s been done to you, and summon enough will power to turn accuser.

And now I was lying flat on my back, unsure of how much strength was left in me, and Glacial Stare was threatening me with that! Not just an hour or two with the barrel-chested lads—on rare occasions they stopped just short of the third stage—but the full, deep-cut treatment.

14

He’d made it plain that he was representing Wendel. But he hadn’t come right out and identified himself, and I had no way of knowing exactly what kind of Wendel agent he was. The worst kind, beyond a doubt. But what I would have liked to know took in more territory than that.

Was he…a replacement? Had he been instructed to step into the shoes of the secret agent the robot had killed in space? If he had, the satisfaction he’d get from killing me would probably exceed the pleasure a run-of-the-mill Wendel police officer would experience.

It would be easier for him to identify with the slain crewman and feel a sense of personal outrage strong enough to make him think of himself as an avenger. The fact that he wasn’t wearing a uniform lent support to that grim possibility. When a man has a strong personal reason for wanting you dead it can make the official reason seem twice as urgent. It could also bring into his face the kind of look that Glacial Stare was still keeping trained on me.

There was only one thing I knew with absolute certainty. Answering his questions would do me no good—would only make the danger greater the instant I stopped talking. I’d be signing my own death warrant with a vengeance if I co-operated with him right there in the hospital room and spared him the trouble of having me bound and gagged and smuggled out of the hospital into a Big-Image interrogation room.

Why make him a present of the only card I was holding? Why be that charitable when…god, how silly could you get? If I’d had my strength or there had been anyone within earshot to dispute his authority if I shouted for help—a one in fifty chance of it, even—I might have been holding at least a Jack or a Queen. But never an Ace, or four of a kind or a Royal Flush. About all I was holding was the joker. In some games the joker can be the highest card in the deck, but not in the kind of game the three of us were playing.

It was the third player who was holding all of the really high cards. He was hovering just behind Glacial Stare, with a shroud with my name embroidered on it draped over his arm. He could see my hand clearly, because he was looking straight at me out of eyes like holes in a skull.

That scythe-and-sickle round is almost unbeatable because of the way Death has of just quietly raising the ante until all hope is gone. Sometimes you’ve no choice but to let him call your bluff, lay your cards face up on the table, and wait for the blow to fall.

Sometimes…but not always. Death is a weird-o who doesn’t really want anyone to live to a crusty old age and that can anger you, and there are no limits to what a certain kind of resentment can do for you. You’ll take desperate chances when you know the sands have just about run out.

I came up out of the bed so fast the electricity my body generated made the sheets crackle. It wasn’t the helplessly weak body I’d thought it. Not at all. When I whipped back my arm I could feel a thrust of power and resilience in my shoulder muscles that amazed me, because it shouldn’t have been there. There was no flabbiness or lack of muscle tone.

I crashed into him before my feet hit the floor, sinking my fist into his mid-section and sending the chair he was sitting in skidding half across the hospital room.

He clung to both arms of the chair, too jolted to straighten up and try to heave himself out of it before I shortened the distance between us by hurling myself directly at him again. I just missed fumbling that crucial follow-up, because my legs were deficient in muscle tone and they almost collapsed under me before I got to him.

I dragged him out of the chair and had him down on the floor and was banging his head against the floor before he could get any kind of grip on me. I wasn’t in the least bit gentle about it. If I’d been banging him around for five or ten minutes without stopping I couldn’t have heightened the look of shock and absolute horror in his eyes.

The best he could do was twist about under me and try desperately to raise himself a little, thrusting his head forward to keep me from bringing it so violently into contact with the floor. He seemed to be trying so hard to get out from under that I decided to help him. I lifted him clean off the floor and slammed him back against the wall—not once, but several times.

I don’t know where my strength came from, but even my legs were doing all right now. They were still the weakest part of me, but they went right on supporting me until I’d finished clouting him with something that was just as good as a sledgehammer—the firm wall itself, completely stationary as it was. If I’d been standing behind it using it as a forward-thrusting shield his skull couldn’t have cracked against it any harder.

I suppose it wasn’t really the hospital room wall I was clouting him with, because, as I say, it was stationary. But when you’re extracting the fangs of a dangerous little reptile who has just threatened you with Big-Image interrogation and know that your strength may give out at any moment cause and effect get swallowed up in an urgency that can distort reality. His face was a confused blur for a moment. But a second or two before all of the expression drained out of it and he slumped jerkily to the floor my vision steadied and I saw that his look of absolute horror had been replaced by the deadliest kind of hatred.

It’s always a little jolting, no matter how you slice it, to know that a man who should be incapable of feeling anything but shock and pain can pass out cold with that kind of look in his eyes.

I’d gone berserk for a moment, but when I have to, when there’s some compelling reason for it, I can cool off fast. Calm down would be a more accurate way of phrasing it, for I knew it would take a long time for the way I felt about Glacial Stare to turn from anger to enlightened scientific detachment. He couldn’t really help being what he was, because what is known as the bastard-pattern gets grooved into the poor unhappy devils who are afflicted with it way back in childhood. They injure themselves more than they injure others, even though what they do to others in the process often doesn’t bear thinking about.

Right at the moment Glacial Stare had injured himself, but not deliberately. I had done most of the injuring for him. But there would be times when he’d punish himself twice as remorselessly, and he’d go on doing it to the end of his days. If there’s a hell on Earth the sadistic bastards occupy it, and it’s unscientific to feel anything but pity for them.

It was equally unscientific for me to feel anything but concern for my own safety right at the moment, because I was still trapped in a hospital room with all of the physical weakness I’d felt a few minutes before creeping back and with no guarantee that if I walked out of the room in a tottering condition I wouldn’t run smack into another Wendel agent.

Quite possibly they had the hospital surrounded and when they saw what I’d done to Glacial Stare they wouldn’t talk with me as long as he had done before I’d belted him unconscious.

They’d either blast me down, cold-bloodedly and on the spot, with one of the compact little hand-guns Doctor Mile-Away had discussed with Joan on the ambulance—how many days, weeks away that ride seemed—or gag and bind me and carry me out on a stretcher.

Glacial Stare himself no longer worried me. He’d be out for as long as it would take me to decide whether it would be better to go staggering out of the hospital room and trust the first person I collided with not to betray me, or flop back on the bed and shout for help from there.

You do crazy things, sometimes, when you’re that uncertain. There wasn’t a chance of his coming to immediately, but just automatically I crouched beside him and rolled one of his eyelids back with my thumb. The glazed pupil that stared sightlessly back at me gave me a jolt, because it could have meant that I’d killed him. I thrust my hand under his shirt and felt around for a heartbeat and found no trace of one. His skin was clammy and very cold.

Then I saw that he was still breathing. His chest rose and fell and there was a sudden, dull thumping where my palm was resting.

All right, that took care of him. He would live to turn vicious again. But it didn’t take care of me. I was still in the worst kind of danger, and sounding off might be the unwisest thing I could do. But what chance would I have otherwise? Someone would have to know or I’d likely as not take all of the wrong risks.

I had to fight off the weakness that was coming back and be ready for anything—even a set-to with another Wendel agent or a half-dozen of them. But I had to have an ally, someone who knew the hospital as well as I knew the lines of my palm. I had to be briefed in advance, or I’d have no way of knowing how good my chances were.

How long could I stay on my feet, despite the weakness, if I decided on a desperate gamble and attempted to get out of the hospital alive? Did any of the doctors have enough authority to oppose Wendel, if I told them who I was and they believed me. Or did Wendel have so much power here they’d have to actually see the silver bird to take risks on my behalf which would bring the entire staff an exceptional courage citation from the Board—if I lived to set the record straight.

And where was the silver bird and my secret-code identification papers? Not on my person. All of my clothes had been removed and I was wearing just a one-piece, in-patient garment with no pockets in it. It stood to reason they’d gone through my clothes before attaching a tag to them and filing them away, on the off-chance I might live to reclaim them. In an emergency case they’d have displayed that much curiosity, at least. It would have been no more than a routine procedure.

Unless—Commander Littlefield had warned them not to tamper with my clothes and to return them to him immediately. No, no—that was crazy. The chances were he’d removed the silver bird and the identification papers from my inner breast pocket before they’d bundled me into the ambulance and they were now safely in his possession. Or perhaps Joan had them. It was all pure guesswork, but I was fairly certain of one thing. They hadn’t found the silver bird or Glacial Stare would never have been permitted—

Hell…why not face it. I couldn’t even be completely sure of that. If Wendel was all-powerful here the doctors’ hands would be tied, no matter how much they knew about me. I’d have to be in robust health and on my feet, with the silver bird gleaming on my shoulder, to overcome that kind of power.

Actually, I didn’t think Commander Littlefield had told them anything. It was the kind of secret he’d guard with his life, unless he’d had reason to suspect that Wendel would send an agent to kill me before I had a chance to tell him whether or not I thought the danger was great enough to justify abandoning all secrecy…immediately and as a simple safety precaution. He’d respect my wishes in the matter, and could certainly be excused for not having had the foresight to take maximum precautions on his own initiative. It could very easily be argued that he should have done so…that he had blundered badly. But I refused to condemn him for keeping the secrecy obligation so firmly in mind that he’d failed to realize precisely how fast and ruthlessly Wendel could move. And even if I’d been ringed about with security precautions Wendel might have succeeded in convincing the hospital staff that the silver bird was a lead counterfeit and Littlefield an anti-Colony conspirator.

A lot of suspicion hovered over the heads of the big sky ship commanders, anyway—a sinister, shadowy aura woven of lies and slander that accompanied them everywhere and greatly curtailed their authority when they attempted to intervene in the affairs of the Colony.

All that passed through my mind as I stood staring down at Glacial Stare and helped me come to a decision. If I lived to get out of the hospital I’d be on my own with a vengeance. But Littlefield was still my best bet I’d be completely alone in totally unfamiliar surroundings, facing a challenge such as no man had ever faced before and survived to tell about it.

I’d have to make my way through the Colony on foot, a stranger in a world I’d had no time to adjust to and get back to the sky ship somehow—even if it meant talking my way into the good graces of criminals and hiding in dark alleys and learning new ways of thinking and acting the hard way—but fast—and resorting to every dodge in the book to keep one jump ahead of the Wendel agents.

There’d be a hue and cry—and they’d be out for my blood. I had no identification papers—nothing. I’d be as naked and vulnerable as the day I was born in more ways than one—except that I’d be a grown man in body and mind with a grown man’s resourcefulness.

I could only hope I’d prove equal to the task and acquit myself well and succeed in silencing the skeptical part of myself that was shaking its head in furious disbelief.

I’d decided to make no attempt to get anyone into the room by sounding off. Much as I needed an ally, the risk would be too great. No one had come rushing in, and the fact that I’d been able to prevent Glacial Stare from uttering a sound by taking him by complete surprise and battering his skull against the wall until he folded was a point in my favor. Not to regard it as a break and take full advantage of it would have been foolish.

Slipping quickly from the room and taking my chances made more sense than waiting around for an ally to come to my assistance, because he might not be an ally at all, but another Wendel agent.

I was deliberately shutting my mind to the greatest danger—the Big One.

You’re deliberately shutting your mind to the Big One, Ralphie boy. Getting back to the sky ship will be tough sledding, every foot of the way, and you’ll have to dodge and weave about and you may end up dead in the darkest of Martian alleys, half blown apart by an atomic hand-gun. But the Big One is getting out of the hospital itself, and you’re afraid to let yourself think about that because you know how heavily the odds will be stacked against you.

You don’t know what the hospital is like—how big it is, even. You don’t know how many corridors there are, or how many alarm bells will start ringing the instant anyone sees you. There may be a dozen nurses to a floor and doctors constantly on the move from the operating rooms to the recovery wards, and a Wendel agent or two on guard at the end of each corridor.

All the exits may be blocked, with Wendel agents aimed with atomic hand-guns just waiting for you to show up running. You don’t even know how far the hospital is from the center of the Colony, only that—just before you blacked out for the last time in the ambulance—you seemed to be quite a distance from the heart of the Colony.

Even if there are no guards at any of the exits and no one tries to stop you how will you be able to find your way back to the spaceport without a compass if the hospital is ten or fifteen miles from the Colony, and all about you is a waste of desert sand and there are no outgoing ambulances standing by to give you a lift.

High up in one of the rooms there’ll be a Wendel agent you’ve belted into insensibility and he’ll be stirring and calling out for help and when they come swarming into the hospital room to lift him up—the nurses and the doctors who can’t help but blanch a little when he reminds them just how powerful the Wendel Combine is—he’ll have only one thing to say to them.

“Get me the Central Police Agency on the tele-communicator.”

You’ll be out in the red desert, fighting your way toward the Colony through a sandstorm perhaps, but ten or twelve minutes after that call goes through you’ll hear a droning overhead and that will be the end of you.

The hell of it was—no man ever needed an ally more desperately. I needed a confederate, right at that moment in the room with me, if only because I couldn’t hope to cheat death for ten minutes running if I ever reached the streets of the Colony without some Colony-type clothes to replace the one-piece, in-patient garment I was wearing. A doctor’s white smock wouldn’t do, and neither would a nurse’s uniform. I didn’t have the right build to pass for a nurse even inside the walls of the hospital, not to mention the craggy cast of my features and the heavy growth of stubble which covered my cheeks.

15

Far back in the twentieth century, when World War II was just coming to a close, the anti-Nazi underground movement had helped quite a few soldiers escape from prison camps disguised as women. It certainly wasn’t a stratagem to be rejected out of hand, when your life was at stake. But somehow my masculine pride was affronted by the thought and I did not take kindly to it.

There had to be a lot of male patient’s clothes hanging somewhere in the hospital, but how was I to get my hands on a complete outfit if I had to leave the hospital like a thief in the night, just one leap ahead of Death in a Wendel police uniform?

Stealth? Would that solve it? If I moved very cautiously at first, putting the thought of what could happen out of my mind, and trying to find a room where clothes were hanging?

No—I couldn’t afford to move too cautiously. I’d have to move fast and boldly, trusting to blind ruck to protect me. But the clothes problem still remained, and unless I could solve it—

She solved it for me. I didn’t know that at first and neither did she—I mean, she had no idea when she came back into the room that any such problem would confront her. All she saw was Glacial Stare lying slumped against the wall, his jaw sagging and the patient she’d left flat on his back a short while before standing in the middle of the room with his in-patient garment twisted grotesquely about his bony, knobby knees and looking one hell of a mess. It’s always been hard for me to understand how a woman can find the angular, bony body of a man attractive, especially when it’s in a state of half-undress. But there’s no explaining the mystery of sex, and I’ll give her this much—she didn’t give me a second glance for a moment. She had eyes only for Glacial Stare. She stood staring down at him with all the blood draining from her face, as if she’d never seen a dead man before or a man as close to death as Glacial Stare seemed to be.

I saw the scream coming just in time. I stepped in front of her and clamped my hand over her mouth, drawing her close to me, and keeping a tight grip on her shoulder to prevent her from breaking away from me and making a dash for the door.

I couldn’t blame her for being scared or feeling, as she obviously did, that I was responsible for the terrible state Glacial Stare was in. And whatever Joan had told her about me…and despite everything she’d told the doctor…she’d been a nurse long enough to know that even a woman who has been married to a man for many years can never be sure he won’t develop some odd, wild quirk of character which will turn him into a murderer overnight.

And that’s even more true of a hospital patient who has been close to death and running a fever and may still be in an irresponsible state, his reason undermined by the suffering he’s undergone.

And she was completely right about one thing. I was entirely responsible for the terrible state Glacial Stare was in. Only…there had been a reason for the violence I had unleashed against him, and I wanted her to hear the full story as quickly as possible, so that she would calm down and become a responsible person again herself.

Hysteria is a woman’s worst enemy…and a man’s too, for that matter. But since it’s ten times as common in women as in men it’s a very special problem which every man should know how to deal with. I was no expert at it, but she helped me by listening to what I had to say in my own defense as if her life depended on it. And when I was through she seemed to agree with me that if someone had put an ether cone over Glacial Stare’s face in his sleep and relieved him of life’s burdens in a painless, merciful way they would have been doing humanity a service.

“It’s not right to feel that way,” she said. “It makes you wonder about yourself when you even think you’d like to see someone who’s that ruthless removed from a world that has too many merciless people in it. But I guess everyone who isn’t that way…thinks about it at times.”

“I did more than think about it,” I said. “But in the main I battered him unconscious just to give myself a one in ten chance of staying alive. The odds against me have shrunk a little, but not much. Unless I can get out of here fast—”

“You can!” she breathed. “I’ll help you. No one will try to stop us, if we make it look as if I was just walking with you to the end of the corridor and back. We get patients right out of bed after minor surgery, to keep them from losing their strength. It’s the best way.”

“Minor surgery! You mean—”

Nurse Cherubin nodded. “They didn’t have to probe to get the dart out. It didn’t go deep into your back. It was the poison that made you so ill. The dart struck a bone and that jammed the poison mechanism. The dart splintered just a little, but not enough poison got into your bloodstream to kill you. But you ran a fever and once or twice I was really frightened, because your pulse started fluttering and you almost stopped breathing.”

“Good God!” I looked at her, wondering. “If I was that close to death how could my strength have come back so fast? I don’t feel too good right now. But I had enough strength when I crashed into him to drag him from the chair, lift him up and slam him back against the wall.”

She nodded. “Even a dying man can do that sometimes, if he’s threatened in a violent enough way and desperately wants to stay alive. But you weren’t that weak, and you’re not going to die. You’ve got more strength right now than you realize. And you’ll get stronger—not weaker. After minor surgery the post-operative shock is usually minor too, and the fever didn’t last long enough to seriously weaken you. The last blood test was good. No poison—not even a millionth of a c.c. You perspired freely, and that helped to save your life.”

“All right,” I said. “That’s good news. Just the fact that you’re the only one who knows what would happen if I don’t get out of here fast would be better news—the best there is. Except that—”

I shook my head and looked past her toward the door. “What good would a walk up the corridor do me if there’s a Wendel agent stationed at the end of it? A doctor might be taken in, but a Wendel agent would wonder why a nurse was helping me to keep my strength up when I could answer questions better flat on my back. He’d come right back into this room with us, to find out what happened.”

“There are no Wendel agents anywhere in the hospital,” she said. “The hospital would have put up a fight if a Wendel police officer had insisted on questioning you as he did—in private. It would have been a losing battle, and we couldn’t have held out for very long. By tomorrow an armed guard would have demanded that you be released in Wendel custody and you can’t run a hospital in the Colony if you defy the Wendel police to that extent.”

I stared at her, amazed. “Then how did he get in here to see me?”

It was then that she exploded the bombshell.

“If the Wendel Combine, with all of its socio-political power, came here in the person of just one man and threatened to make full use of that power if he was not allowed to talk to you in strict privacy…and that man was Henry Wendel himself—”

She shrugged, glancing steadily for a moment at the slumped form of Glacial Stare, with just an uncanny silence hovering over him. No trace now of the power-aura that must have made hundreds of his yes-men turn pale and snap to attention at various times in the past, if the look he’d trained on me was ingrained and habitual with him. And I rather thought it was.

Mr. Big himself! And I’d banged him around without knowing, without even suspecting that I was slamming the Wendel Power Combine back against a hospital-room wall. All the immense height and depth and weight of it, the big atomic transmission lines, the towering black turbines, the boa constrictor coils that snaked in all directions through the center of the Colony. The war, too—the wolf-eat-wolf war that was being waged with Endicott Fuel, and the demoralization that was sounding taps over graves that hadn’t been dug yet but would bear the Wendel trademark.

The lawful authority that the silver bird had conferred on me would have given me the right to act as his executioner then and there. But you can’t solve problems that way and hope to gain by it…because there are always other Mr. Bigs waiting to step into the shoes of the Mr. Big you’ve taken care of in behalf of the common weal, with more cocksureness than you’ve any right to exercise.

When you cut off the head of that kind of boa constrictor and leave the big coils intact the new head may be twice or three times as dangerous.

That he had come to the hospital alone, completely unguarded, would have been hard to believe if I hadn’t remembered that an attempt had been made to blast the sky ship apart in space solely because Wendel wanted me out of the way. I was sure of that now. And if he wanted me dead that bad, safe-guarding his person would probably have seemed of minor importance to him. It could be waived—an inconsequential detail. I had to be questioned and then killed, and he was the best man for the job. He could trust no one else to handle it as well.

The joker was—he had botched it.

There were a lot more questions I wanted to ask Nurse Cherubin but there just wasn’t time for them. We’d wasted four or five minutes already, just discussing the state of my health, and at any moment someone might come through the door who would refuse to let me leave when he saw what I’d done to Wendel.

It wouldn’t have to be a Wendel agent. No doctor who wasn’t keen about committing suicide would have let me go until Wendel came to, and our two stories could be compared. I didn’t have the silver bird to back up my story, and when Wendel came to he’d simply step to a tele-communicator and the hospital would be swarming with Wendel agents before I could hope to win any converts. The fact that he’d come to visit me unguarded didn’t mean he’d placed himself in any real jeopardy…in his book at least. He couldn’t have known I’d knock him out cold, and even if the hospital was located fifteen miles from the Colony it wouldn’t take the Wendel police long to get to him. Ten or twelve minutes, at most.

Perhaps they were already on the way. It stood to reason. He’d hurried himself and arrived ahead of them, but he’d want them to be there as soon as he killed me, to dump my body on a stretcher and carry it out under guard.

When he killed me—God, how easy it was to overlook the most vital things! I hadn’t even searched him. If he had a weapon on him I could certainly use it, for nothing can boost your morale quite so much when your life is at stake as the firm, cool feel of an atomic hand-gun against your palm.

I was starting toward him when Nurse Cherubin said: “Stay here, and keep the door locked until I come back. I’ll tap three times. I’ve got to get you some clothes.”

I nodded, feeling overwhelmingly grateful, tempted to take another minute—precious as every minute was—to tell how wonderful I thought her. She seemed to know without my saying a word, for her wide mouth smiled a little and she was gone.

I stepped to the door and locked it, and then returned across the room and bent over Mr. Big.

I found the weapon but I had to roll him over to get at it, because it was in a holster at his hip. His body was a dead weight, but when I got the weapon free he stirred a little and groaned. I clouted him on the jaw and he stopped groaning. Brutal? You bet it was, but I couldn’t afford to take any chances on his coming to.

What would you have done? If I’d killed him right then and there, the Board would not have censured me. I was sure of that. Not to have done so was perhaps foolish, a weakness in me. I was cutting down my chances of getting as far as the Colony, before a security alert went out, and the Wendel police started after me with instructions to blast me down on sight.

But somehow I couldn’t do it. Not only for the reasons I’ve mentioned…because a new head on the Wendel boa constrictor would have solved nothing…but because it went against the grain. I’d have had a feeling of guilt I never could have completely thrown off. He’d intended to kill me, all right…no doubt of that. But I couldn’t return the compliment in the same coin. It made no sense, perhaps, but that’s the way it was.

The weapon pleased me. It was an atomic hand-gun that had cost a small fortune to construct—intricate, extremely compact, the latest model, the finest, the best. Fortunately I knew a great deal about such weapons, because unusual-type firearms have always fascinated me.

This one I was sure I could aim and fire with accuracy, even though some of the precision gadgetry was new to me. Twenty-five thousand dollars at least that gun had set Henry Wendel back, but what was twenty-five thousand to a man with a fortune of eight or ten billion?

It seemed tragic and a pity that all of that money should have been spent on a weapon that would pass out of his hands into the possession of a man unfriendly to him. But it didn’t sadden me too much and I felt even less sad when I’d unbuckled the holster also, strapped it to my own hip and thrust the hand-gun back into it.

She knocked three times, as she’d promised and came in with some clothes that some poor devil in another room would never live to put on again. She told me as much while I was taking off my one-piece in-patient garment.

“Cancer,” she said. “They’re keeping him under sedation. You think you’re in trouble, that the game is hardly worth the candle, until you see something like that. Then you realize how lucky you are—just to be alive.”

“You don’t have to tell me,” I said. “I’ve often thought along those lines.”

She wasn’t embarrassed when I stood for a moment stark naked before her, as most nurses aren’t. I wasn’t particularly embarrassed either, because right at that moment I had no more sex awareness than a totem pole.

The clothes were a little small for me, but I had a feeling that in the Colony not too much attention was paid to the way clothes fitted you—or failed to fit. In a pioneering society ill-fitting clothes are accepted as an indication that you are a rough-and-tumble sort of guy, know your way around and are, for good measure, an old-timer, with early-settler prestige.

There were two more questions I had to ask her before I became a babe-in-the-woods kind of grown man on Mars, with just the hand-gun and a few highly trained areas of native intelligence to protect me—if I succeeded in getting out of the hospital alive. It was still a very big if, but the questions were just as vital, and were directly tied in with it.

Just how far was the hospital from the Colony? And what was she going to tell Joan to keep her from succumbing to panic when my darling wanted to know what had become of me?

Before we left the room she answered the second question reassuringly. It had been weighing so heavily on my mind I’d been afraid to even let myself bring it right out into the open and face it squarely. Mr. Big hadn’t even mentioned Joan in the ugly little talk I’d had with him, and if she was still somewhere in the hospital I had a feeling he’d have used her nearness as one more way of tightening the thumbscrew.

I’d been right about that, apparently. “She had a talk with Commander Littlefield on the tele-communicator,” Nurse Cherubin said. “He advised her to return to the Mars’ rocket a few hours ago. He wanted to talk to her…said it was urgent…and promised to check on your progress report every half hour. She left in one of the outgoing ambulances. She told me she’d be back just as soon as you regained consciousness. It’s a very short trip in an ambulance. The hospital is only eight miles from the Colony.”

So that answered my first question too, but only in part. If there was just a waste of blowing sand outside it would certainly cut down my chances. But there had to be a firm-packed road for the ambulances to travel over, didn’t there?

“No,” she said, answering me in full a half-minute later, when the door of the hospital room had been firmly closed behind us and we were committed to the big risk and there could be no turning back. She paused an instant to urge me to be cautious, to stagger a little and grip her arm for support and try to look in all respects like a patient taking his first uncertain walk after a minor operation. I didn’t have to worry about looking pale, but when she went on and explained what she’d meant by the “no” relief swept over me and probably marred a little the impression it was important to give anyone who chanced to glance our way.

“There’s no desert to cross,” she said. “It’s all built up. You’ll be passing between high stone walls with massive metal grills set deep in the stone most of the time, with here and there a gap and a few scattered pre-fabs occupied by aereator-system workers and their families.”

So that was it! I knew all about the Martian aerator-system and the big turbines that pumped oxygen out over the Colony. So much oxygen, under such stabilized pressure, that it stayed in equilibrium and didn’t fly off into space even under the light gravity. Even without the aerators there was enough oxygen in the thin Martian atmosphere to enable a man to stay alive for a short period, if he didn’t mind going about with his shoulders bent, gasping for breath and turning blue at intervals. His cheeks, anyway, with the veins on his forehead standing out like whipcords.

The first colonists, as everyone knows, went about with oxygen tanks strapped to their backs and took a whiff or two of the stuff in Earth-atmosphere concentration through a flexible metal tube whenever their lungs started burning. And inside the early pre-fabs, of course, there were miniature aerator systems which made living indoors as comfortable as it was Earthside.

But the big aerator-system had completely eliminated the need—a health hazard-diminishing need at best and never actually mandatory—of the huge glass dome which imaginative science writers in the first three decades of the Space Age had predicted as a must for successful Martian colonization. There are seldom any musts when science advances in seven league boots and you’re right on the scene in person, breathing in a planet’s atmosphere for yourself and finding out that there just happens to be a little more oxygen in it than precision instruments on Earth had led you to anticipate.

It wasn’t a precision instrument of any kind I was needing right at that moment—even to reassure me about my heart beat. I knew exactly how fast it was beating—much too fast. We passed a doctor in a smock so spotless it didn’t seem as if he could have been wearing it for longer than a few minutes. But the look of quick suspicion he trained on us was ageless, the kind of look that comes into the eyes of a trained professional man when he can’t be quite sure that a subordinate is doing the wise thing.

What right had the nurse to take me for a walk along the corridor when I looked that close to caving in? I feared for an instant I was overdoing the act, but when the suspicion faded and he went past us along the corridor I breathed more freely again. We passed a nurse who didn’t even glance at us and another—blonde and pert-nosed—who smiled and nodded, just as if we were old friends. I wondered what she saw in me.

Then we were standing before an elevator at the end of the corridor and the red down light came on…because Nurse Cherubin had pressed the down button…and she was urging me to be cautious for the second time.

“We’re going down three flights to the admitting ward,” she said. She smiled, as if she’d suddenly remembered there’s nothing like a touch of levity to relieve strain, even if it has to be forced. “But don’t let that dishearten you. Patients are discharged from the admitting ward too. It’s not quite as long as this corridor but it will be busier. Patients, nurses—at least three doctors. We’ll just walk right through as if we had every right to be there. Just outside the emergency exit, a few steps further on, there’s a driveway which curves around behind the hospital. Ambulances with accident victims use it, but there’s not likely to be an ambulance standing there. You go down a narrow flight of stairs to get to it. Is that clear?”

I nodded. “What do I do then?”

“You just follow the driveway until it forks and the left turn will take you into the clear-away between the aerators which leads directly to the Colony. You won’t have to pass in front of the hospital at all. Ambulances may pass you before you get to the Colony, but you won’t be stopped and questioned. They’ll think you’re one of the aeration-system workers.”

I had an impulse to give her a hug and tell her I loved her, quite sure that she’d know what I meant, even if I did it inside the elevator where it would have more an aspect of intimacy. You love people who go all out to help you and they don’t even have to be young and beautiful. But when they are there’s an added warmth somehow—

We carried it off better than I’d dared to hope. We descended in the elevator, emerged arm in arm and walked right through the admitting ward without even glancing at the fifteen or twenty people we had to pass to get to the emergency exit she’d mentioned, a third of them in white. No one stopped or questioned us, and we followed the same nurse-helping-patient routine which had proved its worth on the third floor of the hospital.

And then—I did hug and kiss her, just once briefly before I went out through the exit and down the stairs to the driveway. I hoped Joan wouldn’t mind if she ever got to hear about it.

“Goodbye,” I said. “And thank you.”

16

There was no waiting ambulance in the driveway. I descended the stairway, twelve metal steps railed in on both sides, feeling grateful for what she’d said right after I kissed her. “Don’t worry about your wife. If Wendel tries to make us send for her we’ll find a way to roast him over a slow fire until you’re together again. There are three doctors who will put up a stiff fight and I’m going to set to work on all of them. You’ve no idea what a hospital can do with just the right kind of delaying tactics.”

It took me less than two minutes to half-encircle the driveway, take the turn she’d recommended and strike out for the Colony between the towering gray walls of the aerators.

The Big Grayness. I’d seen photographs of that tremendous engineering project in my hell-bent-for-adventure years, when I’d sat at a desk in a schoolroom, and imagined what it would be like to take part in the construction work, standing on a dizzy height with an electronic riveter in my hand, watching blue lights go on and off and sparks fly up into the cool Martian night beneath a wilderness of stars.

The reality was very much as I’d imagined it as a school kid, except that I wasn’t a construction worker looking down over it, a human fly with a man-size job to do, but a guy that kid wouldn’t have recognized, his footsteps echoing on the catwalk at the base of it. I had a giant-size job to do, but how could he have known it would some day turn into anything that big?

It wasn’t even a project anymore—half of it still in the blueprint stage. It was completed and the towering gray walls were firm and solid, and the grills were sending oxygen spiraling out over the Colony without making me feel light-headed at all.

Right at that moment I’d have welcomed a little oxygen intoxication but the aerator-system didn’t work that way. The flow was regulated directly at the source, kept under controlled pressure and diffused outward high up by rotary circulators. As it spread out over the Colony it was drawn down to breathing level by another system of circulators, stationed at intervals about the Colony and extending twenty-five miles out into the surrounding desert.

If you wanted to experience oxygen intoxication you had to strap a tank to your back and breathe the stuff in through a tube in the old way. But no one in his right mind would do that deliberately, for an excess of oxygen can be five-ways dangerous on a planet where what you have to worry about most is over-stimulation.

There were catwalks on both sides of the aerator walls, with a central lane wide enough for vehicles to pass in opposite directions. I kept to the right hand side all the way to the Colony, and it took me about thirty minutes to get there. My strength amazed me. It probably wasn’t quite up to par. But I only had to stop twice to rest and then only for a minute or two.

Two ambulances passed me, their red tail-lights blinking, but the drivers didn’t even turn their heads as the vehicles went droning through the Big Grayness. Up above the sunlight was waning, and turning red, but only a diffuse glow filled that two hundred-foot-high artificial cavern.

Three aerator-system workers, walking shoulder to shoulder, gave me a bad jolt for a moment, for they had the look of Wendel police agents. I encountered them just beyond a break in the cavern wall, where a cluster of pre-fabs with children playing in the yards made five or six acres of stony ground resemble a manufacturing town suburb Earthside.

I should have known better than to be alarmed, because the three men approaching me looked eager and expectant, as if they knew that a few steps more would bring relaxation after toil and the warmth and glow of a family reunion.

But they had the husky build and sharp-angled features of Wendel police officers and I stayed alert until one of them came to a dead halt and looked me over genially. “New on the job, aren’t you, Buster? Don’t remember having run into you before. They keep putting on so many new men it’s hard to be sure.”

“That’s right,” I said. “I live about two miles further on.”

“Well, it isn’t the best job in the world, Buster, as I guess you’ve found out already. You get sucked into a grill sometimes, and breathe nothing but oxygen until you feel like a blue baby they’re trying their best to save, even if they have to fanny-whack him to get the stuff out of his lungs for a week or two afterwards.”

“Don’t discourage him, Pete,” the tallest of the three chided. “You have a cold, cold heart. It doesn’t happen often.”

“You bet it doesn’t…or my wife would have been a widow long before this. Well…good luck, Buster. Be seeing you around…i hope.”

I felt so relieved I didn’t even resent the “Buster.” He was just a big grinning ape who liked to kid the living daylights out of his fellow workers, whenever he thought he could get away with it. No harm in him, and though there might have been times when I’d have been tempted to take a poke at him…i had no such impulse now. I just wanted to be able to look back and see him dwindling in the distance.

I ran into only one other person before the Big Grayness terminated. She was a stout, matronly-looking woman carrying a baby and she nodded and smiled warmly when she saw me staring at the infant, as if she wouldn’t have at all minded if I had been its father.

For an instant there flashed into my mind the nerve-relaxing picture that every normal male has of himself at times—the humble-station husband, big-bosomed wife picture. You’re Mr. Run-of-the-Mill, just a simple guy, working hard at a lathe or feeding processed food tins into a vacuumator. You come home at night with no worries, kick off your shoes and she’s there to make the creature comforts seem important. A good meal on the table, fit for a king with a hearty appetite—do kings ever have that kind of appetite?—children romping all over the house—a round half-dozen upstairs and down—and the kind of night’s sleep you don’t get when you have responsibilities weighing on you. The top-echelon kind that can drive you half out of your mind. It’s there for the taking if you really want it, if you don’t wear a silver bird on your uniform when they add up the score and ask you why in hell you haven’t done better?

It’s not quite an accurate picture, because that kind of guy has worries too—plenty of them. He has to buy shoes for the children and grin and be tolerant when his wife turns shrewish, as every woman with a large family and a big grocery bill is bound to do at times. But still, when you balance the good against the bad, who gets the most out of life—Mr. Run-of-the-Mill or Mr. Big?

Well…however much I might fume about it…i had to be what I was. I could honestly say that I’d never had any driving ambition to be the kind of Mr. Big Wendel was. I just had a kind of inner compulsion to be true to the best that was in me, to preserve my integrity and use whatever wild talents I had to enrich human life and have some fun while doing it. If I couldn’t always have fun, if illness or death or just plain bad luck prevented me from living life to the full and enjoying it…i’d known that when I’d cut the cards, hadn’t I? You have to play whatever cards destiny hands you.

Just before I reached the last quarter mile of the aerator marathon I passed another dwelling section, with more kids scampering about and three or four women standing in the doorways of the pre-fabs. They didn’t look big-bosomy, but slender as willow trees and very beautiful.

I certainly wasn’t running, but it was a marathon in my book, the walking kind where you keep your body held rigid, your arms bent sharply at the elbows. There was only one good thing about it. I didn’t have to worry about out-distancing the other walkers, because it was a one-man marathon.

I came out into the biggest square I’d ever seen. The one opposite the skyport I’d crossed with just as much tension and uncertainty mounting in me an eternity ago on Earth was just about one-fourth as large, give or take a few square yards of shadowy pavement.

In a way, the Big Grayness was still with me, because there were gigantic, interlocking shadows everywhere and although there was nothing but open sky overhead spirals of wind-blown sand were swirling across it, half-blotting out the waning sunlight.

When you’re sure that Death hasn’t played his final trump or even relaxed his vigilance and you could be yanked right back to confront him at any moment a square as big and empty and desolate-looking as that doesn’t give you any support at all.

All right, there was life and movement in it, if you want to call a long line of tractors standing end to end on the far side, one of them snail-active, life and movement.

One of the trucks seemed to be backing up a little and edging out from between the others, but I couldn’t even be sure of that before an ear-splitting blast of sound and a blinding flash of light shattered my last link with the sane universe.

17

I was lifted up and hurled backwards, so violently that if blind luck hadn’t saved me I’d have fractured my skull or felt, ripping through my chest, the beaten-drum agony that sets in right after you’ve shaken hands with a spinal concussion.

I came down heavily, hitting the pavement with a thud. But in falling I went into a kind of half-spin, and landed on my side in a loose-jointed sprawl that just shook me up a little.

I rolled over on my back and stared up in horror. For an instant I was sure that the whole sky had burst into flame. Then the flare dimmed and vanished and I could see that the dust spirals were still there.

I raised myself on one elbow and stared out across the square. The long line of tractors was still there, too. Not one of the vehicles had been blown sky high. And as if that wasn’t enough of a miracle the snail-paced one had turned about and was heading straight in my direction.

It wasn’t moving at a snail’s pace now. It was coming directly at me from mid-way in the square, rumbling and clattering as it came, its heavy treads so ponderously in motion that the pavement under me was beginning to vibrate.

Nearer it came and nearer, swaying a little, and if the driver had been some crazy killer bent on crushing me to death under the treads he couldn’t have gone about it more expertly, for he was maneuvering the vehicle just enough to make sure that it would pass directly over me.

How could I doubt it? It had veered slightly and swung back into a straight-line course again, and if I’d tried to drag myself out of its path there was room enough for it to veer again before I could hope to save myself.

It takes several seconds to recover from a scare like that, even when the danger evaporates right before your eyes. All at once the tractor was veering again, but far enough to the left to make me feel certain that I wouldn’t be flattened to a pancake if I stayed where I was. But you can feel certain about something like that and go right on remembering what big tractors have done at various times in the past to men unfortunate enough to be caught off guard when there’s a killer in the driver’s seat.

The vehicle came to a jolting, grinding halt a few yards to the left of me, and the driver swung himself out of the glass-shielded front seat, descended lightly to the ground, and was grabbing me by the arm and helping me to rise before I could get a really good look at him.

He’d descended from the tractor lightly because he was that kind of a man—just about the most fragile-looking guy I’d ever seen. He was lean to the point of emaciation, with gaunt cheeks and sparse white hair that was fluffed out like thistledown by the wind that was blowing across the square.

He had deepset brown eyes, very sharp and piercing and they were glowing now with a kind of feverish brightness, as if his agitation matched my own or had reached a peak that was just a trifle higher. There was nothing surprising about that, if he knew exactly what had happened and it was as bad as I feared it might be.

Despite his frailness, he had the features of a strong-willed man, the chin and mouth firm, the nose pinched a little at the nostrils, as if stubbornness in adversity had become an ingrained habit with him. I had the feeling I’d seen that face before, but I couldn’t remember where or under what circumstances.

I was certainly seeing it now under the most nerve-shattering of all circumstances and would not be likely to forget it a second time.

“How are you, all right?” he asked, his eyes searching my face as if he was far from sure I knew myself and the way I looked would tell him more than just a guess on my part. “That explosion was miles from here,” he went on breathlessly, “but it lifted the tractor right off the ground, treads and all, for a second. I had the craziest kind of floating sensation until it settled down and kept right on in this direction. I increased the speed, because I sort of felt that a fast-moving machine would have a better chance of not overturning.”

I stared at him half-dazedly, feeling like a pawn on a chessboard that had tilted just far enough to make me wonder if it might not still be precariously poised and go crashing at any moment. And since I couldn’t see the players I didn’t know what the rules of that particular game were or how far they had been abrogated.

“How do you feel?” he asked.

His solicitude amazed me, because if what he’d just said was true—and I had no reason to doubt it—he should have been more shaken up than I was and he seemed to have something on his mind that was making him stare straight past me toward the Big Grayness.

I was staring in the opposite direction. “I’m all right,” I assured him. “Just feel…a little dizzy.” I gestured toward the tractors on the far side of the square. “What’s over there? Did the explosion come from there?”

He shook his head. “No. I told you it was miles from here, in the direction of the spaceport. That’s the Endicott Administration Building, fuel conveyor sections and two-thirds of the distributing units. The tractors are all owned by Endicott. I backed this one out from between them and had just about gotten it turned around when the blast hit me.”

“I know,” I said. “I saw you. I wondered why only one tractor—”

That was as far as I got, because what hit me then was more jolting than any blast could have been, and it wasn’t even physical. Just one word he’d let drop with a delayed-action fuse attached to it made me snap my head back and look at him in desperation. He had no way of knowing what was in my mind, but you don’t think of that when you want someone to do you a favor that’s of life-and-death importance to you.

I wanted him to withdraw that one word, to pretend at least that he hadn’t said it. It didn’t have to be true, he could have been just guessing.

The word was “spaceport.” It couldn’t matter that much to him, surely. It wasn’t his wife but mine who was at the spaceport, and if he was wrong about where the explosion had taken place it would cost him nothing to be merciful and admit that he was far from sure about it.

But before I could hope to get such an admission out of him he sounded a knell to the granting of favors by saying: “Wendel technicians are activating Endicott fuel cylinders in different sections of the Colony. They’re trying to turn the Colonists against Endicott by committing mass murder. The cylinders will only destroy an area of a few square miles, because they’re not in the multiple-megaton, nuclear warhead category. We never thought they’d be turned into bombs.”

Then came the knell. “We were warned about this, by a Colonist who’s on his way to the spaceport with one of the cylinders. Or he may be there already. He just spoke to us briefly on the tele-communicator. That explosion came from the direction of the spaceport, but it may not be the one we were warned about. They may be trying to dismantle another cylinder at the spaceport right now. They won’t succeed, because only an Endicott technician would know how to go about it.”

“Do you know?”

He nodded. “Yes…i can dismantle it. I can get to the spaceport in about fifteen minutes, if I drive between the aerators and turn right just before I get to the hospital. The clear-away from that point on will take me through a section of the Colony and then straight out across the desert to the spaceport. The Colonist who talked with us made a serious mistake, but it wasn’t his fault. He had no way of knowing that it takes a fuel cylinder at least forty-five minutes to build up to critical mass after it’s been activated. In some cases—fifty or fifty-five minutes.”

He paused an instant, then went on quickly. “He should have brought it here. We could have dismantled it in time. But he was afraid it would kill several thousand people if it went off anywhere near his home, or in this section of the Colony. He also over-estimated the area that would be demolished by the blast. When he talked to us he was two-thirds of the way to the spaceport and if we’d told him to turn back then and bring the cylinder here the risks would have been too great. We had to let him go on. I said they can’t dismantle it at the spaceport. But there’s a slim chance they can…because there may be an Endicott man there or someone who knows enough about Endicott cylinders to make a hit-or-miss try. With luck, he may just possibly succeed. But I doubt it.”

“You doubt it? Good God—”

“I doubt it very much. That’s why it’s so important for me to get there as fast as I can. It’s my responsibility—and I refuse to share it with anyone. There are times when a man must face death alone.”

“Who are you?” I asked.

“A man with much to answer for, the opposite of a good man. I’m Kenneth H. Hillard, President of the Endicott Combine.”

It stunned me for a moment, because it was as big a bombshell as Nurse Cherubin had exploded back at the hospital when she’d nodded toward a slumped caricature of a man and told me exactly who I’d been banging around.

But it didn’t stun me for long, because even the showdown miracle of two Mr. Big’s taking matters into their own hands when all of the chips were down—Hillard was also a giant despite his frailness and a better man than Wendel could ever hope to be—even the wonder and strangeness of it was of less concern to me at that moment than the danger that Joan was in.

I told him then. “I’m going with you,” I said. “I’ve every right. If I’m cutting in on your yen to face death alone…that’s just too bad. I’m going with you, or you don’t go at all. I pack quite a wallop, and you may as well know it. Wendel does.”

“Your wife. I see.…”

“I hope to Christ you do—”

“Get in!” he said sharply. “I may need you. I’m not a well man. My heart—”

We climbed in and he tugged at the brakes, releasing them and the big vehicle lumbered into motion.

It was already pointed in the right direction, and in less than half a minute—the second time within fifteen minutes for me—we were deep in the Big Grayness, with the walls of the aerators looming up on both sides of us.

Up above all of the sunlight had dwindled to the vanishing point and the gigantic artificial cavern was lighted now along its entire length by cold light lamps embedded in the walls at fifty-foot intervals. The solid, three-dimensional world outside our minds, whatever segment of reality we happen to be passing through, never looks quite the same to any two individuals. It is always, in a sense, a special creation, colored and altered by the human imagination.

To me the cold light lamps were chillingly like enormous eyes, keeping us under constant scrutiny. The scrutiny of giants, standing motionless in shadows, with just their luminous eye-sockets visible. It was as if any moment, promoted by some wild whim, the giant forms might take a violent dislike to us, might raise mace-like metal fists and smash the tractor, very much as a robot giant had smashed a Wendel agent in space, with a fiendishly mechanical rancor.

But to the frail man at my side the aerator walls may have been chilling in a quite different way, if he was giving the Big Grayness any thought at all.

Apparently he wasn’t, because when his voice rose above the rumble of the treads he didn’t once mention the aerators or the pale blue light that was glimmering on the hood of the tractor.

“It’s the beginning of the end—either one way or the other,” he shouted. “Either Wendel will be destroyed by the Colonists themselves for committing mass murder, or we’ll go down under a juggernaut that can’t be stopped. Sometimes you can’t smash absolute evil, when it’s backed up by absolute power.”

I raised my voice as high as he’d done, because I wanted to be sure he’d hear me. “It will always be stopped in the end, I think—if you have enough moral courage. That’s a dynamic in itself, the most formidable of all weapons. All history confirms it.”

“I wish I could believe that!” he shouted back. “But I’m not so sure. And you have to fight with reasonably clean hands. Endicott is almost as guilty as Wendel, except that it would rather be destroyed than resort to mass murder.”

“That’s two-thirds of the right,” I shouted back. “That’s where the biggest dividing line comes. Every tyranny in human history that has resorted to mass murder has gone down into everlasting night and darkness and very quickly. The few that survived to die a natural death drew back at that point. The great, utterly ruthless destroyers always perish.”

We both fell silent then, because there are times when the whole of the future and everything that human anger and courage can do to safeguard the future and keep it from destruction seems less important than coming to grips with an immediate, life-and-death emergency. When you do that you’re going all out to safeguard the future as well, but you don’t think of it in that way. Just getting to the spaceport in time—Oh, God, yes, in time to be at least a little ahead of time, so that Hillard would have steady nerves and could dismantle the cylinder with cautious precision, with no zero-count demoralization to make his fingers stray from the right wires—just getting there and finishing the job before the spaceport could become a translucent cone of fire was a million times as important to me, right at that moment, as the Wendel-Endicott war.

A million times as important, Ralphie boy. Don’t be ashamed of feeling that way. If the spaceport blows up, and there’s no Joan any more, and the universe comes to an end for you, you’ve no sure guarantee that the actors who will step into your shoes and occupy the center of the stage will make any better job of it than you’ve been doing. So it will be a loss, however you slice it, because the death of two lovers is always a loss. You fight better when you’ve been given that best of all head starts.

18

We stayed silent until the tractor had rumbled past eight or ten of the breaks in the Big Grayness. They were shrouded in dusk-light now, with no kids playing in the front yards of the housing area pre-fabs. Then, just as we were turning into the clear-away that branched off from the one I’d taken on leaving the hospital, Hillard shouted: “We’ve got to get over to the left! There’s an ambulance right up ahead!”

I heard the siren before I saw it, a banshee-like wail cutting through the twilight, unnerving in its shrillness. It took a moment or two for its winking red headlights to come sweeping toward us and if Hillard had seen them before that it had to mean he had exceptionally sharp eyesight.

It careened past without slowing, almost grazing the hood of the tractor. I thought for an instant, when the banshee wail became shrill again, that it was still coming from the same ambulance. Then I saw four more furiously blinking headlights coming out of the dusk ahead of us, and another ambulance swept past, as swiftly as the first had done, but missing us by a wider margin.

A third followed it at a distance of less than a hundred feet, its siren at such full blast that it no longer sounded like a banshee wail.

You can be gripped by a dread that’s practically breath-stopping and still manage to shout, if your only other choice is to die inwardly.

It may have been more of a groan than a shout. My voice sounded ragged and it almost broke. “Could those ambulances be coming from the spaceport? Do you think—”

He cut me off. I probably couldn’t have gone on anyway.

“They could never have gotten out there and back so fast!” he shouted. “We’ll be passing through a section of the Colony in about two more minutes. It’s closer to the hospital, so it’s just possible they’ve picked up a few victims at the fringe of the blast area who didn’t have our luck.”

“The fallout area must be pretty wide!” I shouted back. “Wherever the explosion took place—”

He cut me off again. “No fallout—or very little. What there is is gone within four or five minutes. Safe to go in after that, for the residue wouldn’t mutate a fruitfly. Colonists don’t know that…closely guarded Endicott trade secret. Reason we let the Colonists store them. A fuel cylinder can be converted into a nuclear bomb, all right, but it will be the cleanest midget bomb ever built. Take fifteen or twenty of them to blow up even a third of the Colony. But that doesn’t mean that one couldn’t blow up the spaceport, or seriously injure hundreds of people throughout the fringe area. The ground tremor alone could do that. I told you what it did to this tractor. Has the force of a small earthquake, except that the tremors are three times as erratic. They can just shake you up a little, or break every bone in your body. Depends on where you happen to be standing. It follows a zigzagging pattern, so it can pass right by you.”

All that didn’t come in one shout, but I’m recording it that way because I didn’t interrupt him, and though he must have stopped once or twice to take a deep breath, and keep a sharp lookout for another ambulance I wasn’t aware of any break in what he was saying. He was trying his best to make it crystal clear, if only to calm me down a little.

Some of it was reassuring, but not what he’d said about the spaceport. A clean bomb with little or no fallout can leave you just as dead if you’re unfortunate enough to be blown up by it.

You see things sometimes you can’t bring yourself to talk about, even to close friends when the horror has receded a little and you know it can’t come back in a physical way to torment you.

So I’m going to draw the veil over most of what we saw when we passed through about five square miles of the Colony, before the clear-away broadened out to twice its previous width and we headed out across the desert toward the spaceport.

We couldn’t be sure, even then, just where the explosion had taken place, because it was only the fringe area we passed through. It hadn’t been laid waste by the blast and there were only five or six demolished buildings. If the big square which stretched between the Endicott plant and the aerators had been a built-up section instead of a square the property damage might have been just as great and would not have seemed ruinous.

But there was one other difference. The Endicott square had been unpopulated, with just one tractor moving out from the long line of tractors on the far side. The five miles of Colony we passed through had been the opposite of unpopulated. Its streets and squares and playgrounds and vehicle-parking areas had been thronged with people.

They were still thronged with people but some of them were lying prone, and others were leaning dazedly against the walls of buildings which had remained for the most part undamaged and still others, who no longer seemed to be in a state of shock, were bending over the slumped bodies of the grievously injured and the dying, doing their best to console them and ease their pain.

I’m drawing the veil on the rest of it—the blood and the screaming—because it was pretty awful, and what possible purpose would be served if I described it? How could it benefit anyone? It would serve as a reminder of how cruel life can be at times, how uncertain and terrible. We know that, don’t we? So…to hell with it…i say that in a very reverent way, with awe and respect, and not profanely. But it’s best to consign it where it belongs, to hell, and not let it paralyze all action and make you give up when there are still sunsets, and the laughter of children, and the happiness of lovers, and ten thousand other things that are worth fighting to preserve.

It took us less than eight minutes to arrive at the spaceport, dusty from head to foot, with sand choking our lungs and gasping a little from oxygen shortage, because when there’s a stiff wind blowing over the desert the aerators don’t function at peak efficiency.

I didn’t know there was anything wrong until the tractor began to zigzag a little, about three hundred feet from the massive, steel-mesh gates of the spaceport.

He had strength enough left to tug at the brakes and bring the tractor to a grinding halt before he slumped against me, with a strangled sob that chilled me to the core of my being. It chilled me and stunned me and frightened me, because I’d never thought that anything like that could happen.

He was frail, all right, and had the look of a man whose health had been steadily failing…no doubt partly brought about by the battle he’d been waging with Wendel. And he’d mentioned something about heart-trouble—

The trouble was, I hadn’t taken all that too seriously, because you never think that someone who has displayed extraordinary energy and firmness of will is going to collapse right when you need him most.

I swung about and looked at him, and his pallor gave me an even worse jolt than the way he’d moaned and sagged heavily against me.

He gripped my arm and tried to speak, but the words wouldn’t come. His lips moved soundlessly for a moment and then—they stopped moving. His body stopped moving too. All at once, as if a clock had stopped ticking inside of him, and Time had stopped ticking for him forever just because his life and the clock were bound up together, intricate parts of the same mechanism, and if the clock stopped there was no way his life could be prolonged.

I knew he was dead before I reached out and touched him. I could tell by the dull, unseeing glaze which had over-spread his pupils and the terrible stillness which had come upon him. A stillness and a rigidity that made it impossible for me to doubt what the alarm bells were telling me as well. They had started ringing again, but this time it wasn’t so much an alarm they were sounding as a dirge.

It was impossible for me to doubt, but I still had to make sure, as he would have wanted me to do, by feeling for a heartbeat that wasn’t there and satisfying myself in other ways. It was an obligation I couldn’t evade and had no intention of evading.

It took me less than a minute and a half—a time limit I kept firmly in mind—to fulfill that obligation. Then I descended from the tractor and headed for the steel-mesh gates of the spaceport on the run.

19

“Ralph!” she cried, running to meet me as I walked into the big, steel-walled enclosure where Commander Littlefield and eight or ten or possibly twelve men in gray skyport-technician uniforms were working over a long metal cylinder that Death had started working on well ahead of them. He was the expert and they were just amateurs doing the best they could to beat the time limit he had set for them. With a grim chuckle, no doubt, because, as I said once before, Death is a weird-o.

Joan’s arms went around my shoulders and she crushed herself against me, and kissed me hard on the mouth. Then she let go of me and moved quickly to one side, so that Commander Littlefield could talk to me without interference or a moment’s delay. She seemed to know without waiting for me to say a word how important that was.

One look at Littlefield’s white face told me all I really wanted to know. But I decided that if he could fill in the details for me in half a minute I could risk setting another time-limit in my mind and clocking him second by second by second as he talked.

“A nurse at the hospital got word to us you’d be doing your best to get back here, Ralph,” he said. “The Wendel police have orders to blast you down on sight, but now that you’re here I can protect you—or you can protect yourself. I’ve got your papers and insignia. Right now that’s not so urgent as what’s happening inside this Endicott fuel cylinder. It’s been triggered to build up to critical mass by a Wendel agent. A Colonist brought it here and we’ve been trying to dismantle it. But we don’t know just how to go about it and we don’t dare experiment. We’ve taken a few small risks, naturally. We’ve had to. But we’re getting nowhere, and what looks like a small risk could turn out to be a big one. We don’t even know how much time we’ve got!”

He spoke almost calmly, without raising his voice, but there was nothing calm about the way he looked. The time limit I’d set to clock him by had run out and now it was my turn. I was going to have to ask him to do something that might seem only a little less terrible to him than being blown apart by a nuclear explosion.

But it would have to be done—and fast.

I clocked myself as I talked, allowing myself about forty seconds. “Those cylinders build up to critical mass when they’ve been tampered with and triggered to explode in about forty-five minutes,” I said. “Don’t ask me how I know, because I haven’t time to explain. I do know—you can take my word for it. I knew the cylinder was here, and I was hoping you’d find a way—”

I caught myself up. “Never mind that now. Just listen. I don’t know how long it took the Colonist to bring it here or how long you’ve been working over it. But it hasn’t exploded yet. So there’s still a chance we can get it out into space before it blows up!”

He looked at me as if he thought I’d gone suddenly quite mad. I finished what I had to say fast, because I knew it would take eight or ten more minutes for him to recover from his first shock, and issue orders, and have the cylinder carried on board his big sky ship—his pride and glory—and for the sky ship to rise from its launching pad and be blown apart in space.

He’d have to get all of the crewmen off as well and set the robot controls and if there were any passengers still on board—I refused to let myself think about that.

“It may be too late,” I went on. “We may all be as good as dead right now. But we’ve got to try. Do you understand? You’ve got to get that cylinder on the sky ship, set the controls and send it out into space. It must be done at once. Every second counts.”

He recovered from the shock faster than I’d dared to hope. The grin that hovered for the barest instant on his lips startled me until I realized it was a very special kind of grin—the kind of grin only a man who is about to part with something that means just about as much to him as his own life would be capable of…if he had a non-eradicable streak of wry humor deep in his nature as well.

“Ralph, I’ve always looked upon people who put property above human life as just about the lowest worms that crawl. But for a minute—God pity me—I almost felt that way. It’s just that—it’s fifty billion dollars worth of big, tremendous sky ship and that cylinder is so small—”

“It won’t seem small if it blows up and takes the spaceport with it,” I said. “It won’t seem small at all.”

“I know, Ralph. I said once I was old enough to be your father and I still think I am. But if you put me across your knee and gave me the drubbing a dumb six-year old would rate I’d have no right to complain. I should have thought of it myself.”

“We don’t always think of things that stand out like sore thumbs when we’re under tremendous stress,” I said. “Don’t blame yourself for being human, Commander.”

“I hope it won’t take me much longer than that to finish the job, Ralph,” he said. “I’ll do my best. There are only three crewmen on board and all of the passengers have been cleared.”

He swung about without another word and went striding out of the enclosure.

I would have followed him if Joan hadn’t picked that moment to come back into my arms. It held me up for a minute or two.

* * * *

The incandescent burst of flame that makes a big sky ship’s ascent into space seem for an instant almost cataclysmic, as if the sky itself had been ripped apart in some terrible and incomprehensible way, came exactly eight minutes, thirty-two seconds later.

I timed it myself, not mentally this time but with a watch in my hand. I stood with Joan at my side a hundred feet from the launching pad, watching the cylinder disappear into the sky. It was the cylinder and not the big rocket itself that I seemed to see as I stared upward, as if the sky ship had turned to glass and the deadly thing it was carrying out into space was beginning to stir and vibrate in a quite ghastly way, with its contours enlarged to sky-spanning dimensions under the glass.

To my inward vision it was bigger than the ship itself and it was hard to understand how even a huge sky ship could be carrying anything so enormous and death-freighted when a short while before it had been discharging passengers in the bright Martian sunlight who had given no thought to Death…only what life had in store for them on a new world.

My fingers were clenched around the watch and I wasn’t even aware that Commander Littlefield had joined me until he tapped me on the arm.

“We can see and hear it when it happens—all of it, just as if we were taking it out into space ourselves. Every tele-communicator on the sky ship is turned on and tuned to big screen wave length. If there was a crewman on board he could talk to us and we could talk to him.”

“Thank God there isn’t a living man on board,” I breathed.

“Yes,” he said, nodding. “Yes, we can be thankful for that. And for our lives as well. There are four big screens here, but we may as well watch the one in the port clearance building. It’s the largest of the four—if size makes any difference when about all we’ll see when the cylinder explodes is a blinding flare. We won’t see the bulkheads collapsing, or a robot cyb crumbling, that’s for sure. It will happen too fast.”

“What good will it do us to watch at all?” Joan asked. “I’d rather stay right here. We’ll see the flash, won’t we?”

“You’ll see it, all right,” Littlefield said, grimly. “It will look like an exploding star for about ten seconds. My sky ship—an exploding star. I never thought it would ever come to that.”

He started to turn away, thinking, no doubt, that I’d fallen in with Joan’s idea of passing up a view of it on the screen. But I hadn’t at all and when he started walking toward the port clearance building I was right at his side. So was Joan, because she was that kind of a wife. There were a lot of questions I wanted to ask him—questions of the utmost urgency, such as how much progress he’d made in finding out who had shot the dart at me from high up on the spiral and just what news he’d received from the hospital, when Nurse Cherubin had informed him I was trying to get back to the spaceport, that went beyond that bare statement—I was sure she’d briefed him in detail—and…well, a lot of questions. But this hardly seemed the right time to ask him, because his inner torment was too great.

I could sympathize and understand, because I knew what a hell he was passing through. Nothing could prevent the destruction of his sky ship, but he had to see it with his own eyes, no matter how much agony it caused him.

He didn’t have to do any explaining to the Port Clearance men, because they’d either assumed he’d pick out their screen well in advance of our arrival or their own curiosity had proved overmastering.

The screen was lighted and the sound tracks whirring when we walked into the projection room. It was just like walking into the sky ship’s chart room and staring across it at the four robot giants who had followed both emergency instructions in space and the routine kind and were doing their best to perform a man’s job now. A mechanical best, which meant, of course, that they had no way of knowing how close they were to annihilation. They would be blown apart without pain and had nothing to lose that a man would have valued. But they were not men, and who can be sure that mechanical brains and the thought processes which take place in them are not faintly tinged with emotional coloration?

Probably not…for it would have been something that laboratory tests have never succeeded in establishing. A cybernetic brain can become fatigued, yes—but it is not really a human fatigue. It is on the metal-fatigue level. But knowing all that, a chill would have gone through me if the robots had been able to talk to us.

The image on the screen was three-dimensional, and in full color and the illusion that we were standing right in the sky ship’s chart room was so startling that Joan whispered: “I wish we’d stayed outside. It’s terrifying. Almost as if…we could be blown up ourselves when the blast comes.”

“No danger of that,” I said, squeezing her hand reassuringly. “You’d better sit down.”

There were ten hollow-tubed metal chairs in the room, but all except one were occupied. I reached out and drew it toward her, but she shook her head. “No, I’ll stand, Ralph. I may want to leave in a minute.”

One of the port clearance lads got up and offered Commander Littlefield his chair, assuming I’d take the one that Joan had refused. But we were both of one mind about standing. Only Littlefield sat down, as if the burden of torment which rested upon him had added ten years to his age.

No sound at all came from the screen for a full minute. Then a scream broke the stillness. It was so totally unexpected, so horrifying, that two of the port clearance men leapt to their feet, sending their chairs spinning backwards. Commander Littlefield was on his feet too, but he hadn’t leapt up. He’d arisen jerkily, his hands pressed to his temples, as if to shut out the sound or keep his head from bursting.

We saw her then. She had come into the chart room and was staring directly at us, and just knowing she could see us as clearly as we could see her made her plight seem even more terrible. To me, at least, because it wasn’t hard to imagine what was passing through her mind.

I’m alone on the ship…just as I feared. They’ve sent me out alone into space. If Commander Littlefield isn’t on board…if he’s in that room watching me with all those other men…what else can it mean?

She’d be ten times as sure of it if she’d been inside the port clearance projection room and knew what it looked like, and I was almost certain she had, because there was an unmistakable look of recognition in her eyes, and the Port Clearance building was where they took passengers for questioning.

20

She looked as she always had, with her hair piled up high on her head and the full lips drowsily sensuous, and her breasts thrusting firmly upward against the tight-clinging fabric that ensheathed them just below the curve of her throat, and the soft whiteness of her upper bosom.

Only her eyes had changed. Stark terror looked out of them and suddenly as she stared at us she pressed one hand to her throat and swayed back against the bulkhead on the right side of the doorway. It brought her up short. But I was sure that if it hadn’t she’d have gone right on retreating backwards until she either started screaming again or crumpled to the floor in a dead faint.

She neither screamed again nor fainted, for Commander Littlefield gave her no time to succumb to utter panic. But if his voice hadn’t rung out as sharply as it did—at the precise moment that it did—the outcome might have been quite different.

“Why did you return to the ship?” he shouted. “Why did you do such a reckless thing? Was it because we suspected you? Was it because you knew we were about to place you under arrest? Answer me! Your life may depend on it.”

“Yes…i went back,” she said. “But only to get…something I didn’t want you to find. I was pretty sure I’d hidden it where you’d never think of searching, but when you started suspecting me—”

“I see. A damaging piece of evidence? Something of the sort?”

She nodded. “Yes…yes…a paper. It would have proven my guilt.”

“You admit your guilt then? We can still save you, but not if you go on lying, clinging to the story you told us. Every part of that is false.”

“No, no!” She almost screamed the words. “Most of what I told you was true. My brother did work for Wendel and…i didn’t know that he had died. I just found that out a few hours ago. I came to Mars to help him, to save him if I could. I was a Wendel agent, but only because I had no choice. They threatened to kill my brother…used that as a weapon to make me spy for them and do—uglier things.”

Her voice rose pleadingly. “Bring the ship back. Don’t send me out alone into space. You can’t be that cruel—”

“We can’t bring the ship back. But we can save you. Just tell the truth. Wendel knew that the Board was sending someone to Mars to investigate the combine, a man who couldn’t be bribed to shut his eyes to what he was sure to see here. You had instructions to kill that man before he could set foot on Mars. Wendel wanted him killed because they knew the Board was backing him to the hilt and he had been given enough authority to make him the most dangerous kind of adversary. Wendel also knew that you were the most resourceful and intelligent agent in their employ.

“You proved that, to my satisfaction, when you did what no one has ever done before—outwitted a Mars’ rocket security alert system by concealing yourself in a cybernetic robot. I’m sure it didn’t take Wendel long to discover that you are as intelligent as you are beautiful—both valuable assets in a secret agent. Priceless assets. The time is very short. Am I right so far?”

“Yes…it’s all true. Please…help me!”

“You tried to kill, without success, the man the Board was sending to Mars to investigate and crack down on both Wendel and Endicott. You tried to kill him three times.”

“No, only once. I’m telling you the truth. I didn’t fire that dart. There were other Wendel agents on board. One tried to blow up the ship. And there were other Wendel agents in New Chicago, with instructions to assassinate him if they could.”

“I see. But you did try to kill him in New Chicago. Why did you come to Mars, if you didn’t intend to try again?”

“I told you. I didn’t lie when I said I came to save my brother, that I wanted to see Wendel exposed…forced to face criminal charges. When I tried to stab him in the New Chicago Underground and failed…i realized what Wendel had done to me, what a vicious person I’d become. I decided I couldn’t go on being that kind of person any longer, not even to save my brother. I took the only other way I could think of to keep Wendel from killing my brother. I am a resourceful woman, I am intelligent…why should I deny it? I might have made the Wendel Combine think twice about killing him. But now my brother’s dead and—”

Her shoulders sagged and a look of torment came into her eyes.

“All right. One thing more. When that Wendel agent surprised you in the chart room and the man you’d tried to kill saved you…why were you so frightened? Why did the agent go into such a rage? You must have thought he intended to kill you. And if you were both Wendel agents—”

“I wasn’t supposed to be on the ship. He knew it, and must have been pretty sure I’d turned traitor. He knew all about my brother. There wasn’t much he didn’t know about me, because he was a very high-placed agent. He knew I had every reason to hate Wendel. And I think he was also the kind of man who turns sadistic when he has a woman completely at his mercy.”

She saw me then. I could tell by the way her eyes widened and then fastened on me, staring straight past Littlefield as if he was no longer her only accuser.

But she was mistaken if she thought I had any desire to accuse her. I was furious with Littlefield, sickened by his relentless attack on her and if I hadn’t been stunned for a moment, caught up in a kind of hypnotic spell by the suddenness of that attack and the startling candor she’d displayed in replying to it I’d have interfered sooner.

What she’d told him was evidence. It would help me to smash Wendel in a legal way, which is always the best way, when backed up as it would have to be by armed, completely lawful authority. All I’d have to do would be to put what she’d just said into one package and what Wendel agents had done to an Endicott fuel cylinder in a densely populated section of the Colony in another and bring the two packages together and there would take place, on Earth and on Mars, the kind of explosion that would blow the Wendel Combine into the rubbish bin of history. The Wendel-Endicott war would be over, and the Colonists would have a new birth of freedom.

A death-bed confession has the strongest kind of legal validity and when a woman thinks she has been sent out into space on an unmanned rocket perhaps to die…she is not likely to lie about anything. An unforeseeable accident—a blind fluke of circumstance—had dealt Littlefield a winning hand and he had taken full advantage of it. He had done it to help me, God pity him…for I hated him for it.

Every question he’d asked her and every reply she’d taken a minute or two to make explicit had cut down her chances of staying on this side of eternity.

She was looking straight at me.

“Ralph!” she said. “I don’t want to die alone in space! What are they trying to do to me?”

It was as much as I could take.

I grabbed Littlefield by the shoulders and swung him about and demanded. “You said you could save her. How? Were you lying? If you were…i’ll kill you.”

“Let go of me, Ralph,” he said. “A chance like that would never come again. I had to risk it.”

“All right—you’ve risked it. Now…can you save her? That’s all I want to know. Nothing else matters.”

“Yes…i think so. If the cylinder doesn’t blow up for three or four more minutes. If she puts on a vacuum suit and goes out into space and we’re able to pick her up tomorrow or the next day—”

“Then for God’s sake tell her. You’ll have to tell her about the cylinder, or she won’t know how great the danger is. She may take her time about it.”

“All right,” he said. “I’ll take care of it.”

He was talking to her in the big screen when Joan and I walked out of the port clearance building.

We walked out because, if the explosion had come while he was talking, just watching it would have killed me. No worse death can come to a man than the one that can take place inwardly, for it can shrivel and blacken his soul and leave him a burnt-out shell of a man until he dies physically. And Joan could sense that, and wanted to get me out of there as quickly as possible.

The explosion came a full ten minutes later, which meant that even Hillard hadn’t known how variable the critical mass buildup could be in at least a few of the Endicott cylinders.

We were standing in the open, two hundred feet from the nearest rocket launching pad, when we saw it—Littlefield’s exploding star high up in the night sky. The brightness lasted less than ten seconds.

21

You can be holding high cards, practically unbeatable, in the final deal of a poker game and still not be sure of winning. You have to call your opponent’s hand before he gets the idea that just by drawing out a gun and shooting you dead he can gather up all the chips, and cash them in by threatening further violence. Assuming, of course, that he’s capable of that kind of violence and is in all respects the opposite of an honest gambler.

You can be even less sure of winning when it isn’t a game of cards you’re on the point of winning, but a duel to the death with a ruthless power combine and time is running out on you.

I had all the evidence I needed now to smash the Wendel Combine. But it had to be built up by legal experts, and stripped down as well, until the documentation had the sinewy, blockbusting persuasiveness of a champion’s punch.

It would have to stir popular fury on Earth on a very wide scale, be made so convincing that no one could possibly mistake it for a trumped-up shakedown in another grab for power. And that would take time—two or three weeks, at least.

And right at the moment Wendel was almost certainly out of the hospital and back in the Wendel plant, getting ready to close in on the skyport with his army of goons.

The problem that confronted me can be summarized in just one sentence. I had to get into my uniform, pin the silver bird into place and complete just two visits, or Wendel would dig my grave wide and deep.

Not just my own grave, of course—but when you fight to stay alive you remember all of the things you want to protect and stay alive for. There are men, I suppose, who are chiefly concerned with survival on a more primitive plane, but I think I can honestly say I’ve never been that kind of man.

My first visit was going to be to one hell of a live man—Joseph Sherwood. Sherwood had undisputed custody, by authority of the Board, of every nuclear weapon in the Colony with enough large-scale destructive potential to make open defiance of that authority an extremely risky undertaking.

I was now his superior in rank, but I had no intention of making changes in his command or questioning the wisdom of the decisions he was more than qualified to make. The measures he had taken to protect the Colony I regarded as absolutely correct and he knew far more about nuclear armaments than I did. There were limits to what those measures could accomplish, because a large-scale thermonuclear weapon can destroy thousands of innocent victims, and the Wendel Combine knew precisely how far it could go without bringing down the thunder.

All I had to do was convince Wendel that it had now gone too far and that the thunder was very close. Basically it would be quite a simple undertaking. I would simply have to walk into the Wendel plant and talk to him in a calm way, at the risk of being blown apart.

I was standing before a full-length mirror in a small, windowless room which the skyport officials had assured me wasn’t wired for sound. It sure had privacy. Not that I’d need it while I was putting on my uniform, because I’d be wearing it when I emerged and they would all see the silver bird. And Joan was the only woman in the building…which made privacy a little absurd on more than one count.

It was just that—well, when you stand before a mirror and pin that kind of insignia on a quite ordinary, regulation-fit uniform it does something to the wearer which changes the way he looks in a quite startling way.

I guess I just didn’t want anyone to see me observing the change in a mirror and grin, which would have forced me to do something I just hadn’t time for—take a sock at him. I suppose there’s a little garden-variety vanity in me—show me a man who claims he hasn’t a trace of it in his nature and I’ll show you a first-class liar—but right at the moment I wouldn’t have been lying if I’d said that nothing could have been further from my mind than preening myself on the way I looked.

But it was just as well I had privacy, because I had to stand before the mirror for three full minutes to get accustomed to the change, and feel relaxed and casual about it.

I’d forgotten to tell Commander Littlefield I’d be needing a tractor, warmed up and ready to roll, and that the place to find it waiting for me would be right outside the gate. The one I’d left there with a dead man sitting in it didn’t have quite the trim, speedy look of three or four I’d noticed standing about the skyport and if he could get me a lighter one so much the better.

Joan was taking care of it for me. She came back just as I was turning from the mirror, with the silver bird gleaming on my right shoulder. She’d seen me wearing it before, of course, so she wasn’t startled. But the tall, stoop-shouldered man with graying temples who had followed her into the room had enough startlement in his eyes to have made her a present of half of it and still made the grade in that respect.

He kept staring at the silver bird in tight-lipped silence until I darted a questioning glance at Joan and he seemed to realize he was putting a strain on my patience.

“My name’s John Lynton,” he said, hesitantly. “Commander Littlefield told me you’ll be needing a tractor. I have one, and I’ll be glad to drive you, sir. I brought the Endicott fuel cylinder to the skyport, so I naturally feel pretty strongly about everything that’s happened. There’s just one thing I’d like to see happen to Wendel. But I guess I don’t have to spell it out for you, sir.”

I stared at him in amazement. I’d taken it for granted that the Colonist who had delivered the cylinder was no longer at the skyport, because no one had pointed him out to me, and I’d been under too much of a strain to question Littlefield about it.

“Well…that takes care of one thing that puzzled me,” I said. “I couldn’t understand why you’d just deliver the cylinder and clear out. But people here seem to feel they’re privileged to do pretty much as they please at times. So it didn’t puzzle me too much.”

“I was in the Administration Building, talking to a sky ship officer, when you were in the shed, sir,” he explained. “But I saw you come into the projection room—”

“All right,” I said. “We haven’t time to discuss it and it’s not important anyway. I know how to drive a tractor, but I’m not an expert at it. If you’ve got your own tractor you’ll know what to do if it breaks down. That’s an advantage I’d be a fool to pass up. But if you’re going with me, you may as well know we’ll be in danger the instant we pass through the gate. The Wendel agents have orders to blast me down on sight.”

I shouldn’t have said that, for it made Joan bite down hard on her underlip and say in a kind of talking-to-herself whisper, “An armed escort would cut down the danger. Littlefield could—”

I shook my head. “We’d be certain to be stopped then and an open clash with Wendel agents in the streets of the Colony would wrap it up—but good. There’s no way of packaging it that would please Wendel more.”

The instant Lynton realized, just from the way I was looking at Joan, that I wanted to be alone with her he said: “I’d better check over the tractor once more. I’ll drive it through the gate, draw in to the side of the clear-away and keep a sharp eye on the incoming traffic—if any. I’ll keep the motor running, sir.”

The instant the door closed behind him Joan was in my arms. For the most part all we did was embrace without saying a word, which is one way of saying as much as you possibly can in the space of half a minute.

I was a little afraid that Joan would break down and burst into tears, which would have spoiled everything. I could see the tears trembling on the fringes of her eyelids, and decided right then and there that she was one hell of a precious woman. And when you’re parting with something very precious you can break your heart in two if you let yourself do too much thinking.

So I just kissed her very firmly on the mouth for the tenth time, swung about and walked out of that small, windowless room without looking back to see if she was still doing her best to keep the tears from flowing.

In the ambulance on the way to the hospital I’d seen more of the Colony than I could have covered on foot in half a day. Jogging through the streets again with Lynton doing the driving I could have taken in even more of it in a sight-seeing way. I could have—but I didn’t.

I saw no reason to make myself conspicuous, and somehow removing the insignia from my shoulder so soon after I’d pinned it on would have gone against the grain. And it wasn’t just my uniform or the silver bird which would have made me a sitting duck to a Wendel agent stationed anywhere along the way with my description dear and sharp in his mind. It was a safe bet we’d pass at least a dozen of the Combine’s goons, strutting about in their private police uniforms, so I took care to remain in a seated position in the back of the tractor, with my head well below sight-seeing level.

This time I didn’t look, wonder or black out at intervals. I kept a tight grip on my nerves and refused to even let myself think what an impasse I’d be facing if my talk with Arms Custodian Sherwood didn’t bring the kind of results I was counting on.

It’s hard to maintain just one rigid mental stance when you’re keeping a great many hard-to-control emotions bottled up in your mind with a clamped-down safety valve. But I didn’t have to maintain the stance for long, because twenty minutes after we left the skyport the tractor rumbled to a halt before a massive, fortress-like building which stood a considerable distance from the buildings on both sides of it and was protected in its isolation by steel walls, pacing guards and a well-guarded stockpile of thermonuclear weapons.

No Wendel agent would have risked blasting away at me within three miles of that stronghold—unless he was tired of living and didn’t want to see another Martian sunrise. It made me feel secure enough to stand up and descend from the tractor without making a production out of it, as if I was two-thirds convinced I’d be blown apart before I could advance twenty feet.

I neither hurried nor wasted time, just stood calmly by the tractor until I was satisfied no one who had seen us drive up—I was quite sure we were under long-range binocular scrutiny—would come striding out of the forest to question us at gunpoint. Then I nodded to Lynton, and walked straight toward the big gray building. I’d told him not to move from his seat until I came out, so there was no need to caution him further.

I can’t remember at exactly what point in my approach to the high-walled gate the silver bird became a thunder-bird, or exactly how each of the three guards looked when they first caught sight of it.

I was too startled just by the way the oldest of the three, who must have been a tow-headed twelve-year-old when the first wearer of the insignia walked the streets of the Colony, stared at me, snapped to attention and grounded the heavy weapon he’d been holding slantwise across his chest with a thud. The other two guards quickly followed suit. Quite possibly they had merely taken their cue from him and didn’t want to risk an official reprimand. But they certainly put on a convincing performance, as if what they feared most was a full-dress court martial. If I’d dropped down out of the sky in a golden chariot and was Apollo, maybe, or the Aztec Sun God, I couldn’t have been accorded more deference.

A moment later the high steel gate opened and shut with a clang and I was on the inside, with more guards on both sides of me. I’d paused a moment, of course, to explain to the elderly guard who had first saluted me, just why I was there and whom I wanted to see.

I had an escort of six guards as I walked to the end of the first-floor corridor, and ascended a short flight of stairs and they continued to escort all the way to the door of Sherwood’s office.

Some men can be jolted almost speechless by an unexpected visit and recover their composure so rapidly they seem to have retained it from the beginning. It was that way with Sherwood. He was a big man in his early forties, with close-cropped reddish hair and handsome features.

He was sparing of words, but everything he told me was in direct answer to my questions and a man who can confine himself to just giving you the information you need without wasting words is likely to be the kind of man you can depend on in an emergency.

His final answer was the clincher. It came at the end of a fifteen-minute conversation.

“We can do it if we’ve no other choice,” he said.

“All right,” I said. “I want you to tell Wendel exactly what you’ve just told me, on a two-way televisual hookup. I’ll be at the Wendel plant in fifteen minutes, and I’m sure I can persuade him to talk to you on the screen, right after I’ve laid it on the line for him.

“If,” I added “—and it’s a very big if—I can get in to see him without ending up dead. His goons have orders to blast me down on sight.”

He looked at me steadily for a moment, with a concerned tightening of his lips. Then he leaned back and some of the strain left his face.

“Have any of his goons ever seen you with that insignia on your shoulder?” he asked.

It was a good question and it confirmed the opinion I’d formed of him.

“No, they haven’t,” I said. “But it doesn’t alter the possibility I’ll be blasted down before I can get in to see Wendel. Remember—the Wendel Combine has taken the big gamble and is waging an undeclared, but all out war. This insignia makes me Target Number One. If I took it off before entering the plant his goons would probably recognize me anyway—too quickly for me to save myself by shouting at them and trying to make them see that Wendel would want them to withhold their fire. I may not have a chance to do any explaining, because they may recognize me just from the description that’s been furnished them.”

Sherwood nodded. “Yes…it would be foolish to deny you won’t be exposing yourself to danger. And you’ll have to be wearing the insignia when you confront Wendel. But I’ve a feeling that Wendel’s goons will take you straight to him. I could be mistaken, of course. But somehow I can’t picture them firing pointblank at Target Number One without prior authorization. They’d be sticking out their necks with a vengeance, because their instructions to blast you on sight were issued before you pinned that bird on your shoulder.”

“I hope you’re right,” I said. “But goons are funny people.”

“I’ll be right here at my desk when the screen lights up,” he said. “Don’t worry too much. I’ll handle my end of it with very careful timing.…”

* * * *

Fifteen minutes later my tractor rumbled to a halt for the second time, directly in front of the Wendel plant.

Like the Endicott plant, it faced a big square and there were no pedestrians in sight on the side we parked on.

“This time I’m going with you,” Lynton said, very firmly.

So he was going with me! All right, it was an obligation I owed him, and I couldn’t pull rank on him, because he was a civilian and it wouldn’t have done the least bit of good. Moreover, he’d gotten over being dazzled by the silver bird, if it had ever really dazzled him, which I doubted. He was a too tough-fibered, independent, non-authority conscious kind of guy. You find them in every rugged, pioneering society—guys who will stand up in a public meeting and tell a governmental big shot that the speech he’s just delivered has a phony ring to it and he’d be well advised to try again.

I descended from the tractor a little more cautiously this time, keeping my eye on the ground-floor windows of the plant and wondering how long it would take me to cross from the car to the building’s wide main entrance and if the steel-mesh blinds on the windows might not be a cover-up for nuclear weapons pointed straight in our direction.

But actually, despite the uneasiness which we both felt, we crossed from the tractor to the plant without hurrying and with our shoulders held straight.

There were two guards in Wendel private police uniforms with nuclear hand-guns clamped to their hips standing just inside the entrance and the instant we came into view their hands darted to the holstered weapons and their eyes took on a steely glint.

Then—both guards did a swift double take. They didn’t stiffen to attention the way the guards at the gate of the nuclear fortress had done, but something happened to their faces which made them seem to be wearing frozen masks. Only their eyes remained alive, alert, the steely glint replaced by a look of stunned incredulity.

I spoke sharply, without giving them time to reach a decision on their own initiative which might have had tragic consequences, for you can never tell what desperate, completely unjustified measures a badly jolted man will take it into his head to resort to.

“I’m here to see Wendel,” I said. “Nobody else will do. I guess I don’t have to tell you that this is an order. You’d be very foolish not to unbar that gate, for I have the authority to take you into custody if you prevent me from entering the plant. You may be just guards, but that will not prevent the Colonization Board from imprisoning you on a treason charge.”

Their eyes never left the insignia while they were swinging open the big, iron-barred entrance gate for me. It was set well back from the street, with enough walled-in space in front of it to accommodate a dozen bloody corpses. I had an idea they would have tried to make use of it in that way, if I’d attempted to force my way past them with an armed escort and hadn’t been wearing the silver bird.

The strain and uncertainty eased a little once we were fairly sure we wouldn’t be blasted down without warning. It didn’t take long for that near-assurance to harden into a conviction, for what happened after the big gate clanged shut behind us was almost a repeat of what had taken place in the nuclear fortress.

More armed Wendel police guards fell into step on both sides of us, with much the same look on their faces the two at the entrance had worn ten seconds after their eyes had rested on the silver bird.

Just one small incident took place which made it a little unlike the reception which had been accorded me when I’d asked to see Sherwood. We were held up at the end of a branching corridor while one of the guards went into a small, blank-walled room and buzzed Wendel on an interplant communicator, announcing our arrival.

We didn’t know that until later, because he was careful to shut the door of the room before he spoke into the communicator. When he came out there was a hardness around his eyes, a look of grim satisfaction that should have warned me that we were in danger. But you don’t always attach as much weight as you should to a quick change of expression on the face of a man whose job requires him to resort to brutal violence two or three times a week. The face of such a man can harden just from habit.

Because it was the kind of mistake it was easy to make and the other guards were keeping their hostility under wraps we didn’t know or even suspect that we were walking straight into a trap until we were almost at the door of Wendel’s office on the second floor of the plant.

If you’re the head of a big power combine, and shrewd, as Wendel unquestionably was, and there’s a threat to your survival coming straight toward you along an echoing corridor and you want to be sure in advance he’ll be a broken man when you talk with him in strict privacy, with the chips scattered widely and the game almost at an end—you’ll either take care of it yourself, or assign just one man you can trust to do the job for you.

Not a dozen men—or half a dozen—but just one. It’s more efficient that way, more certain, the right way to go about it.

I had no way of knowing that, of course, no way of looking through a wall at Wendel standing motionless or possibly seated in a chair, his eyes gleaming triumphantly, as we approached the door of his office, with just one guard walking a few paces behind us.

Except that—deep in my mind the alarm bells were ringing again. They were ringing, all right, but very, very faintly and I don’t know to this day what made me turn my head and look behind me just as he was whipping out the heavy metal thong.

I caught only the barest glimpse of the thong gleaming in the corridor light. But even if he’d kept it concealed for a few seconds longer his face would have given him away. His eyes were blazing with a savage enmity, and he started for me the instant he realized that I had been forewarned.

I gripped Lynton by the arm and fell back against the wall, tugging him around so that he was far enough behind me to give me a chance to grapple with Hard Eyes head-on, with complete freedom of movement.

He made the mistake of coming at me too fast. It might not have been a mistake if he hadn’t been so reckless with the thong, trying to lash me across the chest with it before he was sure of his balance. The sheer weight of the weapon carried him forward, straight past me, and it went swishing through the air without hitting anything.

I made a grab for his wrist and before he could recover his balance I was twisting it relentlessly and slamming my fist against the side of his head. He sank to his knees and I kept right on hammering away at him, hitting him first on the right temple and then on the left and not even stopping to take the thong away from him.

There was no need for me to relieve him of the thong, for he flattened out on the floor still holding on to it and passed out cold. It seemed only reasonable and just to let him keep it as a souvenir.

I was out of breath and feeling a little dizzy, because when you hit anyone as hard as I’d hit Hard Eyes, not caring much whether I killed him or not, it takes a minute or two to recover. I still hadn’t quite gotten my breath back when the door of Wendel’s office slammed open and Wendel himself stood there, staring down at the guard with a look of consternation on his face.

I became a little alarmed when I saw that Lynton had moved out from the wall and was making straight for him with his arm drawn back. Hell—that’s an understatement. I became very much alarmed, because the one thing I didn’t want was to have Wendel belted unconscious and laid out on the floor at the guard’s side before I could have a talk with him.

I got between them just in time, and I grabbed Wendel by the shoulders and hurled him back into his office and when he staggered a little and almost fell I grabbed hold of him for the second time, and slammed him down in the chair in front of his big, metal-topped desk.

He looked up at me for a moment with a killing rage in his eyes, but I didn’t give him a chance to get his breath back. For the barest instant, though, if he had been quick enough, he might have succeeded in getting to his feet and lashing out at me, for I saw something on the opposite side of the room that seemed almost too good to be true, and I took three full seconds out to stare at it.

It was a big tele-communicator screen—just the kind of screen I had been sure I’d find somewhere in the plant, but hardly in Wendel’s private office. The fact that Sherwood had one in his office was not quite so surprising, for Sherwood’s custodianship of thermonuclear weapons had made him more communication-conscious.

I’d counted on being able to persuade Wendel to accompany me to wherever the plant’s screen happened to be located, after I’d had a serious talk with him. But since he hadn’t wanted me to have a talk with him until he’d done his best to get me killed or crippled for life, and I would now have to keep him boxed up in his office by force while we conducted the talk, having the screen so accessible was one hell of a lucky break.

“Shut the door,” I told Lynton. “And lock it.”

I waited until Lynton had complied, my hands on Wendel’s shoulders with so fierce a clamp-hold that he gave up trying to rise.

“You’ll never get out of here alive!” he choked. “If you think—”

“Don’t press your luck, Wendel,” I said, warningly. “I might be tempted to break your neck.”

“That insignia you’re wearing doesn’t mean a thing now, Graham. Don’t you understand? You couldn’t command a fly to crawl over a bread crumb. The Wendel Combine is taking over the Colony.”

“Not a fly, Wendel,” I said. “The Wendel Combine. A big boa constrictor has nothing in common with a fly and I’m not interested in bread crumbs. And this will surprise you. You’re going to do the commanding. You’re going to command the boa constrictor to start disgorging—every kill it’s ever swallowed. It’s going to flatten itself out until it’s just a mass of cold mottled skin, which the Board will know how to deal with.”

“Who’s going to make me?”

“I am,” I said. “You have just ten minutes to make up your mind. You either turn over all of the Combine’s nuclear weapons to the Board, break the back of the Wendel police force by arresting all of its officers and placing yourself under house arrest and order every Wendel employee to cooperate with the Board or—Joseph Sherwood will vaporize the plant with a thermonuclear bomb. The rocket will be guided by remote control and will hover directly above the plant until the bomb has been dropped. Only the plant will be destroyed. There will be no zone of spreading radio-active contamination.”

All of the color drained from Wendel’s face, leaving it ashen. “You must be mad!” he gasped. “You’d die too.”

“I’m aware of that,” I said. “We’ll all be vaporized together. But it isn’t too bad a way to die, Wendel. You feel no pain, never know—”

“Do you expect me to take that threat seriously?” he breathed.

“I’m afraid I do,” I said. I gestured toward the tele-communicator. “Sherwood will tell you how serious it is. He’s waiting to talk to you. Suppose we turn that screen on and listen to what he has to say. I’m sure you know how to get the right wave-length. The Wendel spy network would hardly fail to keep you informed when Sherwood changes the code frequencies.”

“You said ten minutes,” Wendel was breathing harshly now and the veins on his forehead were thick blue cords. “You’d have to let Sherwood know when to drop the bomb. You haven’t been in communication with him since you arrived here. Suppose I refuse to dial? That’s a very intricate, highly specialized communicator. You couldn’t operate it.”

That made me change my mind about letting him do the dialing. I was pretty sure I’d experience no difficulty in getting in contact with Sherwood and I didn’t want to give Wendel a chance to make the communicator even more specialized by ripping put some of the wiring.

I turned to Lynton and indicated by tapping Wendel forcibly on the shoulder that I was about to relinquish my hold on the Combine’s difficult president, and would he kindly take my place behind the chair.

“Don’t let him move,” I cautioned, when we’d changed places. “Keep a tight grip on his shoulders.”

“Don’t worry,” Lynton said. “If he moves an inch I’ll do what you said might not be a bad idea—break his neck.”

It didn’t take me long to discover that Wendel had lied about the communicator, which meant, of course, that he had been hoping I’d give him a chance to do a quick job of sabotage on the wiring.

It was just a run-of-the-mill, two-way televisual communicator, with nothing specialized about it.

There was a humming sound for a few seconds right after I’d finished dialing and it gave me a chance to scrutinize Wendel’s face to see how he was taking it.

He was terrified, all right. But his lips were still set in defiant lines and I was sure that if he could have gotten a grip on my throat right at that moment getting his fingers unlocked wouldn’t have been easy.

I thought that when Sherwood’s image appeared on the screen there would be just one minute of hard-to-live-through uncertainty—that he’d back up what I’d told Wendel with his hand on the rocket release button and look straight at me, as if awaiting a signal I had no intention of giving.

But I suddenly realized I didn’t know just how it was going to be. Would Wendel stay defiant right up to the end, would he defeat me through sheer stubbornness, even though he was mortally terrified?

But there was one thing I did know. For the first time, as I waited for Sherwood’s image to appear on the screen, I knew with absolute certainty, beyond any possibility of doubt, that I could never go through with it.

The rocket had to be prepared and ready—the nuclear deterrent had to be a reality—or I could never have carried the bluff through with the kind of confidence that just the knowledge that you’re holding the highest cards in the deck can give you.

I had to feel that I just might give the signal.

But vaporizing the plant would have cost the lives of thirty thousand people and not more than a fourth of them were vicious criminals. I just couldn’t see myself ordering a nuclear bomb to be dropped on more than twenty thousand completely innocent Wendel plant engineers and laboratory technicians.

Perhaps I shouldn’t have felt that way, because if the Wendel Combine took over the Colony three or four times that number of innocent people would perish, or sink into degradation and become completely enslaved. But I did feel that way and—well, I wouldn’t have to live with what I’d done, because I’d be killed by the blast. But I didn’t want that on my conscience even as a dead man.

I couldn’t go through with it, but had I ever really intended to? It didn’t mean I couldn’t win, didn’t change what I’d come to do. If I could carry my bluff through without flinching, right up to the zero-count instant, there was a very good chance that Wendel would crack. A very good chance still.

I had the highest cards in the deck and was only handicapped in one way. If the zero-count instant came and Wendel didn’t crack I couldn’t play them.

I’ve never really believed in miracles. But if you’re holding what you think are the highest cards, and something happens to your hand you never dreamed could happen—if you look and see you’ve got a card that’s even higher, just slipped in between the others as a gift…well, that’s pretty close to a miracle, isn’t it?

I thought when Sherwood’s image appeared on the screen he’d be sitting alone behind his desk, with his thumb on the rocket-release button. But he wasn’t alone and when I saw who was with him I almost stopped breathing.…

Joan was with him and she was looking straight at me out of the screen.

“Don’t do it, Ralph!” she pleaded. “Oh, God, no—”

Then I saw that she was staring past me and without turning I knew that she was appealing to Wendel with the same look of pleading desperation in her eyes. “If he gives the signal his command will be obeyed. And he’ll do it unless you stop him! When you’ve lived with a man in the intimacy of marriage—yes, that’s important and I have to say it—you know him better than anyone else. You know what he’s capable of. He’ll give the signal unless you do as he says, because the insignia he’s wearing gives him no choice. If you don’t stop him now…you’ll die with him!”

I turned then and stared straight at Wendel. I’d never seen a man sag before in quite the way he did. All of the life seemed to go out of his eyes. His defiance gave way to a look of utter hopelessness, of abject surrender, and he sank so low in his chair that he seemed on the verge of slumping to the floor, despite Lynton’s grip on his shoulders.

His voice, when he spoke, scarcely rose above a whisper. “All right, Graham,” he said. “You win.”

As I turned back to the screen and saw the look of overwhelming relief and gratefulness in Joan’s eyes I couldn’t help wondering how close she had been to being right. Had the insignia really given me any choice? If Wendel had stayed defiant and refused to crack—would I have gone through with it? How much does any man know about himself?

I’d probably never know the answer.

In the days that followed every one of the Wendel agents were rounded up and returned to Earth to stand trial. I never did find out the identity of the agent who had shot the dart at me from high up on the spiral or the one who had sent a little mechanical killer in my direction by the shores of Lake Michigan in New Chicago.

It didn’t worry me at all, because I was sure that both of those delightful characters were among the agents who had been rounded up in the mopping up operations.

Oh, yes—they rescued her with her hair in disarray and no longer standing high up on her head. Three days later, drifting through empty space about three hundred thousand miles from Mars. She’s in prison now and will have to answer charges. But I intend to go all out in the plea I’ll make in her defense when she comes up for trial.

Some judges are enlightened and merciful and others are harsh tyrants, but with the backing of the Board I’m not too worried about the outcome. If it goes against us, I’ll take it to the highest court in the land, and the backing of the Board carries plenty of weight there too.

Eventually I forgave Commander Littlefield.

“I’m a hard man, Ralph,” he said, standing in the starlight outside the Port Administration Section with a crumpled sheet of paper in his hand, right after he’d received assurances from Earth he’d be placed in command of a new sky ship. “I did what I did because I am what I am. I knew that her life hung in the balance, that every word we exchanged increased the danger. But when I weighed that against the future of the Colony—I felt I had no choice. I knew what a full confession would mean to us.”

I never saw Nurse Cherubin again. She married her doctor and they were honeymoon passengers on the next scheduled Earth trip, which took place while I was busy making sure that the whole Wendel Combine would come apart at the seams. It was a little like watching a volcanic explosion and keeping the lava flow channeled with the full weight of the Board’s authority.

Joan and I have become Martian Colony residents for the duration. I mean by that there will always be new battles to be fought in a war that will never end…as long as Man stays a part of the universe. There’s something embattled about him that you don’t find in any other species. Maybe it’s good and maybe it’s bad, but it helps to explain why he keeps building for the future, He never knows—and just not knowing makes him want to build as sturdily as he can.

You never prize anything so much as when you feel you’re about to lose it. So you fight to preserve it, and when you’ve done that you’ve built up enough excess energy to want to make a stab at something better. And when that’s threatened you’ll fight again and so on until the final curtain.

It’s just the way things are.

THE THREE FACES OF TIME

Originally published in 1969.

PRELUDE

It came sweeping down from high in the sky, huge and flat and triangular, and looking not unlike a wedge of wild geese winging their way southward.

Autumn sportsmen far below, bobbing about in rubber boats on the salt estuaries that fringed the coastline, thought for a moment that the painted ducks they had been intent on bagging were about to be replaced by a rarer prize, as they heard a faint, honking noise as it swept across the marshes at an elevation of two hundred feet.

Rifles came up, and here and there, where the ground was firm, hunting dogs bounded forward in keen anticipation. A few went plunging into the silt of the marshes, or swam between bullrushes to the crackle of premature rifle fire.

But the flying wedge kept on and on, ignoring the plastic decoys scattered across the shining water and catching the sunlight in blinding flashes.

And suddenly the sun emerged from behind a cloud and shone full on it, altering its three-cornered shape and revealing it for what it was—an enormous, silvery circular disk, moving with great speed across the sky.

CHAPTER ONE

“George, something is moving around in the garden,” Helen Wentworth said, tugging at her husband’s arm and awakening him from a pleasant sleep of fifteen minutes duration. “It’s making a thrashing sound. It can’t be a skunk. When I opened the window and looked out, all of the shrubery was moving, from the front porch to Mrs. Jackson’s washlines.”

Wentworth opened his eyes and looked at her. Her hair wabs in curlers, and she had smeared cold cream on her face, which shone in the moonlight that was streaming into the room from the window which she had just thrown open.

She was trembling a little and he reached out quickly and drew her close to him. Somehow she had never seemed quite so beautiful.

He started kissing her hair and lips and eyes, but she took firm hold of his wrists and forced him to release her.

“George, I’m frightened,” she said. “Perhaps I shouldn’t be, but if there’s a man out there…”

“Now, now, take it easy,” Wentworth said, raising himself on one elbow. “You know how often bears come down from the mountain and nose around, looking for something to nibble on. Or it could be a deer…or just a gust of wind stirring the shrubbery.”

“There’s not a breath of air stirring,” Helen Wentworth said, positively. “It would have to be a man, or a terribly big animal. When was the last time we saw a bear? Three years ago, wasn’t it? And it was just a cub.”

“There are plenty of grown bears around,” Wentworth said. “If it will make you feel any better, I’ll go down to the garden and have a look. Where did you hang my dressing gown?”

“It’s in the hall closet. But please, darling…I don’t want you to go outside. If it’s a man and he sees you…”

“He’ll probably disappear fast,” Wentworth said, reassuringly. “There’s nothing a burglar fears more than a property owner with a gun. I have the right to shoot to kill and burglars are seldom that suicidal.”

“But you haven’t a gun. You’ve never wanted to have one about the house. And if he’s armed you’ll be taking a terrible risk. I won’t let you do it.”

“I’m not afraid, darling,” Wentworth said. “And that counts in my favor. I’ll make him think I have a gun. Just stay right where you are, and don’t worry.”

Before his wife could protest further, Wentworth was out of the room and striding down the hall to the clothes closet. He snatched his dressing gown, shrugged into it, and descended the stairs to the living room, making a gun-shaped bulge in the garment with his tightly clenched fists. He crossed quickly to the kitchen and slipped quietly out into the garden, letting the screen door swing shut behind him, but taking care to leave it unlatched.

There was not much light, the moon was veiled by fleecy clouds. He could just make out the outlines of the hedge which separated Mrs. Jackson’s cottage from his own, and the vast, forested bulk of Thunder Mountain looming up in the near distance.

He cursed himself for not having thought to bring along a flashlight. It would have made a more realistic simulated pistol than the bulge made by his fist in his dressing gown; and he could have used it to send spirals of light boring into the shrubbery and keep a dangerous intruder at bay by half-blinding him. If the intruder were a bear, a flashlight would have been invaluable.

He stood very still for a moment, listening, straining his ears to catch the slightest stir of movement. The foliage did not appear to be in motion. There were no rustling sounds at all—the wind that had been blowing all afternoon had died down before nightfall and the air now seemed almost stagnant.

After a moment, he did hear the small sounds of the night—the chirp of a solitary cricket, the faint scurrying to and fro of some small animal, probably a rodent, and the murmur of the narrow, winding brook that passed under a wooden footbridge eighty feet to the right of his property.

He remained just outside the kitchen door for two minutes, then began to advance cautiously into the garden. He moved in the direction of the hedge beyond which Mrs. Jackson customarily hung out her wash on weekdays. The wash was an eyesore which he had always tried not to resent, for Mrs. Jackson was pathetically gnarled and aged, and the soul of kindness.

He stopped only once, when a twig was crushed by his heel and crackled like a tiny pistol shot. Small animals seldom make loud cracklings and he realized that it would have been a dead giveaway if an intruder had remained unaware of his presence up to that moment.

When nothing happened, he continued on until he was two-thirds of the way to the hedge.

It happened then, the thing that he had been dreading. Something huge and dark and swift-moving arose directly in his path and leapt straight toward him, gripping him by the shoulder and hurling him backwards.

He was hurled completely off-balance—he crashed to the ground, his arms flailing the empty air, unable to do more than cushion the violence of the fall by twisting sharply sideways an instant before the impact sent agonizing pain lancing through him.

So jarring was the impact that he might have fractured his spine if he had landed flat on his back, for the ground there was stone-hard. He was convinced for a moment that he was seriously injured. The pain increased and spread before it lessened, and when he tried to rise he felt numb all over.

He managed to raise himself slightly. But before he could overcome the dizziness that had come upon him, strong relentless hands gripped him by the elbows and dragged him to his feet.

It was more than dizziness, for he could see nothing clearly. It was as if his vision had undergone a distortion, as if his pupils had been widened by the violence of the fall and had remained dilated.

Despite his helplessness, he cried out in anger and jerked his shoulders about in a frantic effort to free himself. But the steel-firm fingers of the intruder who had dragged him to his feet continued to tighten, biting so cruelly into his flesh that he was forced to allow himself to be propelled forward through the darkness toward the hedge. Twice he stumbled and almost fell again, and once his right knee gave way, causing him to lurch so violently that the intruder came to an abrupt halt and he gained a momentary respite.

He gradually became aware that there was more than one intruder. Hovering a short distance from the hedge were five tall figures with features that were vaguely hawk-like. They held themselves very straight and they kept coming closer to him and then darting away again, with swift gliding movements, as if they were skating on a sheet of ice.

Their bodies glistened, and he could not shake off the feeling that they were either covered with scales or clothed in some material of shining texture that would have glowed, more brightly in the daylight then it did at night.

Distant objects stood out clearly and he could see the row of tall pines at the base of Thunder Mountain that he had transformed, in a fantasy of his childhood, into mysterious sentinels from another planet, perpetually standing guard. The fact that so remote a memory had crept into his mind at that particular moment struck a chill to his heart, for it seemed to have a significance that went beyond the present.

There was an opening in the hedge and beyond it the smooth grass of Mrs. Jackson’s backyard. The intruder propelled Wentworth forward through the hedge and across the lawn until he was staggering along at the edge of a road that spiraled upwards toward Thunder Mountain. Mrs. Jackson’s house was the last village dwelling before the forested slopes of the mountain spread a veil of unbroken greenery over the landscape.

If Mrs. Jackson had been peering out of an upstairs window at that moment she would have seen Wentworth moving out into the middle of the road with five tall, hawk-featured figures in his wake who seemed more to glide than to walk, and another accompanying him with a firm grip on his arms, which he was relentlessly twisting. She would have seen Wentworth’s stumbling figure shrink into the distance until it dimmed and vanished.

Helen Wentworth, having waited ten minutes for her husband to come back into the house and ascend the stairs, decided that she could endure the suspense no longer. She had remained by a rear window, staring down into the garden, and she had seen him move out from the kitchen door and start to cross the garden. But then the clouds which obscured the moon had shifted a little and the faint glow which had enabled her to see as far as the hedge had vanished.

Her heart had come into her throat then, for it was pure torture to try to imagine what might be taking place in the darkness. She was almost positive that he had not been attacked by a bear or a human prowler, or he would have cried out and there would have been the sounds of a scuffle. But still…what could be keeping him so long?

Her first impulse was to go downstairs and out into the garden, disregarding the fact that he would not have liked that at all. He loved her far too much to forgive her for placing her own life in jeopardy…until a violent scene made forgiveness possible.

Scene or not, she would do it, of course, in about five more minutes. But there was something she could do first that would take her mind off an uncertainty that was becoming unbearable.

The children. They were safely tucked in for the night and were probably asleep by this time. But when a household was in danger, it was best to make sure.

A moment later she was moving swiftly down the upper hallway to the children’s bedroom-playroom, with its bright picture walls and scattered toys. She thought of her husband’s recklessness in pursuing a prowler, unarmed as he was and she found herself wishing that when her son grew to be a man he would not take after his father in that respect.

As for Susan, it was very hard to tell how a child of six will feel about the value of caution and restraint when, after growing up to be beautiful, she finds herself in a parked car on a moonlit night, seated beside a man as handsome as her father but much younger. But Susan was, after all, the daughter of a very sensible woman, and as the twig is bent…

It was toward her son that her eyes darted first, when she opened the children’s door and saw that the light had not been turned off for the night. He was sitting up very straight in bed, talking to his sister with an angry edge to his voice.

“How stupid can you get?” he was saying. “You’d have to be an awful dope to believe—”

He broke off abruptly the instant he saw his mother standing just inside the doorway with a disapproving scowl on her face.

“Bobby!” Helen Wentworth said, more upset than she would have been if she had not been half out of her mind with worry. “I’m not going to tell you again that if you sit up half the night talking, you’re going to be very sorry when you ask me for a dollar to buy some stamps for your collection.”

If strain could kill she was quite sure that she would be lying on the floor in a crumpled heap instead of making a ridiculous attempt to discipline her son for something he had done a hundred times in the past. She was sure that he would sense she was not her usual self and would take full advantage of the fact.

“If Susan wasn’t so stupid,” Bobby Wentworth said. “I’d have gone right to sleep. I can’t help it if she doesn’t understand what I’m talking about.”

“What were you talking about?” Helen heard herself asking.

“Batman,” Susan said, from the twin bed on the opposite side of the room, her blonde curls bobbing up and down. She was blinking, but not from lack of sleep, and Helen remembered that she had intended to put a smaller bulb in the ceiling lamp, but had completely forgotten.

“She thinks that Batman is a real person,” Bobby said. “I told her Batman is an actor and that he goes home from the TV studio and has dinner with his family, just like Daddy. She thinks she knows everything. She’s stupid.”

“You’ve no right to call your sister stupid…or any one. Your father will be angry about that.”

“Bobby’s a scary cat!” Susan said. “If Daddy got mad he’d run and hide. Scary cat! Scary cat! When Daddy gets mad, Bobby is just a scary cat!”

“Dad always knows what he’s talking about,” Bobby said. “Susan doesn’t.”

“I don’t want to hear another word,” Helen said. “You should know better than to quarrel about something so silly.”

It was the wrong thing to say and she knew it. Wise parents were under an obligation to give children every right to engage in discussions which might seem silly to an adult, but were important to them. But the minutes were going by fast, and she had been straining her ears to catch some sound from downstairs that would dispel her steadily mounting dread which was verging on acute alarm. Why couldn’t the kitchen door slam and a footstep sound inside the house?

Helen Wentworth stood very still, her heart skipping a beat. The thought was a double-bladed one, more alarming than otherwise. If a footstep sounded, how could she be sure that it wasn’t someone who had committed an act of brutal violence in the garden and was coming for her and the children with a gun in his hand?

Her own safety seemed scarcely to matter. But if a burglar entered the house now it would have to mean… She refused to dwell on the appalling picture her imagination had conjured up.

She forced herself to speak calmly as her hand went toward the light switch to plunge the room in total darkness.

“I’m turning off the light,” she said. “I’ll come back in a few minutes, and if you’re not asleep—”

She broke off abruptly, startled by a sound that echoed through the silent house more loudly than a footstep would have done. It was a familiar enough sound. But there are times when the loud, continuous ringing of a telephone can be as unnerving as a distant cry in the night.

“The phone’s ringing, Mommy,” Susan said. “You’d better answer it.”

“I intend to,” Helen heard herself saying, still struggling to remain calm. “But remember what I told you. You’re to stop talking and go to sleep. I don’t want to hear another sound coming from this room.”

A moment later she was returning down the long hall to the bedroom her husband had left long ago—surely a full century had swept past by now—to expose himself to a risk she had pleaded with him not to take.

CHAPTER TWO

The telephone had rung twenty times, or more and she found herself hoping it would stop before she could get to it. Answering it made little sense, for it was likely to be a neighbor calling about some trivial matter—Mrs. Jackson perhaps or Sally Crafton at the other end of the lane. Mrs. Jackson was a real night owl, and when she had some recent item of local gossip to discuss, it was hard for her to restrain her impatience, even when a glance at the clock should have given her pause.

But ignoring a persistently ringing phone is always difficult and great tension and strain increase that difficulty. When she reached her room she darted to the bedside table and uncradled the receiver, her hand trembling a little, feeling herself to be under a compulsion she was powerless to resist.

“Yes?” she said. “Who is this, please?”

There was a brief droning sound, followed by what sounded like a faint click. Then a voice came over the wire in reply—a voice that gave her so great a shock that she gasped and the receiver slipped from her hand and went clattering to the floor.

The same voice continued to come from it, sounding genuinely alarmed. “Darling, I heard something fall. Are you all right? Can you hear me? Is there something wrong with the phone?”

Helen picked up the receiver and spoke into it, trying desperately to keep her voice from rising to an hysterical pitch but not quite succeeding. “I…I just dropped the phone,” she said. “George, you gave me a terrible scare. Where are you? What has happened? Are you all right?”

“I’m right next door, in Mrs. Jackson’s house,” George Wentworth said. His voice sounded as strained as her own and it was hoarse, as if the dampness of the garden had brought back the slight touch of laryngitis which had been troubling him for a fortnight.

Before she could do more than gasp he went on quickly: “Listen to me, darling. Listen carefully. I want you to come right over here and bring the children. Don’t light a match, don’t let them out of your sight for a moment. There’s a dangerous gas seepage right under the house. It’s just a seepage now, but at any moment it will be a great burst of gas flooding the house. There’s something wrong with the main gas line and pressure is building up. The gas company has construction blueprints—they can pinpoint the exact location where the pipeline is going to burst.”

“George, I don’t understand!” Helen was clasping the receiver so tightly that her fingers had gone numb. “How did you find out about it? You couldn’t possibly—”

“The sheriff phoned Mrs. Jackson a few minutes ago. He tried our phone first, but no one answered. I guess you didn’t hear it ring—or maybe he got the wrong number. Mrs. Jackson was coming over to warn us when she saw me moving about in the garden and called down to me.”

“But why didn’t you come right back and tell me. Why are you phoning from next door?”

“There simply isn’t time. This way, don’t you see, there’ll be less confusion, less trouble with the children. Just get them over here as quickly as you can. I don’t want to lose you…and Bobby and Susan.”

“But if I don’t light a match?”

“You’ll be overcome by the gas in two or three minutes—before you can get out of the house. Please do as I say. There’s not a moment to lose. I love you, darling.”

The instant she hung up, a wave of incredulity swept over her. Nothing that she had been told made sense. Why would a man desperately concerned about the safety of his wife and children rush into a neighbor’s house instead of his own and phone from there? Wouldn’t it have been more natural for him to have run to her side, bundled the children up and carried them in his arms as far from the house as he could get before it was shaken by an explosion? And how could the gas company, blueprints or not, determine with absolute accuracy just when and where such a disaster was about to take place? A gas main bursting from pressure. Did that ever happen? Perhaps it did, but it was certainly not one of the everyday hazards of rural life. Gas leakages were common enough, but the instant, lethal flooding of an entire house with fumes from a shattered basement pipeline—

She caught herself up abruptly. No matter how incredible it sounded, the most dangerous thing she could have done would have been to ignore so urgent a warning. It was a plea as well, a desperate plea, by a man she’d have loved and trusted even if she hadn’t been married to him for ten years.

And the children…if just her own life had been at stake she might have decided that something was terribly wrong and phoned the sheriff to find out if he was a little confused as to just what the gas company had told him. But there was no time for that now, no time at all. She must hurry…hurry.

She was afraid that it might be difficult to get the children out of the house fast, for Bobby could be stubborn and resort to delaying tactics when he was confronted with something new and startling that called for an explanation. And Susan would follow his lead.

There would be time only for the briefest of explanations and as she left the bedroom and started down the hall, a chill foreboding came upon her. How terrible it would be if the house became flooded with gas before she could get them calmed down and convinced of the danger that they would be cooperative.

It was not as difficult as she had feared it might be. Bobby protested for a moment, but when she took him by the shoulder and shook him vigorously the fright in her eyes seemed to communicate to him.

“You’re going just as you are, in your pajamas.” she told him. “Right this minute. We’re not taking anything with us.”

It was Susan who displayed defiance, snatching up her favorite calico doll as her mother herded them toward the door and waited for them to pass into the hallway ahead of her. Then they were hurrying down the hall, with Susan stumbling a little, because the doll was almost as big as she was. Helen snatched it from her when they reached the bottom of the stairs and tossed it into a far corner of the living room.

“I’ll buy you a new one!” she said, with maternal harshness. “If the house explodes, it would be better for a doll to burn up than you and Bobby.”

“I don’t want Sally to burn up, Mama!” Susan cried.

She started across the living room to pick up the doll. Helen grabbed her firmly by the wrist and fairly dragged her into the kitchen to the screen door that was banging a little now in a wind that had just arisen.

“All she ever thinks about is herself,” Bobby said as they passed out into the cool night. “Every time you tell her that, Mom, she thinks it’s funny. I bet if the house caught fire—”

Although it was one time when Bobby deserved praise, Helen Wentworth’s relief at finding herself in the garden with the children at her side was so overwhelming that she said the first thing that came into her mind.

“You both think it’s funny,” she complained. “You’re no better than Susan. I don’t know why I was ever cursed with such stubborn, self-centered children.”

Bobby seemed to realize that the best reply to an unjust accusation was a stony silence, for he waited until they were at the back door of Mrs. Jackson’s cottage and she was tugging at the knob in an impatient effort to get it open before he spoke again.

“It’s not locked,” he said. “If you push on it hard you can get it open. You just have to reach in and twist the catch around. Mrs. Jackson always leaves it like that.”

Helen pushed on the door and it opened an inch or two, just as her son had predicted. But she quickly found that her hand was too large to go completely through the opening.

“All right, Bobby, you try,” she said, stepping back. “Why have all the lights been turned off? I don’t understand it.”

“You said Dad expected us to be right over,” Bobby said. “You told me—”

“Never mind what I told you. If you can’t get the door open I’ll pound on it until he comes down and lets us in. Why does he have to put me through such an ordeal?”

For some unaccountable reason, her feeling of relief had totally vanished. Not only was she becoming almost as alarmed as she had been when the phone had dropped from her hand a few minutes earlier, but there was something about the completely dark-silent house that chilled her. Probably it wasn’t as dark as it seemed, she told herself quickly. If there was a light in one of the front room upstairs she couldn’t have seen it from where she was standing.

A tiny fraction of her alarm was dispelled when Bobby said: “I got the door open, Mom.”

“All right, don’t just stand there. Go in, and turn on the light in the kitchen. It’s just to the left of the stove.”

It was a crazy thing to say, because both of the children had been in Mrs. Jackson’s house more often than she had, and knew where everything was, including the cookie jar.

She followed Bobby into the kitchen without waiting for him to switch on the light, holding Susan tightly by the hand. She heard Bobby moving about close to the stove, but the light didn’t come on.

“The bulb doesn’t light,” Bobby said. “It must be burned out.”

Why she hadn’t pounded on the door and shouted was something she couldn’t explain. Seemingly, deep in her nature, there were gentile impulses which even chill apprehension could not instantly overcome. She was the kind of woman who seldom raised her voice, even to her husband during a marital dispute. But she raised it now, in anger and alarm, and it went echoing through the silent house.

“George, we’re here! In the kitchen! Where are you? It’s so dark we can’t see a thing!”

Silence. Upstairs and down not the slightest sound came to her ears.

She knew that Bobby could seldom remain silent for long and was not surprised when his seven-year-old voice came out of the darkness close to where she was standing, still keeping a tight grip on Susan’s hand.

It was much shriller than her voice had been, and it echoed vibrantly through the house.

“Dad, the light bulb doesn’t work! But you don’t have to come down. I can find the stairs in the dark!”

“Oh, you can, can you? And what will we find at the top of the stairs?” It seemed to her that she was virtually screaming the words. But she knew as well that her lips hadn’t moved, and that it was an inward screaming which Bobby couldn’t possibly have heard.

It happened so suddenly that for an instant she could not believe that it had become impossible for her to move. Not only her lips, but her entire body seemed suddenly to have congealed, to have become frozen solid, as if an icy blast of wind had swept over her and stopped her blood from circulating, the very air she had been breathing from moving in and out of her lungs.

She felt Susan’s small hand slip from her clasp and knew her own hand had turned cold. She could feel the coldness, the numbness, creeping up her arms and spreading across her shoulders.

She found, after a moment, that she could still breathe and open and close her hands. But so great a weight of inertia rested upon her that if Susan had gone spinning into the darkness in a circle of blinding light she could not have cried out in stricken protest or moved a foot from where she was standing.

A circle of blinding light! The room was still in darkness. But for the barest instant a vision of Susan vanishing in just that way had flashed across her mind—a vision so totally inexplicable that it terrified her even more than the paralysis.

Her terror increased when she saw that the darkness on the opposite side of the kitchen was disappearing and a circle of radiance was actually forming in the half-light a few feet from the stove. It was faint at first, but it grew swiftly brighter, dazzling her eyes and pulsing with many swiftly changing colors—blue, green, purple, yellow, red.

It grew so bright that she was afraid that it would endanger her sight. But she continued to stare at it, determined not to shut her eyes, even for a moment. She knew that she would die inwardly if the light swirled down over Susan and she vanished as swiftly as she had done in the terrifying vision which had preceded the coming of the light. But she did not want it to happen while her eyes were closed.

As she continued to stare, the light became less dazzling. She was later to realize that what she had seen in the vision was a wild distortion, brought about by her fear that she would lose Susan if sane reality was shattered in a terrifying way. Having seen the light before it appeared, in a flash that seemed clairvoyant, she had anticipated the worst.

She was later to realize all that and more. But now, when the light became less bright and the changing colors coalesced into a steady, intense, but almost hueless glow she experienced only relief—a relief so overwhelming that even Bobby’s frightened voice coming out of the edge of the darkness failed to bridge the gap between the way she felt, and a fear that should not have been thrust aside, even for an instant.

“Dad’s not here! If he was somewhere upstairs he’d come down and save us. I can’t move, Mom!”

Susan hadn’t cried out at all. But suddenly her small hand was clutching frantically at her mother’s skirt and she was sobbing the only way a child of six can, with a wrenching intensity.

Nothing could have brought Helen more quickly back to reality. Her fears returned and she drew Susan closer to her, whispering words of reassurance.

“It’s all right, darling. Nothing bad is going to happen. Some things are real all the time, but other things are only real for a short time and they don’t stay real.”

The fact that she could move her arms had surprised her. Was the paralysis wearing off? She tried to take a short step forward but her legs remained frozen.

She drew Susan even closer, burying her head in the loose folds of the light fall jacket she had snatched up before taking the children from a house that was in danger of going up in flames to a house where something terrifying had come out of the unknown to make their security just as uncertain. But she was determined not to give way to panic.

“Just stay where you are, Bobby!” she pleaded. “Your father may still be in the house. I don’t know why we can’t move or where that light is coming from. But if we let ourselves become frightened—”

“Dad’s not here!” Bobby’s voice rose in shrill protest. I know he’s not here. If he was he’d have come right downstairs when I shouted.”

She said nothing in reply, because what her son had said would have been difficult to refute. In fact, she was by now convinced that he was right.

She was stroking Susan’s hair and whispering to her again in an effort to quiet her when the light changed for the second time, taking on more depth and clarity, and she saw that Bobby had been mistaken.

Not only was her husband in Mrs. Jackson’s cottage, he was right there in the kitchen staring out at them from the depths of the glow with a look in his face that made her cry out in stricken disbelief.

“Helen,” came in a halting voice. “Listen…listen to me.

Never had she imagined that anyone could look quite so haggard-eyed and tormented or display in his gaze, his gestures, the very way he held himself, so desperate a need for compassionate understanding. She would have been moved to tears by a stranger speaking to her, with the same hopeless appeal in his eyes, the same wild insistence that he needed, a passage back to life and hope.

A word, a handclasp, a look which communicated thoughts too deeply rooted in compassion to be spoken aloud might have sufficed—if the man had not been her husband. But him she longed to shield with an outflowing of love that would heal what she hardly dared to dwell upon—some wound that had left him broken, if not completely crushed in spirit, though his body had been spared.

She could not be certain that he had not been wounded in body as well as in mind, for he was firmly clasping his right shoulder and his lips twitched several times, as if he were in great physical pain.

She forgot for a moment that he could not possibly be physically present in the room, that it could only be a visual projection, with no more substance than an image on a TV screen, and that the tormented eyes that returned her stare were somewhere else, perhaps a great many miles away. She forgot, too, the fear which had come upon her when the circle of radiance had first appeared in the room. It had seemed terrifying and mysterious beyond belief, but she suddenly found herself thinking of it as a miraculously bestowed means of communication between her husband and herself.

Her first impulse was to ask him where he was and what had happened. But there was something more important that she had to know first. Could he see her as clearly as she could see him? The circle of radiance must be quite different from a TV screen, because it had materialized out of the darkness, and he had spoken directly to her, with his eyes on her face. She was sure that he could see her, but how clearly? Was every movement that she made visible to him? And could he hear her as well? And the children—could he see them, could he see every part of the kitchen? Was the circle of radiance a marvelous two-way communicating device that brought him actually in the house with them, if only in a mechanical sense?

She clung to the possibility with a feverish kind of desperation. It would be a comfort, a joy even, despite the torment which looked out of his eyes—a torment which she shared—to know they were together, even though he would be powerless to defend her physically against whatever it was that had taken him away from her.

Then, out of the darkness a boy’s voice cried out: “Dad!”—One word, followed by silence. She thought of the terror and confusion being endured by her children.

“Yes, son—it’s all right,” George Wentworth said. “You’ll be able to move about again in a moment—and so will your mother and sister. I’m proud of you, son—more proud than I can say. You’re a brave boy and you’re going to continue being brave, right?”

“You bet I will, Dad,” Bobby said.” I mean…I’ll try.”

“That’s great. But I want you to help your mother take care of Susan. She’s too young to watch every step she takes. The light doesn’t seem to quite reach you, Bobby. But in a moment you’ll be walking around again and the stiffness will go out of your legs. I want to talk to your mother now. There’s nothing I’m going to tell her I wouldn’t want you to hear. That’s why—being brave is so important. You’ll have to be very brave.”

Helen could restrain herself no longer. “George, don’t torment me like this!” she said, her voice filled with agony. “Whatever it is you’ve got to tell me—”

“Oh, darling, darling, that’s not what I want to say. Something terrible must have happened or you wouldn’t look so…so…”

Wentworth’s lips twitched and he shut his eyes as if the kitchen reminded him of something he would have liked to blot from his mind. “I look,” he went on slowly, “like a man who is lost at sea with nightmares for companions.”

“Where are you, darling? What happened? Please tell me. Don’t drive the nails in any deeper. I love you. That’s all that matters.”

“Yes, darling, yes,” he said. His voice sounded flat, drained of all emotion. Suddenly he smiled. It was a small, crooked smile, a smile that didn’t come off well at all, but she knew exactly how much the effort had cost him.

She tried to speak calmly. “Darling, reality as we’ve always known it has been pushed back or aside in some unheard of way and something else has rushed in and taken its place—something that I know nothing about. You don’t have to convince me of anything. Will that make explaining easier for you?”

“Yes,” he said, “I think it will.”

A strand of dark hair had fallen down over his forehead and she had a sudden, almost uncontrollable impulse to put it back in place in a tender, half-caressing way, as she had so often done in the past. Then she remembered that a light-projected image could only be changed at its point of origin and the impulse died.

“I’ve seen and heard too much in the past thirty minutes that the best minds—the best scientific minds—could never hope to explain, to doubt anything you may have to tell me. Please don’t keep anything back—I’m glad you spoke to Bobby as you did. He’s not too young to know how important courage can be.

For a moment, her words seemed to kindle a warmth in her husband’s eyes. Then the look of torment came back and when he spoke his voice sounded despairingly flat again, drained of all emotion.

“I have lost all track of time,” he said. “I do not know whether I walked out into the garden a half hour…or two hours ago.”

“But you must have known when you phoned me,” Helen said.

“No, even then I was confused, uncertain as to the time. And nothing that I said was true. But they told me what to say.”

“They? There was more than one man in the garden then. They—took you away? In a car, George?”

“No, they forced me to walk. Along the road and up Thunder Mountain. But I do not think they are men.”

“You do not think—”

He shook his head, a look of desperate appeal coming into his eyes. “You said that you wouldn’t doubt me, that you’d seen enough to convince you that something strange and terrible must have taken place. Well…it has, Helen, it has. Something strange…and very terrible.”

“Go on, darling,” she urged, when she saw that he was having difficulty in keeping his voice steady. “I won’t interrupt you again. But what you said…it’s so shocking…”

“They may be human. I just don’t know. They keep faces covered with…a kind of hood They are about my height and their bodies are sturdily built, and not in the least malformed. In the brief time I’ve been with them, I’ve found out that there are a great many things they can do which no scientific technologist could possibly duplicate. And they can get inside my mind, and influence my thinking without making me feel I have lost all control over my thoughts. They have succeeded in convincing me that what they want me to do is reasonable, that it makes a great deal of sense.”

Helen could restrain herself no longer. “But if they can influence your thinking they may have convinced you of something that isn’t true. How can you be sure—”

Before she could complete the thought Wentworth shook his head, as if anticipating what she had been about to say. “It’s not an hypnotic compulsion—or anything of that nature. I’m still free to make my own decisions. I know—I’m sure. I could have refused to phone and plead with you to bring the children over here. But they made it unmistakably plain that if I didn’t make that call they would go right into the house and bring you here by force. It wasn’t really necessary for me to phone, but it made it a little easier for them. They are becoming impatient. They don’t intend to remain on the mountain much longer.”

“But why did they want us to come here?” Helen asked, shaken by something in his expression that struck a chill to her heart.

“So I could talk to you,” Wentworth said, his voice a little steadier now. She had the feeling that he was trying desperately to strike a balance between what had to be said, and words that would carry a small measure of reassurance. “I could not have communicated with you as I am doing now in our cottage, because this light transmission circuit is very complex and they set it up here to enable them to use this cottage as—well, I guess you could call it a base of operations. Mrs. Jackson is in her room in a drug-induced sleep.”

He paused an instant. “I don’t know just why they are interested in us. We’ll be told, I think. But that’s no as important right now as the great danger we’ll be in if we disobey them. They’re conducting a very terrible night raid on our unsuspecting village. Ten or twelve of them are still in the village, making contact with men, women and children they would prefer not to subdue by violence. They were compelled to use physical force against me, because I walked out into the garden and surprised them when they were just setting up this light circuit, and if I’d broken away from them and summoned help they might have been in trouble.

“Not really in trouble because I don’t think they would have any difficulty in destroying the entire village. But they don’t seem to want to resort to large-scale violence. They’ve told me just enough to convince me of that. Individual violence they are also determined to avoid, unless they are given no choice, and are forced to make use of it.”

“But why, George?” Helen heard herself asking. “If they are as powerful as you say—”

“They don’t want to inflict an emotional trauma on any of the people they are interested in…a trauma that might have difficulty in overcoming when they take us…”

He hesitated, and for a moment, as the silence between them lengthened, a many-taloned fear took shape in Helen’s mind, and when she tried to speak her throat muscles tightened up and she could only stare at him, her hand pressed to her throat.

His words, when the silence ended, seemed to bear no direct relation to what he had said before. “There is something they want you to see,” he said. “It is very strange…but I think they regret they were forced to take me to the mountain against my will. I struggled at first, and they had to resort to considerable physical violence. But they were less relentless than they might have been and I’m not seriously injured. A strained shoulder is nothing. The hurt would only go deep and destroy me if something happened to you and the children.”

“Thank God you’re not… I was afraid…”

“No, I’ll be all right,” he went on reassuringly. “But there’s something I think you should know before I see you again. The way we feel is important to them. They don’t want us to resent and hate them. It would interfere with whatever it is that makes them take an interest in us. I think, strange as it may seem, that they had two reasons for not going into our cottage and removing you and the children by force. My phone call made it a little easier for them, as I’ve said. But I think they knew I’d be grateful as well, would feel less angry and resentful if they allowed me to talk to you as I am doing now, and you could see what I’m going to show you.”

“You said…they wanted me to see it,” Helen heard herself saying. “What is it, George? Something they gave you?”

“It’s a light-image transmission,” George Wentworth said. “I can project it myself. They’ve shown me how to manipulate the beam, just as I’ve been doing. It’s complex in a quite simple way—unbelievably so, much simpler than a short-wave transmitter. You merely—but there’s no need for me to describe how it works. Bobby could project his image just as easily as I’ve been projecting mine.”

Again there appeared on George Wentworth’s lips the twisted, small smile that had cost him such an effort a few minutes earlier. “An image in full color that you can talk and move about at will inside a circle of light—an image that’s unlike anything you’ll ever see on TV, because it’s completely three-dimensional and can pass through the walls of a house or a pine forest with no clicking transmitter at the sending end or radio tubes to bring it right into the room with you. But it must operate on some principle that’s mechanical, for it’s difficult to set up, and can’t be installed without specialized equipment, even though a child of five could use it with a few simple instructions. There’s a luminous globe and a metal pointer with a notch in it that opens up the two-way transmission.”

George Wentworth’s smile seemed to grow even more forced before it vanished. “To single it out is misleading. It is just one of the many astounding things they can do that seem to do violence to the laws of physics. I’ve seen a few of them, just in the short while I’ve been with them. They can burn down a tree from a distance, make it shrivel into gray ash with no visible flame.

“They can bring a bird in flight down like a leaden weight plummeting to earth from high in the sky, with a tiny tube that’s totally soundless. They can make the waters of Thunder Mountain Lake boil for two or three hundred feet in all directions with another tube that’s not much larger. You know how placid those waters are. We’ve gone canoeing on the lake often enough.

“They can talk to one another at a distance of three hundred feet with midget-sized walkie-talkie—a shining, one-inch disk which they insert in their ears, under the hood. They can uproot a tree with a kind of blowgun that makes a whirring sound and shoots darts that explode on contact.

“What they can do with their minds alone is almost as incredible. But it takes a little more time. Right now they’re keeping you from moving, as they could have kept me from moving in the garden if grappling with me in a physical way had not seemed a simpler, quicker and more silent way of preventing me from struggling.

“No instrument of science, no matter how powerful it may be, or strange, or miraculous can be any more effective than bodily strength in situations where instant action is of the utmost importance. It is actually the most dependable of silencers. But the use of that violence they now seem to regret.”

“Why are you telling me all this, George?”

“To make you understand that to resist them, to fight against them, would be useless. We must do as they say, or we will not be alive to tell ourselves that death is the most terrible of human disasters. And it is, darling—make no mistake about that. Just to remain alive, to draw breath means that all hope need not be abandoned. Men and women have died inwardly just to stay alive and have found themselves reborn again.”

“Reborn as slaves? No—that would be worse than dying,” Helen heard herself protesting.

“To be reborn free and whole again—to get back the great gift of life,” George Wentworth said. “There is always that possibility, always that hope to cling to. We must not relinquish it.”

“Do they know what you are saying to me now?”

“I’m sure they do. But it does not matter. They want me to feel that I am still independent—a free agent. Otherwise I would not be of interest to them.”

“But are you free, George? Could you resist them if you wanted to, if you were willing to risk—”

“I don’t know. I can’t be sure,” he said, cutting her short. “I only know that my uncertainly as to just how free I am to do something that would force them to resort to violence, is known to them and they want me to talk to you as I am doing now, with no attempt to mislead or deceive you in any way. They want you to talk to me just as freely, even to doubt some of the things I’ve told you. You cannot make a wise decision if your doubts remain unresolved, if you keep them concealed. Now I’m going to show you what they want you to see. It may help you to understand just how dangerous any kind of resistance would be.”

The light had begun to flicker and dim a little, but it suddenly brightened again, as if he was having difficulty in altering the circle of radiance to bring another image into view.

It flashed across Helen’s mind—was the thought solely her own?—that the difficulty was an emotional one. If another image appeared he would have to vanish, and she would be alone again, alone with the children in a house that would become as alien to normal experience as it had seemed before he had appeared in the midst of the glow. Oh, it had remained alien enough to make even the darkness seem alive, as if some invisible monster that had been spawned by it was breathing slowly in and out. But just her husband’s presence alone…

“I love you, darling,” George Wentworth said, as if aware of her thoughts. “Keep remembering that, hold on to it very tightly. We’ll all be together again when they leave the mountain. Before daybreak—they have told me that much. I don’t know where they are taking us, or how long we’ll be gone. But others have been released after a short while, have been returned safely to their homes. They’ve had some incredible stories to tell—stories I’ve refused to take seriously. But now I am sure that most of them were true. The incredible can and does happen. When my image vanishes I will not return…but you and Bobby and Susan will have more than light-projected image to turn to for support when you join me on the mountain.”

The circle of radiance began to flicker again, and Wentworth’s image became less distinct. He seemed to be moving slowly backwards into the glow as his image dimmed.

“Dad, don’t go!” Bobby called out. “I’m scared. I can’t move, and if you’re not here…”

“I was never really here, Bobby,” Wentworth said, with a catch in his voice. “If you saw a Western sheriff on TV with a gun in his hand and a badge pinned to his shirt you wouldn’t feel quite so alone and unprotected if a burglar came in through the window and grabbed hold of you. I know. That’s what you’re trying to tell me. But that’s plain silly, Bobby and you’re old enough to understand exactly what I’m talking about.”

“Dad, I can’t help it. If you’re not here—”

“I’m not a sheriff, Bobby and I haven’t got a shining badge or anything of the sort. But I love you very much and sometimes just an ordinary man can do more to protect his family when they’re in great danger than a Western sheriff who is real and not an image on a screen. But if he’s an image himself his hands are tied. I’ll be more than an image, Bobby, when I see you again. Just remember that, and keep your powder dry.”

“I don’t want Daddy to go,” Susan said, tugging at her mother’s hand. “Tell him, Mommy. He’ll stay if you tell him to.”

“No, you’re wrong, Susan,” Helen said, looking at the circle of light with a sinking sensation that was making her feel as if all the breath was being squeezed from her lungs. “He has to go but we’ll see him again soon. That’s right, isn’t it George? You know you don’t have to spare me. But you could be trying to spare the children. Don’t darling, it’s not necessary. Bobby can be very brave—”

“You bet he can,” Wentworth said, his voice still audible but his image so faint now that she had to strain to make it out in the depths of the glow. “He knows I’ve told him the truth, and nothing but the truth. And so do you, darling. What they want you to see is very beautiful. If they can build…well, you’ll see. Something else as well, that’s like nothing you’ve ever known before. An emanation of power, a kind of invincibility that makes itself felt. You can’t hope to struggle against that kind of invincibility. Don’t try. Accept it for what it is—a warning. There is no other way.”

Wentworth’s image vanished and a dull, continuous flickering replaced the steady glow. Gradually the circle of radiance became brighter again, growing almost blinding for a moment, precisely as it had done before Wentworth’s image had come into view.

Suddenly the flickering was gone and another image came into view, huge and shining, and only a little smaller in circumference than the circle itself.

Behind it there towered pine trees on a mountain slope that Helen instantly recognized, for she had often climbed to that height on Thunder Mountain and stood staring down over a sea of greenery at the bright waters of the lake at its base.

The slope was less than a hundred feet from the summit and there was a wide, plateau-like ledge of rock at that point jutting out from it, where she had often stopped to rest before continuing on to the top.

But now she wasn’t ascending the mountain on foot. She was staring at the ledge in a dark and silent house, with a far greater constriction in her chest than when she had been out of breath from climbing, and the strain of the steep ascent had made her temples swell to bursting. Now it was shock alone, a sudden, inexplicable kind of fright, that made it impossible for her to wrench her gaze from the enormous, circular disk that rested on the ledge with the moonlight shining full upon it.

It was hard to understand what there was about it that made her want to shut her eyes and blot it from her sight although she was powerless to do so for it was very beautiful. The moonlight brought into sharp relief the silvery-gleaming projections that encircled its entire circumference at evenly spaced intervals. They looked, at first glance, like fragile, delicately fashioned metal flowers. But as she continued to stare at them she saw that they were small, unfolded wings which were decorative, for they were too small to be functional. It was as if some silversmith of great artistic skill had designed them to symbolize the relationship between a flying object in swift, soaring flight and a flock of birds winging their way into the sky.

An Unidentified Flying Object! At no time since the circle of radiance had formed in the darkness had the thought been entirely absent from her mind. She could hardly have failed to associate a mystery that had been constantly in the newspapers and about which many books had been written with a shattering, first-hand experience of the same general nature.

She had suspected the truth the instant her husband had revealed how relentlessly he had been set upon in the garden by hooded figures who had caused him to vanish and reappear through some miracle of technology beyond the scope of modern science. She had, in fact, been nine-tenths sure that the hooded figures could only have come from a UFO.

But she had kept the appalling thought to herself, had refused to increase her husband’s torment by letting him know that she shared a fear that must have rested upon him like a leaden weight, crushing him to the earth.

If he had been taken captive and she had not yet joined him, how could he be sure he would ever see her and the children again? No matter what the hooded figures had told him there could have been no certainty in his mind.

It would have been so easy for them to change their minds, angered perhaps by her resistance, and take him away from her forever.

She had not wanted that to happen and had remained silent solely to spare him, had kept telling herself that she could be mistaken, that what she was almost sure of might not be true at all.

But now she was absolutely sure. The circular shape that rested on a ledge high up on Thunder Mountain could still take him from her, and she must hurry, hurry to make sure that she did not anger the hooded figures. Better to live enslaved than never to see again the father of her children, whom she loved more than he would ever know, because she was not a demonstrative woman.

She knew now why the sight of the UFO—she had stopped thinking of it as anything else—had filled her with such overwhelming dread.

There was another reason as well. “You will feel,” he had said, “an emanation of power, an invincibility that’s like nothing you’ve ever known before.”

She was aware of that now, as she had been aware of it the instant the mountain slope had come into view. But now there was something about the shining disk that brought two lines from Blake into her mind, two lines that had chilled her from childhood, because they had always seemed to her the strangest, most frightening lines in the whole of English poetry.

What immortal hand or eye,

Framed thy fearful symmetry?

Blake had never seen an UFO and it had been a tiger “burning bright in the forests of the night” that had made him address that question to the unknown. But the symmetry of the shining disk was just as fearful, just as difficult to explain. Only a race that had fathomed the twin mysteries of time and space and could exercise immense power, immense dominance over the forces of nature could create that strange complex on the mountain top.

CHAPTER THREE

The light began slowly to brighten, making every rock and tree and barren patch of soil on the mountain slope stand out with a startling clarity. But the brightness was less blinding than it had been when the circle of radiance had first formed in the room. It seemed to be more diffuse and wide-spreading, for it dispelled the darkness where it had previously remained dense.

For the first time Bobby came clearly into view and the kitchen stove, the refrigerator, and the long row of copper utensils hanging on the wall directly above the stove became brightly illuminated.

For an instant the stiff, completely motionless figure of Helen Wentworth’s son, emerging so swiftly from the darkness into the light, caused her to stop staring at the mountain slope and look directly at him.

Bobby’s face was a frozen mask of horror. For a moment she thought that the enormous shining disk that rested on the slope had widened Bobby’s eyes and that he was staring at it very much as she had done, unable to tear his gaze from a sight that, to a small boy, could well have seemed so new to his experience that his fright had soared to undreamed of heights.

Then she realized that he wasn’t staring at the circle of radiance at all. He was staring at something the light was slowly bringing into view on the far side of the stove.

The instant Helen saw what that something was, she screamed, feeling a weakness in her legs that would have toppled her to the floor if the paralysis had not kept them rigid.

There is a degree of rigidity that even paralysis cannot produce, a rigidity that has only to be seen to be recognized instantly as the stigmata of death. Mrs. Jackson had not slumped completely to the floor in the terrible moment when death had overtaken her, but had remained in an almost kneeling position, her hands turned palms outward as if warding off whatever it was that her eyes had looked upon before she had ceased to draw breath.

Her eyes were wide open and glassily staring, her bloodless lips snagged by her teeth. Her thinning white hair looked like an ill-made wig that failed to cover more than the back of her aging scalp, which gleamed in the spreading glow in a wholly hideous way. Her feet were bent sharply inward, the toes almost touching, making her whole body seem more twisted and bent than it would have been otherwise and giving her a grotesquely gnome-like look.

It has been said that fright alone can kill and Helen had never doubted it. In view of Mrs. Jackson’s age such a possibility, she knew, could not be ruled out. But whether it had been fright or one of the hooded shapes from the great circular disk that rested on the slope, bending above her and laying more violent hands on her than had been laid on her husband in the garden, she had no way of knowing. She only knew that she found herself hoping that it had been more than fright, because physical violence could sometimes be withheld, but from a sight that could kill there was no escape.

The paralysis that had been keeping her arms and legs constricted was gone, she could move about freely. But there was nothing that could lesson the horror which she now shared with Bobby. As the paralysis vanished, a convulsive trembling shook her entire body, threatening to send her staggering forward toward the dead woman.

Her legs had become so unsteady that she could no longer depend on them to support her. The trembling made it impossible for her to shift her weight quickly enough to maintain her balance.

It was the shock of seeing the circle of radiance dim and vanish, plunging the kitchen in total darkness again, that saved her. It caused her to stiffen abruptly, and lurch backward instead of forward, and the wall at her back came rushing toward her to keep her from falling.

In another moment she was leaning against the wall for support, and pleading with her son not to become too frightened.

“Mrs. Jackson was very old, Bobby,” she said. “And her heart just…well, gave out. That often happens with people her age. Sometimes just a little too much excitement…”

She stopped abruptly, straining her ears to catch a possible repetition of a faint sound that had seemed to come from somewhere upstairs. It had been too faint to be called a clattering. It was as if the wind had caused a windowpane to rattle two or three times in some distant part of the house.

It could only have been the wind, she told herself. But then the sound came again, much louder, and she realized it could easily have been made by footsteps crossing the floor of an upstairs room with a distinct clattering.

It almost immediately ceased to come to her ears muffled by distance. First it was directly overhead and then in the middle of the house and then descending a creaking flight of stairs to the ground floor. It descended so swiftly that before it stopped echoing through the darkened house it was right in the kitchen with them, making the floorboards creak loudly.

Helen Wentworth stood very still and spoke as calmly as she could. “Bobby! Susan! We must go with them. That is what your father wants us to do, and unless we do exactly as they say we will never see him again. Remember, my darlings, how much we both love you. You must try to be brave.”

CHAPTER FOUR

The four children were missing again. There were ninety-seven children in the orphanage, but to Joyce Drake the Trilling twins and Dorothy and Richard Thacker were never just four of the children. She thought of them as a group, apart from the other youngsters, even though they were not always together when they got into mischief or disappeared.

Sometimes they would vanish for as long as three days, and the sheriff would have to conduct a search for them. They were so accident-prone that it was incredible that they hadn’t given the orphanage a bad name.

She’d given up try to make a list of the terrible things they did to themselves and to others, such as mistaking Mr. Wilcock’s prize-winning orchids for tiger lilies and plucking them up by the roots, upsetting a hayloft that could have smothered them if they hadn’t clawed their way out fast, and falling off the wharf at Gleason’s Point into the ebb tide silt, and climbing back looking more like mudhens than children spotlessly dressed for a Sunday picnic.

Most children did things like that at times, of course. But every day in the week the Four Children put on a kind of ritual performance in the juvenile misbehavior department.

In a way, it could be contagious, and there were times when Joyce Drake actually found herself envying their ability to shrug off all social responsibility and wishing that she could…well, lean forward, as she was doing now, and tell the gaunt, stern-faced woman sitting opposite her in the sunny administration office to go plumb to the devil.

“It’s your fault, Joyce,” Miss Grayson was saying. “You just don’t exert enough discipline.” She not only accented the last word, but drew it out until it sounded like the swish of a whiplash uncoiling.

Miss Grayson paused for a moment, as if to make sure that what she was about to say would be as cutting as possible. “I sometimes wonder,” she went on relentlessly, “why you took this position in the first place. Unruly children require rigorous discipline and you favor ‘permissiveness.’

“Oh, I know. You’re going to tell me I’d change my mind about the methods we employ here if I read John Dewey. But I don’t intend to read a single line of John Dewey. All I have to do is look around me and see what your theories are doing to young people today. Long hair, student riots, all kinds of outlandish costumes…”

“The children here are hardly old enough to be categorized in that way,” Joyce Drake heard herself protesting, not as assertively as she could have wished.

“They will be, in a few years,” Miss Grayson assured her, with an icy intonation. “Can you imagine what our children will be like in 1980?”

“It would be foolish to try,” Joyce said. “If they grow up determined not to accept ready-made ideas even though they’ve been disciplined not to ask questions about anything, they’ll be far wiser than we are. I’m sure of that, if I’m sure of nothing else.”

“I see. You’d rather have children brought up on ideas that do nothing but get them into trouble. What those delightful brats did last week adds five years to my life every time I dwell on it. And now they’ve strayed off into the woods again. I’m afraid to think how close it may bring me to an enforced retirement. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?—To see all the years I’ve spent—”

Before she could continue the door opened and Sheriff Traubel came into the office. He crossed to where the women were sitting, his heavy tread making the geraniums by the window quake a little.

His tread was heavy and there was a weariness in the way he carried himself which conveyed a impression of ponderousness, as if he were dragging a massive ball and chain across the floor with him.

“Well…they’ve been seen, at least,” he said, without preamble. “About an hour ago, heading for Burnett’s Cove.”

He paused for an instant to stare with undisguised admiration at the younger woman, whose attractiveness he clearly found beguiling, despite the fact that he was a married man with six children. Then his gaze passed to the sternly disapproving countenance of Miss Grayson and his big, rough-hewn face hardened.

“This is the fourth time I’ve had to go searching for those problem kids,” he complained. “Twice I brought them back with only a few scratches, and it wasn’t so bad the third time. I could have gotten myself killed crawling on my hands and knees into an abandoned mine shaft that caved in a few years ago on two levels. But that’s all part of a sheriff’s job, and I’m not complaining. Only—”

“Only what?” Miss Grayson asked, with a look that confirmed what Joyce had always suspected—that Miss Grayson had no great liking for Sheriff Traubel.

“This time I’m seriously worried,” the sheriff said. “We’ve searched the woods for close to an hour without finding a trace of them. And there are a lot of quicksand bogs in the vicinity of the cove that could swallow up four small youngsters mighty fast.”

Miss Grayson swallowed hard and Joyce could see that the sheriff’s bluntness had shocked her. It shocked Joyce less because she admired honesty, and the sheriff just happened to be one of those bluff, plain-spoken men who preferred the truth to evasiveness.

“You mean you’ve given up the search?” Miss Grayson asked, “after only one hour?”

“Naturally not,” Sheriff Traubel said. “There are a half-dozen men combing the woods right now, looking into every nook and cranny. But I had to come back to town to put through an urgent phone call and I just thought that you’d like a report on our progress so far.”

“Lack of progress, you mean. But since you’ve given up all hope it was your duty, I suppose, to tell me.”

“I didn’t say I’d given up all hope, Miss Grayson,” the sheriff protested.

“Of course he didn’t,” Joyce said quickly, feeling it was her duty to come to the sheriff’s defense. “His concern is natural enough, under the circumstances. I’ve explored every foot of the woods on both sides of the cove and there are a number of quicksand bogs—”

“Of course, of course,” Miss Grayson said. “We’re very grateful, Mr. Traubel. You’re going back now, I suppose, and rejoin the searchers.”

“Until we find them,” the sheriff said. “And I’ve a feeling they will be found.”

As soon as the door had closed behind him Miss Grayson said: “How could anyone be so crude? He should have kept what he feared to himself. There’s a harsh streak of cruelty in him.”

“I don’t think so,” Joyce said. “He just speaks his mind, the way I wish more people would do.”

When she left the administration office she could barely control her trembling, and she hoped Miss Grayson wouldn’t think of something additional to say, and summon her back before she could reach the end of the corridor. She hurried, scarcely daring to breathe, not quite sure what she would do or say if Miss Grayson’s harsh voice were to bring her to an abrupt halt.

But it didn’t happen and after a moment she was her natural self again, recovering from the assault Miss Grayson usually made on her personality.

She was almost sure she knew now where the children had gone. “Our secret place,” they’d called it. Three or four times she’d overheard them talking about it, in end-of-the-corridor whisperings. She’d kept the knowledge to herself because she hadn’t wanted them to accuse her of eavesdropping. She was, after all, the only adult friend they had and if their faith in her was shattered their mischief-making might get completely out of hand. Not that it hadn’t already, but still…

She had reached the end of the corridor and was only a few feet from her own tiny office when her gaze traveled, quite by accident, to the red-lighted emergency exit through which she was duty-bound to guide her small charges as swiftly as possible, whenever a fire drill brought them flocking about her.

For a moment the red glare seemed to her an evil omen that bore so close a relationship to the disappearance of the children that it struck a chill to her heart. Their disappearance had certainly created an emergency, and there might well be no exit through which she could safely guide them, for the peril that could surround four small children alone in the woods was quite different from that of an orphanage in flames.

She forced herself to remember that the Four Children had given her many such bad moments in the past and she had always managed to keep panic at arm’s length.

She stood very still directly opposite the red-lighted emergency exit, telling herself that she had done the right thing so far.

The moment the sheriff had mentioned Burnett’s cave she had been on the verge of telling him about the “secret place” but had quickly decided there was nothing to be gained by interfering with a search that was still going on. If the Four Children had gone to the “secret place” they would be in no immediate danger and bringing them safely back to the orphanage would not require the assistance of a half-dozen weary men with surly tempers and mud-spattered boots.

It was primarily her responsibility, as Miss Grayson would have been quick to point out. While the “secret place” was in the general direction of the cove it was on solid ground a considerable distance from the quicksand bogs, and the children had been warned repeatedly not too venture too far into the woods. Perhaps the warning had fallen on deaf ears. But if it had…well, the sheriff and his men could be depended upon to keep right on searching.

Her confidence wavered for an instant, but she forced herself to remain calm. There was a better than even chance that the Four children were, at that very moment, sitting inside a hollow oak tree with a hole so enormous that a woodland playhouse built of logs could not have protected them in a more exciting way from wind and rain and the mysterious voices of the forest.

She had passed the tree many times in her lunch-hour wanderings—she was an enthusiastic bird watcher—but the instant she’d overheard the Four Children whispering together she’d known that the “secret place” and the tree were identical, for no other tree could have called forth such praise.

Now, seeing the tree again in her mind’s eyes, towering and immense, she reproached herself bitterly for not having thought of it sooner. But the news of the childrens’ disappearance had disoriented her, and it was only the sheriff’s report that they had been seen heading for the cove that recalled the oak tree to her mind. There had been at least a dozen more dangerous places to consider first and her oversight, while unfortunate, did not really call for self-condemnation. She was sure that if she hurried and found that the children had avoided the bogs and were playing house beneath the giant oak’s swaying branches, her relief would be so overwhelming that the oversight would not seem worth recalling.

She discarded the thought of returning to her tiny office for the scarf which she usually wore in the woods and descended the emergency fire exit so swiftly that she had to pause an instant at the base of the stairs to regain her breath.

A moment later she was crossing the lawn to the edge of the woods causing her red-bronze hair blowing in the wind that was causing the dandelions between the trees and the brick-walled orphanage to sway and waltz about like inch-high ballerinas.

The trees at the edge of the wood were in motion too, and a squirrel the same color as the red-walled building went scampering away into the forest gloom as her hurrying footsteps set up a crackling sound. Never before had she seen so many dry and withered leaves on the forest floor so early in the autumn, but she refused to regard that as an ill-omen.

The trees might be losing their leaves prematurely in an unusually chill October. But the Four Children were full of spring sap and vigor, no matter how much of a problem they might pose for Miss Grayson and the sheriff. She, alone, understood them and always would. At seven and nine and twelve children had every right to be adventuresome, particularly when they were orphans. And if they became more than merely adventuresome now and then, sympathy and understanding could make it easier for them to stay out of trouble and abide by some of the rules.

There were three winding footpaths between the trees, all leading toward the cove. But Joyce chose the one which zigzagged the most, because the gardener had cleared it of the dense masses of vegetation which made the other two almost impassable in the summer and early fall.

For five minutes she moved swiftly through the forest gloom, pausing only once to remove a pebble from her shoe. Finally she saw in the distance the gleaming, bright waters of the cove and off to the right a clearing between the trees which was close to the giant oak tree.

She continued along the path until she was standing at the edge of the clearing. On the far side the trees stood in an almost unbroken row with their branches swaying in the breeze, forming a solid wall of greenery that extended for thirty feet in both directions. But the wall was broken at one place by a lightning-blasted tree that had crashed to the forest floor, leaving a narrow gap filled with a pale green glimmering.

Joyce drew a deep breath, knowing that the giant oak stood alone just beyond the glimmering, where the sunlight was flooding down with unusual brilliance and that a few more steps would bring its hollow, moss-covered trunk into view.

Should she call out first, to find out if the children were there? Might it not be better to know immediately, to get the suspense over with before crossing the clearing to make sure? Wasn’t it always wiser to seek the truth as quickly as possible and then, if the truth was shattering, to face up to it with grim fortitude?

Abruptly she cupped her hands and called out: “Children, it’s me—Miss Drake! We’ve been searching everywhere for you!”

The words went echoing through the forest and died away into silence.

Joyce’s heart did a flip-flop, then seemed to sink down through her body like a leaden weight, leaving her drained and despairing and with no heartbeat at all for a moment. Surely if the children had been sitting inside the tree or anywhere near it they would have heard her.

The sobbing began so quietly at first that Joyce mistook it for a flurry of wind stirring the branches on the opposite side of the clearing. But all at once it became louder, turning into what was unmistakably the anguished wailing of a small child.

Joyce raced swiftly across the clearing and between the narrow gap in the foliage on the far side and her hair caught on a low-hanging bough, and she had to stop to untangle it.

For an instant her hands seemed clumsy. But just knowing that she had guessed right about the Four Children’s whereabouts had lifted a great burden from her mind and it took her only a few seconds to conquer her agitation, free her hair and continue breathlessly on.

Six-year-old Betty Anne Thacker was standing alone at the base of the giant oak, digging her knuckles into her eyes. The instant she saw Joyce she came running toward her with a despairing cry.

Her face was wet with tears, her small mouth was quivering, and there was a look of fright in her eyes so intense it seemed almost unnatural in a child. A crumpled calico doll lay at the base of the tree, completely dwarfed by its immensity. But Betty Anne herself seemed almost as dwarfed, for she was unusually small for her age and the downstreaming sunlight cascaded about her as she ran making her look wraithlike.

Without saying a word, she buried her face in the heavily starched folds of Joyce’s white supervisor’s uniform, and continued to sob wildly, her small shoulders rising and falling.

For a moment Joyce remained silent, gently stroking the child’s hair and looking apprehensively toward the tree, too shaken to ask what had become of the other children. There was no sign of them anywhere and it was unlikely that they were playing house inside the tree when such a commotion was taking place outside.

A small commotion perhaps, just the clinging of a badly frightened child to an almost equally frightened woman. But the very young could usually be depended upon to know what was going on in their immediate vicinity, whether it was a tree-uprooting tornado, or just some strange, small animal peering out of the forest gloom with an incessant chattering.

“There, there,” Joyce suddenly heard herself saying. “Everything is going to be all right now, because I’m here with you. Tell me, darling. Where are the twins and your brother? You all came here to play house, didn’t you?”

Betty Anne stopped crying so abruptly that Joyce was taken a little aback, until she remembered how natural it was for a small, emotionally distraught child to pay instant attention to an urgent adult question.

“We didn’t do anything bad,” Betty Anne said, raising her tear-stained face from Joyce’s stiffly starched uniform. “Richard said it wasn’t stealing.”

“I’m sure it wasn’t,” Joyce said soothingly.” You took something with you. Is that what you’re trying to tell me?”

“Two camp stools,” Betty Anne said, from the gym. We were going to bring them back. Really and truly we were.”

“Of course you were. You just wanted to fix the tree up like a playhouse. What else did you take?”

It was a totally unimportant question. But Joyce knew that to get the truth out of so young a child she would have to be psychologically adroit and manipulative.

Betty Anne was clearly weighed down by guilt, and that seemed to be preventing her from answering the only question that was important. There was no doubt in Joyce’s mind that the whereabouts of the other three children was tied in with that guilt in some way. She knew that a few sympathetic leading questions were effective in dissolving guilt in a child and open the floodgates wide on more vital information.

“Richard took some forks and spoons,” Betty Anne was saying, with a sobbing catch in her voice. “And I took some cups and saucers. I wanted a picture to hang on the wall, but Richard said he was scared you’d be very angry if we took a picture.”

“Miss Grayson would have punished you severely if she found a picture missing,” Joyce said. “But I wouldn’t have been angry, darling—not if you really intended to return everything as soon as you got tired of playing house. You’d have gotten tired of it before long, Betty Anne. It’s very lonely out here in the woods. If you’d come to me and told me what you were planning to do—You call this the ‘secret place,’ don’t you?”

“We didn’t want anybody to know about it,” Betty Anne said. “How did you find out, Miss Drake?”

“Darling, listen to me,” Joyce said, drawing Betty Anne closer. “We just haven’t time to talk about that right now. There’s something I’ve got to know and only you can tell me. Where are the twins and your brother?”

“Two big bad men came and there was nobody around to shoot them,” Betty Anne said. “Richard told Sally and Jane to run as fast as they could. But the bad men ran after them and caught them. They hit Richard to make him stop crying. He was only crying because he didn’t want them to take Sally and Jane away. Sally and Jane were scared, but Richard wasn’t, Miss Drake. He was just mad. But he had to go with them, too.”

Hard as it was for a child of six to describe a brutal kidnapping, Betty Anne had done very well. But it was the look in her eyes that gave her childish prattle so ominous an implication that Joyce was struck speechless.

CHAPTER FIVE

A coldness was creeping over her now. Although there were more questions clamoring to be answered, she wondered how she could draw out Betty Anne without causing the child to burst into tears again. Her brother’s abduction and being left alone in the woods seemed to be causing her far more anguish than the terrible danger all three of the children were in.

It was natural enough for so young a child to draw no distinction between an immediate disaster that concerned only herself and a threat to another’s safety that was too far in the future to seem real to her. But that did no make Joyce’s task less difficult.

“The big men, Betty Anne,” she asked, “what were they like? Did they look like hoboes? You know what a hobo is, don’t you? A hobo…a tramp?”

Betty Anne nodded, and Joyce could see that, despite her tearfulness, she was trying to be as helpful as possible.

“They wore something over their heads, and I couldn’t see their faces. Their clothes were all shiny.”

Into Joyce’s mind there flashed a picture of two unshaven derelicts in shabby clothes, shiny from long wear, with burlap sacks drawn over their heads—sacks with cut-out holes, through which they could see just how terrified the children were and how much force they would have to use to make off with them.

But somehow it didn’t seem exactly the right picture. There was something wrong with it, for a frightened child would hardly have noticed or stressed the fact that their clothes were shiny.

Shiny?… Shining? Could Betty Anne mean that the kidnapers had been brightly, even dazzlingly attired? Deer hunters, perhaps, wearing day-glo hats and day-glo jackets, to make themselves as conspicuous as possible while moving through the woods? But why would deer hunters want to kidnap three small children? And even if their hats had been lowered, would lowered hat look like something drawn completely over their heads?

“What made you say their clothes were all shiny?” Joyce asked.

Betty Anne’s reply demolished what, at best, had been an unlikely conjecture.

“Because they were.” Her tears had started to flow again, but she managed to continue. “They looked like the knight in the Christmas play who woke up Snow White.”

Joyce shut her eyes for an instant, trying to visualize the Disney knight figure who had played a prominent role in the Christmas play which the orphanage had put on to brighten the lives of children whose days were, for the most part, tragically cheerless.

The knight had worn a breastplate and his papier-mâché clothes had borne so close a resemblance to chain-mail that the children hadn’t doubted for a moment that he had come riding straight out of a fairyland castle to awaken Snow White. The autumn trees in the background had been starkly bare—amazingly realistic stage props—and there had been artificial snow flurries.

To Joyce, the forest clearing in which she was standing, facing a badly frightened child, seemed suddenly just as bleak and threatening.

The two men who had kidnapped the children were no shining knights, regardless of what kind of clothes they had been wearing. And there was no reassurance in the thought that they had probably been wearing fantastic masquerade costumes to conceal their identities and make it more difficult for the sheriff to pick up their trail.

She could picture the two men carrying the children to some remote cabin in the woods, discarding the costumes and writing a carefully penned ransom note to—Joyce shook her head, realizing she was letting her imagination get out of hand. What could kidnapers hope to gain by writing a ransom note to a county orphanage?

The county would not pay a cent to get the children back, even if the rules could sometimes be stretched a little in an emergency. Public funds could not be used to ransom kidnapped children, no matter how desperate their plight might be. Funds to uphold the law, yes—funds to see that no stone was left unturned to bring the kidnapers to justice. But only wealthy parents were in a position to rescue their children from the basest of criminals.

What could it mean? Why would two men dressed like a character in a children’s Christmas play carry off Betty Anne’s brother, and the Trilling twins and leave her alone, crying her heart out in the woods?

“Where were you, Betty Anne, when all this happened?”

“I was hiding,” Betty Anne said, between sobs.

“Where, darling?”

“In the tree.”

“And your brother and the twins were outside, is that it?”

“They went to look for some acorns,” Betty Anne said. “We were playing acorns for keeps, and I won all the big green ones. The big green ones are hard to find. You only find a lot of them in the spring.”

It made sense, of course. There was nothing very unusual about a big, hollow oak, and the two men had apparently been in too much of a hurry to make off with the other children to realize that it was being used as a playhouse.

“Why didn’t the two bad men look inside the tree?” Joyce asked, to make sure that her surmise had not gone wide of the mark.

“I kept my head down,” Betty Anne said. “But I looked out just once and saw them.”

It confirmed what Joyce had always known—that the Four Children were both courageous and highly intelligent, despite their bent for mischief-making. Betty Anne’s brother could so easily have lost his head, and cried out in a futile effort to warn her. Then Betty Anne would have vanished also, and only the stolen dishes and camp stools would have been a pathetic memento of the lost children and secret place that had become the children’s second home.

There would have been nothing to indicate from where the children were abducted. Were it not for the quick thinking of the children, Betty Anne, too, would have vanished, and her description of the men “in shining clothes” would have been lost.

Despite the child’s small size and the fright that was still making her tremble, Joyce was sure that more information could be pried out of her.

For a moment Joyce was tom by indecision. Should she take Betty Anne directly to the sheriff, and let him do the questioning? It was wise, surely, to take advantage of the facilities of the agencies of the law.

But there was a disadvantage in calling in the police, particularly when a small child was the key witness to a crime. Most small children instinctively mistrust policemen and Betty Anne might not talk freely to the representative of the law.

Betty Anne had been very cooperative so far. Might it not be better to try to find out where the kidnapers had gone and follow a trail that might still lead somewhere? A warm trail was better than a cold one, and if she let another hour go by…

She took firm hold of Betty Anne’s shoulders and shook her gently. “Stop crying, Betty Anne,” she said in firm tones. “The men won’t come back. You’re much too old to carry on this way.”

Joyce knew nothing could have been further from the truth. Betty Anne had witnessed something that would have terrified most adults and left them shaken for hours. But she knew an appeal to Betty Anne’s pride would be the best way to calm her and get her cooperation.

Joyce turned and pointed toward the cove, giving Betty Anne a slight nudge as she did so. “When the big men left, Betty Anne, where did they go? Was it in that direction?”

Betty Anne shook her head.

“Over there, then?” Joyce asked, pointing in the opposite direction.

Without replying Betty Anne turned and pointed to the northeast, where the vegetation thinned a little, and Joyce could see from where she was standing, the beginning of another trail.

It was a wide trail and Joyce knew it well, for she had followed it several times in her bird-watching explorations.

It led to a wide stretch of marshland more firm than the soggy ground immediately surrounding the cove, with its many dangerous quicksand bogs. The two marshlands converged where the forest thinned and became a dismal tidal wasteland for many miles, but there was a mile-long stretch of comparatively firm ground and a few cabins scattered about between the trees.

Had the kidnapers taken the children to one of those cabins? It seemed unlikely, but it might not be too late to find out. Joyce gripped Betty Anne firmly by the hand and started off in the direction of the marsh.

They had not advanced more than sixty feet along the winding footpath when they felt the first strong tug of a rising wind. Trees on both sides of the path were in violent motion as the wind came in gusts of steadily increasing violence. The trunks seemed also to be swaying, as if they were in danger of being uprooted by a wind of hurricane force.

In another instant, Joyce felt herself being lifted up, with Betty Anne still clinging to her hand. Betty Anne had become to scream with fright. Joyce tightened her grip on the child’s hand. Her only hope was that the wind would set them down again before they went crashing into a tree and were knocked senseless.

A great roar had begun to fill the forest, as if the wind was converging on the trees from all directions, ripping and tearing at them amidst a vortex of seething violence.

And suddenly Joyce and Betty Anne were high above the trees, spinning about in a wind that was carrying them toward the marsh with a swiftness that made it almost impossible for them to breathe, but was less violent than the winds that were causing many of the trees below them to topple to the ground now, with crash after deafening crash.

Their journey was of short duration. The roar beneath them subsided, became a dwindling echo, as faint as an elfin drum. They continued to spin about high in the air until the marsh came into view and they saw beneath them, dazzling in its brightness, an immense, circular object at least a hundred feet in diameter. In another moment they were descending toward it.

CHAPTER SIX

At first the men and women imprisoned in the metal-walled compartment had been strangers to one another—and to themselves. When a familiar way of life has been torn up by the roots there is often a brief loss of identity, an inability to function as an independent individual in a world in which everyday reality has lost much of its meaning. Thoughts arise which are chilling—thoughts which seem alien to normal experience and are separated, by no more than a hair’s breadth—from madness, with all of its shrieking terrors.

To the imprisoned men and women, habits that had been cultivated from childhood, ways of thinking and feeling that had been taken for granted could no longer provide support. And yet, in a strange way, the peril which they all shared made them draw closer together, unconsciously at first and then with a growing awareness of how desperately important it was to become united in their resistance to a coldly merciless foe.

It was the kind of battle which could not be won if each captive, trapped by a feeling of total isolation, attempted to wage it unaided. A companionship based on mutual trust had to be swiftly established, and more and more the need to achieve such a meeting of minds began to dominate all of their thinking.

It was not easy to achieve, for the captive men and women differed widely in age, social background and emotional and imaginative sensitivity. But once it had been accomplished, they were amazed to discover how quickly a companionship arising from a shared danger could deepen into a firm and unshakable friendship.

Joyce Drake and a young man she had never set eyes on before she had been escorted with the Four Children into the compartment, had been the first to be drawn to each other.

Joseph Wilmont was a garage mechanic and a high school dropout who had spent the last seven years of his uneventful life in California, making it possible for the owners of old-model cars to get a little more mileage out of their sadly battered purchases.

His specialty was cars, but Joyce soon discovered that he was an all-around mechanical genius and that he was quite remarkable in other respects. Despite his lack of formal education he had read, from the age of fourteen, every book of major importance in the realm of mathematical physics he could borrow, beg or steal.

He was almost as much interested in biochemistry, comparative anthropology, and ethnology and had given a great deal of thought to the precise role which genetics played in relation to environment in the overall pattern of human behavior.

He was a little weak on fiction. But he knew enough about educational psychology to discuss some of the new trends with Joyce in a most enlightening way. In fact, there were moments when she would have given way to despair, were it not for his ironic humor. (He had almost succeeded in convincing her that the M.A. she had worked so hard to secure could severely handicap an orphanage supervisor.)

She stood with him now, and the bright overhead light brought his boyish features into sharp relief. It glinted on his gold-rimmed glasses and the tousled brown hair which did not seem quite suitable to his voice and manner. He seemed much older than his years, more thoughtful and mature than most boys of twenty-two. Even when he was engaging in banter to relieve the tormenting strain and uncertainty which he shared with her and which she could see in his eyes, there was nothing callow about him.

His maturity she liked—she needed that now. She would have welcomed at her side the presence of a man of forty or forty-five with the quiet inner strength that went with early middle-age, if such a man was neither a coward nor a fool. But Joseph Wilmont was a very good stand-in for that kind of security and something had happened that was making her feel she would not have exchanged him for anyone else, even if he had been as immature inwardly as his boyish resilience seemed occasionally to suggest.

Her wrist watch told her that it was just two days and seven hours since she had fallen in love for the first time in her life—completely, madly, desperately in love with a boy who was two years younger than herself. And that was just part of the miracle. She could tell by the way his eyes lighted up whenever their hands touched or he looked directly at her that it wasn’t—couldn’t have been—a one-way madness.

What made it even more of a miracle was the fact that she wasn’t pretty. She had become firmly convinced of that, despite the fact that a few men had thought otherwise before she’d majored in educational psychology at a woman’s college and turned into a tight-lipped potential spinster at twenty-four.

Now they were observing together the fourteen adults and eight children who shared their captivity. The children were all on their feet, moving about so rapidly that they seemed more numerous than they actually were.

They ranged in years from five or six to twelve—children who should not be where they were, exposed to a horror that was shattering enough for an adult to endure, and might well leave their young minds permanently scarred, even if the ordeal was of short duration.

She refused to allow herself to dwell on the possibility that the children might be white-haired before the ordeal ended—might not be returned safely to their homes this side of eternity.

Yet, strangely enough, they did not appear to be genuinely frightened. They were darting about in a lively way, their activity accompanied by occasional outbursts of merriment, and they seemed no different from children strenuously engaged on a city street in a game of tag, leapfrog, or hide-and-seek.

For a moment, Joyce’s eyes followed the Four Children for whom she had sacrificed her liberty, in a rescue attempt that had failed. Her feeling toward them had not changed. They were still her children—her own special charges.

In this metal-walled compartment, a child at play could very easily stumble and be hurt. It happened often enough to cause parents and other guardians of the young some concern. But the compartment provided the Four Children with very little scope for mischief-making, and Joyce was pleased to see them mingling with the others without difficulty.

The small boy, and the girl who appeared to be no older than Betty Anne, belonging to the tormented-looking man and woman who sat in a shadowed corner of the compartment with their lips tightly compressed, seemed a little more serious-minded than their seven playmates. But their lack of childish exuberance probably meant, Joyce told herself, that the grim concern of their parents had communicated itself to them.

As if aware of her thoughts, Wilmont said: “Wentworth and his wife are very much in love.” And half to himself, he added, “Does it make it easier or harder, I wonder?”

“Does what make what easier or harder, Joe? Are you asking yourself whether this awful situation we’re in is made more bearable for the Wentworth’s because they love each other?” He nodded silently, as she continued. “They say, ‘To the dying, speak of the glories of life.’ In other words, if life has been sweet, it is easier to die. If life has been barren and unfulfilled, then we go out struggling and saying, ‘But I never really lived at all.’”

“Yes, I know what you mean,” he broke in eagerly. “There are two things involved here. First, our situation is so full of uncertainty, and in the mind of everyone here, except, thank God, the children, is the thought that we may be facing death…facing death without the small consolation of knowing how we will die. But the thought of facing death is less painful to the Wentworth’s because their lives have been filled with their love for each other and their children. And the second thought I had is that any conflict or problem that is faced by an individual is lessened when that person has a deep and loving relationship with someone. ‘Love is an armor that softens every blow.’… You know, I’ve never talked to anyone this way before.” He smiled, embarrassed by his own fervor.

Joyce tenderly took his hand. A repressed and conventional person, who would never ordinarily take a baby step in the direction of an attractive man, she found herself propelled by the intimacy and feeling of warmth created by his heartfelt words, and by the incredible pressure of the strange dilemma that faced them all—propelled to speak and act in a manner completely new to her. “We don’t have time for games or maneuvering. I am going to be completely honest with you; take it as you will. I can’t analyze it or justify it, and I refuse to apologize for it…but…I love you. I have been a lonely person. I have never had for any other man the emotions that I have for you.”

He enfolded her hands in his, and his face told her better than words that she was not being rejected, that he welcomed and responded to her feelings. “Oh, my dear wonderful girl, I can’t explain it, either. Maybe it is the circumstances, but I don’t care about the reason. I haven’t been exactly lonely…there have been several women in my life…”

She laid two fingers on his lips, aware of the tumultuous pounding of her heart. “I don’t care about that. I don’t want to know about it. All I care about, all I want to know, is that we’re together in this. I’m glad I’ve been lonely up to now; I’m glad my loneliness didn’t push me into taking someone I didn’t really want.”

“We don’t have to worry about loneliness now—or ever again,” he said, the instant she removed her fingers from her lips.

“For as long as eternity is,” Joyce said, nodding. “But when we die, eternity may cease to exist for us. Or don’t you believe that?”

“I’m not sure,” he said. “But right at the moment, it doesn’t seem important.”

“Please kiss me.” Joyce said.

“Here, in front of all these less fortunate people?”

“The Wentworth’s will understand—and so may some of the others.”

He took her quickly into his arms and for a full minute his lips remained on hers.

When he released her she turned quickly, her eyes sweeping the compartment. The blood was pounding in her temples and she knew her face was flushed.

She was sure that everyone in the compartment had been watching them. She wondered if their lovemaking was looked upon as a selfish intrusion when people were doing their best to meet a shared danger with courage and calm dignity.

She did not see reproach or indignation in any of the eyes that were still trained on her and the children had gone right on playing. Seemingly she had been forgiven.

Wilmont seemed to be unconcerned about the reactions of their comrades in disaster. He was staring intently at a panel which had glided shut a moment before.

“You know, darling, we’ve seen that panel open and close at least fifty times on a gloved hand with a tray of food. But I’ve never before noticed—”

He paused an instant to give her arm a squeeze before bending lower to bring the bottom of the panel on a level with his eyes.

“I hadn’t noticed before that it isn’t just a perfectly smooth strip of metal grooved into the wall. It glides open and shut smoothly enough, without making a sound, and it looks as though it’s electronically operated. But it may operate on some principle that has nothing to do with electronics.”

“What makes you say that?” Joyce asked, her interest immediately aroused.

“See those tiny, stippled dots? They’re arranged in a curious pattern and are so tiny you’d need a magnifying glass to bring them up to pinhead size. They would be invisible at twelve or fifteen inches.”

Joyce lowered her head until their cheeks were almost touching. “Yes,” she said, after a pause. “I can see them now. What do you think they mean?”

“Nothing, perhaps,” Wilmont said. “But then again—”

He straightened abruptly and stared around the compartment, a speculative look in his eyes.

“I can use a pair of glasses to magnify the dots,” he said. “See if you can collect two or three pairs. I haven’t your persuasiveness.”

“I’ll try,” Joyce said. “But if I wore glasses, I wouldn’t want to take them off, even for a moment. This is not the right time or place to go stumbling about half-blind.”

“Try to make them realize how important it is,” Wilmont said. “I’ll have to keep my glasses on, and I’d like to try at least three pairs. I’ll need a strong glass, but not one that is image-distorting. A strong reading lens would be better than a prescription lens. See what you can do.”

Joyce crossed the compartment, miraculously escaping a collision with the children and approached the seated adults. Four of them were wearing glasses and she talked briefly to each in turn. Moments later she was back at Wilmot’s side.

“Here are three pairs,” she said. “Mr. Tomlinson’s don’t magnify at all, or so he claims. I let him keep them on his stubby nose because he reminds me so much of an Alice-in-Wonderland rabbit.”

“Perhaps we’ll have luck, with that kind of rabbit watching us,” he said, returning her smile. “We’ll see.”

He squatted again, and he’d a lens of each pair in turn, an inch above the dots and then moved further from the panel to increase the magnification until the dots blurred.

The first pair had evidently been prescribed to correct a bad case of astigmatism and while the magnification was pronounced, the dots looked like micro-organisms whirling about on a slide. The second pair magnified the dots about four times, but it also distorted them. The dots looked like microscopic tadpoles. But the third lens he tried was just right. The magnification, when he held it about seven inches above the panel, made the dots seem almost as large as peas.

“The poor devil must be almost blind,” he said, “to need glasses this strong.” But Joyce had the feeling that he was saying that to mask his excitement over something that had nothing to do with the glasses or their owner.

He stared at the dots for two minutes, with an expression of intense concentration. “The pattern,” he said at last, “it’s damned unusual, to say the least. It looks almost like the combination of a safe.”

“But that’s crazy,” Joyce said. “If the panel is operated on a combination-lock principle, the dial would be on the outside, wouldn’t it?”

“It isn’t a dial pattern exactly,” Wilmont said, “although it does suggest that. As for its being on the outside… I don’t know. It may be on both sides. Perhaps they want to guard against locking themselves in by accident. They seem to be very thorough about everything they do.”

“Twenty dots, arranged in an unusual way,” Joyce said. “I hope you don’t seriously think you can get that panel open just by staring at them.”

He turned and looked at her. “It’s unbelievable,” he said. “That’s precisely what I was thinking. Whatever put that idea into your head?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “It just came to me.”

“But you didn’t take it seriously,” he said. “I do.”

“I was just speaking sarcastically, of course. You mean you really think—”

“I don’t know what to think. The same thought occurred to us both. Just suppose—I know it’s wild, but the whole thing is wild—just suppose that panel operates…well, telepathically, by thought impulses, or ESP or whatever you want to call it. Perhaps those dots are laden with a kind of thought-impulse energy—a static or stored up energy—that can be released if you stare at them in just the right way.”

“It may be very different from a photo electric eye mechanism which can open a door when you approach, and close it again after you. And that stored-up, thought-impulse potential may be so strong that it communicated itself to us just now, made us both obscurely aware—gave us a hint—that the panel can be opened by the power of thought alone.”

“But what would you have to do? Just continue to stare at the dots?”

“Perhaps…with intense concentration. Or it may require more than simple concentration. The way the dots are arranged may be important. Why do they suggest the dial combination of a safe, when there’s nothing actually dial-like about the pattern? A dial of a safe has to be manipulated, either by someone who knows the combination or who has the skill of an experienced safe cracker. Perhaps, instead of being an agile-fingered safe cracker, I’ll have to be an agile-minded one.”

Wilmont paused an instant, then went on thoughtfully: “When you stare at an object that’s complicated in structure or just at some unusual design—stare steadily for several minutes and let your vision become a little hazy—have you ever noticed how many incredibly fantastic shapes the object or design can assume? A flower can turn into a human figure, with well-defined arms and legs and a smiling face. Or a figured bookend can become a living-room, filled with brightly dressed men and women moving languidly about.

“The blurring of your vision conveys an illusion of motion as well. I’ve often wondered if that charge is wholly illusionary. It may be that there is an actual rearrangement in the structural details of the object you are staring at in that almost hypnotic way. The power of thought alone can perhaps manipulate the dial-combination of a very unusual kind of safe and make the portals of the unknown open wide.

“And you think you could do that now—with this panel? The change would have to be more than visual to make the panel glide open.”

“It may well be more than visual, if those dots are charged with the kind of thought potential I mentioned. At least, I can try.”

She started to reply, but he silenced her with a look. She knew that he was following a train of thought an interruption could derail.

She remained silent as he lowered his eyes again to the lenses which he was holding a few inches above the dots.

She studied his face in profile as his lips tightened and he raised the glasses a little higher, to achieve the best magnification before they blurred. The overhead light slanting down over his features gave him a monkish look. Perhaps there was some obscure relationship between that kind of light and deep meditation.

Some kind of inner illumination was taking place in Wilmot’s mind; his fingers tightened on the lenses and his lips began to move silently.

Then he was whispering, in a voice so low she had to strain to catch the words.

“The dots…are changing. They are shifting about. A new pattern. Hard to believe. It seemed so…but yes, yes, I think I was right.”

It happened more swiftly than either of them could have anticipated. The panel began to move—slowly at first and then so rapidly they found themselves staring at a metal wall four or five feet distant from them. The panel had completely vanished.

The opening was about two feet wide, and beyond it there was a pale blue glimmering. The wall stood out clearly in the glow, but they could not see the ceiling that must have arched above it from where they were standing. They knew only that they were staring at what appeared to be a passageway of some kind.

They had been herded into the compartment through another, much wider panel, after passing through a passageway of similar width and it had seemed most likely that the passageways outnumbered the compartments, as they did in most seagoing ships. Though they had been cast adrift on unknown seas in a craft that had never sailed the oceans of Earth, nevertheless, space to move freely about was a vital necessity for navigators, human or otherwise.

It was that thought which seemed to weight most heavily on Wilmot’s mind, for he remained silent when Joyce gripped his arm and cried out. The incredible miracle that had taken place, the accuracy of his wild surmise—surely it could not have been more dramatically confirmed—seemed suddenly to concern him less than a fear which Joyce had shared, but had momentarily forgotten.

“Will this do us any good at all?” he exclaimed, his voice tight with strain. “They’ll be everywhere, moving constantly about. On an ocean liner if a passenger does anything to endanger the safety of the ship he’ll get a tap on the shoulder in half a minute. The watchfulness here must be just as close. If we’re lucky, we may be able to stay out of sight long enough to do a little exploring. But the chances are against it.”

“The risk is worth taking,” Joyce said quickly. “Knowing more about them is of vital importance. We don’t even know if they’re human, closely as they seem to resemble us. They could be scaly monsters. I’m sure they don’t wear hoods when they’re not in our presence.”

“All right,” Wilmont said. “I’ll see what I can find out. I’ll get a good look at them before they drag me back here—if they do. They may not want me to tell the others what I learn about them.”

Joyce paled and drew in her breath sharply. “You mean you think they might—”

“Silence me, yes. But they could do that in a great many ways.”

“No, say it,” Joyce said. “They might kill you.”

“All right, they might. That’s part of the risk. But you said it was worth taking. Have you changed your mind?”

“You don’t have to ask me that. I’ve changed it and it’s going to remain changed. You’re staying right here.”

“Listen to me,” he said, taking firm hold of her arm. “There’s one thing you can do that makes sense and it has to be done right now. Go over and talk to anyone who may get the idea I’d prefer not to go alone. That includes you, darling.”

“I won’t let you go alone,” Joyce said. “I hope you realize that, because if you don’t I’ll follow you anyway. You can’t make the panel glide shut again, because all of the dots are out of sight. They may know how to do it, but I don’t think you can. If I thought—”

She broke off abruptly, to stare in concern across the compartment. “Everyone saw the panel open,” she said. “I’ll have to be even more persuasive than I was when I got you the glasses, or we’ll be followed the instant we leave. Frightened people are funny that way. The children will have to be sternly controlled. I think we can depend on the Wentworths and a few of the others.”

“I know we can. They’re getting up, so it will have to be quick. Hurry, darling—please. I don’t want the children swarming all over me.”

“I’ll be right back,” Joyce said, turning. “If you slip out while I’m talking to them I’ll be all alone when I follow you. Remember that.”

Wentworth and his wife were half-way to where she had been standing when they saw she was agitated and came to an abrupt halt.

“He got the panel open, didn’t he?” Wentworth said, his gaunt, attractive face filled with concern. “I saw it glide open. If it wasn’t for my children—”

“He’s staying right here,” his wife said, echoing Joyce’s words of an instant before. Women in love she thought, having identical thoughts when a man’s recklessness gets out of hand.

“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about,” Joyce said quickly. “Joseph got the panel open. He feels he has earned the right to ask you not to risk your lives by leaving the compartment before he gets back. If five or six of us went with him the danger would be much greater. And the children must be watched. I’m going with him because we’ve just ourselves to consider. My four children aren’t… I mean, I’m not…”

“I understand,” Helen Wentworth said. “You’re not exactly a mother and that makes a difference. Don’t worry. We’ll look after them. And we’ll keep the panel open if Richard has to block it with his body. He has a lot of strength and he seldom loses an argument.”

“Tell Wilmont I’m in his corner all the way,” Wentworth said. “He’s the right man to undertake something that requires a cool head and the kind of confidence in a dangerous situation that always seems to diminish a little when you’re over thirty, no matter how much mature experiences rushes in to take up the slack. It’s more than just courage—”

“I’ll return the glasses,” Helen Wentworth said, cutting him short, her eyes on the metallic gleaming in Joyce’s hand.

“Oh, yes…of course,” Joyce said. She’d almost forgotten about the glasses.

She found herself hoping, a little wildly, that she wouldn’t forget anything else of importance before she returned to Wilmont.

He was looking at her now in an impatient, almost pleading way. The children had stopped playing and everyone in the compartment was converging on the Wentworths, as if they resented the fact that they were keeping her from continuing on and talking to each of them in turn.

She was relieved when Helen Wentworth said: “You’d better go now. The longer that panel remains open the less time you’ll have to move freely about outside. They are sure to discover that you’ve left the compartment within the next ten or fifteen minutes. They must keep a close check.”

“Helen’s right,” Wentworth said. “You’ll have to face up to the fact that they’ll probably discover what happened before you can return. You’ll be trapped outside. But if Wilmont is willing to accept that as almost inevitable—”

“We’re both willing,” Joyce said.

“All right, go now,” Helen Wentworth urged again. “We’ll take care of everything. There’s a remote chance that you can get back. The panel will still be open if they don’t find out.”

Joyce turned, ignoring the jostling of adults and children pressing close and returned across the compartment to Wilmot’s side.

“The Wentworths will see that no one follows us,” she told him. “But we’d better hurry.”

“That’s good,” he said. “I’ll go first.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

The walls of the passageway into which they emerged had the same bright metallic sheen as the walls of the compartment. It was long and straight and very narrow, and the low lamp-studded ceiling which arched above it had a tunnel-like look. The floor mirrored the radiance in weaving splotches which swirled up about them as they moved over its polished surface, until they seemed to be wading through small lakes of fire as they passed from darkness into light and then into darkness again.

“Stay close to me,” Wilmont cautioned, his face set in tight lines. “We must guard against becoming separated, even by a few feet. Distances can widen fast when something looms up in front and you lose your head and start backing away from it. If we get separated call out, shout as loud as you can.”

Their footsteps did not set up an echoing clatter as they had feared they might, but made only a slight swishing sound. Apparently great care had been taken to make the passageway soundproof.

Once they halted, straining their ears to catch what had seemed to be the sound of someone moving about at a distance—a faint shuffling noise. It had seemed to come from the far end of the passageway, but when it was not repeated, they continued on in silence.

And presently they were no longer in the passageway, but immersed in a sudden brightness, and directly ahead of them there towered a vertical transparency at least sixty feet in height.

The enormous window was as transparent as glass. But ii resembled more a vertical sheet of running water, and if it had been in a horizontal position it would have had almost the look of a swift-flowing brook, so sparkling bright that every pebble, and waterplant and darting minnow beneath the racing water would have stood out with a startling clarity.

But it wasn’t the sandy bottom of a brook that Wilmont and the woman at his side saw as they stared out at a sight that made them draw close together and look at each other in shunned disbelief.

A vast gray plain stretched out beyond the window to a long line of snow-capped mountains, darkly silhouetted against a sun-reddened sky. Across the plain, through the haze of a smoky sunset which made distant objects a little vague, ten or twelve strange-looking vehicles were moving. Most of them were quite distant, but two were so close to the window that they could see every spoke in wheels that guttered as they revolved. The wheels gave the vehicles the look of Victorian-age bicycles dominated by an enormous wheel with a much smaller one behind it.

But when they looked more closely at the strange vehicles, they could see that they bore only a superficial resemblance to bicycles, Victorian or otherwise. They were covered with a projecting hood of shining metal which looked not unlike the carapace of a beetle and so completely concealed the riders that even their legs were invisible. What force propelled the wheels was not evident.

For a moment the strange vehicles remained visible and then, quite suddenly, they dimmed and vanished. Instantly there came into view two other vehicles, if vehicles they could be called, facing each other in what appeared to be the center of the plain. It was impossible to determine their exact size, but they were at least fifty times as large as the bicycle-shaped vehicles and their dull gray bulk completely blotted out the swollen red disk of the sun, which had changed its position in the sky. It did not appear to be the same sunset, however, for it was not so smoky and cast deeper and sharper shadows at the base of the mountains, where the light was dwindling fast.

The two vehicles were bristling with what appeared to be armaments of incredible size—great tubes that rotated as they moved cumbersomely about and glistened with an iridescent sheen, and tapering objects that looked like gigantic ballistic missiles held aloft by segmented metal arms terminating in claw-like metal hands.

They were quite clearly not pleasure vehicles, designed to provide swift, short-distance transportation for their invisible occupants. With their enormous size and the formidable-looking gadgetry which projected from them, they bore resemblance to military tanks.

Both vehicles seemed to be simultaneously convulsed by the violence that ensued. Long sheets of sweeping flame came from the glistening tubes, lighting up the desert for miles, and sand spurted skyward in pulsing jets, as if a dozen oil wells had come uncapped before the first blinding flash of light could be succeeded by a second and a third.

Instinctively, Wilmont clapped his hands to his ears and looked away, sure for an instant that a glare so incandescent would be followed by a deafening blast. Then the fact that he had heard no sound at all up to that moment made him realize that no sound could penetrate the transparent barrier through which he was staring, and he dropped his hands to his side.

Near the mountains, two mushroom-shaped clouds began to arise. Since there were no human habitations on the plain that could have been destroyed by the blasts, Wilmont was sure they were looking at a battle of two heavily armored desert fortresses engaged in a thermonuclear artillery duel.

There could be no other possible interpretation of what was taking place. But what stunned him the most was the realization that some of the blasts were going wild and that could only mean that the armaments were so formidable that the engagement had gotten out of control and the only way one of the fortresses could hope to survive was to unleash all of its weaponry in an all-out attack, surpassing in destructiveness the most massive of aerial bombing missions, with no saturation point decided on.

Three more mushroom-shaped clouds arose, much closer to the two moving fortresses, and with each blast they seemed to change shape and spiral more furiously skyward. As the battle continued to rage, a jagged fissure appeared in the plain and widened. Finally a direct hit appeared to have been scored. One of the fortresses had stopped moving. A steady incandescence spread outward until enveloped the second fortress.

There was no doubt in Wilmot’s mind that the blasted wreckage that would be strewn across the plain when the incandescence vanished would point up the sheer insanity of such a double attack with thermonuclear weapons. But they were mercifully spared that sight by the sudden appearance of clouds in the sky that had not been there an instant before and a sun that was just rising far to the east.

An incredible change had taken place. The entire desert was now covered with high cactus growths and scattered about between the grotesque-looking vegetation, were small stone structures that bore a striking resemblance to Eskimo igloos. There were at least a hundred such structures fairly close to the window, and perhaps a thousand others grouped unevenly across the plain, and running along the base of the mountains in three parallel and unbroken rows.

There could be no doubt that they were human dwellings, for men and women were moving around in front of them clad in dun-colored pelts, and leopard skins. There were fires burning close to many of the dwellings. Women and children huddled around the high-leaping flames, or carried large metal pots from the fire to the dwellings and stopped, now and then, to talk to the men.

Some of the men were sprawled out in the sun, and others were busily working at stripping the flesh from antelope-like animals hanging suspended from T-shaped poles. Their long sharp knifes glittered in the dawn light.

Joyce spoke then, for the first time since she had come to a halt before the window. Wilmont too, had been stunned by the swift and frightening changes that had taken place on the plain.

“What can it mean?” she breathed, tightening her grip on his arm. “We can’t be…on another planet. Those men and women resemble us too closely. And everything keeps changing. Days must have passed since—”

“Not days, Joyce,” Wilmont heard himself replying. “Years, certainly—centuries, perhaps—must have passed since those armored tanks were destroyed by atomic weapons that couldn’t have existed until considerably later than the Apollo mission. We possess no weapons so complex and only the mushroom-shaped clouds were familiar. And what we are seeing now appears to be aftermath of an age of continuous thermonuclear warfare.”

“Right here on Earth, you mean?”

“It’s something we’ve always thought of as more or less inevitable, isn’t it? We’re looking at it, I think. People living in primitive stone dwellings, clad in the skins of animals. The new barbarians.”

“But if it’s true, we must be traveling through time, into the future. We can’t possibly be on some unknown planet or a UFO base on the moon—or Venus or Mars.”

“I’m sure it’s true. How can we doubt it now? How can we possibly doubt it? If we were on Mars or Venus, or the planet of another star, that scene out there wouldn’t keep constantly changing, all apart from the fact that parallel evolution—if it exists at all—could never have led to the appearance, on another world, of human beings identical with ourselves. Humanoid creatures, with big brains and a primate aspect perhaps, but never Man as we know him.”

“But I can’t believe—”

Before Joyce could go on another change took place on the plain. The low stone dwellings vanished and larger dwellings appeared, with sloping roofs and windows with gleaming panes that caught and mirrored the sunlight. There were gardens in front of the dwellings and winding roads leading up to them and on the roads, men and women, no longer clothed in animal skins but wearing tunic-like garments of woven cloth were walking singly and in pairs. A few rode small gray animals that might have been donkeys, for they had a peculiar dwarfish look. But there were no vehicles of any kind and no mechanical contrivances, although to manufacture window glass hinted at the recovery of a little of the past’s technological knowledge, and the development of advanced tools.

“But this is madness!” Joyce exclaimed, shielding her eyes to shut out the fierce glare of the sun, which was directly overhead now. It burned through the pane through which they were staring until they feared that it might at any moment catch fire, curl up in smoke and disappear. If the window was moving swiftly through time, it was impossible to know how much of that terrible, swift change would leave it unaltered, for its molecular construction could hardly have resembled that of an ordinary pane of glass and as probably unimaginably strange. Tiny bubbles seemed constantly to form and dissolve on its shining surface in a way that was vaguely alarming.

But then Wilmont remembered that the—yes, he would think and say it now—time-machine was equally strange in its ability to break the time barrier, and a little of his alarm left him. He was able to answer the unspoken question in Joyce’s eyes without her suspecting how unnerved he had become.

“We know now, don’t we? I think it’s important that we should know, and keep it constantly in mind. The UFOs which have caused so much consternation are actually time-machines. It is not inconceivable that they should travel in space as well, and have followed planes and that the many ‘sightings’ have been confirmed. To think of them as spaceships from another planet was a natural enough mistake. It could scarcely have been avoided, since they are circular and closely resemble flying saucers spinning through the sky.

“And don’t you see—a machine that can travel in time, into the future or into the past, would have to be a flying vehicle as well, or it would risk destruction every time it arrived at a particular locality in time, whether in the future or in the past.

“There would be so many changes, Joyce—most of them topographical. Mountain ranges rise and fall, inland lakes appear in the midst of a desert, shorelines shift with the passing of the centuries. Suppose they pinpointed a certain area that was important to them—an area in the past or in the future they wished to explore. What would happen if they came out at the bottom of a lake or even—well, encountered a tall building instead of a level stretch of land. A machine that can travel in space as well as in time can avoid such accidents very easily.”

“Even if I understood all that,” Joyce said, “how can we actually be looking at something that won’t take place until long after we’re dead and buried. How can you travel into a future that doesn’t exist yet? How can they come from a future that will never exist for us?”

“It exists for us now,” Wilmont said, “in a very real way.”

“In a very strange way. How fast is the time-machine traveling? So fast that some ages vanish in a few seconds, while others remain unchanged for several minutes? Nothing has changed out there for almost five minutes now. It just doesn’t make sense. We saw those two tanks—if they were tanks—engage in a battle that must have lasted four or five minutes, just as if the time-machines were standing still. Then we saw the survivors of an age of atomic warfare that could very easily have lasted for centuries. There must have been, at the very least, a time gap of fifty or a hundred years. But we didn’t see the skipped interval at all.”

“It does make sense, Joyce—if you think about it. Do trains or automobiles always travel at the same speed? There may be slow-downs and speed-ups, and we’ve had a glimpse of the future that a brief slow-down allows us to see. As for the gaps—the machine may travel so fast at times that centuries sweep past with only a faint blurring for a second or two.”

It seemed incredible to Wilmont that he could talk so calmly when the events were so tremendous, so totally beyond the scope of what the human mind might conceive. So little was known about the nature of ultimate reality and the complex and unsuspected relationship that might exist between past, present and future time in some higher dimension of space.

Joyce’s ability to accept all this somewhat calmly amazed him too. She seemed to have controlled the emotions that had made her incapable of speech and to have accepted as an inescapable reality the changes that were taking place on the plain.

It was as though nothing beyond the window was real. It was a frail raft to cling to in a stormy sea, where every wave was of hurricane force, and could crash down in a solid, three-dimensional way. Between wisdom and folly there could be no middle ground. To walk into a rose garden and see, amidst the flowers, the grinning face of a monstrous dwarf, might give one the feeling that the dwarf was unreal. But it would be both foolish and dangerous not to consider the possibility of it being a dwarf—accepting the idea that a sight so nightmarish could mean only that total madness had possessed the beholder’s mind.

Suddenly, the view beyond the window changed again. A thin haze now overhung the plain, and through it there towered tall, breathtakingly beautiful buildings of intricate design. Some of them were pylon-shaped, and others had wide, pagoda-like roofs and great pillars at their base, and still others were surmounted by enormous domes that glowed through the thin mist, their colors constantly changing from blue to red to gold and back to blue again.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Wilmont stared intently at each pagoda-like roof and dome, observing the pace of the changing colors. The possibility that the time-machine had come to a full stop, he dismissed as unlikely; for he saw that the tall buildings were changing in many ways, almost imperceptibly at first and then with a rapidity that left him in no doubt that the machine was not maintaining a constant speed. Although the age through which it was traveling had not been left behind with a sudden blurring and a leap forward of many centuries.

Some of the buildings became taller, shorter or wider, as if some new construction work had substantially reshaped them. And once or twice he could detect through the haze, aerial traceries that might well have been networks of scaffolding, with tiny human figures moving about high in the air as agilely as spiders repairing their webs in the teeth of a gale.

And suddenly beyond the window, there was blowing the fiercest of gales, and all of the tall buildings were gone. A sand twister was moving across the plain toward the distant mountains, leveling everything in its path. But in its path there were only tall cactus growths again and numerous small animals scurrying for the safety of a wind-lashed ledge of rock protruding from the sand like the prow of a sunken ship or the skeleton of some gigantic, prehistoric beast that had been exposed to view by a millennium-long wearing away of the plain.

The plain had not looked so desolate before, for now all evidence that it had once been the home of an advanced people and had provided rich soil for cultivation, had totally disappeared. Even the mountains seemed eroded by age, less sharp in their outlines, more completely at the mercy of the elements.

The storm that was now raging seemed to increase in violence as they watched, and for a moment Wilmont was almost sure that he could hear the torrential screaming of the wind as it lashed against the window.

But that had to be a deception, of course, or he would have heard sounds a thousand times louder in the ages through which the machine had taken them.

Had the long human journey come to an end? Had another atomic age and perhaps even a third or a fourth come and gone, leaving the Earth a sterile waste no longer capable of supporting life?

Almost instantly he realized that the plain could have undergone no such destructive change, for it was not pitted and scarred with craters and the soil did not have the glassy or blackened look that repeated thermonuclear holocausts would have left in their wake. And all life had certainly not vanished, for the small mammals that were fleeing from the fury of the storm were very much alive, but seemed to be fatter than the wild hares, weasels, and ground hogs that he had known as a boy in the bleak stretches of desert surrounding his home.

There were no birds in wind-buffeted flight above the plain. The absence of buzzards, the most common of desert birds, could be accounted for by the absence of man. He could not explain the chilling somber thought that flashed across his mind. Vultures had surely not waited for the coming of man to breed and multiply and go searching for food in the waste places of earth, even though man provided them with an unexpected bounty.

“I’ve a feeling that each time the machine slows down a long leap ahead follows,” he heard Joyce say close to his ear, her voice tremulous with strain. “The city we just saw must have taken generations to build. And there’s not a trace of it left. How long does it take stone ruins to crumble into dust? You’d think there would be a few stone or metal fragments scattered about—some slight indication at least that a city as large as New York or London once occupied that empty stretch of desert.”

“I know,” Wilmont said, nodding. “It’s a wasteland, all right. But we’ve seen the same kind of vegetation before. It may not mean too much—only that the ruins have been buried deep in the shifting sands by a great many other storms as furious as that one.”

“But we’ve never seen a sandstorm like that. I haven’t, and I was born in Kansas, and know how destructive tornados can be. Couldn’t it also mean that we’re so far in the future now that even the climate has changed?”

Suddenly Wilmont felt her tense. Their shoulders were touching and he could feel her shoulders jerk and stiffen as her hand went out to point at the change that was taking place on the plain.

“There was a dimming for an instant,” she exclaimed. “And now… I think we’re passing into another age. It could be just a shift in the weather. But a blizzard would have to last for weeks to pile up all that ice and snow.”

The sand twisters had vanished and a whiteness had come into view, blanketing the entire plain and covering the mountains from base to summit, so that their snowy crests no longer stood out in sharp contrast to the gray granite slopes that had cast long shadows on the plain.

The slopes now seemed to blend with the plains in a completely shadowless way. Every craggy surface feature was buried deep in snow and ice, and reflected back the sunlight with a brightness that was almost blinding.

It was Wilmont who voiced the thought that was in both of their minds.

“There are no glaciers, but the landscape in a temperate zone might look just about like that if a new ice age was just starting. It could be merely a seasonal change, as you say—a heavy winter snowstorm. But there is nothing to suggest that the climate is as harsh as when we saw the first dwellings and people moving about with bare arms and shoulders.”

“There’s nothing moving about out there now,” Joyce said. “The desolation frightens me more than anything we’ve seen. How severe would a new glacial age have to be to destroy every vestige of life on earth? In a few million years the sun will begin to grow cooler. Could we have traveled that far into the future?”

“I don’t think so,” Wilmont said. “Man survived the glacial age that began far back in the Pleistocene Age when the mammoth and the mastodon were heading toward extinction. If he could live through a thermonuclear holocaust to become a builder of cities again he must have developed a genius for survival by this time.”

Joyce drew in her breath sharply and spoke a few words that Wilmont could not catch, for her voice did not rise above a whisper. He stood transfixed before the window, and there seemed to be a slight humming in his ears, as if the shock of what was taking place on the frozen waste, where no human form had appeared, had brought a quick rush of blood to his temples.

Six towering metal robots appeared. Each was well over fifty feet in height and had similar, light-projecting apertures in the middle of their conical heads which cast a pale violent radiance over the snow as they moved back and forth in front of a huge, boxlike object. The giants carried what appeared to be enormous, mechanically operated shovels, which they used to clear away the snow and ice on all four sides of the metal box.

Presently a wide area of dark, denuded soil stretched from the box to a barrier of piled up snow which completely encircled it.

As soon as the six metal figures had completed their task they returned across the plain toward the glacier. They vanished behind it and for a long moment there was an absolute stillness on the plain. Then, all over the metal box, small, window-like openings appeared, and what could only have been a gliding entrance panel opened—it did not swing outward like a door—and four men clad in heavy fur garments walked out upon the plain. They were quickly joined by three women and a child.

The snow seemed suddenly to pile up in vast mounds, both near the window and at the base of the distant mountains and something that bore a striking resemblance to a high-walled, deeply creviced glacier came into view in the middle distance and began to move across the plain with a snail-like slowness. Then, abruptly, it ceased to move.

It was stationary when they saw the first of the metal giants. It strode out from behind the towering barrier of snow and ice and set something down on the plain that looked like a square metal box a third as large as itself. The metal giant’s body consisted of a cylindrical shaft of coppery sheen and it had segmented arms and legs that glittered in the sunlight. Its head tapered and a pale violet light streamed out over the plain from what may or may not have been eyes, set quite far apart in the conical head. Its enormous metal face was otherwise featureless, and if it had not been so humanoid in aspect it would have been impossible to think of it as anything but a mechanical contrivance that had been built to perform a specific task in the frozen waste beyond the capacity of the men who had built it.

That it was such a contrivance—a robot shape that moved with mechanical precision but appeared to be limited in its movements—Joyce was the first to realize. It took Wilmont only a moment longer to reject as an absurdity a possibility that would have been a threat to his sanity—that the earth had been invaded by a race of metallically gleaming monsters, vaguely man-like in aspect, from another planet and that man himself had, in all probability, been annihilated.

“Gigantic robots!” Joyce gasped, wonderstruck. “They must have been robots. But why would they be used in that way? To carry a metal house into a frozen waste—”

“It may seem strange to us,” Wilmont said quickly. “We’ve never had the remotest idea, actually, of what the future would be like. You can dismiss all of the speculations in books of imaginative fiction. They mean nothing—they are wild guesses, at best. This is the reality and it seems strange, unbelievable only because we’ve no previous yardstick to measure it by.”

“But it seems—well, such a complex and elaborate way to transport a house with human beings inside to a frozen waste.”

“Only to us. Look at it this way. Man will build many gigantic and complex machines in the far future. It would be contingent upon his survival, of course, but we now know that he has survived—thermonuclear warfare, another glacial age—everything. And such mechanisms can take many forms.

“Some of them would be more likely than not to be humanoid in appearance, because the human body is highly functional. The advantages of a functional simplicity alone could have dictated that choice of form, all apart from the fact that there may be something deep-seated in human nature that makes us take a perverse kind of pleasure in creating complex machines that look manlike. We’ve done that already. Think of Univex and some of the other big-brain computers.”

“But robots so gigantic—to accomplish what? Look! Those eight people haven’t moved. They’re just standing there, blinking in the sunlight. They look bewildered, dazed. The glare must be half-blinding them. Why would they want to live on a frozen plain, cut off from all human companionship?”

“I can think of a dozen reasons,” Wilmont said. “That house may be…well, a weather station, set down in a frozen waste to collect meteorological information. Exploration and research would be of vital importance to a highly civilized race with a survival problem to contend with. The robots could hardly have come from a great distance, so there must be a large operational base somewhere in the vicinity. Or possibly those eight people are daring pioneers, determined to find out just how much man can endure in an environment like that. If they can make a go of it there may be hundreds of such dwellings on the plain before there’s another change.”

“One is coming! The house is gone!” There was a stricken look in Joyce’s eyes now, and Wilmont could see just how close to the breaking point she was.

“Darling, how is it going to end? Where are they taking us? Just the fact that we’re traveling into the future is frightening enough. But not to have the remotest idea how it is going to end—”

She broke off abruptly and Wilmont, too, was struck speechless by the change that had taken place on the plain. The ice and snow had vanished. The whole of the plain was covered with enormous flowering growths that surpassed in luxuriance the vegetation of a tropical rain forest. And now there were birds in abundance, with flaming plumage. Some were larger than flamingoes and others as tiny as humming birds, as they flashed past the window or were impaled for an instant against it by a mild flurry of wind.

Another change had taken place at the end of the metal-walled tunnel behind them. But they heard no sound and the thought of turning to make sure that they were still alone, as they had done several times previously, came to their minds, so totally absorbed were they in the view beyond the window. They remained unaware of the two tall, cloaked figures that had emerged from the tunnel until they were gripped by the elbows from behind and dragged relentlessly backwards.

Joyce cried out and began furiously to struggle. But Wilmont was quick to realize that to resist would have been worse than useless and would only have increased their peril.

There could be no escape from a prison cell if the slaying of a guard started alarm bells ringing, and the outer walls could not be scaled, and they were trapped in a prison that was traveling into the future, its outer walls moving through time.

Before they were turned about and propelled forward toward the tunnel there was a moment when the danger blotted every other thought from his mind and he heard himself frantically whispering: “They don’t have to kill us, Joyce! They’d have nothing to gain by it. But if you keep on struggling, they may hurt you badly. Stop trying to escape. You must.”

A moment later they were stumbling back through the long tunnel, forced to keep moving by fingers that had not relaxed their grip and felt like steel bands biting into their flesh.

Suddenly a voice seemed to be whispering, deep in Joyce’s mind. “Silence…when you are asked what you saw. You are different from the others—as you will discover when this long journey is over. You can be very helpful to us, because your mind is more receptive, more open. Clairvoyance in your era is rare. There have been only a few men and women from your age with minds so receptive. Tell your companion—warn him. He must remain silent too, or we will be forced to take stern measures. It is too early yet, too dangerous, for the others to know.”

The voice paused an instant, then went on more reassuringly. “The journey is almost over. There is no need for you to rejoin your companions before we arrive at our destination. There is a smaller compartment where you will be provided with every necessary convenience.”

CHAPTER NINE

The long hours of uncertainty, torment and strain had receded for a moment. No longer traveling through time, they were standing in shadows, with the great, silvery disk looming up behind them. The other men and women were watching the children, with what appeared to be a shared, if momentary, relaxation of tension.

“It’s incredible,” Joyce said. “Why do you suppose the journey ended here—I mean, in a place that looks exactly like a children’s playground, except that the toys are unbelievably strange-looking.”

“There must be children’s playgrounds in the far future,” Wilmont said. “There will always be children, I should think. It’s a wide open space as well. That may be why they chose it. The machine would have been wrecked if it had come out in that forest right up ahead.”

The children had been quick to recover from their fright and take an interest in their new surroundings.

They raced excitedly back and forth, completely ignoring their parents. They ascended and descended metal ladders that spiraled upwards into a blue eye. Before they reached the top dizziness prevented them from climbing higher. But they had fun seeing how high they could climb without becoming dizzy.

The boys were the noisiest and took delight in tossing back and forth huge crystal balls as light as a feather that made a tinkling musical sound. But a few of them, more scientifically inclined, kept picking up and examining more complicated-looking toys that bore an unmistakable resemblance to instruments of science.

The girls found little metal stick figures to play with. They appeared to be unbreakable, and had four stubby limbs, and fuzzy, metallically gleaming hair spun out as thin as salt water taffy.

Susan Wentworth was the only little girl who seemed to prefer male company, staying close to her brother’s side as she followed him from shining wonder to shining wonder, her eyes saucer-round.

“Where do you think we are?” she asked, as her brother bent to examine a small, glowing cube that had changed color when he touched it. It had been red, but suddenly it became a deep purple and glowed twice as brightly.

“Why don’t you ask Mom and Dad,” Bobby Wentworth said. “I bet they know.”

“No, they don’t, Bobby,” Susan said. “They’re as scared as I am.”

“You always were a’ fraid cat,” her brother said.

He had just made an astounding discovery. The tube changed color when he thought real hard about what color he wanted it to be. It became blue, green, yellow, and finally the dark brown color of his hair.

“Do you want to try something?” Bobby asked.

“I don’t know,” Susan said. “I’m worried about Mom. I’ve never seen her look so scared.”

“We’re having fun, aren’t we?” Bobby said. “If Mom and Dad didn’t want us to have fun they’d stop us. They always do.”

“They will, don’t worry,” Susan said. “What is it you want me to try?”

“This looks just like a building block,” Bobby said, tapping the cube with his chubby forefinger. “When you want it to be blue or yellow or green you just think about it, real hard, and it happens. You don’t have to say anything.”

“I’m not blind,” Susan said. “It was red and now it’s brown.”

“All right. It turned the same color as my hair. See if you can make it turn the same color as your hair.”

Susan shut her eyes and thought very hard. The cube glowed more brightly again and the brown color vanished. It took on a shimmering sheen, as golden as a field of summer wheat, or daffodils dancing in the sunlight on a country lane.

“Well, you did it!” Bobby exclaimed, clapping his hands. “If it’s really a building block…just think what a whole house made of blocks like that would look like.”

Suddenly the cube rose up and struck Bobby a glancing blow on the forehead. He cried out, but more in shock than in pain, and looked toward where the cube had clattered to the ground a short distance away.

“I guess it didn’t like the color of your hair,” Bobby said, frowning and rubbing his forehead. “But it had to do what it was told.”

Susan said nothing in reply. She had turned and was looking toward her parents and suddenly she was tugging at her brother’s arm.

“The very tall men are being mean again. They’re taking Mom and Dad away. We’ll be left here alone.”

“No, we won’t,” Bobby said. “We’ll have to go with them, too. They’re making everyone go with them.”

A few minutes later a procession of adults and children was winding its way through the forest gloom. Joyce recognized many of the trees, shrubs and clinging vines and the forest clearings were just as familiar to her. There were scrub oaks, birches and willow trees, with here and there a stately pine or a small one so symmetrical that it would have made a perfect Christmas tree.

The procession halted from time to time, at the command of the tall, cloaked figure in the lead. Almost ghostlike he seemed as he swung about with his arm upraised, shouting out an unintelligible order. His white and flowing garments were faintly stirred by the breeze that was making the treetops sway, and his movements were strangely abrupt and mechanical. He appeared not so much to walk as to glide, as if he were skating on a sheet of ice instead of progressing over a forest floor that was strewn with small stones and fallen branches.

Often, the children and adults in his wake had great difficulty in keeping up with him. But there was something so frightening about the eight cloaked figures who were spaced at intervals along the entire length of the procession that they almost, ran at times, risking bad falls and ignoring the prickly thorns that tore at their clothes and the nettles with stinging hairs that lashed across their faces.

The cloaked figures carried no weapons. But from them there emanated something far more threatening—a firmness of will that was ominous in its implications. It was a firmness both steel-hard and intangible, a firmness that would brook no disobedience. The cloaked figures did not need to resort to threats of physical violence. They had appointed themselves guardians of the march and it was impossible to ignore or question their authority. It flowed from them in a relentless way. Every man, woman, and child in the swiftly advancing, double column was aware of what would happen to them if they held back or tried to break away and run frantically off in another direction.

They would be struck down instantly, with a terrible kind of mind-numbing paralysis. No one doubted it, no one had the slightest urge to put it to the test. Perhaps the guardians of the procession were not evil, perhaps they merely wished to make sure they would be obeyed because obedience was a necessity. But to Joyce, and the others their dominance was—or seemed for the moment—unassailable.

What it was based on Joyce had no way of knowing. Superior wisdom or knowledge, perhaps, the powers conferred by some undreamed of advance in technological civilization. Or it could have been simply an instinctive or inborn trait in a race that had passed, almost from the beginning of its slow ascent of the evolutionary ladder, brains superior to man’s.

Joyce was hurrying through the woods with one of the older children. Wilmont tugged at her elbow as the child—an eleven-year-old—fell behind and guided the footsteps of a small frightened girl. The Four Children had also fallen behind. A swift glance backward assured her that they were keeping close together and were not in any difficulty.

“Watch the ground in front of you!” Wilmont said concernedly. “A path that cuts through the underbrush as sharply as this can be dangerous.”

For the barest instant, Joyce paused to stare at him with a stricken look in her eyes. “Dangerous? For us—or for the children? Two of them are just past the toddling stage.”

“They’ll be helped along,” Wilmont said. “The Children seldom fall heavily, anyway. They’re too light and agile. It’s you I’m concerned about. One bad fall and they’ll show you no mercy.”

“What makes you so sure?” Joyce breathed. She hoped that Wilmont would ignore the question. She knew what his answer would be.

He let a minute go by before he drew close to her again, his hand tightening on her arm. “There’s something inhuman about them,” he said. “I can sense it. It’s hands off…if we don’t stumble. But if we do, they’ll drag us to our feet and force us to go on.”

“Yes, I know,” Joyce said quietly. “Broken legs won’t save us. I don’t think they’re actually brutal. But they know we’ve been under a terrible strain and if we give way to panic they’ll lose all control over us. That’s why they’re using fear as a weapon.”

She paused an instant, but Wilmont said nothing. His lips were set in tight lines and he was nodding. It came then, in a wild rush of words. “They’re attacking us with their minds, Joseph. You know that, don’t you? There’s a weapon just as powerful as fear we could use against them—the kind of resistance men and women can offer when they’re desperate and have nothing to lose by rebelling. But it’s hard to revolt, when you have to watch every step you take and have no time to think clearly. That’s why they’re keeping us moving so swiftly.”

“There’s no doubt of that,” Wilmont said. “But it’s a controlled kind of attack they’re waging. They want to keep us demoralized, I think. But if the fear becomes too great, we’ll lose all of our capacity for self-preservation. They know that. They’ve gotten inside our minds and are using a great deal of restraint and shrewdness.”

“They’re not inside my mind completely,” Joyce said. She was almost breathless from hurrying, and had to swerve abruptly to avoid colliding with a decaying log, half-embedded in the earth, which had loomed directly in her path. “It’s just a vague uneasiness—and the feeling that I can share some of their thoughts, can know how they feel about us, to some extent, if I make a tremendous effort. It comes and goes in flashes, and, of course, it frightens me. Vague as that mental communication is, it is strong enough to make me realize we’d be in the deadliest kind of danger if we disobeyed them.”

“But you’re still largely your own master?” Wilmont asked, his voice tight with strain.

Joyce nodded. “I think so. In fact, I’m sure of it. I could still disobey them, but it would be a mad thing to do.”

“I feel the same way,” Wilmont said quickly. “Mad…self-destructive. Until we know more about them we’ll have to stay in line. But please, darling—don’t get careless. Remember how disastrous a bad fall would be.”

Joyce had no intention of ignoring Wilmot’s concerned plea. But a boy of ten succumbed to fright and came running toward her, seeking the protection of the nearest adult, and she reached out to reassure him with a firm pat on the shoulder. Instantly he grabbed hold of her arm, nearly causing her to sprawl headlong over a gigantic, purple-domed mushroom.

Wilmont cried out in alarm. But Joyce managed to smile and continue on with a reassuring look at the lad, who had the good sense to let go of her arm and stride on ahead of her with all of his courage recaptured.

The ranks did not remain completely even, but continued to break and reform and occasionally the adults joined hands and walked three or four abreast. The children, too, supported one another, as they marched resolutely along. Surprisingly, a few of them did not seem in the least terrified. There was a look of adventurous expectancy in their eyes, and when the tall, shrouded guardians of the procession drew closer to them they did not shrink back in terror.

No one, however, whistled or hummed in brave defiance as prisoners so often do. Too heavy a burden of fear and uncertainty rested upon them.

Before long, the trees became more widely spaced and the underbrush less dense, so that it ceased to encroach on the trail. There was no need to leap over fallen branches or brush aside the dangling vines that had several times brought the entire column to a halt.

There was something white in the distance that had a sun-gilded look. It was faintly visible between the trees and the thinning foliage, but whether it was a high stone wall, a fence, or a complete building, Joyce could not determine.

After several minutes, the vegetation thinned out and she could see it clearly whenever the wind came in gusts and left wide gaps in the foliage. It was a structure of towering proportions, standing out in sharp silhouette against the sky. It was entirely surrounded for several miles by a slightly elevated expanse of open countryside covered with gorse-like, russet-colored vegetation and broken, here and there, by clusters of small buildings that looked like circular beehives. There were a few small ponds—pools of still, dark water scattered over a wide area.

Wilmont had moved closer to her, his expression strained. There was something chilling and forbidding about a building of such size—a building that appeared to be windowless—arising starkly from a desolate stretch of forest-encircled countryside.

“I don’t think we’ll be traveling much further,” Wilmont said. “The chances are we’re heading straight for that big square building. A tall man couldn’t move around without stooping inside the smaller ones.”

Joyce could not repress a shudder. “Do you know what it looks like?” she asked, meeting Wilmot’s gaze unflinchingly.

“A prison,” Wilmont said.

Joyce could see by his expression that he was immediately sorry he hadn’t remained silent. To spare him further self-recrimination she said quickly: “It may not be a prison, Joseph. There are buildings just as massive and dismal looking in New York and Chicago and Los Angeles—buildings that make you feel that all the people inside are prisoners—shut away from the light. Many hospitals have the same look, and law courts and—”

“Mental institutions,” Wilmont said, without giving her time to finish. “All right—it could be any one of those institutions. Suppose we go over them again. A hospital where men and women taken captive by the navigators of a UFO are nursed slowly back to health, while they’re kept under constant guard. A mental institution where minds shattered by the experience we’ve undergone are patched together again—perhaps in a way we wouldn’t like or appreciate. Or a court of law where we must stand trial for the blackest of all crimes—being born human instead of monster-like. Or even—”

“Stop it, Joseph! You’re accomplishing nothing by anticipating the worst. We’ll find out exactly where they are taking us as soon as we’re out of the woods and can judge for ourselves what kind of building that is.”

“‘Out of the woods’ hits it pretty squarely on the head,” Wilmont said. “Do you honestly believe we ever will be…out of the woods?”

“I don’t know. I don’t want to think about it. Not right now. You warned me against stumbling and if you keep on talking that way I’ll have the worst kind of fall.”

“I’m sorry,” Wilmont said, quickly. “I’m the worst kind of fool, I guess. I’ll try to keep my thoughts to myself.”

“That’s just it, Joseph. They are not all our thoughts. I don’t think you’d have talked that way if you hadn’t—”

Joyce stopped, her hand darting to her throat. Her heart had begun a furious pounding and as she swayed in alarm a coldness started creeping up her spine. Higher and higher it crept until the base of her neck felt as if it had become encased in ice.

Then, slowly and insidiously, splinters of ice seemed to enter her brain. Her steps faltered, slowed and came to a halt. She saw Wilmont moving past her and realized, with a feeling of utter helplessness, that she had not cried out to warn him not to leave her side. Another man passed her, followed by two women and a child.

“Joseph, don’t leave me! Stop! Come back!” The words echoed in her brain. But her throat muscles remained frozen and she could not move her tongue.

The splinters of ice were inflicting great anguish. Deeper and deeper they seemed to go into her brain, draining away all of its warmth as they dissolved and became a flowing coldness that penetrated every recess of her consciousness.

She could still think and feel, but all of her thoughts had turned cold, terribly cold and remote from the sunlight that was still filtering down between the trees and the voices of the children that seemed now to come from another world.

Then, abruptly, the visions came. A vast corridor, blue-lit, hushed, tomb-silent one moment and echoing the next with voices that were quite different from the voices of children, took shape in the depths of her mind. First she saw it from a distance, as if she were standing apart from it but near enough to be enveloped in its steady glow.

CHAPTER TEN

She looked at her hands. They were faintly luminous, and ribbons of blue light cascaded over the strange, tunic-like dress she was wearing. Then, gradually, the inner vision shifted, looming larger and nearer and all at once she was inside the long, blue-lit corridor, moving silently along it.

She halted midway, and, looking up, saw on the high wall of shining metal that ascended into shadows near her, a glittering assemblage of intricate mechanical devices. Serrated metal disks revolved as slowly as the hour hand of a clock when the eye does not remain steadily riveted upon it. Several luminous crystal globes filled with colored fluids, suspended from the wall in brackets. There was a large metal plate stippled with dots that looked like a graph upon which measurements could be recorded; and fifteen or twenty interlocking metal tubes coated over with a thin film of hoar frost.

It was then that she heard the voices again, loudly and clearly this time, with each syllable falling on her eyes with a chillingly somber rhythm. The language was English but she had the feeling that it was not native to them, although they had mastered it with remarkable skill.

“You must try to listen calmly,” a voice said. “What you are seeing now in a clairvoyant vision you will experience again in the near future, and not only as an unfolding sequence of mental images. You will be physically present where you now seem to be standing, accompanied by a guide. So powerful are the thoughts that flow from our minds to yours that you feel that your presence here is a physical one. But you have merely paused for a moment in your walk through the forest. Your body is still on that forest path, and you will walk on again when the vision dims and vanishes. But first you must listen carefully to what we are about to tell you.”

There was a moment of silence and then another voice said: “Your clairvoyant endowments are unusual, more acute than we have found in any of your companions on this journey—a journey which you did not willingly undertake. We regret that we were compelled to use force. But—and this you will come to understand—we had no choice. There is a matter of vital importance to us that must be explored and the knowledge that we desperately need was peculiar to the middle years of the twentieth century. John Mollison Bramwell lived in your age. He was born at the turn of the century and died in 1972. Do you recognize the name?”

“No—no, I do not!” Joyce heard herself saying.

The first voice came again, tinged now with an impatience verging on rancor. “That is very strange. I was afraid that we might be making a mistake. We took it for granted that you would be able to help us to determine precisely what it was that made the men and women of your age think and feel as Bramwell did, since no man of more sublime wisdom has ever walked the earth. There is a difference, of course, between the sun and the planets that encircle it. The planets merely mirror the sun’s splendor, but they, too, are light bearers. John Bramwell was the sun, and the men and women of his age must, of necessity, have shared his wisdom, if only by becoming a multitude of light-mirroring satellites. They would differ greatly in brilliance, of course, but still—”

The first voice interrupted impatiently. “It is not surprising that she does not remember. John Bramwell’s name must have been on her lips as often as it is on ours. But we are dealing with a mind block here, clearly the result of an experience that has made her not want to remember. When you feel yourself to be threatened, you instinctively guard your most precious possession, fearing that it will be snatched from you. She does not want to lose the memory of Bramwell, does not want to share it with us, because it has become to her a source of protection. So she has hidden it deep in her mind and will not admit, even to herself, that it is his wisdom that continues to support her.”

The first voice was addressing the one that had spoken at great length and in a stern tone of authority, Joyce was sure that the interchange had been intended for her ears.

She was still quaking inwardly and the splinters of ice that had entered her mind had not ceased to torment her. They were still melting, dissolving, draining all of the warmth from her brain and making her obscurely aware that her body had become inert and almost lifeless. But she had not entirely lost the ability to reason logically, to weigh the meaning of what she was being told and she refused to believe that all of it—or could—true.

John Bramwell? The name was totally unknown to her. How could she have failed to remember it if it had been of historical significance at any time in the present or recent past? The second voice had compared Bramwell’s splendor to that of the sun. He must have been some kind of legendary figure in his own lifetime. There were East Indian gurus who were extravagantly praised by their followers. But they were, for the most part, not unknown in the Western World and Bramwell was certainly not an East Indian or a Tibetan name.

Suddenly, her thoughts seemed no longer completely her own and a new kind of fear swept over her. Were they probing her mind while they talked, seeking answers that were buried so deeply in her consciousness that she, herself, would not have been able to set their doubts at rest?

She was sure that they mistrusted her and were beginning to regret that they had revealed a secret which they had kept hidden from all of her companions.

No one else in the procession that was still moving through the woods had been singled out as she had been. She was sure of that, and the thought made her want to turn and run along the corridor and escape this terrible mind-imprisonment—escape back to her body before it was too late. Might not her body be turning cold even now, mindless and helpless and alone? Surely the procession had by now reached the end of the forest trail, and Wilmont would be turning back in search of her. What would he do if he found her standing rigid and mindlessly staring in the depths of the woods? Rub her wrists and slap her face, try desperately to bring recognition back into her eyes, life to her frozen limbs?

The first voice spoke again, and the words cut across her mind like a whiplash, so stern and commanding were they in tone, so vibrant with harsh displeasure.

“Your body is safe,” the voice said. “Only a little time has passed, and no harm will come to it if you stop wasting time, as you are doing, by asking yourself unnecessary questions. Look steadily at the wall. I am going to show you John Bramwell as he was when the men and women of your age sealed him away from the light which he himself created—a light of wisdom, strength and power which shone so brightly in your age that the long sleep into which he has passed has failed to extinguish it.

“Someday he will awaken. That light has grown brighter with every passing millennium and we know now how great he must have been to have conquered death forever.

“The frozen sleep into which he passed at the moment of his entombment has lasted for tens of thousands of years. And records, imperishably entombed with him, give precise instructions for his revival.

“We have conquered time. We have traveled back through time to your age and beyond, but death we have never conquered. You surpass us in wisdom because of what John Bramwell accomplished. The light of his creative genius made the middle years of the twentieth century the most glorious years that the world has ever known. Surely you are aware of that? Surely you have not forgotten?”

Joyce had a sudden, almost uncontrollable impulse to cry out. “I was telling you the truth. I never heard of John Bramwell. You say he died in 1972. Yesterday, for us, it was 1968. If you’ve traveled back through time, as you say, you should know that. And the age you praise so highly was a dreadful age in many ways. And we were not so wise—are not so wise. Oh, no. We could not prevent wars and famine, and human wretchedness…what makes you think it was so glorious an age?”

“John Bramwell,” the second voice said, and she knew then that none of her thoughts could be kept hidden. “He was the first man to achieve human immortality. If he could do that he must have been wise beyond our understanding. And his splendor must have shone on every man, woman and child in your age—it had to be a glorious age.”

The truth dawned on Joyce then, impinging on her consciousness with the force of a physical blow.

“They worship Bramwell. They have made an idol, a fetish symbol out of him. They are in some respects blindly superstitious, children of unreason despite what they have accomplished scientifically. It’s unbelievable. I never would have thought—”

“What you think is of no importance,” the first voice said. “It might have been…a brief moment ago. But now we are beginning to realize that we must have been mistaken about you. Bramwell was like a first magnitude star, burning in the depths of the night sky. If you do not admire that kind of brightness what hope is there for you?”

“Her clairvoyant gifts may have deceived us, and we may have told her more than it was wise to reveal to a woman of the twentieth century at this stage of our explorations,” the second voice said. “We told her that she would look upon Bramwell, unchanged by time’s tyranny, and that may have been the opposite of wise. But I still prefer to believe otherwise. If she looks upon Death’s Conqueror, as he must have appeared when he walked the earth millenniums ago, the memory block may dissolve. She may remember then, and drop to her knees in adoration.”

“Yes…she may remember,” the first voice agreed.

For a moment there was no sound at all in the corridor. Then the first voice spoke to Joyce directly, less harshly this time. “Stare steadily at the wall. It will become completely transparent if your desire to see what it protects and conceals is strong enough. It is an effort that we cannot help you with. But if you wish to return to your body before it collapses, creating a danger you would be wise to avoid, you will not doubt your ability to see beyond the wall. Your clairvoyant gifts are unusual, as you have discovered without our help. Use them now. Try, try, with all the strength of your mind.”

Joyce stared steadily at the wall. A voice seemed to whisper, deep in her mind. “If you fail to do as they wish, you will surely die. It has come to that. You have given them no choice. They are not infallible. They can make mistakes—just as we can. And they feel they have made a mistake in revealing so much to a woman from the past who does not even know who John Bramwell was.”

She had no way of knowing how rapidly time was passing—or how slowly. Her mind seemed for a moment remote from time, existing in a world that had never known the ticking of a clock.

Suddenly the wall before her began to grow transparent. It turned slightly luminous, and a human face came slowly into view. It was that of a man of early middle age, darkly bearded, with extremely handsome features. Strands of moist, jet-black hair clung to his high brow and strayed down over his cheeks, which were of yellowish cast. His eyes were closed, as if in sleep and there was a serenity, an immense calmness in the set of his lips and the granite-firm contours of his jaw.

There was no strain in his expression at all, no hint that nightmare visions might be passing through his mind in the long, deep sleep that had given his face the look of a corpse.

Then Joyce began to hear it. A rustling and a whispering, remote and yet, in some strange way, startlingly near. It became louder and Joyce thought for an instant that a wind was blowing through the vault. Then she felt something sharp and prickly clinging to her face and raised her hand to brush it away.

She could see her hand clearly as she raised it, as firm-fleshed as it had been before a feeling of lightness had come upon her and she had seemed to be standing in the vault with no bodily sensations at all.

Swaying above her now were the wind-stirred branches of trees and the vault had totally vanished and she was lying flat on her back in the forest gloom and a voice seemed to be saying: “I rescued you just in time. I have often wondered why it must always be a Krull who must undertake such a rescue. Unfortunately, there are times when the Telens give us no choice.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The overhanging bough grazed her face again and burrs and nettles clung tenaciously to her clothes as she struggled to a sitting position and stared about her.

At first she saw nothing but the wind-stirred leaves and a shaft of sunlight boring down from high overhead, and shedding a radiance on the gently swaying foliage. Then from the filigree pattern of shifting light and shadow directly in front of her, there emerged a figure so grotesque in aspect—so misshapen and stooped-shouldered and dwarflike that she thought for an instant that one of the gnarled tree-trunks had come to life and was moving toward her amidst the sun-dappled foliage.

The figure halted a few feet from where she was crouching and stared at her in silence for a moment, its small eyes trained so steadily upon her that she recoiled in fright. She dragged herself backwards over the forest floor, not so much to avoid close physical contact with the small malformed shape, as to escape the powerful, almost overpowering emanation of something indefinable that seemed to come from it. There was something—yes, ghoulish in the intensity of its stare. It had a small flat nose and high cheekbones and there was a skull-like boniness in the configuration of its features that chilled her to the core of her being.

“You…you spoke to me in perfect English,” she heard herself muttering, almost pleadingly, feeling that it was necessary to establish some kind of contact with the creature that would prevent him from becoming enraged by her swift recoil.

The ghoul shape withdrew his gaze from her face and moved to a moss-covered boulder and sat down. There was no trace of anger or resentment in his eyes.

“It is wholly an illusion,” he said. “But I suppose there is no way you could have found out the truth for yourselves. I seem to be talking to you now in your own language, in words familiar to you. But it is not really so. Thoughts arise in our minds which are sometimes penetrating and profound, and other times thoughts as childish as those which the men and women of your age so often entertained. And I agree with you that it was not a very wise or discerning age. And you—well, you clothe those thoughts in language drawn solely from your own experience. To you, the Telens seem very solemn, serious-minded, scientifically advanced. So when their thoughts impinge on your mind they seem to be speaking to you in the kind of language a precise and pompous twentieth century scientist would use.”

The ghoul shape threw back his head and laughed. Great bursts of merriment came from him.

“Oh, how mistaken you are! The Telens are in some respects—perhaps in most respects—savage children—superstitious, mentally unbalanced. Could you not have sensed that from the first?”

“Look here. Listen to me carefully. Try to understand. Vast ages have passed over the earth since you were born and acquired the wisdom and knowledge peculiar to your age. And that wide waste of years has brought undreamed of changes.

“Did it never occur to you that the human race might split up into many warring factions, become divergent, and, in part, wildly grotesque or half-insane?

“Did it never occur to you that perhaps a third of the human race would become absolute buffoons? Remember, these are my thoughts—not my words. You are a brilliant and discerning individual and you can clothe my thoughts in words that closely parallel what I am thinking, but are inexact in a strict sense. But they are exact enough to have a great deal of meaning for you and that is all that really matters.

“Continue to listen, please. You will know a great deal about the Telens and my own race when I am through.”

Joyce stared at the huge, misshapen jaw and small, beady eyes of the ghoul shape and a wild incredulity swept over her. Could so monstrous a caricature of twentieth century man possess infinitely more sensitivity than the Telens, with their straight carriage and outwardly robust aspect? Yes…yes, she told herself. There could be no doubt of it. In a way that warmed her heart and made her want to embrace the grotesque figure who sat facing her, the ghoul shape spoke her language.

He was capable of merriment and laughter, he did not appear to take himself too seriously and yet there seemed to be in him a high seriousness, a great depth of human understanding.

“It was easy enough for the men and women of your age to have a stereotyped idea of what the far future would be like,” the ghoul shape went on quickly. “Your scientific knowledge was very limited and rigid and you were trained from childhood to curb your imagination whenever it took a turn which the so-called best minds of your age regarded as dangerously speculative.”

“You foolishly imagined, for instance, that mankind would follow a single line of development. You visualized the men of the far future as enormous-browed, with receding chins and almost infantile features. It never occurred to you that the evolutionary pattern can change in dozens of ways and that man’s outward appearance has very little to do with his intelligence.”

“There have been many, many changes, enormous ones, and not in man’s physical aspect alone. The greatest changes of all have occurred in the realm of power distribution.”

“Power distribution?” Joyce heard herself asking.

“Yes, power distribution of a grossly unequal nature. The enormous piling up of the materials which support physical dominance in one direction and their almost total depletion in another.

“You see, for thousands of years the Telens were the lucky ones. Their intelligence helped them to acquire dominance and they were courageous as well and great risk-takers. Their scientific achievements verged on the miraculous.”

“That’s not hard to believe,” Joyce said. “The discovery and perfection of time travel alone—”

“Yes, they invented time travel. But then something happened to them. They began rapidly to lose their intellectual brilliance, without ceasing to be robust physically or forfeiting their supremacy in the realm of power distribution.

“A great many of them became totally unbalanced, and others superstitious, semi-mad cult worshippers. That is not at all unusual, you know. The terrible strain of maintaining a technological civilization that is so complex and demanding that it provides no opportunity for relaxation, often leads to that kind of breakdown. It can take place in so short a period as four or five generations.

“There are still a few completely sane, highly intelligent Telens. But they are so few in number that they can exercise no control over the thirty or forty million Telens who have turned the ice-encased, still living body of John Bramwell into a symbol of strength and power. John Bramwell has become a cult idol or cult hero. The man who conquered death, who achieved the kind of immortality the Telens felt that they themselves might have possessed if their minds had not succumbed to the virus of semi-madness.”

“There are moments, you see, when a mind unbalanced, a mind that has regressed to a more primitive level of consciousness, becomes aware of what has been lost. That awareness can be pure torment, an agony surpassing anything the sane mind can envision. It is commonly believed that distortions of thinking and feeling can enable a mind over burdened with strain, a mind that can no longer cope with the complexities of civilization, to escape from reality. And that is true—up to a point. But the escape is seldom total, and there are moments when every mind so afflicted knows how great and terrible a price has been paid for a security that is wholly illusionary.”

The ghoul shape paused for an instant, as if to assure himself of Joyce’s understanding. When he saw that she was responding, he went on quickly: “A mind so afflicted has momentary glimpses of a vanished glory, a glory that it feels it must recapture or the sanctuary it has created for itself will be exposed for what it is—an iron-walled prison.

“What I am saying would not apply, of course, to the Telens who have regressed so far that they have become raving lunatics. But, as with the remaining sane Telens, they are few in number. The great majority of Telens are borderline cases. I have compared them to savage children, and even to buffoons, and that, in a sense, is precisely what they have become. But they are savage children with tattered remnants of a high intelligence, and a vanished glory flapping about them. They are not incapable of intelligent planning. The shrewd, if erratic, application of technological knowledge to problems of great and immediate urgency has enabled them to travel back through time with a definite purpose in mind and to carry that purpose out with a fair measure of success.”

“They are helped, of course, by the sane Telens who can no longer control them, but have no desire to relinquish their share of the tremendous power which the Telens have possessed for thousands of years and have not, as yet, been forced to relinquish.”

“I can understand why they should regard Bramwell with superstitious awe and worship him as a cult hero,” Joyce heard herself saying. “He must loom through the mists of time as a symbol of the splendor which once enabled them to feel that they, too, might be capable of achieving as much as he had, that the gift of immortality was almost within their grasp and that if they had not regressed, as you say, death itself might have been conquered forever. But why should they travel back to the middle years of the twentieth century and take me captive? The others, too—some of them children. What could they hope to gain by it? I had never even heard of Bramwell.”

“Ah, yes,” the ghoul shape said. “Few of the others knew who Bramwell was, and there have been many captives. That would have seemed strange to them if they had not been under a half-insane compulsion. They want to believe that Bramwell was known to every man, woman and child in the years immediately preceding his entombment and have shut their eyes to the historical record. They have discovered a great deal about the twentieth century. But when one of the captives denies having so much as heard of Bramwell they think he is being secretive and stubborn—or has some kind of mind block.”

Joyce hesitated, for the question she wanted most to ask had become of vital importance to her and she was afraid that the ghoul shape could not answer it. But there was nothing to be gained by putting it off and she suddenly found herself asking: “Who was Bramwell? Do you know?”

The ghoul shape nodded. “He was one of the first of the frozen-sleep experimenters, and left detailed instructions for the preservation and revival of his still living body. The instructions are encased in a metal cylinder inside the vault where he was placed before his heart stopped beating.”

“Yes…that explains it!” Joyce exclaimed. “In our age there were several such frozen-sleep experiments. But few people could have named the scientists who were engaged in a project that did not attract anything like the interest it should have aroused. Or perhaps…it aroused too much interest. It both chilled and fascinated people, and they were a little afraid to face all of its implications. To go to sleep and wake up thousands of years in the future! The conquest of death on so bold and fearful a level made even the most imaginative viewers shrink a little when it was presented to them for the first time on television.

“Human nature is like that. It prefers to approach the possible conquest of death obliquely, in slow stages. It seems to dread a little—to draw back at first—from the scientific miracles it is secretly eager to believe in and embrace. Heart transplants were viewed in much the same way. But the surgeons who performed them were better known, perhaps because the success of the experiments could be determined without waiting for ten or fifty or a hundred thousand years to pass.”

“The Telens know that there must have been quite a few frozen-sleep experiments,” the ghoul shape said. “But they have succeeded in blotting the implications of that from their minds. Don’t you see? Only Bramwell has achieved a near-approach to immortality by surviving into our age. To become a cult idol, Bramwell had to remain, in their eyes, unique and almost godlike in his attributes. They never tire of comparing him to the Sun.”

“To the Sun! Of course. During the first few moments of that clairvoyant vision, they kept insisting that his splendor shone on every man, woman and child in our age.”

“Well, that answers your first question,” the ghoul shape said. “They took you captive, held you in bondage, accused you of disappointing them, even heaped harsh abuse upon you because they envied you.”

“Envied me? I don’t see—”

“It is really quite easy to explain. They are convinced that the men and women and even the children of your age must possess some special knowledge, some gift of healing that would dispel all of the dark shadows that have closed in about their minds and make them whole again. They are convinced that you share enough of Bramwell’s shining wisdom to enable them to regain what they have lost in their regression to a more primitive level of consciousness.

“To them, you hold in your hands a key which could open the portals wide on a lost wisdom, a vanished splendor. It is a wisdom and splendor which they have lost and desperately want to regain.”

“You cannot really help them, of course, but they do not know that. They want to become as you are—or as they think you are. But they envy you as well, and that, you see, is the other side of the coin. Envy and a desire to imitate the unattainable always lead to anger and resentment. They feel that you are deliberately withholding your shining gifts of wisdom and strength from them. And they are determined to break down your resistance, to shatter the pride which they feel is keeping you from helping them.”

The ghoul shape shifted his position on the boulder, as if his limbs had become cramped from remaining too long in one position. “What they hope to accomplish by taking more and more of the men and women of your age captive and keeping them under constant observation, would make very little sense to a sane mind. But, as I have said, their thinking is emotionally distorted, and far from sane.

“They are trying to find out as much as they possibly can about you, to determine—to use an idiomatic expression peculiar to your age—precisely what makes you tick. They are under the illusion that they are conducting a rigorously scientific experiment to find out if you can be persuaded to share your wisdom with them. They have made the mistake of thinking that just the right kind of psychological pressure will break down all of your resistance. Your age had a term for that, too, a highly descriptive one—‘Brainwashing.’

“Brainwashing would, of course, defeat everything they are hoping to accomplish, for if you were forced to think exactly as they do you could not possibly help them. But an unbalanced mind is seldom capable of reasoning consistently enough to avoid the most glaring of contradictions.

“Bramwell’s apparent achievement of immortality has become a superstitious obsession with them. In that respect, they are wholly primitive, have regressed to the tribal god stage of culture. To them Bramwell’s still living body is surrounded by a kind of halo. Now do you understand?”

“I think I do, yes,” Joyce answered. “But why did you rescue me. You said that you had rescued me, didn’t you?”

“You were in great danger, that’s why,” the Krull said. “Your mind had been under their control for a dangerously long time. They don’t really care if the men and women they keep under constant observation are irreparably harmed. I did not like what I saw and heard.”

“You mean…you knew? You were there?”

“Just by accident. Sometimes we take an interest in what they do. I was there in the same way that you were—in a clairvoyant vision. My physical body was right here in the forest but I overheard everything they said to you, and that you said to them.”

“You mean—you can actually spy on them in that way?”

“If you want to call it that. There are many things that I haven’t time to explain to you now. You see, we can control them to a certain extent, with our minds alone. I am keeping them from suspecting that you are no longer in the vault in a non-physical way. It is an effort—a great strain, in fact—but I can do it for a short while. It should enable me to attempt something the Krulls should have done long ago. If I am successful it will be possible for you to leave this age and return to the twentieth century.”

Joyce almost stopped breathing. “But why do you want to help us? I must know. Unless I know it would be difficult for me to believe you.”

“You mean…it would be difficult for you to trust me. I think you know that you can. As for my reasons—we are so different from you in some respects that I could never hope to make you understand why it has become necessary for us to take such a risk. We cannot hope to succeed, however, unless you are prepared to trust me completely and do exactly as I say.”

“What must I do?” Joyce heard herself asking, stunned by what the ghoul shape had said, not quite daring to believe him, but feeling that if she let her doubts overwhelm her there would be no hope left at all.

“Bramwell must be awakened from his long, frozen sleep,” the ghoul-shape said. “Only the children can do it.”

“Only…the children?”

“Yes, does that seem strange to you? It is strange, but it is also true. The Telens cannot get inside the minds of the children and influence their thinking as they would like to do. They have never stopped trying, and that is why they have taken so many children captive. But children have minds of their own, weaker in some respects than the minds of adults, but stronger in other respects.

“Children have many hidden thoughts—dark, mysterious, secretive. They know how to keep many of their thoughts hidden from adults. They will fight to protect their secrets, with all the strength of their minds. There are secrets that can never be pried from a child. Their thoughts are simple in a complicated way, and the Telens cannot fathom what children may be thinking when they are fleeing down the wind—yes, I think that describes what I have in mind—in their private, well-guarded inner worlds.

“I told you that I could control the minds of the Telens but only up to a point, and only for a brief time. And if an adult went into the vault and set the mechanism in motion which would awaken Bramwell the Telens would know. The instant the hand of an adult touched that mechanism they would know, because such an intrusion, such a desecration, would be so terrible a shock to them that I would lose all of my ability to influence their minds. I would be powerless to prevent a temporary mind block from being completely shattered. They would know and you would all be destroyed.”

“You still haven’t told me what I must do.”

“Your companions are only a short distance away, in a round stone building on the far shore of a small lake. You can see the glimmer of the water from here, if you look past that large, lightning-blasted tree. You will have no difficulty in joining them. It is unguarded now—I have made sure of that—and they could all escape, if they knew how somnolent the Telens have become. But it is fortunate that they do not know, for the children will need adult assistance when they are brought to the vault.

“But remember—no adult must touch the mechanism itself. The children will set it in motion. I will be there to see that the children are told exactly what they must do before they enter the vault. All of your companions must accompany you when you return with them to the vault. I will guide you back. It is only a short distance from here.”

“But I was never actually there. You mean that this time—”

“You will be physically present, of course. And so will the children and all of the adults. I must leave you now, for there are a few precautions that I must take immediately. But when you start out for the vault, you will discover that you know exactly how to get there. I will be guiding you every step of the way.”

“I hope I will be believed when I tell my companions what you’ve just told me,” Joyce said. “If I should have difficulty in convincing them…”

“I’m sure you won’t. I’ll help with that, too. You must not allow any doubts to enter your mind.”

The Krull turned then, and Joyce stood motionless for a moment, watching his small, hunched form disappearing between the trees.

CHAPTER TWELVE

It was Bobby who had climbed the highest. He’d ascended, hand over hand, the ladder-like indentations on the walls of the vault and was balancing himself right underneath the complex dial that controlled the freezing mechanism.

Suddenly Bobby’s hand went out and began to turn the massive dial. Slowly at first, because he possessed only an average child’s strength and then more rapidly as the revolving mechanism itself seemed to gain momentum.

He looked down at the Four Children, who had made no attempt to ascend in his wake and called out to them.

“You said you’d let me try first,” he said. “All right—it’s turning. Something is going to happen in a minute. That’s what my Dad said. You’d better not stand right under it. Why don’t you climb up here with me and then we can all get up on that shelf and watch.”

He reached down as he spoke and helped Susan up until she was crouching beside him at the base of the dial and then the Four Children started up.

The dial kept right on turning, faster and faster. It made six complete revolutions before the Four Children joined Bobby and Susan. Bobby was no longer turning it. The dial was moving by itself now, around and around and making a faint, droning sound.

The six children all climbed up on the projecting ledge of metal that jutted out from the wall of the vault on the right hand side of the spinning dial.

As they crouched there, they could clearly see the crystal-encased face of the frozen man who had slept for so long a time. Bobby was no longer able to remain silent while they waited for the dial to stop turning.

“My Dad says he’s been like that for thousands and thousands of years,” he said as if aware that there were emotions he was duty-bound to share. “How do you think he’ll feel when he wakes up?”

When no reply was forthcoming he added: “I know how I’d feel. Scared.”

The dial was revolving so rapidly now that it had turned into a gray blur. Suddenly the markings on it became distinct again and it slowed and stopped.

Instantly the frozen, crystal-encased face began to move. The mouth moved first, the lips pushing in and out and then there was a flickering of the sleeper’s eyelids.

“Look, Bobby!” Susan cried. “He’s waking up.”

It was true, of course. The eyes of the frozen sleeper suddenly opened wide and he was looking straight at Bobby and Susan and the Four Children.

Betty Anne was sitting right beside Susan, and the two tiny tots suddenly grabbed hold of each other, as if they were afraid the older children would become too frightened to stay on the ledge and would leave them without support. One of the twins stood up straight and gave a little cry. But none of the others made a sound until a section of the wall directly beneath them began to move. A wide panel that had been so smoothly grooved into the wall that there had been no line of demarcation separating it from the shining expanse of metal surrounding it, glided open, and a white human arm, glistening with moisture, shot out of the aperture. The arm groped waveringly about in the overhead light, as if searching about for some solid object to grasp, and then a leg appeared.

Bobby and the staring Thacker boy cried out simultaneously, and the Trilling twins flattened themselves against the metal wall at their backs, as if seeking to get as far away as possible from what was taking place directly below them.

Into the vault there emerged a swaying figure still weighed down with a clinging film of ice. The ice was melting rapidly, permitting the figure to emerge almost naked into the light.

Its movements were slow and cumbersome, but it was its face that held the children’s gaze. It was a wildly staring countenance, the lips slack, the eyes darting to right and left in what appeared to be an extremity of fright.

There was silence for a moment, save for the quickened breathing of the children on the ledge. Then the vault was filled with shouts and hurrying feet.

Wilmont was the first to reach the swaying figure, his face tight with strain. As he seized firm hold of one cold arm, Wentworth grasped the other. Bobby started to climb down from the ledge, but his father waved him back.

“Stay right where you are, Bobby, until we get him out of here. Then you can follow us.”

“All right, Dad!”

“All of you—stay where you are,” Wilmont said. “Everything’s fine. You’ve helped more than you’ll ever know.”

Three other men had entered the vault and they remained standing guard at the entrance until Wilmont and Wentworth passed between them with their swaying charge. His feet dragged and the look of dazed horror had not left his eyes.

“We’ll be outside in a moment,” Wilmont said reassuringly.

“There’s not a sound from below,” one of the men at the entrance said. “But you’d better hurry.”

“We will,” Wilmont assured him. “See that the children follow us one at a time. Keep them from making noise.”

Despite the urgent need for haste, both Wilmont and Wentworth were considerate and gentle with the man from their own age whose conquest of time had verged on the miraculous. They guided him forward with no more than the reassuring firmness of concerned attendants helping a patient to walk from his bed to a hospital elevator.

In a moment they were descending the short flight of stairs that spiraled downward to the metal-walled passageway on the ground floor of the building through which the children had passed a few minutes previously. Then they were in the passageway and moving with their charge toward the open doorway at the end of it.

There was a glimmer of sunlight just beyond the doorway which dispelled somewhat the tomblike gloom. But their expressions remained somber until they were standing in a flood of downstreaming sunlight directly in front of the massive, black stone building, facing a wide stretch of heavily forested countryside.

There was a reassuring stillness everywhere.

Wilmont was the first to break the silence. “It helps considerably to know we’ll have support as soon as we reach the forest. But we must not forget how dangerous over-confidence can be. We’re just at the start of a trail that may not end for us this side of eternity.”

“You don’t have to remind me,” Wentworth said. “The children could delay us. I hope—”

Before he could go on, Bobby emerged from the building, followed by the other children. Behind them loomed the three men who had been guarding the entrance.

“Here I am, Dad,” Bobby said, moving quickly to his father’s side. “Does he know where he is? Does he know we’re his friends? He looks funny—”

The man who had conquered time turned slowly and looked straight at Bobby. “Who is this little boy?” he asked. “Why did he say that? Do I know…where I am? Yes…I think I do. I am… I have awakened…”

Wilmont tightened his grip on the trembling man’s cold arm. All of the ice had melted now, but there were a few tiny frost crystals still clinging to his beard, their sparkling brightness contrasting eerily with the dull, parchment-yellow skin that was stretched so tightly over his cheekbones that a mummy could scarcely have looked more in need of restoration. There was one difference, however. A mummy could not be restored to life. But the sun and air and human voices were dispelling for John Bramwell, slowly but surely, the mists of a sleep a thousand times longer than a mummy had ever known.

“Yes, you have awakened,” Wentworth said quickly. “But you mustn’t try to remember too much too fast. There is nothing strange about us. We know who you are, and we are your friends, as my young son has just said.”

“Do you really know?” John Bramwell asked, a look of desperate appeal in his eyes. “Or did you just stumble on a strange, rusting clutter of machinery and—watch what you thought was a frozen corpse open its eyes and look at you? Do you know how many years, how many centuries have passed since I closed my eyes and could hear for a moment distant voices speaking my name and then nothing at all? Or are you confused, bewildered, with no knowledge or understanding of what was done to keep me alive all this time?”

Before either Wentworth or Wilmont could reply the look of horror that had vanished for an instant from his eyes returned and he went on quickly: “But how could I expect you to understand? I have awakened in an age that must be remote from the twentieth century—a thousand years in the future, five thousand. I do not know. The great experiment—”

He stopped, his eyes sweeping the forested landscape that stretched out in front of him. “It is all so strange.” His voice had become a hoarse whisper and they had to strain to catch his words. “I thought I would see no trees, that every forest would have been leveled by now. And you—you speak in English and you have used no new words, no words that should have made it almost a different language by now. Even your clothes—”

“This age is as strange to us as it seems to you,” Wentworth said. “It would be best if we told you the truth now, even though we are in great danger. The loss of a few minutes might be less to our disadvantage than your inability to trust us, as you must do if we are to save ourselves.”

“It has been longer than you think,” Wilmont said. “A half million years perhaps.”

A sudden anger flamed in Bramwell’s eyes. “I have been restored to life, no matter how brief the time. How can you make light of an achievement so tremendous?”

“We are not making light of it,” Wilmont said. “I have told you the simple truth. You have not slept for just a thousand years—or ten thousand years. This age is so remote from ours that changes we would have thought impossible have taken place, and have become accepted as commonplaces in a civilization that has reached undreamed of heights. That civilization is disintegrating now, but even in its decline its achievements surpass our understanding.”

“We have been brought here against our will,” Wentworth said. “Listen carefully, try to understand. They’ve built a machine that can travel back and forth in time. Twentieth century science enabled you to survive into this age. But the science of a half million years in the future has enabled them to conduct us on the same journey, by a different route. The two journeys have brought us together in a way they could not have foreseen. If you will think of us as your friends, we may still be able to save you—and ourselves. They worship you as a god.”

“But surely this is madness!” Bramwell’s voice shook, and he made a futile effort to free himself. “Let go of me and do not torment me with such talk. Nothing you say makes sense. Let me find my own way out of this nightmare. Surely you owe me that much. I have risked so much—”

“We are wasting precious time,” Wilmont said. “I’m afraid we have made a mistake. You will have to do as we say, John Bramwell. You give us no choice.”

“You…you know who I am then?”

“Wait,” Wentworth said, laying a restraining hand on Wilmot’s arm. “Let me talk to him. The time will not have been wasted if we can make him understand. If he struggles and refuses to believe us, we’ll have much greater obstacles to overcome. Give me just five more minutes.”

“Each of those minutes could cost us our lives,” Wilmont said. “But you are right, of course. We need his help even more than he needs ours.”

“I will listen,” Bramwell said. “But do not threaten me again. I do not take kindly to threats.”

Wentworth glanced behind him and saw that the children were standing very still, having seemingly grasped the significance of what they had overheard. It surprised him that they could have remained quiet for so long. Then he saw that the two men who stood in the doorway were holding the two six-year-olds by the hand, and looking sternly at the Trilling twins. Bobby’s silence did not surprise him, and the Thacker boy seemed almost Bobby’s equal in his ability to exercise restraint.

Reassured, he began talking to Bramwell, quietly and earnestly, and Bramwell heard him out in silence.

For a moment, when he had finished, it was impossible to tell how much Bramwell believed of what he had said. But he was not kept long in doubt.

Bramwell drew himself up and said, very firmly, “You can stop treating me as if I were a very ill man, barely able to stand. I had difficulty in walking at first, but now my strength has returned. I have to believe you. Otherwise I think I would go completely mad. A half million years. It could just as easily be a million years, since, as you say, you’ve no sure way of checking on it. Time travel! How utterly inconceivable that seemed, even to science fiction writers who made so much of it. We thought it would be ten times as difficult to achieve as breaking the genetic code. It seemed inconceivable, in fact, that the past and the future could exist as three-dimensional realities anywhere in space or time, despite the fact that the physicists refused to rule it out as a remote possibility in a relativistic universe. We thought that only the present could be real in a totally physical sense. How mistaken can you be?”

“We’ll be making a greater mistake if we doubt it now,” Wilmont said, “Or lose another minute. We have only two weapons. One of them is you. The other is the guidance we have received from one of the Krulls, who is risking his own life to help us, as you’ve just been told. But both of those weapons may be frail reeds—against the destructive forces they could unleash if the thought-barrier we’ve erected against them breaks down. Their inability to infiltrate the minds of the children may be of no further use to us. The children enabled us to do what we could not have done ourselves, for no adult could have turned the dial that controlled the freezing mechanism. But now—”

“As soon as we’re in the forest we’ll all be together again and the Krull will go right on guiding us,” Wilmont said, his voice harsh with impatience. “We’d better get started. The worst mistake we could make would be to belabor the possibilities of disaster.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

They were all together again, the children no longer as carefree as they had seemed when age upon age had gone rushing past in the long journey through time. They were not playing games now, as they had done in the steel-walled compartment which had concealed from their view the wonders which only Wilmont and Joyce Drake had gazed upon. They looked serious and alert, as if they had become aware, as children can, that when adults have a great responsibility to bear, fun-making must be ruled out.

In the forest gloom only the Krull seemed able to move about as if he were performing some simple daily task that did not alarm him in the least.

What strange creatures they were, Joyce found herself thinking, as she moved at Wilmot’s side at the end of the long procession of men, women and children who were winding their way with extreme caution between the tall pines and century-old oaks. How could the Krulls, she wondered, remain so completely above the battle which everyone else, since the very beginning of man’s life on earth, had been compelled to wage just to stay alive?

They were sensitive and imaginative, they appeared to feel deeply, and yet the thought of death and destruction seemed not to trouble them at all. They held very lightly joys which they could hardly have failed to value highly, for every aspect of human experience delighted them.

Might it not be possible that in the Krulls human nature had been transformed into something truly splendid? To enjoy life to the full as an individual but to complain not at all when it became necessary to pass the torch to other hands—was not that the hallmark of a kind of greatness?

They appeared to be both self-centered and completely selfless, and there was something about them so paradoxical, a combination of human attributes that filled Joyce with awe.

Perhaps only in a civilization that was dying, a culture pattern that was on the wane, could such an embodiment of the human spirit at its best and most courageous free itself from the shackles of the past, and truly soar.

To her amazement, Wilmot’s thoughts had apparently almost paralleled her own, for he turned to her suddenly with a look of grim satisfaction in his eyes. “Trusting Kaljac completely was the wisest thing we could have done,” he said. “In some strange way, the Krulls have thrust aside all fear and possess an inner strength that they seem determined to keep a closely guarded secret. I’ve a feeling Kaljac doesn’t want us to know just how strong the Krulls are. In an emergency, I believe they could overcome a threat to their survival without experiencing an instant of uncertainty or self-doubt.”

“I think I know what you mean,” Joyce said, nodding. “Bramwell has conquered death as no other man has ever succeeded in doing, but now he has become vulnerable again. No matter how courageous he may be, he does not want to die. But the Krulls are without fear. They have managed somehow to erase the sharp line which we draw between living and dying. They think of human existence as a kind of—well, a kind of flowing. If you live you live and if you die you die, and the flowing never stops.”

The vegetation was beginning to thin out a little. The huge oaks stood further apart, their branches seldom interlocking and there were glimmers of sunlight between the masses of swaying foliage.

Wentworth and his wife were at the head of the procession and Kaljac had been walking at their side, his grotesque body slightly hunched. He had turned back only once and had fallen a short distance behind to make sure that the other men and women and the surprisingly quiet children had not gotten out of line. But now he abruptly stopped walking and stared back toward the very end of the line, curious to see if Wilmont and Joyce had been encountering any difficulty in keeping up with the others.

Just why he should have been particularly concerned about them wasn’t revealed until he was at their side, a look of uncertainty in his deep-set, gray eyes.

“It is very strange,” he said. “I am unsure that we are not being followed. Perhaps in your minds the barrier is weakening a little and I became obscurely aware of it. You must remember that, as I’ve told you, we must be prepared for a sudden breakthrough. It could occur at any moment. Have you heard any unusual sounds behind you? They will try to move as silently as possible. But a crackling of the underbrush, a faint sound, would be enough to convince me that the uneasiness I experienced a moment ago should be taken seriously.”

“We heard nothing,” Wilmont said. “If they attack us, how can we hope to defend ourselves without weapons? Won’t we be completely at their mercy again?”

“You have a living weapon—Bramwell,” the Krull said. “I’ve told you that before.”

“And I told Bramwell that,” Wilmont said. “But I had difficulty in making myself believe it.”

“You must guard against doubting it,” the Krull said. “You must not permit yourself to forget, for an instant, that I am here also. If I were not here even Bramwell might not be able to save you. But there are many things about the Krulls that you know nothing about. We are an affectionate and brotherly people. I like all of you, I have allowed myself to be very foolish and now there is nothing that can be done about it. You may pity me a little, if you wish. I think I should like that.”

“Anyone with so shining a gift for friendship is in no need of pity,” Joyce said. “In our age we should have looked upon you as far above us in every respect. The love for one’s fellows you speak of was not unknown to us, but we were reserved and suspicious. Why have you singled us out? I mean—there is nothing special about us.”

“You do not understand,” the Krull said. “You are human and so am I. You are in trouble and I am not—or was not until now. If I did not share your torment by taking a part of it upon myself, I would no longer be able to go on thinking of myself as human. And when you share such a burden with someone you find yourself warming to them.”

Before Wilmont could say anything in reply, the Krull turned and went hurrying back to the head of the advancing column. Bramwell swung about and stopped walking for an instant as the small, grotesque figure darted past him, shaking his head in evident concern.

“Apparently when Bramwell saw a Krull for the first time it gave him as much of a shock as his awakening did,” Wilmont said. “What Kaljac just told us was very strange.”

“Why?” Joyce asked, the tension under which she was laboring making her voice rise almost angrily. “I don’t see anything strange about it. Perhaps emotions which are rudimentary in all of us have become highly developed in Krulls.”

“But it’s as if there was something in his nature which makes him feel like a condemned man. He doesn’t have to help us. I mean—he’s under no actual compulsion to do so. It just isn’t human to feel that you have to expose yourself to the deadliest kind of danger for total strangers from another age. Instant friendship. You drop it into a cup of boiling water and it dissolves in a few seconds, and you’ve got a strong brew that you may not want to drink at all. It doesn’t make sense to me.”

“It does to me,” Joyce said, her anger very real now. “Of course the Krulls are different from us—tremendously different. What do we really know about human motivation? No two people ever think or feel exactly alike. And in a half million years human nature could hardly have remained unchanged. The Krulls have changed so much physically that it’s hard for us to think of them as completely human. Why shouldn’t they have changed emotionally as well? They may actually be more human than we are—if by ‘human’ you mean all of the attributes which set us apart from the lower animals.”

“You may be right about the changes,” Wilmont conceded. “There is no scientific evidence that supports the contention that human nature cannot change, that it remains basically the same no matter how greatly human beings may differ in a superficial way. I’ve always believed that human nature is as plastic as the physical changes which take place throughout the whole of nature and lead to the evolutionary development of new species of plants and animals.

“A new and different kind of man would naturally not share all of our so-called human motivations. The kind of instant friendship—you can call it empathy if you wish—which Kaljac has just displayed could be, as you say, the result of a half million years of evolutionary development. It may have become so deeply grooved into his nature that he cannot fight against it, even though surrendering to it would threaten his own survival.”

“I think I showed remarkably good judgment when I fell in love with you,” Joyce said, all of the anger gone from her voice. “You are willing to argue against yourself when you feel you may have been mistaken.”

“We’ll know soon enough exactly how mistaken I may have been,” Wilmont said, looking up at the patch of open sky which had come into view between the thinning canopy of leaves. They had emerged from under foliage so dense that the sunlight had filtered down with a few fitful gleams of brightness. “The most serious mistake we could make—”

He broke off abruptly, and came to a sudden halt, his hand going out to fasten on Joyce’s wrist.

“Stand still—listen!” he said, his voice tight with concern. “We are being followed. Kaljac said they would move silently. But he was right about the snapping of twigs in the underbrush. If they’re very close and there are ten or fifteen of them that crackling sound will come again.”

“Yes, I heard it,” Joyce said. “But it could have been made by some small animal.”

Wilmont shook his head. “I doubt it,” he said. “Listen!”

The forest confirmed his surmise. There arose a pattering noise, as of raindrops descending, and the forest came to life. There was a rustling that could have been made by a wind stirring the foliage at their backs—if the day had not been windless—and something that sounded like a bird call choked off by fright. It was followed by a wild fluttering, and a large blackbird came into view and flew from a low wall of foliage to the topmost branch of the nearest tree.

When they heard the crackling again, very loud and near, all of their fears were confirmed. They were being pursued. The pursuers were apparently sure of victory and had abandoned all caution, forfeiting the advantage which they might have gained by staging a surprise attack.

Although the Krull could not have heard the commotion in the underbrush as quickly as Wilmont and Joyce, he responded with surprising swiftness the instant he became aware that all was not well. He left Wentworth’s side and darted back along the column, planting himself directly in front of Bramwell.

Kaljac was making urgent gestures with his stubby arms when the underbrush at the end of the column shook for a dozen feet in both directions, and a tall Telen emerged into the open. He carried no weapons, but he was quickly followed by ten or twelve Telens who were equipped with gleaming metal instruments which they kept steadily trained on the halted column.

Wilmont and Joyce were blocked by the tall, unarmed Telen; they could not plunge into the underbrush without colliding with him, and they were prevented from fleeing in the opposite direction by a woman and a child who had succumbed to utter terror, and were running straight toward them.

In a moment the long line was completely broken. The children broke away from their parents, ignoring warning shouts and a pursuit that was quickly abandoned. They scattered in all directions, a few seeking the false security of the tall trees near the head of the column. They ducked behind the enormous boles and peered out in hide-and-seek fashion, but the terror in their faces showed that their futile attempt to conceal themselves was not a game to them.

Most of the adults lost their heads and made no attempt to regroup and take up defensive positions with their backs to the trees. Wentworth and his wife did not attempt to flee, but froze where they had been standing. Their two children had joined them and the entire family seemed more in command of themselves than any of the others, though Helen Wentworth was trembling violently. Her small daughter was clutching frantically at her skirts as if, like the older children, she had become fully aware by now that the Telens had only one thought in mind—to take away their liberty and shut them up again in a big metal room with no windows. Only Bramwell appeared to be completely calm and resolute as he turned to face the steadily advancing Telens, and walked toward them arms upraised.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

There was no longer any doubt in Bramwell’s mind that he might well be walking to his death. The years seemed to fall away as he walked, and he was a young man again, with the bright lights of a great city shining in his eyes and all of its night sounds roaring in his ears.

New York was a half million years in the past and yet only the thinnest of dividing lines seemed now to separate that past from a present that was totally alien to him.

If he had slept for ten million years and awakened on some distant planet in an unknown region of space, no stranger creature than a Krull could have pleaded with him to come to the assistance of men and women like himself to whom he owed nothing, beyond the bond which he shared with them.

It was a bond not easily broken, for what he had in common with them was no more—and no less—than everything that had given his life meaning on a tiny island in the vast ocean of time.

They were of his own time and place, helplessly adrift now on that ocean in the frailest of lifeboats. No—the lifeboat had gone down and they were castaways on another island and if he failed to rescue them they would have to abandon all hope.

A hundred doubts assailed him as he advanced to meet the Telens, and for a moment the strange thought-exchange, that he had been told by the Krull would take the place of spoken words, gave him so much concern that he found it hard to concentrate on what the Krull had told him to say.

How could speech be silent and yet leap from mind to mind in ringing syllables? How could a voice that arose in the mind impinge not at all on human ears and yet be heard as distinctly as a voice raised in a shout?

The Krull had assured him that there was no need for him to utter a spoken word—that even to move his lips would be a mistake, since it would mislead and confuse them. Only in his mind must the voice be heard, by himself first, as if he were speaking his thoughts aloud and then by the Telens. And when they answered him he must be prepared to carry the conversation forward in the same voiceless way, syllable by unspoken syllable, and without doubting for a moment that he was making himself heard.

The tall, unarmed Telen, who was clearly the leader of the advancing group, was within twenty feet of Bramwell now and there was something about his expression and the way he held himself that gave him the look of a man approaching a sacred shrine who might, at any moment, drop to his knees.

Suddenly the silence was shattered by what sounded to Bramwell like the voice of a man with as fluent a command of English as he himself possessed. But the lips of the speaker did not move at all, and he knew that the silence which had been shattered had been solely a thought projection, for the voices of the forest had not been stilled. There were frightened whisperings and the crackling of twigs everywhere and yet the voice of the Telen seemed to come from some other plane of existence where the silence had been absolute.

“The men and women of your own age were about to betray you,” the voice said. “If they took you back to the twentieth century everything that you hoped to accomplish would crumble and be lost. We need your help to preserve a greatness which they cannot understand. In their selfish and petty minds that greatness has become a threat to their own survival, and they can think of nothing else. They have closed their minds to us, attempted to deceive and mislead us. We are closer to you than they are, for John Bramwell and the Telens share the same shining vision—the vision of a wisdom so profound, a purpose so unyielding, that the entire universe of stars will be transformed by what we shall accomplish.”

There was silence again for an instant and then the voice went on: “You have conquered death and we can travel back and forth in time. But that is just a beginning. For a brief moment we have allowed ourselves to doubt our own greatness, to falter and draw back from the tasks which must be undertaken if we are to remain as daring as you were when you hid your great glory from men who had no knowledge of what the future would be like. We thought that your great wisdom would be shared by others—even in your age. But we were mistaken. We know that now. We know how great you are, but they do not. We have waited so long…”

Bramwell made an effort to follow the Krull’s advice. It proved less difficult than he had feared. His voice seemed to ring out in the silence, although his lips remained un-moving.

“You must not think me harsh—or lacking in understanding. But you are mistaken. I possess no more wisdom than a great many men and women of the twentieth century and considerably less wisdom than the many gifted scientists, philosophers, artists and skilled craftsman that made it a not unworthy age. We did our best, with the tools we had. We had thinkers and dreamers and poets who knew that there would someday be a better, more creative world. We did our best, do you understand?”

“But what you say is madness!” came in quick reply. “There is no need for you to find excuses for a blindness so universal that not one of the men, women and children we have removed from your age seems to have been aware of how great you were. How can you expect us to believe that you shared that blindness and concealed the whole of the truth from yourself?”

“I concealed nothing from myself,” Bramwell said.

“Wait, wait,” came the reply. “It is just possible that you did not know. The truly great are always humble, can be blind to their own greatness. Tell me that it was so. Surely you must realize now that it was so. You have put death forever behind you, you have accomplished what even we would have thought impossible—”

“No,” Bramwell said. “I have not put death forever behind me. I could die now, if a small splinter of steel pierced my chest. And I would not awaken again.”

“That is not true,” the Telen said, his voice so fiercely challenging that it seemed to echo like a pistol shot through the aisles of the forest. A pistol shot could also have put an end to his life, Bramwell thought—long ago in another world that suddenly seemed to sweep close to him again. He could almost hear again the roar of city traffic, and the winking lights of tall buildings and hear a familiar voice whispering close to his ear as he tossed about on a bed of pain: “Darling, you will live again when I am dust. A way will be found to cure you. They will know so much more about cancer than we do…”

“Even now,” Bramwell said, “I carry the seeds of death in my body, and I am not sure that you have found a way to destroy them. In our age there was a disease—”

“We are familiar with all the diseases which were common in your age,” the Telen said. “And it is true that some of them remain unconquered. But for thousands of years we have known that you would awaken restored to health in body and mind. I was taught as a child what I have since come to believe as a man. You will never die.”

“Why do you say that? I have told you that I am as mortal as you are. My death has only been postponed. I will not be alive fifty years from now.”

“You will be alive when the sun cools and the earth is a dead world spinning through space. It is an unfathomable mystery. But we would have known if it were not true. Your great wisdom has enabled you to conquer death forever.”

Bramwell knew then that what the Krull had told him about the Telens was true. They were totally mad.

It was the most dangerous kind of madness, for it contradicted everything that the Telens must have known about him. The frozen sleep that had prolonged his life had been well within the scope of twentieth century science and yet they were determined to believe that a mysterious kind of wisdom—a wisdom little different from the tribal magic of a witch doctor—had made him immortal. Human wisdom alone, knowledge alone, hardly supernatural attributes, could not have given a man godlike qualities and miraculous powers of survival.

The Telen facing Bramwell must have contained his rage and frustration with the thought that a man who had slept for a half million years would be too bewildered on awakening to grasp the full truth about himself, immediately.

Bramwell suddenly decided that he had already said more than the Krull would have thought wise, that silence might be his best protection. But the Telen would not permit him to remain silent.

“You have awakened with the memory of a past that you cannot—must not—return to,” the Telen said, and Bramwell did not like the look that was creeping into his eyes. “The past is gone, it has dropped away from you, and you can never return to it now. Surely you must know that.”

Bramwell and the Telen looked at each other. Despite the awe which the Telen had displayed when he had first drawn near to Bramwell the two men became suddenly engaged in a contest of wills. Bramwell could feel the Telen’s rage beating in tumultuous waves against his brain.

It would not have been so frightening if Bramwell had not known that the rage of a madman could be quite different from the fury of a sane man. It could spring from uncertainty alone, a dark suspicion that a delusion that must not be questioned was about to be attacked and all of its hollowness exposed.

The Telen turned abruptly and walked to where the nearest of his armed companions was standing. He spoke to him briefly, swung about again and gestured toward Bramwell, jabbing at the air with his forefinger.

The shining instrument in the second Telen’s clasp began slowly to vibrate. The instrument had three gleaming prongs attached to it, and it was trained on Bramwell.

The voice of the Telen leader came again, like the crack of a whip drawn swiftly back and just as swiftly uncoiling.

“For a hundred generations only the wretched Krulls have doubted a truth that has been proclaimed, again and again, by the wisest of our ancestors. Again and again your mind has been probed while you slept, the exact hour of your awakening determined. You will see for yourself that we cannot possibly have been deceived. You have put death forever behind you. This weapon, powerful as it is, will not harm you.”

The shining metal instrument trained on Bramwell made a low humming noise. The sound increased in volume until it drowned out all of the forest murmurs and the frightened voices of the children. The adults who stood in widely scattered groups between the trees were all looking in the same direction now, clearly sharing the children’s alarm. But no sound came from them, and not one of them attempted to move.

Only Bramwell moved, taking a quick step backward. It was an instinctive recoil from the death that he knew was about to come flaming out of the instrument—a futile recoil, because if he had turned and fled he could not have hoped to save himself.

His lips moved then, for the first time and an articulated cry came from them. Until that moment only the inward silence had been broken when he had communicated with the Telen from a subliminal plane of existence.

It was a stricken cry, loud and clear, a desperate appeal for understanding. “No, no…you must not use that weapon! I have told you the truth. I will die instantly.”

Neither the Telen leader nor his armed companion…they were standing side by side now…seemed to have heard him. They were both looking at the vibrating instrument, with the intensity of minds deranged and dominated by a single, relentless compulsion—to preserve a delusion that nothing must be allowed to shatter.

Bramwell took another slow step backward, the stricken look that had come into his eyes deepening, aging his features. His face, pinched with horror and despair, resembled that of a very old man tottering on the brink of the grave.

The instrument in the second Telen’s clasp was vibrating violently; he tightened his grip on it, and hunched his shoulders, as if he feared it would leap from his hands. And suddenly there darted from it a thin, almost threadlike filament of flame.

The filament crossed the short distance which separated Bramwell and the two Telens and flickered for a moment over Bramwell from his head to the soles of his feet. And all at once it was no longer a filament but a sheet of flame that billowed out as it brightened and swiftly soared to a height of twenty feet.

In the midst of the flame, Bramwell remained visible for an instant, thrashing about with his limbs agonizingly contorted, the long row of trees at his back looming up behind him like the walls of a burning house.

Then the flame swallowed him up, and continued to brighten, until it seemed less like a flame than a pulsing blob of radiance that had fallen from the sky and was filling the dark forest aisle with so dazzling a glare that it seemed for a moment to outshine the noonday sun.

Then, abruptly the glare vanished and where Bramwell had been standing there was now only a smouldering pile of fallen leaves and a few blackened twigs. Of Bramwell himself there remained no trace.

One of the smaller children screamed and a woman standing close to him darted quickly to his side and drew him protectively into her arms, as if fearful that the terrible act of destruction might at any moment be repeated.

The Telens who had emerged from the underbrush were carrying the same kind of weapons. There was an instant and overwhelming surrender to panic; no one remained still. Five of the adults broke for the cover of the trees, as most of the children had done when the Telens had first appeared, and threw themselves fiat on the ground or staggered waveringly about as if they had been struck blind.

The smell of burning still hung in the air, but the Telens were not looking in the direction of the smouldering leaves, nor at the terrified men, women and children.

They were looking at the Telen leader, who had fallen to his knees and was beating furiously at his temples with his fists.

One Telen and then another began to sway and wild, despairing wails arose in the forest gloom.

The wailing continued for a minute and then it stopped as abruptly as it had arisen. A change seemed to come over the Telens and one by one they straightened and stood very still, their eyes still on the kneeling figure of their leader.

One of the shining weapons began to vibrate. It was as if an understanding had passed between them with the briefest of exchanged glances—an agreement that only one weapon would be needed.

A filament of flame came from the vibrating instrument of destruction, the humming grew very loud. The flame was the same as the one that had played for an instant over Bramwell’s body before he had been blotted from view by a burst of consuming fire. It was directed downward and the end of it zigzagged across the fallen leaves like a luminous worm before it whipped across the shoulders of the kneeling Telen and moved back and forth across his back.

For an instant the Telen leader seemed unaware that he was about to pay with his life for a mistake that had driven the others to despair and enraged them beyond endurance. It was only when the filament widened and became a raging column of flame that his shoulders jerked convulsively and an agonized scream was torn from his lips by the searing heat that was burning the flesh from his bones.

Bramwell’s thrashing body had disintegrated invisibly, concealed by the swollen flames. But the Telen’s body remained for a longer time obscurely discernible in the midst of the glow. It shriveled and darkened and turned skeletal, the flames licking at the hollow eye sockets of what was no longer a human face, but a deaths head turning slowly about. Then a blinding brightness turned the flames into a stationary blob of radiance, filling the forest aisle with a dazzling glare again and making every tree and shrub seem to glow with its own light. The dark tangle of underbrush from which the Telens had emerged looked as if it were tipped with fire.

The glare vanished as abruptly as if a giant hand had closed about it, and reduced it to a few flickering glimmers of flame. Then it was entirely gone, and another smouldering pile of fallen leaves concealed the incinerated Telen’s ashes and what may have been a few blackened fragments of bone.

One by one the Telens dropped their weapons, as if they were reminders of the madness that had led to a double act of violence and destroyed forever what they had thought indestructible—the torch of eternal life held high by a godlike figure from another age.

It was not from the haphazard discoveries of man that their belief in Bramwell had grown, but from the myths and legends that only a mad mind deluded with thoughts of a vanished greatness could have originated and sustained. Now the glory was gone, the bedrock of their belief forever splintered into inglorious fragments.

One by one their weapons crashed to the forest floor and they fled from the sight of them, and from the men and women who had almost succeeded in taking Bramwell from them. They plunged into the underbrush, their tall bodies seemed as grotesquely bent as broken reeds at the edge of some dismal, time-forsaken lake.

For a moment there was only the sound of the underbrush breaking under their feet and then their despairing wails began again and sustained until they dwindled to far-off echoes of sound.

Wilmont could hear all around him again the voices of the forest, the scurrying of small animals from thicket to thicket in the sunless gloom, the hum of numberless insects, the sudden fluttering and wild cry of a nesting bird, alarmed for the safety of its young. But most of all he was aware of his own harsh breathing and the tumultuous beating of his heart.

His gaze was on the two mounds of smoking leaves. Joyce was tugging at his arm, but he could not throw off the feeling that he was completely alone, caught up in some wild distortion of reality that had carried him across oceans and continents to a world where impossible hurricanes raged and the sky was a sheet of flame.

Then the face of that strange, wholly terrifying world changed and he was in a much smaller world that seemed for a moment like a gigantic goldfish bowl and he was looking out at Joyce’s white face pressed to the glass.

At last the forest came sweeping back and he saw everyone moving about like puppets on a lighted stage, pointing and staring with their limbs attached to strings.

Finally the strings turned into downstreaming rays of sunlight and the men, women and children came back into focus and he heard Joyce pleading, close to his ear.

“We must follow Krajan now. We must do exactly as he says. Darling, try to remember that Bramwell has been spared all further torment. Try…you must. He is gone, yes. But he could not have lived much longer. In this age, cancer is unknown, and the cure that was undoubtedly discovered has been forgotten.

Wilmont nodded and was about to reply when he saw the Krull coming toward him. The children had come out from behind the trees and the men and women he had thought of as puppets were moving about more purposefully now, despite their paleness and the look of horror in their eyes.

The Krull seemed completely composed and moved with miraculous ease, casting only the briefest of glances at the two smouldering mounds of leaves as he skirted them on his way to Wilmot’s side.

“The time machine is completely unguarded,” he said, as he stood close to Wilmont, his breathing distinctly audible. “They have never made the slightest attempt to surround the machines with guards or protective devices of any kind. Why should they take such precautions when the Krulls, to the best of their knowledge, have never displayed the slightest interest in time-travel? How little they know…or suspect. I am depending on you to help me keep the children from delaying us. They could so easily do so…”

“We will see that they do not get out of control,” Joyce promised, with a tremulous smile.

“It should not be difficult.”

“Well…”

“She has had considerable experience with children,” Wilmont said.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

They were traveling back through time. It seemed incredible and yet it was happening—it was happening to all of the men, women and children who had been removed from the middle years of the twentieth century and imprisoned in a metal-walled compartment from which only Wilmont and Joyce had escaped—to look out through a wide, shining window at the future sweeping past.

And now that future was reversing itself, the years were falling away and beyond the wide pane the past was coming into view again.

They were alone again in the great observation compartment, with only the Krull at their side.

And the Krull was talking, talking, and everything that he said made a glorious kind of sense.

“Time has three faces,” the Krull was saying. “The hoary face of the past, the always dangerous, uncertain face of the present and the face of a future that may be either the most beautiful face in the world, or dark, cruel, and ugly.”

Suddenly the Krull’s arm swept out, seeming almost to embrace the window, as if it held a secret and an importance for him which only a Krull could understand.

“The navigational instruments have been set,” he said, “to return you safely to your age. But I shall not accompany you. In a short while now, I shall be getting off.”

Before Joyce or Wilmont could reply he continued quickly, his eyes crinkling a little, as if the stunned look that they both trained on him had not been unexpected and it amused him to find his expectations confirmed.

“You see, there was an age when the Krulls exercised a tremendous influence when they were respected for their learning, their wit and their imaginative sensitivity. That influence was powerful enough to have prevented the Telens from gaining an ascendancy such as you have seen. But it was not used wisely—we neglected too many golden opportunities. That is why I am returning to that age to lay the groundwork for—I guess you would call it a new start. I have been selected for that task and it is one that I shall take pride in undertaking.”

Wilmot’s reply was further delayed by the sudden arrival of Wentworth, his wife and two children by the window.

“Krajan is getting off!” Bobby Wentworth said. “Has he told you yet? He told me this morning.”

“No,” Joyce said, her eyes crinkling. “Your children are the real heroes and have every right to be told first. Isn’t that so, Krajan.”

“Well…” The Krull looked embarrassed. “I just thought…”

“That children are good at keeping secrets,” Wilmont said, nodding. “We understand, and there is no need for you to apologize. All success, my friend, in the great tasks ahead.”

“We’ll all drink to that,” Wentworth said.

SURVIVAL WORLD

Originally published in 1972.

CHAPTER ONE

“The call should come any minute now,” Dan Blakemore told the unsmiling blonde woman at his side. “Mason warned me on the disk last night that my reprieve would be revoked before noon.”

He looked away for a moment, experiencing a trace of that rending sensation which most people feel when they are required to break abruptly with a treasured moment in Time.

“But we’ve had our days in the sun—total freedom from strain,” he added, pressing her hand. “Haven’t we, darling?”

“I guess you could say that, Dan,” his wife replied. “But I sometimes think we’re the only two people in the world who know exactly what that kind of freedom can mean.”

It had been Blakemore’s first vacation in four years and he could not shake off the feeling that it might well be his last.

By digging deeply into his memory he could recall an earlier one that had been a shade more physically invigorating, but only because his extreme youth at the time had enabled him to engage, for ten or twelve hours at a stretch, in strenuous outdoor games and dangerous sports. They had embraced the scaling of precipitous cliff walls, surfboard riding and skin-diving in the Bahamas, long walks over rugged terrain, and a go at archery and dart-hurling that could be hazardous if you relaxed your vigilance, and your competitor stayed alert.

At thirty-four he could still have passed for a university undergraduate and he was just as capable of resisting physical fatigue as the youngster he had once been. But when once the edge has worn off adventurous risk-taking for its own sake, inhibitions can be generated that are difficult to overcome.

All of that had to be equated, of course, with the fact that he was no longer in the Bahamas, and that most of the youths who had shared his belief that the spearing of sharks and barracudas was the most challenging of underwater sports had long ago given up and gone home.

It had to be equated, also, with what could happen if the surfboard you were riding overturned where the levels of offshore contamination had not been determined in advance. You might merely choke and gasp for awhile, with an acrid taste in your mouth. But you were far more likely to be plunged into an undertow so corrosive you’d have to shop around for a skin graft.

Otherwise nothing had changed very much across the years. The youngster he had been and his present self had both been engaged in ecological research on a Government grant and had found themselves thinking of ecology, at times, as having much in common with an abandoned puppy, barking furiously at their heels and making intolerable demands.

It was only when Blakemore, moved by a concern despite himself, picked the puppy up and walked on with it that it turned into a porcupine in his arms—a monstrous beast with lacerating quills and razor-sharp claws. It was almost as bad as having a tiger by the tail.

“When you’ve achieved a major breakthrough,” he heard himself saying, “the feeling that total victory may be within your grasp can make putting your head on the chopping block again easier to endure.”

Helen Blakemore’s reply was slow in coming, giving him an opportunity to stare around him once more and luxuriate in the great beauty of his surroundings.

How supremely beautiful everything seemed, how remote from the decay and dissolution that was so prevalent elsewhere! The salt water aquarium which stood on a pedestal in the middle of the sun room was as enchanting as the view through the wide picture window before which he was reclining in a soft-cushioned lounge chair.

Beyond the pane there was a stretch of open countryside that bore a distinct resemblance to the sea, for there were many acres of golden grain ruffled by the wind, and in the far distance a lighthouse. The oceanic sweep of the vista extended for miles, beneath an almost cloudless summer sky.

But even more oceanic, in minuscule, was the aquarium, for it seemed to bring the sea right into the sun room, despite the fact that it was small enough to be encircled by Blakemore’s spread arms in much the same kind of loving embrace he had bestowed on his wife a few minutes earlier.

In the circular glass bowl, amidst waving fronds and a miniature coral reef, fishes of fantastic shape and coloration, disported precisely as they would have done in the sea itself—great “Mother of Mysteries,” and, of course, of mankind.

Blakemore felt a little guilty whenever he quoted Swinburne, if only in his thoughts, because he liked to think of himself as a man with no hangups dating to the Victorian Age. But great poets were, after all, ageless and it was surely his privilege to recall the immortal lines, from Spenser to Auden to Robert Graves.

Not forgetting Shelley, of course, who had had some marvelous things to say about the blue Mediterranean, the only sea that had remained two-thirds uncontaminated and that Blakemore could still visualize as it had once been while traveling in an astrojet high above it.

Why was that? He found himself wondering for the thousandth time. Had the ancient gods protected it in some inscrutable way? It seemed unlikely, for it had been on that very sea that the despairing cry, “Great Pan is dead!” had first come to the ears of the ancient world.

Helen Blakemore spoke then, seemingly in reply to what he had said a full minute previously. “There should be no need for Mason and the others to tighten the thumbscrews, as you’ve accused them of doing. I’m quoting your exact words. Haven’t they enough discernment to realize that a man who has devoted the best years of his life to patient research carries his own built-in taskmaster around with him?”

She paused an instant, then went on angrily, “What kind of image do they have of you? And of themselves? Are they just well-meaning but badly frightened men or hooded executioners who would have been perfectly at home in the Tower of London seven or eight or ten centuries ago? I’ve never been very good at dates. It’s hard to say, anyway, just when they first started lopping off the heads of people on a systematic scale, for failing to accomplish the impossible.”

Her voice became even angrier. “Tightening the thumbscrews! Putting your head on the chopping block! If such medieval notions keep occurring to you I may have to start worrying about what could happen to the widow of a condemned man. They razed his land, didn’t they? And put his wife and children on the auction block?”

If, at that particular moment, anyone else had been sitting at Blakemore’s side he would have refused to tear his gaze from the picture window. But now he turned and looked directly at another vision of enchantment that most men would have surrendered the best years of their lives to without feeling that they were making the slightest sacrifice.

Surely time and change, he told himself, could never really mar the inner splendor—yes, and the outer splendor as well—of so beautiful a woman, for it existed quite apart from aging.

“You’re judging them too harshly,” Blakemore said. “They’re weighed down with responsibilities that they can’t shoulder without help. They’re simply counting on me to keep them from staggering too much when everyone is watching them. You know what it could mean otherwise. It would take very little now to start a panic.”

Helen Blakemore fell silent for an instant. Then she said, “How long have we got, Dan? Fifteen years? Twenty? It all seems so hopeless.”

She gestured toward the picture window, as if the wind that was blowing across the wheat field, bending the stalks erratically to right and left, had stirred in her just as great a swaying. Hope and fear, hope and fear—back and forth precariously.

“Those acres of golden grain are your personal triumph, Dan,” she said. “But it was the costliest ecological project ever undertaken. It would take a century and the pooled resources of every nation on earth to duplicate it on a wide scale. Even on a limited scale, right here in the United States, it would take too long. And who is to say to one demoralized community, ‘You will get enough food to insure your survival’ and to another, ‘You will get no food and must perish.’ It would lead to chaos—and open warfare.”

Before Blakemore could say anything in reply a sharp crack echoed from wall to wall of the sun room, and a small, black hole appeared in the center of the picture window, causing it to splinter along its entire length.

The aquarium was blown apart. As the shattered glass tinkled to the floor the water gushed forth in a descending torrent, carrying the fishes and clotted masses of bright green algae with it.

In a moment the fishes were flapping about on the floor, separated by violence from the uncontaminated microcosm that had simulated a coral reef in some far-off, bright Azore.

There was another sharp crackling sound and Blakemore heard his wife cry out in frantic warning “Dan, get away from the window. Oh, my God—”

Blakemore remained for the barest instant frozen to immobility, his eyes on the shattered aquarium, as if whatever was turning the sun room into an exploding nightmare had drawn to a focus there, in the worse of all possible disasters.

Then he stiffened in sudden horror, realizing that the aquarium was of far less consequence than what was happening elsewhere. His wife was on her feet now, clutching at his arm and endeavoring to drag him to one side.

He leapt up instantly, grabbed hold of her, and dropped to his knees, pulling her down with him until they were well below the sill.

Staring up, he could see that there was nothing left of the windowpane but a few jagged splinters of glass projecting from a frame that had a smoke-blackened look. It was hard to see beyond the sill from so oblique an angle. But there seemed to be a faint flurry of movement—a land of animated blue—at the edge of his vision. Just a wind-stirred stalk of wheat, perhaps. It was impossible to be sure.

“Stay down!” he warned, tightening his grip on his wife’s shoulder. “Did you catch a glimpse of him?”

“No,” she breathed. “Just a stirring in the wheat.”

“How far from the window?”

“Fifty or sixty feet. Dan, be careful. He may be nearer now, waiting for you to do something reckless.”

“I don’t like not knowing,” Blakemore whispered. “If he’s up tight he won’t just go away—not if he came here to kill me.”

There had been a few times in Blakemore’s life when so great a recklessness had come upon him that he had thrust aside all caution and taken almost suicidal risks. But at such times his thinking had not been entirely without merit, for he could usually make the way he felt fit in with what he had come to believe from experience.

When the danger was immediate and very great it was often best to take unusual risks, to dare greatly and put a quick end to all uncertainty. If you wavered and hung back you were more likely to lose than to win.

Beyond the shattered pane a man bent on cold-blooded murder might be waiting with a weapon held steady—waiting for a slowly rising head to come into view. He might even be hoping that Blakemore would make himself a better target by arising to his full height.

It would have been natural enough for Blakemore to have regarded obliging him to that extent as an incredible act of folly. But he refused to let himself think of it in that way. It was undoubtedly the most dangerous thing he could have done. But it was also the best and quickest way of finding out just how great the danger was.

Unless he was met by the blast of a weapon at point-blank range or a distant shot aimed with miraculous timing and skill he could duck down below the sill again as swiftly as he had arisen and would remain in sight for no more than a second or two. And in no other way could he take in the entire wide sweep of the wheat field at a glance.

Just possibly he might get his head blown off. But that was no worse than waiting for a blast to occur inside the sun room, with a weapon moving from himself to his wife and back again, in the hands of a man who had leapt right over the sill.

Wait, and try to trip the would-be assassin up by making a mad grab for his legs as he came in? No, the odds against that would be too great. The man would be almost sure to anticipate such a tackling attempt and stay alert enough to forestall it. In a furious struggle an armed man had an enormous advantage, for even if his arm was twisted and he was forced to blast at random, the shot could wreak unimaginable havoc.

Blakemore got to his feet abruptly, ignoring his wife’s startled gasp. He took two quick steps backward as he arose, to keep as far from the window as possible without bringing the wheat field less completely into view. Farther back he could have seen almost all of it, but not the vital quarter-acre immediately below.

Not one or two but twenty seconds went by as Blakemore stared out, his body as rigid as a totem pole. But if the head at the top of a totem pole could be thought of as the best of all possible targets that were small in size the man whom Blakemore saw was no longer capable of realizing that.

He was at least eighty feet away and fleeing with his body grotesquely bent, his arms in flailing motion. He was clearing a path for himself as he fled, with the vegetation-crushing frenzy of a terrified animal, separated from its kill by the approach of an armed hunter.

But Blakemore wasn’t armed and he had certainly not gone out into the wheat and inspired that kind of terror. It was only when the fleeing man turned once to look back and Blakemore saw how close to a skeleton he was that the fright which had overtaken him became easy to understand.

Starvation, or near-starvation, could do that to a man, strip his nerves ragged and make him recoil from his own act of violence as if it had turned into an accusing fury, relentlessly pursuing him.

Suddenly the wheat closed in around him and he vanished from sight. But the long-barreled weapon that had served him as a threshing implement, along with his flailing arms, remained visible above the wheat for several seconds longer, standing straight up like a periscope.

Blakemore bent then, and helped his wife to her feet. There was no mistaking the look of overwhelming relief in her eyes when he told her what he had seen. But her voice shook and she continued to cling to him for support.

“He must have lost his nerve,” she said. “Or perhaps he just wanted to frighten you, just wanted you to know that you’d be making a mistake to count on being safe here while other men are starving.”

Blakemore shook his head. “He came here to kill me. I haven’t the slightest doubt of it. If he’d been a better marksman his first shot might still have shattered the aquarium. But it would have passed right through me first.”

“Dan, is that the image they’re beginning to have of you? A lord of life and death, with a golden harvest key dangling at your waist?”

“I’m very much afraid so,” Blakemore said. “And it means I’ve got to go after him. He’s the first marauder to appear on this particular stretch of coastline. Until he’s caught we won’t know if the hatred here is likely to spread as fast as it did on the West Coast.”

“But there’s been no actual famine yet, anywhere in New England.”

“That depends on what you mean by ‘famine,’” Blakemore said.

Blakemore turned abruptly and strode to the opposite wall of the sun room. The thought flashed across his mind that just the fact that the communicator disk was in the precise middle of the wall, surrounded by concentric coils of wiring, made it possible for him to think of it as a target. It was an absurd thought perhaps. But centering something that you wanted to demonstrate in that way could bring it to a sharper focus in the eyes of a viewer.

“It will take him at least thirty minutes to get out of the wheat,” he said. “The neutronic barriers I’ve set up will keep him fleeing straight ahead until he reaches the sea wall. I can pick him up in ten minutes from the astrojet. So we’ve time enough left to try for another glimpse of him. With eighteen visual transmission mechanisms scattered about the field it won’t be difficult to activate the one nearest to him. I want you to see what he looked like when he turned—exactly how emaciated he was. Then we’ll talk some more about famine—and starvation, if you wish. You may not want to.”

Blakemore clicked on the disk and waited for it to light up before he began to make some quick readjustments on the remote control dial. It would take, he knew, two full minutes for an image to come through, even if he was lucky, for the activated transmission instrument would have to pick up the fleeing man’s body warmth and the precise texture of his skin, muscles and bones before it could rise into the air and follow him.

It took longer than he had anticipated, close to four minutes. But there was a compensating factor involved, for the transmission instrument had been stabilized by his care in tuning the controls until the stipplings on the V-tube had been transformed, without flickerings, into light and sound and color.

First the back of the fleeing man’s head and shoulders leapt into sharp relief on the light-suffused disk, then his face as seen from in front in an enlarged close up.

Helen Blakemore cried out and swayed a little. But she waved her husband back as he started to re-cross the room to her side.

“All right,” she said. “Turn if off. I’ve seen enough.”

Blakemore hadn’t. It was sometimes hard to tell, just by studying a man’s face, how likely he was to be a victim of mental illness, particularly if it was the gaunt, emaciated face of a starving man. The dejected, tight-lipped, hopeless look that went with involutional melancholy was usually a dead giveaway. But a close-to-maniacal look was something else again. Stark fright alone could produce it, the feeling of being trapped, with all hope of escape cut off.

The neutronic shields that guarded the wheat field on the north and the south could keep a man confined to a limited area, as Blakemore had pointed out, forcing him to flee in just one direction. If he veered too much a jolting shock, accompanied by a muscle-contracting spasm, could lift him up and hurl him to the ground. That the experience was a painful one went without saying.

Blakemore was sure of only one thing. No one could have been more hollow-eyed, or displayed, in the region of his cheekbones, a more parchment-thin stretching of the skin and gone on living. His eyes were not only feverishly bright. They looked like holes in a skull, filled with a phosphorescent gleaming.

Blakemore hardly dared hope that his wife would forgive him. But he continued to stare for another minute, experiencing both a feeling of profound compassion, and an anger that was detached and impersonal. He could forgive the man for trying to kill him, and bore him no ill-will as an individual. But what he had attempted to do was a threat that could not be ignored, for it struck directly at something more precious to Blakemore than his own survival and dwarfed it to insignificance.

For most of the few seconds remaining to him—he was on the verge of reaching out to click the disk off—the visual transmission instrument continued to accompany the fleeing man through the wheat, dipping and soaring like a wheeling bat with an abnormality of vision which enabled it to see in the sunlight just as clearly as it could in the dark.

Then, for the barest instant, the fleeing skeleton-figure vanished and a wide expanse of open sky swept into view. High in the sky a single, dark-plumaged bird hovered. It resembled a vulture, but could just as easily have been a crow. Blakemore preferred to think that it was either a crow or a chicken hawk.

The instant the disk went dark he made a slight readjustment in the remote control dial, to keep it from cooling too rapidly and returned across the room to the shattered picture window.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“For not turning it right off? I didn’t expect you to, really. It would have been a crazy thing to do. It’s just that—”

She hesitated, her gaze accusing. “Oh, I don’t know. It was all right this time. But you always seem to end by doing exactly what you want to do. It was the same way last night, when we were discussing news censorship. You knew I suspected you were keeping something from me. But you didn’t want me to know about New York, Baltimore and Charleston. So you started talking, in an evasive way, about news blackouts in general—what a good thing they sometimes are.”

“All right,” Blakemore said. “The shipments of vegetables and dairy produce from the non-famine areas are being stretched dangerously thin, in New York especially. But there’s no actual famine-stage scarcity there yet. It’s only what you just said about New England that made me feel you might as well see what starvation can do to a man who’s probably a native.”

“So you waited until he tried to kill you before you decided I might as well know the truth. Why, Dan?”

“There’s a word that may help to explain it,” Blakemore said. “‘Extrapolate.’ It means, of course, to take what is known and infer from it some likely future development. I’ve tried to spare you because it’s hard for you, at times, to get a purchase on something that’s actually quite simple. If the premise—the basic data—you start off with when you extrapolate is unsound, the picture you come up with is certain to be a distortion of reality.”

Helen Blakemore seemed suddenly to decide not to remain angry, for her accusing look vanished.

“Dan, listen to me,” she said, almost pleadingly. “I wish you’d tell me in exactly what way I’m distorting reality. I shouldn’t have to remind you that it’s what complicates the blight that makes it so insurmountable. If it were just soil impoverishment alone—or industrial waste pollution alone—the outlook might not be much darker than it was in, say, 1980, when the danger was still being aggressively attacked on a wide scale and before human perversity brought about a kind of backlash.”

“It wasn’t so much a backlash as a surrender to sheer inertia,” Blakemore said. “That always seems to happen when an effort is sustained too long, and the odds against it keep mounting. People—even the best minds—develop an almost compulsive need to chuck everything and go fishing. Hedonistic drives take over, on other levels as well.”

“There’s nothing wrong with hedonism, up to a point,” Helen Blakemore said. “It can make people more tolerant, generous, willing to devote a larger share of their lives to enriching human experience and relieving human suffering.”

“I’ll grant you that,” Blakemore said. “But the rub is—inertia is quite different from the pleasure principle. No one actually enjoys throwing in the sponge to that extent. Human nature isn’t built that way. But when it happens there’s a tendency to combine it with a wild excess of pleasure-seeking, to guard against going over the hill to the happy farm.”

“But isn’t that all tied in, Dan, with what I’ve just said? The odds have become insurmountable. Radioactive seepage from the ‘peaceful’ uses of thermonuclear reactors, deadly pesticides still polluting rivers and streams after half a century, antibiotic-resistant organisms increasing on a frightening scale year after year, dreadful plagues in Eastern Europe, India and China and—five billion hungry mouths to feed.”

“The radioactivity isn’t increasing,” Blakemore said. “We can still live with it.”

“How wonderful! So we’ve become sane again in that one respect. And if whales and porpoises shun the North Atlantic all the way to the Arctic Circle that should be of no concern to man. He has wings and Paris is still lovely in the Spring—if you can ignore the half-starving children.”

“I could add a dozen more blight factors,” Blakemore said. “But hunger is still the number one problem—the really big one. If we can achieve more of a breakthrough there—”

He looked at her steadily for a moment. “There’s something I guess you might as well know. In Massachusetts people have been gathering on the Cape for close to a month now, living in shacks on the beaches, and setting on lobster traps. The rocks have been stripped bare of edible seaweeds, and the muscles lining the rocks are poisonous at this time of the year. But since they provide an illusion of food in abundance more and more people are eating them. There have been a number of deaths.”

Helen Blakemore could not repress an exclamation of shock.

“I guess I don’t need to tell you,” Blakemore went on, “what could happen if all of that spreads to the Connecticut beaches. Every stalk of my wheat could go up in flames.”

“But Dan, that’s insane! Why would anyone want to set fire to it? It would make no sense.”

“I’m afraid it would. Anything that’s understandable makes sense, no matter how distorted the motivating factors may be. Why did that man come here to kill me? If, as you’ve just said, I’ve become a symbol of an abundance of food deliberating withheld, for selfish reasons, it would seem a cruel mockery. Smoldering resentments of that nature often lead to destructive violence, without concern for the consequences.”

“But he could have been driven to desperation by just the need to stay alive.”

Blakemore shook his head. “I don’t think so. He could have made off with a few stalks without taking so great a risk’. His rage must have gone deep. What I’ve got to find out is whether or not it’s just the destructive rage and hatred of a single deranged man, or a contagion that has begun to spread. There are drastic steps that may have to be taken—”

“But how would taking him captive shed more light on that?” Helen Blakemore protested. “What would you do? Give him some comparison chart tests to determine how deranged he may be?”

“It might help,” Blakemore said. “It would be better than letting him escape. It would be in the hands of men far more adroit than I am at finding out exactly how contagious such emotional instability may become. Psychological probing in depth is hardly in its infancy today, despite a regression to infantalism by the background structure groups who play it by ear.”

“The comparison chart technique has never impressed me very much, Dan. Grandfather felt the same way about the Freudian hypothesis before it came apart.”

Blakemore had never known her to stand quite so motionless, with so tormented a look on her eyes. They were trained on the wheat field again and her voice, when she continued, had a calm incisiveness that was not in the least deceiving, since he knew how great a struggle she was putting up to remain outwardly calm.

“That wheat could help our descendants—a century from now,” she said. “But—we won’t have any, Dan. What’s the use of pretending? It’s only a matter of time before all of the lights go out.”

“And I still refuse to believe that,” Blakemore said. “There’s something I’ve got to tell you, that I don’t think you quite understand. It’s the way I feel about that wheat and what it has cost me to grow it.”

Blakemore spread his arms as if, in that sweeping gesture, he was picturing them as long enough to embrace the entire vista beyond the window.

“You may be right in many ways,” he said. “But I’ll go on believing that man’s best hope of survival would be diminished if anything happened to a single stalk of that wheat. In an experimental test project every stalk is important. Tests must still be made of the entire growth, and the exact extent of my success—or failure-balanced against the cost.”

“But you were also thinking of something else, weren’t you, Dan?—something you were afraid I might not understand.”

Blakemore nodded. “It’s not so easy to explain. But—well, when a man has paid a heavy price for something he can’t allow himself to think that everything he has accomplished may be meaningless. Perhaps it may be. But it would be a kind of self-betrayal to let momentary feelings of despair blind him to the fact that nothing is certain, that future events may cut across and drastically change every present-day trend. No disaster is inevitable, because the historic process simply doesn’t work in that way.”

Although Blakemore’s rather handsome features were distinctly on the rugged side, there were moments when thought gave him more the look of a sensitive and scholarly philosopher who took his marching orders from the accumulated wisdom of mankind but was not above questioning some of those orders as well, on the basis of what he had himself experienced.

“You’ll never know what a price I’ve paid,” he said. “In self-hatred alone—”

“Self-hatred? What do you mean, Dan?”

“Well—for thousands of years symbolic rites and ceremonies have been associated with the planting and harvesting of crops. The ‘bringing in of the sheaves’ has been a kind of glory symbol, something in which a man should take pride. It goes all the way back to the Neolithic Age. But there have been times when I’ve resented every sacrifice I’ve had to lay on that altar. I’ve resented what it has cost me in peace of mind and the time I could have spent in making love to you.”

“Please, Dan. Is that necessary?”

“I think it is. Or don’t you agree?”

“You know I didn’t mean it in that way. I meant—is it necessary for you to pretend we’ve ever let anything interfere with—Dan, why do you make it seem even worse than it is? I know exactly what it has cost you in other ways.”

Blakemore said nothing in reply. He stepped forward instead and took her into his arms, so quickly that it would have been impossible for her to protest, even if she had wanted to. He kissed her hair and lips and eyes, lightly at first and then so vehemently, in an embrace so demanding, that they both gave up all attempt to breathe until the need to do so forced them to draw apart again.

He knew, from the way her eyes were shining, that she would have drawn him back into her arms again if he could have blotted every other thought from his mind and permitted it to happen. But he was forced to shake his head and content himself with a visual caressment of barely five seconds duration.

“I’m drawing it too close,” he said. “He’ll be at the sea wall in fifteen more minutes.”

“All right, Dan,” she said. “But be careful.”

CHAPTER TWO

It took Blakemore less than a minute and a half to descend from the sun room to the ground floor living room of what had once been a more ornately furnished summer residence, cross to the locker room adjacent to it, strip off his lounge suit and emerge into the sunlight at the rear of the dwelling clad in a garment just as flexible, but so tight-fitting that it gave him an almost frogman aspect.

He was still reproaching himself for not having kept his eyes more constantly trained on the sun room clock when he ascended into the astrojet and bent over the controls.

It had been stationed sixty feet from the house, but he had crossed the intervening distance a little faster than he could recall having done in recent weeks over a runway of comparable length. Emergencies that called for haste were certainly as much of a run-of-the-mill occurrence, as the sudden darkening of the sky when storm clouds gathered overhead on a pleasant day in spring, and could hardly have averaged less than eight a month in the course of a year. But there were always a few that made you strain every muscle to outrace the clock.

In a moment the astrojet was moving straight up into the sky, where it would hover like a tiny humming bird a thousand feet in the air until he made another adjustment in the controls which would send it darting forward—to rise higher and encircle the earth or simply to remain at the same altitude and travel toward the coastal shoreline above a field of golden grain.

From the air the field looked just as much like a wind-stirred stretch of open sea as it had from the sun room—perhaps a little more so. But there was one difference. Now the sea itself was visible in the distance, sun-gilded but not as golden as the wheat. Its blueness showed through in patches where the lighthouse towered. There was a region of whitecaps as well, and where the wind-lashed waves were cresting into foam there were glints of purple and a more tarnished kind of gold.

Blakemore was very careful, when he began slowly to encircle the wheat, to keep the astrojet from rising higher, for sharp visibility was of the utmost importance. At a thousand feet the visibility was not too good, but at a lower altitude an improvement in that respect would have been offset by a disadvantage.

It was best to get a wide view first, to take in all of the cultivated acreage with his eyes sweeping back and forth over every part of it, all the way to the sea wall. The instant he detected an unusual stirring in the wheat it would be no problem to descend instantly and hover directly over it.

There was a pair of high-powered binoculars in a case at his waist. But bright sunlight shining through a faint sea mist could be image-distorting, and he preferred to depend on his naked vision and the facile maneuverability of the astrojet. It was almost the equivalent of a body-extension, never failing to give him the feeling, when he was in the air, that he was himself in bodily flight, with a hawk-swift ability to sweep higher or lower in a matter of seconds.

The stirring, when he saw it, was close to the center of the field. It was quite unlike the stirring which was visible in other parts of the field, for the stalks were not being bent in a windswept way, with just their tops in motion. It was as if a gigantic field mouse from the age of archaic mammals was plowing its way through the wheat, opening up a path that did not immediately close in its wake.

Blakemore bent abruptly over the controls, and the astrojet began to descend, so swiftly that it was hovering over the stirring at an altitude of four hundred feet before he could straighten again in the pilot seat.

For an instant he was so occupied with making sure of the jet’s stability at exactly that level that he almost missed his first and only glimpse of the fleeing man.

The gaunt skeleton figure remained in view for only a moment, amidst a bare patch of rust-red earth which his flight had opened up between the stalks. He was turning as he ran, his right arm upraised in a gesture of defiance, the long-barreled weapon glinting in his clasp.

It was so startling a change that Blakemore could only stare down in disbelief, without relaxing his grip on the controls, or giving a thought to the fact that to grasp them too tightly was the opposite of wise.

So the man had gotten some of his courage back!

Blakemore instantly decided not to dwell on that. It was the wrong time to let reluctant admiration take hold of him. It would have been wrong at any time, in view of what such defiance implied.

Apparently something had held the man up—probably an agonizing attempt to get past the neutronic shields—and he was still only half-way to the sea wall.

The fleeing man was clearly trapped now, as much of a prisoner as if every stalk of wheat at the edges of the field had turned into a steel bar. For ten minutes more, at least, Blakemore could safely postpone picking him up, and a thought had occurred to him that made him decide to enlarge the scope of what he’d set out to do.

If he ascended higher again and passed over the sea wall and the wide stretch of beach beyond it the time lost could be spared, and there was something he needed to know. Was the beach deserted? If not, the man who had tried to kill him might have had some companions who were waiting there for him to return. And if there was a boat anchored offshore—

No, that was taking too much for granted. If the neutronic shields had delayed the man he must have tried to escape in another direction. Would he have made such an attempt if he had planned to escape by sea?

Perhaps, Blakemore told himself. It could not be ruled out. The horizontal narrowness of the field would have enabled him to get out of the wheat more quickly by heading north or south and if there had been no shields to stand in his way it would have been natural enough for him to avoid a long flight to the sea wall, circle about and return to the beach eventually by another route.

Or his companions, if they existed, might be waiting for him to rejoin them on another, more remote part of the coast. But Blakemore did not think he would have taken the risk of killing a man and depending on a distant ship to enable him to escape.

Blakemore looked down and saw to his surprise that the astrojet had already begun to ascend again, for his hands had moved automatically on the controls in response to what was perhaps the most mysterious of all human impulses—a command from the unconscious that leaps a little ahead of what is deliberately willed in a moment of heightened tension.

The astrojet had almost reached the altitude which Blakemore had been careful to maintain before he had caught sight of the stirring when a small, gray-white puff of smoke arose from the wheat eight hundred feet below.

It was dissipated by the wind so quickly that Blakemore failed to realize that the astrojet was being fired upon until a second puff arose, and the instrument section lurched and shuddered throughout its entire length.

There was a series of small explosions, all inside the jet and following one another at two-second intervals. There were flames as well, and one of them swept so close to Blakemore that it scorched the left side of his face before it swept across the controls with a hissing sound and expired.

There were no more flames and when the explosions stopped it was hard for Blakemore to believe for a moment that the astrojet had been seriously damaged, for it continued on in steady flight for a full minute.

During that minute he was far from idle. No instrument within reach of his hands was allowed to remain untested. He jerked and tugged at some, reversed others, set a dozen dials to spinning, plugged in connections and listened to sounds that he recognized and a few that were new to him.

It was the new sounds that alarmed him the most. His alarm increased when one of them became very harsh and grating, like the rasp of a rusty hinge on a massive door that was being battered by a hurricane.

A great many of the instruments, including two that were vital, went dead almost simultaneously. At least, he got that impression from the way they stopped functioning the instant he re-checked them in rapid sequence.

The astrojet began swiftly to lose altitude, though it did not descend vertically but in a wide horizontal curve that carried it in the direction of the sea wall as it sank lower.

Against the altitude loss could be balanced the likelihood that it would clear the wheat field before it crashed, or was ripped apart in the air by another explosion, which would probably be quite unlike the small ones that he had survived with no more than a scorched cheek and a feeling of near-desperation.

If it came down in the sea—he could no longer hope to bring it down by maneuvering it—he might still be able to get out and swim ashore, since it would not sink immediately. If it came down on the beach—well, even there his chances of surviving would be greater. A wide expanse of smooth sand would provide more emergency-landing space and lessen the impact of a crash.

He had no way of knowing what the outcome might be and his uncertainty had increased and was becoming unendurable when he looked down and saw that the sea wall was directly below him. He was passing over it at an altitude of less than two hundred feet.

The wall itself, with its dike-like inundation safeguards, and the beach beyond stood out in the sunlight with a startling clarity.

The beach was the opposite of barren. It was occupied by two men and a woman, and a wedge-shaped object at least seventy feet in length that looked not unlike an enormous dead skate cast up by the tide, its pinkish flesh shriveled by the blazing sunlight and mottled gray and black.

There were clotted masses of seaweed on the beach as well and for an instant the entire scene made Blakemore think of the shattered aquarium spilling its contents in the sun room. Just why he could not have said, for unlike the fishes the human figures were not flapping about in an element unnatural to them, and he did not really think that the wedge-shaped object was a skate.

But there was still something sea-strange about what he saw, as if some unexpected catastrophe had caused the beach to rise up out of the sea with an aura of unreality hovering about it.

Then, just before the astrojet came almost level with the sand and the sunlight became so dazzling he could no longer see, the answer came to him.

The figures on the beach looked unreal because they were close to naked and the men were robustly built, the tallest darkly bearded and waving what looked like a trident as he stared up at the sky. And not only was he a Neptune figure with his body gleaming with salt spray. The woman at his side bore a striking resemblance to Venus rising from the waves, for her dark hair had come unbound and was flowing down over her shoulders as the wind lashed at it. Her slender young body was also gleaming with spray from the crashing surf a few yards behind her. The other man—

The crackup was even worse than he had feared it might be. It was as if two crumbling temple walls in a grotto measureless to man had come together with a sea-echoing crash, blotting all awareness from his mind. Not all at once, but just slowly enough to make him feel that he was standing a little apart from the terrible grinding and splintering until it passed inside his head and brought about a total blackout.

CHAPTER THREE

Someone—or something—was tugging at Blakemore’s arm and whispering urgently to him, repeating the same words over and over.

“You’re not hurt badly—just stunned. Open your eyes, boy. Look at me. You’re going to be all right.”

His thinking was way out, he realized, with the buzzing that had come upon him when the darkness had lifted still making it difficult for him to do what the man wanted. It had to be a man, a “someone”—not just an object, a “something.” An inanimate object did not tug at you and speak with a deep, resonant voice.

The face he saw when he opened his eyes was so close to him that he could only bring it into focus by shutting them again and reopening them more slowly, blinking as he did so.

It was not a darkly bearded Neptune face. It was a much older face, heavily lined, the eyes deep set beneath a forehead that was both broad and unusually high. The fact that it was clean-shaven brought all of the lines into sharp relief and enabled him to identify it more quickly than he would otherwise have been able to do, for he had caught only the barest glimpse of it before the crash had—

No, no, he was making a mistake. It was a familiar face, long known to him. But now it looked different somehow.

In the photographs the lips had been less tightly compressed, the eyes less alive, less animated by the emotional intensity which men who like to think of themselves as emotionally detached care to display on the lecture platform, or when being interviewed by the press.

Philip Faran was nodding now with both warmth and reassurance in his eyes, as if he wanted Blakemore to know that, having opened his eyes, it would be a good idea for him to just about take his time in deciding how he felt.

Blakemore felt very good. There would have been no percentage in concealing it, for there almost had to be something seriously wrong with a man who could not rejoice after cheating death by the narrowest of margins.

“You know who I am, I guess,” Faran said, with a resigned shrug. “When people recognize a certified lunatic you can usually tell. Their startlement—not to say, alarm—is ten times as great as it would normally be if they just ran into an old friend tottering on a cane whom they had always thought of as only a few years beyond his first youth.”

How many years? Blakemore found himself wondering. How many exactly—since Faran had dropped out of sight?

“Eight years can make a man’s image dwindle more than you might expect,” Faran said, as if aware of Blakemore’s thoughts.

“Not if it’s a certain kind of image,” Blakemore heard himself replying. “You’re right about one thing, though. I started thinking of you as a friend when I was knee-high to a cricket. I just barely missed meeting you in person twice, and have always envied people who were luckier in that respect.”

“I’m afraid,” Faran said, “that hostility, not friendship became the dominant note with most of them. But thanks for trying.”

Blakemore raised himself a little more and looked around to make sure he was not inside a crumpled mass of wreckage. He wasn’t. He was lying stretched out on the sand with a firm support, probably a boulder, at his back. Standing directly behind Faran, who was kneeling at his side, was the much younger, darkly bearded man he’d mistaken for Neptune armed with a trident and a girl whom Blakemore now saw was much too young and slim-waited to have assumed the role of even a Botticelli Venus, let alone a Rubens one. They were both wearing swim suits so body-clinging in texture that it was not surprising that they had seemed from the air to be totally naked.

The girl could not have been more than eighteen and the man looked only a little older, possibly in his early twenties. His beard was both long and forked, however, and combined with his tall stature and the trident it gave him a sea god aspect, despite the youthfulness of his features, and the fact that Neptune had taken part in the building of Troy was represented in classical mythology as seated in a chariot drawn by dolphins, and must have been almost as ancient as Jupiter his brother. Jupiter and Neptune-Jove and Poseidon to the Greeks. Greek and Roman tales of gods unaging! It seemed incredible that such thoughts could have come flooding into his mind at such a moment. The girl had sea-green eyes and there could be no question as to her great beauty. It almost had to mean that he was still so badly shaken up by the crash that a slight pinch of delirium could still distort his thinking and he did not want that to happen.

Blakemore shut his eyes, unwilling to accept what Faran had said about himself, although perhaps, in a cruel way, it cut close to the truth.

He did not think he could keep them closed for long, for Faran would certainly be tugging at his arm again in alarm before the waves that were descending on the beach could crash down more than ten or twelve times.

A famous musician had once murmured on his deathbed, “Ah, Shubert!” and expired, the tribute having come from him at an advanced age. A technological genius of Faran’s stature might not stand on quite the same heights as an immortal music maker or play upon the human lyre in an ecstatic enough way to evoke an “Ah, Faran” even from the young, who might die before becoming old, but could somehow never picture themselves as dying at any age.

But to Blakemore there wasn’t too much difference between the music of the spheres, and a technological inventiveness so flawless and beautiful that it surpassed what Euclid had achieved in the realm of mathematics or Kepler in his exploration of the heavens with mathematics as his guide.

For a moment Blakemore remained very still, peopling the darkness that had swept across his pupils with a host of profoundly grateful men and women intent on paying Faran the tribute that was his due.

He had earned that homage in a hundred different ways. Every one of his inventions had provided a new kind of insurance against the all-too-human tendency to write off progress as meaningless in a society that kept repeating the errors of the past and that might soon cease to exist.

Progress might not be too different from someone walking with pride down a long corridor toward a shining portal and getting his head blown off before he could emerge into the sunlight. But Faran had stubbornly refused to believe that just because ecological progress had come to a standstill for a dangerously long time some other way could not be found of staving off disaster.

It was not a belief that Blakemore could do more in that respect, since all of his energies had been devoted to starting—or helping to start—ecological progress moving again. But that did not mean that Faran was not a clearheaded, scrupulously self-disciplined thinker with every right to affirm with confidence that time travel was theoretically possible.

Whether such a claim was true or false, he had every right to make it. The only question was—had he gone too far in publicly stating that he was on the verge of surmounting every obstacle that could prevent a man from traveling from the present to an age remote from ours and returning again with evidence to prove that he had not been caught up in a wild fantasy caused by a head injury.

To his shame Blakemore had to concede that there had been moments when he had almost found himself sharing the conviction of small minds—that Faran was mentally unbalanced. About all he could have advanced in his own defense was that the thought had made him castigate himself severely and that the general outcry had shocked and angered him.

That was not putting it too strongly. It had been an outcry—an almost frenzied, know-nothing kind of protest. Faran was holding out false hopes, was adding to the general misery and despair. No man with so great a previous reputation should be allowed to put forward such a claim. It had to mean that he had become either a power-hungry schemer with an ax to grind, callous and cynical beyond belief—or hopelessly psychotic.

Faran had taken what was probably the most sensible course open to him, and not, Blakemore was convinced, through lack of courage. When a sensitive and imaginative man is accused of increasing human wretchedness and uncertainty on a wide scale he is very likely to recoil from even the remote possibility of increasing it further, despite the injustice of such an accusation.

Faran had simply dropped out of sight before the two charges—that he was insane or a cynical opportunist—could be combined and millions of unreasoning men and women had succeeded in convincing themselves that he stood condemned on both counts.

“All right, that’s good,” Blakemore heard Faran saying. “Just stay relaxed as long as you want to. Frankly, I was amazed that you could talk at all.”

Blakemore opened his eyes, shifted about a little to ease the pressure of the rock surface at his back—he had guessed right about it; it was a boulder—and stared across the beach to the pounding surf. The astrojet was nowhere in sight.

“Was the jet—badly wrecked?” he asked. “I don’t see it.”

“What do you think?” Faran asked.

“It must have been. The controls were dead and it was fifty feet from the beach when the sun blinded me. But I heard the beginning of the crash.”

“It went down in the water,” Faran told him. “About thirty feet out. The undertow was scooping out a big hollow in the sand, so it might just as well have come down on the beach. The jet stayed in sight and we waded out and got you out before it could go up in flames.”

“You mean there was an explosion?”

Faran shook his head. “No. But it happens often enough, doesn’t it? In comparison with the way it looked, Humpty Dumpty would have seemed reconstructible. It’s a wonder you weren’t—well, fragmented. But miracles do occur sometimes. I’m absolutely convinced of it.”

“Why isn’t the wreckage still visible?” Blakemore asked, his eyes on the breakers.

“It broke up even more, apparently, and sank deeper—right after we carried you ashore. And the tide has been rising also, just in the past twenty minutes.”

The girl moved quickly past the sea god, fell to her knees at Faran’s side and spoke for the first time.

“I’m so glad,” she said. “Dad’s no better than Roger at concealing the way he feels, and for a moment I was afraid you might be—” She hesitated.

“You may as well say it,” Blakemore told her, tempted to reached out and pat her bare shoulder reassuringly. Not because it was bare, or—at that particular moment, at least—it would have given him the male thrill that even the most fulfilled of married men is never totally immune to, but simply to confirm, once again, that she was a woman of flesh-and-blood. The skin of a goddess would certainly have a different feel—would be marble-like perhaps, or suffused with a strange kind of fieriness.

“You thought I might be dead,” he went on, knowing that if he attempted to smile he would seem to be grimacing. “I’ve often wondered how long it might take for someone who had become convinced of something like that to shake off the feeling that they were in the presence of a ghost.”

“It was only because you looked so white,” the girl said, almost apologetically.

He looked again at Faran. “I didn’t know you had a daughter,” he said.

“Not everyone did,” Faran said. “A ten-year-old tucked away in a suburban cottage, doesn’t attract much public attention, as a rule. I was always very much aware of the fact, however. They say a boy can be pretty rambunctious. But a small girl can actually be more of a problem, when you’re a widower, and just a broken doll can bring on tantrums. But I guess it’s been worth it.”

“You know damned well it’s been worth it, Dad,” the girl said, but not angrily. “Why don’t you tell him what a great help I’ve been to you.”

“Right now there are things it’s more important for him to know,” Faran said. “A woman’s indispensability can’t be kept concealed for long.”

He patted her shoulder as Blakemore had been tempted to do, but with a paternal simplicity that reduced to an absolute absurdity the notion that a mere mortal could be the father of a goddess.

“This is Gilda,” he said, nodding. “Her name was not of my choosing. But my wife liked it, and I’ve grown to feel that the choice was a wise one. We could do with more Gildas today and fewer Cassandras.”

Here we go again, Blakemore thought. Neptune and Venus and now—Cassandra. Cassandra the breast-beating prophetess of despair, wailing on the Trojan beaches because the sands were running out fast and no one had known what to do about it. Blakemore had always felt that Cassandra had not been so much unheeded as used as an excuse for inertia and the wildest kind of hedonism. Yes—Gilda was certainly a much better name for a woman. What good were predictions of disaster if everyone became helpless in the face of them?

Or did Faran have something else in mind that had made him speak as he had? Was he still firmly convinced that there was no need for despair and that the twenty-first century Cassandras, whatever their actual names might be, were not helping at all?

Well, at least the Venus-rising-from-the-waves absurdity had been demolished, and the other one had begun to crumble. Just the fact that Faran’s daughter had given the young man with the trident a myth-dispelling name had made the trident seem irrelevant and now Faran was completing the demolition by saying: “Despite all the pinned-downed machinery that’s right at hand we didn’t have a wire-cutter. Without Roger’s help, extricating you from the wreckage would have been more of a problem. I’ve got osteoarthritis in six of my fingers. Not really bad yet, but it can be a handicap—”

“Roger Tyson,” Gilda Faran said, nodding toward where her swim-suited companion was still standing motionless. It flashed across Blakemore’s mind that she might have felt his full name was important, because she was expecting to share it with him. It was one of those flimsily based hunches that more often than not turned out to be wholly groundless.

Tyson seemed to possess the peculiar shyness that sometimes goes with big, husky, goal-crashing types who never seem to be completely at ease outside of athletic stadiums. He had hung back a little, as if not wanting to intrude too abruptly on Blakemore’s efforts at recovery. But now he strode forward with his hand extended.

“It was rugged for us before you arrived, Blakemore,” he said. “Now it seems to have been your turn.”

Tyson’s recognition of him would have surprised Blakemore more if he had not known how extensively his image had been spread around by the media. People experienced a certain chill fascination, apparently, in watching a man clinging to a small shred of hope which they could not share and wondering how he was going to feel when it was stripped from him. Just the fact that—oh, well.

He returned the firm pressure of Tyson’s hand, thanked him for what he had done and looked accusingly at Faran, who was just starting to rise.

“I’ve a feeling you recognized me too,” he said. “Why didn’t you say anything about the project—all the wheat I’ve grown. Frankly, nothing else is so important to me. Not even the fact that I’m still alive is one-tenth as important. Not that I’m not grateful to you, but I would have thought—”

“Oh, the wheat,” Faran said. “Of course I knew who you were. But first things first, boy. Without you I don’t like to think what the future might be like. That wheat was still here, in the year 2207. But if you had been killed—”

He was on his feet now, gesturing toward the sea wall. But suddenly he shook his head and his arms dropped to his side. “I didn’t mean to hurl it at you like that—so abruptly, without working up to it. I’d hate to have anyone do that to me. You’ve got to make sure a man has some firm ground to stand on, before you shatter his universe with a single blow.”

“It won’t be a blow to him, Dad,” Gilda Faran said, quickly. “He’s been trying to build another universe too—by growing that wheat when everyone thought it couldn’t be done.”

Blakemore was too startled by what Faran had said to decide whether or not he was less—or more—startled by what his daughter had said.

The wheat—still growing in the year 2207! Gilda Faran had revealed that she possessed a mind that was keenly perceptive and unusual in so young a woman. To accomplish the seemingly impossible did mean to build a new universe, in a way—to bend nature’s laws to one’s will, and achieve something that was almost the equivalent of altering the basic structure of matter itself.

But what Faran had said went beyond that in a practical way, for what his daughter had said was metaphorical—a conceit of thought that took liberties with reality.

If Faran had seen the wheat a century from now it could only mean—

Could a man become so startled that it could affect his hearing? He heard nothing, but Faran and Tyson had both stiffened to an instant alertness, craning their necks as if listening to some sound inaudible to him.

It seemed to be coming from the sea wall, for they were both staring in that direction. Gilda Faran, too, was standing motionless, with her hand pressed to her throat.

Suddenly Blakemore was no longer lying stretched out on the sand, with the boulder at his back. He was getting to his feet, so swiftly that if some force apart from his volition had lifted him up it could not have been accomplished with greater posture-changing rapidity. For an instant he was convinced that something of that nature was happening to him. Then he realized that it was something quite different. It was hearing the sound at last, hearing it clearly, and that had made it impossible for him to remain for a second longer in a reclining position.

It was a shout of insensate rage, echoing back from the sea wall, sounding-board amplified. It could only mean that the shouter had descended to the beach and was now on the seaward side of the wall.

A great wave of dizziness swept over him, fogging his vision. But through the haze that danced before his eyes he could see that the stretch of beach between the sea wall and the boulder was not just an expanse of gleaming sand with some cockleshells, clumps of seaweed and sun-bleached driftwood scattered across it. Something spider-like was swiftly crossing from the sea wall to where he was standing, zigzagging a little as it drew near.

But a spider couldn’t shout and though it looked through the haze more like a spider than a man he had no doubt at all that he was about to be fired upon again by the gaunt skeleton he had pursued through the wheat from the air.

Faran’s sharp cry of warning was followed almost instantly by a weapon blast that made Blakemore reel back as from a blow, and drop to the sand.

Although he had ceased to feel any pain he would have thought of himself as a dead man, with his stomach blown open, if the sand had not geysered a yard from where he had been standing. It was only that spurt that made him realize that he had not been hit, and that his recoil had been caused by the feeling that he had been struck a savage blow in the groin.

The weapon had to be close for the air misplaced by the blast to lash against him so furiously, and he braced himself for what he thought was coming—another blast so close that a second miss would be impossible.

Either that, or his skull would be crushed by a blow from a weapon that would not be fired again—a weapon a madman might well decide to use as a bludgeon, to give freer vent to his fury.

Blakemore’s second fear was the one that materialized. But he saw the weapon descending and gripped both skeleton wrists before it could crash down on his head.

He twisted the man sideways and away from him, then slammed his fist against his mouth before he could wrench free. The man’s mouth opened and the instant Blakemore’s arm jerked back it was filled with a gleaming redness.

He hit him twice more, putting as much force as he could into the blows, and he heard the rather sickening sound of a nasal cartilage splintering.

Then hands other than his took over, and the gaunt man was no longer clasping the weapon. It dropped to the sand and was instantly snatched up by Faran, who took three quick steps backward, keeping it trained on the man’s writhing torso for an instant and then shaking his head as the two struggling figures on the sand rolled over and over.

But his fear of bringing the weapon to bear again on a target that could easily have been the wrong one did not prevent him from stepping forward to intervene with the weapon reversed. He was just starting to do that when Tyson took care of it by bending over and prying the gaunt man’s almost skeleton-thin fingers from Blakemore’s throat, where they had gone in a last, frantic effort to reverse what the latter had accomplished by lashing out with his fists.

Lifting the still furiously struggling man up, Tyson staggered with him to the edge of the beach and sent him crashing backwards into the surf.

“That should cool him off!” he shouted. “But we can’t let it go at that.”

“No, that would be a mistake,” Faran agreed. Although his voice did not quite rise to a shout it seemed to carry as far as that of the younger man. Perhaps there was something on that particular stretch of beach that magnified sound.

Or so Blakemore thought as he dug his fists into the sand and arose to a sitting position, hating what he had been forced to do. But it stood to reason that if he had not sent his fist crashing into his assailant’s face he would not have been alive to wish that some other way could have been found.

At least the odds could hardly have been more even—a hunger-emaciated scarecrow of a man with a weapon, and an unarmed man weakened by shock and a close brush with death.

But were the odds even now? What had come over Tyson? Yes, and Faran as well. What Blakemore feared was about to happen appalled him, made him want to cry out in protest. Tyson was standing at the edge of the surf, with the trident upraised and aimed directly at the thrashing skeleton’s chest.

Its three, arrow-shaped prongs made it a far more destructive weapon than a single-bladed spear would have been. Destructive in the sense that it could tear and rend, whereas a single-bladed spear could be driven home with a single, body-piercing thrust, quickly, almost mercifully. Even that would have been terrible—unless the thrashing man was some kind of monster with the lightning at his fingertips. What kind of lightning, what kind of monster could he possibly be, Blakemore found himself wondering wildly, to justify such an assault?

He was struggling to his feet again now, grabbing Faran by the arm and swinging him half-around.

“Stop him, can’t you?” he pleaded, a look of horror in his eyes. “There’s nothing to be gained by killing him. It’s three against one now, and you have his weapon—”

“Wait!” Faran said. “You’ve got an almost killing grip on my arm. Could you ease it a little, just as a favor?”

Gilda Faran spoke then, for the first time. “He doesn’t know, Dad—he doesn’t understand. How could he?”

“He’ll just have to be patient then,” Faran said. We could use more of that—all four of us.”

There was no real need for Blakemore to be patient, for it happened fast. But he could scarcely believe what he saw. Tyson had raised the trident higher and there was a rippling interplay of sunlight and shadow on his straining back, as if the muscles were contracting as he made ready to plunge it into the thrashing skeleton’s chest.

But he did not bring it downward in a vigorous, forward thrust. Instead he held it steady, and from it there came a sheet of almost blinding flame.

The man in the surf remained invisible for a moment, completely enveloped in what looked like a fireball dancing above the surf, outshining the noonday sun.

Then the fireball vanished, and he came into view again. He was rising unsteadily to his feet, his arms dangling loosely at his side. He walked slowly forward until he was standing well beyond the breakers, a vacant look on his face. So totally vacant was that look that there could be no mistaking it, even from where Blakemore and Faran were standing.

“Just his arms are paralyzed,” Faran said. “The paralysis will wear off in about ten minutes, and his memory will come back. But that will give us time to make sure that he’s safely behind—not lock and key, exactly, but a sliding panel that will keep him just as securely imprisoned.”

He turned abruptly and gestured to Tyson.

“All right,” he shouted. “Make him walk. He told us how to go about it. He’s helpless now, has to obey you. But you’ve got to prod him a little.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll see to it!” Tyson called back. “I can lift him up and carry him—if I have to.”

“If you train that three-pronged weapon on a man’s legs he can’t walk,” Faran said, answering the unspoken question in Blakemore’s eyes. “But Roger was careful not to do that. The flare you saw is highly selective in range, and that’s about all we know about it—except that it does something very strange to the mind.”

Faran looked down at the weapon he was still clasping and lowered it carefully to the sand. “I know even less about this one,” he said. “I’m not sure I could manipulate the right trigger-mechanisms if my life depended on it. But take a good look at it. When would you say our present technology will have taken a big enough leap forward to make possible the construction of a weapon as complicated as that?”

Blakemore bent down, and made a close examination of the weapon on the sand, seeing it at close range and in detail for the first time. Not only was it complex beyond belief. There was something about it that hurt his brain when he concentrated on it, making him feel that his temples were being compressed in a vise. There were at least thirty intricately constructed parts, none of which looked exactly like a trigger-mechanism, and a few of them seemed neither triangular nor round, but in some strange way warped out of geometric alignment with—well, the way they should have looked. Or possibly it was just their metallic brightness that made them seem to blend and separate and run together again, assuming more impossible configurations the longer he stared at them.

“If you put the date about a century from now—say in 2210 or 2220—I’d have to agree with you,” Faran went on slowly, “because that’s when weapons like that were in common use. Also the three-pronged one which Roger couldn’t have used with more precision and skill if it had come into his hands long before it did. In fact—”

Faran paused abruptly, his eyes darting to the surf line again. The man from the wheat was now walking unsteadily across the sand with the trident pressed to the small of his back. There was no unsteadiness in Tyson’s determined stride.

“Funny thing about Roger,” Faran said. “He has the basic maturity of a man—well, crowding forty at least. But he has a yearling colt side, and sometimes it gets out of control. A moment ago he was parading around the beach with that weapon solely to enhance his image in Gilda’s eyes. But I suppose few men are above indulging in that kind of harmless vanity at times. Those who can’t I’ve never particularly liked.”

He paused an instant, then added: “Roger felt that weapon went with the sea, made him feel like Poseidon. As you’ve probably noticed, it looks like a trident.” Blakemore had an impulse to throw back his head and laugh, feeling that unrestrained mirth was the only antidote to a coincidence so incredible that it could not be reconciled with reality. But was it, after all, so unheard of? Did it not simply confirm what he had never seriously doubted—that human thinking, on certain occasions, could follow an identical pattern in two or more individuals?

Given youthful exuberance, a robust build, and a half-humorous impulse to strike a pose might not the temptation to assume the role of a sea god prove irresistible, even in the absence of a Gilda?

There was a little of the actor in everyone, and Blakemore could picture himself in the same role, planting the shining trident in the sand with a vigorous, downward thrust and watching it quiver like a flagpole above the mirroring surface of the waves while he shouted to the dolphins to draw nearer on the rising tide.

It cost him an effort to keep looking at Faran as the latter talked, for the weapon at his feet still amazed him, and he could not quite share Faran’s feeling that all would go well on the surf line, and Tyson would succeed in making the gaunt man obey his every command.

“It will be difficult for you to accept the fact that we’ve actually traveled in time,” Faran was saying. “But a start has to be made. Since we’ve only got a minute or two to spare it might be better if we just thought of it as a start. I’m not sure exactly how fast Malador’s memory may return and Roger may need help.”

“Malador? You mean that’s actually his name?”

Faran nodded. “His only name. It’s surprising how many of the names we’re familiar with—everyday names like Brown, Goldsmith, Henderson—have survived unchanged for well over a century. But his happens to be one of the new, unusual ones.”

It occurred to Blakemore that many present-day names had remained unchanged since the Middle Ages, particularly European ones. But he experienced not the slightest desire to interrupt Faran by reminding him of that.

Faran paused anyway, shading his eyes and staring toward where Tyson and the near-skeleton figure were still moving along the beach with no change in their relative positions.

For the first time Blakemore realized that the direction in which they were heading was bringing them nearer a distant section of the beach which was familiar to him. It would have been just a sloping stretch of sand with no distinguishing characteristics if the wedge-shaped object he had seen from the air an instant before the crash had not towered in the middle of it. It was the first time he had looked in that direction, for what had happened between the sea wall and the surf line in the immediate vicinity had kept him totally occupied.

But now he saw it clearly. It no longer looked as it had in the brief glimpse he’d caught of it from the air. It was still mottled gray and black, but it had a solid, metallic look, a mechanical look that made what he had first thought it might be—a gigantic skate cast up by the tide to dry out and darken in the sunlight—seem an absurdity. The pinkish patches which were visible here and there could easily, he told himself, have been produced by—well, the kind of firing that can raise a rocket from its launching pad enveloped in a sheet of flame. It could have accounted for the mottling as well.

Seemingly Faran had followed the direction of his gaze and guessed correctly as to the trend his thoughts had taken, for he was nodding now with an unmistakable look of understanding in his eyes. Although he did not even gesture toward the wedge-shaped object, his expression said as plain as words, “Yes, that’s it, Blakemore. That’s the time-traveling vehicle that everyone thought could never be built.”

He seemed content to assume, as he went on, that Blakemore could hardly have failed to recognize it for what it was.

“We had no intention, originally, of cutting our journey short and returning without finding out what the real future will be like,” he said. “A century is no more than an extension of the present, in a sense. There are certain to be changes. But when there’s a general hopelessness—and barring some cataclysmic event that puts an end to everything—it doesn’t provide enough time for the shadows to do more than lengthen and deepen.”

“The real future,” Blakemore heard himself saying. “Just how many years did you have in mind?”

“A thousand, at least,” Faran replied. “Two thousand perhaps. Everything will be changed by then—for better or for worse. There are limitations on how far we can travel—technological ones. We cannot travel back into the past, however problem-solving that might be. I doubt if we should like what we’d find there, or that the presence of twenty-first century man would be tolerated in the past for long. It may not be tolerated in the future, but that is a risk we shall have to take.”

“Why did you come back?” Blakemore asked. “Since you seem so determined to make a much longer journey I don’t see why you didn’t continue on. When you start to do something that takes years of planning, when it’s that big and that frightening—it is frightening, you know—the natural human tendency is to go through with it while you’re in a keyed-up, hyper-sensitive state. There are emotions that can’t last and you’d need them, I should think, to travel through Time for ten or twenty centuries.”

“Yes, you’re right about that,” Faran said. “But an unexpected technological difficulty developed when we reached the early years of the twenty-second century. Overcoming it will not be a seriously time-delaying problem. But it compelled me to balance the temptation to continue on against the wisdom of returning and making absolutely sure that nothing will go wrong. And when I made that decision I immediately made another one that seems to have been the opposite of wise. By bringing Malador back with us I felt that I could—”

Gilda Faran had remained silent for so long that Blakemore had almost forgotten she was still at their side. But now she was tugging at her father’s arm and pointing along the beach, causing him to break off abruptly.

“Roger’s not going to have any trouble with him,” she said. “They stopped walking for an instant and I was afraid— But now he’s waving. Look, Dad! He wants you to know, I think, they’ll be inside in about ten more seconds.”

Far down the beach Tyson was shouting as he waved, but his voice, although whipped by the wind, failed to carry distinctly to where they were standing. But there was something in his attitude that conveyed reassurance, and the few words which Blakemore caught left no doubt in his mind that Faran’s daughter had not been mistaken.

In another moment both figures had disappeared from view.

“Well, that’s a relief,” Faran said. “When Roger’s inside just five steps will take him to a compartment that has all the safeguards of a prison cell. If Malador was a criminal, which he’s not, he might be able to pick a lock. But a sliding panel that can be hermetically sealed is as secure a safeguard as anything of that nature you’ll find in the twenty-second century. There are a few things you can’t improve on much, even in an age when prisons have mushroomed out.”

Faran stared across the beach to the offshore lighthouse, and a somber look came into his eyes, as if in the few places where the sea had turned a leaden gray he could see beneath the waves a lost city of dreadful night, where the buildings had turned the same leaden color and half of them were massive structures that could well have been prisons, or something worse.

“I’m sure Roger is no longer in the slightest danger,” he said. “And there’s something I think you should know. It concerns Malador and what I started to tell you about him. It’s something I couldn’t have anticipated and it’s not an easy thing to talk about. But when there’s something ugly weighing on your mind it’s a mistake to keep it under wraps. The best time to talk about it, I think, is right now.

“If I had thought Roger couldn’t handle Malador alone,” he continued, after a pause, “I wouldn’t have told you as much as I have. There would have been no time for that. But with a man like Roger it’s not too good an idea to go rushing in with an offer of help when he’s doing all right by himself and would prefer to keep it a one-man job. Unless help is needed it’s the best way of convincing a man that you’ve supreme confidence in him, and it helps him to stay steady. Otherwise you’d just be rocking the boat.”

“I could never think of you as doing that, Dad,” his daughter said. “When you’re in a boat—or anywhere else—you contribute nothing but steadiness.”

“Well—that seems to confirm what I told Blakemore,” Faran said. “Contrary to popular belief, a daughter can be more of a problem than a son. But if she can grow up believing that about you, you can hardly say it hasn’t been worth it. It’s not true, of course. I can become unsteady right down to my soles, when decisions have to be made with split-second timing.”

“That’s nonsense and you know it,” his daughter said.

“Not entirely,” Blakemore said, coming to Faran’s defense. “I’m pretty sure Columbus and Drake felt that way at times.” Then his expression became troubled again.

“What were you going to tell me about Malador?” he asked.

“I saw an opportunity to prove, beyond any possibility of doubt, that time travel is an accomplished fact,” Faran said. “Weapons and other objects from the future can undermine skepticism to a certain extent. To a man with your background they can perhaps carry absolute conviction. I’ve a feeling that you are no longer wavering between belief and doubt. But in general, the belief would persist that I had the inventive capacity to fake even so complex a weapon as the one you just examined. There is no substitute for a living witness.”

“But wouldn’t the time machine itself—or whatever you’ve decided to call it—be just as convincing?” Blakemore asked, “If you invited someone to accompany you whose word would not be doubted?”

“I can think of no one whose word would not be doubted,” Faran said. “And anyway—I would not care to undertake that kind of demonstration. I can do without a passenger who would be sure to be antagonistic from the start and might well become convinced that he’d made the trip under hypnosis or I’d put an hallucination-creating drug in his food or something of the sort.”

“But could you prove that Malador is actually from the future?” Blakemore persisted. “He could be hallucinating too—or so a great many people would believe. Judging from his behavior, the safest place for him right now would be a mental institution.”

“I can assure you that Malador is completely sane, unless you prefer to believe that a violent, uncontrollable rage can only occur in the insane. That’s hardly tenable, you know. And I shouldn’t have to remind you that we have the psychological means today of determining with absolute—or close to absolute—accuracy whether or not a man’s personality is sufficiently intact to rule out psychotic behavior and the rigid, persistent system of delusions that usually accompany it.”

It was true, of course, Blakemore realized, recalling what he had himself said to his wife about the comparison chart techniques before going in pursuit of the man. They could quickly remove all doubt as to whether a man who claimed to come from the future was telling the truth, since they could even expose as a fraud the infinitely complex and ingenious memory structures which believers in reincarnation sometimes came up with, in an effort to prove they could recall a thousand and one details of their previous lives.

“You may be right about Malador’s importance,” Blakemore conceded. “But it would take considerable time to overcome the way millions of people feel about time travel. On decision-making levels you’d encounter just as much anger and resistance. Wouldn’t all that interfere with your plans?”

“It would,” Faran said. “But if something should delay me, and I should need more technological assistance than seems likely at the moment, Malador—just my ability to produce him—could make me feel the way a man does when he has more insurance than he would ordinarily need. It’s a good way to feel. When there’s a widespread hostility you never know just how much insurance you’ll need.”

“Did you force him to return with you?” Blakemore asked.

Faran shook his head. “No. He desperately wanted to come and that helped me to make up my mind.”

“There’s something you’ve left out, Dad,” Faran’s daughter said. “It was just as hard for you as it was for me to watch all hope die in the eyes of the hundreds of starving men and women we talked to, when we told them we could only save one of them. Two perhaps—but there would have been a great risk in adding fifty pounds more of weight—or so you told me—when the stabilizing units were giving you trouble. But if you’d been alone, with just your own safety to consider, Malador would have had a companion. That girl who kept clinging to my knees, and sobbing or the little boy with big, sad eyes who would have made Oliver Twist seem chubby. Don’t deny it, Dad. You can’t, because it’s true.”

“Starvation can be a terrible thing,” Faran said. “How did you expect me to feel?”

“Thanks, Dad—for coming out of your shell,” Gilda said. “I wish you’d do that more often.”

“If I’d drawn further into it, or hardened the outer casing, Blakemore would have been spared what just happened,” Faran said. “To come that close to getting killed can be a terrible thing too. And I don’t like what I’m going to have to tell him, because it will be harder for him than it is for me to accept the fact that there’s a brighter side to it.”

He turned and looked directly at Blakemore. “The brighter side is tremendous, because human tyranny can’t endure forever. Eventually it will collapse under its own weight and what you’ve accomplished will make Johnny Appleseed dwindle to a pygmy legend lost in the mists of time.”

CHAPTER FOUR

Faran fell silent for an instant, and before he could continue something made it impossible for him to do anything but shade his eyes and stare past the lighthouse to where the sea had darkened to an almost purplish hue. There are compulsions which just a startling, totally unexpected sight can impose, enforcing silence with as much authority as a human voice issuing a command.

Blakemore experienced it too, the feeling that he must look seaward, that he could not fight against the magnet-like tug that the great ship that was coming into view around a bend in the coastline was exerting.

It was a Trawler, one of the few remaining ocean-plundering ships that every government on earth had outlawed. That its commander and crew should have taken the almost unthinkable risk of venturing into New England waters, where it could be attacked and sunk a few minutes after an alert went out, was either a tribute to a courage beyond the call of duty—if a criminal enterprise could be thought of as imposing a duty—or a testimonial to human madness.

Trawlers could navigate both rough and calm waters with twice a helioliner’s speed, which just possibly might have accounted for the taking of so great a risk. But Blakemore didn’t think so, for the ship would have been unable to vanish below the horizon, or slip into some nearby, cliff-walled cove in time to escape an attack from the air, unless its instruments were more sensitive than seemed likely and could pick up the vibrations from ascending astrojets a few seconds after they left the ground. Still—there were men who took long-odd risks.

Blakemore shut his eyes and for an instant was back in the Bahamas again, standing in the blazing tropical sunlight watching the Trawlers put out to sea with their flexisteel nets raised to deck-level and looking, in the glare, like gleaming shrouds completely encircling the ships.

And “Rusty” Symons was saying to him again, with an almost pleading look in his eyes: “Kid, why go back? What can that university do for you? It’s just a big pile of stone that will start crumbling soon, like everything else in the north. Ecology, hell. The only hope we have left is in the sea. Why don’t you join the fleet? I don’t care what you say. It’s the only sensible thing—the only brave thing to do.”

“It’s not brave to take anything more out of the sea—or sensible either,” he could hear himself protesting. “The sea has to be left alone now—for three or four generations at least. It may provide some hope eventually but not enough. You won’t get big catches again—of fish or crustaceans or any other kind of underwater life that’s edible for a century and a half.

“The Trawlers are doing it for profit, to cash in on human misery. They don’t realize it yet, but there’s a drawback to that. Without ecology there will soon be no human misery left to take advantage of.”

“Rusty” Symons was crowding eighty and had long ago given up all thought of joining the Trawler fleet. But most of the day and probably at night the sea remained his first and last love and he could seldom take his eyes from it.

Nothing had changed much since the far-off days of the old man’s youth, for in the West Indies the flow of time moved counter-clockwise to time everywhere else.

There were still cathedral bells and masses and hooded monks and if you weren’t careful a Voodoo curse could still be placed on you. Or so “Rusty” had always believed.

Blakemore opened his eyes, perhaps because a mind’s gaze vision dating back seventeen years could not be recaptured for long where the northern bleakness which “Rusty” had warned him against was making Trawlers in northern waters seem remote and unreal. Or perhaps it was simply because Faran was tugging at his arm.

“They must be out of their minds,” Faran muttered. “They’ll be attacked any minute now. How can they hope to avoid it? If that ship is blasted out of the water I’m afraid to think of what could happen to us. We’re dangerously close to it.”

The ship was a beautiful sight. Blakemore hadn’t seen its like for so long that for a moment he could only stare, sharing Faran’s alarm in some deep crevice of his mind, but consciously hardly at all. The flexisteel nets were spread out like a fan now at the Trawler’s stern, and it was moving so smoothly over the water that it seemed to be gliding past the lighthouse on a frozen plain. Even the waves that broke over its bow looked like splinters of ice glistening the sunlight, hurled high into the air by the sharp, cutting edge of the Trawler’s keel.

Blakemore heard the boom of the astrojets breaking the sound barrier before he saw them. But they came swiftly into view, six almost evenly spaced dots far to the north, glittering star-bright against a low-hanging cloud.

They did not remain distant for long. There may or may not have been a rushing back and forth on the decks of the Trawler, with half or more of the ship’s crew crowding the rails, for Blakemore could only make out a flurry of movement at the stern. But it seemed unlikely that the sight of six astrojets hovering directly overhead could have failed to create that kind of panic.

There wasn’t much time for panic to arise, however, for the bomb loads began dropping before the jets had encircled the ship more than once.

There was a sudden, incandescent burst of flame and a thick column of black smoke billowed skyward.

For the barest instant two-thirds of the Trawler’s shattered and blazing hull came into view above the smoke, suspended in the air like a gigantic boulder hurled from the crater of an erupting volcano.

Then it fell back into the sea and the smoke became so dense that even the lighthouse was blotted out. The jets remained visible, however. They had become separated for an instant but now they were drawing together again in a tight formation high above the smoke.

The instant that formation was achieved they swept lower and headed directly for the beach, looking not unlike a wedge of flying geese.

The fact that, having already broken the sound barrier, they made no sound at all made their swift approach seem even more frightening, somehow, than it would have been otherwise, or what can strike a greater terror to the heart than death on soundless wings?

Gilda Faran pointed and then screamed, gripping her father’s arm so violently that he was almost thrown off balance.

“Dad, they’ll bomb us too! They must think we’re—”

“I know,” Faran said, in a voice so calm that Blakemore’s admiration for him soared. “They think we’ve been stationed here with a pickup apparatus, to signal a warning to the Trawler if jets should take off. It’s probably the end. We have to face it. I love you, child, more than I’ve ever told you.”

“We’ve still a chance,” Blakemore said, his voice considerably less calm. “Just stay where you are. Stand very still.”

The jets were within two hundred feet of the beach and continuing to descend. But Blakemore did not even look up at them until he reached the surf line. He dropped to his knees and waited until the distance had shortened to close to a hundred feet before he began to signal with his arms.

He used the simplest of wig-wagging codes, repeating the three-word message again and again. “I’m Dan Blakemore. I’m Dan Blakemore. I’m Dan Blakemore.” Then, dropping a word, “Dan Blakemore. Dan Blakemore.” Finally: “Blakemore, Blakemore, Blakemore. I’m Dan Blakemore.”

For a moment he was sure that the message had been missed, for the jets continued on. They swept lower and were hovering directly overhead before an answering message came.

It came in dots and dashes, punched out upon the air.

“Sorry, Blakemore. Our mistake. We didn’t like what we had to do. But trawling must be stopped. Good luck with the wheat.”

The amplification was so intense that every click of the transmitting instrument made Blakemore’s ears ring. He could not have wig-wagged back a reply, even if he had wanted to, for the jets had swept across the sea wall and were dwindling to dots again high in the sky before he could get to his feet. But he would not have wanted to, because what he had seen had enraged and sickened him.

Cheery good wishes were a mockery, when an act of coldly calculated ruthlessness had sent a hundred men to their graves without giving them a chance to surrender. Two hundred perhaps, for the Trawlers were heavily manned. Trawling was a criminal enterprise, but it was one thing to yield to no man in your hatred of it, and quite another to exact so terrible a penalty.

Something surfaced in Blakemore’s mind that he would have preferred to keep hidden, even from himself—the knowledge that he did not like the age he was living in as much as Mason and the others could have wished. But unless a man could escape from his age entirely he had to find some way of coming to terms with it, for it was integrated with the most vital aspects of himself. Could a man perform a major surgical operation on himself, slice off much of his childhood, many of his closest friends—it was useless to pretend that some of them were not at odds with what he believed—and hope to survive? He seriously doubted it.

The pall of smoke that still obscured most of the sea between the lighthouse and the beach was beginning to thin out now. Through the dissolving haze, Blakemore could make out floating masses of wreckage. Something that looked not unlike a gigantic eel was drifting slowly toward the beach. Serpentine and seemingly in writhing motion, it caught and held the sunlight.

But Blakemore knew that it couldn’t be an eel, or any other kind of marine animal.

It had to be some part of the blasted Trawler, perhaps the thermonuclear reactor that had once enabled it to take on a kind of life on the sea’s surface that exceeded in its speed of motion the fastest-darting monster of the deep.

Why it had not sunk twenty fathoms deep Blakemore did not know. Possibly the blast had made it as porous as a sponge, elongating it to an unheard of length and stripping away its destructive, radioactive potential. Possibly, far beneath the waves, that destructiveness was spreading in all directions now, destroying even the few marine creatures that had escaped the Trawler’s nets.

It was ironic to reject how small a thing such additional contamination had become. In the depths of the Atlantic there were—how many such sunken pockets of radio-active blight, since the first atomic submarine had vanished off Bermuda’s cliffs? Twenty thousand surely, and as long as Trawlers remained on the high seas there would be many more.

For many centuries the skulls of drowned sailors had been buffeted by the tides, with a phosphorescent gleaming in what had once been their eyes. But that phosphorescence had been brought about by plankton alone. It had been a natural thing, inseparable from the sea, and not a horror engineered by man.

Blakemore did not like the direction his thoughts were taking and he stopped looking directly seaward and stared down the long beach toward the breakwater.

The beach was no longer deserted. Roger Tyson was coming toward them across the sand a few feet above the surf line, moving so swiftly he seemed almost to be running.

That did not surprise Blakemore at all. A Trawler could hardly have been blasted to fragments so close to the dark shape into which he had vanished without drawing him forth again in concern, unless imprisoning Malador had given him more trouble than Faran had been convinced it would.

Apparently Gilda had been looking in the same direction, for she was running to meet him before Blakemore could turn. Her bare feet made a swishing sound as she descended the beach, her hair whipped by the wind, and ran parallel with the breakers as she continued on, gesturing toward the lighthouse and the floating wreckage, as if she were not sure that Tyson had grasped the full extent of the disaster which had overtaken the Trawler. Blakemore doubted that he had, unless he had emerged upon the beach in time to see the jets and the Trawler before it had been blown apart.

In the moment the distance between them had shortened to a few feet and then, quite suddenly, she was in his arms. That didn’t surprise Blakemore either, although up to that moment he had entertained a few doubts as to how important he had become to her and she to him.

She remained clinging to him for only an instant, her arms moving back and forth across his bare shoulders. Then they both turned and walked a little more slowly than he had moved when alone diagonally across the beach toward where Blakemore and Faran were standing.

They were both still a little out of breath, but that did not prevent Tyson from speaking the moment he reached Faran’s side.

“Gilda told me that Trawler was blasted by six jets in a matter of seconds,” he said. “I didn’t see it, just heard the bombs going off. When I descended to the beach the sea looked the way it does now. There can’t be any survivors. There never has been when there’s just one ship and that many jets.”

“If Dan hadn’t signaled to them from the beach it would have been just as bad right here,” Faran told him. “Six jets—and no survivors. We’d have been—I might as well say it—vaporized.”

“But why? I can’t see the reason for that. They must have known—”

“How could they have known we weren’t lookouts stationed here to transmit a warning?” Faran said. “Just one look at the size of my time-traveling arrangement from the air would have convinced them that the Trawler’s presence in these waters had been made a little less than suicidal by some new technological safeguard. It’s a wonder they didn’t blast it to fragments before they attacked the ship.”

“Yes, I didn’t think of that,” Tyson said, his expression grim. “With me inside of it. Oh, brother! I guess I owe Blakemore just as great a debt.”

He turned to Blakemore, extending a hand so huge and muscular that it would have given most wrestlers an unfair advantage. Though Blakemore had seen it close up once before and taken the risk of clasping it, he was a little reluctant to do so now, for there was in Tyson’s eyes a dangerous depth of gratefulness.

There were handshakes that could be bone-crushing, and though he had enough tensile strength in his own fingers to withstand that kind of pressure under ordinary circumstances he was far from sure of it now.

Fortunately Tyson’s fingers exerted no more than a firm, steady pressure, and he seemed content to let just a “Thanks, Blakemore,” take care of the rest of it.

“No, Dad and I have dropped all formality,” Gilda said. “He’s ‘Dan’ now and always will be.”

“I see. Well, that’s fine. Thanks, Dan.”

“He’s quite a personage,” Gilda said. “He just wigwagged his name eight or ten times, and the jets took notice. It should still be that way with Dad.”

“It was once and it will be again,” Tyson assured her. “But I don’t think your father attaches much importance to that, one way or the other.”

“I’m afraid that’s so,” Faran said. “Most men have enough vanity in them to make that kind of a disclaimer sound like mock modesty. But it happens to be true. I’ve more than my share of vanity, I’m sure. But practically all of it runs in other directions.”

“Roger,” Gilda said. “We’re still alive and that’s the only thing that matters now. We’ve got to put that—that horror out of our minds.”

She nodded toward the wreckage-strewn sea between the lighthouse and the beach, where the curtain of smoke had almost vanished. There were still fifteen or twenty masses of wreckage that had remained floating, most of them drifting slowly shoreward. Two of the larger fragments had been tossed up on the beach close to the breakwater and another was awash in the crashing surf, where it had settled deep into the sand.

There was a sight that Blakemore had dreaded but that they had been mercifully spared—a reddening of the water where the wreckage had just begun to thin out and there was still a faint swirling which resembled a waterspout in reverse.

“There’s nothing we can do now—no survivors in need of help,” Gilda said. She was staring at Tyson’s face and Blakemore thought he knew why there was so much concern in her voice. Tyson had tightened his lips and looked more than just troubled. It was as if he had suddenly recalled something that he would have preferred to forget.

“We’ll all have to do that,” Tyson said. “It’s over and done with. There’s nothing you can’t put out of your mind if you make an effort and have no choice. It wasn’t that, Gilda. I was thinking of something else.”

Tyson’s wind-ruffled hair—it was medium-blond with a slightly reddish cast—was cut fairly short. But it descended slantwise over his brow in a one-sided bang, and coiled around his right ear, almost hiding it. With a flick of his palm he brushed it back, exposing a darkly swelling bruise, low down on his temple.

“Malador put up a struggle,” he said. “A pretty savage one. The paralysis wore off just as I was sliding the panel open. He turned on me and knocked me down. I got up before he could come at me again, grabbed him by the shoulders and hurled him into the compartment. Then I managed to get it shut before he could keep it from closing. But he tried. He thrust his arm straight out and tried to slow the panel’s momentum. I’d given it a terrific slam.

“I had to grab hold of his arm and bend it back, inch by inch. If he’d kept it wedged in the opening the panel might have closed anyway. But I would have gone reeling backwards with just his arm, severed at the elbow. Both our arms could have been cut off while I was struggling with him, because, once the panel has been set in motion, it’s like trying to hold back a moving steel blade. But all it did was go about an eighth of an inch into my flesh before he gave up, whipped his arm back and the panel glided shut.”

Tyson held up his arm and for the first time Blakemore saw that there was a dark stain on it an inch below his elbow on the underside, where the blood had started to congeal.

Gilda swayed a little and Faran said something under his breath that Blakemore failed to catch. It could have been a grunt of admiration and approval, or just the reverse, for it was the kind of risk that only a very reckless man would have taken.

It would have made more sense, Blakemore told himself, if Tyson had let the man come out and then grappled with him again, or gone into the compartment after him. But why even that, when he still had the weapon and could have used it a second time?

“The weapon—” Blakemore said. “Couldn’t you have just stood back and trained it on him again?”

Tyson shook his head. “I didn’t have it,” he said. “Malador snatched it away from me when I gripped him by the shoulders and hurled him into the compartment. I think he knew he couldn’t have kept a tight hold on it, because right at that moment I was getting the upper hand. He snatched it so quickly it took me by surprise. But I would have gotten it back again if he hadn’t tossed it from him as far as he could, while he still had the chance.”

“He could have picked it up again when you hurled him into the compartment,” Blakemore said. “Why didn’t he?”

“The panel was already closing,” Tyson said. “Apparently he didn’t have time to look around and see where the weapon had landed. The only way he could keep the panel from closing was by thrusting his arm into the opening.”

“So he’s locked up now in the compartment with that weapon with him,” Faran grunted.

“That’s right,” Tyson said. “But it can’t blast a hole in a solid metal wall, or even shatter the panel mechanism. Don’t forget—the panel practically melts into a more massive sheet of metal, inches-thick, and with nothing he can get at attached to it.

“Are you sure?” Faran asked. “How do we know what that weapon can do?”

“He told us exactly what it couldn’t do,” Tyson said.

“He told us that a half-dozen times, but, as you’ll recall, he made it emphatic when we asked him to join us in some target practice. It’s not like that one—”

Tyson pointed to the far more complex-looking weapon that was still lying in the sand at Faran’s feet. “We discussed both weapons when we asked him to bring down that gull, remember? That was before he leapt up and started for the sea wall. The rage against the wheat hadn’t come upon him yet. He would have had to reason to lie to us—”

“Still, I don’t like it,” Faran said.

“Remember how friendly he was before he saw the wheat,” Tyson persisted. “He was a gentle sort—Gilda liked and trusted him, and so did I. He was so grateful to you for keeping him from starving to death I had the feeling, at times, he was like—well, like some poor, mistreated hound dog you’d rescued from malicious children as cruel as only children know how to be—children and savages—because an unthinking cruelty is something special and apart—”

Tyson shook his head. “You know what I mean. There’s a gratefulness and a loyalty that’s also special and apart. I had the feeling he would have died for you—or for Gilda. That he would be capable of deceiving you about what that weapon can do— No, I refuse to believe it.”

“He could have had his reasons—even if what you say about him is true in a general way,” Faran pointed out.

“I trust everything he told us, before he became enraged.”

“All right, have it your own way. But I still don’t like the thought that he is confined in that compartment with a weapon we don’t know too much about.”

“I’m going right back,” Tyson said. “But I don’t think there’s the remotest possibility that he could get out of the compartment. I’m more concerned about the way he feels about Dan. I never saw anyone quite so enraged, with such an intensity of hate in him. He kept cursing Dan even while I was struggling with him, and his eyes were wild.”

The more than merely troubled look had come back into Tyson’s eyes and Blakemore could see that Faran shared his concern.

“That’s bad,” Faran said. “It could lead to all kinds of complications, none of them pleasant to contemplate. We can’t keep him locked up permanently and unless we can reason with him and overcome the way he feels—”

“We can try,” Tyson said. “I’ll talk to him through the audiotube and see what can be done. I’ll remind him that he wouldn’t be alive now if you hadn’t brought him back with us. I think we can still reason with him.”

“I’ll go with you,” Faran said. “He’s more likely to listen to me.”

He nodded at Blakemore. “Just Roger and I will go,” he said. “Gilda might as well stay here with you. We won’t be long.”

CHAPTER FIVE

Before Blakemore could say anything in reply Faran changed his mind. He had started to move to Tyson’s side, but he suddenly frowned, and came to an abrupt halt.

“It can wait five minutes or so,” he said, returning to where his daughter was standing. “There’s just one or two things concerning Malador and the wheat I was going to tell Dan when the Trawler came out from behind the lighthouse and we saw the jets. Until he knows how the world’s tragically thinned out population is going to feel about that wheat a century from now Malador’s rage will be incomprehensible to him. I think he should know, right now. That we can all come to a better understanding.”

“Understanding?” Tyson asked. “I don’t quite see—”

“We’re going to need to draw closer together. Because when I take the longer journey I doubt that there will be just the three of us—and Malador. That will be for Dan to decide. But I don’t want Dan to be kept in the dark, when it’s not absolutely necessary. I can spare a few minutes more, if you’ll go back and make sure that Malador isn’t beating his brains out against the wall of the compartment or lying in a crumpled heap on the floor. You never know what a man so enraged may take it into his mind to do. I doubt if he’s injured himself, but you’d better make sure.”

“Good God,” Tyson said. “What if he uses that weapon on himself? It’s something I didn’t think of.”

“Think of it now,” Faran said. “But if it will make you feel any better, I’d say it was extremely unlikely. For the first time in his life he knows what it means to be able to look up at the stars and breathe the salt sea air and stride along the beach with the sun and wind in his hair without knowing that he’s going to die—and soon.”

“There’s more to it than that, Dad,” Gilda said. “It’s knowing you’re with people who care.”

“I think he knows we care—or did,” Tyson said. “You can forget what I said about a hound dog. I didn’t mean it the way it probably sounded. I was just thinking of how grateful he seemed to be—to you and your father. But if a man turns homicidal it’s a little harder to care.”

“That’s why I don’t want Dan to judge him too harshly,” Faran said. “The sooner he knows the truth about him the better. All right—see what you can do. Talk to him if you want to. Tell him I’ll be along shortly. If you fail, I’m almost sure he’ll listen to me. If we can take just a little of the edge off his rage it will help.”

Tyson put his arm around Gilda’s waist, drew her close and kissed her once lightly on the cheek before he turned and headed back toward the breakwater, crossing to the surf line first, as if the crashing of the breakers had become so familiar a sound that it steadied him in some way and he was reluctant to part with it.

At any other time the tenuousness of the embrace would have amused Blakemore, for it had been quite different from the one they had exchanged a few minutes previously that Tyson must have known he could not have failed to see. But his thoughts were of too grim a nature to provide room for amusement—and anyway, it hadn’t been too surprising a thing. No matter what degree of intimacy their relationship had reached, there were men who became reticent in the presence of a father and even, sometimes, in the presence of an older man. He hoped that Tyson and Gilda would not go on thinking of him in that way, but ten years did, after all, make a difference.

Blakemore was quite sure that Faran was completely happy about the earlier embrace, for he had been watching his face closely during the twenty or thirty seconds Gilda and Tyson had remained entranced, with the roar of the surf no doubt indistinguishable from the pounding of the blood in their ears.

For a moment Faran remained silent, his eyes on the tall, robustly built figure of a man who seemed to have the strange capacity—Blakemore had noticed it before—of looking just as tall a considerable distance away as he did close at hand. Then he turned and gestured toward the sea wall.

“I’d much rather start by telling you exactly what you’ve accomplished by growing that wheat,” he said.

“Then I think it would be wise to tell you about the darker side before—well, I think I can make you see how something that seems dark for a short while can change and become a shining hope.”

“What you probably mean is—you’ve decided I’ll be needing a bandage to keep the wound tidied up. If Malador hates me the way he seems to—”

Faran smiled. “I suppose it is wounding—just to know you’re hated by someone you’ve never set eyes on before, someone you’ve done nothing, to the best of your knowledge, to provoke. The fact that he comes from an age remote from ours doesn’t make such a wound any the less painful.”

“It’s the feeling of unfairness it gives you,” Blakemore said. “It doesn’t matter what kind of man he is. When someone hates you irrationally it’s hitting below the belt. You keep asking yourself why, and there’s no answer.”

“There is an answer, I’m afraid,” Faran said. “As for the wound—there won’t be any flow of blood. The age from which we’ve just come can’t deal you a direct physical blow with Malador where he is now. And I don’t think you’ll want to visit that age when you’ve heard what I’m going to tell you.

“A later age, yes—but not that one. That’s why it’s important for you to know what we found out about it. The early years of the twenty-second century foreshadow, as perhaps no other age could, what life on earth may be like a thousand years from now.

“If we’d traveled a century into the future and found no trace of your wheat—we’d have had good reason to feel that the battle had been lost. But we found a great deal more than a trace. Not the present field, of course, but a harvest yield fifty thousand times as abundant.

“Not only has that field been duplicated thousands of times around the world. There are apple orchards, acres of plum, cherry and pear trees, banana and melon plantations, and fields of corn just as golden—all utilizing the soil-restoring techniques you’ve worked out.”

Blakemore was almost sure, from the intent way that Faran was staring at him, that his expression had frozen into a strange mixture of wonderment and disbelief. He had difficulty in keeping unsteadiness out of his voice.

“I thought it might be just barely possible, a century from now,” he said. “But when I considered what it would cost—”

“The cost has come close to exhausting the resources of every nation on earth,” Faran said. “You see, there are still separate nations in the early years of the twenty-second century. But they are bound together in a loose confederation. A confederation of that nature gives tyranny on decision-making levels a better opportunity to flourish than would a World State, where it would have to be more rigorously curtailed. It is unfortunate that it should be so, for it is not too bad a governmental system otherwise. It has at least eliminated war.”

Faran paused for an instant to stare seaward, as if the Atlantic’s gray immensity symbolized for him the height and depth and width of the governmental systems which had been explored and discarded since the Dawn Age.

“There are two ways,” he said, “of trying to recapture the special qualities that separate one age from another. You can set ten thousand scholars to writing books about an age in walled-off cubicles and you’ll have as many volumes to consult in a surprisingly short time. But I can hardly choose that way now.

“Another way, perhaps the best way, is to try to recapture the inner essence of an age by considering how—and to what extent—its dominant characteristics may have been shaped by the age immediately preceding it. You ignore everything but the characteristics which stand out to such an extent that they fairly leap at you.

“Straight for the jugular, perhaps, like a suddenly materializing werewolf. I’ve said that, barring some unexpected cataclysm, a century does not provide enough time for the shadows, in an age like the present, to do more than lengthen and deepen.

“All right. Think first of the early years of the twenty-second century as an age of steadily deepening shadows. An age, also, in which technology, particularly in the categories associated with weapon-making, has taken a considerable leap forward. You can put that down, if you wish, to the desperate need that men faced with starvation have for weapons.

“Now—introduce one other factor, the most crucial one of all. The tyranny, often unconsciously motivated, and present—I’m referring, of course, to the need to exercise it—even in men of good will.

“There are many different kinds of tyranny and some of them are motivated by greed or an insensate grab for power. But fright alone can bring about a very terrible kind of tyranny. In the early years of the twenty-second century there are hundreds of men and women on decision-making levels who have become remorseless tyrants simply because of the Big Scare.”

“The Big Scare?” Blakemore asked curiously.

“Yes, I can think of no better name for it,” Faran said, nodding. “After long years of famine, of deprivation and human wretchedness, with people dying like flies everywhere, a man can become so conditioned by fear that he cannot rejoice in a sudden change for the better. Both his emotions and his thinking will have become almost pathologically distorted.”

“But I can’t quite see how that would make him a tyrant.”

“Listen carefully and I think you will. He’ll ask himself all kinds of tormenting questions. How long can an abundance of food, in a few scattered areas, last? What if some future blight should wipe out all of the gains? Would it not be a mistake to distribute even a small part of it?

“Why do some men become misers? It’s usually because, in their youth, they’ve endured some memory-searing deprivation. To have it happen again would be unthinkable and they go right on hoarding, ten, twenty times as much wealth as they could possibly need—or a thousand times as much.

“Don’t you see? Men on a decision-making level, so afflicted, can honestly come to believe that by refusing to distribute available food where it is most needed they are acting with sobriety and far-sightedness, in the public interest. All of the wheat must be hoarded and guarded, encircled by high walls that would be suicidal for a starving man to scale.

“There wasn’t sufficient food being grown a century from now to justify not withholding perhaps a third of it, purely as a safeguard. But nothing can justify not distributing the other two-thirds to the starving. Actually, nine-tenths of it is being withheld. In some localities, the entire yield. An East Indian famine at its very worst couldn’t equal some of the horrors we’ve seen.”

Faran stared out over the sea again, as if he still saw beneath the waves the city of dreadful night, but changed now from a prison-guarded metropolis to a city in which no attempt was being made to keep the inhabitants from destroying themselves as they fought with one another for scraps of food, or leapt from high terraces to the darkly-stained pavements far below.

“There’s one thing I’m not absolutely sure about,” Faran continued. “Did Malador recognize your wheat by the fields distinguishing characteristics, and realize he was in the actual presence of a hated symbol from another age that could still be attacked and destroyed? The violence of his rage is easy to understand. Up to that moment the wheat you’ve grown must have seemed to a man from the twenty-second century forever safe from human destruction, simply because both the wheat and the grower had ceased to exist. You cannot exact retribution from the dead. But when he realized that he had been mistaken—

“Well, that seems the most likely possibility. That he did actually recognize the field. But it’s not inconceivable that he was enraged beyond endurance because, being walled in, it bears a close resemblance to the many, securely-guarded fields that had made the gaunt specter of starvation so terrible a reality to him.

“What makes me feel otherwise, however, is the fact that crude drawings of your field were everywhere. Crude—but accurate and detailed enough. They showed the lighthouse, the sea wall, the distant breakwater which looks like the skeleton of whale stranded on a sand bar, the width and curvature of the beach and even the way a few stalks of wheat tower above the sea wall on the landward side.

“Apparently the field, as it exists today, has not escaped the attention of photographers with sufficient prophetic insight to know that it will soon become legendary. Microfilm reproductions of it were probably projected on wide screens, and in depth for a great many years before men on decision-making levels decided it was not too good an idea to let starving men and women dwell on something that could make them so embittered and enraged that they would demand to know why a field of wheat grown a century ago was being praised so highly when nothing that had come of it was of the slightest benefit to them.”

Faran was staring at Blakemore now as if what he felt he had to say he would have much preferred to leave unspoken.

“When that land of rage and hatred is driven underground it can take an ugly turn. Graffiti. You know where they are most often encountered, both in verbal and pictorial form. No one in the early years of the twenty-second century could have failed to read what was said about the wheat you’ve grown, for the impulse to add a comment or two to the rude drawing of some vilified symbol becomes irresistible at times. “Hatred feeds on hatred and—well.”

“So that’s the dark side of the picture you promised you’d get around to eventually,” Blakemore said. “You said it would seem darker to me than it does to you—and you’re right. I’ve always thought of my wheat as something—well, rather shining. I had to. And there’s nothing exactly shining about a graffito, no matter where it’s found.”

“Time’s verdict will erase all that. Listen to me, boy. A man and his work may be reviled in one age, placed on a high pedestal in another. And that’s sure to happen.”

Faran was staring a little farther along the beach, to a point midway between the breakers and the sea wall and when he continued Blakemore was almost sure that he was visualizing as he spoke what had taken place there.

“We were all on the beach,” Faran was saying. “Malador had the weapon with him. He was showing us how to operate it. We’d asked him for a demonstration, more to satisfy our curiosity than anything else. There was a gull wheeling and dipping offshore and we were curious to see how quickly he could bring it down. Then Roger would have taken a crack at it. I had no particular desire to, and, as I’ve said, I’m not sure I could operate it now if my life depended on it.

“He’d already told us what the trident-shaped one could do to the mind—how you had to prod a man a little to make him walk when the paralysis sets in. We never thought we’d have to use it on him. To Roger it had become for the moment just a grown man’s toy—a shining gee-gaw.

“Malador had told us it could render an animal just as helpless, so that even if you were not bent on hunting down a man—” Faran shook his head, his features tightening a little. “A century from now the penalty for killing an animal is death. But the penalty for killing a man is much less severe. Sometimes no one bothered to ask what had become of a missing relative or friend.”

“Please, Dad!” Gilda said. “We didn’t actually see anyone being hunted down. Everything we saw was bad enough. If we keep remembering everything we heard—”

Faran nodded, “You’re right, of course. It’s a mistake to let it weigh too heavily on our minds. I could remember a dozen other things as bad as cannibalism, but I don’t intend to. If a man is driven to such extremity that he has to cut off and eat his own—”

“No, Dad—please.”

“I just wanted Blakemore to know how rare a thing it was for a man in an age like that to go to sleep at night with a reasonably clear conscience. Think it over, boy. If they committed an ugly crime against your memory and your wheat it shouldn’t disturb you too much. It was inevitable, under the circumstances.”

Faran paused again. But this time his gaze did not travel to the sea. He looked down instead at his own sun-bronzed legs—remarkable in their sturdiness for a man of sixty-three—and Blakemore was half-convinced that he was wondering how he would feel if he were compelled to part with one of them to keep himself alive.

Not that such a heroic measure would have been possible or, as far as Blakemore knew, had ever been attempted by a man in his right mind. A toe or finger, yes. He had heard of that.

“It was the first time that Malador had had an opportunity to really look around him, and take in the entire beach, the sea wall and as much of the wheat as we can see from here,” Faran said. “All I can be sure of is that he stopped showing us how to operate the weapon and swept the beach with his eyes, looking toward the breakwater at first and then up at the sea wall.

“All at once he began to tremble, and gripped the weapon more tightly. He narrowed his eyes and a dark flush crept up over his cheekbones. He had the look of a man convulsed with rage. But whether he had recognized the wheat from the drawings he’d seen of it or was just enraged because it was guarded by a high wall—well, your guess is as good as mine.

“I only know that he swung around and made for the sea wall on the run, still holding fast to the weapon. He was on the other side of it before Roger was half-way across the beach.

“There were several things Roger could have done. If he had been less startled, he could have trained the trident-shaped weapon on him before he reached the wall. Failing that, he could have pursued him through the wheat. He might even have managed to race after him a little faster before he reached the wall. But you’ve got to remember we had no idea what had come over the man.

“Not right at the moment, I mean. Later we put two and two—or six multiplied by eighteen—together and decided we could make a pretty good guess as to what had motivated him. But by then he was far gone in the wheat.

“We figured there were several things he might do. He was a stranger in a strange age. Strange, that is, to him. What seemed most likely was that his brainstorm would wear off, he’d be gripped by panic, and return to the beach. What we feared most was that he might continue on through the wheat and find the grower of the wheat and—”

“He did, “Blakemore said. “If you’d gone in pursuit of him I would have been spared a lot of anguish, both mental and physical. Though I suppose you can’t say that anguish can be physical.”

“You mean he attacked you with that weapon once before? Good God—”

“Twice before,” Blakemore said. “The first time he blasted at me through the window of the summer residence where I’ve been vacationing. The second time he trained it on the astrojet from the wheat when I went in pursuit of him. That’s why I crashed—”

“We were just about to go after him when the astrojet came sweeping down over the sea wall,” Faran said. “It took us a long time to decide what it might be best to do. We banked too much, I’m afraid, on his returning. We thought we’d better wait and see.”

“That doesn’t make too much sense to me,” Blakemore said.

“I’d be happier if you’d refrain from accusing me until I’ve told you why we waited,” Faran said. “Armed with that weapon and acting the way he had, I wouldn’t have wanted him to return to the beach with just Gilda here to pacify him. What if he had trained the weapon on her? And that’s a big field of wheat you’ve grown. A two-man searching party could get lost in it for hours. Of course only Roger could have gone. But he was stubborn about leaving me and Gilda here alone.

“I’m better at inventing weapons than using them in self-defense, and only he had really mastered that trident—or thought he had. And he thinks my osteoarthritis has slowed me up a little physically, which is nonsense, perhaps. But still—”

“But eventually you would have gone after him? You just said—”

“All three of us,” Faran said. “But the thought of Gilda stumbling through the wheat, accidentally separated from us perhaps, and with Malador on the loose— At first I refused to take that risk, and it took Gilda at least twenty minutes more to convince me I was underestimating her ability to stay alert. Then we saw your astrojet—” A thin smile hovered for an instant on Faran’s lips. “At least an hour must have passed while we were debating what to do. When you’re under that kind of strain you’ll do crazy things at times. The sun’s still almost directly overhead, as you can see. But it was even hotter an hour and a half ago, and Gilda and Roger went for a swim, leaving me perched here like a boiled New England lobster.

“I needed cooling off more than they did, because I was angrier at Gilda than I’d ever thought I could be. She had the idea that a frail girl of eighteen could go striding through that wheat with all of Roger’s capacity for endurance. Yes, and his ability to defend himself.”

“Not physical strength, Dad—confidence,” Gilda said. “It’s a big asset in a woman.”

Blakemore wasn’t looking toward the sea wall when he heard a high-pitched woman’s voice raised in what he thought for an instant could only be a scream.

He turned abruptly and stared, shading his eyes against the glare. Faran and his daughter swung about just as quickly.

It hadn’t been a scream, but a shout. He realized that when he saw that his wife was descending the sea wall without ceasing to wave at him, and so swiftly that he feared that she might at any moment lose her balance and fail.

He would have shouted to her to be careful, not to take such a risk, that there was no need for her to rejoin him in a matter of seconds when they had been separated by an astrojet crash, a painful awakening, an attack by a man from the future and his subjugation by a blinding sheet of flame—he would have shouted all that to her and more, if only inwardly, if she had not reached the beach before he could do so, and was now running toward him across the sand.

In another moment she was in his arms, straining against him, her hands entangled in his hair.

“When you didn’t come back there was only one thing I could do,” she breathed. “There was nothing to stop me from coming straight through the wheat on foot, and you must have known I would.”

“I didn’t know,” he said, stroking her hair. “I’ve got to be honest about it. I thought you’d wait until I got back, because, after all, I haven’t been gone so long.”

“No? You’ve no idea how long it’s been, apparently, or you wouldn’t be talking that way. Where’s the astrojet? Did you overtake him? Who are these people?”

“The astrojet broke up and has been carried away by the tide,” he said. “In fragments—or so I’ve been told.” She pushed his head back away from her and looked steadily into his eyes, her own eyes more startled than he had ever known them to be.

“Dan, why do you always talk like that when something terrible, something you’d rather not have me know about, happens to you? If you were forced to bring the jet down and it crashed—why must you pretend it had an amusing side? You could have been carried away in fragments too!”

“All right, I might well have been. No crash could have been more shattering—to the jet at least. He tried to kill me again, from the wheat. He shattered most of my instruments and I came down in a long glide that carried me over the sea wall and into the sea, where the water was barely ankle-deep. Only some miracle kept the jet from bursting into flames. But they got me out.”

“Who did, Dan?”

“I did, but not without assistance,” Faran said. “It was the assistance that counted most. I’m Philip Faran. Blakemore didn’t know I had a daughter, but I’ve always known he had a wife. The media took care of that, but I must say—”

Faran permitted a glint of amusement to show in his eyes. “It would be just a waste of time—and we haven’t got too much of that—to damn the media for not doing full justice to your image on the disk. Too great a dazzlement can arouse the envy of—well, men less fortunate than Blakemore, and they may not have wanted to do that.”

Helen Blakemore was staring as steadily now at Faran as she had stared at her husband. But now there was more than just startlement turning to relief and gratefulness in her eyes. Her expression puzzled Blakemore for a moment, until he remembered where he had seen that look before. He had seen it in old photographs of the men who had first set foot on the moon, after they had returned to Earth, removed their space gear and settled down to be interviewed, with their thoughts still two hundred thousand miles away, on lunar craters gilded by the sunlight and dead sea bottoms that were not really seas, but seemed just as cavern-mysterious.

It was Faran who told her everything he felt she should know, gesturing occasionally down the beach toward the breakwater as he talked. And when he had finished it didn’t surprise Blakemore that it was only a moment before they were all moving along the beach in the direction of the breakwater, for Helen, as he should have known, was not going to be satisfied until she had seen the time-traveling machine for herself.

CHAPTER SIX

Time can pass very quickly just in the natural course of events, human or otherwise, as Blakemore knew very well. But it had seldom been brought quite so forcefully home to him as it had during the hour it had taken Faran to conduct them on a guided tour of the machine.

They had seemed to move from compartment to compartment—from the staggeringly incredible to the just-short-of-miraculous—in a matter of minutes, ten or fifteen at most.

Blakemore also knew that there were moments in a man’s life so filled with startling revelations that the mind encapsulated them in a kind of shining cocoon, which remained apart from all other memories from the cradle to the grave.

They were standing now in a metal-walled compartment flooded with pale blue light, staring up at what Faran had called the viewing window. It was about twenty feet long and ten feet in width, and through it the breakwater and a narrow stretch of shining beach were distinctly visible.

“Once the tangential scanners have activated the warp field and the machine is in motion,” Faran said, “you’ll see at times just a continuous flickering. But images will appear as well. They will dissolve very quickly, however, and if you don’t stay alert you could miss an entire age, perhaps three hundred years.”

There were several questions that were troubling Blakemore, for he was quite sure that there must be great, onrushing waves on the River of Time that would have to be broken up or held back before you could emerge in just one particular age, one decided upon-in-advance region on the shoreline.

But before he could ask them Faran said: “I’ll have to leave you for a moment. I’ve got to talk over with Roger the problem we’ll be having with Malador and I don’t think I should postpone it any longer. Considering the strain you’ve been under I imagine you’ll welcome a few moments of uninterrupted silence.”

He smiled, nodding toward the viewing window. “If you’d prefer a slight diversion instead—it needn’t interfere with the silence—you might try thinking of the window as a crystal ball. Who knows? You might get a clairvoyant glimpse of the future without traveling in time at all.”

Since the window had actually looked out upon the future the suggestion had a curious relevancy, even though Blakemore was sure that Faran had spoken jokingly and that his smile would have broadened if he’d thought for a moment that his words had been taken seriously.

They certainly hadn’t, Blakemore told himself, as far as he was concerned. But when Faran had nodded, and left them alone, passing through a gliding panel that instantly closed behind him, Blakemore was less sure about how seriously his wife had taken the remark.

“Why don’t we try it, Dan,” she said. “An ordinary crystal ball wouldn’t interest me at all, unless I was just killing time and there was one right at hand. But think, Dan—that window has actually traveled into the future. What if it brought back with it some undeveloped astral images of the future that we could develop by concentrating on it?”

“Astral! That’s the first time I ever heard you use that silly word. Paranormal, you mean. ‘Astral’ goes with fake medium rubbish and having your fortune read in tea leaves.”

“Well, paranormal then. Why not, Dan? It’s not going to hurt us to try.”

“Because you know how I feel about crystal-ball gazing. I thought you felt the same way.”

“But you don’t really have to believe it. Not in a serious way. You’ve always been interested in Charles Fort, and those strange books he wrote close to a century ago. About how—well, what we think are stars may be just pinpoints of light shining through holes somebody cut in the sky. You told me once that you couldn’t imagine anything more nonsensical. But still, I could see that the notion fascinated you. I bet if you’d had an opportunity to test it out—”

“All right, you win,” Blakemore said. “But just until Faran comes back.”

Aside from the strain that it put on his eyes, staring steadily at the viewing window cost nothing, as Helen had pointed out, and for a full minute Blakemore did not lower his eyes, as he might have done if he hadn’t feared that she might transfer her gaze to his face and accuse him of cheating.

Suddenly she cried out, and her fingers fastened on his wrist. They tightened, causing him pain, but the changes that were taking place where the breakwater encroached on the narrow stretch of beach were happening so swiftly that for an instant he could only stare.

The beach was both receding and dissolving, the sands running down toward the sea but melting away before they quite reached the surf line. The surf line itself was dissolving, along with the breakwater.

Everything beyond the window seemed suddenly to whip away and dissolve into emptiness, to be replaced by a flickering that was no different from the one Faran had told them about.

Or at least, it did not appear to be different, for it was occurring at intervals between a number of swiftly appearing and dissolving images.

There were barren gray wastes and tempest-tossed seas. There were crumbling buildings as well, and great stationary machines starkly silhouetted against the swollen red disk of a setting sun, or a rising one that was shedding a brighter radiance across the land.

There were black wharves and many ships and occasionally stretches of open countryside, with almost all of the vegetation looking as if it had been swept by fire or destroyed by frost or leveled by a hurricane.

And then, slowly, the land became green again, with an abundance of vegetation everywhere, including orchards of fruit-bearing trees.

When the flickering returned for perhaps the twentieth time and Helen’s nails were biting so painfully into his flesh that he was forced to twist his wrist about without actually wrenching it away from her he heard Faran saying,

“The dials have been reset! We don’t know how it could have happened, since Roger didn’t do it. And no one else could have gotten to them, except— It certainly wasn’t me and it couldn’t have been Gilda.”

Blakemore turned, too shaken to quite grasp what Faran had been trying to tell him.

Faran was standing just inside the panel, his pallor so extreme that if he had returned looking the same way a few minutes earlier, when nothing had taken place that could have alarmed him, Blakemore would still have had the feeling that he was in danger of collapsing.

“The machine’s completely out of control,” Faran went on, with an unsteadiness in the way he was holding himself that made what Blakemore feared seem even more likely. “We’re already beyond the age we visited—three or four centuries beyond, at least. And there’s nothing to stop the machine from careening through Time for a half million years. Do you realize what that means, Dan? A half million years!”

Faran might have gone on and told Blakemore more if the viewing window hadn’t filled with a sight that even he could not ignore, close to collapse as he appeared to be.

It was a white and resplendent city, and it seemed almost to tower to the stars. It was the most beautiful city that Blakemore had ever seen.

In a moment it was gone.

CHAPTER SEVEN

What it really came down to was a drawing of lots to see who would be the first to go outside.

After seven hours, six minutes and an uncounted number of seconds the machine had presented them with that problem by ceasing to continue on through Time. It had emerged tangential to the warp field that Faran had tried and failed to make comprehensible to Blakemore in an age so remote in Time that there was no possibility of determining the exact length of the journey by a careful examination of the dial tapes. Faran had put it at between four hundred thousand and a half million years, but had conceded that it might be closer to seven hundred thousand years. He had insisted on allowing for a reasonable margin of error, but Blakemore had found it a little difficult to believe that a difference of three or four hundred thousand years could be thought of as reasonable.

He saw no point in arguing with Faran about that now, however, for a problem of a more immediately critical nature was confronting them.

Outside the viewing window there was a luxuriance of vegetation that wasn’t just tropical. There was something monstrous about the plant life that the view revealed, something that seemed to pass beyond the limits imposed by nature on the size, coloration and structural complexity—but particularly the size—of flowering plants.

And someone had to be the first, to descend into that unknown morass. It wasn’t nearly as important as to who should be the second or third, for it would be the first who might be the least likely to return.

It was Tyson who had suggested drawing lots but it was Blakemore who now found himself insisting that it did not have to be with straws.

“Lot drawing depends entirely on chance,” he pointed out, ignoring the skeptical look in Tyson’s eyes. “And it is circumstances that determine how chance will operate. Or, if you prefer, how the dice will fall.

“Now—there are plants out there. And I’m an ecologist. That circumstance is the exact equivalent of an unlucky straw. I’ve drawn the unlucky straw.”

It was a claim that was hotly contested by both Faran and Tyson. But the logic of it was unassailable, and in the end he got his way.

A few minutes later he was standing at the summit of the machine, on the topmost rung of the narrow metal ladder that descended forty feet to the ground.

Blakemore looked down before he started to descend and for a moment the thought that when he reached the base of the machine he might find no solid ground to stand on made him hesitate.

Was it so wild a conjecture? For several years before the first moon landing a similar fear had exercised a profound influence on the planners of the Apollo mission. It had been thought that the lunar surface might prove to be a fragile superstructure, of powdery pumice perhaps, and that if a man stepped out upon it he would break through that thin crust and plunge, perhaps several hundred feet, to his death. Just the fact that a lunar module, despite its much greater weight, had landed without breaking through would not have ruled such a possibility out, for its wide-based equalization of weight distribution would have enabled it to float as lightly on the thin outer crust as a raft on the surface of the sea.

What Blakemore saw when he stared down was quite unlike the pumice superstructure which the Apollo astronauts had failed to find and had not seriously expected to find after the lunar probes had sent back to earth data that had revealed exactly how firm and rock-strewn the moon’s surface was—at least over wide areas.

What Blakemore saw when he stared down was different in a bewildering and—yes, frightening way. He had never seen vegetation quite so profuse and variegated. But though it was quite unlike the mineral superstructures the moon probes and human explorations had failed to find, it was certainly a sea—not a watery one, but a living sea of vegetation with great tidal whorls and swirling cross-currents in it—blue, green, vermilion, purple and black.

It was the black whorls that filled him with the most alarm. No, call it just acute concern verging on alarm. But under the circumstances that was bad enough. Upon such a sea a raft of light construction might have stayed afloat but hardly a man—if what he feared turned out to be true.

What if the seemingly almost unbroken surface of that sea was a delusion and a snare? Not of man’s making, of course. But nature could create traps and pitfalls just as dangerously deceptive. Between the gigantic blooms of many colors—some of them were so bright he could not stare down at them without shading his eyes—and the swaying palm leaves, five or six feet across, there were—those dark areas.

They seemed filmed over with a kind of weaving opacity that changed color as it stared at it, becoming faintly bluish and then jet black again. But might it not be the opacity of total emptiness? Did not an absence of substance sometimes produce exactly that land of illusion?

What if the first step he took amidst the blossoms and swaying fronds became his last? What if he went crashing through a flowery superstructure to land amidst a tangle of roots far below, killed instantly by the height of the fall?

Blakemore suddenly found himself thinking of it in a different way. Not as a sea of vegetation, but simply as the roof of a tropical rain forest with a towering cliff wall to the right of it where the machine had emerged from another kind of sea—the vast ocean of Time. It was poised on the brink of the precipice and the instant he descended and took a few steps forward he would go toppling over the edge and fall to the forest floor and be just as instantly killed.

But that the machine should have emerged at precisely that point, in so unusual and precarious a position, would have been too coincidental for sane belief, and his refusal to take it seriously for more than a few seconds helped him to think of the first possibility as almost equally wide of the mark.

When a traveling vehicle came to a stop after a long journey, whether in Time or in space, an emerging passenger was more likely than otherwise to find no immediate danger confronting him, for Earth’s hazardous pitfalls were widely dispersed.

Deciding that the law of averages was in his favor, Blakemore descended all the way without letting himself think again of what might happen if he had placed too much trust in a law that many thoughtful men had questioned and with considerable justification.

The moment he reached the base of the machine and took two cautious steps forward all of his fear returned. And this time it was not just acute concern that had brought it back, but overwhelming, instantly experienced alarm.

He began to sink down. His feet sank into something soggy and the gigantic blooms closed it around him with a swishing sound, half-smothering him as they lashed against his face and threw him almost completely off balance.

He sank lower, throwing out both of his arms in a frantic effort to remain upright amidst the lashing. He came close to toppling forward in a head-long sprawl and might have done so if the vegetation had been less tightly wrapped around him, exerting a backward tug and his legs had not descended into the sogginess from his ankles to his knees.

The awful thought that he might have stepped into a quicksand bog made him suddenly attempt to do deliberately what he had almost done by accident, hurl himself forward and stretch out at full length on the ground to keep his weight more evenly distributed. But that had become difficult with the sogginess already tightening octopus-like about his knees and the instant he tried to bend forward at the knees and bring the rest of his body level with the ground, the backward tug of the vegetation increased twofold, forcing him to remain as vertical and rigid as a corpse being carried into ocean depths by a swiftly revolving maelstrom.

Then, so abruptly that it seemed for an instant like the total evaporation of a deadly peril in a nightmare that awakening has shattered, he was spared all need to struggle. The sogginess underfoot was replaced by a firmness and he ceased to sink down.

So firm did the ground under the sogginess become that he was able to stand on it without swaying and lift first his right foot and then the left from the sand or mud, or whatever it was the gigantic plants had needed to enable them to achieve a luxuriance that could have been matched in any age less remote in Time—not even by the great rain forests of the Amazon.

Blakemore was quite sure of that. Not in any recent age could such growths have made a mockery of man’s puny attempts to enrich a soil that had not yet suffered despoilment—or after it had been despoiled and abandoned to the desperate, uncertain and even more fumbling efforts of ecologists to overcome a criminal interference with nature’s capacity for renewal.

For almost a full minute Blakemore remained motionless, staring incredulously about him. Some of the blooms were intricately veined and possessed a marvelous translucency. There was one that resembled a wafer-thin circle of lighter-than-air tissue—or tissue, certainly, as light as thistledown—sliced from the center of an enormous orange. It swayed gently back and forth in the breeze, on a stalk that glowed like an amethyst, and was just as clear purple-violet in hue. Another was three-tiered, with a projecting terrace on each level that blazed with contrasting colors and if a swarm of bees had descended on it, Blakemore was sure they would have looked like tiny dancers swirling about to the tunes of a Viennese waltz.

There was a heart-shaped flower that looked not unlike the heart of a giant, torn bloodlessly from his chest and suspended high in the air on a stalk so thin that it seemed to be floating back and forth above the palms without visible support. There were two other heart-shaped blooms, not hueless like the truly enormous one, which was unique of its kind, and looking more as if they had been detached from a pack of cards used by the same giant. The smallest, looked as it might well have come from the Queen of Hearts herself, for it was encircled by three golden crowns and what could have passed for a jewel-encrusted diadem.

The palms—many of them seemed also to be floating—were just as huge as the blooms and there were two that had a diameter of at least thirty feet. Some of them were as bristling and formidable-looking as the spiny cactus growths that had survived the blight in unirrigated desert areas during all the years of Blakemore’s boyhood and had done pretty well after that. Others were as smooth as glass.

Slowly and carefully, while another minute passed, Blakemore untangled the fronds that had whipped themselves about his waist, and were still threatening to throw him off-balance as the wind tore at them. It was not a strong wind for the most part. But it came in gusts, and all of the vegetation swayed when the gusts swept over it with what occasionally seemed almost hurricane force.

Surprisingly enough the feet that he had lifted from the sogginess no longer sank down into it again, and he suddenly realized that he had taken a few steps forward without being consciously aware of having done so. He was now standing on ground that still seemed a little soggy but that he could move over without becoming mired.

Cautiously, as soon as he had freed himself, he advanced a few steps more. The ground was firm enough to support him, and although he had the feeling that he was sloshing through mud or some very clinging kind of wet clay he experienced no difficulty in raising his feet and setting them down again farther on.

Apparently his first step had taken him into an unusually soggy expanse, probably one of the black whorls he had noticed before starting to descend and should have taken care to avoid by keeping its exact location in mind.

But it would not do, he told himself, to retrace his steps and shout up from the base of the machine that it was perfectly safe for the others to descend. That had to be established with absolute certainty, even though Faran and Tyson would probably start down the instant they saw he was still on his feet and was continuing on without difficulty.

For them the risk would not be too great and there was no way he could keep them from descending, unless he shouted up that he was in deadly danger and was coming right back. Since that would not have been true he saw no reason for deceiving them. In their case a warning to be careful and to test in advance every step they took would be sufficient.

But he had no intention of letting his wife descend until he had walked back and forth between the blooms for a considerable distance and in more than one direction. Not only was she more impulsive than the overwhelming majority of women, she had the foolish idea that he was over-solicitous in regard to her safety and on that account could be unduly cautious, restraining her quite unnecessarily.

There could be no question about his solicitude. But why, he found himself wondering for perhaps the thousandth time since their marriage, did some women have to be like that? What was wrong with solicitude? Why did Helen actually resent the fact that the man she had married loved her so much that he was tormented night and day by the thought that she might do something dangerously reckless?

He happened to know, just from discussions he’d had with three or four of his non-bachelor friends, that there were women who valued solicitude more than any other quality in a man. Why couldn’t it have been that way with Helen? Weren’t women supposed to want to be loved in that way? How often did it happen? Weren’t they always complaining about how infrequently it happened? “Love is a woman’s whole life—to a man a thing apart.” But when a woman like Helen got the kind of break women were always dreaming about, she scorned it.

Someday, Blakemore told himself—if he lived to be a hundred and six—he might get to understand women. But he seriously doubted it.

He had advanced about thirty steps more and was just about to turn around and look back at the machine to see if Faran and Tyson were descending when he felt a sharp stab of excruciating pain in his right heel. It vanished so swiftly that he thought for an instant that he had stepped on a nettle or been stung by a hornet, except that it felt more like a white-hot wire grazing his foot and whipping away again.

His sandals were not only covered by crisscrossing straps in the region of his heel, with less than a quarter-inch of bare flesh exposed and vulnerable, but the mud or clay that was making his feet still feel sodden must have made that quarter-inch harder to get at. Yet, incredibly, something had pierced his flesh to the quick in precisely that spot, and now he was walking on again, too stunned for an instant to accept it as believable.

Then, abruptly, he was forced to accept it, for something cold and swift-moving slithered past his ankles with a faint, hissing sound.

Just as unbelievable as the assault on his heel was the thought that flashed through his mind as he lowered his eyes, for it was an attempt to rationalize away a probability that struck a chill to his heart, and he had never before thought that he could complete a rationalization in two or three seconds.

But complete it he did, lowering his eyes slowly to give himself just a little more time. There were hornets that built nests out of mud, and if a passing heel trampled on the entrance of such a nest—well.

It was a useless rationalization, as he should have known the instant the hissing had come to his ears. He had been bitten by a snake, and it was still in sight when his eyes came to rest on the tangle of above-ground roots, each twice as thick as its emerald-green body, between which it had started to crawl.

He bent quickly, grabbed it by the tail, and dragged it forth. In a moment he was stamping on its head, breathing harshly, bringing his bitten heel down upon it until it was flattened to a pulp.

It had been flat to begin with, because it was unquestionably the head of a snake with an adder-like aspect. A Green Mamba? No—Mambas were of the cobra family. It was certainly just as green but clearly not a mamba. A little less deadly perhaps, but most, if not quite all, snakes with triangular, flattened heads were venomous.

Familiar as he was with snakes—what ecologist wasn’t—some of the rarer Old World ones he wasn’t sure he could have identified from a single specimen, since the sub-species color-range varied.

Perhaps Faran or Tyson would know. Oh, God, was he starting to become irrational? If he didn’t know how could he hope that they would? Still, the snake might be of some help. There were snakes that mimicked adders. And he might be able to determine how much poison it had carried. If it had just previously bitten some small animal its poison sacs might have been depleted. Smashing its head had been a stupid thing to do. It would make that harder to determine.

He should have gripped the back of its head just below its mouth as he’d once seen a herpetologist do with a Fer-de-lance, and carried it intact, and despite its thrashings, back to the machine.

But he picked it up anyway, and flung it over his arm, still quivering and with its head so crushed that it no longer looked triangular.

He had almost covered the distance he had traveled over ground that had turned out to be as dangerous as he had feared it might be, but in a different way, when he saw Faran waving and staring down at him from near the summit of the machine. He had just started to descend and there was a puzzled, slightly angry look on his face, distinguishable even from a distance of forty feet.

“What kept you so long?” he called down. “We couldn’t see you at all for a minute or two. This is the wrong time for ecological research.”

“I’ve been bitten by a snake,” Blakemore shouted back. “A venomous one, I think. I’m carrying it. Didn’t you notice?”

“Yes, I see it now. For God’s sake, boy, get up here as quickly as you can. We’ve got to do some fast cutting.” It took Blakemore close to half a minute to ascend to where Faran was standing, for he had to transfer the snake from his right to his left arm, and once it almost caught on one of the ladder rungs.

He was a little out of breath when he reached Faran’s side and the older man was breathing harshly too, but not from exertion, and his face was drained of all color.

“Get inside,” he urged. “Hurry. We’ve got to make some deep incisions and apply a tourniquet. Poisonous snakes are far rarer than harmless ones. What makes you think it’s venomous?”

It was true, of course—wildly, fantastically so. They were far rarer, which meant that anyone who trusted the law of averages was backing a horse of the wrong color. To encounter a venomous snake a few minutes after you emerged in a world remote from ours was as unlikely as that the machine could have come out on the brink of a precipice. Of the two possibilities it was probably the unlikeliest. But that meant nothing at all, since it was the one that had happened.

“It had the flat, triangular head of an Old World viper,” Blakemore heard himself saying. “It’s crushed now, so you can’t see it.”

“All right, don’t talk. Just get inside. The quicker we get the tourniquet on the better.”

It was good advice, but Blakemore found himself under a compulsion to add: “My chances may not be too good. The venom could be cobra-deadly.”

“An adder’s isn’t. Neither is a copperhead’s or a rattlesnake’s. Even a cobra— Listen, boy. You ought to know that. All the accounts are exaggerated—from the Black Widow spider on up. A centipede’s bite, for instance, is hardly worse than a bee sting, as a rule. Do you feel all right, so far?”

Blakemore managed to nod.

“Good. A cobra’s venom is a nerve poison, quick acting. Get rid of that fear right now and get inside.” Blakemore nodded and ascended the seven remaining rungs of the ladder, with Faran holding on to the arm over which the snake was draped to steady him.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The worst thing of all was the crowding. Being human, there was nothing that Blakemore ordinarily appreciated more than sympathy. And the look in his wife’s eyes completely transcended the kind of very-real concern displayed by Gilda and Tyson. It was the kind of solicitude that could only mean that if he died she would die too, at least inwardly and would never be the same again this side of eternity. It was exactly the kind of solicitude that she resented when it was directed in the opposite direction. But now he could even forgive that strange quirk in her nature.

If it hadn’t been for the crowding—

They were all clustering so closely about him that Faran was having difficulty in making the incisions, for he had to keep stopping to gesture them back. And it gave him a smothering feeling even though neither Gilda nor his wife was standing that close to him, and Tyson was at least three feet away.

He lay stretched out at full length on a metal cot and Faran was setting to work on his heel first, seeming to feel that the first order of business was to get the venom still lingering at the site of the wound out, as quickly as possible. He had made two crosswise cuts and was just bending to apply his lips to the wound when Helen brushed past him and knelt beside the cot.

“Here, let me do that,” she said.

Blakemore looked at Faran, raising himself a little, his hand going to his wife’s shoulder to push her gently back.

“Is—is it dangerous?” he asked.

Faran shook his head, smiling wryly. “If it was me—you’d have let me take the risk,” he said. “I’m surprised an ecologist wouldn’t know the risks are negligible. You must have seen it done before.”

“Once or twice,” Blakemore said. “I knew, in a way, but—sometimes you don’t think.”

“It’s all right,” Faran said. “Naturally you’re more concerned about Helen than anyone else. But if you’d thought it was dangerous I don’t think you’d have been too happy about letting me kill myself.”

“Christ, no,” Blakemore said.

“So—all’s forgiven.”

He tapped Helen gently on the shoulder. “There may not be any venom,” he said. “But we don’t know, so we can’t take a chance. The greatest concentration is still at the site of the puncture. Only ten or twelve minutes have elapsed, so not much of the venom may have—well, we can only wait and see. Just keep drawing the blood into your mouth and spitting it out. I’ll tell you when to stop.”

When Helen had finished she stood up, pressed her husband’s arm and stood back, her shoulders shaking a little.

The tourniquet was just a splinter of wood and a cloth bandage bound so tightly around Blakemore’s leg to stop the flow of arterial blood that he winced when Faran was applying it. Despite the way he felt it amused him a little to realize that the wooden splinter—it was peg-shaped, with a lizard-like head—came from the sea. It was one of the small, grotesquely shaped fragments of driftwood that Roger had picked up, along with the few rare and exquisitely beautiful shells that were sometimes cast up on non-tropical beaches, and which he had seemingly been unable to resist.

“The earliest ones were made of rubber,” Faran said. “Esmarch’s is perhaps the best, in principle, but just a torn-up sheet has saved as many lives. More perhaps, because when people come staggering in after a snake bite, ripping a sheet off a bed is the first thing that comes to mind. Anything that puts a big dent in the circulation will do as well.”

He paused an instant, then asked: “How do you feel now, boy? Be honest about it.”

“I’m not sure,” Blakemore said. “All right, I guess. There’s a slight dizziness, but that could just come from the strain.”

“And the excitement,” he added, with a thin smile.

“We may well be getting excited about nothing,” Faran said. “That snake could be as harmless as—well, a garter snake or a black snake. Look—I read somewhere that there are two harmless snakes that look exactly like adders. Protective mimicry. ‘Don’t tread on me because you know what an adder can do to you. You’ve got to believe me. Look at my flat head.’”

“I thought of that,” Blakemore said. “I guess there’s nothing I didn’t think of.”

“That kind of protective mimicry could save the lives of a lot of people I’ve met too, Dad,” Gilda said.

“I don’t think it’s too good an idea to flaunt the colors of malignancy,” Faran said. “In the end—you get your head flattened out even more.”

“It’s damned unfortunate we haven’t some snakebite serum,” Tyson said. “But since you can’t positively identify the snake it might have been the wrong kind anyway.”

“Quite possibly it would have been,” Faran agreed. “But since it would have done no harm, I would have injected it immediately. That’s like saying it would be nice if you could carry a collapsible medical clinic around with you which you could blow up like a toy balloon in the event of an emergency.

As if feeling that what he had said was not as reassuring as it should have been he pressed Blakemore’s shoulder and went on thoughtfully: “I’m not at all seriously worried. Let’s put it this way. Unless the snake is a cobra, quickly applied emergency measures are extraordinarily effective. You may have a few bad moments—be as ill as you would be if you came down with a light to middling attack of influenza. It may last for a few days. I just don’t know. But the fact that you still don’t feel ill at all—you can write off the slight dizziness—is highly encouraging.”

“If a coral snake had bitten me I’d be dead by now, is that what you mean?”

Faran shook his head. “No, contrary to popular belief, there may have been many coral snake recoveries, despite the fact that it is almost as poisonous as a King Cobra. But a coral snake didn’t bite you—”

He sighed. “I keep forgetting you know much more about snakes than I do. But that’s good, in a way—it means you know that everything I’ve told you is the truth. You either won’t become ill at all, because the snake was harmless or—”

Helen Blakemore cut him short, her voice rising a little. “There’s something I’m waiting to hear both of you say. That there’s not the remotest chance that you’re both mistaken. That it’s not going to be very bad.”

She covered her face with her hands, and Blakemore was sure that she had not wanted to come out with that, that she would rather have bitten her tongue off.

“There’s always that possibility, darling,” Blakemore said. “Philip knows that—and so do you. But there’s something else you’re forgetting. The thread can be cut at any time, for anyone, young or old, and it happens so often that it’s just as well we can’t see how close to the precipice edge we’re standing every day of our lives. Let’s say I’ve just moved a few steps nearer, on this one particular day. But everyone does that constantly without even being aware of it.”

Faran made no attempt to dispute what Blakemore had said. Instead he turned abruptly, and spoke directly to Gilda and Tyson. “Dan needs rest now—as much of it as he can get between now and tomorrow. So please vanish, both of you. Helen can stay with him as long as she wants to, but I’m hoping she won’t want to. There are times when it’s best for a man to be absolutely alone.”

“I’m not sure about that,” Helen Blakemore said. “But I think I know what you mean. I’ll go too. So will you, I suppose.”

Faran nodded. “Of course.”

He looked at Blakemore.

“The communicator is right there—at your elbow. I’m suggesting this for your own good. You must avoid the slightest exertion or emotional strain for awhile. Lie back and close your eyes. Try to get some sleep. We want to keep your circulation as stabilized as possible.”

“All right, I’ll try,” Blakemore said.

It hit him an hour and a half later. Stomach cramps at first and then darting pains in his arms and legs. He reached for the communicator but almost immediately changed his mind, bringing his hand back to his side.

Better to wait and find out how bad it was going to be. It was still not very bad and perhaps if he waited the pains would go away. He must not alarm Helen unless it became absolutely necessary.

Besides, what could Faran possibly do? There was no remedy that could change the course of snakebite illness after emergency measures had been applied, except a serum that he was separated from by a wide waste of years.

Whiskey? That wasn’t a remedy at all, but a lethal way of making sure that a bitten man’s chances of survival would be cut in half. It sent the poisoned blood coursing through every artery and vein and the harm it could do had been known for close to a century. It was as bad, if not worse, than the once widely practiced medical insanity of putting a man with cirrhosis of the liver on a starvation diet.

He would simply have to endure it as long as he could, and after that, if the pains did not ease, accept the fact that a viper’s bite could kill, as it so often had.

The bite of any poisonous snake could kill, and in the absence of emergency measures was more likely to do so than otherwise, despite what Faran had tried to make him believe. And even with emergency measures—the fatalities were legion.

True, such bites could be almost as inconsequential as bee stings at times, but even bee stings could kill. It depended on the individual, his constitutional peculiarities, the freakishness with which any poisonous substance introduced into the body could bring about changes in the victim’s vital organs before making its exit.

The pains in Blakemore’s limbs began to get worse, to march along in company with the dark turn his thoughts were taking.

If nothing that Faran could do was going to help him, using the communicator would make very little sense. To have his wife at his side was the only good that could come of it. But it would be a wholly selfish kind of benefit and would bring her nothing but pain. To be forced to watch him suffer and be powerless to ease his torment— Had he any right to make her undergo such an ordeal?

Was he going to die? If he was he would, of course, want her to be with him when the end came. But until that moment came, until his desire to spare her cracked under his terrible, human need—as of course it would—it was surely better to fight on alone.

It wouldn’t be easy, but he felt that he could do it if he turned his face to the wall, drew up his knees and forced himself not to think of just how bad the pain had become, and how likely it was that a pain that started in a leg or an arm would not stay confined to a limb. It would almost certainly spread to his chest and interfere with his breathing and he would soon begin to feel a constriction about his heart.

It didn’t seem to be happening, however. There were just the darting pains, and he could still draw a deep breath and hold it, and there was even a slight improvement in the way he felt, for the stomach cramps had gone away.

He had not even considered the possibility that what he might have most to fear was the spread of the toxins in his bloodstream to the cells of his brain. He had no premonition concerning that at all, no forewarning, and when it happened he had no way of knowing that it had taken place, because he passed so swiftly from an awareness of his immediate surroundings into a gray world of vast, stationary shadows that it seemed perfectly natural to him to be standing in the midst of towering gray monoliths covered with indecipherable inscriptions carven into the stone.

It was not strictly true, perhaps, to say that he had no awareness of the fact that everything about him had undergone a change. It was only that it all seemed so natural to him that it was hard for him to think of it as a change.

There was a mountain too—a high, domed mountain with something shadowy and enormous bisecting it from its base to its summit, but he could not quite make out what the something was.

A voice seemed to whisper to him that it might be just as well for him not to know, that it was a secret as old as Time itself.

Long ages seemed to sweep by as he stood staring up at the towering monoliths and the mountain in the near distance. There was no sign of human life anywhere or any stir of movement that might have revealed the presence of some great beast lurking in shadows that could tear and rend.

Yet—and this disturbed without frightening him as it should have done—he had the feeling that he was being watched by invisible eyes which might well have been the eyes of some great, hidden beast.

Why was his fear not more acute? Was it because everything in proximity to him did not seem quite real enough to be firmly grasped, either by his hands if he should reach out and attempt to find out whether he was dreaming or awake, or by his mind if he brought his vision to a sharper focus and the shadows changed into something else?

Somehow he was incapable of doing that, of testing the reality of everything he saw in that way.

Then, quite suddenly, all of the shadows began to deepen and a curtain of blackness swept down over the monoliths. It was almost as if he were watching a play on a lighted stage, and the end of the final act had come. But that would not have been strictly true, because there had been no light behind the curtain bright enough to be cast by footlights even if the rest of the stage had been dark.

It had never been more than a kind of half-light that had seemed on the verge of vanishing even when he had been able to make out by straining his eyes, the outlines of the domed mountain and the shadowy shape bisecting it from its base to its summit.

And yet—it was a paradox that verged on the insane—he had actually been able to make out the inscriptions engraved on the monoliths, so distinctly that the configuration of every character had stood out with a startling clarity. He had been able to determine how impossible it would have been for him to decipher them, for although they bore a slight resemblance to Egyptian hieroglyphics the resemblance was tenuous at best and probably non-existent. Deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphics would have been beyond him anyway, except that he could have recognized the presence of animal-headed gods, and the stylized representations of human figures that were conspicuously absent in the monolith inscriptions.

No, wait—there had been one recurring motif in most of the inscriptions. A little stick figure bearing what had looked like sheaves of wheat. That at least was Egyptian. But it was Assyrian, Babylonian, Trojan as well. In fact, there had been no ancient civilization in which that motif had not recurred on tomb-wall or temple engravings. But in going back over every visit he had ever made to a museum he was unable to recall having seen it so often repeated, amidst a small number of inscriptions that contained a great many other configurations that bore not the slightest resemblance to it.

It was as if the little stick figure had become an obsession and been turned into the only pictorial symbol worth recording—as if the written glyptographs were merely embellishments designed to shower lavish praise on it, or perhaps just to indicate the great awe that it inspired and the homage that should be rendered it.

The monoliths and the domed mountain were being swallowed up now by the darkness, were growing dimmer and dimmer. And suddenly even the last glimmer of half-light was gone, and the darkness became ink-black and impenetrable.

He could see nothing at all and he had the feeling that the ground on which he had been standing was dissolving beneath his feet and he was sinking down into an unfathomable gulf of emptiness. Sinking at first and then falling, his body becoming heavier, picking up speed as it plunged downward, moving with as great a velocity as a rock would have done if it had been hurled into the abyss from the top of the mountain. After that—there seemed to be nothing left to experience or remember.

CHAPTER NINE

Blakemore felt the tugging before he heard the far-off woman’s voice pleading with him. He could tell that it was a pleading voice just by the way it sounded. The words meant nothing to him until the voice came much nearer and the tugging stopped, as if whoever had taken hold of his arm had decided that the words alone, if she whispered them right into his ear, would awaken him just as quickly.

“Dan, Dan—please. Open your eyes and look at me. You did a moment ago. Don’t you remember?”

He couldn’t remember. But if Helen said so it was probably true, because, unlike most women, when something that she might have to struggle to make him accept happened she saw no reason to keep it to herself.

The instant he opened his eyes and looked at her, precisely as she had urged him to do, everything came back—too fast for comfort. The snake bite, the cutting, her lips on his wounded heel, the stomach cramps and—the darting pains had been bad, bad. He had thought he was going to die. Why hadn’t he?

She didn’t give him much time to remember. She just bent and kissed him until he had to plead with her to stop, because there were things he had to know immediately.

Was the venom still winning? Had she come into the compartment to be with him when—

“Do you know how long you’ve slept?” she asked, which answered nothing, except that it did not seem exactly the kind of question a dying man would be likely to display the slightest interest in. Just the fact that she had asked it almost had to mean that his ability to sleep had seemed so encouraging a sign to her that she could hardly wait to tell him about it.

“No, I don’t,” he said. “I guess you’d better—”

“Just lean back now. Don’t try to sit up too quickly,” she cautioned, the instant he started to raise himself. “You’ve slept for almost a day and a half. Philip and I have been in and out at least fifty times, taking your temperature, feeling your pulse, watching the fever go down. You stopped tossing back and forth hours ago. Everything’s fine now. At least, it should be. You haven’t any temperature and you certainly recognized me quickly enough. Oh, I was scared for a minute. But the way you’re talking now—”

“I haven’t said much,” Blakemore reminded her. “But I’m not disoriented, if that’s what you mean. Mind’s clear enough. But I haven’t tried moving around yet. I don’t know how weak I am.”

“You may not be weak at all,” she said. “But you’d better wait a few minutes before you try to move around. No setting up exercises, darling. Don’t try to prove too much. It doesn’t seem to have been a very poisonous snake.”

“It was a deadly killer snake,” Blakemore said, shaking his head. “All adders are. I was lucky, that’s all. Every venomous snake bite doesn’t inject into you the same amount of poison. There are lots and lots of recoveries, as Philip stressed. There were some lancinating pains in my arms and legs before I blacked out.”

“Yes, I know. You kept groaning in your sleep for a long while. Poor darling—”

“I’m going to get up,” Blakemore said, abruptly.

“No, don’t. It would be a crazy thing to do—”

“I’ve got to find out. No sense in putting it off. If I get dizzy I can flop right back on the cot.”

Before she could protest further Blakemore sat up and lowered his feet to the floor. In a moment he was not only on his feet but walking back and forth in front of the cot with his shoulders held straight.

“It’s incredible,” he said. “I’m perfectly all right. Not a twinge. I’ve never felt better.”

“That’s because you’ve lead such a clean life. No smoking or drinking. It always helps.”

“If I had to forego tobacco I’d let that snake bite me again.” Blakemore said. “Liquor too, whenever a little of the watered-down stuff comes my way. If you mean, it’s no longer possible for me or anyone else to be a heavy drinker—”

“You could smoke right now, if it would help,” Helen said.

“It would,” Blakemore confirmed. “Unfortunately, Roger borrowed my tobacco pouch. When there’s something you’d really be grateful for it always seems to vanish.”

“Yes, I’ve noticed it too. Whenever you say something like that I get a shock of recognition.”

Suddenly all of the forced levity went out of Helen Blakemore’s eyes. She grabbed hold of him, pressing her face hard against his chest, clinging to him with both arms. He could feel a wetness trickling down between his chest hairs. “If anything had happened to you—” She was mumbling the words and they sent a kind of vibration through his ribcage. “Dan, it would have happened to me too. Not in just the same way, but it would have happened. If any part of me stayed around for awhile, to walk about and talk to people, it would be just a shell.”

“I don’t think so, darling,” Blakemore heard himself replying as he stroked her hair. “Look, if everyone went on mourning the dead the world would turn into a big, big funeral parlor. I’d want you to marry again and be happy.”

“You don’t really mean that.”

“Well, I—”

“All right, it’s what most people would expect you to say—even to think and feel. But you and I, Dan—we don’t have to think in clichés. We don’t have to at all, because what we have is very rare.”

Suddenly she straightened and removed her head from his chest. He hadn’t been mistaken about the trickling. Her eyes were so wet they looked like tiny lakes vertically suspended on opposite sides of her nose. The insane fear came upon him that all of the water might suddenly drain out of them, and he was quick to prevent that by flicking away the wetness, very gently, with his thumb. Instinctively she shut her eyes, enabling him to admire, for the ten-thousandth time, the veined delicacy of the lids.

She managed to smile. “Dan, if it would help you to smoke it will take me only a minute to get you that tobacco. You could get it yourself, but I’d like to be the one to tell Roger the good news. Philip too, of course.”

“Well, all right,” he said. “But don’t be gone long and please come back alone. Not that their concern doesn’t mean a lot to me. I probably owe my life to Philip’s presence of mind. I was damned shaky, and if he hadn’t applied the tourniquet fast—”

He looked down and stamped his bitten foot. “Circulation there seems to be okay now,” he said. “When did Philip take the tourniquet off? Within forty-five minutes or so, I should imagine. I’ve heard it’s a little risky to leave one on for more than half an hour.

“We both came back to see how you were after about twenty minutes,” Helen said. “Philip felt it would take you that long at least to fall asleep, and that if you needed us you’d use the communicator, as he told you to do. You were asleep, but tossing about and groaning when we looked in on you. Philip loosened the knot a little and pulled out the wooden splinter he’d used to tighten it with. About an hour after that he removed the tourniquet completely.”

“A risk in that too,” Blakemore said. “But I guess he figured if gangrene set in I’d have no chance at all, and he had to balance one risk against another.”

“Please don’t,” Helen said. “I’d rather not think about it. It’s over and done with. I’ll get you the tobacco.”

Just before she passed out through the entrance panel directly opposite the cot he said again: “Come right back—alone. I just want to sit here quietly for about fifteen more minutes with my arm around you.”

“I don’t like tobacco smoke when it’s swirling all around me, as I’ve told you again and again,” she said. “But this time—it will be heavenly.”

He sat down on the cot as soon as the panel glided shut, not because he’d been mistaken about how completely recovered he was, but simply because, after a moment of great uncertainty and strain, it was more natural to sit than to stand. Besides, he had nothing important to do until she got back and it was easier to just sit there with his hands on his knees and his eyes trained on the panel, waiting for it to glide open again.

The trouble was, it didn’t open for so long a time that he got restless and stood up again. What could be keeping her? Both Faran and Roger were certain to be waiting impatiently for her to return with either good news or bad and could hardly have been far from the compartment. It surprised him a little that Faran had not been at Helen’s side, that he had awakened to see only her face bending over him. But that could be put down to her conviction that he would soon open his eyes and her determination to be alone with him when it happened.

But surely Faran, Gilda and Roger were just outside, probably at the end of the passageway. Why then was it taking her so long to secure his tobacco pouch from Roger?

The minutes seemed to be lengthening out, to be turning into hours. Possibly not more than five minutes had passed, but how could he be sure of that? He was losing all track of the time. Besides, five minutes were three minutes too many. He was sorry now he’d said anything about the tobacco. It wasn’t all that important.

He suddenly realized he was making too much out of it. There was nothing to stop him from going in search of her. He owed that to Faran anyway, even if Helen had already told him. “See, here I am, as well as ever. Helen and I will not soon forget what you did for us. Now she and I are going to relax for a while. We’ll put a ‘do not disturb’ sign on the panel and I’ll pack some of that stringy, stale tobacco into my pipe that Roger doesn’t seem to appreciate and light up. Come next Thursday, we’ll all go outside and have a picnic in the cornbrake. No, the big, exotic, year 500,057-type flower garden. There are no stinging vines out there, or cannibal plants or anything like that, as far as I’ve been able to determine. Adders? Oh, a few, of course—Mamba-green and very beautiful, at least in coloration. But we won’t let them scare us, will we? If one of them should bite us a tourniquet and a little extra attention to the wound will fix us up fine and dandy. We’ll be new men and women—”

It was a new man who crossed to the panel, activated the opening mechanism and waited for it to glide open—a man quite different from the one Blakemore had felt himself to be when his anxiety had been getting out of hand a few seconds earlier. What he’d needed most of all, he now realized, was a strong incentive to stride about confidently outside of just one narrow compartment. It was the best and quickest way of making absolutely sure that all of his strength had come back.

The instant he emerged into the passageway all of his anxiety threatened to return. It wasn’t so much that the passageway was deserted. Faran and the others could easily be waiting a little farther away. It was the stillness. Not a whisper of sound anywhere, nothing that remotely resembled a far-off murmur of voices.

It was the kind of stillness that could make you feel that you were standing in a vacuum, with no medium that could carry sound waves to your ears even if they had been present immediately outside the vacuum. It was even worse than that. It was as if the entire machine had become a vacuum, had turned into the exact opposite of an echoing chamber, with all sound sucked away into emptiness.

Always before there had been sounds of one sort or another. Even walls of solid metal made sounds continuously, very tiny stress signals that you couldn’t actually hear but that you somehow remained unconsciously aware of. The inaudible creaking of the inanimate. You were most aware of it in the control compartment, with its intricate tiers of machinery. No one could stand close to a big, silent computer, even when it wasn’t cerebrating and remain unaware of it. It didn’t have to be clicking out punched tapes. Just its sheer mechanical weariness after that kind of toil could make it give off fatigue signals. Machines, particularly complex ones, never stopped complaining and the metal walls of a machine that had traveled thousands of years into the future should have had more to complain about than the most weary of giant computers.

There was one thing, Blakemore knew, that he must do immediately. Such thoughts were wild indeed, and although he could not deny that there was some truth in them, he must stop blowing it up in that way. There was just a kind of unnatural stillness around him, period. He had experienced the same feeling before, many times, and even though it had seldom been quite as pronounced as now it could still turn out to have been a delusion.

Another thing he must do was refuse to take seriously, even for the space of a skipped heartbeat, the even more alarming thought that something had happened to Helen and the others and he was alone in the machine. That, too, could have created a stillness, for the absence of a living presence that you’ve taken for granted, that you’ve visualized as still close at hand, could make you feel more totally cut off from the stir of life than a long period of solitude to which you’d become accustomed. The harder to believe, the more incredible such an unexpected stillness seemed, the more acute your awareness of it became.

Just the fact that he could have been standing straighter, that he was letting it get to him to such an extent that he was losing confidence in the complete return of his strength, made him square his shoulders and advance in quick strides to the end of the passageway.

He passed around the first turn and was half-way down the equally deserted passageway that branched off from it when he ran into Roger.

The passageway had been deserted when he’d made the turn, because at that moment Roger had no more than started to come in view around the sharp-angled wall where the passageway branched for the second time.

Roger had covered the intervening distance in a forward lurch that was half a stagger and half a leap, so quickly that he smashed into Blakemore before the latter could hurl himself to one side.

He would have gone right on past if Blakemore hadn’t recovered his balance, and flung his arms around him, not in a warm comradely embrace, but with the embattled anger of a man who refuses to be almost knocked off his feet by anyone, friend or foe, without demanding and getting an explanation.

Roger’s face had the half-insane, wildly twitching look of a man goaded beyond endurance by something that he has seen or heard or endured as a result of atrocious physical violence.

But somehow, just the fact that it was Blakemore who was holding fast to him and not an extension of some unimaginable horror pursuing him along the corridor enabled him to conquer—or hold in abeyance-enough of his fright to make what came from his lips intelligible.

“Malador got away! I’m going after him. Dan, don’t try to stop me. If you do, I’ll have to make you let go of me. I’m bigger, stronger than you are—”

“Now look—” Blakemore flared. “If you think—”

“Oh, for God’s sake, can’t you realize that’s not a boast or anything? I just happen to be built that way. You know I can do it. And I’ll have to—if you make me.” There was a strange look in Tyson’s eyes. Blakemore had seen that look before. It was that of a man who felt guilty right down to his soles, shaken to the depths by something he’d done or said. But Blakemore had the feeling that it had nothing to do with what Roger had just said and his curiosity overcame his anger.

“All right,” he said. “If you want to get yourself killed I can’t stop you. Just tell me one thing—and I’ll step aside and let you do that. Where is Helen? Is she all right? If she’d been harmed I’ll go with you—even if a midget doesn’t pack much of a punch.”

“Dan, I told you I didn’t mean it that way. Helen’s all right. So is Gilda.”

“And Faran?”

“He’s paralyzed. But it will wear off. He tried to stop Malador by struggling with him, and that skeleton ape trained the—the trident on him. Helen and Gilda are with him. I’m sure he’ll come out of it. Malador’s still grateful to him, I think—wouldn’t want to kill him. It’s you he wants to kill.”

“I see. The gut-level hatred is still there. He had the best chance he’ll ever get. Why didn’t he take it?”

“He thought he had—yesterday. He thought you were dying—or dead. You can’t exact vengeance on the dead. Good God, that’s what Faran’s always saying. Well—it’s true.”

It suddenly seemed to Blakemore that he might be losing his mind. He tightened his grip on Tyson’s shoulders, shook him. “You’ve got to help me get this straight. Then I’ll let you go. How could he have tried to loll me? The snake tried and almost succeeded. But what had Malador to do with—”

“Everything,” Tyson said. “He made you step on that snake, with his mind. He knew it was there. He’s—well, clairvoyant. He has hypnotic powers as well—extrasensory hypnotic powers.”

“I can’t believe that. Malador—”

“Dan, listen to me,” Tyson pleaded. “He made me let him out of the compartment. He didn’t have to use the trident, he just told me to let him out and I did. And he came walking right out with the trident. Possibly he couldn’t have done that earlier. All I can be sure of is that he tried and succeeded once before in forcing me to—to obey him. The word sticks in my mouth but I might as well say it. I went into the instrument compartment and made changes on three of the dials. That’s why the machine went careening through Time. That’s why we’re here.”

“He forced you to— You mean, you were under an hypnotic spell?”

Tyson nodded. “I was in a trance—both times. The first time it was so deep I came out of it without knowing what I had done. This time I knew exactly what I was doing, what was going on around me. But I still had to obey him. Maybe he was working up to that, bending all his efforts toward making me let him out. I couldn’t lift a hand to help Philip when he was struggling with him. But I could see, I knew. The hypnosis must have been stronger in one way, lighter in another. That could happen—”

“But how could you have known what you did when you were in the first trance?”

“I put two and two together. I can’t be absolutely sure, of course. But doesn’t it seem logical it must have happened that way? Changes were made in the dials. And no living hand beside my own could have made them. I was alone in the instrument compartment when you arrived with Faran, and your wife - Gilda was in her own compartment at the opposite end of the machine.”

Tyson’s voice changed, became more urgently pleading, almost stricken in its appeal. “Let go of me, Dan. Don’t force me to lash out at you. I’d win, you know, and that’s still not a boast. I’ve got to go after him and bring him back.”

“In God’s name, why?” Blakemore demanded. “If he can make me step on a poisonous snake and force you to obey a hypnotic command, bringing him back could be suicidal. He has the trident-shaped weapon to fall back on if he can’t repeat what he did to you. What chance would you have? Unarmed as you are—”

Tyson shook his head. “I’m not quite that much of a fool. He didn’t take the other weapon—the death-dealing one—with him. Philip has made access to it very difficult, and he forgot to make me bring it to him. I’m on my way to get it now.”

“He didn’t forget. I’m sure of that. If what you say about him is true he has too many other strings to his bow to be concerned about your going in pursuit of him. I can’t imagine just why he wanted to escape, if he thought I was dead and he could have killed you and Helen. I can understand his wanting to spare Faran and his daughter out of gratitude, but otherwise—”

“There must have been some slipup—a land of blind spot in his thinking—or he would have made me get the more powerful weapon,” Tyson said. “So what I said about forgetting still goes. He’ll certainly need that weapon out there.”

“I know,” Blakemore conceded. “And that’s our best hope. Don’t you see? Let him stay out there. He’ll be a twenty-second century man in an age as unknown to him as it is to us. Just as hazardous an age, with just as many unexplored pitfalls—”

“No,” Tyson said, shaking his head. “I can’t see myself doing that. We don’t know what he may be up to. Extrasensory hypnosis is something special. It can apparently operate from a distance. He didn’t have to look at me or talk to me. He just sat quietly inside the compartment and forced me to do his bidding. The first time, I mean. And even the second time to start with.

“All hypnosis is supposed to be self-hypnosis,” he went on after a pause. “You look into the hypnotist’s eyes or a bright light and what you actually do is send yourself into a trance. A kind of hysteria sweeps over you. Then, of course, you start obeying the hypnotist’s spoken commands. You either do what he commands immediately or carry out, on awakening, the post-hypnotic suggestion which he has implanted in your mind. But when you can’t see or hear the hypnotist at all—” Tyson began to tremble a little under Blakemore’s still firm grip on his shoulders. “You’ve got to let go of me. He’s got to be brought back. I don’t care how great the risk may be.”

“There’s something you forgot,” Blakemore said. “If what you say is true—it does violence to everything that has always been known about hypnosis. You’re not supposed to be able to make a hypnotized man do anything that outrages his moral sense—or goes against the grain in some other way. A very slight resistance can be overcome by persuasion sometimes, but it takes great skill. That’s what makes me doubt that Malador could have made you—”

“Are you suggesting that I wanted to make the machine go out of control? Or make sure that snake would bite you—or even to let Malador out of the compartment, so that he could risk his life, as you’ve said, in an unknown world? Because if you are—”

“You might have unconsciously wanted to do the last,” Blakemore said. “But let’s put it this way. You may have had an unconscious fear, a constant dread, that the machine might go out of control in just this way—on Philip’s next journey. And Malador may have exercised just enough extrasensory influence over you to make you act out what you feared in a trance-like state. You would not want it to happen but your fear that it might happen would cause you to make it happen. It’s like—well, you’re standing on a high cliff in a dream and have an uncontrollable impulse to hurl yourself to the rocks far below. And not always in a dream.”

“And would that explain how Malador made you step on the snake. Did I dread that, too?”

“I’m not sure,” Blakemore said. “You may have actually dreaded something of the sort, when you saw me descend into that boggy flower garden, amidst all those gigantic fronds.”

“But that would have to mean that I, and not Malador, was in extrasensory contact with your mind,” Tyson said. “It makes no sense at all.”

“It could have been a three-way communication,” Blakemore said. “But you’re right. It strains credulity. I’m just trying to make you see that Malador may not be quite as dangerous to us out there as you seem to feel. There may be other ways of explaining what happened.

“He may be—he probably is—clairvoyant. And he can send you into a kind of trance—an extrasensory trance. But that may be the whole of it.”

“For the last time,” Tyson said, warningly. “Will you let go of me. I’m going after him.”

Blakemore looked at him steadily for a moment. “Just before you crashed into me I got a good look at your face,” he said. “You seemed less to be going in pursuit of Malador than fleeing from something behind you. It was as if you were being pursued yourself, by the Furies. We might as well keep it Aeschylean, since that trident made you wonder how Poseidon would have looked walking back and forth on a Connecticut beach. Could it have been a feeling of guilt you were fleeing from, Roger? Is that why you’re so set on risking your life out there? As a way of redeeming what you could not forgive yourself for having done? If so—I urge you to forget it. You have no guilt to live down. It could have happened to me, to Philip—to anyone.”

“Damn you!” Tyson flared. “When you feel there’s no time to be lost you can seem to be running from something when everything that matters is straight ahead of you. Quit trying to head-shrink me—”

Suddenly he stopped being angry. Blakemore could see what an effort it cost him and the way he’d always felt about Tyson—it had been shaken for a moment—came back.

“I’m sorry,” Tyson said. “I know you were just trying to make me feel better about what happened. Of course I feel guilty. I should. You don’t know—”

“I think I do,” Blakemore said. “And I still say—forget it.”

“I can’t. But there’s more to it than just my being unable to forgive myself. Malador should be back here with us, with all of us guarding him. If he’s where he was again, without that trident and— Oh, hell, don’t you see? He’d have a hard time making all of us go into a trance.

You could keep me bound hand and foot, if necessary.”

“What you mean is—there are some people who can’t be hypnotized, even when it isn’t extrasensory. That’s true, of course. It has failed with me every time it’s been tried. I’m not boasting, mind you—I was just built that way.”

“All right, I deserved that.”

“I can’t quite believe that he has the power to put you into a trance-like state at any time, in any place,” Blakemore went on quickly. “Or that it actually was extrasensory hypnosis, despite the fact that you let him out. As for the snake, I could have stepped on it without outside help. But let’s say you’re right—and you may well be. If he has that power over you—or even a lesser power—how can you hope to bring him back, no matter how formidably armed you may be?”

“I can try,” Tyson said.

“No, you’re not going to even try,” Blakemore said. “I won’t let you.”

“You won’t let—”

“If anyone goes outside with that weapon it will be me,” Blakemore said. “And I’ll have to think about it, because I’m not at all sure we’re not better off with Malador stepping on poisonous snakes or running a constant risk of getting himself killed in some other way. It’s a harsh thing to have to say, but we might be better off if we never set eyes on him again.”

All of Tyson’s anger came back.

“That’s beautiful, Dan. You’re going to stop me. I’ve got fifty pounds advantage on you in weight alone. I’m close to a foot taller and I’ve got a much longer reach. Let go of me, Dan. I wasn’t joking before, but now I’m twice as serious.”

“Thanks for not mentioning the edge you have on me in years,” Blakemore said. “Some men start falling apart when they pass the thirty mark.”

“Don’t make me do that. I could, you know, because if you were Philip’s age I’d still have to flatten you out if you gave me no choice. That’s how set I am on going after him.”

“All right,” Blakemore said. “Try to break loose.”

Tyson took a quick step backwards, almost wrenching his shoulders free and carrying Blakemore with him.

Blakemore made just three movements in all. The first was an upward chopping one, the second a downward chopping one and the third a kind of twisting that ended in a somersaulting toss. They were executed as swiftly as a magician’s pass.

Tyson looked up at him from the floor, his sprawled out body mirrored by its gleaming metal surface with only a few slight distortions here and there. The actual physical distortion which the first movement had brought about—a slight, reddish swelling in the region of his jaw—did not show in the mirrored image.

For a moment Tyson said nothing at all—just lay where he had fallen with a look of stark incredulity in his eyes. Then, abruptly, he began to laugh.

Blakemore found himself laughing as well.

Quickly Tyson got to his feet, still laughing and brushing invisible dust particles from his clothes, as if he’d forgotten that a dustless metal floor was quite different from a Connecticut beach with its above-tide surface of blowing sand.

“I’ve always felt that a man who can’t admit defeat and take it in stride isn’t worth a damn,” he said. “I’m not sure I’d say that, though, if I could duplicate what you just did.”

“I’d be glad to show you exactly how it was done,” Blakemore said. “I’m sure you could master it in two easy lessons. It took me much longer.”

“No thank you,” Tyson said. “If there was someone else here you could demonstrate it on I might take you up on it. But since it would have to be me—”

“Some other time then.”

“Yes, that suits me fine. You must think I’m crazy, but I swear to you it wasn’t being floored like that that made me change my mind. Oh, I suppose it did, in a way, because it jolted me up enough to make what you last said really register. You said you couldn’t be hypnotized. I heard it all right, when you said it, but the implications didn’t really sink in until I hit the floor. You’re naturally the man to go, and of course I’ll go with you, if you’ll let me. And thinking it over before you decide is all right with me too. You could be right, we may be safer with Malador outside. It might be wise for both of us to do a little more thinking all along the line.”

“I should have done more right after I grabbed hold of you,” Blakemore said. “I had to know why you’d slammed into me and when you told me you’d let Malador out in a trance and were going after him, I felt I had to drum some sense into you at any cost. But if I’d known it would take so long I’d have let you go, and gotten to Philip. Just the fact that Helen and Gilda are with him doesn’t mean the paralysis will wear off.”

“I’m sure it will. It probably has by now.”

“Just what makes you so sure?”

“I told you. I know I can trust the way I feel about Malador not wanting to harm Philip or Gilda in a serious way. I should have stayed with him. But I lost my head. All I could think of was getting the weapon and overtaking Malador before he could thrash his way out of the vegetation it took you more than five minutes to cross. He’s probably just about reaching the end of it—”

“Let’s hope that Philip isn’t thrashing about in a darkness that’s not going to lift,” Blakemore said. “Come on, we’ve got to find out.”

They were at the end of the passageway and turning into a wider one when Tyson said, “By taking as long as you did to drum some sense into me you probably saved my life. Just thought I’d mention it, for whatever it may be worth.”

CHAPTER TEN

Faran was sitting on the floor a few feet to the right of the viewing window, with his legs drawn up and his shoulders slightly slumped. He was leaning back against the wall and made no attempt to rise when Blakemore and Tyson entered the compartment. Neither did Gilda, who was kneeling at his side and pressing a wet cloth to his brow.

Helen Blakemore had been kneeling also, but she got up quickly and darted to her husband’s side.

“He’s all right now,” she said. “But we were terribly frightened at first. Did Roger tell you what happened? He must have or you wouldn’t be together.”

“He told me,” Blakemore said, nodding. “When you didn’t come back I was afraid—well, I didn’t think you’d been detained by anything as serious as this. But I had the feeling something unusual had happened.”

“It was unusual, all right,” Faran said. His voice was surprisingly firm and his eyes were not those of a man who has any doubt as to his ability to think clearly and forcefully.

Suddenly he was looking at Tyson, almost accusingly.

“I caught only a brief glimpse of you when I was struggling with him,” he said. “You seemed to be just standing back against the wall, doing nothing to help me. You could have tried to knock him down while his back was turned to you and just before he trained that weapon on me. But I’m not reproaching you, Roger. Don’t misunderstand me. I’m just puzzled. You could have been too startled to think clearly. How do you suppose he got out? Have you any idea?”

“I have a very good idea, unfortunately,” Tyson said. “I let him out.”

“You did what?”

Blakemore laid a firm hand on Tyson’s arm. “You’d better let me tell him, Roger.”

“Tell me what?” Faran demanded. “After what he just said—if there is any talking to be done—”

Blakemore crossed to where Faran was sitting and knelt with his left leg bent and his right knee resting on the floor. He had to lower his head a little more to bring it on a level with Faran’s ear. Faran removed the damp cloth from his forehead and returned it to his daughter, who was still on her knees directly across from Blakemore and seemed reluctant to rise.

“I don’t need this now,” he said. “Get up, Gilda. Dan has something to tell me you may not want to hear.”

“If Roger let Malador out,” Gilda said, “I’m sure it’s not anything I’d prefer not to know about. Something must have happened that gave him no choice.”

“I did have no choice, darling,” Tyson said. “But somehow it doesn’t quite seem to excuse what I was forced to do. Dan thinks I must be off my rocker to feel that way. I realize that it makes no sense, but I’ve got to be honest about it. Perhaps if I’d put up more of an inner struggle—”

“This is getting us nowhere,” Faran said. “All right, Dan. Roger opened the panel and let Malador out. He’s confessed to that. And what he just said makes it sound like something you’re going to have a great deal of difficulty explaining away. But I want to hear all of it. Then I’ll decide for myself.”

Blakemore told him, leaving nothing out.

For a moment Faran remained silent, his lips set in tight lines. Then he said: “What I’m going to say may surprise you. I don’t share a single one of your doubts, Dan. You’ve tried to rationalize a part of it, have put a remarkably ingenious, psychologically adroit interpretation on what you think may have happened. No doubt you’ve succeeded—or almost succeeded—in convincing Roger that, while Malador may be clairvoyant and possess ESP gifts that are unusual in other respects he couldn’t possibly hypnotize anyone, sight unseen, and enforce absolute, unquestioning obedience to his every command. Or compel you to step on a poisonous reptile and perhaps even draw that reptile toward you with a deliberate effort of will, extra-sensorily enforced.

Faran’s expression became grave. “I think he may be able to do more than that. I think he may possess the power to move and shake.”

“The power to—move and shake?”

Faran nodded. “Yes, to move objects at a distance, to lift them into the air and send them whirling about. Perhaps even to teleport a huge block of stone over a considerable distance. Many such occurrences have been recorded. It’s called psychokinesis.”

“No, Philip!” Helen Blakemore heard herself protesting. “You can’t really believe that.”

“I think it’s distinctly possible,” Faran said. “I don’t think it’s too likely. I’m more inclined to believe that what Roger told Dan he was almost sure of comes closer to the truth—that Malador had to work up to actually getting Roger to set him free—that about all he could do at first was hypnotize Roger in a superficial way and compel him to make those changes in the dials. Otherwise he would have escaped before this.”

“But what makes you so—” It was seldom that Blakemore was at a loss for words, but for an instant he felt as if a clamp had tightened around his tongue.

Faran seemed to guess what he’d started to ask, for there was a look of complete understanding in his eyes. “You’re naturally wondering why I seem so sure that Malador is more than just clairvoyant. I’m basing it on what happened to Roger, and something else of greater importance.

“I wouldn’t go so far to say that I’m a hundred percent sure. There is the barest possibility that you may be right, Dan—that he didn’t actually hypnotize Roger but simply made him more responsive to unconscious impulses already present in his mind. Guided and directed Roger’s thoughts, in other words, so that the acts he performed were brought about by his own unconscious fears.

“But what makes me feel that he compelled Roger to obey him in a more direct and forceful way is—well, everything that we know about the hidden powers of the mind. It is only in the East that those powers have been developed to their full potential across the centuries. The evidence of that is overwhelming. You’d have to have a gigantic blind spot to deny it.

“The Hindu rope trick. Can anyone in his right mind believe that it starts and ends with that—that for centuries Eastern seers and so-called ‘holy men’ have not been performing miracles of teleportation, blind sight, suspended animation, clairvoyance that doesn’t just come in brief flashes but illuminates vast areas of experience that the occidental world knows very little about.”

“But Malador did not come from the East,” Blakemore heard himself protesting.

“How do you know? Actually he never set foot in the Orient. He comes from Western Europe, from a region bordering on the Mediterranean which, in the twenty-second century, is no longer a part of France. But just the fact that you didn’t even ask me whether he came from the East or West should help you to understand why I feel as I do about him.”

“I’m afraid I don’t understand—”

“Why didn’t you ask me? It is the first question you should have asked, because it is the most natural thing in the world for a man who has traveled in time to draw a map for you. The region’s geographical features—its precise locality—should have aroused your curiosity beyond anything else. But you didn’t even ask. Shall I tell you why?”

“If it will help me to understand, I guess you’d better. But it’s all very strange. I had the feeling I didn’t have to ask—that I knew.”

“You thought you knew—and you were not greatly mistaken. Only slightly so. You thought he must come from a country very much like India, where the specter of starvation can turn the thoughts of men inward as it has never done in the West, despite the blight, despite everything.

“When I described that age to you there came into your mind a picture of thousands of emaciated men and women, half-naked, despairing, seeking escape from their wretchedness by the kind of self-imposed and tormented introspection that has actually, in India as we’ve known it across the centuries, increased the hidden powers of the mind.

“Contemplation, constant brooding, a summoning of an inner strength to resist an environmental deprivation that would otherwise be unbearable. The weakest slew or were slain in a desperate struggle to avoid starvation. Others, the strongest, managed to survive with little or no food and turned into gaunt skeletons like Malador. It happened in India centuries ago and in the twentieth century, too, of course and it could happen anywhere on earth in the twenty-second century, because the world I visited was like that everywhere.

“There must be many Maladors in the twenty-second century. Emaciated skeletons with the mind’s powers so highly developed as to seem almost limitless.

“We thought Malador was no different from all of the others who begged us to save them, often falling to their knees, sobbing and pleading.

“But I’m almost sure now that he was one of the strong ones, with the power, as I’ve said, to move and shake. That does not mean that he would not have welcomed food as well. Starvation or near-starvation is never pleasant. And if he was one of the strong ones, Dan, his hatred of you could be just as all-consuming. The only difference would be—his inner strength would make him a hundred times more dangerous, a hundred times more determined to exact retribution for the torment that he has endured.”

“What you are really saying is that developing the hidden powers of the mind does not always turn men and women into saints,” Helen Blakemore said.

“Exactly,” Faran said. “I’m feeling much better now, but not because of that. I think I can get up without having the compartment start pinwheeling the way it did a moment ago.”

“All right, let’s try it,” Blakemore said. He took firm hold of Faran’s arm, but when Tyson started forward Gilda gestured him back. “Dad doesn’t need all that help, Roger,” she said. “Dan and I will take care of it.”

It seemed a surprising thing for her to have said, and for the barest instant there flashed across Blakemore’s mind a thought that might have thrilled him in some other age as remote in Time, long ago or far away and if the only woman more important to him than a thousand others combined could have been had not come into his life at all.

It was almost as if Gilda, despite herself, could not quite forgive Roger for what he had done and was letting him think that he had a rival she was experiencing no need to forgive at all.

It was a mad thought and the instant Faran was on his feet Blakemore saw how mistaken he had been, for she darted instantly to Roger’s side, linked her arm with his, and kissed him firmly on the cheek.

“I was ready to believe, when the paralysis started to wear off, that Malador had actually borrowed that weapon from Poseidon in some way,” Faran said, with a twisted smile. “A god of the sea must have possessed hidden powers of the mind as well—quite extraordinary ones, if Homer was not a bald-faced liar. Who knows? There may have been a man like Malador once in the Aegean world whom the Greeks later deified.”

“A god of storm and shipwreck,” Blakemore said. “Yes, I can well believe it.”

“He probably hated both the land itself and all landsmen,” Gilda said. “It makes sense. He may have been a lean and hungry god, and when he saw a field of golden wheat he shook his trident in rage, a storm arose and the land became flooded.

“If a man like Dan had grown that wheat I’m sure Homer would not have let it be forgotten,” Faran said.

“Perhaps he didn’t,” Blakemore said. “He may have turned me into the Cyclops. One-eyed and short-sighted. Polyphemus was the wrong kind of landsman.”

“Far-sighted, you mean,” Faran said. “Your wheat built the cities we saw. No short-sighted Cyclops could have done that. Besides, you’ve nothing in common with a Cyclops, apart from being a giant.”

Before Blakemore could comment on the absurdity of that the compartment did what Faran had feared it might—for him at least. It began to pinwheel.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

It was a swaying as well as a pinwheeling, a movement of the entire compartment that was not unlike the rising and falling movements of a ship at sea, riding the crest of a high wave and then descending into the trough. It lacked the violence, the swift, erratic tossing about of a ship caught in a gale. But it was not on that account less terrifying, for the floor tilted at a precarious angle before it righted itself again, threatening to hurl the occupants to the floor.

Only Faran did not become wildly alarmed. The look on his face was merely one of chagrin, and he immediately sat down again, clearly thinking that it was a wave of dizziness sweeping over him that was causing the compartment to sway and spin about.

Then, abruptly, the vexation vanished from his eyes and was replaced by as great a look of fear as he had worn when he had first discovered that the dials had shifted about and the machine could not be stopped from careening through Time, completely out of control.

Blakemore’s concern, on seeing him descend to the floor, had prevented him from keeping as well-balanced as the others, and he was hurled to his knees just as Faran arose, with Gilda’s screams echoing in his ears. Helen simply drew in her breath but so sharply that he was sure he would have heard the sound as she had been three or four feet away instead of almost at his side.

She was even closer to him when he regained his feet, for an increase in the swaying was forcing her to cling to him for support.

All at once the swaying stopped and the compartment became totally still again. But the viewing window had become enveloped, on its outer surface, in what looked for an instant like a solid sheet of flame.

Then there were flames inside the compartment as well, dancing on the walls, streaming across the floor in widening banners that wrapped themselves around Tyson and Gilda, blotting them from view, and then turned into a thin dragon’s tongue spitting fire.

The dragon’s tongue was forked as well, and one fiery filament ascended and coiled around Faran’s head, and shoulders. His hair seemed to catch fire. Helen screamed as Gilda had done, and went limp in her husband’s arms.

Blakemore was retreating with her toward the opposite wall when all of the flames expired. No one appeared to have been harmed. Tyson and Gilda could not have looked more shaken and their lips were drained of all color. But their clothes had not caught fire and their arms and faces were not scorched. Neither had Faran’s hair been burned away. It had, in fact, not been burned at all.

Blakemore could only hope that the seemingly heatless flames had not inflicted injuries which were invisible and might be slow to heal. But the look which Faran was exchanging with him was not that of a man who had been wounded in his mind, at least not grievously, and Tyson and Gilda were raising and lowering their arms and looking down over themselves with considerably less fear in their eyes, although it was far from an absence of fear.

Only Helen Blakemore remained limp and unstirring in her husband’s arms. He looked at Faran almost accusingly as he lowered her to the floor. “She fainted when she saw the flames swirl up over your head,” he said. “I’ll try chaffing her wrists. I hope it helps.”

“Don’t do anything,” Faran said. “Just ease her gently down, and let her recover by herself. She’s going to be all right.”

He swung about and moved unsteadily toward the viewing window, and for an instant Blakemore was angered by what he mistook for a lack of concern. Then he saw that there was still a brightness beyond the pane. It had ceased to look like a solid sheet of flame, but there was nothing reassuring about that. The glare was less bright but Blakemore knew from experience, having once nearly lost his life in trying to put out a fire, that high-leaping flames that darted in all directions could be more difficult to bring under control than just one steady blaze.

He was on his knees at his wife’s side, chaffing her wrists despite what Faran had said and pleading with her to open her eyes when Tyson’s voice came to his ears. He was pleading with Gilda in much the same way, except that he wasn’t trying to awaken her from a dead faint but simply doing his best to calm her down.

“The swaying is gone and the flames are gone and nothing more may happen—at least for awhile. If it’s Malador and that’s the best he can do— Don’t you realize what it means? He’s shot his belt and failed.”

“I’m terribly frightened, Roger,” Gilda’s voice was barely audible, a kind of half-whisper, choked, despairing. “Those were real flames, not just reflections of light. You can always tell.”

“Not always, no. We weren’t burned. There was no heat.”

“But I felt them, swirling around me. There was a slight heat. Please, Roger—don’t deny it. You know it’s true. The next time—”

“The flames outside are real enough!” Faran’s voice cut in sharply. “The vegetation is burning. And the machine was moved. Not much, but a little. There’s no question about it—”

“Dad, how do you know?”

“The flowering plants—the biggest ones—aren’t as close as they were. The whole alignment has changed. The glare makes them stand out.”

“Are you sure?” It was Roger’s voice again.

“Yes… yes. I can tell.”

Blakemore neither looked toward the viewing window nor across the compartment toward Tyson and Gilda. He had not removed his eyes from his wife’s face, nor his hands from her wrists. He was glad that he hadn’t, for she was stirring now and the color had come back into her face.

Suddenly she opened her eyes and looked up at him. He was almost sure he knew, from the way her pupils quivered and widened, the exact moment when she remembered what had caused her to faint.

In a moment she was sitting up, her fingers biting into his wrists.

“Stay steady, darling,” he pleaded. “Philip’s all right. So are Roger and Gilda.”

“But I’m not. I’ve never had so terrible a shock. There’s a quivering inside me and I—I can’t make it stop. How can Philip be all right? His head was ablaze.”

“I tell you, he is. There were no burns.”

“I don’t see him. Where—”

“I’m right here,” Faran said, having crossed so quickly from the viewing window to where she was sitting that he was standing directly behind her with his hand on her shoulder before Blakemore’s eyes could sweep the compartment.

“We’re still in danger,” he said, “because the vegetation outside is burning and the machine is right in the midst of the flames. The flames outside may be hot enough to damage the machine. I’m just guessing, of course, but I think when the flames penetrate a thick metal barrier they lose most of their heat. It’s as if a harmless beam of light were swirling over us, except that it isn’t quite like a harmless light beam in its fieriness, the way it singled us out and wrapped itself around us.”

“I should think it would have to be an invisible heat ray, infra-red or some other ray situated below the red end of the visible spectrum to penetrate a metal barrier,” Blakemore said. “It would have to be hot and invisible, not visible and without heat.”

“It would have to be, of course,” Faran said. “There’s only one thing wrong with that. What it would have to be it isn’t.”

“But how can visible light penetrate an opaque metal barrier?” Blakemore persisted.

“I don’t know,” Faran said. “Do you?”

“A moment ago you were talking as if you did know,” Blakemore couldn’t help saying. “You based it on the educated guess that Malador knew exactly how to enlarge on the East Indian rope trick. I still don’t quite share that point of view, but since you and Roger seem to think there’s invisible writing on every folded-back part of the universe—what’s so strange about it? If you’re right, I mean.”

Before Faran could say anything in reply Roger’s voice caused him to swing about and postpone, for an instant, helping his wife to get up. Both Tyson and Gilda had managed to cross the compartment and were blocking off the light from the viewing window.

“Whatever you may believe, Dan,” Roger said, moving a step closer. “We’ve got to do something about it. If Malador could move the machine, what that light failed to do is of no importance. It can only mean we’re completely at his mercy, until he’s—well, until he’s stopped. There may be only one way of stopping him, and I don’t think we should go on refusing to face it. I think you know what that way is, Dan. He’s forfeited all claims to survival.”

“Oh, hell,” Blakemore heard himself saying. “What makes you think I’d draw back from that? If I was sure it was his life or ours I’d blast him down at the first opportunity, and that’s entirely apart from the way he feels about me. But two things stand in the way. One—I’m still far from sure you and Philip are right about him. Moving the machine would take more doing than just lifting up a big boulder, say, and teleporting it a short distance. Psychokinesis may be a paranormal possibility. How should I know? I’m not enough of an expert to know what the hidden powers of the mind can accomplish, in India or elsewhere. But there’s one thing I can’t buy. That inside man’s fragile cerebral cortex—it’s like a blob of jelly—there’s enough hidden power to move the machine. In a small way, it would be like moving a mountain.

“Two—” Blakemore went on, after a pause. “I don’t think we could train a weapon on him—any kind of weapon—and blast him down in time to prevent him from stopping us. I’ll concede you and Philip that much. He’d find some way of stopping us.”

“He’s right, Roger,” Faran said. “I don’t think I could operate the weapon he turned against Dan—and I doubt if you could. You were watching him closely on the beach when he started to bring down that gull. But he didn’t complete the demonstration.”

“I’m sure I can operate it,” Tyson said. “But there’s something Dan told me that would enable us to go after him with a much better chance of succeeding. Dan can’t be hypnotized.”

Faran straightened and looked at Dan steadily for an instant. “Is that true?” he asked.

“I’ve encouraged a few hypnotists, exceptionally gifted ones, to try it—just out of curiosity,” Blakemore told him. “It has never worked. It doesn’t have to mean I’m particularly strong-willed. I didn’t put up too much resistance—once or twice or none at all. That would have spoiled the experiment. Hypnosis just doesn’t seem to work with some people.”

“Extrasensory hypnosis—sight unseen, as Roger has stressed—might be different,” Faran said. “I don’t like that term. It’s basically meaningless. But something of the sort undoubtedly exists and has been often practiced.”

He hesitated, then said: “Still, still, it could change everything. If you can’t be hypnotized in the usual way Malador might well be unable to get through to you. It would provide an added protection and if Roger is really convinced he can operate the weapon—”

He broke off abruptly, stood up and walked to the window. It gave Blakemore an opportunity, while he remained staring out, to help his wife to her feet. Up to that moment both she and Gilda had remained silent.

But now there was a fear in Helen’s eyes that was exactly like the look that had come into them just before she had fainted, and her voice could not have been more chillingly close to desperation if it had been a voice from the tomb.

“You’re not going to leave the machine. I won’t let you. If you do—I’ll find some way of not being here when you come back.”

“Roger’s not going outside either,” Gilda said. “He’s lying to you about the weapon. He told me he was far from sure he could operate it.”

“I’m not the one who’s lying,” Roger said. But I can forgive you for that, darling, because I know why you—”

Faran’s voice from the window prevented him from going on. Faran spoke without turning. “I think the fire’s dying down a little,” he said. “Since there’s nothing out there that could stop a blaze like that in an ordinary way Malador may want the flames to go out. About a third of the vegetation is seared, but it has stopped shriveling and blackening over a wide area.”

“Between us we should be able to operate the weapon,” Blakemore said, not wanting his wife to repeat what she had said, but fearing that she would. “I’ve always been rather—well, good with guns.”

Before Helen could grasp the enormity of what he had said Faran turned from the window and spoke again.

“We’ll have to wait, of course, until there are no more flames. The fire could blaze up again and get worse. It’s still spreading a little here and there. But I’ve a feeling it’s going to burn itself out—”

“Dad, don’t you realize what that could mean?” Gilda almost screamed the words. “Malador may want Roger and Dan to go outside. He may be waiting for them to come out and get themselves killed. Maybe he found he couldn’t move the machine enough to wreck it. He may have tried and failed. So he set that fire to bring Dan out. He must hate Roger too, now, because of what happened on the beach. But he needed him, right up to the last moment and after that—well, killing him may have seemed unimportant to him, not worth bothering about. But if he goes out with Dan—”

“We all know it’s Dan he hates the most,” Faran said. “That’s why he must do the deciding.”

He looked directly at Blakemore. “Gilda may be right,” he said. “You may be walking into a trap that Malador has set for you. But before you decide, there are one or two things I think you should know. They have to do with how I feel about it. Malador could have killed you before he made his escape. Roger thinks he thought you were dead—or dying. We can’t know for sure whether he did or not. But if he did, it would have to mean he had some other reason for wanting to escape. And if he didn’t—wouldn’t going outside and trying to kill you by wrecking the machine or setting a fire be an insane thing to do—when he could so easily have done it inside the machine right after Roger let him out?”

“There’s no question about that,” Blakemore said. “But now he seems to be trying to destroy us all, if what you believe about him is true. Roger is sure he doesn’t hate you and Gilda at all, quite the contrary. For all we know, he neither set the fire nor moved the machine. But if he did, something very strange must have happened to make him change his mind. I’m basing my decision on one of those two possibilities—nothing more. I’m going outside because we’re in the deadliest land of danger until I find out.”

“No, Dan!” Helen Blakemore stumbled a little in her haste to grip him by the arm and swing him half-about, as if she felt if she did not look directly into his eyes her ability to sway him would dwindle and vanish. “If you go you’ll never stop regretting it, because I won’t be here when you get back. I mean that, Dan.”

“I think you will, darling,” Blakemore said. “Those flames outside aren’t going to die out for an hour or so. I’m almost sure of that. And in an hour you can do a lot—of sober thinking. It isn’t my life alone that’s threatened now, much as Malador seems to hate me. Philip said it was only natural for me to be more concerned about you than about anyone else.

“It’s true, of course. I can’t deny it. But there are five of us, not just you and the man you married. Each has a claim on the other. It will always be that way, I’m afraid, when people have shared great dangers, and have come to feel very close to one another.

“You’ll have time to think it over, darling, and change your mind about letting me go. I’m not worried at all about what your decision will be.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

Blakemore descended first, with Tyson about eight feet above him, and this time the apprehension that had come upon him when he had first stared down into the sea of gigantic fronds and yard-wide blooms was of a different nature. He had no fear of sinking down into a bogginess that might be close to bottomless, or of stepping by accident into a yawning pit of emptiness, marked only by a blue-black, whorl-like swirling.

It was the fear of not being sure that a patch of ground that looked as if it were covered with a scattering of ashes might not turn into a bed of white-hot embers, concealed from view by a superficial layer of embers that had, in cooling, turned powdery white and dust-like.

Two-thirds of the vegetation directly below the machine had been so seared by the flames that only the blackened stalks of the great plants remained standing, like the trunks of titan oaks and cedars that had been lightning blasted. Most of them were as large as tree-trunks and a few were considerably larger. Between them were wide patches of bare earth not even covered with ashes, but brightly gleaming from the fire’s scouring. All of the sogginess was gone, dried up by the intense heat that the conflagration had generated.

It was a fire-blackened wasteland for the most part, and yet Blakemore could not see beyond it even from the summit of the machine, for it was still fringed by a row of very tall plants that had escaped destruction. Their blossoms still swayed in the breeze that was blowing across the fire-ruined acreage in erratic gusts, exactly as it had done on Blakemore’s first descent and nothing had marred a display of colors—vermillion and purple, orange and green—so bright that he had to shade his eyes when he stared at them.

Closer at hand the few blooms that still hung from the fire-ravaged stalks were withered or tarnished, and a few had collapsed into shriveled husks that looked not unlike gigantic pea pods half-eaten away by swarms of locusts just as gigantic.

There were no insects flying through the air or alighting on the ravaged growths, but Blakemore did not think that in the least surprising, for insects were slow to return to regions made desolate, whether by fire, flood or earthquake.

He paused suddenly—he was half way to the ground now—looked up and gestured to Tyson. “We don’t have to worry about snakes, I guess—but it’s just as well to be careful. We don’t know what might come crawling up out of a burrow that goes deep into the soil.”

“Makes sense,” Roger said. “I’ll keep a sharp lookout.” In a moment they had both reached the ground and were staring around them. Roger transferred the heavy weapon that Malador had made the mistake of not taking with him—or had it been a mistake?—from his left to his right hand and gestured toward the tall growths that were blocking the view.

“We might as well keep walking straight ahead,” he said. “The important thing right now is to get a wider view of our surroundings. There could be open countryside beyond this out-sized flower garden or just another garden. What do you think?”

“I’d prefer not to think,” Blakemore said. “Just to walk, as you suggest.”

It took them perhaps forty seconds to cross the ash-covered expanse of ground between the machine and the tall growths that hemmed it in in a half-arc that was not quite a semi-circle. They were careful not to step on the ashes, but to keep to the smooth patches that the flames had burnished. Once or twice they had to stop, and hopscotch from patch to patch.

They were moving between the tall, un-seared growths, and were so utterly dwarfed by them that they had the illusion, for a few more seconds, that they were advancing through the aisles of a tropical rain forest.

But when they finally emerged from between the outermost row of towering stalks—some were bright green and seemed bursting with sap and others were curiously mottled—not only did the rain forest illusion vanish, but the vista that stretched out before them was so unlike the region of gigantic blooms and fronds surrounding the ship that it was hard for Blakemore to believe that they could have existed side by side, in such close proximity that they could be thought of as brushing elbows.

It was a vista desolate beyond belief, stretching out for miles to a distant mountain that was aureoled in a thin grayish haze which hid its summit from view and obscured as well something gigantic and sharp-angled that bisected it from base to summit.

The vista did two things to Blakemore. It stirred memories deep in his mind that totally bewildered him, for he was quite sure that he had never seen the vista before and yet he had instantly recognized it.

The monoliths— There were at least fifty of them scattered across the plain that stretched from the mountain to where he was standing and he had a distinct recollection of having stood before three or four of them and examined the inscriptions which covered them.

The other thing that the vista did to Blakemore was strike him speechless, so that Tyson had to tug at his arm to jog him back to attentiveness.

“I said that the important thing was to get a wider view of our surroundings,” Tyson said. “But I didn’t think it would be quite as wide as that. It’s like walking out of a glass-walled hothouse with plants all around you and damp earth odors in your nostrils and finding yourself in the middle of the Sahara—or the Gobi. If it jolts you as much as it does me, it might be better if we just accepted the fact that talking about it would serve no useful purpose.

“I mean—how can we hope to find Malador out there—if he is out there. It’s too vast an expanse. With so many places he could—”

If Tyson had planned ahead and decided at what precise moment it might be best to carry out his suggestion and fall completely silent it was hardly likely that he would have done so in the middle of a sentence. Yet fall silent he did. Or it might be more truly said that silence was forced upon him by the blinding flash of light that came into view on the plain about a hundred feet from where they were standing. It was followed by a deafening blast of sound.

The ground shook and Blakemore was hurled to his knees. Tyson swayed, but managed to stay on his feet by bending a little backwards and using Malador’s heavy weapon as an equilibrium-maintaining aid.

Something that looked like a fireball arose from the region of the blast and went streaking overhead, zigzagging for a moment and then hanging suspended almost motionless high in the sky. For five or six seconds it remained motionless. Then it sped on again until it was hovering directly above the vegetation from which Blakemore and Tyson had emerged.

Then it was gone, vanishing as abruptly as a meteor burnt to a cinder in earth’s upper atmosphere but leaving in its wake a trail of bright radiance that took longer to disappear.

Another blinding flash arose from the desolate plain and another fireball streaked across the sky, hovering precisely as the first one had done above the fire-ravaged vegetation when it had completed its zigzagging course, but vanishing just a little more slowly, as if a giant hand had closed over it, and some of the radiance had gone right on spilling out between the contracting fingers of the hand.

As Blakemore got unsteadily to his feet he was struck by the strange thought—strange at such a moment—that he had never before seen on a human face an expression quite like the one that had turned Tyson’s features into a grotesque, almost aboriginal-like mask.

Not only was his face livid and the lines about his mouth abnormal in all respects. His lips were so tightly contracted that they must have been giving him pain and his eyes had a glassy, protruding look.

Just the fact that he had remained standing seemed to mean nothing at all to him, for he gripped Blakemore’s arm the instant the latter regained his feet, as if he, and not Blakemore, were most in need of support.

“It’s another attack on the machine,” he muttered hoarsely. “I—I don’t see anything out there. Do you? How do you explain it? That burst of flame seemed to come right up out of the ground.”

“There’s nothing moving out there, that’s for sure,” Blakemore heard himself replying. “We’re too near to where that fireball came from to be mistaken about that.

“Fireball? Yes, that’s what it looked like. Do you suppose it could be some land of natural phenomenon? I was sure it had been fired from a weapon, but—I just don’t know.”

“I think it was fired deliberately,” Blakemore said.

“Not at the machine, perhaps, but at us. That traveling ball of flame could well have missed its mark.”

“What shall we do? Go back to the machine? I think we should.”

Blakemore shook his head. “If the attack is being made on the machine—and we don’t even know if it is an attack—we’re not going to stop it by giving up what he came out here to do. We’ve got to get over to where that blast came from before we’re blown apart.”

“Are you crazy? When there’s a blast like that you don’t walk right toward where there could be another one at any moment. You get as far away from it as you can.”

“There was just one blast, followed by two balls of flame,” Blakemore said. “We’ll wait a minute to see if another one comes. If it doesn’t—I think we should take the risk. There are a few boulders out there—large ones. We can dodge and weave about until we get up close. There’s no other way we can hope to put a stop to it.”

“Well, all right,” Tyson said, after a pause. “It isn’t just taking a risk. It’s making four-fifths sure there’ll be a funeral cortege for both of us, but without a hearse. “I’ve often wondered what it would be like to be ‘buried’ that way, in shining fragments spread out across the sky.”

“We may find out,” Blakemore said. “But we’ve no choice. If we go back to the machine the attack will go on, and— Look, I said it may not be an attack. You think Malador is behind it. I’ve never been sure. We’ve got to settle it, once and for all. If it’s a natural phenomenon it’s not too likely to be repeated. How often do freakish lightning bolts, the kind that can fork down and kill you without harming a tree or a house, occur more than once in the same place? If it’s a natural phenomenon we’ll have nothing to worry about. But we’ve got to determine whether it is or not or everything will stay the way it was. It’s not a good way to have everything stay.”

They waited at least three full minutes before they left the shadows cast by the tall stalks at their backs and started out across the plain. They moved toward the nearest of the scattered boulders, almost but not quite running, for the ground was rugged underfoot and crouched down behind it for an instant before continuing on. It was perhaps a useless precaution, but it had occurred to Blakemore, as he had pointed out to Tyson, that a very large boulder might afford some protection if another blast came.

Whether it would have concealed them as well from watching eyes was a moot question, for their swift advance could hardly have remained unnoticed otherwise, unless the eyes had been trained in some other direction nine-tenths of the time.

There were five more boulders to pass, behind each of which they crouched briefly, exchanging glances that were meant to be self-congratulatory but could hardly have looked that way, before they came in sight of something that made them duck down behind the fifth boulder with their eyes widened in disbelief.

Projecting straight up out of the ground—or almost straight, since it was at a slight tangent—was a long, shining tube.

It seemed like no more than a tube at first, burnished a coppery bronze. Then they saw that it was smoke-blackened over a third of its length and bore a distinct resemblance to a weapon of large-scale warfare that had been used in the twentieth century over a span of more than twenty-five years. A bazooka. But no—it wasn’t like that either. There was something about it that gave it more the look of a weapon that hadn’t been invented yet—if by “yet” you meant as late as the early years of the twenty-first century.

There were some incredible outside gadgetry attached to it near its base, so complex-looking that it made Blakemore’s vision reel and seemed actually to hurt his eyes, precisely as the weapon which Tyson was now carrying seemed always to do whenever he stared at it for more than a few seconds. Except that the complexity was a great deal more pronounced than it was in the weapon they had taken away from Malador, and there was a glitter too, which made it even more difficult for him to keep staring at it.

“Well, that’s it,” Blakemore said, but with no note of triumph in his voice. “Apparently you and Philip were mistaken and I was right. Malador couldn’t have hurled that fireball toward us—or the machine—just by monkeying around with the hidden powers of his mind. It came from that weapon, and he not only couldn’t have known he’d find a weapon like that—if he has found it—but—well, can you picture him as discovering how to operate it fast enough to launch an attack on the machine in less than a half hour after he made his escape? I certainly can’t.”

“But if Malador didn’t launch the attack, who did?” Tyson asked, and there was a shakiness in his voice that was so uncharacteristic of him that Blakemore preferred not to meet his gaze. No man likes it to be known that so great a shattering can take place in his mind that, if only for the barest instant, all of his courage recedes, like channels of water running with quicksilver speed down a slanting beach at ebb tide.

“That’s what we’re going to find out,” Blakemore said. “There’s nothing to be gained by putting it off.”

“But it was just fired! There’s no one in sight, but someone must have operated it.”

“Malador could have fired it this time,” Blakemore said. “He could have mastered its complexity by now. I don’t think so, but it’s remotely possible.”

“Where is he then?”

“Underground—whether it’s Malador or someone else. Can’t you see—the emplacement is just a shallow trench. A weapon that massive would have to have just as massive an operational base. The gadgetry at the base of the tube itself provides no solid support.”

It took them only a moment to emerge from behind the boulder and advance to within a few feet of where the weapon towered.

They halted for an instant, but only long enough to confirm what Blakemore had been almost sure of. There was a cavernous opening in the earth immediately surrounding the tube, visible from where they were standing.

It completely encircled the tube, which jutted up at its precise center.

“What do we do now?” Tyson asked. “Go to the edge and look down? We’d better do that before we start down. There has to be someone at the bottom and he’s not going to rush up and embrace us.”

“We’ll see,” Blakemore said. “Keep a tight grip on that weapon. We may need it at any moment.”

They moved forward again, and came to another halt at the edge of the cavernous opening. They could see nothing when they looked down—just a swirling darkness.

They were steps leading downward. That much they could tell despite the darkness, for the three uppermost ones stood out distinctly. The one at the top was even gilded by the sunlight.

They did not appear to be stone steps, and had a metallic luster.

“I’ll go first,” Blakemore said. “Stay about four feet behind me and make sure that you can bring that weapon to bear on anyone who leaps out at me. I hope that what Gilda said isn’t true. That you do know how to operate it.”

“I never told her that,” Tyson said. “I swear it.”

“But are you sure you can operate it?”

“No,” Tyson said, with startling candor. “But I’m almost sure.”

“You might have tried—just to make absolutely sure,” Blakemore said. “Oh, well—”

“I was afraid to,” Tyson said. “You told me he blasted with it three times, perhaps more. We don’t know how many charges he may have used up before he brought your jet down. I might have wasted more than one in testing it out. No—it would have been foolish. There may not be any charges left as it is.”

“That’s a comforting thought,” Blakemore said. “All right. We might as well start down.”

They descended slowly and cautiously, testing the firmness and width of each step with their feet before leaving the one above. There were no handrails.

The emplacement seemed to go deep into the earth, and for close to half a minute they descended in absolute darkness. Then a faint glimmer of light became visible far below and grew swiftly brighter.

That would have been more reassuring than otherwise if something had not happened a few seconds after it became brighter that made Blakemore halt abruptly and stare with alarm at the shining tube.

The tube was moving very slowly back and forth, as if whoever might be operating the massive weapon was uncertain as to whether or not it should be fired again. It was almost as if there was a childish irresponsibility at work at the base of the weapon, a failure to understand that a weapon so formidable should not be operated in so erratic a way.

Just the fact that Blakemore was no longer outside on the plain, standing in the target area, did not mean that he had nothing to fear if the weapon went off again. The steps were so near to it that the heat of the firing alone might come close to incinerating him, if the concussion did not hurl him from the stairs.

Tyson had become aware of the danger too, and his voice was sharp with alarm, though he managed to keep it low-pitched enough to avoid giving their presence away before they reached the lower-most step and could no longer hope to keep it concealed.

“If that weapon goes off now we could be killed,” he said. “We’re within three or four feet of it. The recoil alone—”

“I know,” Blakemore said, cutting him short. “It means we’ve got to get down the rest of these steps fast. Proves one thing, though. That fireball was aimed at the machine, not at us.”

They got down the rest of the steps fast and were moving out from the lowermost one when the great weapon went off with a thunderous roar.

They were hurled to the ground and before they could get to their feet again someone darted past them and started ascending the stairs as swiftly as they had descended.

The light was very bright and they caught no more than a fleeting glimpse of him amidst a dazzlement that half-blinded them. But that brief glimpse caused Blakemore to cry out in furious disbelief and Tyson to cry out also.

The swiftly vanishing figure was that of a naked child—a boy of not more than eleven or twelve at the most, his hair long and matted, and straggling down over his ears, his skin glinting berry-brown in the glare of what looked like a dozen crude oil lamps sending out smoky fumes. He was carrying a short, stone hatchet, which he did not relinquish as he fled.

“A barbarian child!” Tyson said, looking so stunned it surprised Blakemore he could speak at all. “A Stone Age child. How could he possibly have known how to operate—”

“A boy half his age—a child of four even—could fire almost any weapon with an uncomplicated trigger mechanism,” Blakemore said. “The complexity of that one was apparently in the gadgetry on the tube and the precise technological function it was built to perform—perhaps a half million years ago.

“He was only a child,” he went on thoughtfully. “But an adult on the rude barbarian level might well be able not only to fire it, but to turn it on a hated enemy, without knowing a thing about its technological complexity. And the machine, arriving as it did out of the blue, might have seemed to the barbarian inhabitants of this age the equivalent of a fiery dragon breathing out smoke and flames. So they tried to destroy it with fire from this weapon—not knowing, of course, that it was the kind of fire that could pass right through an opaque metal barrier as only infra-red and other lands of invisible heat rays are supposed to be capable of doing, and still look like visible light.”

“The boy we just saw wasn’t a Stone Age youngster, I’m afraid. He’s just a boy of the far future, when mankind’s triumphs will have dwindled and vanished—as we now know, of course, they’ve done. We could hardly fail to know, since we’re standing right in the midst of the tragic remnants. I would say that the remnants have a very frayed edge.”

“And I thought it was Malador. I thought we’d find him here—not that boy.”

“Malador is here,” Blakemore said, gripping Tyson’s arm, and pointing, his fingers tightening on the younger man’s wrist like steel bands. “He couldn’t have fired the weapon, however. Not with that spear in him.”

Malador was lying on his back, half in shadows, with the crude oil lamps casting a flickering radiance over his head and shoulders. He was spread-eagled on a floor of smooth, but verdigris-encrusted metal, his eyes sightlessly staring and his arms stretched so wide they seemed to be wrenching to get out of their sockets, even in death.

A long gleaming spear, with a cluster of feathers attached to its hilt, protruded from almost the exact middle of his chest.

“God!” Tyson said, his voice choked. “You saw him and didn’t tell me. You went right on talking—”

“I had a reason,” Blakemore said. “There’s nothing we can do for him now, and I don’t want what happened to him to happen to us. I don’t think they liked the interest he took in their weapon and that’s why they killed him. It means we’ve got to get out of here fast. I had to make you see how important getting out fast is—just what it means to them to own a weapon like that.”

“I think I get it,” Tyson said. “You enraged Malador by growing a field of wheat and he enraged them just as much by violating a sacred taboo.”

“Exactly,” Blakemore said. “Now suppose we see how fast we can climb back out and get back to the machine. Any minute now they may discover that we’ve enraged them too. Just one look at that kid gives me a pretty good idea what the adults must be like. A stone hatchet at twelve might not be so bad in itself, compared to some of war-game toys kids that age played with in the past. But there was blood on it. Or didn’t you notice?”

“No, I didn’t notice,” Tyson said. “Freshly shed?”

“I think so. It could be animal blood, of course. A fine, brave little hunter. But if there are warring tribes in this age—”

“Come on,” Tyson said. “Let’s go.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

It happened more swiftly—and unexpectedly—than Blakemore and Tyson had feared that it might, and they had feared that it might not be long in coming.

The skin-clad barbarians—or were they savages?—emerged from behind a dozen boulders the instant Tyson’s head came into view and while Blakemore was still four steps lower down.

They came swarming over a slight rise in the landscape as well, some swinging stone axes and others armed with spears. They were not in the least Neanderthal-like in aspect, for the one thing that man had apparently not done in regressing culturally was circle back on the course of human evolution. They were sturdily built and tall in stature, clad for the most part in the skins of animals, although a few were totally naked.

They were not tribally well-organized and had seemingly no great skill in warfare, for they converged on the massive weapon singly and in pairs, waving their arms as they ran and occasionally taking long leaps that somehow failed to enable them to cover the intervening distance much faster.

A few bore themselves with more dignity and had more the look of seasoned warriors.

What saved Blakemore and Tyson from an immediate hand-to-hand encounter at the base of the weapon and enabled them to postpone it was the fact that the running tribesmen nearest to the weapon did not move quite fast enough.

It was a simple enough circumstance, but one which, across the ages, has determined the destiny of millions of individuals and not a few nations, and not always in the realm of warfare.

In a moment they were both several yards from the weapon and running across the plain just as fast, Blakemore found himself hoping, as the nearest of the pursuing tribesmen, who were comparatively few in number.

But their numbers swelled rapidly and when Blakemore glanced back for the second time—his first glance had been reassuring—he realized that he could not hope to outdistance them until he reached the machine. There were too many very rapid runners.

“You’ve got to use Malador’s weapon,” he said, pausing for the barest instant to bring Tyson to a halt. “Turn around, take careful aim and see what you can accomplish. You don’t have to blast them down. It’s crazy, I know—I ought to have my head examined. But it’s the way I feel about it.”

“What do you suggest I do?” Tyson demanded. “It is crazy, when it’s our lives or theirs.”

“Blast the earth directly in front of them,” Blakemore told him. “Rip a big trench in it, if you can. It’s not their fault they’ve regressed to barbarism.”

“Oh, all right. But it’s madness.”

Tyson was raising the weapon, his hands busy on the trigger mechanism which no child could possibly have operated when two hurled spears went spinning over their heads, making Blakemore almost regret what he’d told the other not to do.

“In another moment we’ll have spears sticking out all over us,” Tyson muttered. “You’ll be as sorry as hell and you won’t get any sympathy from me. I’ll be too dead to extend it.”

“Shut up and take careful aim. Hurry. If you can’t work it—I’ll try. It’s got to be done fast.”

Tyson had the weapon at shoulder level now. But Blakemore had no idea what was going to happen. Probably Tyson would blast to kill and apologize afterwards, but he’d done all he could to prevent it. His conscience was clear and he could sleep nights, but he was probably a fool in the bargain.

The weapon seemed to come to life in Tyson’s hands an instant before a long tongue of flame darted from it, followed by a deafening roar.

Though Blakemore was standing within four feet of him only his ears were deafened. There were no displaced currents of air lashing against him, nothing to indicate that a hand weapon more powerful than the gunmakers of the twenty-first century would have been able to construct in a lifetime of trying had gone off that close to him. Except that, when he looked down, he saw that Tyson had been hurled to the ground and was just struggling to a sitting position, the weapon still in his clasp.

Directly in front of him a thick curtain of smoke obscured what had happened. But it thinned out very quickly and he saw that Tyson had accomplished exactly what he had urged him to at least attempt. The ground immediately in front of the pursuing tribesmen had been ripped apart in eight or ten places and from the dust-filled craters which had been blasted out of the soil thin columns of smoke were still arising.

The tribesmen had scattered. Some had turned and fled, shrieking in terror. Others were climbing out of the craters, their faces smoke-blackened and looking as if they would have no heart for continuing on in pursuit of men they had made the mistake of thinking less than godlike.

But there was one who seemed undaunted, both by the yawning craters and the demoralization which had followed in the wake of the blast.

He leapt straight across the narrowest of the craters and came rushing straight toward Blakemore with his spear extended.

Blakemore waited until he was within four feet of him, then sidestepped the spear, brought his right hand up in a chopping motion no different from the one he had used to keep Tyson from committing an act of suicidal folly and finished with a blow that would have disqualified him if he had been a professional boxer. But deep in every man, Blakemore knew, there was a buried savage and if ever there was a right time to resurrect him it was now.

The tribesman crumpled as if a wedge of steel had slammed into him, Blakemore bent and picked up the spear, which had gone spinning.

He hoped he wouldn’t need it, for Tyson was on his feet now, and they were both in good mettle to make a final run for it.

He hoped he wouldn’t need it—and he didn’t. What could not have been more than three minutes later they were ascending into the machine, with no one at all in pursuit of them.

Before they passed inside Tyson paused just long enough on the topmost rung to ask: “Why do you suppose Malador wanted to bring down the thunder? He must have known what he’d be walking into. Whatever you may think about the extent of his paranormal gifts you’ll have to admit that they were unusual. He must have known exactly what those barbarians would be capable of.”

“He may have felt he was no longer among friends, exactly,” Blakemore said. “In a way, I feel sorry for him. He thought I was dead or dying and hating me was no longer something that could make him forget almost everything else. He just didn’t want to remain in captivity. He hoped to find a new world outside that he could reshape, a world that would enable him to live a richer, fuller and more abundant life than he had known in the twenty-second century. Wretchedness and starvation can make a man desperate, willing to take any risk to achieve something better.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Blakemore doubted if he would have been capable of performing a miracle and keeping it as closely guarded a secret as Faran had done.

He doubted also that he could have revealed the wonder of it in quite so dramatic a way.

Faran didn’t just walk into the viewing window compartment and say: “I knew I could do it. All I needed was a little more time. I won’t pretend I wasn’t afraid we might be stranded here forever until I got down to really studying the dials. But then I knew, it came to me.”

He didn’t say that at all. All he said was: “In just about four more minutes you’ll be taking your last look at our flower garden—or what’s left of it. When we come back—and I think we will—there isn’t one chance in a thousand we’ll come out tangential to the warp field at exactly this spot.”

No one spoke, no one said a word, because there are times when no one can, when speech becomes impossible. Blakemore could understand that and had no wish to change it. He might have said a few words, he felt, by making a supreme effort, but he preferred not to.

They saw it perhaps twenty seconds—not longer after the machine had been set in motion.

They were all standing directly in front of the viewing window when the mountain came clearly into view, and they saw the Great Stone Face.

It could have been carved out of basalt or quartz crystal or some other, unknown mineral. What it had been carved out of didn’t seem to matter.

Helen Blakemore cried out and then remained motionless, standing as still as the carved figure, which must have been at least a thousand feet in height, because it was the same height as the mountain.

Blakemore blinked, then swayed a little.

Tyson said: “After a half million years—”

It was Gilda who broke the spell. “You look a little pale, Dan. But it’s a wonderful likeness all the same. Isn’t it, Dad?”

“Yes, it is,” Faran said. “And it makes what I’m going to say—well, this is the right time to say it, I think.

“We saw the shining cities—we saw what Dan’s wheat made possible. But that, too, had to come to an end because the human clock ran down. Man’s energies simply gave out. Almost everyone knew it would be that way—the wisest philosophers simply saw it more clearly than most.

In this age man is on his way to extinction. It is really all over, or soon will be. But time travel and what Dan has done—can change all that.

Don’t you see? There can be another beginning, a new blueprint for the human race. We can build more machines like this and save the bravest and the best—from a hundred different ages—and set the clock to ticking again, a half million years in the future.

“We can and we will,” Dan said. “But there’s only one thing—that face out there should be yours, not mine.”

“I like Dad’s face just the way it is,” Gilda said. “It has a comfortable, fatherly look. But on you—both faces look good.”

Table of Contents

- COPYRIGHT INFO
- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
- A NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHER
- The MEGAPACK® Ebook Series
- SPACE STATION 1
- MARS IS MY DESTINATION
- THE THREE FACES OF TIME
- SURVIVAL WORLD